Month: August 2016

Under Siege

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The base at Hellenikon was often under siege and sometimes physically so; before, during and after I was stationed there in the early 1980s; regularly once a year when the local national employees went on strike, and blockaded the front gate, and now and again by anti-US and anti-NATO protesters. Although there was a Greek Air Force installation right next to the American base, there was no passage between the two, unlike the base at Zaragoza, where Spanish and American personnel had pretty much free passage between their respective halves of the facility. In the case of striking workers, or hostile protestors at the main – and only entrance – those of us inside the base were stuck there, while those outside were also cut off. Only one year did it become a problem lasting more than a single day – but it was an inconvenience for us all, and particularly frightening for family members.

And I was remembering all of that, this weekend, reading about how Incirlik Air Base – which also used to be called Adana Air Base – was cut off for about a day this weekend, after having commercial power cut off for nearly a week by Turkish civil authorities, in the wake of an attempted coup against a president who strong-armed himself into office by side-stepping the established rules.

Read more

Seth Barrett Tillman: Letter to the Editor: Responding to Robert Fisk’s “To understand the Islamist beheading of a French priest ….”

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It is not “inevitable” in any civil war—no matter how brutal—that one side murder foreigners. Certainly, the GIA’s murdering foreigners—even during the brutal Algerian civil war—was not “inevitable”. It was a choice; it was the wrong choice…

Read the whole thing.

Hillary & FBI Director Comey’s Cyber-Security “Broken Window”

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When FBI Director Comey publicly took a dive and sold out the rule of law in refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton’s Cyber-security crimes.  He began a new chapter in providing evidence of the validity of “Broken Window Policing”  in the field of cyber-security. For which, see the following definition:

The broken windows model of policing…focuses on the importance of disorder (e.g., broken windows) in generating and sustaining more serious crime. Disorder is not directly linked to serious crime; instead, disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents, which then allows more serious crime to move in because of decreased levels of informal social control.

Hillary and the FBI Director Comey have advertised both outrageous cyber-security weakness and more importantly the breakdown of social mores of “the rule of law” in Federal Government cyber-security.  If you advertise you are weak, stupid and capricious in enforcing cyber-security, it is blood in the water for cyber-criminals of all sorts.

Consider this not exhaustive list busted e-mail security associated with Hillary Clinton and her Democratic Party surrogates.

1) Hillary’s email system on Bill Clinton’s server.
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2) The Hillary Controlled Democrat National Committee email server.
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3) The Democrat Congressional Candidates Committee server.
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4) Hillary’s election campaign server.
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5) Hillary’s several different illicit off-site email servers when she was Secretary of State.

This is a very small fraction of the “Broken Window theory” as applied to cyber-crime.  What we see related to Hillary.  The problem here is that this sort of political corruption cannot be centralized.  If Hillary can do it and get away with it.  Exactly how many other illicit off-site e-mail accounts filled with Federal secrets are there now?  And how many more will there be between now and Jan 2017?

Lois Lerner at IRS and the EPA director are both known to be using non-Federal government secured public e-mail systems as early as 2010.

Exactly how many other officials at the State Department, Defense Department, Interior Department (Can you say Secret Service?), other non-departmental American intelligence bureaucracies, and the Federal Reserves are there?

That is the real cyber-security “broken window” Hillary and FBI Director Comey have opened. And this is the cyber-security nightmare that will be with America for decades, barring a massive and systematic purge of everyone high and low associated with such behavior by a new President or after another — likely nuclear — Pearl Harbor.

I’ll close with the following Sept 12, 2008 Obama campaign statement that applies in 2016:

“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,”  “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

— Obama for President 2008 campaign spokesman Dan Pfeiffer.

 

New Jobs Contest! You Could Be a Winner!

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In a comment to my post About Those Job-Killing Robots, TM Lutas said:

If you want to slay the mistaken talk about the end of human employment, hold a contest. Come up with labor demand boosting ideas that we do not engage in today because we either don’t have enough people or don’t have enough money to do it. Weigh jobs that don’t require much intelligence or education as more valuable than those requiring high education/intelligence. Within a year I predict enough entries to be submitted to put the entire world to work multiple times over.

It is a bit embarrassing to think about things we are too poor to do. This makes these jobs invisible to us today. By creating a contest and an artificial market for these ideas, they become visible and we turn from despair at the jobless future to wondering how we can become efficient enough to afford to do all these wonderful things.

Let’s prototype the contest here, among friends (and a few special adversaries and maybe even some enemies), and maybe we can roll it out later on a larger scale. The winner will receive a microscopic amount of fame, and also a virtual certificate, not suitable for framing.

What are the things that we collectively and individually can’t afford–but might be able to afford given higher levels of productivity and national income–that would meaningfully affect well-being and human satisfaction?  Define “things” as broadly as you like.  Consider both things that could become more affordable due to productivity improvements in a specific industry, and things whose creation might not by itself be meaningfully improvable from a productivity standpoint but which people could better afford given an upward trend in overall productivity and income.

Thoughts?