Cover Up? Mais Non, Ils Protestent

The Russian Meddling/Trump Russian Alliance investigation has been fast changing.

Until a day or two ago it has been characterized by the white house and the republicans: "very important, but we need to ferret out the source of the leaks, not if the president is guilty of treason".

This talking point has changed this morning to "given the fact that it is a witch hunt, of course general Flynn needs to have immunity to testify" according to the tweet of the day from donnie.

Flynn said not long ago that anyone needing immunity must be guilty of crimes; at the time he was talking about the republicans’ never ending investigation of their favorite “witch”.

I'm beginning to think that John Dean and carl Bernstein are correct: cover up under way.

Chris Hayes’ New Book

When I was about twelve years old I distilled what had been until then a distinct dislike for cops into a viewpoint: cops are paid to repress a class of people less fortunate than I perceived myself to be and to defend to the death a class of people that I knew to be much richer than my family, and to pretty much ignore – unless we got uppity – people like me and my parents and grand parents.

Now apparently somebody has written a book that sounds as if, what I have always thought to be my one of a kind and strange (based upon all the white folk rhetoric in favor of the cops) viewpoint, has some legs in the market place of ideas.

Sounds as if it is a good book.

And it sounds especially well fitted to the US in its waning days.

A Health Care Thought

Since donnie and the dildos think they can sell us a turd by telling us it’s a pig with lipstick, and since that sale is the initial pivot point for success or failure for donnie, why don’t they just do the obvious thing?

Pour the AHCA solution into donnie’s magical top hat, wave donnie’s magic dildo over it, uttering donnie’s magic incantation (“it’s gonna be yuge”) and pull a new rabbit out of the hat, shrieking “you’re gonna love it”.

The rest of this obvious thing is that, in secret session (like various briefings donnie gets about the investigation on his russian connections) the hat will have been pre-loaded with Obamacare.

The Court Jester And Related Subjects

My wife's idea is that Kelly Ann is the court jester.

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Concerning Gorsuch – or whatever his silver haired upper class white supremacist name might be: phony is faux and faux is him.

I have heard him talk for ten hours and I now know that he is faux.

But then, so is the Senate; and so is the House of Representatives; and, especially so is the presidency.

But I guess that’s the best an America ostensively led by a reality television maven can bring onto the world stage.

How sad.

Sad for us – Americans who still give a shit.

And the majority of us who did not vote for donnie must never forget that this phony judge, was appointed by a phony president who was put in office by a phony election (unless one is real comfortable with Putin).

So, I guess the next move is going to be by the various militias that the republicans have fostered over the years: when the inevitable revolt against donnie the dildo starts, his various crazed – and deeply armed, and marginally trained - supporters will divide the geography amongst themselves, and start shooting at one another.

Vive the Second Amendment!

I suggest that those of us in the general population of what we currently call "America" listen to the multiple daily accounts of life in Syria to get a feel for our future.

Keep all your furniture because you are going to soon need it for cooking fuel.

Also, watch Red Dawn – the one with Patrick Swayze, because that will tell you what a patriot – not bullshit phony Americans, like the various militias – does when attacked.

But minimum requirement: we can all get ready to break up our furniture for fuel and to kill our dogs and cats for food.

JCL and IBM

One of the dishearteningly large number of things about which I had no idea about what my instructors were talking  in my first IBM training class was JCL – job control language.

From the vantage point of years and intervening experience JCL looms ever larger.

Somewhere in the months after I nearly washed out of CST – that first IBM class (I was 41 of 42 graduates (but number 42 ultimately became a Vice president of one of IBS’s many Divisions) – I had some projects assigned to me that caused me to have to learn what I had either resisted learning in CST, or had been too stupid to learn, and, as I learned those things, I became increasingly agitated: why had I not paid attention in class at CST?

This stuff was really interesting

It was probably because I just didn’t give a shit when I was in CST; that is a direct allusion to part of Saigon 1967.

But for some reason, after I got back to the Portland Branch Office after my amazingly deflating experience at CST, and had been given an assignment that was going to require me to know some stuff that I had apparently eluded knowing from CST, I began to give a shit.

And I began to learn some stuff.

Rather than making this post boringly longer that it needs to be, I am just going to say that one of the things I had to learn was JCL.

JCL at CST had been an alphabetic mystery.

It had something to do with making  files and things do what you wanted them to do; but that was all I knew about JCL.

That was all I knew until I had been given an assignment that required me to make disk files do what I wanted them to do.

