08:20 – Wow. Yesterday I heard about flooding in southern Alberta, which I think of as a semi-arid climate. But I didn’t realize just how bad the flooding is. At least three dead, and billions in property damage. The image below is of a street in High River, Alberta, a real town that stands in for the fictional town of Hudson in the TV series Heartland and is currently under a mandatory evacuation order. (That’s Maggie’s Diner from Heartland in the middle of the row of buildings.)
Our thoughts and best wishes to our Canadian friends in Calgary, High River, and the rest of the affected areas in southern Alberta.
The Calgary Stampede may be canceled for the first time ever, as well. The music festival that started on Wednesday is definitely canceled, and all the bands visiting from BC are now trapped trying to get home, as most of the highways between our provinces are closed because of mudslides and flooding, and the road north to Hwy 5 through Jasper is clogged with refugees from the flood. The Saddledome football stadium in Calgary is reported as flooded to the 15th row. The mountain resort town of Banff received 10″ of rain in a 24 hour period. That’s 2/3 of Kelowna’s yearly total!
Calgary is built on what was once the bottom of an ancient lake. When the storm started a few days ago, I told my kids this, and said all the water will end up there.
Sometimes I hate being right.
Mrs. OFD and grandkids have cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents up in Alberta and the NT; their posts on FB speak of this and difficulty getting to work, etc. It’s the first time in my nearly 60 years on the planet that I ever heard of catastrophic flooding up there.
Anyone know Algore’s whereabouts?
Another unusually wet and cold spring here in northern Vermont and two historic record floods in the past five years.
Mrs. OFD off to Fort Myers, FL for this next week, home for a week and then Kansas, Wyoming, etc. with work lined up to October and they tell her next year will be twice as busy. In fact, next year she’ll probably be traveling and gone 40-50% of the time and my next job could be likewise; so glad we bought this house by the Lake to enjoy.
“Chelsea Clinton Laments: My Great Grandmother Did Not Have Access to Planned Parenthood”
http://www.lifenews.com/2013/06/20/chelsea-clinton-laments-my-grandmother-did-not-have-access-to-planned-parenthood/
Can I lament also? Does this person not have a brain on her shoulders? If her beloved grandmother had been aborted then the beautiful and smart Heroine of Tripoli would not exist. One wonders if there is a brain cell between those two ears.
And no, I am decidedly not for banning abortion. I actually like what her dad said, “Abortion should be freely available and rare”. Smooth, real smooth.
Chelsea’s a bit cute, but I think the world would have been a better place if her great grandmother had had access to an abortion.
There is a good chance the HoT ™ will be our next Great Dick-tator. That means Chelsea will probably be our next Secretary of State. You know how how the Clintons work. BJ will have a permanent smile on his face chasing assistants.
Ya never know, the Republicans might choose someone sensible in 2016.
“…the Republicans might choose someone sensible in 2016.”
I want what HE’S smoking! Not gonna happen. No chance. They’re all either RINO rumpswabs or wack-job fundie nuts with visions of Armageddon in Israel and after all the Jews either convert or are killed the righteous shall be raptured into the air from their moving automobiles and from off their riding mowers while swinging rattlesnakes around in the air and drinking strychnine. And Jesus is their personal friend and pal and buddy.
The Clintons may well try to pull of some kind of family dynasty thing but they face a powerful Chicago crime syndicate machine that has zero scruples about offing the opposition one way or the other and my money is right now on this Barry Soetero figurehead/puppet character to hang in past his legit term of office like their hero, Pharaoh Roosevelt II. National security, you see. They’ll find a way to wag the dog in the next two to three years even if some catastrophe doesn’t happen on its own; like a massive DDOS or EMP attack on our infrastructure; more terror assaults; the economy tanking miserably, etc., etc.
What I find illuminating is that there is no shortage of our fellow American citizens being paid to spy on us, turn us in, get us imprisoned, tortured and executed if necessary, etc. I expect more of a Stasi environment to take hold in the near future; a nationwide network of informers, spies, and agents provacateur along with the skies and streets full of surveillance drones and cameras.
Eric Blair was only off by thirty years or so.
What OFD said. Not even a remote chance of Republicanism becoming sane in my lifetime. They have been going down the path to destruction since Abe derailed the train 2 centuries ago.
