Tag Archives: news

Article – Texas power companies remotely raise temperatures on people using their smart thermostats

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Give the power company access to your smart house and….

Power companies in Texas are remotely raising temperatures inside of some customers’ homes amid the state’s ongoing energy shortage.

…….

English appears to have enrolled the thermostat, operated by the company EnergyHub, an a program known as “Smart Savers Texas,” KHOU 11 notes. The program, which customers have to opt-into, allows power companies to remotely adjust thermostats when energy demands are high.

Upon realizing the details of the program, English says he immediately unenrolled: “I wouldn’t want anybody else controlling my things for me.”

I love the idea of just saying “Shields up!” or “Activate Barn Door Protocol” and have all my locks, shutters, and access points suddenly armoured up. But, as Scotty said in Star Trek, the more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to jam up the pipes. Anytime you give someone access to your personal server, your personal phone, your personal security system, your personal life….you create a possibility of risk. Sometimes the risks are minimal and are outweighed by the rewards. But…it never seems that way when the risk actually catches up. Moral of the story: don’t give the rest of the world freakin’ access to your critical systems.

News – Federal judge overturns California’s ban on assault weapons and likens AR-15 to Swiss Army knife

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The Ninth Circus? Really? That Benitez guy is gonna be the patron saint of Ballistic-Americans at the rate he’s going. The meme AR lowers are sure to be out next week.

(CNN)A federal judge overturned California’s longtime ban on assault weapons on Friday in a ruling that likened the AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife.

Assault weapons have been banned in California since 1989, according to the ruling. The law has been updated several times since it was originally passed.
According to the ruling by US District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego, the assault weapons ban violates the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms and deprives Californians from owning assault-style weapons commonly allowed in other states. Benitez issued a permanent injunction Friday so the law cannot be enforced.
“Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Benitez said in the ruling. “Firearms deemed as ‘assault weapons’ are fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”

Pipeline musings of things to come

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‘Tis the weekend, so its time to go grocery shopping. Realistically, there is very  little I need from grocery shopping these days…the house is full of food. I t ink I picked up some butter and that was really about it. :::shrug::: Food is money in the bank.

Speaking of money, I saw that the pipeline fiasco back east wound up with people getting paid off after all. Wanna bet that the oil company will quietly either get a $5m tax deduction or .gov quietly paid the $5m ransom for them to prevent major chaos? Either way, a buncha guys in a basement in Russia just inspired everyone on the planet to get into the hack-the-infrastructure business.

The days of having to cripple a country by carpet bombing and boots-on-the-ground are waning. A buncha guys in the Utah desert can fly RC planes over Iran, and a buncha basement dwellers in Minsk can cut off a fuel pipeline in the US. Push-button warfare indeed.

You know the saying about how amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics? That tells you that logistics is just as paramount as everything else…heck, even Napoleon agreed when he famously stated that an army marches on it’s stomach. The Germans tried it WW2 by torpedoing every supply convoy it could find.You don’t have to get your hands terribly bloody to throw a country into turmoil these days…you just cutoff the pipeline valve controls, lock the floodgates open, turn all the traffic lights to green, shutoff all the runway lights, and power down all the telecommunications relays.

I suspect we’re going to experience more of that sort of thing although we probably won’t hear about much of it. Heck, for all I know we’ve experienced it a buncha times recently and it was dismissed in the media as something else. After all, it doesn’t do the .gov any good for the people to know just how vulnerable the systems really are. They  might wana know why their tax money isn’t going towards keeping things secure.

So, the lesson here is that when people can bloodlessly shut down a system from halfway across the planet, with minimal risk to yourself, and a potentially huge payday, you’re going to see a lot more of that sort of thing. So..be prepared for it. It took only a couple days for people to turn into savages fighting in gas lines. Why be there if you don’t have to be? Store enough fuel to meet your needs for at least a couple weeks. I keep about two months worth of gasoline on hand, based on my average usage.

But, most importantly, this is a harbinger of things to come. Compromised infrastructure that leads to calls for .gov to ‘do something’ and the next thing you know Uncle Sam is keeping his thumb down even tighter on ‘public services’.

The news just gets more and more interesting, doesnt it?

