July 2021 – Page 3 – Bear Bussjaeger

Feel like wasting a few minutes?

Do a web search; find all the leftstream media mentions of Biden’s CNN town hall yesterday.

It’s almost as if it never happened for some strange reason.

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Babylon Bee Wins the Internet Today

Heh.

Here’s a question for the PA Secretary of State.

If Dominion election systems are so inherently unsecure that IT professionals, authorized by county election officials, merely looking at logs permanently compromises the systems — beyond the ability of even the vendor to check — how in the hell did they get certified for use in the first place?

Pennsylvania Decertifies County’s Voting System, Cites Violation of Election Code
Acting Secretary of State Veronica Degraffenreid, an appointee of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, informed the Fulton County Board of Elections that she “did not arrive at this decision lightly.”
[…]
“These actions were taken in a manner that was not transparent,” Degraffenreid said in her letter to Fulton County officials on Tuesday. She said the access given to Wake TSI has caused Fulton County’s voting system to be “compromised,” and that neither the county, state officials, nor Dominion could now “verify that the impacted components of Fulton County’s leased voting system are safe to use in future elections.”

The question is rhetorical, of course. The “how” most likely involves bribery and other corruption. But I invite Degraffenreid to prove my guess wrong.

Thank you, Degraffenreid, for admitting that Dominion systems are not safe for use in elections.

Chicago has had 56 mayors since 2019?

Had occasion to look up something about Chicago Mayor Groot, and ended up at the always authoritative Wikipedia. There, I learned…

Lori Elaine Lightfoot (born August 4, 1962) is an American attorney and politician serving as the 56th mayor of Chicago since 2019.

Commas; they’re free. Use ’em.

Wikipedia is also free, but you’re better advised to skip it.

Here’s a feel-good video for ya.

This is happy-making.

It’s here, if you can’t see it.

If Viruses Were Light

We’re up to at least 13 “variants” of SARS-CoV-2. Differing nucleotide sequences, differing spike proteins. But somehow they all cause “COVID-19.”

No one seems to want to explain why none of these are “novel coronaviruses” themselves, or call the disease associated with each COVID-20, COVID-21, and so forth. It’s like…

And no doubt all those colors would cause sunburn.

Funny thing. In the real world, coronaviruses — which SARS-CoV-2 is — account for roughly a quarter of all “common colds.” Maybe we should check definitions, and consider whether we’re just seeing the usual summer colds.

Nah. Colds wouldn’t panic people into accepting unapproved, experimental jabs.

CNN and the Fuzzies?

This was good for a chuckle.

CNN Says CNN+ Service Will Not Be Liberal, ‘We’re Not an Opinion Network’
MORSE: I don’t think anyone who’s looking for “deep lib” would seek out CNN. It’s just not what we do. But no, it’s not going to be ideological. We’re just not in that game. We’re not an opinion network, we’re a news network.”

Yeah. Right.

I long assumed — quite cynically — that CNN was consciously lying through their teeth. How else could you explain constant reporting of blatant… inaccuracies; even about verifiable physical facts. But somewhere along the the line I began to wonder.

If you’ve never read H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy novels, you really should.

Fuzzies are an alien race on another planet. They are primitive hunter/gather nomads. The entire species lacks even the concept of lying, which is a major premise for the entire trilogy.

But in the third novel, one Fuzzy — Wise One — discovers more or less accidentally that he can say a “not so thing.” The first time, he wants his little gang to go in a particular direction that the rest do not. He assures them that that place has lots of wonderful foods; that it’s an “everyone know thing,” that his predecessor told him. He puzzles over how he could say something like that, and decides maybe he did vaguely recall hearing it as a child.

Later, when the Fuzzies have found a pretty nice place, Wise One still wants to push on. With one exception, the others do not. Wise considers the “not so” lie he told before, and decides to run back to their camp screaming that a hesh-nazza — one of the Fuzzies’ most feared predators — is coming. The Fuzzies flee in terror in the direction Wise One wished.

But the thing is, in the panic Wise One forgets for a moment that there is no attacking creature. And he too is terrified by his own lie.

