Category Archives: Uncategorized

Satrap:

(in the past) someone who governed a province (= political area) in ancient Persia [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Trump refuses to learn the lessons of World War II,” Max Boot, WaPo:

Those were farsighted decisions, but the postwar order was also deeply flawed. The Red Army occupied Eastern Europe, turning the region into a Soviet satrapy for more than four decades. Joseph Stalin’s troops also advanced into Manchuria, China’s industrial heartland, helping speed Mao Zedong’s victory in China’s civil war.

I’m dreaming of a … glurg glug glurg

The Monster Walks (1932) is a rather limp murder mystery cum horror show, with beastly arms emerging from the headboards to strangle the lovelies in their sleep. Not that this is a bad thing, but this particular script could have used at least a couple of rewrites.

Don’t bother.

Stolen from The Weekly Dish’s VFYW contest – thanks to Chris Bodenner, I think. I had not heard of the Chinese ghost cities:

Bad planning? Leaders’ prestige? I wonder about the environmental costs.

Pentest:

Penetration testing is an offensive security exercise conducted by an organization with the intent to uncover security weaknesses and ultimately help strengthen their defense mechanisms, threat detection capabilities and response times. Traditionally, penetration testing is performed by an independent third-party with little to no upfront knowledge of their target organization. This is done to imitate an adversary who is targeting the organization with nefarious intent.

Penetration testing can be performed against something as small as a single tenant application and as large as a global enterprise network. Several methodologies frameworks standards and tools exist which are often motivated by or designed to satisfy a particular compliance or regulatory committee such as PCI and HIPAA. [Pentest Geek]

Noted in “Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5″ floppy disks,” Gareth Corfield, The Register:

“Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know,” said [Alex] Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. “Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won’t just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don’t know what state you’re going to leave it in.”

Groups frowned upon by established authorities, such as terrorist groups and revolutionaries, may find cryptocurrency alluring, but sometimes things like this can happen …

The Justice Department seized $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from terror groups in the Middle East, federal prosecutors announced Thursday, marking the largest ever US government takeover of online terrorist financing.

The funds from ISIS, al Qaeda and the al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, would likely have been used by the groups to buy weapons and train would-be attackers, Justice Department officials said.

“Two million dollars is a lot of equipment that they can buy, a lot of weapons a lot of training that they can fund, a lot of tickets to fly people around the world,” said John Demers, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s national security division. “This is going to make a big difference in their operation.”[CNN/Politics]

The problem with hard currency is security: transportation and storage can be a chancy business. The ease of use and security of cryptocurrencies, though, have a counterbalance in ease of confiscation, or even just simple disappearance. If you’ve invested in bitcoin and the infrastructure disappears, too bad for you.

While hard currency can lose its value due to inflation, at least it still has some. Quick conversion into weapons or other supplies may be a wise move, depending on the stability of the country issuing the currency.

From NewScientist (11 July 2020):

Everyone is entitled to one good scare – and it may be good for us. People who watch a lot of horror films and those who are morbidly curious about unpleasant subjects seem to be more psychologically resilient to the covid-19 pandemic, a study reveals.

“Horror users tended to have less psychological distress,” says Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago. …

Fans of horror movies were less prone to negative mental states. “Which suggested to us, maybe with horror it’s about emotion regulation,” says Scrivner. Watching scary movies “allows me to give myself the experience of being afraid and then conquering that fear”. This may be one of the underlying reasons for people’s fascination with scary stories.

The prepper genres, which all feature society’s institutions collapsing, had an additional benefit. “We find that same decrease in psychological distress, but you also find an increase in preparedness,” says Scrivner. The team found a similar pattern for pandemic-themed movies. “People who’ve seen none at all were much less prepared than people who said they’d seen many.”

Some of it will be in the promptings of considering how things can go wrong, rather than how they can go right. Consider a fan of romantic comedies, searching for the right person to date, the anticipation of the pleasures and ecstasies, all that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, the horror fan is screaming “Don’t open that door where the fumes are coming,” because they’ve learned to think ahead on a more realistic level. The researchers note that just watching horror movies isn’t enough, as if seeing The Omen would be helpful in preventing social anxiety. No, it takes an active interest, in my opinion, the inquisitive mind that looks at how things may go wrong.

And figure out how bad it can get.

It’s the unknown that causes anxiety; the horror fan who thinks they have the worst figured out, right or wrong, can now take actions to mitigate the worst. And that leads to less anxiety.