Article -Treasury warns of need to deal with national debt limit

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The Treasury will continue to initiate the types of bookkeeping maneuvers it has used in the past to keep the government from breaching a level that would trigger a default on the massive national debt.
……..
The amount of the debt that is held by the public currently totals $22.1 trillion, an amount slightly higher than 100% of the entire economy and heights not seen since the huge borrowing the government did in the 1940s to finance World War II.

I genuinely believe that, in one way, the national debt has become absolutely irrelevant. Simply, there is no feasible way to pay it down without going Weimar on it’s  butt. The best anyone can even hope for is to slow down it’s growth.

I remember the Carter years and the inflation. I don’t remember it’s real-world affect on those around me because I was just a kid with no real interest in economics. Nowadays, I’m an aging survivalist with a real interest in not being a homeless, broke, beaten down wretch…so I follow economics like a man with cancer follows drug trials.

End of the world? Probably not. End of your world? Quite possible. A smart man will have eliminated as much debt as possible, put away a goodly amount of cash or cash-like instruments for when his job disappears, and stocked up on things he’d rather not be forced to buy during a period of austerity. And….thats actually a good policy to have even when the economy is doing well.

There is a time when you can still do something to save the ship, and there is a time when the best thing you can do is head for the lifeboats. The critical part is knowing which particular moment you’re in and acting accordingly.

The passing of G Gordon Liddy

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G. Gordon Liddy passed away.

Buffoon or patriot, man’s man or political joke, he was probably all that and more. His book ‘Will’ was probably not the best choice for inspirational reading by a 14-year-old boy, but thats about what happened. I found it to be an interesting book, somewhat inspiring, and it wasn’t until many years later I realized that all biographies have a healthy dose of…shall we say ‘fiction’…in them just by virtue of who their authors are. Nonetheless, it was certainly an entertaining book.

I wouldn’t call Liddy a role model in the classic sense, but as unhinged and showman-y as he was, there were a few things you could be 100% certain about when all his other qualities could be questioned as mere pretense and theatrics. I think he genuinely was a patriotic man, and he genuinely loved his country.

Yeah he was flawed, theatrical, blustery, self-aggrandizing, and a bunch of other things….but he did have a certain BFYTW attitude that he wasn’t scared to trot out at the powers that be. And thats always a trait worthy of respect, in my book.

So…roast up some rat over a candle, once youre done holding your hand over the flame, in remembrance.

 

The passing of Commander Zero

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Commander Zero passed away from unspecified causes although there are rumours of Covid-19 infection. From the NY TImes (behind a paywall, so I’m not gonna bother linking.)

Edén Pastora, a hero of the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua who was known by his nom de guerre, Commander Zero — and who later turned against his victorious comrades in arms in a long counterrevolutionary war of words and guerrilla attacks that failed to budge the socialist regime in Managua — died early Tuesday in a military hospital in that city, the capital of Nicaragua. He was 83.

A grandson, Álvaro Pastora Gutiérrez, said the cause was a heart attack. He said Mr. Pastora had been gravely ill when he was admitted to the hospital, though he did not identify the nature of the illness.

Mr. Pastora’s wife told a local newspaper that the cause was bronchopneumonia. His family had denied rumors that Mr. Pastora had contracted Covid-19. The government has been widely accused of listing pneumonia as the cause of death in Covid cases as a way to dispel reports that the pandemic was out of control in Nicaragua.

I hadn’t caught this story when it first broke back in June. Commander Zero ‘made a stunning debut’ in 1979 in a Castro-like underdog story but never followed up on it in terms of future successes. After becoming disillusioned with the victory he helped win for the Communists he picked up his rifle, went back into the jungles, and tried starting a revolution against them. He never had any great successes after his initial one and he eventually wound up as a somewhat charismatic figure popping up in the spotlight once in a while to tweak the nose of whatever government had caught his attention. Sort of a Central American Don Quixote, tilting at political windmills. I always kinda thought it’d be interesting to get a selfie with him someday just for fun. Plus, he probably could have used the money. Kinda funny…I like the HiPower and the G3, same as he did apparently, judging from the pictures.

““The first thing we revolutionaries lose is our wives. The last thing we lose is our lives. In between our women and our lives, we lose our freedom, our happiness, our means of living.” – Eden Pastora

For those who are curious, one of the qualities of any nickname is that you don’t get to choose it. Many years ago I was talking to someone about my preparedness projects and they said something along the lines of “Do they know about your secret life as Commander Zero?” and thats how that appellation came to be.