Anyway, it all boiled down to three JCL statements as far as my project was concerned:

//VOL

//DLAB

//XTNT

Those were for sure the statements; I am not totally sure they were spelled that way.

//VOL gave the hard wired address of the disk drive that was expected to be on line for whatever operation you wanted to have happen; that drive had to have its “on” switch activated.

//DLAB gave the name of the file that the computer needed to look for once it had addressed the volume indicated in the //VOL statement.

//XTNT gave the tracks upon which the referenced disk drive contained the desired file of the specified (DLAB) name.

I think those statements worked equally well whether you were ‘getting” or “putting” a file, but I can’t remember for sure.

The project I had been assigned was a success and the various JCL statements to make it a success had worked as they had been supposed to.

I was elated.

As a side effect of that success, began to wish – as I have to this moment – that I had given a shit in CST; there were a lot of interesting things to have been earned there; but I hadn’t learned them.

But I had more significant  fish to fry, real soon; IBM had decided not to fire me but instead, to “put me on quota” which for most of the next year was a state of owing IBM more money every month; so I totally forgot about JCL.

In fact it wasn’t until about 30 years later that the thought ever came up again.

I was a fairly early fan of the WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW).

It made the world my disk drive I used to tell people.

They all tried to change the subject.

Since I really didn’t give a shit whether they knew what I was talking about I always let them – change the subject: “hey that welfare reform thing looks to be a big step forward”, etc.

But I couldn’t help thinking: “how is it possible to get from having to tell one single computer the physical address of one single disk drive, and a physical disk drive that has to be electrically engaged with the computer you are trying to address, including the file name you have given the space on the disk pack that someone has – hopefully – put on that machine, and then telling it what is the place on that unique drive where the information you are trying to access, to being able to enter http://noelmckeehan.com/ and get everything that was resident on my personal repository of experience?

And the same protocol worked for anything.

WTF?

Somehow somebody had magically taken the human race from needing to use arcane weird non human statements that could access something on a specific physical piece of computer hardware that understood a specific computer operating system from a specific computer manufacturer to being able to click on something and get anything.

Amazing.

Chuck Berry

The house I live in has a central amplifier hooked to 5 sets of speakers spread around the house.

I recently bought a small Bluetooth amplifier to replace the hulking multi-interface Kenwood that had been doing things around here for years; the CD player had quit working reliably so I had been thinking Bluetooth for some time.

Just recently I found a little, one function Bluetooth amplifier that was cheap enough to buy; if it didn't do what I needed so what?

So I bought it.

And it did what I needed: it can drive all 5 sets of speakers.

I should mention that it is driving an iPhone 7.

I have all my music and a lot of my movies on it.

So it’s a trove for would be curators like me.

That allowed me to think about playing some Cuck Berry – perhaps somewhere near the threshold of auditory pain.

Just a little while ago – this evening - I cranked the volume up to 8 or 9 and began to play my favorite Chuck Berry songs.

After I had heard Teenage Wedding I played Emmy Lou Harris's version.

Then I went back to Chuck.

When I quit - I was drinking Johnnie Walker Red the whole time - I realized that I had had a mini wake for Chuck Berry.

I really hope it makes him happy; it did me - amongst the sorrows.

One of the sorrows is I guess I never get to hear that duet that I have always wanted to hear: Chuck and Emmy Lou doing "Teenage...You Never Can Tell.

I opened the doors so the neighborhood could share the wake.

I hope they liked it.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=It+Gooe+To+Show+You+Never+Can+tell&FORM=EDGNNC

The Last Straw

This is from The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

"... since this is a capitalistic society, the class most interested in its security and prosperity is the capitalist class, which thus should have the most power. The theory has survived every test but experience. It simply has not worked. Since the Federalist party the American business community appears to have lost its political capacity; it has not been, in the strict sense, a ruling class. In placid days power naturally gravitates to it as the strongest group in the state; but through American history it has been unable to use that power very long for national purposes. Moved typically by personal and class, rarely by public, considerations, the business community has invariably brought national affairs to a state of crisis and exasperated the rest of society into dissatisfaction bordering on revolt. "

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I have been guilty of making posts and comments about donnie the dildo as if he were some new and threatening phenomenon.

I have just realized that error and want to correct it: he is not new; he is last.

He’s the last straw.

A lot of people voted for Barack in 2008.

He came out of a different handful – the executive handful - of straws.

But he was burdened with an alarming number of bum straws from the other –legislative -  fistful.

In 2010 this worsened.

In 2012 Barack’s straw got pulled out of the executive fist again, but he got stuck with a majority of bad – legislative -straws.