I am not a horror fan, although I must say I enjoyed Alien and Aliens.

From SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory):

SOHO is no stranger to discovering new comets – via the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project, the observatory has discovered over 4,000 previously unknown comets since launch in 1995. Most of SOHO’s comet discoveries can be categorized into families, or groups, the most famous being the “Kreutz” sungrazer group which accounts for over 85% of the Project discoveries. Only around 4% -some 175 comets- do not appear to belong to any known group or comet family. However, these are often among the most interesting comets and this most recent discovery -SOHO’s 4,049th comet- was no exception!

The comet was first spotted on August 5th, 2020, by amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod. At discovery, it was just a tiny faint smudge near the edge of the C3 coronagraph images recorded SOHO’s Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument. As it neared the Sun over the next day or so, the smudge became increasingly elongated, ultimately hinting that it may be two comets pretending to be one!

This was confirmed as the comets entered the narrower field of view of the LASCO C2 camera, where the improved resolution confirmed that not only was this more than one comet, it was actually THREE comets! The two main components are easy to spot, with the third a very faint, diffuse fragment following alongside the leading piece.

And here’s the fascinating film:

And not from any known comet family. Wheeee!

Only watch if you want a glimpse into the far right GOPers spouting what they’ve read on right wing websites:

Adding to the story of Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy:

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy continues to hold a multimillion-dollar stake in his former company XPO Logistics, a United States Postal Service contractor, likely creating a major conflict of interest, according to newly obtained financial disclosures and ethics experts.

Outside experts who spoke to CNN were shocked that ethics officials at the postal service approved this arrangement, which allows DeJoy to keep at least $30 million in XPO holdings.

DeJoy and USPS have said he fully complied with the regulations.

Raising further alarms, on the same day in June that DeJoy divested large amounts of Amazon shares, he purchased stock options giving him the right to buy new shares of Amazon at a price much lower than their current market price, according to the disclosures. [CNN]

To the latter point, these fall into the class of stock trading known as call options. By buying these options while selling his current holdings, he expects to see shares of Amazon plunge in the near future, although the article doesn’t state an expiration date, so take “near future” as you will. As Amazon uses USPS for much of its delivery requirements, he may be banking on his “optimizations” on impacting Amazon in the near future.

Or, perhaps, he expects the Covid-19 pandemic to, again, negatively impact Amazon. Or even its cessation might. It’s difficult to say.

But it’s the former point that’s appalling. He should have been required to sell all of those holdings, and if USPS regulations are so lax that he can claim he’s in conformance with them, those regulations need reform.

In any case, even an appearance of a conflict of interest should be, and would be, avoided by public service employees. I would not be surprised if there’s criminal charges related to DeJoy in the near future.

Sinistral:

1. of, relating to, or located on the left side, esp the left side of the body
2. a technical term for left-handed
3. (of the shells of certain gastropod molluscs) coiling in a clockwise direction from the apex [Collins English Dictionary]

Noted in “Lefties get their day today,” Michael Pearson, CNN:

It’s National Left-Hander’s Day, a celebration founded by the Left-Handers Club to honor leftie style.

Now in its 17th year, the day has been celebrated with right vs. left sports matches, left-handed drinking events and other activities, the club says.

In honor of the day, some tidbits about sinistrality: …

You just wait until we get you home, young lady!

The Lady Vanishes (2013) is what I might call a typical British mystery thriller. Set in 1930s Europe, orphan and heiress Iris Carr, temperamental and unafraid of scandal, decides to leave a European resort for home. Dizzy and ill on the train, she’s taken under the wing of housekeeper Ms Froy.

Until she turns her back for a brief moment and loses track of Ms Froy.

This isn’t a problem until everyone from the old English ladies, eager to return home, across the pastor and his wife, to the minor noble family traveling with an ill family member, all swear up and down that Ms Froy doesn’t exist.

All of which nettles our woozy Ms Carr, a lass with little use for societal norms at even the best of times. In her search of the narrow, wobbling train, she stumbles into bridge-builder and linguist Max Hare, a young & somewhat charming man, and his Professor, also a linguist. This helps the search to proceed – both in the physical and theme spaces.

I reveal nothing even the casual audience member will miss, but the fun is somewhat enhanced by the notion that the ill passenger has a contagious disease and must remain isolated; that the consistent assertions that Miss Froy never existed rings so true as it comes from the pastor, and so menacing from the noble family’s matriarch; and the religious mania of the pastor’s wife leads to meditations on our current  crop of hysterics, urged on as they are by mega-church pastors such as Copeland, today, and, in the past, Oral Roberts.

