The world has since moved on – Events, dear boy, events! – but I suspect the political polarity reversal evident at this year’s Republican National Convention will come to dominate the US political landscape for the next twenty years, if not longer. There is a perceptible phase transition underway, adumbrated over the past decade and a half. The Democratic Party shore itself of last wooly remnants of its New Deal-era commitments to labor and the poor under Obama; the new populist Republicans have picked up those discarded threads and knitted themselves a new mantle as champions of Middle America’s Deplorable Man, the modern descendant of FDR’s Forgotten Man:
(Chris Arnade’s Dignity and Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism offer the best anthropological and sociological explanations of Homo misirabilis.)
That’s not to say that the entrenched power blocs of Cheneyite neocons, Pencian cryptotheocrats and Romneyite plutonomists have left the scene. They’re still there, but their bases of popular support aren’t anymore, and as a consequence they’re adrift and diminished, though still dangerous – gradually melting icebergs broken off from the main icesheet and lurking sullenly on the fogbank, forever threatening to doom anyone hapless enough to cross them. The most important signifier of this sea change was the anti-corporate address by Teamsters Union president Sean O’Brien. His appearance at the convention riled members of the Teamsters’ national and regional leadership cadre, which is itself a form of PMC misleadership class, but could not have taken place if the union rank and file still felt they owed any fealty to the Democratic Party:
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/tdu-teamsters-union-rank-and-file-organizing
https://jacobin.com/2024/07/gompers-sean-obrien-rnc-speech-teamsters
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/07/teamsters-sean-obrien-rnc-hawley-trump-labor-union.html
Organized labor acting as independent political agents, extracting a real price from politicians for their backing, and, most importantly, enforcing their bargains by mercilessly and remorselessly repudiating politicians and parties that betray them. Such dinosaurs haven’t been seen in half a century, and were presumed extinct. Who woulda thunk it? Not the Democrats, who’ve managed not to think about organized labor much at all since the First Scabs were elected in 1992:
I watched little of the convention directly, just the first half of Trump’s speech on PBS and intermittent snippets of the some of the speakers. Like most people, I let others watch it for me, filter out the long stretches of tedium, and report on the interesting bits. Epistemic triangulation is the only workable strategy to navigate the news. The New York Times’s coverage, overweight though it may be with opinion and analysis that promotes what to think about events, over and above and usually mixed in with simply recounting the events themselves, is a starting point. Just be sure to read closely, and between the lines, as Ol’ Noam would tell you. Glenn Greenwald and guests on System Update juxtapose the current consensus narrative of events with what’s independently known about and what was being said just a few news cycles ago, exposing lies, hypocrisy, and manipulations. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn of Racket News provide (on what is affectionately(?) referred to in my household as “The Conspiracy Theory Podcast”) a gonzo journalism cum absurdist novel-ish take on the weird, revolting and even direful world events we’ve been cursed to witness – their takes are best viewed through the right kind of polarized lenses (and at 1.5x speed), but at least they’re usually funny.
America This Week
System Update
Along with millions of other people, the Mz. and the K’s fell victim to CrowdStrike’s incompetence last Friday:
Their codeshare flight to Amsterdam was cancelled, though it wasn’t clear whether that was done preemptively by Delta or by KLM, and they were stuck at Berlin’s notoriously late, overbudget, and poorly designed “new” Brandenburg airport.1 While I tried to get help from Delta (there was an estimate 6 hour 45 minute wait for a callback on the helpline for Medallion members), KLM was fortunately able to rebook them through Paris with an overnight layover. KLM-AirFrance’s IT operations seem to have been substantially less exposed to the consequences of CrowdStrike’s blunder than those of their US partner, which lost track of its flight crews in the outage:
It looks like it will take through the end of this week for Delta to get things under control, though it would not surprise me if the airline takes another week to shake off its Blue Screen of Death hangover.
The root cause of the debacle appears to be dereferencing a null pointer, a basic programming error that every decent programmer working in memory-unsafe programming languages like C/C++ guards against paranoiacally:
If that is in fact the culprit, it speaks to poor coding and verification practices within CrowdStrike. (Automatic zero had it been a CS217 assignment. Dave Hansen should glide off the piste and beat those fools with his ski poles.) That kind of bug absolutely should have been caught in code review, or simply by using standard static analysis tools:
CrowdStrike has plenty of form for incompetence and mischief. Over a two-year stretch my work-issue laptop has gone through regular periods of near-unusabilty as the falcond daemon sucks up all of the CPU cycles and often lots of RAM. Each time the fix has been to wait, and wait, for CrowdStrike to issue a patch:
CrowdStrike’s suggested fixes for this cluster don’t inspire confidence the company’s technical chops:
And CrowdStrike’s CEO George Kurtz was the CTO of McAffee at the time the anti-virus software company caused another worldwide Windows Blue Screen Of Death meltdown when that company released a similarly faulty update:
(Though several outlets report that the damage from that led to McAfee being sold to Intel — by implication, at a bargain price – that 2011 transaction seems to have been only minimally affected by the 2010 fiasco. Intel bought McAfee at a 60% premium over its market price.)
