Generational Dynamics World View News

[Bob Butler]

Solar flare and cyber attack are nice and possible theories, but cyberattacks are quick. We would have seen troops moving to the ports well before Chinese cyberattacks were launched. Maybe someone other than China. I'd like a source for the solar flare theory. There are enough solar observatories that they should have confirmed it by now.

Edit: Looks at the moment like a techno glitch caused by trying to expand capacity.

[FullMoon]

Carrington Event
"A geomagnetic storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage due to extended outages of the electrical power grid.[3][4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

It's still too early to know whether it was solar induced, accidental, or cyber---somehow. Probably one of those and nothing has been said about accidental. Regardless, the chances of big things happening from either solar or cyber are known to be high and increasing. That's what is concerning.

[Bob Butler]

First, it hit AT&T much more than anyone else. A user of another network calling an AT&T user could be effected. That and the fix was to a known piece of software. The government has no evidence contradicting AT&T.

Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.

https://about.att.com/pages/network-update

[Guest]

First, it hit AT&T much more than anyone else. A user of another network calling an AT&T user could be effected. That and the fix was to a known piece of software. The government has no evidence contradicting AT&T.

Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.

https://about.att.com/pages/network-update

Shows how glass fragile the system is.

[Bob Butler]

Shows how glass fragile the system is.

As is any large program. Before I retired I was a software engineer for GTE Communications Systems Division. You play with something big you are going to break it occasionally. We were lucky in making most of our changes off line. AT&T's network couldn't be taken off line. Oops.

One of my first projects was a trainer for launching Minuteman ICBMs. After we made the many asked for changes and ran them through the final acceptance test, they started on the not asked for changes. In went the fixes. By patch. We had to manually insert numbers to modify the machine code. In the early 1980s with a machine that was already old even then, we had only 128K of magnetic core memory to work with. Yes, that was K, no typo. We ran out of it. Some bugs stayed in for another decade when the next upgrade came due.

I'm sure the modern AT&T system was much better, but still there are lots of opportunities to slip up, and if you try it on a working network...

[FullMoon]

Shows how glass fragile the system is.

In generational perspective, fragility becomes more of an issue when the systems become more dysfunctional. Downplaying the dangers we currently are facing by comparing them to previous years is an oversight. The frog is almost getting boiled but still thinks it's taking a warm bath.

[Bob Butler]

Shows how glass fragile the system is.

In generational perspective, fragility becomes more of an issue when the systems become more dysfunctional. Downplaying the dangers we currently are facing by comparing them to previous years is an oversight. The frog is almost getting boiled but still thinks it's taking a warm bath.

It is not just that systems become more dysfunctional, they change. With computers, Ks of memory become Ms, and the code gets so complex you don’t manually overwrite it anymore. If you study the industrial Age as S&H did, it is easy to conclude that major changes to a culture require a crisis war. which comes once a generation. If you study ages, you question whether in the Information Age with its nukes, proxy wars, computers and effective democracy requires a crisis war for cultures to change. Thus, everybody here is predicting violence which from a more broad perspective is obsolete.

The frog getting boiled would be better off jumping out of the pot. Some so enjoy the idea of warm baths they get boiled.

[Guest]

Blue Laws for Red Citizens
28 Comments / February 22, 2024
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

One state prosecutor and one civilian plaintiff have already won huge fines and damages from Donald Trump that may, with legal costs, exceed $500 million.

Trump awaits further civil and criminal liability in three other federal, state, and local indictments.

There are eerie commonalities in all these five court cases involving plaintiff E. Jean Carroll, Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James, federal special counsel Jack Smith, and Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis.

One, they are either unapologetically left-wing or associated with liberal causes. They filed their legal writs in big-city, left-wing America—Atlanta, New York, Washington—where liberal judges and jury pools predominate in a manner not characteristic of the country at large.

Two, they are overtly political. Bragg, James, and Willis have either campaigned for office or raised campaign funds by promising to get or even destroy Donald Trump.

Carroll’s suit was funded by left-wing billionaire Reid Hoffman.

Smith sued to rush his court schedule in hopes of putting Trump on trial before the November election.

Three, there would not be any of these cases had Donald Trump not run for the presidency or not been a conservative.

Carroll’s suit bypassed statute of limitation restrictions by prompting the intervention of a left-wing New York legislator. He passed a special bill, allowing a one-year window to waive the statute of limitations for sexual assault claims from decades past.

