Surigao Straits, October 25, 1944

October 25th 1944 was the battle of Leyte Gulf, and a side battle but determining one in the Surigao Straits on the south side of Leyte. The USS Albert W Grant, DD 649, part of a destroyer squadron, sailed straight at the Japanese southern fleet, sending off torpedo after torpedo, and damaging several Japanese ships. Unfortunately, it has been alleged that the Captain of the light cruiser Denver decided, despite warnings to the contrary as reported later, fired on the Grant with 16" armor piercing shells. The good news was the Grant was a destroyer and armor shells did not explode. The bad news was that they went through the ship killing dozens.

Above is the burial at sea of some of the men. Their descendants, as I am one, still remember the event.

A Paris!

Finally, I can try my French in Paris. You see as an American, my French lacks tonal character. My American accent is flat, non-tonal, whereas after two weeks I can finally get the second syllable working again. But never in Paris.

Now a kind French politician is proposing to make this illegal. As Reuters notes:

French member of parliament has proposed that mockery of accents be outlawed, after an irate politician derided a journalist’s southwestern pronunciation before asking if anyone had a question in “understandable French”. Laetitia Avia of President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party said she was proposing a bill that would classify such mockery with other forms of prohibited discrimination such as on grounds of sex or race. She did so after a journalist from Toulouse in southwest France asked former presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon about an anti-corruption investigation of his hard-left political party. In an exchange widely relayed on media and social networks, Melenchon mimicked the journalist’s accent and told her she was “talking nonsense” before turning away and saying: “Has anyone got a question in more or less comprehensible French?” 

I may be able to return to Paris yet. In Normandy no problem, in Savoy, no problem, in Brittany, no problem. Finally a solution. Bonne chance mes amis!

What is in a Name?

If Joe Jones gave MIT $2 billion, would they change the name to "Joe Jones University"? How about $5 billion? Would $10 billion allow Joe to call is "Joe Jones' Happy Place"? Then again what is in a name.

Take the Department of Materials Science. From their web site they note[1]:

MIT's DMSE, like the field of Materials Science and Engineering, grew out of the studies of metallurgy and mining. When MIT opened in 1865, Course 3 consisted of geology and mining. Later, the department's name was changed to the Department of Mining and Metallurgy and over the next fifty years, the disciplines of geology, mining, and metallurgy were repeatedly joined and separated until in the 1940's, MIT discontinued the study of mining engineering and Course 3 was named the Department of Metallurgy. In 1967 the department name changed to the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science and in 1974 to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. These name changes reflect the growing awareness, both at MIT and in the field, that materials should be studied in terms of their behavior and characteristics, rather than by specific class.

There were Departments of Meteorology, Departments of Naval Engineering, Departments of various types.

What was common were several things:

1. As technology changed Departments morphed to reflect the change. Often leading the change.

2. As new Departments arose, the names were descriptive. They were not reflective of the donor at the time.

3. Evolution of Departments was consistent in form, namely a School and then a Department

4. Ad Hoc assemblies were set in Laboratories or Centers. Thus RLE or the Media Lab. Innovation, research were allowed within these petri dishes. Education in the more formal strictures.

5. MIT never was a University nor did it have Colleges. It was reflective of the core technologies that it was a key player in creating and promoting. MIT was in no way like an Oxford or Cambridge, the strictures were loose, allowing for innovation.

6. Donors names got on buildings, not educational centers.

Now along comes a dramatic change. As MIT notes[2]:

MIT today announced a new $1 billion commitment to address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the prevalence of computing and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). The initiative marks the single largest investment in computing and AI by an American academic institution, and will help position the United States to lead the world in preparing for the rapid evolution of computing and AI. At the heart of this endeavor will be the new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, made possible by a $350 million foundational gift from Mr. Schwarzman, the chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, a leading global asset manager. Headquartered in a signature new building on MIT’s campus, the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will be an interdisciplinary hub for work in computer science, AI, data science, and related fields. The College will: reorient MIT to bring the power of computing and AI to all fields of study at MIT, allowing the future of computing and AI to be shaped by insights from all other disciplines…give MIT’s five schools a shared structure for collaborative education, research, and innovation in computing and AI…

Now this is truly a dramatic change. First, it is the creation of a "College", an entity never seen before. MIT had a strong pragmatic sense, and this in essence changes this. Second, MIT named things for what they did not who funded it. Recall the Metallurgy and Mining efforts. Third, there appears to be an overwhelming unity of focus, AI, whatever that may be.