Natural selection takes a holiday

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When the judge says it like it is:

Years ago, here in town,  there was a little old man who was asleep in his house when some drug monster came crashing through his living room picture window, Terrified old man did the reasonable thing and gave the intruder a new belly button. Cops were pleased enough that there was talk of offering to reimburse the man for his ammo.
Such is the world we are in……

Capitol Friend/Foe firearm recognition

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On closer inspection, a number of those pistols have reflective red-and-white striped tape on the sides of their slides. There is an established practice of marking guns in similar ways to help members of security forces quickly identify each other and prevent friendly fire incidents in a chaotic situation, especially when there might be one or more active shooters present brandishing their own weapons.

Interesting. Apparently there’s more to federal ‘same team’ identifiers than just the lapel pins. I would think it’s safe to assume that they have changed the color or pattern of those markings by now.

I recall one large metropolitan police force used to prohibit officers from carrying stainless/nickel guns off duty. The reasoning was that if you came across a situation you could be sure that the guy was not a cop if he was waving a ‘silver’ handgun around. And if you were an offduty cop who had his gun in hand when the uniformed officers arrived, you were less likely (though not certainly guaranteed) to be shot as a bad guy before you had time to scream “I’m on your side!”.

If you really want to hone your your super secret squirrel skills, next time you’re in an environment where theres a lot of ‘presence’, check for people that all seem to have something in common…. pins, buttons, armbands, particlar shoe colors, etc…might just be a unified group subtly showing recognition signs so that others of their like can identify them.

Anyway, an interesting little piece about last weeks excitement. Interesting read.

Casus belli

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Gotta say…no burning police stations, no flipped over police cars, no looted Starbucks….still a more peaceful protest than your average BLM march.

Doesn’t matter though… these are the sorts of optics that people need to further an agenda of nerfing your gun rights. They’ll say that, clearly, there is a ‘clear and present danger’ in America of ‘right wing extremists’ and that those ‘weapons of war have no place on our streets’ and that ‘reasonable, commonsense’ legislation is needed to……, etc, etc, etc.

Probably add in body armour just for good measure…’cause those ‘right wing extremists’ were armored up against the ‘legitimate government’.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue of electoral misconduct and impropriety, it’s hard to not think that all this news footage of outrage and outrageousness isn’t going to come back in the form of justification for some sort of Draconian legislation.

I’ve been banging this drum for years, that a new ban was coming…… maybe this is the year. Certainly, it seems more likely this year than at any point previously. Take your stimulus money and grab a couple stripped lowers and a twenty-pack of magazines, guys…might be glad you did in the not too distant future.

Black Start

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An article from Yahoo about a state-sponsored data breach that may have handed over some interesting info to the Chinese/Russians.

“For example, it’s reportedly possible the hackers accessed Black Start, the detailed technical blueprints for how the U.S. would restore power if there was a major blackout. If that was indeed the case, Russia would theoretically have a list of systems it could target to keep power from turning back on.”

A government plan for restarting power generation? Interesting. Makes sense when you think about it…but I’d never thought about it before. Shades of “One Second After“. (WOrth reading, btw.)

As the saying goes, “it takes money to make money”. Apparently the same is true, to some degree, in power generation. As I read it, previous plans for restarting an offline power plant assume you’ll be able to have power from elsewhere where the grid is up. But, if the entire grid is down…well…you can’t start up your power plant if you can’t even turn on the lights in the control room.

The solution, it seems, is to either have enough capacity in your onsite generators to get the plant up and running, or get your electricity from a source that will continue to provide..such as hydropower.

What I find interesting here is that .gov had a planned response in place for a grid-down power plant restart procedure..and now that the playbook for that has fallen into enemy (and make no mistake about it, thats what the Chinese are) hands they know how to create that grid-down situation and disable our ability to get past it. All in all, to my unstrategic way of thinking, that seems to have just made the possibility of an attack of some kind on the national power system more likely.

Very cursory googling shows that apparently the current plan (or one of them) is RADICS.. Apparently the .gov has, in the last two years, stepped up it’s research into preparing against cyberattacks that target energy infrastructure. Interesting, that.

Remember the old days when targeting a nations energy infrastructure involved a B-52 instead of a laptop?