Like elections being at a polar opposite calendar position to tax time, I am afraid the NSA hubbub will be over and accepted by the time Nobama’s term is up. Of course, Democrats could have picked up on the Patriot Act and won agains a GW second term, but now we know what they really think: the Patriot Act does not go nearly far enough. Our government has taken its cue from big business, who considers the customer the enemy, while the current crop of both Demo’s and Repub’s consider middle-class citizens subjects to be tortured and stripped of every vestige of wealth, which is to be given to the political class and their overly rich CEO contributors.
What Chuck said.
They’re fanatically about the business of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs in this country and they don’t care. Frosting on the cake for them is the entertainment derived from ruining the lives of millions, never to be the same again.
Elections are a bald-ass charade and we have one Party, devoted exclusively to their own wealth and power and acting at the behest of their masters.
We had one perspective decades ago on this from the late Gore Vidal, who knew whereof he spoke; the other angle has been viewed and discussed by many others on the Right, notably Pat Buchanan and the late Russell Kirk and Murray Rothbard.
One thing done right recently.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/german-parliament-says-no-more-software-patents
We need that kind of backbone in the US, but we will not get it.
Unbelievable that those guys from out East are still in court, trying to get every radio station and stream broadcaster to pay them a royalty if any programming material is played from a hard drive. All this, in spite of the fact that many friend-of-the-court briefs have been filed, documenting and PROVING prior art back into the ’80’s, when the patent litigation is over stuff that was not filed until 1993. A summary judgment to dismiss should have been issued already. But no—anybody with any idea can now patent something, and no one else can use it without paying for it. Next thing you know, I will be paying somebody for the right to open my refrigerator for cookies and a drink of milk.
“I want what HE’S smoking!”
Ask Bill. He sent me a free sample of the weed he’s growing in a nearby forest. Obviously trying to earn some good foreign currency… 🙂
Now I get it. OFD and Chuck are twins, separated at birth.
Lost another WD external USB hard drive yesterday. Was the 2 TB model but with the slim case. I figure that it died a heat death since the case is so tight. I also dropped it yesterday and it nailed the wall on the way down. Replaced it with a 3 TB big case that I had ready to replace my oldest external drive on June 30:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008S94HXG/
I just realized that I might should be buying 4 TB drives for our LAN external drive backups instead of the 3 TB. Our LAN backup has hit 1.7 TB and we may be crossing over the 2 TB mark by the end of this year. That means that we may hit 3 TB by the end of 2014. I so need to go around the LAN and delete unused crap.
I will be paying somebody for the right to open my refrigerator for cookies and a drink of milk.
Thanks for the idea. I have filed a patent. But only for doors that open on to the right. My wife is filing a patent for doors that open on the left. Slide open freezer drawers on the bottom will belong to my son. Won’t be long I will have enough money to be president. IF I can lower my intelligence level and especially my sense of fairness.
I was watching Fox News this morning and they mentioned that the Congressional Budget office has determined that the immigration bill will depress wages in the USA. Amazing that the 11 million undocumented workers and 30 million more coming in the next decade (friends and family, climate change refugees, LBGT lovers, etc) would depress wages. Just amazing (not!).
Me, I am going to buy every piece of land that I can get my hands on. All these people moving to the USA need some place to live and some place to work.
BTW, housing prices went up 12% in May in the Houston area. 12% in one month! We’ve got investors from the east coast coming in here and paying cash for homes to turn into rental property. I should have waited another couple of months to sell my old house.
Speaking of which—here’s an FYI. The radio project has an Hispanic music program on for 2 hours during Saturdays. Audience figures jump to *5* times what they are during other hours of the broadcast week. Second highest-rated program is a 2 hour reggae music show. It is only 3 times the jump above normal, however.
“No chance. They’re all either RINO rumpswabs or wack-job fundie nuts”
This. People really have to stop hoping the Republicans are going to learn. The only chance in recent history was the Tea Party – and look, the movement has been completely co-opted in just a couple of years. The Republicans are just the other face of the same, damned coin: an “aristocracy” completely out-of-touch with the real population, or else just out for its own good, depending on how generous or cynical you care to be.
Frankly, I figure Ms. Clinton is the most likely democratic candidate in 2016. Who knows who the Republicans will field, and who cares – it really doesn’t matter.
The current Snowdon/NSA scandal is a real chance for people to get up in arms and do something about the developing police state, but I don’t see it happening. Snowdon has now been charged with a crime, and the government reflexively sealed the indictment. This ought to just underscore how secretive the whole government has become, and throw fuel on the fire, only…there’s no fire. There ought to be a million people marching in Washington; instead, the lead headline on one of the major US new sites I look at is “Why Americans are in love with Greek yogurt”.