Let me comment on each element. First names. Harvard is John Harvard, Stanford is Leland Stanford, and Cornell is Ezra Cornell. Even Weill Cornell Medical School is just a rebranding of a Medical School. If this had become the "School of" perhaps some continuity. But why a College? Second, the naming based upon what is done seems to be missing, but then again this is less of a problem.

Finally, AI. I have seen and been a peripheral participant in AI for half a century. In simple terms it is the application of computer processing power, "tools" for measuring and observing, and "rules" which may be adaptive, to effect actions from observations. AI is amorphic, it lacks substance, as it should. It has become a catch phrase for anything that uses computing and data to effect something. Take Watson and medicine. Physicians are taught differential diagnosis and then an application of the most effective remediation, if available. Yet as Osler noted more than a century ago, if all else fails listen to the patient. Really listen. Watson does not do that and in the age of the EHR many young physicians do not even have the skill. Thus we all too often collect data and fail to listen to the patient.

Thus one should ask, is AI a  unifying construct like the term physics or mathematics or philosophy? Or is it as I suspect a catch all phrase for "smart" programs which can "adapt" by measuring data and responses and thus find some "optimal" result. It is akin to the "chess program" that, if the computer is fast enough, stay a dozen moves ahead of its opponent. It may win every time. On the other hand I can think of a recent medical presentation where a patient presented with bleeding gums, and this led to a urinalysis, a finding of blood, a cystoscopy, MRI, an ultrasound, and so forth until someone remarked the patient is on warfarin, check the INR! Yep, as suspected, too high, so titer down the warfarin. How would Watson handle this? It may very well have demanded the same tests, after all the more data the better the answer.

Thus AI as an organizing principle may have severe negative effects. Namely its vagueness, its vagueness, and its vapidity.

Now to the term Computing. Perhaps this would be akin to a College of Typing, or Shorthand. Computing is a tool a technique, and not every Electrical Engineer is dominated by Computing. We no longer use slide rules, and computing, as valued as it is, is also so broad a term, it is accepted as an essential part of all that we do in the 21^st century. My stethoscope computes, my blood pressure cuff computes, my car computes, my stove computes, in the broadest terms, but in all cases computing is a tool which facilitates not defines. In an equal sense they all use electricity, all have materials of so form, so why no collect those terms as well?

Thus, overall, I find this proposal a bit disconcerting. It is dropped upon the alumni out of the blue. It will be interesting to see the human dynamics as they evolve. Science and Technology are forever changing. Just remember the old Departments above. Thus it is essential to embody that fluidity of innovation, not immortalize it. Just some thoughts from an older alum.

---

[1] https://dmse.mit.edu/about/history

[2] http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-reshapes-itself-stephen-schwarzman-college-of-computing-1015

What is the Internet?

The NY Times had an editorial bemoaning the breakdown of the Internet. As the Times notes:

