Opinion | Local Girl Makes Good – The New York Times

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows the importance of connecting with working voters.

WASHINGTON — At dawn on the day after the election that rocked her world and her party, working on three hours of sleep, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked out of her Bronx apartment building.

“A sanitation truck pulled up,” said the 28-year-old with the contagious smile and an energy that impressed even the dragon-energy president. “The driver reached out his arm to give me a high-five. What that moment tells me is what we did was right. We are touching the hearts of working people. Democrats should be getting high-fives from sanitation truck drivers — that is what should be happening in America.”

Source: Opinion | Local Girl Makes Good – The New York Times

This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson. | The Nation

Great take, apropos to my working class voter observation.

Fifty years after Thompson published his book, a lot of Americans have come to feel like motorcycle guys. At a time when so many of us are trying to understand what happened in the election, there are few better resources than Hell’s Angels. That’s not because Thompson was the only American writer to warn coastal, left-liberal elites about their disconnection from poor and working-class white voters. Plenty of people issued such warnings: journalists like Thomas Edsall, who for decades has been documenting the rise of “red America,” and scholars like Christopher Lasch, who saw as early as the 1980s that the elite embrace of technological advancement and individual liberation looked like a “revolt” to the mass of Americans, most of whom have been on the losing end of enough “innovations” to be skeptical about the dogmas of progress.

But though Thompson’s depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture—one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals—is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as “white trash” or “deplorables.”

Source: This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson. | The Nation

Skier’s disappearance, return may stay a mystery – Times Union

More than 100 days after Constantinos “Danny” Filippidis went missing from Whiteface Mountain, State Police and Filippidis’ family are no closer to understanding what led the skier to end up in a rental car section of the Sacramento Airport.

State Police said Thursday they considered the case still open but had no new information on Filippidis’ disappearance.

Filippidis was on a ski trip with some fellow Toronto firefighters. At around 2 p.m. Feb. 7, he decided to go on one last ski run while his friends returned to the lodge. When he still hadn’t returned by 4 p.m., they began to look for him.

Searchers eventually found his identification in his car but no sign of him. The disappearance sparked a massive search effort, involving more than 130 members.

Six days later, Filippidis’ wife received a call from a number she didn’t know. On the other line was Filippidis. He called her by a nickname he used for her but sounded lost and confused. After calling him back, she was able to convince him to call 911.

Source: Skier’s disappearance, return may stay a mystery – Times Union

Pompeo says China incident is ‘entirely consistent’ with Cuba ‘sonic attacks’ – CNN

Sonic attacks on American diplomats continue, this time in China.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that an incident involving a US government employee stationed in China who reported “abnormal sensations of sound and pressure” suggesting a mild brain injury has medical indications that are “very similar” and “entirely consistent” to those experienced by American diplomats posted in Havana.

US officials have issued a health alert in China following the incident. Additionally, the US State Department is looking into whether the incident is similar to what happened in Cuba in 2016 and 2017, a US diplomatic official told CNN, which the US government characterized as a “sonic attack.” That incident led to a reduction in staffing at the US Embassy in Havana.

Source: Pompeo says China incident is ‘entirely consistent’ with Cuba ‘sonic attacks’ – CNN

It’s Time For A New Maritime Strategy – U.S. Naval Institute Blog

In the current environment, the U.S. military is stretched too thin and lacks the strategic purpose and resources to effectively employ this strategy. There is no guiding principle for the employment of naval force and yet the Navy continues to be used as an active tool of diplomacy in an era without strategic priorities. As globalization continues to take hold but the U.S. begins to focus inward, the role of the Navy must be better defined. In April of 1991, as the U.S. faced a period of unchallenged superiority with the demise of the Soviet Union, then CNO Admiral Frank Kelso made the following statement in Proceedings:

We must shift the objective of our “National Security Strategy” from containing the Soviet Union to maintaining global stability. Our evolving strategy must focus on regional contingencies in trouble spots wherever our national interests are involved.

Source: U.S. Naval Institute Blog

Jolly Roger Telephone Company, saving the world from bad telemarketing | How Does it Work?

This is brilliant. It’s a service that screens your phone calls and answers with an annoying, delaying robot if the caller is a telemarketer or scammer.

