Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I was just catching up - this discussion reads like a sequel to "Mad
Max Beyond Thunderdome"!  I know that things could fall apart, but will
they? Dystopia scenarios (and, for that matter, utopian scenarios)
never quite seem to play out. As long as I can remember, I've seen
cartoons of long-bearded men standing on street corners with signs that
say "The end is near."  Sometimes it's true: this or that part of the
world may collapse or suffer catastrophe, but the world as a whole goes
on.

Day after day I see acts that are unselfish and caring, and as a
result I'm hopeful. 
  

    
We're not having a discussion about drifting into political collapse,
exactly--more like a sudden slide. It's far from impossible. 
  

    
I don't think people in this country have become any less nice, but I 
think the ties that bind us together have really weakened.  The 60s
and 70s felt different.  We all fought like cats and dogs, but we it
still felt like we were in it together, however much we disagreed.

Now, our most nominally patriotic Americans basically want to dissolve
the government, and we've got a major presidential candidate who has
openly talked of secession.  People are cheering the idea of letting
people without health insurance die.

That's different.
  

    
Yup.  My neighbor down the street flies the Gadsen flag on major
holidays instead of the US flag and the guy he voted for who became
our Governor thinks slashing the education budget by %50 and not
taxing Shale drilling companies is the way to fix the economy.
  

    
I hung a huge yellow "Don't Tread On Me" rattlesnake flag on my living
room wall shortly after Reagan's inauguration in 1981. My candidate,
Ed Clark, had lost to that traitor Reagan. Gave it away a couple years
later. Don't miss it one bit.

It's become like the Stars and Bars.  It means something mean now.
  

    
That it does.  I keep threatening to steal my neighbor's flag then
daring him to call the local (union) police to file a complaint.
  

    
He'll just shoot you like a libertarian. 
  

    
And if you don't have insurance, he'll cheer while you die of your
untreated wounds.

Another metric of how things have gotten meaner: hitchhiked lately?
  

    
If this is real, it's quite a sobering view of what's coming
economically thanks to Goldman Sachs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqN3amj6AcE&feature=player_embedded

Sounds right to me....this is exactly how traders and the big houses
think.
  

    
Infrastructure failure, one of my favorite subjects. Fortunately, it
can't happen here.


Homeland Security tries to shore up nation’s cyber defenses 

"This frantic but entirely simulated attack last week on a chemical
plant demonstrated what U.S. officials and industry experts say is a
little-understood national and economic security threat: the ability of
malicious computer code to cripple critical systems that millions of
people rely on for food, fuel, safe water and more."

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/homeland-security-tries-
to-shore-up-nations-cyber-defenses/2011/09/27/gIQAtQ6bDL_story.html>
  

    
As I understand it, Jack, that sort of thing only happens in banana
republics.
  

    
I've been reading up on SCADA and IPv6 security problems. I get the
impression it's not so much hackers as code errors themselves that can
cause serious damage.

Is that right?

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread757563/pg1

http://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-18/dc-18-speakers.html

http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/oeprod/DocumentsandMedia/22-Impacts_of_IPv6
_on_CS.pdf
  

    
Example of an single-failure point at the national level.  It's gotten
very little press, but the main manufacturer of calcium carbide in the
US had a factory shutdown and there's been a shortage of acetylene,
one of the most common gases for gas welding:

<http://www.praxair.com/praxair.nsf/78f8cb7dc1379181852569730069e75d/59ccfafdf3
e8f7fd8525789a0059d2a8?OpenDocument>
  

    
Whoopsie!
  

    

There is simply no reason, except monopoly capitalism run amok, for the 
United States to have only one Calcium Carbide manufacturer.
  

    
I wonder how many basic industrial products are tied up under
industrial structures that maximize profit rather than decreasing
vulnerability. Helium, for example, which is a non-renewable resource,
has become the production responsibility of the oil and gas industry.
But as a sideline product, it's often vented and wasted. We're selling
off the United States helium reserves, and it's often considered
non-profitable to recover helium from gas and oil fields. So what are
we doing to do to support the requirement for helium in various
industrial and scientific fields if we don't keep an eye on the
stockpile now?

I wonder how many other such products there are out there. 
  

    
There are apparently other producers, but this one plant manufactured
over %75 of what the US consumed, according to some of the trades that
I've read.

I'm guessing the big "move to a service economy" thing has a lot to do
with this.  Reading some of the fabrication trades, it looks like
"open a welding school" is the current way to print money.
Westinghouse went so far as to buy a school as a way of making sure
they get first crack at the graduates.
  

    
John Robb's advice for the "cleanup" of #occupywallstreet: 

<http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/10/bloomberg-vs-occu
py.html>
  

    
The comments are interesting too.  Even better is what really
happened, detailed on his next blog entry, here:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2011/10/bloomberg-vs-occu
py-a-knock-out-decision-ows.html

His recap from that page includes:

>    To block the bank protest, Mayor Bloomberg initiated a plan to
evict the Occupation from Liberty Square on the 14th of October.  He
claimed the city needed to "clean" the park.
>    In recognition of the threat, the Occupy movement gathers its
strength.  It makes a widely reported call to come to the park on the
morning of the 14th to block the eviction.
>    Occupy then rapidly delegitimizes the complaint.  It starts to
deep clean Liberty Square with powerwashers, brooms, and mops (they
even hired a dump truck).  It even offers to let cleaners into the
square to clean 1/3 of it at a time.
>    With the complaint delegitimized, the Occupy movement goes on the
offensive.  It personalizes the eviction move (already inside
Bloomberg's OODA).  It finds Bloomberg.  He's at a gala dinner at
Ciprianis (a Wall Street restaurant). They surround the restaurant and
try to enter it to deliver a petition with 310,000 signatures. 
Bloomberg hides, departs from the rear.

...
Again, the discussion is interesting. 
  

    
I am all for protests that leave places cleaner than they found them.