As governments push toward a splintered internet, American corporations do little to counteract Balkanization and instead do whatever is necessary to expand their operations. If the future of the internet is a tripartite cold war, Silicon Valley wants to be making money in all three of those worlds. Part of the rationalization is that whether or not American companies get in on the action, a homegrown company will readily enact the kind of censorship and surveillance that its government requires. (Indeed, if Google launches in China, it has an uphill battle to fight against Baidu, the entrenched, government-endorsed Chinese search engine.) What this future will bring for Europe and the United States is not clear. Mr. Gomes’s leaked speech from inside Google sounded almost dystopian at times. “This is a world none of us have ever lived in before,” Mr. Gomes told employees. “All I am saying, we have built a set of hacks, and we have kept them.” He seemed to hint at scenarios the tech sector had never imagined before. The world may be a very different place since the election of Donald Trump, but it’s still hard to imagine that what’s deployed in China will ever be deployed at home. Yet even the best possible version of the disaggregated web has serious — though still uncertain — implications for a global future: What sorts of ideas and speech will become bounded by borders? What will an increasingly disconnected world do to the spread of innovation and to scientific progress? What will consumer protections around privacy and security look like as the internets diverge? And would the partitioning of the internet precipitate a slowing, or even a reversal, of globalization? A chillier relationship with Europe and increasing hostilities with China spur on the trend toward Balkanization — and vice versa, creating a feedback loop. If things continue along this path, the next decade may see the internet relegated to little more than just another front on the new cold war.

The editorial is bemoaning the balkanization of Internets, American, European, Chinese, to begin with. However, the real question is; what is the Internet?

We show above the essence of the Internet. Simply:

1. A backbone transport mechanism such as fiber, wireless, even copper.

2. A protocol set called TCP/IP. IP is the from and to addresses of the packets and TCP is the control mechanism to sequence all the packets in a message.

3. Routers to take a message and send it to the next location so that it may ultimately get to where it was sent.

4. Router Tables: A list of what router to send it to next

5. DNS: A device which converts an Internet address such as xxy.com to an IP address.

6. Communications Interfaces: Devices that interface with routers at end points.

Now what can the Chinese do? Simple, they can mask the routing tables or block DNS address conversions. They can send users seeking to go to a forbidden site to a control site, get their IP address, locate then and take appropriate remedies. Namely anyone who can control a DNS or routing Table can control a regional portion of the Internet. Balkanization already exists. Always has so in a way this is not new. In fact in 2000 when in Prague we connected a Czech only Internet to Frankfurt and the Tier 1 backbones. Overnight we have a global network. Yet before that any one in the Czech Republic could speak to anyone else.

Thus Balkanization has always been with us. So why the uproar. China would not block all traffic outward, only that which they see as inappropriate. After all, a hundred years ago the US Postal Service blocked all books coming into and out of the US that they deemed in appropriate. There is nothing new here.

But wait, to get to these balkanized Internets all one needs is an access portal in that net, and Tier 1 carriers afford that. So perhaps it will not be as easy as one thinks.

Now Who Said This?

For those whose lives were nearly shattered by upgrading to W10 1809 and losing all their data, for those who have their W10 machine frozen somewhere between W10 upgrades, for the eons wasted trying to figure out how to fix a Microsoft problem comes an interview at Harvard, of course where else, which notes:

Whether we like it or not, the public is increasingly turning not to their elected officials, but to the heads of major corporations for leadership on important and difficult issues. Perhaps because of partisan gridlock, perhaps because politicians seem to pay more attention when Big Business talks, rightly or wrongly, people expect today’s CEOs to pick up the ball. That’s both good and bad for society, according to Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer. “I think it’s not only good, but fundamentally important that companies have a conscience,” he said during a talk with Harvard Business Review ...People, especially younger workers, want to work for businesses that operate conscientiously, and as companies expand globally, particularly those in creative and intellectual property sectors, it becomes not just a nice thing to do, but an imperative for corporate survival. “You better have a conscience,” Smith said.

One could reasonably ask in my opinion what planet this tin eared executive has just arrived from. Is there any conscience for what damage in my opinion has been done to the masses of computer users with this W10 disaster. Worse yet, what is to come from this behemoth as it rolls our newer and more useless in my opinion software. People in glass houses.......

Watch the Internet Crash

ICANN, the now internationalized "manager" of the Internet has announced a "security update" and they note:

ICANN is planning to perform a Root Zone Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) KSK rollover as required in the Root Zone KSK Operator DNSSEC Practice Statement.

