Cyber warfare is real and happening right now. Welcome to the 2nd millennia

Panetta Is Wrong:

The Next Pearl Harbor Will Not Be a Cyber Attack

Mat Honan — Everyone’s favorite Italian grandmother and likely next Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made headlines last week when he cautioned that “there’s a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor we confront could be a cyber attack.” That’s fear-mongering nonsense.

Look, we know cyber-security is an important issue. Stuxnet showed unequivocally that state-sponsored cyberwar is already upon us. News that the recent IMF hack was likely pulled off by a sovereign government feeds that fire. Hell, Anonymous is even kinda-sorta bullying NATO and the Federal Reserve, and meanwhile Lulz Sec is hitting the US Senate’s Website.

And you know what? We were even okay with hearing the military muttering that “if you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks.” Not because we want to see a war over some silly DDOS attack. But rather because it at least means the government is finally treating cyber-security seriously.

But a cyber attack will not be the “next Pearl Harbor.”

Panetta is concerned by electronic attacks on the nation’s electrical grid, and communications networks. As he should be. Cut off the heat to Chicago in the winter, or the AC to Atlanta in the summer, and you’ve got a situation where people are going to lose their lives. Cut off our communications and you disrupt our command and control operations. It’s all bad.

But in order to seriously devastate the United States, to kill thousands of Americans and cripple our military as Pearl Harbor did, a cyber attack would need to be coupled with a military attack. And the only entities cable of launching that kind of coordinated attack are state actors.

And look, here’s the deal, grandma: No state actor (especially not the Chinese with whom we’ve got a mutually beneficial relationship) is going to sucker punch us. Panetta is worried about the wrong thing.

We need a program focused not just on massive, system-wide attacks, but on the nickel and dime stuff that’s taking a slow but steady toll. We need to be worried about the steady drumbeat of theft and espionage and vandalism that goes on daily, only a fraction of which makes the news. We need to sweat the incremental damage lone individuals and stateless groups can do to harass and harangue and weaken us. We need to understand what weaknesses in our information security allowed Bradley Manning and Wikileaks to access a treasure trove of our secrets. We need to identify and secure vital portions of our infrastructure, both public and private. And we need to not oversell the notion of total electronic devastation.

Yeah, the US needs to be worried about cyber-security. But if you want it to be effective, or to have anyone pay attention, it needs a realistic program that focuses not just on grandstanding and the pie in the sky threats, but on the real and present dangers we face right now.

See you in SoCal

Sorry I haven’t posted very much lately, I have been working a lot and getting ready for my big trip out to San Diego and LA for the week. I will try to keep you updated with pics and posts of the Left Coast as I explore new avenues of adventure with my buddy Pat and my cousin Sherry. Stay tuned! Me and Pat will be getting into trouble shortly… and Stay Classy.

Do you think I’m crazy

Do you think I’m crazy? Do I have that certain something that just makes you nuts….

How do I it? Why do I it? What makes me do it? And if so why do I do it so often. Do I make you laugh, or inspire you I’m so crazy? Answer the poll below this post and let me know with some of  your comments…

Greed, corruption, injustice… just another day in NCAA athletics

The Fall of Jim Tressel

By Nando Di Fino

Jim Tressel’s resignation as the head coach of Ohio State’s football team Monday marks another strange step in a saga filled with vague lies and odd timing. After a federal raid on a Columbus-area tattoo parlor turned up evidence of Ohio State players trading memorabilia for tattoos and cash, Tressel told school investigators that he didn’t know anything about the violations. He eventually relented, saying he was tipped off by an area lawyer via email about the raid and was slapped with a two-game suspension for the upcoming season by the school. But Tressel and his athletic department decided to self-extend the suspension to five games—the length his suspended players would be missing—as either a noble show of solidarity or a way to possibly stem further punishment from the NCAA or Ohio State. (The Columbus Dispatch has an amazingly detailed timeline of these events.) All was pretty much silent in Buckeye Nation for a few months until Monday, when Tressel announced his resignation. Many observers pointed to a Sports Illustrated report by George Dohrmann and David Epstein that alleged deeper corruption within the program as the impetus.