Sad to see the great ship sinking, but damn, it’s sinking fast…
I’m currently pretty pissed at the US. Just sent in my 2012 taxes, and actually had to pay this year. Why? Because the value of the dollar continues to the basement, now being worth substantially less than a Swiss franc. So on top of our normal income taxes we had to shell out several thousand to a country I haven’t lived or worked in for more than 20 years. Next year I’ll have to file taxes through April, then I’ll be done, done, done.
Unfortunately, I am still waiting for the official confirmation (the “CLN”). The consul said it would arrive in a month. When it didn’t, I asked the embassy, and they told me that so many expats are renouncing their citizenship that there is now a backlog of several months. This is mostly due to FATCA putting normal people like me in an impossible situation. The US doesn’t release official figures, but just within tiny Switzerland there were 900 renunciations in 2012.
“We’ve got investors from the east coast coming in here and paying cash for homes to turn into rental property. I should have waited another couple of months to sell my old house.”
Yeah, probably. That’s the market now; developers and investors are buying up foreclosed and other properties by the tens of thousands and flipping them as rentals; they plan to wait a few years and then sell again, when presumably the market has turned up a lot by then. I think they’ll be left holding the bag, LOL. Oh, and when they do sell, they’ll joyfully turn those tenants out into the street. And laugh while doing so. But he who laughs last, laughs best.
“…Audience figures jump to *5* times what they are during other hours of the broadcast week. Second highest-rated program is a 2 hour reggae music show. It is only 3 times the jump above normal, however.”
Gee, Chuck; my oh my, whatever are we to make of these stats?? I guess this means there are no plans for my favorite programming, i.e., organ and choral music from England, France and Germany in the period 1200-present….
“The Republicans are just the other face of the same, damned coin: an “aristocracy” completely out-of-touch with the real population, or else just out for its own good, depending on how generous or cynical you care to be.”
I’ve been saying this for decades now, and it continues to fall on deaf ears, like that song about the ant having high hopes. And I am hugely cynical by now, of course. Who with a brain in their heads would not be?
“… putting normal people like me in an impossible situation. The US doesn’t release official figures, but just within tiny Switzerland there were 900 renunciations in 2012.”
We’re all increasingly being put in an impossible situation; but, and here I go again with the insect and amphibian analogies; I think most dumbass Merkans are like the frog in that pot of wottuh; they’ll never notice that their day is done by the time it’s boiling. They’ll be totally gobsmacked and have no idea what to do; instant mass panic, which the State is fearful of and will do just about anything to avoid. And if it can’t be avoided, they’ll roll tanks and machine guns if need be. More stunned Merkans.
Hey, it’s Saturday night; here’s a prediction, on this overcast, raining, foggy day on the Bay: Next three years some kind of large-scale attack on the national infrastructure, possibly including water and food distro systems, but more likely someone will have ramped up the old Stuxnet caper to a whole other level and managed to shut down a lot of critical stuff. We may also see the beginnings of more suicide bombings in crowded places here, since the borders are jokingly wide open and who knows how many hadji fucks have gotten in by now.
In five to ten years, the Great Default. Things will look a LOT different here.
Lynn wrote:
“Replaced it with a 3 TB big case that I had ready to replace my oldest external drive on June 30.”
What OS you running there Lynn? I bought a couple of 3 TB drives without thinking of the 2 TB limit. Can you make them run on anything?
What OS you running there Lynn? I bought a couple of 3 TB drives without thinking of the 2 TB limit. Can you make them run on anything?
Windows 7 x64. They work just fine but these are USB external drives. I have not tried them on older OS and/or motherboards.
Booting off a greater than 2 TB hard drive is a trick. You need an x64 operating system and a motherboard less than 2 years old:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581408
I have Windoze 8×64 on this box, an HP Pavilion, and Windoze Server 2012×64 on the adjacent HP Pavilion. Both also have Virtual Box running on them. First has 16GB RAM and the Server has double that.
I prefer Linux but if I get the job I’m waiting for, via a 4-6-week background check, it’s a Windoze site, so whaddya gonna do? I can still run Linux in the vm’s here for stuff I like to do.
71, drizzle and fog continue.
