May Your Trails be Crooked - A Brigid Guest Post

It was early morning.  I had to be in my expensive midnight blue "court suit" so I could perhaps help win one for the good guys today.  I'm not an attorney, but I get to do the expert witness thing, or forensic testimony every once in a while, usually looking around going "where!?" when someone calls for "Doctor Johnson" (I'm still a six-year-old playing grown up most days).

I stepped out into the drive to the truck where I'd left it. The air was calm, the east was still grey, but it will soon burst forth in crimson garb any moment, the sky suddenly red with the firing, the burst of sun, before it finally, after hours of heat and volley, marches back into the West, wearily but not defeated. Overhead I hear the sound, the sound, a winged formation of geese performing their own maneuvers in grey, laying the field for a retreat from winter. I stopped in the drive to look up and admire them, the precision, the form, the beauty. Honk Honk!

I thought, "wow, I wish I had my camera".

What I actually said was CAC!  (you may need to brush up on  your Gaelic).

I know a fair bit about blood spatter, such as the greater the height from which a drop falls, the more it will spray out in a star-like shape. Let me tell you, blood has NOTHING on goose crap from 50 feet.

The jacket was going to have to go to the cleaners, probably the pants as well. I had no choice but to change into my only other clean suit,  the "oh we are so going to lose" brown one.  I'm not saying it was ugly or out of date, but. . .

Suit notwithstanding, the rest of the day went OK and our side won the case so perhaps my misadventures this morning were an anomaly.  After work, I  looked forward to running a couple of errands and then getting home to a furry dog, a happy husband, and a large bottle of Single Malt.

One of those stops was the car wash to get rid of the goose spatter. The bat truck was ever so shiny as I pulled out onto the road.

Honk honk honk! No, I hadn't cut anyone off.

SPLAT.

Damnú ort geese!

Days like these it's just best to go work out and get rid of some stress. I usually do 90 minutes with a personal trainer on Thursday, repeating the reps on my own on Saturday and Monday, but why not go to the gym tonight.

I made the mistake of foregoing my usual swimming and exercise bike and joining a new class that consisted of skinny soccer moms performing what I do believe was the dance scene to Saturday Night Fever to new age music.  I completed the class with all the fluidity and grace of a stepladder and crept back to my car, hoping no one got pictures.

The geese were nowhere in sight.

The last stop, the grocery store.  As I enter the store, I see an older gent with a beard and a cane having trouble with one of the powered cart. It looked like he'd had knee surgery, so I figured he was new to the carts.  I stopped and helped him, telling him I'd had to use one recently and then, with a conspiratorial wink said: "don't go too fast, they track your activities".

Apparently, he took my "being in the know" seriously because the next thing I knew he was following me around the store happily chatting away about Elvis's current location and how the aliens abducted him last Fall while squirrel hunting and took him bowling on Mars.

I lost him in the Tampax aisle.

Quick! To the parking lot!

Honk! Oh good, I just cut someone off. There's the finger! Wave!

As I pulled back into that driveway, I realized I'd planned to bake a cake for a couple of new LEO's who man the entrance at squirrel central. The Scotch would have to wait.

But you know, as I headed inside to break out the cake pans, I thought to myself - no one ever said being a grown-up was easy. There's machines and body parts that break, usually resulting in more bills to add to the bills you already get just by existing. There's dealing with other people and man's general nature to evoke religion or politics to justify what their ego or glands insisted upon no matter the outcome. There are battles and defeat and then there is glory.

But isn't it better to get out there as you are, to take chances, to fight, then to sit home on the couch, living on the sweat of the taxpayer or simply your own inertia, until nothing is left of you but silent, sentient meat that knows not the difference between trial and triumph?

No, you get out there and try.  You may get help along the way, not by your government, but by those that know and support you. But you live. You do it when you have all the energy of youth and health, you do it when all that is left to you, for now, is the grooved habit to survive. You do it because this is all you really know that you have for sure, this place, these hearts, here now, today, goose poop and all

So for me, I'll get up, get out, get dirty, get bloody and occasionally make a complete fool out of myself. Then I will come home with a smile, for I have lived. Then I can simply sit with those two souls that share this house that love me and tell them everything (even if one of them looks at me like "Blah Blah ABBY, Blah Blah ABBY).

