Update Tuesday. IRS Plot thickens slightly. Never try to rape a hornets nest.

View 774 Wednesday, May 15, 2013

This is Wednesday, and all the Windows computers here need updating. For reasons I do not understand, the Windows 8 machine wants to be told to do the updates including the resetting although it says that it does it automatically. That is, there is a screen that says updates are automatically installed, but if I manually tell it to update I am told there wre 13 critical updates do I want to do them now?, and if I do I get to download them, and after downloading install them, and then I get to tell the machine to restart or it will do it in a week or so without my having to tell it so. Now it may be that I have insufficiently pored over the Help files and other instructions for Windows 8 and my cursory look is insufficiently informed. I no longer spend about half my time mucking about with small computers, so that I do all these silly things so you don’t have to. Still, I have had some experience with these little machines over the years, and you’d think that I could get the automatic updates setting right on Windows 8 – but I don’t.

Now true, the machine is in sleep mode on Tuesday nights, and it’s not my primary machine. My primary machines are two older Windows 7 machines, and on Wednesday Morning when I sit down at my desk they will both be asking me to log in, having done their updates during the night. They’ll want me to log in. When I do that all is well and over, for them, and for me I know to go to Alien Artifact, a Windows 7 system that will have been in deep sleep for days, and get his started on his updates; and then go tend Swan, our very powerful Windows 8 system, and tenderly bring her into update condition, and that’s going to take some personal attention until it’s done. I suppose I should make an effort to find out what’s going on, and perhaps I will; but meanwhile, take this as a reminder to wake up all your sleeping machines and update them.

When Windows does an update, this is a signal to all the hackers to update their software, since there will be new fixes to older hacks, and sometimes fixes to hacks not yet loose in the wild, and that means there are millions of machines vulnerable to those hacks. Hacking is a big business now, and some of the best computer scientists in the world are employed by those interested in penetrating your computer and using it for various nefarious purposes. If you are lucky you might be taken over by a concern that merely uses your system to forward a ton of spam, and if you’re really lucky the proprietor will not only install his control software, but another virus that protects you from other hackers. There are concerns out there that do that. There are even rumored to be some who recognize that a machine has already been hacked, and stop trying to get this one – a sort of professional courtesy. And then there are those who update the scripts they sell to script kiddies who use them to try to start their own companies of zombies they can rent out.

In other words, it’s dangerous out there, and keeping your systems up to date is the first – but not the only – line of defense.

Be safe.

So having gone the rounds of the Chaos Manor computers to get them properly updated, I sat down to the mail, to find this the first mail in my inbasket.

Tried to have sex with a hornet’s nest

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http://nyheternasverige.se/forsokte-ha-sex-med-getingbo-avled/

No matter what I’m exposed to, no matter how many times I think I’ve seen or heard it all, somebody tops it. The big, neon, flashing lighted sign in my head reads "What did you think was going to happen?"

I hope this is some sort of weird joke.

Graves

Have a nice day.

The IRS scandal develops. The White House insists that no instructions came from there. Here is the official report of the Inspector General.

http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

I have made only a cursory inspection, and found no surprises.

We are awaiting the President’s speech on the IRS mess.  The official story is that two lower level IRS employees in Ohio took it upon themselves to delay the applications for tax exempt status of all groups using the word “Patriot” or the phrase “Tea Party” or other libertarian/conservative code words in their title or statement of purpose, while expediting those who claimed to be “progressive” or “responsible.” There was no knowledge of this at higher levels,k and certainly none at the political level.  It was all a matter of low level professionals.

Of course that opens the question of the civil service.  If a nation cannot control its bureaucracies, perhaps a spoils system with naked political appointments would be preferable, because that way at least you get political responsibility: everyone knows who appointed his ward leader as Commissioner of Public Roads, and if you want a road past you house you elect someone who lives near you. That way eventually you get your road, whereas with a bureaucracy you never get a road.   A politically responsible system would be able to remove the bunny inspectors after a few years of ridicule but in fact it has been several years and they are still inspecting stage magician performances to insure that if the magician uses a pet rabbit in the performance he has a Federal License to do so, and no, I am not making that up.  Indeed, if the magician geeks the rabbit – slays it with his teeth and eats it raw – he may be in violation of state or local laws, but the Federal Inspector of the Department of Agriculture has no jurisdiction, whereas if he uses the rabbit in the performance and keeps it as a pet, he must have a Federal License to do so.