In the case of CNN, I’m no longer sure if they know they’re lying. They’re so caught up in their own narrative — with leftstream media regenerative feedback — that they now believe it’s truth, unlike the wiser Wise One who was able to remind himself, “Oh, yeah. There is no damnthing.”

Piper has been one of my favorite authors since I discovered his stories decades ago. But his work wouldn’t be bought by any publisher these days, excepting Baen, because he is not politically correct. Or leftist.

In Piper’s worlds, government is rarely the solution, and only when responsible people (usually men, given when Piper was writing) keep it in check. Solutions come from individuals who step up and take responsibility… and try to keep themselves in check (another discreet theme in the Fuzzy novels). Individuals are willing to take chances, even risk their lives, to do the right thing.

Socialism is a bad thing thing, and makes things worse, requiring responsible individuals to tke a hand (Oomphel In The Sky). Communism is the same as the officially slave-based society from which it evolved (A Slave Is A Slave).

In the case of the Fuzzies, Piper rejects the Left’s preferred “noble savage” narrative. Meeting humans was an — almost — unalloyed good thing for them. Humanity, in fact, saves the the species from extinction in a few generations, due to a nearly nonexistent birthrate, and more or less accidentally at that. We know it worked because Fuzzies are still around thousands of years later (Ministry of Disturbance).

Piper would get no Hugo awards these days.

Light Reading For The Day

THE HANGING JUDGE, at the corner of Mason and Rodney, did not refer to Roy Bean ( a Supreme Court justice in this particular branch of surreality) or to those like Roy with with an inclination to judicial severity. No, the sign outside, over the entryway, consisted of a white-wigged dummy in long black robes swinging from a gibbet by a length of looped hemp. At the bottom was a legend: “Sic semper tyrannis!”

— The American Zone, L. Neil Smith, 2001

That was even quicker than I expected.

The lawsuit challenging the Georgia Senate run-offs, filed yesterday, was dismissed… yesterday.

Judge tosses lawsuit attempting to overturn Georgia Senate runoff elections
A lawsuit in Georgia seeking to overturn the results of the state’s twin U.S. Senate runoff elections in January was dismissed by a judge during a hearing on Monday.

I expected it to be tossed, but I thought the court would make more of a show of pretend “fairness.”

Nope. Georgia effectively no longer has a state constitution.

Maricopa County: We discovered that we don’t have routers.

Seriously; that’s now their claim: no routers on the election system, no connection to the Internet, no connection to the county network. Yep, they’re changing their story again. In fact, they provided this handy diagram.

Yet, somehow, up to now they claimed they did have routers, and that they’re connected to the county network.

“We had previously believed that the risk would be eliminated by redacting the law enforcement data on the routers and not producing it. But we were informed that redaction did not eliminate the risk,” Deputy County Attorney Joseph LaRue wrote in a letter to Senate Audit Liaison Ken Bennett.

And Maricopa County Sheriff Penzone confirmed that the — now suddenly nonexistent — elections routers (you did notice their use of the plural, right?) were at the very least connected to his system.

“The integrity of classified data, private information and law enforcement specific material would immediately be vulnerable and exposed, regardless of the steps promised by a private vendor who states otherwise.”

I’m thinking that, if there were no routers, Maricopa should have mentioned that to the auditors… instead of offering the router logs in lieu of the physical — now suddenly nonexistent — routers. If they had no routers, where in the hell were those logs going to come from?

I fear that it may not be much longer before Arizonans start decorating lampposts.

Added: It’s probably also worth noting that access to the Netgear switch would be useful. Switches direct packets across a network in a fashion similar to routing, but use device MAC addresses instead of IP addresses. If the auditos=rs could see the switch, they should be able to see what devices connected to the election network, and communicated with what other devices. They might even see that Maricopa is…. mistaken about what was connected.

Added 2: It appears that Netgear only sells 48 port switches (which Maricopa’s diagram shows) with some level of management. So they can’t eh, shouldn’t claim that switch won’t have logs.