Sometimes being a grown-up is hard.  But as  I sit here, my furry pal by my side and my husband on the way home, even if late, I realize the rewards are worth it. - Brigid

Socialized Medicine leads to international man hunts

Friend and long time reader libertyman emails a pointer to a Boston Herald column by Michael Graham that's well worth your while.  In it, there was this that led me down a rabbit hole:

Which is why the American right has been so focused on the Alfie Evans story. They believe progressives have been eroding parental rights for years — denying parents the right to opt their children out of some sex-ed courses, or to decide that some books aren’t age appropriate for their own children, for example. They also see the inevitable logic of socialized medicine leads to cases like Alfie’s, and Charlie Gard’s and Ashya King — whose family fled the U.K. and became criminals to get his son experimental treatment in the Czech Republic. 

Ashya is still alive today, but only because he escaped the “health care” system of Great Britain.

I've posted a lot recently about Alfie Evans, and a year ago about Charlie Gard - both intentionally killed by Britain's National Health Service.  But I'd totally missed the story of Ashya King.  A quick Wikiwander led me to his story.

In short, the kid had brain cancer, the NHS didn't provide Proton Therapy, hospitals on the Continent did, and his parents took him over on a ferry.  The Wikipedia article writes about what happened next:

On 28 August 2014, an international manhunt for King and his parents commenced.[4] On 30 August, King and his parents were found in Velez Malaga, Spain. King's parents were arrested and their son was sent to a local hospital for urgent treatment.[5] They were held in prison for more than 24 hours and released when the request to extradite them to the United Kingdom was withdrawn.

Get that: his parents were imprisoned because they sought better health care for their child.  They were imprisoned.  I don't see how anyone can describe Britain as a free country.

Yesterday's post about the 1989 removal of the border fence between Hungary and Austria is a parable on the futility of trying to keep your population confined against their will.  But we see Britain doing this repeatedly.  The difference between Alfie and Ashya was that Ashya's parents didn't ask a Court, they just headed for a seaport and a ferryboat.  At that point the fury of the NHS was mitigated by cooler heads in the Foreign Ministry who hesitated to cause an international incident over this.

To this day, Ashya is cancer free, because his parents are jail birds.

It's long been a question as to why Leftist Institutions always devour those whom they are nominally charged with helping, but we see this in full flower in Britain's NHS today.

Happy Downfall of Communism Day!

Yesterday was Dirty Commie Day, so it's quite apropos to celebrate the Downfall of Communism Day today:

On 2 May, Hungarian soldiers began to dismantle the barbed wire and electric fencing along Hungary's border with neighbouring Austria. 

The communist governments of East Germany, Romania, and Czechoslovakia were furious. They feared that their own citizens would use this gap in the Iron Curtain to flee to the West. But Moscow did nothing.

And the dam broke.  I remember being stunned in September of that year when the East German commie government decided not to machine gun all of its citizens who were trying to travel to Hungary, but instead let them leave.  It was the end of the Iron Curtain, but that end all began on this day in 1989.

Quote of the Day - Magic Bullet edition

Comrade Misfit looks at "exciting" "new" ARX bullet designs and takes a step back from the hype:

The various new magic bullets tend to be lubricated, in part, with snake oil. My personal belief is that this is no place to be on the cutting edge. Stick with that which has been proven to work.

Heh.

Volkswagon and Audi cars remotely hackable

This is my shocked face:

A Dutch cyber-security firm has discovered that in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems deployed with some car models from the Volkswagen Group are vulnerable to remote hacking. 

Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade, security researchers with Computest, said they successfully tested their findings and exploit chains on Volkswagen Golf GTE and Audi A3 Sportback e-tron models (Audi is a brand part of the Volkswagen Group).