Until Trump, no New York prosecutor like James had ever filed a civil suit against a business for allegedly overvaluing real estate assets to obtain loans that bank auditors approved and were paid back in full, on time, and with sizable interest profits to the lending institutions.

Alvin Bragg bootstrapped a Trump private non-disclosure agreement into a federal campaign violation in a desperate effort to find something on Trump.

Smith is also charging Trump with insurrectionary activity. But Trump had never been so charged with insurrection, much less convicted of it.

Willis strained to find a way to criminalize Trump’s complaints about his loss of Georgia in the 2020 national election. She finally came up with a racketeering charge, usually more applicable to mafiosi and drug cartels.

Four, in all these cases, the charges could have been equally applicable to fellow left-wing public figures and officials.

Joe Biden, like Trump, was accused of sexual assault decades earlier by former staffer Tara Reade. Yet Reade was torn apart by the media and the left for inconsistencies in her memory. By contrast, the wildly inconsistent and amnesiac E. Jean Carroll won $83 million from Trump.

Jack Smith created the precedent of charging former president Trump for unlawfully removing classified files to his private residence.

But the government simultaneously did not charge Joe Biden for similar offenses. Yet Biden had removed files not for two years but for more than 30. He stored them not in one location but several.

His rickety garage was a mess, not a secure family compound like Trump’s estate. Moreover, Biden did so while a senator and vice president, without any presidential authority to declassify almost any presidential document he wished.

Biden never came forward to report the crime for over thirty years—until Trump was charged. Indeed, he was caught on tape six years ago, admitting to his ghostwriter that he possessed classified files but never reported it.

Bragg might have noticed that both Hillary Clinton (fined $113,000) and Barack Obama (fined $350,000) broke campaign financing laws. Neither was subject to federal criminal charges by local prosecutors.

An array of left-wing celebrities, politicians, 2004 House Members, former Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams have all recently challenged elections. They sought either to delay or redo ballot counting or, on the federal level, to sidetrack electors to ignore popular votes in their respective states.

These lawfare cases are part of other efforts that were highly partisan and without merit. Recall the Trump “Russian collusion” hoax and the “Russian disinformation” laptop farce.

In another first, some blue states are suing to take Trump’s name off the ballot for “insurrection,” a crime for which he has never been charged.

Total up the deaths, damage, and length of the summer 2020 Antifa/BLM riots. Then compare the tally to the one-day January 6 riot.

The former proved far more lethal, long-lasting, and destructive. Yet very few of the 14,000 arrested rioters in 2020 were ever prosecuted, much less convicted.

By contrast, the Biden administration sought to jail hundreds for crimes allegedly committed on January 6, such as “illegal parading.”

We are entering a dangerous era in America.

Ideology and party affiliations increasingly determine guilt and punishment. Opponents are first targeted, and then laws are twisted and redefined to convict them.

The left is waging lawfare with the implicit message to political opponents: either keep quiet or suffer the consequences.

[Guest1]

England reminds me of Constantinople in its final years. Anyone who could leave had already left. Only the poor remained; the emperor, a few nobles, priests, and foreign merchants. Constantinople was a shell of its former self. Today, England is covered in garbage, graffiti, and littered with criminal 3rd world migrants, mostly military age violent men. Qualified whites have fled England left the drug addicted and unqualified behind. The black and brown migrants that leech off the welfare system are completely oblivious to the system's fragile and finite nature. These new comers only take and take. England, like the West, is, for the most part, at its end.

However, unlike Constantinople, there will be no Ottoman Empire to replace us.

I don't see corrupt and womenless China picking up the mantle of global leadership; I see only barbarism replacing the West. I take solace in the fact that the black and brown races will not survive our disappearance, as they are unable to maintain a first world infrastructure. No, Samsung will not be run by African scientists in the future and black Americans will not reinvigorate the American medical system with 3rd rate doctors. I see what is happening now all around me: degradation.

And this is only the beginning.

[Another guest]

First, it hit AT&T much more than anyone else. A user of another network calling an AT&T user could be effected. That and the fix was to a known piece of software. The government has no evidence contradicting AT&T.

Based on our initial review, we believe that today’s outage was caused by the application and execution of an incorrect process used as we were expanding our network, not a cyber attack. We are continuing our assessment of today’s outage to ensure we keep delivering the service that our customers deserve.

https://about.att.com/pages/network-update

Shows how glass fragile the system is.

If a simple glitch will bring down the US system, the system will turn to dust when the Chinese and Russian launch a full scale cyberattack on us.