Security - System Wrights

The Angst

I just put a young man on a plane back to his hometown. Our meeting was four days earlier where I found him sleeping in the alley behind my home. My dog had barked all night because of his presence. I asked if he was all right. I also asked him to move on. Initially he did but he returned in the evening.

The next day in the morning he walked by in front of my house and I asked him about his circumstance. He had worked until the pandemic closed his work. He had played out all his string. No money… hadn’t eaten in days. He was in trouble.

I brought him in, fed him, and got him access to get cleaned up and a place to sleep. The next day we got clothes and a phone for him. His had been destroyed. All the email and apps hooked up ok.

His desire was to return home to the midwest where he was from. He knew from checking the Internet that a plane ticket was $149. He wanted to go right away. The bargain fares were days away. We plied the net and found a Friday flight.

On Friday , the two hours after dropping him off to get checked in, I got a voice mail from the young man saying he was getting on the flight home. His mom and dad will be happy.

I asked him what he had learned in his year away from home. He realized that the network of support you have around you is vital. He never thought he would get in the position he was in.

The vigor of youth meets the wisdom of experience.

Bernard Lambert August 29 2020

About Conspiracy and Knowledge

This note is to cover the connectedness of government, business, and the populace with relevant observations on the applicability of current theories and the genesis of such theories. An attempt will be made to connect the dots.

Today much controversy is swirling around the Covid Pandemic and conspiracies. Public controversy surrounds the selection methods state health departments are using to allow or disallow businesses to operate.

The conspirators in this instance are the public drivers of the state health department, the business owners, the public, the medical industry, the insurance industry, and of course banking.

The concurrent need for all involved is for life to return to what it was last summer and fall. Prosperity is measured and perceived in that way. Any deviation from that causes uncertainty and fuels our suspicions. This alone divides us into separate conspiracy categories.

Next add the public-facing actions of each of the stakeholders. Today this causes further division in the public and feeds subdivision in the stakeholders. Add the isolation of the pandemic environments and financial want and you have nothing but time on your hands to scheme on what is conspiring against YOU. At this point, the real conspirators have won as you are totally distracted.

You are allowing this to happen and all you need to do is refocus your attention. The unknown is uncomfortable. A lot of what we are uncomfortable with today is the lack of solid indisputable facts to help us. A sense of macro proportion must be developed to gain some insight into the scope of this pandemic.

How long in time it will take cannot be known right now, progress is being made, miscues have been many. It is dangerous. It spreads before you know it. Normal social behavior is now extremely dangerous. Getting a bunch of us together is now lethal and a spoke in the spread of the pandemic.

I do not believe that any of the efforts to limit spreading is disputable by way of civil rights. It is arguable by way of financial wants and needs. The danger of grouping up inside, in any way, is absolutely guaranteed to affect more people badly. If the effect was immediate, easily observed, and tested quickly, then we would not have the superspreader generation happening at the gatherings.

The pandemic came from social gatherings. Families, restaurants, airplanes, trains, buses, airports, cars, schools, etc. could be infected and the infection carried on to others before anyone knew it. This cannot be fixed financially. Our want to gather has to be changed so we don’t superspread any more. This conduct will be necessary until years after the widespread use of medical treatments that prevent the attack on our bodies.

Bernard Lambert – August 12, 2020

How It Happens

I just finished watching a documentary about Amelia Earhart done by PBS American Experience. It details the meteoric rise to fame she enjoyed while learning and dedicating herself to flying and expanding women’s horizons on a grand scale.

Unfortunately the last world record flight she attempted ended in tragic loss of her life. Conjecture about the causes of the loss points to the failures to train, to learn new radio direction finding, egoism, promotional avarice, failure to rest adequately, and a general underestimation of the limits caused by diminished mental acuity.

We find our lives rushing headlong into the future similarly hobbled by our misunderstanding of the hazards that lay before us. A high mortality virus with the ability to spread long before it can be identified in one’s surround is making its way to every corner of the world. Leaders are at first dismissing the threat then eventually admitting the dangers long after the pandemic is deeply seated in the population. The cries for protection equipment, life support equipment, testing kits, and facilities to treat the afflicted are going unanswered as the hundreds of thousands of citizens are sickened and between two and four percent of them die.