Reuters

If you faced losing your million-dollar job because of tattoos, you’d make a face like this, too.

Tressel’s reign ended not because of pressure from NCAA investigators, but following two investigations by sports outlets. A Yahoo Sports investigation uncovered the fact that Tressel was aware of the violations his players were committing and led to his publicly admitting—after issuing a denial—that he was tipped off by the lawyer. And Sports Illustrated ripped open a large can of worms in a report that says the tattoo trade at Ohio State was far more widespread than initially reported—the six current players involved were just the tip of the iceberg; 22 more were discovered to have been taking part, including nine current Buckeyes. “For more than a decade, Ohioans have viewed Tressel as a pillar of rectitude, and have disregarded or made excuses for the allegations and scandal that have quietly followed him throughout his career,” Dohrmann and Epstein write. “His integrity was one of the great myths of college football.”

Dan Wetzel, who with Charles Robinson broke the original Yahoo story that led to Tressel’s admission that he knew of the violations, says that while the players might be excused for mistakenly thinking they could sell their own wares, Tressel could not. “The NCAA has a lot of questionable statutes,” Wetzel writes. “Demanding the truth from multimillion dollar employees isn’t one of them. Violations happen on every campus, it’s how you respond that counts.”

To balance out the harsh accusations of the SI article, USA Today’s Thomas O’Toole sought out presidents of Ohio State alumni associations for perspective. He found a mixed bag of torn Buckeye fans. Shawn Murnahan, president of the Atlanta Alumni Club, was stuck—like many fans—in a vague middle ground, alternately wondering if Tressel’s actions were just an anomaly by an otherwise honest man, or if the coach masked a win-at-all-cost attitude and had successfully duped everyone. Barbara Smith, who runs the Alumni Club of Franklin County, which includes Columbus, Ohio, was far more supportive, saying that Tressel was just trying to protect his players. “We’re all still behind Tressel for whatever he wants to do,” Smith tells O’Toole. “The man is highly thought of. He would never do anything to hurt the kids.”

The Newark Advocate’s Jon Spencer puts the entire scandal in its astonishingly simple proper perspective. Tressel had four years left on a contract that was believed to pay him $3.5 million annually. He now exits the school with a tarnished legacy. “What’s sad and so stunning,” Spencer writes, “is a glowing OSU legacy built during 10 years could unravel in almost an eyeblink about something as trivial as tattoos.”

We’ll update with any comment we receive from OSU or Tressel’s representatives.

UPDATE: OSU’s athletic department issued this statement from athletic director Gene Smith: “During the course of an investigation, the University and the NCAA work jointly to review any new allegations that come to light, and will continue to do so until the conclusion of the investigation. You should rest assured that these new allegations will be evaluated in exactly this manner. Beyond that we will have no further comment.”

This has been a trend in white America I’ve noticed developing over that last 10 years

By National Journal – Tue May 31, 10:17 am ET

By Ronald Brownstein
National Journal

Almost no one noticed, but around George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, the nation crossed a demographic milestone.

From Revolutionary days through 2004, a majority of Americans fit two criteria. They were white. And they concluded their education before obtaining a four-year college degree. In the American mosaic, that vast white working class was the largest piece, from the yeoman farmer to the welder on the assembly line. Even as late as the 1990 census, whites without a college degree represented more than three-fifths of adults.

But as the country grew more diverse and better educated, the white working-class share of the adult population slipped to just under 50 percent in the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey. That number has since fallen below 48 percent.

The demographic eclipse of the white working class is likely an irreversible trend as the United States reconfigures itself yet again as a “world nation” reinvigorated by rising education levels and kaleidoscopic diversity. That emerging America will create opportunities (such as the links that our new immigrants will provide to emerging markets around the globe) and face challenges (including improving high school and college graduation rates for the minority young people who will provide tomorrow’s workforce).

[ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ]

Still, amid all of this change, whites without a four-year college degree remain the largest demographic bloc in the workforce. College-educated whites make up about one-fifth of the adult population, while minorities account for a little under one-third. The picture is changing, but whites who have not completed college remain the backbone of many, if not most, communities and workplaces across the country.

They are also, polls consistently tell us, the most pessimistic and alienated group in American society.

(PICTURES: Meet the GOP’s 2012 Presidential Hopefuls)

The latest measure of this discontent came in a thoughtful national survey on economic opportunity released last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project. If numbers could scream, they would probably sound like the poll’s results among working-class whites.

One question asked respondents whether they expected to be better off economically in 10 years than they are today. Two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics said yes, as did 55 percent of college-educated whites; just 44 percent of noncollege whites agreed. Asked if they were better off than their parents were at the same age, about three-fifths of college-educated whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics said they were. But blue-collar whites divided narrowly, with 52 percent saying yes and a head-turning 43 percent saying no. (The survey, conducted from March 24 through 29, surveyed 2,000 adults and has a margin of error of ±3.4 percent.)

What makes these results especially striking is that minorities were as likely as blue-collar whites to report that they have been hurt by the recession. The actual unemployment rate is considerably higher among blacks and Hispanics than among blue-collar whites, much less college-educated whites.

(INTERVIEW: Paul Ryan’s Finest Hour?)

Yet, minorities were more optimistic about the next generation than either group of whites, the survey found. In the most telling result, 63 percent of African-Americans and 54 percent of Hispanics said they expected their children to exceed their standard of living. Even college-educated whites are less optimistic (only about two-fifths agree). But the noncollege whites are the gloomiest: Just one-third of them think their kids will live better than they do; an equal number think their children won’t even match their living standard. No other group is nearly that negative.

This worry is hardly irrational. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists Frank Levy and Tom Kochan report in a new paper, the average high-school-educated, middle-aged man earns almost 10 percent less than his counterpart did in 1980. Minorities haven’t been exempt from that trend: In fact, high-school-educated minority men have experienced even slower wage growth than their white counterparts over the past two decades, calculates Larry Mishel, president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute.

But for minorities, that squeeze has been partially offset by the sense that possibilities closed to their parents are becoming available to them as discrimination wanes. “The distinction is, these blue-collar whites see opportunities for people like them shrinking, whereas the African-Americans [and Hispanics] feel there are a set of long-term opportunities that are opening to them that were previously closed on the basis of race or ethnicity,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the Pew survey.

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By contrast, although it is difficult to precisely quantify, the sense of being eclipsed demographically is almost certainly compounding the white working class’s fear of losing ground economically. That huge bloc of Americans increasingly feels itself left behind—and lacks faith that either government or business cares much about its plight. Under these pressures, noncollege whites are now experiencing rates of out-of-wedlock birth and single parenthood approaching the levels that triggered worries about the black family a generation ago. Alarm bells should be ringing now about the social and economic trends in the battered white working class and the piercing cry of distress rising from this latest survey.

Visit National Journal for more political news.

The rathskeller lives on…

Not sure how long I can keep this up 😉

This song is a great look into modern America

The Kids by B.O.B.

 

Drug boy said it’s show time
Streets don’t give a damn
They filled with such pollution
The kids don’t stand a chance

We’re trapped inside the matrix
Forced to play our hand
We’re fill with so much hatred
The kids don’t stand a chance

I said the kids don’t, the kids don’t stand, the kids don’t stand a chance
I said the kids don’t, the kids don’t stand, the kids don’t stand a chance

Well, since I was planted at birth
I abandoned my own planet and I landed on earth
As I kid I never understood what I observed
Some of it was strange but most of it disturbed me
Always in detention for the lack of my attention
You could call it deficit, really I just didn’t listen
And I was always missin’
The teachers like, where is bobby simons?
But tryna get a record deal is all I can I remember
It’s funny cause lookin back on the past that I had all my days in the streets tryna prove that I was bad
I still elevated to the level that i’m at
Still elevated to the level that i’m at