The exploit gives the attacker access to the entertainment system, so on the surface this doesn't look catastrophic.  But here's the fine print:

Keuper and Alkemade say the IVI system is also indirectly connected to the car's acceleration and braking system, but they stopped investigating the possibility of interacting with those systems fearing they might breach Volkswagen's intellectual property.

$100 says you could disable the brakes with this while you floored the gas.

But don't worry, I'm sure that this sort of thing will be impossible with self-driving cars.

Happy Dirty Commie Day!

It's the annual "Hug a Commie Bastard" day, so to help educate the idiots who think that Socialism is totes cool and everything, here is a selection of jokes told back in the Soviet Union.  Five minutes reading the dark humor of the people trapped behind the Iron Curtain will be a bracing tonic to the drivel that your pinko teachers taught you.*

First up: declassified CIA reports on soviet jokes (I'm not making this up, you know):

Click through to read the whole multi-page thing, along with some pretty interesting background material.  My favorite here is this one:

A train bearing Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev came to a sudden stop when the tracks ran out.  Each leader applies his own, unique solution.  Lenin gathers workers and peasants from miles around and exhorts them to build more track.  Stalin shoots the train crew when the train still doesn't move.  Khrushchev rehabilitates the dead crew and orders the track behind the train ripped up and laid in front.  Brezhnev pulls the curtains and rocks back and forth, pretending the train is moving.  Gorbachev calls a rally in front of the train where he leads a chant: No track!  No track! No track!

Remember, these are jokes told by the average Ivan on the street in the Worker's Paradise.  Now, remember I said that I'm not making this up - the CIA really did collect jokes from behind the Iron Curtain.  It's not sure when this started, but we know for a fact that at least one US President liked to tell them to people:



Next up: a more web-friendly collection.  This is my favorite from there:

A farm worker greets Josef Stalin at his potato farm.  

“Comrade Stalin, we have so many potatoes that, piled one on top of the other, they would reach all the way to God,” the farmer excitedly tells his leader. 

“But God does not exist,” replies Stalin. 

“Exactly,” says the farmer. “Neither do the potatoes.”

Heh.  And last but by no means least, Yakov Smirnoff's epic Light Beer commercial:



He also had a great joke on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show: You know what I love about America?  Warning shots.

So have a happy and humorous Dirty Commie Day.  Celebrate that the Usual Suspects™ haven't shoved it down our throats yet.

* Well, not you, gentle reader.  Work with me here.

Scientists: Post-birth abortion is super duper OK

Ignore for the moment that we have a perfectly fine word for "post birth abortion" (infanticide), this is pretty bold:

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

...

The article, entitled “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?”, was written by two of Prof Savulescu’s former associates, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’.

Unsurprisingly (but hysterically) the scientists complain that they're getting death threats.  Hey Doc, what makes you think that you yourself are a person, subject of a moral right to life?  Pot, meet kettle.

But let's take this idea and run with it.  After all, this concept is as old as time, and the the old Roman Pater Familias had life and death power over his children.  And all the kids marching for gun control is pretty annoying right now, so why don't we just extend co-blogger ASM826's excellent idea of no rights for kids until they turn 21 to allow post-birth abortion of them until they are 21?

I mean, the idea is no more stupid than the one that just got published in a Journal that deigns to call itself "Medical Ethics".  And scientists wonder why the public trusts them less than in years past.

Now that's how you tweet

We just smuggled a half ton of smoking gun evidence of Iran's nuclear program in a daring mission to save the world and you're all talking about the PowerPoint font. Just for that next time we're using comic sans.

— The Mossad (@TheMossadIL) April 30, 2018

HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Maybe next time they'll use Sharks with frickin' "lasers" too ...

Well played, Mossad.

Just how badly did the Broward County Sheriff's office screw up the Parkland school situation

Unbelievable.

If this were a private company, people would be in jail.  But because it was government employees (and because so many people worship at the Church of the State) nothing will happen other than chin tugging "Mistakes Were Made" mumbling.