I have a Windows 7 x64 box, so I’ll use them on that, thanks. The drives involved use USB 3, some might also accept eSATA.
I have a Celeron 366 system from 1999 and an Athlon 1200 from 2001. Paid a motza for the latter, I think they’ll have to go to the dump in the next few weeks. I’m pretty determined to keep everything younger though.
I don’t know what the temperature is here in wonderful Adelaide, but I’m freezing my butt off. My nephew and his lady friend are visiting in a minute so my sister has turned up the heat. Wonderful.
I was hoping to get some reliable malware removal advice…
My sister has a desktop PC that is loaded with Bad Stuff ™. I tried getting rid of it a few days ago but didn’t kill it all. Anyone got some reliable suggestions? I know the Linux fanboys’ solution but my sister and niece are familiar with Winderz (Vista Ultimate in this case).
My inclination, if it was my PC is to reformat and re-install from scratch, but would rather do a cleanup to keep peace with my sister and niece. Plus I don’t know where the installation disk is.
Miles_Teg, I’d take out the drive and connect it as an external drive to another computer, then run the cleanup software on the other computer. That doesn’t always get everything but it’s much better than trying to run antivirus on the drive you booted from. And if it doesn’t get everything, yah, wipe and reinstall.
A somewhat equivalent option is to boot from a CD/DVD/thumbdrive which has a minimal OS and cleanup software. In theory that’s about the same as connecting the drive to another computer but in practice it’s never worked as well for me. Note that I haven’t tried this many times and may simply have had bad luck with the combination of infection and selected cleanup image.
I’m here for two more days then back home. I’ve decided not to get involved; if my sister wants the problem fixed she has two very IT savvy sons who can re-install Vista. I don’t know if it’s worth it, as my sister, younger niece and my sister’s grand kids are clueless about security. I don’t know if anyone knows where the disk is, or if there is one for this PC.
I was hoping to get some reliable malware removal advice…
If it’s beyond what something like malwarebytes can deal with I recommend one of the malware/spyware forums such as: http://www.spywareinfoforum.com/forum/18-malware-removal/ This method takes time but you’ll usually get advice from someone familiar with a number of esoteric tools.
Of course, when feasible, reformatting may well be the best option.
Time to upgrade to a touchscreen system anyway. My solution has always been virtually the same as SteveF’s. Get a new drive and reinstall the OS and software; then take the old hard drive, plug it into one of those external USB plug affairs and let the user find and copy their own files. Although I suppose with malware on it, there is some risk to letting them do that unassisted. But usually data files are not the ones infected.
But the best of all options is the one you have chosen, IMO: don’t get involved at all.
“But the best of all options is the one you have chosen, IMO: don’t get involved at all.”
Boy do I agree with this. Not only does it take your valuable time, if it’s a friend or relative, you are their IT support for life. After using Macs for almost 7 years now, I still get calls from friends and relatives for help on WindowsX and MS software. Geez.
We’re an odd bunch up here in my family; wife is fairly competent with IT stuff, as is son; two out of four siblings are also employed in IT, and have worked with it and in it for many years.
80s here today and just had thunder and monsoon-level downpour, so nice and muggy and stinky for several days now. Getting flashbacks of Charlie in the wire….
Mrs. OFD should be in Tampa/Sanibel Island about now, with temps a lot warmer. Just saw some stuff about rising sea levels over this next century wiping out Miami, the Everglades, Norfolk/Virginia Beach, Mordor, Manhattan and Boston/Cambridge.
Wish I could still be around to see Mordor and Manhattan go under….also Cambridge…
Just this past week I heard some “science” (sneer quotes are purely deliberate) show about rising oceans and the need for seawalls and other “climate change” abatement programs.
Except the oceans aren’t rising much if any. In one place, the alleged 12″ rise of the sea level over a few decades turned out to be caused by the land sinking. Gee, who would ever have suspected that pumping out the underground water would make the land subside?
Much as I would love to see the glaciers melting and the oceans oceans rising and the coastal pestholes being swallowed, I just don’t see it happening.
You and I and most everyone else on this board will never know, either. The article I read did mention land sinking as a cause of some coastal flooding. But otherwise, the conventional MSM thinking on this is that it is a catastrophic disaster affecting humanity in the aggregate and we MUST get cracking on it right NOW with major programs, projects and innovations, all dreaded words to 18th-C empiricists. When one sees where the howling and braying originates, and what their “solutions” entail, one then realizes the game that is afoot, of course.