That little historical sequence left the United States with an executive with the intellect, ideas and instincts appropriate to the challenges of the times.

But it left that executive with a legislature with one purpose: make the executive powerless and bring the United States to a standstill so that at some future time the executive straw would also be pulled their way.

The legislature won: standstill was achieved; pretend catastrophes like the implosion of Obamacare were induced; no plans, programs, or even ideas were proposed to redeploy the inevitable losers in the supply chainment of the world and the massive growth in technology as a replacement for human labor in the United States.

The executive did propose major investments in infrastructure improvement and replacement but the legislature would not even consider them; their view was that any improvement during the tenure of the executive was a loss for the legislature; how could the legislature expect to get that last straw – the one in that other – executive - hand - to be one of their own unless things were so apparently bad that the straw would be almost automatic?

By inducing disaster in the lives of a large enough segment of America’s voters – many of whom voted for change in 2008 – the legislature has gotten the last straw.

And the rest, as if often said, is disaster.

UNIX: A Virus Masquerading As An Operating System

In the never ending coverage of the latest WikiLeaks thing I keep hearing the word “backdoor”.

That is interesting.

The first time I ever heard (actually I saw it in print) that term was in a book of a name that I can’t remember.

It was a quote from somebody of whom I had never heard and therefore whose name I can’t remember.

But I thought it was fairly profound.

And now it’s all coming home to roost.

I can’t remember all the details of what the book was about.

But I remember that it was about a kid of average intelligence in Portland  - in the late Twentieth Century - who, between what his average intelligence allowed him to figure out, along with the help of a community of on line hack type people who were willing to humor him with suggestions, was able to accomplish getting into a lot of major computer systems; I think some were DOD systems, but I can’t remember for sure..

He accomplished quite a bit.

I can’t remember all of the sites he hacked.

But I do remember that he was able to download the source code for Sun Microsystems, among those that he hacked – using a computer in his bedroom and a link to the computer at Portland State University.

That’s a big deal; source code is the code that can be modified, re-compiled and then stored and executed.

I never heard that Solaris had been modified by him, but, with source code he could have modified it.

And that would have meant that the OS of one of the major computer vendors of the day would have been performing according to the whims of a kid in Portland.

And the whole thing was possible because of UNIX.

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Back in the long ago dark ages of computing some engineers at Bell Laboratories needed an easy to use and infinitely flexible operating system.

They cobbled together something they called UNIX.

And they gave it a “back door” so that they could get in if they wanted to get into applications written under it and change stuff.

And they made it available to the computing world of those days for a pittance of a one time license fee.

The computing community paid that fee and started using UNIX in droves.

They came up with their own fully licensed and re-named versions of UNIX.

Solaris was only one of the most successful UNIX based operating systems.

There were and are lots of them.

What a deal!!

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Due to that confluence of computer technology and economics, most non IBM operating systems (IBM already had a whole shitload of operating systems, none with back doors) are children of UNIX.

It should therefore  be no surprise that things like iOS, Android and Windows have security problems.

They all have massively proliferated a virus: UNIX.

They all have back doors that magically seem impossible to close.

At least based on what I keep hearing form the Children of UNIX community.

And, surprise, surprise, the CIA knew that and went right in the back doors of those operating systems.

The good news is, all of the CIA’s systems are probably UNIX based.

Coming To A Boil

I have a Facebook presence, albeit not wide or deep: I have just over 100 friends, and a lot of them are actually friends – some from many years past.

Given my personal political viewpoint – which many years ago did not preclude my having a lot of friends with whom I totally disagreed politically, but which recently has required one to take sides rather than discuss alternatives and seek compromises - my circle of friends and acquaintances all pretty much see the world as I do, and I see it as they do.

As unhealthy as that state of affairs might be, it has a sociological advantage: it is possible, by scrolling down Facebook, to see what my herd seems to be thinking.

That is currently alarming.

It is alarming not because of “what” anybody seems to think; it is alarming because of the vehemence with which they appear to be thinking it.

Coming to a boil I would call it.

Assuming that there is at least one other, diametrically opposed herd to the one in which I seem to be running, it would seem reasonable to further assume that they are coming to a boil as well.

(I know this assumption is actually valid because some of the other herd occasionally leak into my Facebook world spewing their particular views of the world with vehemence and a boil equivalent to that of the boil of my herd.)

Let’s just say – to keep this thing real simple – that two herds are all that there are.

That’s a totally unreasonable thing to say, but all I need is two herds to make the point I intend to make.

