Stuxnet. . .

. . . sounds like the name of a new, sci-fi, thriller. Well it IS!!!! Only it's real.

(from Wikipedia.com)
"Stuxnet is a computer worm discovered in June 2010. It targets Siemens industrial software and equipment running Microsoft Windows. While it is not the first time that hackers have targeted industrial systems, it is the first discovered malware that spies on and subverts industrial systems, and the first to include a programmable logic controller (PLC) rootkit.

The worm initially spreads indiscriminately, but includes a highly specialized malware payload that is designed to target only Siemens supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that are configured to control and monitor specific industrial processes. Stuxnet infects PLCs by subverting the Step-7 software application that is used to reprogram these devices.

Different variants of Stuxnet targeted five Iranian organizations, with the probable target widely suspected to be uranium enrichment infrastructure in Iran; Symantec noted in August 2010 that 60% of the infected computers worldwide were in Iran.Siemens stated on 29 November that the worm has not caused any damage to its customers,but the Iran nuclear program, which uses embargoed Siemens equipment procured clandestinely, has been damaged by Stuxnet. Russian computer security firm Kaspersky Lab concluded that the sophisticated attack could only have been conducted "with nation-state support", this was further backed up by the Finnish computer security company F-Secure's chief researcher Mikko Hyppönen who commented in a Stuxnet FAQ, "That's what it would look like, yes". It has been speculated that Israel and the United States may have been involved. . . "

Doesn't sound out of the realm of reality, does it?!




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Have you ever really. . .

. . . read the story of Sodom from the book of Genesis? This is the text used by the literally 'uninformed' to defend their homophobic positions; those who think their Bible must be interpreted 'literally'.

(paraphrasing from The Sins of the Scriptures, by John Shelby Spong, © 2005 John Shelby Spong)
'Travel in the ancient world was hard and dangerous, so travelers were few. Visitors depended upon the hospitality of a citizen of the place they were visiting. Without it, more often than not, strangers became fair game for abuse which usually took the form of ribald play in which the manhood of the strangers was compromised.

The two 'messengers', who accompanied the Lord in his inquest of the citizens of Sodom with the intention of destruction, left the Lord with Abraham and visited the city of Sodom. Late on the evening of their arrival, Abraham's nephew Lot offers the strangers hospitality, much to the dismay of the town's menfolk who had been eagerly anticipating a night of debauchery since the arrival of the two. They surrounded Lot's house and demanded the surrender of the two visitors. Lot refused knowing that once the protection of a home had been offered, the honor of the entire household was at stake if that protection was compromised.

So Lot makes a counter offer, one that literal interpreters of the Bible generally fail to criticize. He offers his two virgin daughters to the crowd to "do to them as you please." (Also consider the literal interpretation of offering daughters as though they were property, precisely the ancient biblical view of women.) The daughters have, of course, not been consulted regarding the proposition, as being property only, they have no say in the matter.

Well, in short, Lot and his family (including the daughters) escape and the city is destroyed by the visitors in accordance with the Lord's intention.'

Have we learned the biblical condemnation of homosexuality from this fascinating little story? I must have missed it. What I did, and we all should, learn from it is that NONE of this material should be taken LITERALLY!




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I can't explain . . .

. . . or to paraphrase Ellington, 'If you have to ask, you'll never know.'

from Slate By Dahlia Lithwick|Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011, at 5:57 PM ET
". . . I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you.

What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you. . .

. . . By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance. The rest of America has little trouble understanding that these are ragtag, complicated, and leaderless times. This may not make for great television, but any movement that acknowledges that fact deserves enormous credit."




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Creepier than Halloween. . .

. . . and actually quite tragic.

from This Week In Texas
2009-02-04 / Local History
by Bartee Haile

". . . Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa in the dead of winter were a sub-zero ice box that took an awful toll on man and machine. On any given night, half of the stage talent and support staff were sick - "Goose" Bunch's feet actually froze! - and the tour bus gave up the ghost in the middle of nowhere.

By the time the road show reached Clear Lake, Iowa, on Feb. 3, Holly had had it with all-night rides on the latest mass transit - a converted school bus with a broken heater. He chartered a private airplane to fly him and two passengers to Fargo, N.D.

Ritchie Valens won one seat on a coin flip with Tommy Allsup, and Buddy assigned the other to his Panhandle pal. But soft-hearted Waylon gave his spot on the warm plane to Richardson, who had come down with the flu.

"You're not going with me tonight, huh?" Holly joked at Jennings' expense. "Did you chicken out?" Waylon explained fear had nothing to do with it, that he was just doing the Big Bopper a favor.

"Well," Buddy said in obvious jest, "I hope your damned bus freezes up again." Waylon answered in kind, "I hope your old plane crashes."

And that was what it did less than 10 minutes after take-off, killing all on-board.

"I just wanted to go home," Jennings recalled 37 years later, "but they wouldn't stop the tour." The grief-stricken guitarist had to wait until he collected his pay after the final performance to return to Lubbock.