Rolling the KSK means generating a new cryptographic public and private key pair and distributing the new public component to parties who operate validating resolvers, including: Internet Service Providers; enterprise network administrators and other Domain Name System (DNS) resolver operators; DNS resolver software developers; system integrators; and hardware and software distributors who install or ship the root's "trust anchor." The KSK is used to cryptographically sign the Zone Signing Key (ZSK), which is used by the Root Zone Maintainer to DNSSEC-sign the root zone of the Internet's DNS.

Maintaining an up-to-date KSK is essential to ensuring DNSSEC-validating DNS resolvers continue to function following the rollover. Failure to have the current root zone KSK will mean that DNSSEC-validating DNS resolvers will be unable to resolve any DNS queries.
The KSK rollover plans were developed by the Root Zone Management Partners; ICANN in its role as the IANA Functions Operator, Verisign as the Root Zone Maintainer, and the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) as the Root Zone Administrator. The role of NTIA ended on 1 October 2016. The KSK rollover plans were posted in July 2016 and incorporate the community Root Zone KSK Rollover

What this means in simple English is that you better pray your ISP or IT Folks have done what ICANN says and that further ICANN knows what it is doing. Certificate management and DNS updating is NOT TRIVIAL. There will be mistakes. There will be crashes.

And then you can try the US Post Office again. Horrors! Poor Ben Franklin, a good idea but sent to the Government employees, worse, an "international" body.

English, the Customer and NJ Transit

One of the issues needing improvement in the "consultants" report on NJ Transit was communications with the customers, you know those folks paying their salaries.

So try this one on for size:

INBOUND to Hoboken (temporarily discontinued)

Train 330, the 6:01 p.m. arrival at Hoboken from Summit

Train 432, the 6:19 p.m. arrival in Hoboken from Gladstone, operates 19 minutes earlier on the Gladstone Branch then replaces Train 330’s schedule east of Summit.

Now let us try to translate this.

1. "temporarily discontinued" most likely means not working. I guess it means the stuff listed below

2.Train 330 arrives at Hoboken from Summit...I guess means it is working, so why say it is discontinued, is it working or not?

3. Train 432, now just what does this mean?  This sentences is an example of following the bouncing ball.

I may have a PhD, written 17 books, 250 papers, etc and I have a reasonable grasp of Frnech, Greek, Russian, Spanish and of course Italian as well as English and in the old days Latin and Classic Greek. But this makes no sense.

NJ Transit needs someone who can communicate, now really folks. This reads worse than a Goldman Sachs investment advisory.

The Internet: Do Non Techys Have a Clue?

In a recent piece in the NY Times, a Harvard Kennedy individual states:

The primary reason computers are insecure is that most buyers aren’t willing to pay — in money, features, or time to market — for security to be built into the products and services they want. As a result, we are stuck with hackable internet protocols, computers that are riddled with vulnerabilities and networks that are easily penetrated. 

Back in 2000 I was Vice Chair of what became an Internet 2 Presidential Commission. Before that, in the mid 70s I got the job after coming from MIT to DC to sneak the ARPA net onto the Intelsat satellites. So I guess I have been working this issue for 40+ years. I may know something.

As to the above statement, the key fact is that the TCP/IP protocol developed in 1974 was done to deliver an open system, with the smarts at then end user location. The "security" of the network depended on physical security of the links, if you wanted it, otherwise it was intentionally OPEN! Now what the author means by "hackable internet protocols" is unknown. The protocols are open, they are known, and unless you physically secure the fiber, copper, wireless channel, it is open, never was meant to be secure. DoD has an IP network, but the links do not connect to the open public network. They have massive firewalls etc. But a router is like a public toilet, anyone can drop by an perhaps you want to go before you leave home. Sorry for the analogy.

Security is multilayered. Always has been. In the early 70s we had developed secure operating system kernels. The fear was that somehow an application could penetrate the OS and the kernel. So now nothing is new.

It is NOT the networks that are easily penetrated now, they were designed that way! Only wish these non-techys would walk down Mass Ave and speak with someone, anyone! Oh well, it is the NY Times and Harvard, what to expect?