Most of us here remember the “nuclear winter” scare and “global cooling/new ice age” hullabaloo of forty or so years ago, with similar “solutions” that just had to be done immediately. And supervised/managed by guess who?
Much as I would love to see the glaciers melting and the oceans oceans rising and the coastal pestholes being swallowed, I just don’t see it happening.
This is all about money. The new global warming XXXXXXX climate change taxes being announced by Obummer this week will be remorsefully introduced to help the poorest and most fragile of us, the children. Do it for the children!
http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2013/06/23/obama-climate-change-speech-tuesday-georgetown/2449913/
The taxes will be 1/2 trillion dollars in the first year and quickly rise to a trillion dollars per year. Gasoline, diesel and electricity will double in cost over the next couple of years. Do it for the children!
Some of us old-timers in broadcasting around here meet every week at a restaurant in Indy (well, the meeting happens every week for the last 26 years, but I only attend about once a month). Conversation last week was on how fast into irrelevancy, radio and television are moving. All prompted by this article
http://variety.com/2013/music/news/radio-digs-its-own-grave-as-cultural-currents-shift-1200500285/
If you wish that the MSM would have a lot less influence, it is coming! They are voluntarily committing suicide.
Actually, the number of AM radio stations being torn down (unused towers are very expensive to keep insuring) is nothing short of breath-taking. I look for a couple in Indy to succumb shortly. One station keeps changing formats about every 4 months, and nothing is clicking (nor will it). Another station in Kentucky was just sold for $15,000. That would have been in the millions back in the ‘60’s.
Programming out of a central location (usually NYC or LA) is forcing stuff on smaller markets that are both inappropriate and irrelevant, while the down-home styles that smaller markets find attractive, are being squelched.
A Chinese woman educated in the US, who worked on the Netscape browser, was recently interviewed on BBC Biz Daily. She maintained that it is not obvious to many, but globalization has already been accomplished. It is not the ‘coming’ thing; it is fully here and completed. Next is localization within globalization, and those who do not get the fact that it is the next battleground, are going to find themselves behind. She gave 3D printing as an example. Shoes are not going to be made en masse by factories in low wage countries; yes, they will be designed and engineered by a global effort, but will be manufactured by 3D printing in a shop not far from your house.
Same thing applies to broadcasting, IMO. Making stations everywhere sound like something directed to people living near the Hudson River is not cutting it. Having one disc jockey or announcer appearing on hundreds of stations (and getting paid as if he worked in Oshkosh) may have cut the expense of broadcasting to the marrow, but it is sending listeners away in droves—forever!
Actually, the number of AM radio stations being torn down
AM Radio? Does that still exist? I have not listened to an AM station in the last 20 years. Noisy, not just in static but in the DJ’s that work the station. As for FM the only time I have listened to an FM station in the last seven years is for the occasional traffic report. And even that is almost worthless as any useful information is 15 minutes behind. And even that need is going away with traffic information on my GPS.
The biggest user of FM broadcast in this area is for the local college football and basketball games. And I suspect that streaming is slowly replacing that for the younger generation. The oldsters are just hanging on with their transistor radios with the single earplug earphone.
Had breakfast at the soccer moms’ favorite morning hangout in Indy the other day. Two different business-dressed middle-aged men came in with the white earphones (signifying an Apple product) listening to something. It’s all I can do to keep from asking whether they were listening to radio, podcast, a how-to or sales pep talk, their own music files, Howard Stern streaming on an iPhone—what? But I managed to keep to myself.
I still listen to radio, but don’t enjoy it. As for my own music, I am getting tired of my library, even though it numbers in the thousands of tunes. My kids say I should use Pandora or Spotify, because once you tell it your likes and dislikes, it picks similar stuff from tens of thousands of tunes.
On a completely separate issue, I am one who loved “The Producers”, a now ancient comedy movie that has a lot of entertainment industry inside jokes, in addition to having guest appearances from an incredible range of entertainers. I am being told that “This Is the End” is a similar movie. Friends say do NOT watch any trailers or IMDb promotion—go in cold, or the punch lines of the funniest jokes will be ruined. Plot is that the Biblical Apocalypse arrives, and a group of friends finds out they are not part of the rapture that would save them. Friends who do not enjoy comedy movies in general are telling me they laughed so hard they cried at this movie.