Proposed "Universal Secure Backdoor" for iPhones isn't secure

Ray Ozzie is one of the technical giants of the computer era.  He was one of the team that created VisiCalc back in the 1980s.  He followed this by creating Lotus Notes (IIRC, this is still being sold by IBM two decades later which has to be some kind of record).  He was one of Microsoft's CTOs and took over as Chief Software Architect from Bill Gates himself.  He is responsible for Microsoft's Azure cloud initiative - if you haven't heard of this, it's a bet-the-company gamble on making Microsoft Office work as a cloud service.  It looks like it's going to save Microsoft's bacon.

That's quite a resume.  Ozzie has a new proposal out for a secure universal backdoor to allow Law Enforcement to unlock iPhones.  It's an excellent example of the way that great software engineers are spectacular failures as security engineers.

The Geek With Guns has background on how it's supposed to work:

Dubbed “Clear,” Ozzie’s idea was first detailed Wednesday in an article published in Wired and described in general terms last month.

[…]

1. Apple and other manufacturers would generate a cryptographic keypair and would install the public key on every device and keep the private key in the same type of ultra-secure storage vault it uses to safeguard code-signing keys.
2. The public key on the phone would be used to encrypt the PIN users set to unlock their devices. This encrypted PIN would then be stored on the device.
3. In cases where “exceptional access” is justified, law enforcement officials would first obtain a search warrant that would allow them to place a device they have physical access over into some sort of recovery mode. This mode would (a) display the encrypted PIN and (b) effectively brick the phone in a way that would permanently prevent it from being used further or from data on it being erased.
4. Law enforcement officials would send the encrypted PIN to the manufacturer. Once the manufacturer is certain the warrant is valid, it would use the private key stored in its secure vault to decrypt the PIN and provide it to the law enforcement officials.

Well, so what's the problem?  After all, the keys used to sign software are incredibly sensitive - if someone gains access to your keys they could sign all sorts of malware which people's computers would recognize as coming from you.  So keeping these keys on the same secure system solves the problem, right?  Well, no:

Yes, Apple has a vault where they've successfully protected important keys. No, it doesn't mean this vault scales. The more people and the more often you have to touch the vault, the less secure it becomes. We are talking thousands of requests per day from 100,000 different law enforcement agencies around the world. We are unlikely to protect this against incompetence and mistakes. We are definitely unable to secure this against deliberate attack.

Ozzie makes an assumption that makes sense only if you don't understand operational procedure.  Yes, we've secured the keys under Scenario A.  Ozzie spends absolutely no time at all showing how his Scenario B is similar to Scenario A.  Quite frankly, it's not even in the same ballpark.  A procedure that is performed a few dozen times a year can be handled quite well by a small group of highly security savvy people; the same procedure performed thousands of times a year simply cannot be.  I myself have been part of these teams, and there is a very high level of awareness of the implications of any screwup, and so team members need joint simultaneous access to the system to make it work.  Think of it as sort of like ICMBs where there are two launch keys that have to be turned simultaneously, with the locks on opposite sides of the room.  The Launch Operators have to work together to make it happen.

That works for a few launches, but couldn't possibly work for a dozen a day or more, which is what Law Enforcement would want.  The system will collapse - or be intentionally subverted - a thousand different ways:

We have a mathematically pure encryption algorithm called the "One Time Pad". It can't ever be broken, provably so with mathematics.

It's also perfectly useless, as it's not something humans can use. That's why we use AES, which is vastly less secure (anything you encrypt today can probably be decrypted in 100 years). AES can be used by humans whereas One Time Pads cannot be. (I learned the fallacy of One Time Pad's on my grandfather's knee -- he was a WW II codebreaker who broke German messages trying to futz with One Time Pads).

The same is true with Ozzie's scheme. It focuses on the mathematical model but ignores the human element. We already know how to solve the mathematical problem in a hundred different ways. The part we don't know how to secure is the human element.

How do we know the law enforcement person is who they say they are? How do we know the "trusted Apple employee" can't be bribed? How can the law enforcement agent communicate securely with the Apple employee?