Remember the dictum that In order for evil to triumph, good people need do nothing? It plays a part here, too. Miss Carr, acting on her certain knowledge, is doing something rather than nothing; but what of those who do not have that certainty, yet would be good, such as Max Hare, the bridge builder? While the movie hardly dwells on the question, it is an important question, and well worth considering when an Administration puts migrant children in cages while keeping them apart from their families; denies the reality of the novel coronavirus; and attacks vital public institutions for reasons dishonorable.

Sure, that’s a digression, a little adventure for the voter dubious of their duty, to remind them that voting is not only about casting a ballot, but of self-education concerning their choices and how government should be run.

Back to the story, this is well-told in the comfortable and competent British way. You won’t be knocked off your chair by it, but you’ll almost certainly enjoy it. But it is unsettling if you allow yourself to consider its parallels with today.

I like both colors, and so will you.

And then there’s this.

I believe we were told it eats milkweed. It almost looks like a cartoon.

The Democrats are a little excited at their victory in South Carolina last night in what they term the last special election before November, or so I infer from an email:

Democrat Spencer Wetmore was just declared the WINNER in the last special election in the nation before November!

This is a big one, too: Spencer’s landslide, 20-point victory is a huge upset in a South Carolina district that favored Donald Trump in 2016, and it’s nothing short of a disaster for GOP Senator Lindsey Graham’s reelection chances.

20 point victory? Well, yes it is. But there’s more than one way to look at data like this, isn’t there?

Obviously, turnout for the special election was low, but, still, more Democrats than Republicans showed up. Is it important?

I can’t make up my mind. A 20 point Democratic victory in a district that voted for Trump has at least some symbolic importance. On the other hand, the losing Republican, Josh Stokes, doesn’t appear to have wrapped himself around Trump, at least so far as I can tell from his campaign site, and his Facebook page. This may be more of a signal that the base won’t turn out unless you’ve sworn your allegiance to Trump.

And Stokes no doubt knows that. Perhaps he was testing the anti-Trump Republican waters. Perhaps he truly can’t stomach Trump and doesn’t feel simpatico with the Democrats – or couldn’t win their primary.

So I see this result as more obscure than revelatory.

On the QAnon angle, the Republican Party is now a smidgeon worse, a little closer to extinction and ridicule, members discredited, etc:

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a businesswoman who has expressed support for the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon and been criticized for a series of racist comments, has won the Republican nomination for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.

Greene beat neurosurgeon John Cowan in a primary runoff for the open seat on Tuesday in the deep-red district in northwest Georgia, despite several GOP officials denouncing her campaign after videos surfaced in which she expresses racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim views. [NBC News]

Or perhaps I shouldn’t use the adjective smidgeon, because, well, a smidgeon is a smallish quantity. Greene beat her challenger Cowan, and by quite a lot, while making her QAnon leanings known.

Source: Ballotpedia

A survey of previous primaries for this district yields little useful information, as candidates tend to run unopposed, and the Republicans usually win by large margins.

November should be perversely interesting in this case, as it’ll speak to the depravity with regards to ascertaining truth in the case of the Republican Party.

One of the reasons I value reading atypical writers such as Jennifer Rubin is paragraphs like this:

For the Republican primary in Minnesota’s District 7:

Ya gotta wonder if hugging President Trump was a good idea for Collis, but otherwise it’s a cute commercial.

And, no, I don’t know who won the right to challenge Colin Peterson (D-MN), one of the more conservative Democrats in Congress.

Part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.

The promise: Candidate Trump will protect Social Security.

Results So Far: So far, Social Security has not been changed. However, it’s not hard to see a threat on the horizon, as I documented here. Here’s the pivotal Tweet from one of Trump’s lawyers:

This is actually the biggest news of the day:

President Trump said if he is re-elected, he will look into terminating the payroll tax permanently!

— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) August 9, 2020

The “payroll tax” is the only revenue stream funding Social Security. Kill it, and in the face of the incredible deficits being run by the Republicans as a result of the 2017 Tax Reform law and the Covid-19 pandemic, as poorly managed as that has been, and there’s little chance of Social Security gaining a different revenue source and therefore surviving.