We have that “album station” about 60 miles south of here that plays, supposedly, the long-neglected album rock of the 60s-70s, but they sure play a lotta Neil Young, Steve Winwood, and Tull nearly every day; a married couple basically does the playlist and Chuck gave me chapter-and-verse a few months ago on the ownership status, etc., very informative. And there’s a classical station not far that we can sometimes get, but they too, have a ‘top-40’ playlist every day. We also have a bunch of CD’s that we sometimes listen to, and other that, it’s shortwave, from around the world. I’ll be working on some antenna configs for that soon along with two-way and marine radio stuff, and my amateur license.
Haven’t heard AM in a real long time, and we ditched our tee-vee about eight years ago.
“Globalization” and all that won’t be so wonderful if the grid goes down and stays mostly down, and then all them nifty gadgets will be boat anchors, too. Well, toy boat anchors.
Went and saw “World War Z” tonight with the son. Was extremely well done with awesome CGI and Brad Pitt. The zombie conversion time (from bite to zombie) was totally unbelievable but made for a great story. 7 billion dead in two weeks across the planet.
The raft of good new music that we had from the late ’50’s that became super-charged with the advent of The Beatles in ’64, and lasted until Warner started demanding nothing but “evergreen” tracks from every artist after MJ turned out about the only evergreen album ever—“Thriller”,—is dead, and I don’t think it will ever return. I really miss the mass of good new music we had back then. Kids today have no idea what we had at their age. All they have got is spoiled brats like Justin Bieber, who ought to be spanked senseless, but instead becomes rich beyond belief. Every single one of the Beatles had more intelligence, maturity, good sense, and talent in the exhale of their cigarettes than Bieber will have in a lifetime of riches.
Very, very sad.
What Chuck said. Nothing after circa 1975, and we are in agreement with, in good company with, the likes of Larry Coryell (fabulous jazz guitarist) and The Hag, who says he only listens to oldies and classical when he’s on the road.
And I just got pretty much the entire Beatles “canon” on CD here. I’m not a huge Beatles fan but hell, any ONE of their albums beats anything else put out in the past forty years. Our daughter discovered some of this old prehistoric stuff a few years ago and was amazed.
“Globalization” and all that won’t be so wonderful if the grid goes down and stays mostly down, and then all them nifty gadgets will be boat anchors, too. Well, toy boat anchors.
I do not think that you are taking the current wave of energy production resurgence into account in the USA. This is totally moving the economy forward.
The bad thing is that the Obummer is getting to stomp on the energy production economy with a series of new taxes XXXX fees.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/06/obama-climate-change-speech-emissions
Note the focus on “carbon pollution”. All of the regulations will be from the EPA and venturing into new areas for them without clear legislation and oversight from Congress. Obummer is using the bureaucracy to further his view of a future USA without hydrocarbon fuels. $8/gal gasoline and diesel and 20 cents/kwh electricity in the USA in 2 to 3 years. Then the economy will come crashing down hard. 2008 hard.
Yes, it would be nice if Obama and the rest of the Democrat and Republican politicians would have the courtesy to drop dead before they do any more damage.
What I don’t understand is how so many bright people can fail to see that government and religion are just two sides of the same coin. They’re both all about controlling people and forcing them to act against their own interests in favor of government and religion. It’s been that way since both have been around. The shamans supported the tribal chief, who supported the shamans in turn. Pharaoh supported the priests, who supported Pharaoh in return. Kings and governments support religion, and religion supports kings and governments. It’s all a scam. Always has been, always will be.
Many commenters here rightly despise government, but support religion. Conversely, a lot of equally bright people on liberal boards despise religion but support big government. It’s all the same, people. Get real, and start despising both.
OK. I will despise that religion and those religions that entwine themselves with the State or have done so in the past and remain that way without making a serious attempt to disengage. My own Catholic Church is guilty as charged and those of us within the Church hope and pray and work for that disengagement, especially here in the West. When I say “religion” I mean as it exists in its organized state, run by the usual fallen, broken and sinful human beings. I distinguish it from faith.
And to be clear, this particular regime does most emphatically NOT support Christians in general and the Catholic population here in particular. We need to make our side of that divorce just as official and real as they have made it and quit looking for handouts and approval and special treatment.
“I do not think that you are taking the current wave of energy production resurgence into account in the USA. This is totally moving the economy forward.”
This is moot if the regime continues to torpedo it as you describe and/or if there is a massive DDOS attack on the grid infrastructure as I and much higher-level experts figure in the next three or four years.