Kurtz managed to fail upwards into billionaire status with CrowdStrike.
CrowdStrike was also leading rain wall in the early days of the bullshit hurricane of Russiagate, publicly proclaiming that Russian government sponsored hackers had breached DNC computers and removed a cache of highly embarrassing emails (revealing, among other things, the DNC’s coordinated efforts to rig the 2016 Democratic Party primary process against Bernie Sanders in order to secure the party’s nomination for Hilary Clinton). Only under oath in a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee did CrowdStrike’s Sean Henry admit that the company had no real evidence of Russian involvement, facts kept from the US public until mid-2020. Veteran CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s pieces for Consortium News explain this hoodwinking very clearly:2
FTC Chair Lina Kahn, who is likely the most beneficently effective public servant appointed by Joe Biden (probably an accident), connected the CrowdStrike-caused outage to market concentration: “All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting industries from healthcare and airlines to banks and auto-dealers. Millions of people and businesses pay the price. … Another area where we may lack resiliency is cloud computing. In response to @FTC’s inquiry, market participants shared concerns about widespread reliance on a handful of cloud providers, noting that consolidation can create single points of failure.”
I’d love to see Kahn go after CrowdStrike, but I suspect the PR-centric groaf-tech company is too plugged in and too useful to too many political players for her to have any chance of curbing it.
The awfulness of Berlin Brandenburg Airport and the story of its excruciatingly slow and inept design and construction put paid to any residual notion of Germany as paragon of efficiency and engineering know-how:
The venerable Berlin-Tegel airport that it replaced was indeed too small and too old to serve the city much longer, but it was an exceptionally convenient and flier-friendly throwback to mid-20th century airport design. Until 2020 you could step out of a taxi, walk 20 meters to a check in desk, and then another 20 meters through security right at your departure gate. Incredibly easy.
CrowdStrike defended its hacking claims in an obfuscatory blogpost that relies on statements in the Senate Intelligence Committee report which ultimately refer back to CrowdStrike’s evidence-free assertions for substantiation, sometimes via a chain of assessments attributed to various US intelligence agencies which had not themselves conducted any digital forensics but instead relied on CrowdStrike’s summaries.
I had intended to resume blogging over the weekend prior to the Fourth of July holiday, and true to form, I am late acting upon that intention. But at least the moment originally chosen for reviving this blog after its long hiatus in suspended animation was a propitious one. The past three weeks have brought forth a succession of exceptionally unusual and noteworthy events of such import that some of them actually deserve to be called historic, an adjective so habitually overused and degraded as to be effectively weightless, just more hot air filling the empty spaces within the shrinkflated rhetorical packaging of conetmporary public discourse. To enumerate a handful of the significant occurences of the past several weeks:
So many things are happening so quickly it is hard to know where to begin, and events pass and are superseded at such pace that keeping current seems nigh impossible. My purposes here, though, are to maintain a record of the salient facts around various events as an aide de memoire, to analyze their underlying factors and probable consequences, and to formulate through public writing something more than inchoate and merely intuitive stances regarding them. Life has certainly provided a bounty of weird and worrisome subjects to feed this project for the foreseeable future – though as things have been going, the future is anything but foreseeable.
]]>We’re in a compressed version of reality …. All Americans have something in common right now, left or right: They’re strapped into a plane that’s going through extreme turbulence. If you’re looking for unity with your fellow Americans, just turn to somebody who looks different from you and maybe on the surface might seem to disagree, and just say, “Shit’s weird, ain’t it man!” And you can both high five each other – the commie and the John Birch Society guy can both go, “No shit, let’s go get a drink.” Mormons and Black Panthers can sit down together, shake their heads, and say “I wonder what they’re going to do with the rest of us once they’re done deciding who’s the next emperor.” – Walter Kirn
Six, going on seven, weeks into Salt Lake’s partial lockdown, and about eight weeks since the pandemic really began to be taken seriously by a broad swath of Americans, the quality of information available from broadcast, print and internet media remains uneven, with much of it frustratingly poor. A few sites have become standard references for COVID-19 information, though some make the cut simply because they’re all there is for a given area.
Here is a partial list:
Models