Guest Editorial

NOTE: This Editorial is from my friend Antnee, my local squirrel savant and historian. He has asked that we post this and frankly I take no position here. Also Antnee is an avid Breitbart reader so for any of you who would object please forward them directly to him at antnee@telmarc.com

To whom it may be concerned:

I have just finished a Breitbart news piece which I find offensive. Not from Breitbart but from the airline. They state:

A video showed a Frontier Airlines employee and police escorting the woman off of the aircraft at Orlando International Airport after she brought the animal onto the flight bound for Cleveland Tuesday evening. The passenger stated in her Frontier Airlines reservation that she would be bringing an “emotional support animal” on board the flight, but did not specify that it was a squirrel. Frontier Airlines said in a statement that “rodents, including squirrels, are not allowed” on flights. Airline staff discovered the squirrel, advised the woman of the airline’s policy, and asked her to leave the flight.

First and most importantly the airline calls us "rodents". That is a fallacy, we are squirrels, rats are rodents, we are squirrels.  We resent being called the "R" word. Do you see any New Yorkers resting and feeding rats? No. They feed squirrels, and we help them relax. We are a comfort animal if there ever were any. Go to Central Park and what do you see, young children feeding us and we entertaining and loving these young humans! If we were the rodents the airline contends then would any reasonable parent allow this? No! Argument over!

Police escorts! How tragic. We squirrels strongly object to this form of speciest behavior. After all, we are in close daily proximity with all humans. Admittedly some humans have selected us for their meals, I understand that humans have even consumed other humans, but after all we cannot all be human.

So the next time this despicable type of anti-species behavior occurs, I suggest we find whoever makes all those great signs and hats and have a march on Washington!

Thank you for your time,

Antnee Squirrel

Yield Curve

The several yield curves are shown above. The FED is slamming up the short term yield to brake inflation, even though we do not see any. We have gone from a FED who was out to lunch to a FED eating our lunch.

The above is the comparison over the last decade since the great Bush Collapse. The spread is dropping and the curve flattening. The worst problem is that most of our debt is short term and thus interest costs are exploding. So far no one has commented on this one.

Same Word, New Meaning?

Having spent time studying Thomistic Philosophy, a painful intellectual experience if ever there was one, I was a bit surprised when I saw an article in NEJM entitled:

Classification, Ontology, and Precision Medicine

Now I know the meaning of classification and precision, but ontology was the study of "being". The Ontological Proof of the Existence of God and all that. But here the authors have abandoned this millennial old meaning to define it as:

Ontologies are systematic representations of knowledge that can be used to integrate and analyze large amounts of heterogeneous data, allowing precise classification of a patient. In this review, we describe ontologies and their use in computational reasoning to support precise classification of patients for diagnosis, care management, and translational research.

Got that? I have had to read this more than a dozen times, through my mild dyslexia and all, still do not get it. I think I get the point they are making that we now have vast amounts of data on patients and that data may dramatically change the way we do diagnosis. No surprise there.

So just what are these "systematic representations of knowledge" they are opining about? Well we have all this data, not that I would call it "knowledge". It seems that every time we have a discovery of some new gene interaction in say cancer, a few months later there is another. Add to that the networking of these genes, then add to that the in vivo interaction, and so forth. I suspect we may have just begun to understand some issue in cancer, some very few, but important issues.

The problem however is that data is not knowledge. Eliciting from data fundamental principles and then validating them and then creating "tools" to measure then is critical. Even then the tools we have to measure stuff may elicit a cloudy picture, take the PSA test as a simple example.

The authors further state:

Conventionally, most of us think about structure as the arrangement of data, either on an EHR screen or as a database schema behind the scenes. Semantics, in turn, refers to concepts and the relationships between them. Software systems require assertions about term equivalence. ... Semantics and structure are not orthogonal but deeply intertwined.