Waylon Jennings made the most of the 43 years that an act of kindness on a cold Iowa night bought him. At his death in 2002, he was a full-fledged legend in his own right with more than 60 albums and 16 No. 1 country-music hits.

Buddy would have been proud. . . "




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Normal or not? . . .

. . . who's to say?

My brother-in-law came to the house last Sunday to watch a football game. He lives on the outskirts of the metropolitan area and is does not, as a result, have the games of our local NFL franchise available on his cable television broadcast schedule. Now this may sound like a very ordinary situation to you. Brother-in-law visits brother-in-law, the guys watch the game together with a few beers, maybe a pizza and pretzels, right?

Well most of it's right. The only wrong part of the picture is the 'guys' part, at least literally. You see, the two football fans that enjoyed the game together were my brother-in-law and my wife. My wife and my two younger sons are the only football fans in the family. Our eldest and myself would rather. . . be doing just about anything else. So as my wife and her brother were screaming at the television, I walked through the room. He said, "Ray, I guess you're not really interested in this game are you?" to which I responded, "You could tell, huh?" (not rudely, mind you.) To my brilliant remark he responded, "I guess you're the only normal one here."





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The OWS protesters. . .

". . . are filling a large hole in America’s democracy. Congress, the president, the media, and even the think tanks were not reflecting the frustration, confusion and anger among Americans. They talked, they did not listen. I have witnessed these people several times now, talked to the group twice, talked to them in private—they listen. It is quite wonderful.

But what bugs me most is the widespread criticism of their ignorance of economics. What they know and what Wall Street and much of Washington do not is that the American model has been failing for decades. Look at income inequality. More important, look at average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation, now back to their 1969 level. Look at our crummy roads, our unequal education, our uniquely absurd healthcare system. Look even at relatively weak capital investment.

Then they are lectured by people like the Competitive Enterprise Institute that they do not understand how markets work. There have been no free markets by neo-classical or even Hayekian standards for decades on Wall Street. When there is no transparent pricing of derivatives, there is no free market. When five major banks control the entire market, there is oligopoly, not free markets. When enormous banks in every avenue of finance exchange information within their own companies, information asymmetries, not to mention potential for insider trading and front-running, are rife. When the conflicts of interest between ratings agencies and their clients are built into Wall Street, who can but laugh that this is real competition. And what about asymmetric financial incentives that made the bankers rich? They rewarded risk when you won, but did not penalize when you lost.

Don’t lecture the OWS movement about competitive markets. In league with Washington regulators, Wall Street learned how to rig those markets. And then they could misprice risk and lead to runway speculation that was bound to result in failure. One number always grabs me. Private financial firms wrote 18 percent of mortgages, which resulted in 42 percent of all serious defaults. There is the culprit. And then they didn’t have the capital to cover the losses. They drove the housing market sky high. Then they built debt on the bad mortgages.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that even had markets run on more competitive lines speculation and crisis would have been completely avoided. There is little in neo-classical theory that suggests mild corrections are all that is needed to set economic growth on its inevitably stable path. But people like Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke stuffed the deep crises of 1982, 1987, 1989, 1994, 1997, 1998 and 2000 into that mild model. The great moderation was born.

Then wise guys who cannot help but champion Wall Street with little sense of history tell us that all the OWC criticism is unwarranted. Capitalism must be allowed to make mistakes. This is true.

But on balance, OWS is not against capitalism, it is against wild capitalism. And it is against injustice. Is Wall Street?"
(by: Jeff Madrick, TripleCrisis Op-Ed http://www.Truth-Out.org)




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Another one of those. . .

. . . pesky, health-related things that you have to do when you get old. Well, when you get OLDER. Well, maybe I should say when you have health-related issues that requires medication and monitoring NO MATTER HOW OLD YOU ARE. Well, maybe I'm just bitching because I have to go out EARLY on a miserable, rainy, cold, Saturday morning. And not only do I have to go out EARLY, I can't even have my morning coffee or absolutely ANYTHING to eat. Yes that's right. Since midnight, I haven't had a thing to EAT or DRINK, except water of course, because to produce accurate results, I have to FAST on days I do this.

Two common, health-related issues are present in this particular system of mine, high cholesterol and hypothyroidism.

"The term high cholesterol is a bit misleading, because there are two types of cholesterol. If you've been told you have high cholesterol, it usually means you have more of the bad type and less of the good type. This may put you at higher risk of having a heart attack or a stroke.
You won't notice if you have too much bad cholesterol, because you won't have any symptoms. The only way you can find out is to have a blood test."

"Hypothyroidism is a condition in which the thyroid gland does not make enough thyroid hormone. Symptoms: Early symptoms: Being more sensitive to cold; Constipation; Depression; Fatigue or feeling slowed down... " well YOU get the picture.

SO, here I am, EARLY Saturday morning. NO COFFEE, NOTHING TO EAT or DRINK, FASTING since midnight, terribly inconvenienced and just miserable about it just because I have to go have them draw my . . . BLOOD!




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