You think these things are theoretical, but they aren't.

Nope.  This isn't about hardware or software, it's about wetware (sometimes called "peopleware").  People, as we all know, are prone to make mistakes or to be corruptible.  And this is where the Geek With Guns makes his point:

What’s noteworthy in regards to this post is the fact that nowhere does the Fourth Amendment state that measures have to be taken to make information easily accessible to the government once a warrant is issued. This omission is noteworthy because a lot of the political debates revolving around computer security are argued as if the Fourth Amendment contains or implies such language

We are often asked "Why do you need an AR-15?"  The question implies that we need to justify ourselves to some government authority and get permission before we can do something.  You could easily rephrase the question to "Why do you need a phone that keeps your secrets from everyone"*

The answer to both questions, of course, is identical.  Because fuck you is why.

* Assuming you can get one of these today.  Which you can't.  But while Law Enforcement could indeed collect all your data from the companies who collect it, it would be a royal pain in the behind for them to go to Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other companies with warrants.  Which is why they want backdoors.

I'm not sure where the North Korea negotiations are going

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 30, 2018

But I don't have a good feeling about this ...

Damned 9th Circuit

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 29, 2018

William Blake (verse) and Sir Hubert Parry (score), Jerusalem

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

- William Blake, Jerusalem

William Blake was a revolutionary, a supporter of the French revolution, and was actually tried (and acquitted) of High Treason and Sedition in 1804 England.  Considered borderline mad by his contemporaries, he became highly regarded in later years.  His writings became a core of the Fabian Socialists, and this hymn (put to music in 1916 by Sir Hubert Parry) became a favorite with working class socialists.

And still is today.  Socialist Review opens their article on the hymn with this:

For Danny Boyle, on the left, Jerusalem created the opportunity to include industrial workers in the Olympic opening ceremony. For David Cameron, on the right, Jerusalem is an expression of distinctively English nationhood. For many ordinary people Jerusalem offers a welcome alternative to the depressing, jingoist dirge of God Save the Queen.

Jerusalem is open to many interpretations. William Blake was a complex character and his works can be difficult to read - but one thing Blake was not was a nationalist of any kind. He was a revolutionary.

This hymn is more complicated for today's left to swallow because of the Nationalist themes.  In contrast, Beethoven's annexation of Schiller's Ode To Joy in his Ninth Symphony is universalist and so is acceptable to socialist organizations like the Olympics or the European Union, both of which have adopted it as their anthem.  International organizations must needs adopt universalist symbols.

But in Britain, no such constraints are felt, and since the triumph of socialism in that land is complete, this hymn remains popular.  It touches a deep nerve, and the words fail describe the never sleeping mania of the Left:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

Scientists and experts would plan, and workers would compete with zeal, until the New Jerusalem stood in England's green and pleasant land.  That was the ideal.

The reality is, if not quite as grotesque as the other socialist experiments behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, plenty grotesque.  A bumbling National Health Service is revered by the populace as it intentionally kills their children.  Attempts by desperate parents to seek care outside England's green and pleasant land are blocked by police; the Sword indeed does not sleep in their hand.  It's not enough that the NHS doesn't provide care, no others must be allowed to either.

And so the New Jerusalem is indeed built, but it is a ruin.  It is perhaps best described by another English poet who lived a century after Blake.  In The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot painted a very different vision of England's future.  It's a little uncanny how the opening line is extra poignant today:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But he is only warming up.  Here is his vision of the New Jerusalem that was being built, even as he wrote:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.

The NHS remains quite popular despite the furious sacrifice of toddlers on Socialism's altar.  The national propaganda effort has borne fruit, although like propaganda in all mature socialist societies it is very strange:

Theodore Dalrymple explained this well.

"In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to," he wrote.

Yet another English author, C. S. Lewis explains the poisoned fruit of the Fabian Socialists who now rule the realm and who direct the NHS:

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

But at least the public holds the NHS in high esteem.  England is screwed.  The English people are screwed, but at least they seem to like it.  Pretty music, though, and nice pictures of a land now lost.  Pictures from an England that is in the place that Great Britain used to be.