Drug boy said it’s show time
Streets don’t give a damn
They filled with such pollution
The kids don’t stand a chance

We’re trapped inside the matrix
Forced to play our hand
We’re fill with so much hatred
The kids don’t stand a chance

I said the kids don’t, the kids don’t stand, the kids don’t stand a chance
I said the kids don’t, the kids don’t stand, the kids don’t stand a chance

Sometimes it’s hard to grow
While livin in fear of the unknown
How can he ever give love
When no love is in his heart?
A child can barely see that i
Do worry bout tomorrow
And what it beholds,
He drowns himself
Deep down in his sorrow
Will you run or will you share your light
Tell a story of the live and try
See it when we’re given hope
That we know that we can grow

Drug boy said it’s show time
Streets don’t give a damn
They filled with such pollution
The kids don’t stand a chance

We’re trapped inside the matrix
Forced to play our hand
We’re fill with so much hatred
The kids don’t stand a chance

I said the kids don’t, the kids don’t stand, the kids don’t stand a chance
I said the kids don’t, the kids don’t stand, the kids don’t stand a chance

Immigrants built this country… but should they build it illegally?

Immigrant-Law Ruling Irks Some Businesses

By MIRIAM JORDAN And DANNY YADRON

A Supreme Court ruling this past week upholding an Arizona state law that cracks down on employers of illegal immigrants is irking some businesspeople who expect similar measures to spread to other states and threaten economic recovery in sectors that rely on unskilled workers.

But other businesses say they don’t mind the extra requirements for them to prove they’re hiring legal workers.

Thursday’s ruling said Arizona could strip employers of a business license after a second violation of the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which bars hiring illegal workers. It also upheld the requirement that state employers use an electronic database system, E-Verify, to check whether new hires are eligible to work in the U.S.

“We’re in a fledgling economy with everyone trying to get their feet on the ground,” said Clark Ivory, who runs Ivory Homes, one of the largest homebuilders in Utah. “Because Congress isn’t addressing immigration reform, states are coming up with these…counterproductive schemes.”

The Web-based E-Verify program allows businesses to check information provided by new hires against government databases. All federal contractors must use it. Three states—Arizona, Mississippi, and South Carolina—require all employers operating within their boundaries to use it.

About a dozen other states require its use by employers with public contracts. In Utah, private employers with more than 15 workers are required to use it, but there is no penalty for failing to do so. Elsewhere, use is voluntary.

E-Verify grew out of a pilot program introduced in 1997 and was promoted by the Bush administration. Still, it is only used by 11% of 7.7 million employers nationwide.

After Arizona made E-Verify mandatory for all companies operating in the state in 2008, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined civil-liberties groups to challenge it in the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court’s ruling is expected to influence several states where lawmakers have been seeking to mandate E-Verify use for all employers, among other measures to combat illegal immigration.

In Florida, where state contractors and agencies are required to use the program, using E-Verify “will get dicey as the economy recovers,” said Mark Wiley, chief executive of the Central Florida chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors.

At a House Judiciary Committee meeting in February, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, (D., Calif.) said mandatory E-Verify use would “encourage businesses and workers to enter the underground economy by working off the books.” She said it would “decimate” the agricultural sector, where illegal workers fill 75% of the jobs.

Mississippi passed its E-Verify law in 2008, and some employers in the state say it gives them more peace of mind.

“The majority of my members don’t have a problem with it at all,” said Henry Cote, executive director of the Yazoo City Chamber of Commerce. “If ICE comes knocking on the door, they’ve got the paperwork to say they’ve checked,” he said, referring to the federal immigration agency.