Is anything that really matters actually connected to the public Internet?
I mean, I’m sure there are idiots out there who thought it’d be a fine idea to connect their factory automation software or whatever to the public Internet, but I assume that saner heads usually prevail. If I ran something sensitive I’d have nothing connected to anything other than a direct fiber link to my other sites. I’d have my OS and apps in firmware that required physical access to change. And so on. I don’t want someone opening the spillways in my dam or closing the locks in my canal or closing the valves in my nuke plant or refinery or playing with my ATC radar or whatever.
Surely there are enough bright, competent people running things that such things are guarded against? And how do you DDOS something that’s not connected to the public Internet?
Wow.
Exhibit A: “…I assume that saner heads usually prevail.”
Exhibit B: “Surely there are enough bright, competent people running things that such things are guarded against?”
Maybe forty or fifty years ago this was the case. No longer. Even this regime publishes documents illustrating the sorry state of our national infrastructure and the potential for dam failures, bridge collapses and the vulnerability of the grid. They’ve also admitted that the grid has been probed recently, so that would seem to address the issue of how much, if any, is connected to the internet.
Sure, if you, Bob, or most of the folks on this board were running this sensitive stuff we’d take the right precautions. But I’d venture to speculate that this is far from the case with the current administration.
Since I keep broaching this topic I’ll see if I can round up some good links to the info.
couple of links:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123914805204099085.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/05/22/house-democrats-report-says-power-grid-vulnerable-to-cyber-attacks/
There is also the direct physical access to a lot of sites around the country:
http://phys.org/news/2013-04-aged-national-power-grid-vulnerable.html
http://www.prepper-resources.com/national-research-council-electric-power-grid-inherently-vulnerable-to-terrorist-attacks/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/11/14/power-grid-vulnerable-terrorism/1704803/
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-14/thousands-seen-dying-if-terrorists-attack-vulnerable-u-dot-s-dot-grid
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-11-14/thousands-seen-dying-if-terrorists-attack-vulnerable-u-dot-s-dot-grid
Dave, I’m not talking about moron politicians and bureaucrats and corporate executives. I’m talking about the competent worker bees–the engineers and scientists and mechanics. The guys who actually keep things running and fix them when they break. The kind of guys who when our power went down last week worked around the clock to get it back up. I think you grossly underestimate just how many competent people there are. When something breaks, they don’t sit around in meetings and writing reports. They go out and fix it.
And there are a lot more of them than you seem to believe. After a bad storm, have you ever seen civilians standing in intersections directing traffic because there weren’t enough cops to go around? I have, many times. I even did it myself once. I stopped and relieved a guy who’d obviously been directing traffic for a while. He gave me his blaze orange vest. An hour or so later, another guy pulled over and volunteered to relieve me. I gave him the vest. That was apparently happening all over the place, and traffic continued to flow.
I won’t argue that the government has done everything possible to make people depend on it instead of on themselves and their friends and neighbors, but when the chips are down even many of the people who’ve come to depend on government will be out there doing for themselves. Yeah, there are stupid, lazy people out there, but most of them aren’t.
Given Stuxnet and its discovery, I’d say that there are things that matter connected to the Internet. Or at least there were! The question is who has the brains to learn from the mistakes of others?
if there is a massive DDOS attack on the grid infrastructure as I and much higher-level experts figure in the next three or four years.
Anybody connecting any infrastructure item on a non-readonly basis to the intertubes is a moron. There is no reason to do that whatsoever.
Many domains are starting the move to the cloud. I really dislike the single server that I have right now under load. Some day, Google will upgrade their cloud services and allow me to move my domains over there. My current limitation is that I have a bunch of C++ compiled server side software and the Google Cloud does not support that yet. Yet. And it is very difficult to DDOS a cloud.
I am aware that there are competent, honest and reliable worker bees and lots of helpful and altruistic civilians in the country. The worker bees may tend to rush out and take care of problems but their bosses and the State may forbid them to do so or find them other projects to occupy them; the interests of the State may be to let large disasters unfold and then observe the reactions as they are or are not dealt with and then set up their own plans for how to deal with mass disturbances, riots, sabotage, etc. Run them as test scenarios, in other words, like the Chicago mayor used to say, ‘never let a good crisis go to waste.’ The State does not concern itself with the consequences, however dire, to us Mundanes.