The Bigger Picture: It doesn’t get much bigger than this. President Trump appears to be fixated on deferring the payroll tax as part of the Covid-19 management strategy, but most experts do not think it’ll be of any help to to the unemployed, since they aren’t paying those taxes presently; I don’t see how such a reduction will spur growth, either, which is the usual reason for deferring collection of these taxes over the year. It’s our personal behavior, and progress made on cures or vaccines for Covid-19, which will determine when jobs will begin to reappear.

Republicans are well-known for their repugnance in connection to Social Security. Is this fixation a quid pro quo to the Republicans for not convicting him on the articles of impeachment earlier this year? Without further evidence, No must be assumed – but it remains an open question.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) apparently has little use for the current generation of Wisconsinites and, indeed, Americans in general:

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson would rather see no new coronavirus stimulus bill than one that includes new spending, the Oshkosh Republican said Friday.

Johnson said in a Friday interview with Breitbart News Tonight that he hopes negotiations stay broken down between the Trump administration and House Democratic leaders on a new pandemic relief package given the trillions Democratic leaders proposed in new spending.

“From my standpoint, the breakdown in the talks is very good news. It’s very good news for future generations,” Johnson said. “I hope the talks remain broken down.”

Johnson does not support any new spending that would add to the federal debt, which is at about $22.8 trillion, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. He instead wants any new proposals to spend money already authorized by a relief package passed earlier this year known as the CARES Act. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Seems a bit harsh of me? Well, he can’t hide behind the government debt excuse, because he voted for the 2017 tax reform bill.

So I have no sympathy for that excuse. He just hates Americans.

Michael Jackson in the wrong genre:

The Kodak Pharma story continues to deepen:

“Recent allegations of wrongdoing raise serious concerns. We will not proceed any further unless these allegations are cleared,” the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation said in a tweet Friday.

The review of funding comes as the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating how the company disclosed the deal with the government, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The probe is also reportedly expected to review stock options that were granted to executive chairman James Continenza ahead of the announcement. [NBC News]

This is getting more and more interesting. Never mind that the stock price has plunged from its high after the announcement. There may be criminal charges waiting for someone at the end of this story. And, besides the company execs, who in government is going to be caught with their hands in the cookie jar?

This mention of the app Robinhood is also interesting:

As news of the deal broke Kodak, which had been trading under $2, skyrocketed. Within two days, the stock was trading at $60, with 284 million shares changing hands. In the span of just 24 hours, more than 100,000 investors added the stock to their account on Robinhood, an app popular with millennial investors, according to data from Robintrack. The stock was so volatile the day after the announcement — at one point it was up more than 600 percent — that it was halted 20 times during the session.

But the momentum didn’t hold and on Friday the stock closed at $14.88, or 75 percent below its recent high. However, the current price is still more than 400 percent above where the stock traded ahead of the loan announcement.

It sounds like impulsive behavior was encouraged in this incident. I wonder how many people lost how much money on this. And while such things are learning moments for investors, it feels more like sheep being sheared.

Some more of what you know and love:

I like that last one the best.

With all the shouting about adding an image of President Trump to Mount Rushmore, I must admit the wrong thing stood out for me in this paragraph:

After all, the president had told [Governor Noem of South Dakota] in the Oval Office that he aspired to have his image etched on the monument. And last year, a White House aide reached out to the governor’s office with a question, according to a Republican official familiar with the conversation: What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore? [The New York Times]

Forgive my lack of focus, but I’ve been out to Mount Rushmore – twice – and you do not etch into that big pile of rock. Etching is what you do to make microchips and decorate watches and rings. When you’re dealing with a mountaintop, your tools are more along the lines of dynamite, hammer and chisel, and Bobcats.

This is not etching.

So, it’s bad, bad word usage about adding a face in travesty to a national monument which in turn is a defacement of a holy American Indian mountain.

Gad. It’s like the nuclear cherry on top of the arsenic ice cream mound.

Derecho:

A derecho (pronounced similar to “deh-REY-cho”) is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Although a derecho can produce destruction similar to the strength of tornadoes, the damage typically is directed in one direction along a relatively straight swath. As a result, the term “straight-line wind damage” sometimes is used to describe derecho damage. By definition, if the wind damage swath extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length, then the event may be classified as a derecho. [National Weather Service]

Noted in “Derecho with 100 mph winds moves across the Midwest, bringing down trees and power lines in Chicago,” Theresa Waldrop and Judson Jones, CNN/Weather:

The storms are part of a derecho that was moving out of Iowa into northern Illinois, toward Chicago, and that prompted the Storm Prediction Center to issue a PDS thunderstorm watch through 7 p.m. CT Monday.