But the law has scared off migrant workers for some Mississippi blueberry farmers, who rely on immigrants for up to 95% of their labor, said Joe Fairchild, manager of Miss-Lou Blueberry Growers Cooperative in Lumberton, Miss.

This season, the labor shortage caused farmers to use machine harvesters rather than hand labor, Mr. Fairchild said. Machine picking is cheaper, but requires the blueberries to be processed, which means it takes longer for farmers to get paid, he said.

Laborers are “very unsure of it,” he said. “So they don’t come, so we don’t have labor.”

A 50-acre farm that relies on hand-picking needs at least 60 workers, Mr. Fairchild said. His cooperative has 40 active farms, he said.

Write to Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com and Danny Yadron at danny.yadron@wsj.com

Do you like I do and stay away from everyone else on the road!

Americans don’t know rules of the road

Charles Riley, On Thursday May 26, 2011, 4:04 pm EDT

More than one in five Americans — some 36.9 million — are not fit to drive and would fail a driving test if asked to take one today, according to a new survey of the nation’s drivers.

Shocking as that may be, it’s actually an improvement. Last year, 38 million received failing grades. Nationwide, the average score this year increased to 77.9% from 76.2% in 2010.

According to GMAC Insurance, which conducted the survey, the results mean that a great number of people on the road still lack basic driving knowledge, an ignorance that leads to dangerous driving habits.

For example, a full 85% of those surveyed could not identify the correct action to take when approaching a steady yellow traffic light.

And only one in four knew safe following distances.

But, the survey suggests, you can avoid some of these drivers if you know what to look for: Young people, women and motorists who live in the Northeast.

Twenty-seven percent of women failed the test, while males had a failure rate of 13.6%. The oldest drivers tested — ages 60 to 65 — had the highest average test scores at 80.3%.

Drivers in the Northeast scored lowest, while respondents in the Midwest fared best. The worst place, no surprise to anyone who drives there, is Washington, D.C.

Wyoming, where less than 5% of the population failed the test, took home the top prize for states.

The annual GMAC Insurance National Drivers test polled 5,130 licensed drivers from 50 states and the District of Columbia with a 20-question test derived from state department of motor vehicles exams.

The Joplin, Mo tornado… The heartland is hurting.

updated 2 hours 10 minutes ago

JOPLIN, Mo. — The death toll from the monster tornado last week in Missouri has risen by seven to at least 139, city spokeswoman Lynn Onstot said Saturday.

The state has been working to pare down the list of people missing and unaccounted for in the wake of the deadliest single U.S. twister in more than six decades. It said Friday that the original list of 232 missing or unaccounted for residents had dropped to 105 by Saturday.

Missouri Department of Public Safety deputy director Andrea Spillars said Friday that at least 90 people on the initial list had been located alive. But at least six others were identified as among the dead, and some new names had been added to the scroll of the missing. Authorities had cautioned for days that while they believed many on the list were alive and safe, others likely had been killed.

City manager Mark Rohr acknowledged Friday afternoon that there may be “significant overlap” between the confirmed dead and the remainder of the missing list. Still, search and rescue crews were undeterred, with 600 volunteers and 50 dog teams out again across the city.

“We’re going to be in a search and rescue mode until we remove the last piece of debris,” Rohr said.

The tornado — an EF5 packing 200 mph winds — was the deadliest since 1950 and more than 900 people were injured. Tallying and identifying the dead and the missing has proven a complex, delicate and sometimes confusing exercise for both authorities and loved ones.

Earlier Saturday, a family member said that a teenager believed to be ejected or sucked from his father’s car on the way home from graduation in the massive tornado has been confirmed dead. Will Norton’s aunt, Tracey Presslor, said Saturday that the family received confirmation of his death late Friday night.

Family members had previously told The Associated Press that Norton and his father were still on the road when the storm hit. Mark Norton urged his son to pull over, but the teen’s Hummer H3 flipped several times, throwing the young man from the vehicle, likely through the sunroof.

Several social-networking efforts specifically focused on finding information about Norton.

© 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.