I read a lot of history, and from my reading I can’t identify another time in American history when we the people were ever sorted down into two irreconcilably boiling factions convinced that the other needs to be eliminated.

It looks to me as if the Russian hackers have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

We are poised on the brink of a gradually developing civil war based only on hatred of some “other”.

Unlike our previous Civil War which had underpinning ideals on both sides, this one is just going to be the result of hate, brought to a boil, by an insane and irrational charlatan masquerading as a leader.

The world as it exists today is thing that has been created and maintained by America for seventy five or so years.

The main objectives of that American creation have been to spread self governing democracy, foster world wide prosperity and, most important (because this is pre-requisite for the other objectives to be achieved) the elimination of war between or among the world’s great powers.

Without America the world quickly devolves into chaos.

And that’s not good for jobs.

And that won’t make America great again.

Another Cog Has Slipped

“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

4:02 AM - 4 Mar 2017

This was one of several similar posts to Twitter by donnie the dildo in the early hours of this morning.

I can’t see how anyone could interpret this in any way but as evidence of insanity.

Straws In The Wind

“The Buck Stops Here” (Harry Truman) stops with trump.

Jeff Sessions admits that he actually did have two meetings with the Russians (after testifying under oath that he had no such contacts).

Pre-donnie I had always heard that this sort of thing was called perjury (Bill Clinton comes to mind).

General Flynn still hasn’t had anybody come after him for felonious contact with Russia.

Republicans nation wide are passing laws to criminalize protests.

Key components of those laws are:

1. Long prison terms;

2. Expropriation of assets of protestors;

3. No liability for motorists running down and killing protestors (I’m not making this up).

I finally heard today – it was Luke Burbank – make a reference to the Biff as a billionaire segment at the beginning of Back to the Future II. 

I have been wondering why nobody has brought this up so far; the character is absolutely trump.

The fact that that scene was shot in 1995 is unnerving.

donnie the dildo tweets pictures of Chuck Schumer having a bagel with Puty (I guess he was jealous) and of Nancy Pelosi in a room full of people, one of whom was the Russian ambassador. donnie wants a full investigation of both of those, obviously sinister, occasions.

I once saw a picture of John McCain with a picture of Ho Chi Minh in the background: I think we need to get to the bottom of that too; probably a special prosecutor is in order there.

I have come to my own personal conclusion about donnie’s Russo love: the last time he went bankrupt some Russian banks re-financed him. I guess that might make tax returns inconvenient.

I assume there ARE some interesting videos.

Finally, a fairly believable and certainly cogent magazine article says that trump is where he is and is doing what he is doing for one reason.

He has a plan for becoming the richest man in the world.

But what the hell.

We did pretty well for 230 years.

I guess that is all we had in us.

I’m going to watch Gladiator now.

Doggerel For Jeffie The red

Ol’ Jeff Sessions

He’s a snaky little fellow

Makes me want to bellow

“What the fuck you talkin’ about boy?

Ol’ Jeff Sessions

Didn’t talk to no Russians

And also no Prussians

So I guess it’s all OK

Ol’ Jeff Sessions

Won’t investigate the hacking and lying

But he sure will be trying

To make America great

How fucking nice

Truth Is An Option Too Dear

The faux president of the united states gave a speech tonight.

He gave a speech to the faux congress of the united states.

All the faux elected crew clapped and gesticulated enthusiastically.

And Little Orphan Annie – the faux vice president – looked really dewy eyed proud.

But the real faux presence was the faux president.

That faux guy – the orange guy with the bad comb over – said a bunch of stuff he either didn’t believe or didn’t understand, or both.

Everything he said is negated by everything he has ever said elsewhere.

The man lies.

The man is incapable of truth.

The man doesn’t acknowledge that a thing such as truth could exist.

And he is incapable of seeing it.

Which  is why so many cabinet appointments – Sessions and Flynn come to mind – are also liars.

He needs liars to keep him on message.

The Sessions Rule

Senator Franken asked if Sessions had talked to the Russians during the campaign.

Senator Sessions said that he had not.

Except for two times I hear.

But two is less than three and you can’t have a talk unless you do it three times.

That’s an old Alabama rule.

Orphan Annie Eyes

Ol’ Mike Pence

He’s out by the fence

With his Orphan Annie Eyes

 

And Opposed to sense

The Vice president is Pence

With his Orphan Annie Eyes

 

So Let’s all pensé

About how blasé

We all are about his orphan Annie Eyes

 

‘Cause no matter trump’s speech

We may need to impeach

And end up with his Orphan Annie Eyes