“PDS severe thunderstorm watches are rare, and reserved for only the strongest thunderstorm events,” CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller said.

That’s a new one on me. I wonder if we’re going to be hearing more about derechoes because they’ll become more common with climate change.

Dan McLaughlin on National Review thinks he can justify the naked hypocrisy of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) if he just throws enough words at it, but I don’t see it.

Literally.

First, his presentation is confusing, and it’s not at all clear to me that he’s found parallel situations in which a SCOTUS seat became open in a term-limited election year in which the President is of one party and the Senate is controlled by another party. He certainly enjoyed talking about all the other situations, of which the nominations of President Tyler seemed particularly interesting, and his remarks about some of the politics were a lot of fun – such as President Lincoln’s banishment of Salmon P. Chase to SCOTUS as a way to eliminate a rival. But I’m not looking for entertainment.

Second, there is the veiled use of the discredited whataboutism argument inherent in frantically parsing past behavior without regard to the intent of the Constitution. That is the bulk of his article, a confusing survey of how these things came about. I much preferred the Wikipedia version, which shows several such “No actions”, some of which were due to the lateness in the Presidency of the nomination, others for reasons I shan’t guess – and none of which have happened in the era of Presidential term limits, with the exception of Garland’s appointment. But my point is really this: reaching back to other misdeeds to justify current misdeeds is a misdeed in and of itself; the standard that may be ascertained from the Constitution itself is of more importance.

Third, McLaughlin hides in the avalanche of words and charts a few key mis-statements. I’ll cite the paragraph that stood out for me:

In 2016, Barack Obama used his raw power to nominate Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia in March of the last year of Obama’s term, with the Trump–Clinton election underway. The Republican majority in the Senate used its raw power to refuse to seat that nominee. Having reached that decision, the Republican majority did not even hold a hearing for an outcome that was predetermined.

Using the phrase raw power is a mischaracterization of governance as a power game between opposing parties, and betrays McLaughlin’s inclinations when it comes to governance in the post-Cold War era. The fact of the matter is that

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court …

is best understood as an obligation upon the President and the Senate, collectively, to keep the Supreme Court properly staffed. This is clear once one remembers that the President, and all others, are to take care to execute their duties. There is no mention of political maneuvering, of vacating duties in the interests of furthering political or societal goals, of election year skips, or the importance of having an elvish presence in your heritage when being nominated.

If I may bypass the formal politeness of the Founding Fathers, it comes down to Here are your fucking duties, now go fucking accomplishing them.

And, just because McLaughlin needs to cover the above misstatements, note his closure of the paragraph:

Having reached that decision, the Republican majority did not even hold a hearing for an outcome that was predetermined.

No, no, no. If McLaughlin really believes this, he should hand in his quill pen and retire. Senator McConnell, Majority Leader, chose to never even bring it up. One man. No other Senator had a chance to cast his ballot, now did they? Some Republican Senators may have told McConnell they agreed with him, but, quite honestly, McConnell had a real problem. Merrick Garland was not a far left ideologue. In fact, he’d been endorsed by some Republicans for earlier SCOTUS vacancies. If hearings had been opened, Garland might have charmed his way into enough Republican votes to be confirmed. After all, elections were close, and independents, not Party members, held the keys to power. And Garland’s mid-spectrum position would have become apparent to a public that might have learned to mistrust the Republicans earlier than they apparently have learned since the Trump electoral college victory.

This all would have made McConnell look weak, and it would have made him a target of the Trumpian base. I clearly remember that when the report came of Scalia’s passing, Trump jumped onto his hind feet and shouted during a primary debate, Delay, delay, delay!

Any Senate leader ignoring that advice, that directive, was taking their political life into their hands. McLaughlin is presupposing a conclusion of dubious worth in that one little sentence, attempting to gloss over what was basically a political decision imposed on a governance function over which the Senate has little influence, once confirmation occurs.

But, by McLaughlin’s reasoning, a precedent had been set, and that’s why McConnell is a hypocrite – he’s willing, if a seat opens up, to confirm a nominee, while in identical circumstances with Obama, he was not. And he’s said so.

Fog may obscure the forest, but it’s still there.