Posts from — June 2013

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has an informative little post: Edward Snowden Makes Himself an Even Bigger Problem to the Officialdom .

After Rumsfeld eliminated all of the IT personnel from the Department of Defense, NSA hired Booz Allen Hamilton to upgrade their computer system. The result cost twice the original contract price of $2 billion and is noticeably slower than the old system. Despite that, Booz Allen continued to receive contracts.

Actually the name of the contractors are basically irrelevant, because when a new contractor takes over a contract, they hire all of the employees of the old contractor. This means that if you didn’t like what the old contractor delivered, you will get the same problems with the new contractor.

Snowden didn’t work for the US government, he worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. That should make for an interesting court case. A good defense lawyer has a lot of leverage, and Glenn Greenwald is a first class civil liberties attorney if he gets involved in the defense.

Digby remembered this Time magazine article: Bin Laden’s Secret Communications Plan: Use a Thumb Drive. He wrote his e-mails to a flash drive, and had an assistant take the drive to an Internet café to send, and probably went to a different Internet café to download responses. He did it for years without getting caught, while the US government was downloading meta data on American citizens in the US.

My first thought when I saw the PRISM slides was “WTF – contractors?” The classification of the slides was a dead giveaway that they weren’t part of the core NSA mission. I won’t get into why I say that, but anyone else who really worked in the Agency would know what I mean.

NSA was founded because of problems that resulted in a warning about the attack on Pearl Harbor sitting in a State Department in-basket from Friday, December 5^th until Monday, December 8^th. Military analysts had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, and since is was a diplomatic code, the State Department was the agency notified.

The Agency had two main missions – insuring that US communications were secure, and making sure that the communications of adversaries weren’t. Because it was a military organization, it avoided anything that involved US civilians in the United States. The communications security mission covers all US military installations and all US government installations outside the United States.

The two largest groups of employees in the Agency were mathematicians and linguists, with multiple other specialties. Because of the classified nature of everything the Agency did, the military guards and even the housekeeping staff were Agency employees.

The Agency has managed to stay ‘under the radar’ because mathematicians and enlisted rank linguists don’t attend cocktail parties in Georgetown, or hang around with the media.

That’s what things were like when NSA worked, but things have changed.

[Read more →]

NBC reports that Socal Edison Retiring San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

I saw them every time I went to LA from San Diego – right on the ocean so they could get hit by a tsunami, built on an earthquake fault so they could be cracked open like an egg. This was some of the worst siting ever for a nuclear reactor, and it was made worse by recent remodeling. They have been shut down since January of 2012 because the new changes leak. This is prime beach property, and it will be generations before anything can safely be done with it.

The beatings will continue until morale improves – the BBC reports that Austerity ‘may last until 2020’. George Osborne just can’t understand why laying off thousands of people and slashing government spending while increasing taxes during a recession hasn’t managed to balance the budget and made the British economy grow, so he is going to continue to do it for another 5 years. He is really puzzled that the only bright spot was when they spent all that money and hired all those people for the Olympics.

Since playing with the price of oil wasn’t evil enough, the CBC reports that corporations have been playing with the price of Chocolate:

Authorities in Canada have charged the food giants Nestle and Mars, together with a network of independent wholesale distributors, in an alleged conspiracy to fix prices of chocolates.

The Competition Bureau in the capital Ottawa said it has uncovered “evidence” suggesting price-fixing.

Nestle Canada, Mars Canada, and the distributors ITWAL have been charged.

The Bureau said the Canadian division of the US confectionary company Hershey co-operated with its investigation.

What do they have to do before we start throwing CEOs in prison? First they steal homes, and now they are going after chocolate. When will people agree that enough is enough?

Position: 43.6N 68.8W [10AM CDT 1500 UTC].
Movement: Northeast [050°] near 39 mph [63 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 45 mph [ 75 kph].
Wind Gusts: 55 mph [ 90 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 230 miles [370 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1000 mb ↑.

Currently about 75 miles [ 120 km] East of Portland, Maine.

The storm has left the National Hurricane Center’s area of reporting and passed to the Canadian Hurricane Centre as it transits Nova Scotia and brushes the tip of Newfoundland before heading out to the open ocean.

It is a bit amazing that it has maintained tropical storm force winds while the center has spent so much time over land.

Position: 38.5N 75.0W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Northeast [045°] near 35 mph [56 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 45 mph [ 75 kph].
Wind Gusts: 55 mph [ 90 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 230 miles [370 km].
Minimum central pressure: 997 mb ↑.

Currently about 30 miles [ 45 km] South of Cape May, New Jersey.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

Sharing

Nom…nom…nom…

[Editor: Froggie and JR put aside their differences to share a meal. They are the two loudest cats around – Froggy’s Harley purr, and JR’s squeaky toy meowing.]

Friday Ark

The XP computer is next to my right leg and the Win7/Linus computer is next to my left leg. When I need to do something on the XP machine, I can just change my monitor to use the VGA port, but I need to swap out the keyboard and mouse. This was annoying and wasted space, so I looked for a solution.

I saw the write ups on the Logitech Unifying receiver, and thought “Problem solved, I’ll just plug one of those little buggers in both machines, and then I can use the same keyboard and mouse.” I don’t use them at the same time, so there shouldn’t be any conflict.

I was wrong. While the receivers work in all three operating systems, the keyboard and mouse can only be assigned to a single receiver. The connection information is stored in the keyboard and mouse, not in the receiver.