The saddest part of this experience is learning that our experts at fighting this kind of fight were dismissed, unfunded, and removed years in advance of this current pandemic. The executive and legislative leaders are now busy saying they are not responsible and are trying to redirect our attention in order to obscure their failures.

It is common in the collapse of civilizations for all of these things to take place. If we could learn from our mistakes this would not have to happen. Our first mistake is to allow others to have such critical control over our life. The second is to assume anything is someone else’s responsibility. The third is to enjoy our bread and circuses instead of organizing an effective correction of this self-inflicted demise.

Get to work!

For Trump Supporters….

From Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway:

“For Trump supporters, let me make one thing VERY clear!

For the record NO ONE is blaming the President for the virus. Let me repeat. Coronavirus is not Trump’s fault.
Here’s a detailed list of what we are blaming him for:

* Trump declined to use the World Health Organization’s test like other nations. Back in January, over a month before the first Co-vid19 case, the Chinese posted a new mysterious virus and within a week, Berlin virologists had produced the first diagnostic test. By the end of February, the WHO had shipped out tests to 60 countries. Oh, but not our government. We declined the test even as a temporary bridge until the CDC could create its own test. The question is why? We don’t know but what to look for is which pharmaceutical company eventually manufactures the test and who owns the stock. Keep tuned.

* In 2018 Trump fired Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossart, whose job was to coordinate a response to global pandemics. He was not replaced.

* In 2018 Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC director for medical and bio-defense preparedness left the job. Trump did not replace Dr. Borio.

* In 2019 the NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and bio-defense, Tim Ziemer, left the position and Trump did not replace the Rear Admiral.

* Trump shut down the entire Global Health Security and Bio-defense agency. Yes, he did.

* Amid the explosive worldwide outbreak of the virus Trump proposed a 19% cut to the budget of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention plus a 10% cut to Public Health Services and a 7% cut to Global Health Services. Those happen to be the organizations that respond to public health threats.

* In 2018, at Trump’s direction, the CDC stopped funding epidemic prevention activities in 39 out of 49 countries including China.

* Trump didn’t appoint a doctor to oversee the US response to the pandemic. He appointed Mike Pence.

* Trump has on multiple occasions sowed doubt about the severity of the virus even using the word hoax at events and rallies. He even did it at an event where the virus was being spread. Trump has put out zero useful information concerning the health risks of the virus.

* Trump pretended the virus had been contained.

* Trump left a cruise ship at sea for days, denying them proper hospital care, rather than increase his numbers in America.

Repeat. We do not blame Trump for the virus. We blame him for gutting the nation’s preparations to deal with it. We blame him for bungling testing and allowing it to spread uninhibited. We blame him for wasting taxpayer money on applause lines at his rallies (like The Wall). We blame him for putting his own political life over American human life. I hope this clears things up.”

This is why the U.S. has the highest number of cases on the planet!!!

Covid-19 & Work From Home

For a three weeks we have been working from home. My wife and I are both doing this. We have a excellent garden, well stocked larders, freezers, and refrigerators. We both have a substantial amount of work on our horizons. We are both healthy. We wish that the shelter-in-place was not necessary. We wish others could do as well in light of the layoffs so many have experienced.

Our agreement on the issue of the perils of everyday life, especially the present day’s newest ones, is that we have always been so aware of what could go wrong, what we were able to overcome, and how in the end we survived, that we are very much less concerned for ourselves than most folks.

This does not mean we are not concerned for ourselves and for others. Our concern is for the people that have not ever worried about the perils surrounding them and how they remained oblivious to the danger. This current crisis is going to interfere with their life. How will they react? The greatest danger may be their awakening!

NPD vs Disaster

Narcissistic Personality Disorder versus a world disaster is the subject of this epistle. We have a leader who self-deals so extensively that a pandemic is dismissed as “in control” and represented in direct contradiction to medical experts around the world. As a result of this individual’s efforts to cut CDC funding in previous years we are unprepared as a nation to react to this virus spread in our country. The very part of the CDC that was set up to deal with such things was dismantled by that same individual.
The nature of this pandemic is also been misrepresented. It does spread prior to an individual showing symptoms in up to 66% of the Covid-19 exposed individuals. The most adverse outcomes manifest themselves in older or immunity challenged individuals. The governmental reaction is to order sequester.
The most extreme example of the profound ignorance associated with our NPD damaged leader is the refusal to test for Covid-19 after being exposed to individuals with the virus. One can only hope the virus can correct those undesireable behaviors.