Rest in peace, Alfie Evans

Killed by socialized medicine.

You want a vision of the future?  Imagine a police line preventing people from taking toddlers to get health care, until they die.

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 28, 2018

Orwell is spinning in his grave.  We're told that the dark night of fascism is always falling on America, and yet there is in in Britain.

You know Britain, right?  It's in the place where Great Britain used to br.

Socialized medicine is not fair or compassionate to the poor

Proof:

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 28, 2018

At this point can anyone who ever talked about how awesome national health would be just shut up and sit down in the back of the room?  Grown ups are talking.

Render unto Caesar

Everyone knows this quote from the Gospels: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and render unto God that which is God's.  So what belongs to Caesar, and what belongs to God?

In Britain, the lives of the Subjects of the Crown belong to Caesar.  This is recognized throughout the land, to the extent that the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool has thrown in the towel:

The Archbishop of Liverpool has backed Alder Hey hospital’s handling of the Alfie Evans case, saying doctors have done everything “humanly possible” to help the child.

Everything humanly possible?  The Italian government would beg to differ with the Most Reverend McMahon.  They made Alfie a citizen, eligible for treatment there.  Rome’s Bambino Gesù hospital stands ready to treat him, and airplanes and helicopters stand ready to take little Alfie and his parents to treatment.

The Catholic Bishops in the United States disagrees with him.

We urge all Catholics to join the Holy Father in praying for #AlfieEvans and his family and that their desire to seek new forms of treatment may be granted. May the dignity of Alfie’s life and all human life, especially those who are most vulnerable, be respected and upheld. https://t.co/gA4RhU7nL0

— US Catholic Bishops (@USCCB) April 25, 2018

The Pope disagrees with him.

Moved by the prayers and immense solidarity shown little Alfie Evans, I renew my appeal that the suffering of his parents may be heard and that their desire to seek new forms of treatment may be granted.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) April 23, 2018

So His Grace clearly does not think that a person's life belongs to them, or to God.  Or at the very least, he does not think that Alfie Evans' life belongs to Alfie, or to God.  Rather, His Grace believes that Alfie's life belongs to the Crown.  After all, he tells us that everything “humanly possible” has been done to help the child, ignoring that the Police hold him hostage in a hospital that intends to starve him to death.  Police that turned away a German Air Ambulance come to take him for treatment far from the shores of Her Majesty's Scepter'd Isle.

The Crown's motivation is clear: with socialized health care, they're on the hook for Alfie's health care costs for the rest of his life.  The bean counters in the NHS have obviously realized that the cost/benefit payout of Alfie's life says they should shorten that life as much as they can.  That's quite ugly, but rational in a purely utilitarian sense.

But the Crown pays them for that sort of thinking.  The Crown (presumably) does not pay His Grace. So what's his excuse?  Why does he bow his head and tug his forelock to the green eyeshade crew at the NHS?  Why does he differ so completely and so (it must be said) violently from the Revealed teaching of his fellow Bishops?  Of his Pontif?

One suspects that the reason is that His Grace is a fully paid up member in the Ruling Elite of that sad land.  No doubt with a membership card and secret handshake and everything.  He certainly won't lift a finger to protect his flock from them.  The Shepherd is in cahoots with the wolves.  He worships at the altar of Ba'al.

Of what use, then, is a British Roman Catholic church?  The World wonders.

No doubt His Grace is familiar with Matthew 25: 40-45:

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Here on these shores, we seemingly still have a Roman Catholic church that understands this.  We also have our own holy scripture, a secular one:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it

Life.  We hold it to be an unalienable right.  Not granted by the government, or the NHS, but endowed by our Creator.

And abolish the old form of Government we did.  We are no longer subjects of the British Crown and have not been these centuries.  The reason is one that His Grace should recognize, but probably refuses to:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Weep for the Catholic church in Britain, adrift with no leadership that deserves the name.  And weep for Britain. It used to he Great.

