Comfortably Numb

Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" will stick with me until my last days. Every time I hear David Gilmour's guitar solo I choke up. Weird, huh? We saw Floyd in London a couple of years back and when they played this song, it was strangely epic. Gilmour wasn't playing with Floyd at that time, but the guitarist (WTF was his name?) did a fantastic job. But no one can play it like David.

Parkland, FL

Yep, another week, another mass shooting in America. This one was at a high school in Parkland, Florida and was committed with, you guessed it, an AR-15, the weapon of choice of mass murderers. No wonder. This weapon fires bullets at over 2,800MPH, about three times faster than a typical handgun, and the result is usually instant death. Many people survive from being shot with a handgun. Not so with an AR-15.

David Hogg, NOT a "crisis actor"

This time, however, the surviving kids have gotten really pissed that, after so many shootings like this, our Congress has done not one fucking thing about lessening this violence. It would appear that a large number of our elected reps are in the pockets of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Trump even signed a law early in 2017 making it EASIER for the mentally ill to buy weapons!

Add this to the list of reasons to be ashamed to be an American right now. We are the only western nation where mass shootings like this happen over and over and over. And over and over. I was frankly numb to it, thinking that nothing was going to change, as usual, until these kids started stepping up and demanding change to our gun laws. They are a real inspiration.

Florida teens stage a "die-in"
in front of the White House.

That's the thing about life: you never know what the fuck is coming next. Just ask that Fortune Teller working out of that beat-up shack down the street.

For the first time in a long time, it feels like something might change about our insane gun laws. 

Stephen Colbert has been talking about it.

Loudon Wainright

I missed this one when it premiered wayyyyy back in 2016.

cryptojacking

A lot of things in todays world makes me feel "old" but few things make me feel older than the concept of crypto-currencies and this latest thing, "crypto-jacking." I just do not get it. How can you hack a computer and mine crypto-currency? What the actual fuck?

Hackers hijack Tesla’s cloud system to mine cryptocurrency

by Ryan Browne of CNBC

• Tesla's Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud account was compromised by hackers and used for cryptocurrency mining, RedLock said.
• Other major firms, including Aviva and Gemalto, were affected by similar problems.
• This incident marks another case of what is known in the cryptocurrency world as "cryptojacking."
• Tesla said that it did not see any initial impact on customer data protection or the safety and security of its vehicles.

Tesla's cloud system was hijacked by hackers who used it to mine cryptocurrency, according to researchers.

Hackers were able to infiltrate the automaker's Kubernetes administration console because it was not password protected, cybersecurity firm RedLock said Tuesday. Kubernetes is a Google-designed system aimed at optimizing cloud applications.

This left access credentials for Tesla's Amazon Web Services (AWS) account exposed, and hackers deployed cryptocurrency mining software called Stratum to mine cryptocurrency using the cloud's computing power.

Cryptocurrency mining is a process whereby so-called miners solve complex mathematical problems to validate a transaction and add it to the underlying network. RedLock did not specify which cryptocurrency was mined in the cyber breach.

This incident marks another case of what is known in the cryptocurrency world as "cryptojacking."

Cryptojacking is a process whereby hackers deploy software that exploits a computer's CPU (central processing unit) to mine cryptocurrency.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that hackers had deployed an altered version of the popular plugin Browsealoud to a number of government websites in the U.K., the U.S. and Australia.

This version of Browsealoud infected the government websites with Coinhive code, which is used to generate units of privacy-focused cryptocurrency monero.

U.S. online news outlet Salon is even asking visitors to its site who use ad blocking plugins if it can use their computing power to mine monero instead.

Uh, what? The rest at the original.

DJ Shadow

No, I do not usually partake of rap videos or rap music, but this video by DJ Shadow caught my eye and ear. What in the fuck is this world coming to?!

dereliction of duty

I can feel some righteous anger bubbling up to the surface about Agent Orange (Donald Trump). It's long overdue, but I think one would have to admit that Trump was given time to "settle down" and work his way into the presidency. Predictably, however, he is incapable of faithfully executing his duties. He doesn't even understand half of his fucking job.

How can any Trump supporter honestly excuse Trump's refusal to deal with the Russians and their attacks on our democracy? It becomes clearer and clearer that Trump is on the side of Russia, and not America. That should be an impeachable offense, maybe even a jailable one.

Trump's Staggering Dereliction of Duty

by Ruth Marcus, Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor

National security adviser H.R. McMaster is in the news — and apparently in the presidential doghouse — for stating the obvious: that evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election is “now really incontrovertible.” So it is appropriate to take, as this column’s theme, the title of McMaster’s book on the Vietnam war, “Dereliction of Duty.”

McMaster was writing about military leaders’ failure to stand up to presidents who insisted on pursuing an unwinnable war. Now, in the White House in which McMaster serves, the dereliction of duty starts at the top. And, as the past several days have shown, President Trump’s failure is dereliction on a grand, unprecedented scale: We find ourselves at war without a commander in chief; in national mourning without a consoler in chief; and in political gridlock without a negotiator in chief.

The first is the most appalling and most terrifying. “Incontrovertible,” McMaster said, and so it is for anyone who bothers to read the indictment of 13 Russians for running a massive operation not only to disrupt the election but to do so to Trump’s benefit. But of course Trump never has and apparently never will be able to accept this. Is it his fragile ego that cannot tolerate the implicit challenge to his legitimacy? Is it something more sinister?

This much is clear: For whatever reason, Trump is unwilling to accept the reality of what happened in 2016 and, more alarming, unwilling to do his duty to seek to prevent it from happening again. We are at war with an enemy plotting to undermine our democracy, and our supposed leader, far from working to halt this, seems determined to ignore it. Where is Trump’s outrage now that the evidence against Russia is public, not that he needed to wait for that? It is invisible.

Instead, Trump’s anger is directed against McMaster, for omitting the untrue party line: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

Trump’s anger is directed against the democratic institutions that have rallied to discover what happened and seek to prevent its recurrence: “If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!”

Laughing their asses off in Moscow, indeed. There has been not one word, not one syllable of presidential anger directed toward the people who did this.

But there is no depth to which Trump will not sink in defense of the only thing he holds dear: himself. And so, the nation witnessed a tweet in which the president, a leader to whom the country once looked for healing in times of national tragedy, instead used innocent victims, high school children mowed down in their own school, to make his bogus, self-interested point: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

Did he? Did he really use dead children to attack an investigation into his campaign and his conduct in office? Yes, he did. This is a person devoid of empathy. He can experience the world only through the prism of his own ego. He can read the requisite words from a teleprompter — “To every parent, teacher, and child who is hurting so badly, we are here for you — whatever you need, whatever we can do, to ease your pain” — but he is incapable of feeling them. No one who imagines the shattered heart of a grieving parent could have written that despicable tweet.

Finally, a word about the “dreamers,” and the impending, unnecessary tragedy of Trump’s own making. He wanted a “bill of love” to protect the dreamers, Trump told us. “I will be signing it,” he said of any congressional deal to allow these promising innocents to remain. Trump broke the inadequate status quo for dreamers when he rescinded President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order allowing them to stay. Then he failed to fix it. Then, with an unnecessarily belligerent and premature veto threat, Trump got in the way of lawmakers of good faith attempting a solution.

“Dereliction of duty” is not a strong enough term to describe this man’s abysmal performance.

Original.