Position: 30.3N 82.4W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Northeast [045°] near 15 mph [24 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 45 mph [ 75 kph].
Wind Gusts: 60 mph [ 95 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 140 miles [220 km].
Minimum central pressure: 993 mb ↑.

Currently about 40 miles [ 65 km] West of Jacksonville, Florida.

The outer band has been spawning tornadoes on the Florida Peninsula this morning.

The storm is ashore North of Cedar Key this evening.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the Atlantic coast from Flagler Beach, Florida to Cape Charles Light, Virginia; the Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds; and the lower Chesapeake Bay South of New Point Comfort.

When I was in law enforcement the state of New York made two great strides in the Penal Law.

The first one dealt with domestic abuse, when the state finally figured out that beating someone up was a criminal matter, and being related by blood or marriage didn’t change that situation. Prior to that change, the domestic abuse cases were sent to the civil Family Court, rather than the regular criminal court.

The second one was the change in attitude about so-called ‘sex crimes’. Police academies changed and taught that ‘sexual assault’ was a crime of violence, with the ‘sexual’ being a reference to method not the crime. IOW, rape isn’t about sex, its about violence, about hurting the victim.

That was almost 40 years ago, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff don’t understand it yet. They go before a Senate hearing and have a hissy fit that unit commanders are going to be excluded from sexual assault cases. They should be excluded because they have failed to do their job, and the Joint Chiefs have failed to provide the leadership.

I just don’t get it. In the military there is no question that a ‘barracks thief’ is the lowest of the low. Anyone who would steal from other members of his/her unit is dealt with swiftly and harshly. If they are lucky, they are turned to the military justice system, rather than being dealt with by the members of the unit. This is a tradition in the military everywhere, going back at least two centuries. Why is it so hard for the military command structure to deal with the ‘barracks predator’ the same way as the ‘barracks thief’?

Senator Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, was a prosecutor and she explained it to the generals, but they are thinking more like Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Greorgia, who thinks it has something to do with hormones. If these generals think the problem is the presence of women in the ranks, and I think they do, it is time to fire them all and find some people whose attitudes have evolved beyond 1970. The fact that all of the service academies are having problems with sexual assault, shows that the current officer corps is tainted, and some leaders need to be found who will clean up this mess.

When the troops don’t have enough confidence in the system to report being assaulted, you already have a problem of unit cohesion and morale. Giving people the confidence that crimes against them will be investigated and prosecuted in a fair manner will certainly improve the situation.

Today is the anniversary of the D-Day landings at Normandy in 1944, but it will now be remembered in Okaloosa County as the day the oil came ashore in 2010.

Three years later there is still ongoing damage to the Gulf, as there is still a lot of oil sitting on the bottom waiting to be pulled to the surface by a slow moving hurricane.

Despite that, many in Washington think it would be a great idea to build a pipeline across the US so a Canadian oil company can export its product to China.

Position: 26.0N 86.3W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: North [010°] near 6 mph [ 9 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 40 mph [ 65 kph].
Wind Gusts: 50 mph [ 80 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 140 miles [220 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1002 mb.

Currently about 270 miles [ 430 km] West Southwest of Tampa, Florida.

The current forecast is for landfall in the ‘armpit’ of Florida on Thursday. It has picked up speed and started its turn to the Northeast at 10PM CDT.

A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the west coast of Florida from Boca Grande to Ochlockonee River.

A Tropical Storm Watch is in effect for the Atlantic coast from Flagler Beach, Florida to Surf City, North Carolina.

It looks like Invest 91L will become Tropical Depression One of the hurricane season. There is a Hurricane Hunter mission scheduled for this afternoon, which is a pretty good indicator that the forecasters suspect that the system is on the verge of passing all the tests for official status.

The water has been warm enough to support a tropical storm, but there has been high wind shear over the area preventing development. The wind shear is lessening.

Currently the storm is forecast to head North and then Northeast. It has already produced heavy rains in Cuba and South Florida.

Dr Masters reports: Largest Tornado on Record: the May 31 El Reno, OK EF-5 Tornado

The largest tornado in recorded history was Friday’s May 31, 2013 EF-5 tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma, the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma announced on Tuesday. The EF-5 re-classification was based upon Doppler radar data taken by Oklahoma University’s mobile RaXPol radar. According to comments made by tornado researcher Rick Smith at a press conference today, the mobile radar was positioned on top of an overpass, and recorded winds close to the surface of up to 295 mph in satellite suction vorticies that orbited the large, main vortex. The large, main vortex had EF-4 winds of 185 mph, and the satellite suction vortices moved across the fields at that speed, and rotated on their own at speeds of up to 110 mph, giving a combined wind speed of up to 295 mph in some of the satellite vortices. It’s no wonder that so many storm chasers got in trouble with this tornado, since these suction vortices moved as speeds of up to 185 mph towards them as the tornado rapidly expanded into the largest on record.

What they discovered is that as well as the central tornado, there were several ‘satellite vortices’, like mini-tornadoes, on the edge of the core tornado’s wind field. The vortices were moving around the edge of the tornado at speed of the wind, 185mph, and adding their spinning speed to produce the observed wind speed of 295mph at ground level.

The storm chasers could outrun a normal tornado, but they didn’t have a prayer of getting away from the voriteces coming at them at nearly 200mph.

The current death toll is 18.