The President is speaking now, and he will fix it, and see to is that nothing like this will ever happen again, and it was never anyone in his staff who ordered it, and it’s all going to be all right, and trust him. It was outrageous and inexcusable and it will never happen again, and the acting head of the IRS has resigned, and it is all going to be all right. The perpetrators have been “disciplined” but so far have not been identified nor discipline defined.

So it goes. More breaking news. There is a link between the two people in Cincinnati and the acting director of the IRS (who has resigned). Too much for me to follow.  The President took no questions and left after promising to make everything all better.  And of course he may well be completely sincere. But someone in his campaign staff knew exactly what was going on.  The story is not yet over.

The Tea Party frightened the campaign to reelect the president, and someone took steps to place a primary hamper on the Tea Party after 2010. Who knew what, and when did they know it?  Those who lived through the Watergate investigations will remember all this…

IRS Scandal expands to EPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI53kkF-WGM&feature=youtu.be

John David Galt

And now there are stories of leaks from tax returns to political groups.  The old Nixon Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) never went this far. One wonders what the media will make of all this. The last time, a President resigned.  That isn’t likely here.

And I don’t know about any of this:

[Link formerly here deleted as it does not lead where I thought it did.]

We have a case in Los Angeles of a guy who was curious about bombs so he built some. He never exploded one, nor threatened to.  He just wanted to see if he could do it.

Having done something of that sort at age 14 – I am sure there is a statute of limitations at work here – I suppose I have a bit of sympathy. Of course I made mine down by the hog pond having turned the hogs out into a previously harvested cornfield, and he was working in a city apartment, so I suppose it’s right that he be charged with endangerment – but if he wants to volunteer for the Army bomb squad I’d let him go do it. Rather see him there than in jail…

 

I see on tonight‘s news that sexual harassment in the military is now one of the gravest of problems.  It must be “solved.”

Of course a long time ago this was predicted as an inevitable consequence of making military service a “right” and sexually integrating the services.  It was unfair to women to exclude them from any part of the military, and any attempt to segregate the sexes was just wrong.

Of course the purpose of a military is to break things and kill people; to win battles; and the kind of people who do that are not always those we want as our neighbors.  The French long ago created the Foreign Legion for that purpose. They never though of making membership a right, and ringing women into the Legion barracks.

It is certainly the case that women can do many of the functions of military forces.  It is also true that one has to have career paths for the troops at the sharp end.  When the fighting me begin to think it unfair that women are promoted over them through a quota system, that has an effect.  If your goal is to have a sexually integrated service with no segregation of the sexes while also having no sexual harassment you may have set yourself a more difficult task than you think.

It may be easier to win battles than to integrate your armed forces without sexual harassment. History doesn’t show many successful military forces with sexual integration – except of course the present one. Which, we are now told, suffers from an intolerable problem of sexual harassment that must be rooted out of the system.  And of course full sexual integration of the forces requires that mothers be sent overseas at the need of the unit, not making much allowance for the needs f the children – who are future citizens and future warriors.

I know that women can perform many of the military functions, and probably do some of them better than men can. But to try to erase sexual differences while building an invincible military has yet to be done; and the flurry of complaints about sexual harassment suggest that it’s not going as well as we would like it to.  Yes, certainly, it’s a lovely ideal and we have had some movies based on the notion of absolute equality of the sexes in military forces.  We have rather fewer examples of battles and wars won by forces that enforce absolute egalitarianism.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. The Navy has a long experience of men at sea; rather less than men and women at sea; if it’s going to work anywhere it should be in the Navy and perhaps the Air Force.  We’ll see,  But is the goal to win battles or to demonstrate sexual integration?

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.  James Burnham made that observation log ago, and as the Soviet Union collapsed we all forgot it.  Let’s hope that we know how to bring this off and build a thoroughly integrated force that wins battles and can be deployed when and where it is needed.