 Again I think I get the point. Syntax is how we put words together to form a sentence, semantics is how we obtain meaning from the sentence. At least that is what it was sixty years ago when I first grasped the idea. They conclude:

The second barrier is the cost and effort of getting data into and out of EHRs. Manual input of structured data by clinicians is not scalable and is not a good use of clinicians’ time. Emerging efforts on standard application interfaces with EHRs from devices and data sources could help, as could patient-collected and patient-entered information. Systematically harvesting signs, symptoms, severity, and other clinical details from dictated notes or even from audio capture of the patient encounter is becoming increasingly practical.

 I believe it is fair to say that the EHR was not to be used by anyone professionally but was developed as part of the OCare system to oversee physicians and hospitals. Fundamentally as we have argued for over a decade the implementation and execution if fatally flawed. It is not patient centered. It is a check mark that all providers must meet. "Meaningful Use" is the greatest misnomer in the world. It just added costs to the system without any fundamental benefit. Thus this conclusion is useful but limited.

Highway Billboards?

I have had a few Kindles over the years and this one seems unique. I went and got a new one due to the features promised. Technically it works well. Not great but well. It has a good wifi/bluetooth system, it has a reasonable email and web browser. Not great but OK. It seems quite well built and very light. It charges well, and seems to hold the charge. I got it to update the older one I had which works fine but I thought a bit heavy and wanted to see what was new. Overall I am satisfied with the platform.

However, I am reminded of all the billboards on roads when I was a kid in the late 40s and early 50s. Billboard after billboard, garish sign after garish sign, and then strip malls along every highway in New Jersey. It made a Garden State landscape into a cluttered entry to Hades. How does this relate to this device, simply Amazon has packed everything into it to sell you something. There are apps for everything and anything they want to pitch. Take audible, I read, I write (17 books) but I do not waste time listening to someone preach about a book. So why can't I get rid of this? Took an hour to find out but I think I did. Then they push the Washington Post. Stop already, if I want to read the Post then I will, do not shove it down our throats.

Then come the game pop ups. Seems every time you restart, not reboot, you get endless pop ups for games. I do not play games, and I certainly have no interest in the onse Amazon is pitching. Yet each time you go to the Kindle another few horrible games.

Then, wallpaper! It seems that computer programmers think every use wants a nice picture of some scene for wallpaper. No, I just want to find what I am looking for and not to have to wander through useless visual dissonance! Solution is simple. I took a picture of a black poster board and used that. Worked well.

Finally, there is no instruction manual. I had to resort to the old computer dictum; if all else fails, getting a computer to work is like sex, just keep pushing the buttons until it works (sorry for the digression but it was an old MIT rule).

So is it worth it? On the one hand, yes, cheap, and if you are willing to work through the chaff, it is not bad. On the other hand I am bringing my old first generation Kindle with me, not this one. Pity, in my opinion a great platform got ruined by over exuberant marketing types, and wild "if I like it, everyone must like it" millennials.

Microsoft, Arendt, and The Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt wrote her work on the banality of evil. It is worth reading, banal being dull, unimaginative. Microsoft has apparently issued its latest update of the computer destroying Windows 10. I personally have two dead laptops resulting from this monster. In this case, in my opinion and based upon my experience, the evil is the destruction of hardware, software, most importantly peoples' productive time. One should question how many human years of creativity are lost due to the shabby software handed down from this company.

PCWorld announces the latest destroyer of cyber entities. They note:

Microsoft is slamming the brakes on the Windows 10 October 2018 Update’s rollout. The upgrade became available during the company’s Surface event on Tuesday, but in the days that followed, numerous users across the web reported that the transition deleted massive chunks of data. User profiles and entire folders full of files went missing in some cases and rolling back the upgrade didn’t restore them. Now Microsoft is temporarily halting the October 2018 Update’s distribution due to the issue. “We have paused the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) for all users as we investigate isolated reports of users missing some files after updating,” Microsoft’s support page for build 1809 says.