Impeachment

Today the House has conducted the debates among politicians, largely lawyers, that argued rules, policies, constitutional law, moral law, and the basis for impeachment.

When the guy on the top of the executive branch deals for himself, however and in whatever form, he is violating the laws of the people. This is not arguable through manipulations of language. To go further and slander and debase his critics is uncivilized.

The American democracy has very few political parties. The arguments being offered right now by some of the parties speaks to the lack of moral integrity that most of those folks enjoy. It is obvious that politicians will argue. Look at how little they have done in the last several decades.

The fond hope of the powers that are in charge at this moment is that they can wear down the American voters spirit, hide the real dealings going on, and otherwise exhaust us. This tends to keep folks away from the polls.

We need everyone to make it to the polls this next November. We cannot be indifferent, lax, tired, to busy, confused, or in any way diverted from our duty as citizens.

Bernard Lambert – December 18, 2019

The 70’s Miniseries

I just finished watching the miniseries The Seventies produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. They also did The Sixties. It reminded me of what I grew up in and what went on around me. I highly recommend these.

The presentations provoked thoughts that had remained dormant for these many years and renewed how my present life was formed. I played in a band, I protested, I played sports in school, I went to concerts, I enjoyed all the youthful experiments in drugs, marijuana, sex, music, cars, motorcycles, and cohabitation. Our ideals were dismissed roundly in the early years. Many things have made it into the mainstream. The real loss has been our youthful optimisim.

While I remain optimistic about our lives in this world, I am convinced that there are large capable forces at work erasing and diminishing the hopes of the 60’s and 70’s.

Please comment on this subject.

BLL 2019-09-26

What Our National Security Did Not Do

I just finished watching this documentary called “A Good American”, a film by Friedrich Moser. The story is about Bill Binney who once worked as an analyst for the NSA. Oliver Stone is the Executive Producer. What it offers in pretty clear language and evidence is how badly misappropriation of public monies, corrupt Washington insider activity, political appointments, and gross incompetence lead up to the losses of 9/11 and subsequent years.

Bill and others employed at the NSA developed a program called thinthread which, when placed in the communications streams being monitored by the NSA, traced communications packets from source to destination and saved the data about the data (called metadata) into a large database. Then, using techniques Bill developed in previous decades, reports could be made showing the interconnections between hundreds of millions of telephone and internet users worlwide.

It was so successful that it could find threats developing well before anything would happen and allow for a substantial advanced warning on threats about to happen. Bill’s earliest use of the analytical techniques told of the impending Tet Offensive in Hue in Vietnam. He perfected the automation of the techniques with the introduction of the personal computer.

At the NSA he was given charge of a small team of individuals to automate analysis of the data being collected. The team quietly did that and demonstrated it’s efficacy at several “research” operations the NSA ran around the world. It was discovering things that no other individuals or systems were able to discover.

As the world threat levels loomed and Osama Bin Laden began financing the terrorism, Bill’s thinthread was detecting those activities in advance. The problem was that the appointed head of the agency, the director in charge of analysis automation, the assistant director in charge of analysis automation, and the newly hired systems vendor had a vested interest in making sure Bill’s thinthread did not get to play throughout the agency. They made millions burying it and touting their nonworking, expensive, protected system offered by the vendor SAIC.

As a good American Bill then pursued notifying the Defense Department of the missteps by the bosses. What he did not anticipate was the fallout. The NSA had pulled the plug on thinthread and buried all information about it at the direction of the bosses who were enriching themselves pushing the nonworking system SAIC had produced. They even went after him, his team members, his Congressional liason, et al as enemies of the state. Later the FBI’s case was dismissed due to falsified charges.

There was another feature Bill and team worked into the code that prevented anyone in the United States from being spied upon without the proper court authority. Those same bosses stripped it off. The NSA is not to spy on U.S. citizens by law. The bosses were also law breakers.

In subsequent years Bill and team tried selling this technology to other government agencies and were stymied by the NSA at every turn. Well into the post 9/11 era the NSA still did not have or use the thinthread or any equivalent of it but instead continued to push the SAIC vendor solution.

Bill and the team members are retired now. They had to “retire”. Our country is at greater risk without them. Our government agencies are accelling at their incompetency and trouncing our civil rights to privacy all at the same time.

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