How does it work?
1) You buy a subscription, telling us your phone numbers and your email address.

2) Pick a robot you like from our “Pick a Robot” page. Mark down the robot’s phone number and keep it handy.

3) When you receive a telemarketing call, you transfer it to the robot (see “Use a Robot” page for instructions).

4) After our robot is done talking to the telemarketer, it will send a copy to your email so you can have a laugh.

Source: Jolly Roger Telephone Company, saving the world from bad telemarketing | How Does it Work?

Exclusive: CIA ‘Leaker’ Josh Schulte Posted Agency Code Online—And CIA Never Noticed

This is supposed to be the latest on Joshua Adam Schulte, the former CIA worker suspected of passing hacking secrets to WikiLeaks. This case raises so many questions:

If Schulte is suspected, why hasn’t he been charged?
Did what Schulte post online to GitHub qualify as classified information?
There’s nothing worse than child pornography. Doesn’t it seem convenient that Schulte was found with a bunch of it on his computer? His job was to break into computers. He almost certainly worked with expert colleagues whose job was also to break into computers. How could we possibly know that he wasn’t framed?
If Schulte is allegedly into child porn, how did he ever get a security clearance?
Did the government really think that quoting IRC logs of one of Schulte’s friends mentioning child porn was proof of anything other than a joke?

All of these parts mentioned in this case seem like they’ve been carefully chosen to paint a picture. Bottom line: If Schulte did leak the classified material, he should go to jail. If he willingly collected child pornography, he should go to jail. The onus is on the government to prove these charges (or possible charges) and so far I have not seen much to convince me.

Joshua Adam Schulte, the former CIA worker suspected of passing the agency’s hacking secrets to WikiLeaks, previously posted the source code for an internal CIA tool to his account on the public code-sharing site GitHub, The Daily Beast has learned.That potential red flag was apparently missed by the spy agency just months after Edward Snowden walked out of the National Security Agency with a thumb drive of secrets in 2013. A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.Schulte, 29, worked at the CIA from 2010 to 2016. He was raided by the FBI on March 23, 2017, roughly two weeks after Julian Assange began releasing 8,000 CIA files under the rubric “Vault 7.” The files had been copied from an internal agency wiki sometime in 2016, and contained documentation and some source code for the hacking tools used by the CIA’s intrusion teams when conducting foreign surveillance.

Source: Exclusive: CIA ‘Leaker’ Josh Schulte Posted Agency Code Online—And CIA Never Noticed

Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index – Digiconomist

According to these numbers, a single Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of electricity as thirty-one U.S. households use in one day. Insanity.

Bitcoin electricty consumption

The continuous block mining cycle incentivizes people all over the world to mine Bitcoin. As mining can provide a solid stream of revenue, people are very willing to run power-hungry machines to get a piece of it. Over the years this has caused the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network to grow to epic proportions, as the price of the currency reached new highs. The entire Bitcoin network now consumes more energy than a number of countries, based on a report published by the International Energy Agency. If Bitcoin was a country, it would rank as shown below.

Source: Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index – Digiconomist

For the Comedy Iconoclasts of ‘SCTV,’ a Joyful Reunion Tinged With Loss – The New York Times

I loved watching SCTV. It was a brilliant, funny show.

On a warm Mother’s Day afternoon here, sunlight streamed into the gold-filigreed lobby of the Elgin Theater, where traveling vaudeville acts passed through a century ago. A troupe from the more recent past, though also tinged with nostalgia, would soon take the stage: the cast of the cult TV show “SCTV.”

The afternoon of clips and conversation, hosted by the “SCTV” fan Jimmy Kimmel, will be part of a Netflix comedy special directed by Martin Scorsese, set for release in 2019. As a sellout crowd of 1,300 pushed by, the 40-year-old friends Jeff Maus and Eric Makila stood finishing their beers, having a fanboy moment about the show, which debuted more than 40 years ago.

“This is hometown love,” Mr. Makila said.

“I gave a speech to my class on ‘SCTV’ in Grade 3,” said Mr. Maus, who grew up in nearby Paris, Ontario. “It was the only hip Canadian show we could lay our hands on back then.”

Source: For the Comedy Iconoclasts of ‘SCTV,’ a Joyful Reunion Tinged With Loss – The New York Times