This post sports the tag "Statist Pricks" because the Most Reverend McMahon is most assuredly one.

NHS Death Watch, Day 3

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) April 26, 2018

Ski Lift shut down because of bad Internet security

I'm not making this up, you know:

Officials from the city of Innsbruck in Austria have shut down a local ski lift after two security researchers found its control panel open wide on the Internet, and allowing anyone to take control of the ski lift's operational settings. 

The two researchers are Tim Philipp Schäfers and Sebastian Neef, both with InternetWache.org, an IT security-focused organization. 

... 

On March 16, Schäfers and Neef discovered the Human Machine Interface (HMI) used for controlling Patscherkofelbahn, a ski lift that connects the village of Igls with the Patscherkofel mountain resort, to the south of Innsbruck. 

The two were surprised because there wasn't any login screen to prevent Internet user from accessing and interacting with the HMI panel. 

Settings for controlling the ski lift's speed, the distance between cable cars, and cable tension were all exposed in the open, along with logs and other data.

What's a worse password than "password"?  Not requiring a password at all.  Herren Schäfers and Neef realized the danger to life and limb and went straight to Austria's Computer Emergency Response Team.  CERT contacted the ski resort, who shut down the lift.

As I like to say, security wasn't an after thought, it wasn't thought of at all.  It's distressingly common:

As for Schäfers and Neef, the two said they'll continue to scan the Internet for unprotected systems. "It's like finding a 'needle in the haystack' and makes a lot of fun," Schäfers told us, 

"In the past, we also found the building control panel of a clinic in Switzerland, the control panel of mobile traffic lights in Germany, control panels of wind farms across the world, and three waterworks in Germany." 

"We had direct control over the Industrial Control Systems (ICSs) and would have been able to turn off the water for thousands of people, in the case of the waterworks systems, or do other harm," Schäfers said.

I was promised that when the future came, I'd have a flying car.  Instead, everything is insecure because idiots set everything up.

The failure of the Public Schools

Even NPR is noticing that a lot of kids don't need to go to College, and can do very well by not going to College:

Like most other American high school students, Garret Morgan had it drummed into him constantly: Go to college. Get a bachelor's degree. 

"All through my life it was, 'if you don't go to college you're going to end up on the streets,' " Morgan said. "Everybody's so gung-ho about going to college." 

So he tried it for a while. Then he quit and started training as an ironworker, which is what he is doing on a weekday morning in a nondescript high-ceilinged building with a concrete floor in an industrial park near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. 

... 

Morgan, who is 20, is already working on a job site when he isn't at the Pacific Northwest Ironworkers shop. He gets benefits, including a pension, from employers at the job sites where he is training. And he is earning $28.36 an hour, or more than $50,000 a year, which is almost certain to steadily increase.

 His attitude towards his College bound High School friends?

As for his friends from high school, "they're still in college," he said with a wry grin. "Someday maybe they'll make as much as me."

LULZ.

The Public Education system is selling education to students.  It's terribly expensive - destructively expensive - education, but why not?  After all, that's what they sell to the students' parents.  You need to invest in your kid's education.

It's a scam.  Caveat emptor.

You hear a lot about how much more college graduates make compared to their non-college graduate peers, but it's funny how Colleges don't break that down by major, or compare it to non-College work by industry and job classification.  Gosh, I wonder why they don't do that.  /sarc

If you have a High School age kid, get them a copy of this:

World War II Navajo Code Talker reports for final muster

Roy Hawthorne dead at 92:

Navajo Code Talker Roy Hawthorne, who used his native language as an uncrackable code during World War II, died Saturday.

At 92, he was one of the last surviving Code Talkers.

Hawthorne was 17 when he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and became part of a famed group of Native Americans who encoded hundreds of messages in the Navajo language to keep them safe from the Japanese. Hawthorne served in the 1st Marine Division in the Pacific Theatre and was promoted to corporal. 

Semper fi, Corporal.