When first we practice to deceive!

The BBC reports on the latest press release of Al-Qaeda’s current CEO, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawarhiri compliments individuals on their local efforts, and urges more ‘lone-wolf’ attacks on US soil and boycotts to harm the US economy.

He should just chill out because Alexander the Geek is destroying swaths of US industry with his benighted tactics in the War on [insert noun here]™.

Having already made US Internet service providers anathema to foreign companies, and made US hardware very undesirable, he is now rampaging through on-line commerce and credit cards.

Badtux has an extremely justified ‘I told you so’ on NSA ‘man-in-the-middle’ intercepts that totally negate the value of the SSL certificate system and the little padlock in your address bar.

Mother Jones, the source of the graphic, reported on the corruption of the Certificate Authority system based of more of the PowerPoint slides from Snowden. [It is bad enough that they did it, but making it part of a presentation is frankly unbalanced.]

Steve Bates notes that NSA is also plundering VISA credit card records.

When you look at all they have done, and what the impact will be on the US tech industry and compare it to the single, verified incident that they can show was discovered by the system [the infamous $9K donation by a cab driver in San Diego] you have to conclude that this is a total disaster for the nation. The tech companies need to march on Washington and force Congress to deal with this out-of-control mess.

Position: 27.0N 43.3W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Stationary.
Maximum sustained winds: 40 mph [ 65 kph].
Wind Gusts: 55 mph [ 90 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 175 miles [280 km].
Minimum central pressure: 1005 mb ↑.

Currently about 1215 miles [1955 km] Southwest of the Azores.

The storm lost its tropical characteristics over the weekend but has reformed.

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.]

Position: 23.7N 99.4W [10PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: West [270°] near 5 mph [ 7 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 30 mph [ 45 kph].
Wind Gusts: 45 mph [ 70 kph].
Minimum central pressure: 1007 mb ↑.

Currently about 10 miles [ 15 km] West of Ciudad Victoria, Mexico.

The storm weakened to a Tropical Storm just prior to landfall at La Pesca at 7AM CDT [1200 UTC].

The double hit on Mexico of Manuel on the Pacific Coast and Ingrid on the Gulf Coast are dumping up to two feet of rain on areas in a belt across that country that will result in flash floods and mudslides.

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.]

Día de la Independencia
Estados Unidos Mexicanos

¡Viva México!

Some background on 16 de Septiembre and El Grito de Dolores.