There could well be a combination of DDOS attacks on whatever infrastructure is vulnerable to them within the grid, including email and electronic communications servers, the telcos, etc., combined with physical-access attacks on remote, rarely or loosely guarded sites around the country.
For example, how to alert your worker bee crews to go out and fix a major regional power outage and coordinate their efforts with no phone and no radio and no email?
For example, how to alert your worker bee crews to go out and fix a major regional power outage and coordinate their efforts with no phone and no radio and no email?
Without phone and radio service, the dispatch of the work crews will definitely be challenged since most of the local distribution centers have been consolidated at five to one or more. Used to be every city in Texas above 2,000 people had a distribution center. Now it is more like every 100,000 people.
BTW, I would view such an attack an act of war with an appropriate response up to and including nuclear.
That is what I mean; the worker bees are themselves dependent on communications which are vulnerable to several forms of attack. And rest assured that this regime would view such an attack as an act of war, and that’s all well and good if a state entity can be identified but bloody unlikely these days with all the non-state actors out there. How to pin it down to one group within the hadji or other terrorist factions? At whom do we retaliate?
Knowing how ignorant and inefficient our state rulers are, they’re just as likely to nuke Tehran or Pyongyang when the actual culprits are a splinter hadji group in Namibia or some wacky criminal scheisskopfen in a Bosnian hacker cell. This would no doubt satisfy the Pavlov’s dogs that are the majority of our citizen-subjects now but would not get the right perp or solve any problems; it would, in fact, blow up all over hell. Remember how most of the 9/11 bastards were from Saudi Arabia, yet we concentrated our efforts on the Suck and Iraq instead, while our presidents hold hands with and bow to Saudi princes? If that fails to stick in anyone’s craw anymore then we are much farther gone than even I think.
From the work that I do, which involves the medical field almost exclusively, I think you would be amazed at how many pieces of medical equipment need a LAN connection. Why?
I sure don’t know. And from my friend who works putting up cell towers, the communications channel for all those conversations is IP bandwidth going to each cell tower. More important than the power grid, I think, would be an interruption of the Internet on a massive level.
Oh, I’ve assumed and taken for granted that the internet will go down along with the grid. A lot of corporate and State sites will stay up for a while with their UPS and backup generators, etc., but eventually even that will subside, with sporadic bursts here and there after that.
So no ttgnet.com, no Facebook, no Twitter, no email, no Amazon, no Netflix, and no more working from home with a VPN.
I never touch facebook or twitter and can live without Amazon and even ttgnet. But the porn? Tell me there’ll be an emergency porn network so I can get my daily fix!
What’s funny is that the porn networks will most likely be the very first ones back up and running; way too much money there to let that go down the drain, billions. More than some sovereign state entities around the world.
Even more funny is that just now our second t-storm of the day knocked out our power for all of one second but that was enough to shut off both desktops here and my alarm clock. Plus the tee-vee, set-top box and hard drive connected to them. I gotta finish doing my office and assembling shelving and hooking up the UPS stuff this week for sure. The weather liars say the whole week will look like this: partly sunny with showers and t-storms daily and fog at night. Temps in the low 80s; Mrs. OFD down in Tampa sez the temps there ain’t much warmer than here and they have about the same humidity. WTF? Why am I getting Florida weather HERE??? I’m gonna kick Algore’s fat ass!
Yah, thunderstorms have been rolling up and down here, too. The power’s flickered a few times, just long enough to doink the modem and router and my one server. Yes, they should be on a UPS. No, they aren’t. They were, but the battery’s dead and all available funds are currently spoken for. (And then some.)
When you catch up with Big Dumb Al (and it’ll be tough, because he’s always so busy flying around in his private jet to tell us to stop using so much fuel) give him a kick for me, too.
The third t-storm is slowly drifting south toward you right now. Didn’t doink the power this time.
Algore swans around in a small fleet of jets to his half-dozen or more mansions around the country while badgering the rest of us; while Michael Moore does a fair imitation of Dumbo the Elephant with glasses and lectures us on various sundry matters that concern him and the rest of the hard-Left Hollyweird rabble. Meanwhile Bawa and Woopie are pretty sure it’s OK for Bill Maher (who does a great imitation of The Cryptkeeper as a young man) to call Sarah Palin’s kid a retard.
I don’t know as I have enough mileage left in my boots to kick all these rumbswabs’ asses….maybe just a firing squad against a cinderblock wall outside of Mordor….