Release after release destroys computers and data. This time in a real big way. Perhaps Microsoft should hire some competent software testers. Really, it is not hard. The company seems to be in free fall.

One suspects that sooner or later there will be a massive class action suit, despite the unread user agreements. Think "contract of adhesion".

One is almost forced to use Microsoft. It is in my opinion a monopoly if ever there was one. It consistently issues updates that cause in my opinion and in my experience irreparable harm. And it appears that it just does not care!

Endless Incompetence

NJ Transit, the State owned run and managed notes as usual:

Train service in and out of Penn Station New York is subject to 45-minute delays following yesterday’s (sic) minor, slow-speed train derailment near Penn station.

What is a "minor" derailment. Less than 100 fatalities, a broken finger nail?

At some point and at some time there must be a come to meet the Lord moment. Hopefully it is still when we are alive!

Also infrastructure improvement can be done with bonds, but the longer these folks wait the greater the costs of the bonds, higher interest rates. Just a few years ago would have been perfect, but Government run entities seem to be incapable of doing anything. Pity.

So What is New?

Bloomberg news reports on China planting microchips in computer mother boards for the purpose of cyber whatever. They state:

The companies’ denials are countered by six current and former senior national security officials, who—in conversations that began during the Obama administration and continued under the Trump administration—detailed the discovery of the chips and the government’s investigation. One of those officials and two people inside AWS provided extensive information on how the attack played out at Elemental and Amazon; the official and one of the insiders also described Amazon’s cooperation with the government investigation. In addition to the three Apple insiders, four of the six U.S. officials confirmed that Apple was a victim. In all, 17 people confirmed the manipulation of Supermicro’s hardware and other elements of the attacks. The sources were granted anonymity because of the sensitive, and in some cases classified, nature of the information. One government official says China’s goal was long-term access to high-value corporate secrets and sensitive government networks. No consumer data is known to have been stolen.

And you are worried about Russia. The US has been trusting on the kindness of strangers in China since the beginning of the Clinton Administration, This even extended to critical infrastructure and defense and intelligence elements. So what did they expect. Out telecommunications business are defunct and reside in China. This is akin to relying on Russian launch vehicle to protect us against a Soviet attack. Nothing new, it is just Government.

Now if you think this is bad hold on to your hat. Massive amounts of our pharmaceuticals are made in China! Yes, key drugs. China has developed with the help of US educational institutions a massive and world class pharmaceutical capability. That means two things. First they can run circles around us. Second, and this is critical, then can put into therapeutics all sorts of other stuff to do everything from creating massive cancer outbreaks to mind control. They do not need Facebook, that have half the population in the US hooked on their drugs, and I am not speaking of opioids.

Would we have allowed this in the Cold War with Russia? No. So why do we allow this with a declared adversary? Profit? For whom and of course at what cost.

This will make a great suspense novel. Can't wait to get started. And, oh to you folks out there with whatever derangement syndrome you profess, than Beijing, I think.

Surprise!

NJ Transit is undergoing upgrades. That means trains will be randomly cancelled. There does not appear to ban any schedule. The current notice states:

Beginning Sun. Oct. 14, some trains will be temporarily discontinued or have changes of origin/destination. This will impact customers along the NEC, NJCL, M&E, MOBO & MBPJ Lines.These adjustments are temporary and we anticipate service to be restored mid-Jan All tickets and passes for travel in November, December and January will receive a ten percent discount.

But, and this is a great BUT, they will tell you NOTHING about what will happen where or when.  Only when you get to the station will you, if lucky, find out what train is running. 

Our new Governor is fully behind this move of gross incompetence. Yep, up go the taxes, and to hell with the taxpayers. And one wonders why people despise politicians. Washington is not the worst place, it has become pandemic.

Perhaps they should recall that Mussolini made his move based upon getting the trains to run on time. That was a century ago. 

As a side note, this was supposed to be done over the summer. Apparently the grossly incompetent management of the State owned and run transit system just let the ball drop. Who says it will be done by January. In your dreams!

Where is Benito when we need him?