Wouldn't hurt for him to say: "My PROSTHETIC Leg!" Would be tragically ironic if the guy trying to save him got a heart attack while handling his emotion/adrenaline.

That said though, pretty cool to see that's not stopping him motocrossing!

People needs to see the UK's weekly "The Last Leg" show, those guys are hilarious.

It's a mad, mad world we live in. I may have confirmation bias from the media coverage, but to me it's tragically ironic that people still don't understand "The American Dream" is very much over for the vast majority of people going to America, as even most of those born in America are very much struggling compared to those in the G7 countries. American may be richer dollar-for-dollar, but standard of living and quality of life? Not so much.

That said though, it's still a huge financial, political and security improvement for most coming from the South. But the reality they faced vs the idealistic "American Dream" is very different.

Tragically it's all more complicated than anyone can really state, right? I mean, if you had a 30 book(10k pages a book) series solely on the conditions in the region of Palestine between 1930 and today you'd still have so much material to cut, you could limit all 30 books to only 1 sides POV.

The closest I see to shortcutting things, is trying view what is likely to happen in the future, and from that maybe what one might try and do.

The trouble being there's so little one can do. The reality is that Israeli military strength compared to Palestine is completely and entirely one sided, and thus Israel can and will do whatever it wishes to militarily. It's all their choice, period. In fairness to Israel, you have to note that Hamas as stated in their own charter, given that same power would've already cleansed the entirety of Israel and have created their own single state 'final' solution.

It's also not actually about Palestine vs. Israel, which should be obvious given the fact of Israel's military dominance. Israel IS really facing existentially threats of it's own, just not directly from Palestine, and instead from ALL of it's neighbours. That state of constantly requiring Israel to be capable of winning an existential war since it's inception has kept things in a perpetual state of near-war, and more often proxy-war with the Palestiniances as the pawns of alternately Iran, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others depending which time and region we choose to look at.

Predictively, that gives us that Isreal can not, under any circumstances, accept conditions to exist where any party(in particular Iran as the main backer) views the "Al Aqsa Flood operation" as a success. That means Israel will do whatever they deem necessary to ensure that happens and Iran in particular views that operation as a mistake. Nothing the UN or any of the rest of us say or do can change that.

Would be nice if they also included estimates on ejecta, and how much of the world would be under nuclear winter for how long. The destruction of NYC would clearly be tragic, but the scope of the impact on humanity would make that something of a footnote by comparison.

I think it’s not uncalled for to throw in hate crime enhancements and go for the death penalty. Let them prove their murderous callous behavior wasn’t racially driven.

Their training means they absolutely knew what they did would kill someone in his condition. No question. This wasn’t even depraved indifference, it was pure premeditated callous torturous murder. My absolute worst nightmare death.

The only truly just reward is to slowly suffocate them by compression…compassionately offering them a light sedative to speed things up slightly. A lot of tragic things happen in life, and I think they need a little tragedy in theirs.

What they’re going to get won’t come close to justice.

Just disgusting.

WHEE!

Did y'all notice the attack was on the Dr., the media, and there was no mention of the illegal alien from the All Amazing and Knowing Right? Too busy covering their mistakes they couldn't see the pointless counterpoint in front of them.

only now assless BK33 🤭 uses it to deflect from the horror that is the Republican Party.

It's really funny.

If it wasn't so f'n' tragic.

Poor bob. A wonderful libertarian information clearinghouse hasn’t become a home for right wing nonsense, lies, and propaganda. Tragic!

Still talking about Hunter Biden, eh? You still have nothing better? Another Benghazi nothing burger with fries….something fake to keep you mad at the right person. There’s zero credible evidence on that laptop, no evidence it ever belonged to Hunter, at best there’s evidence someone who hacked his email account at the same time the Russians hacked Clinton and the DNC created it, adding tons of fake information, photoshopped photos, fake and doctored emails, etc. Because the right had possession of it, and tampered with the contents for 9 months before “turning it over” (to Giuliani?), it’s nothing. Like a piece of evidence allegedly taken from a crime scene, washed, dipped in blood, exposed to close range gun fire, wiped with dna, tested at a filthy unaccredited lab with zero anti-cross contamination protocols, then handed to police and expecting a conviction. Just so stupid.

They don’t “vouch” for the emails….they say there are indications some of them are real….not all. Liars.

So family is fair game….now….but not Trump’s criminal family that undeniably took BILLIONS in bribes from horrific murderous dictators and Trump covered for them, directed his DOJ to not investigate or to just exonerate people like Mohammed bin Salman, even bragging he saved Mohammed’s ass from consequences for the live dismemberment of an American. Far from the only KNOWN bribe, Melania…..Don Jr, Eric, Jared, likely Barron too. Better investigate since this kind of stuff outrages you….but it doesn’t really, now does it? It’s just a crutch you cling to like an emotional support blanket, propaganda.

Oh wow! Right wing media isn’t reliable!? Who knew!? (EVERYBODY KNEW, YOU DUMB SHIT…for decades)

Whine some more, snowflakes. Why not create your own? (Because it would be chock full of insanity from day one, with zero real information or usefulness and you know it).

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

Good dog, Cujo! Also, you know that mutt drops a log the size of a baguette at least twice a day and it practically takes a snow shovel to fling it into the neighbor's yard.

I use to have a tragically retarded Cocker Spaniel (and, to note, there is no other variety of that breed) and it was like the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, only with dogshit. At least three times a day, this golden-furred, floppy ear'd mongrel would scarf down a can of Alpo, a cup of kibble and whatever food was left lying on the table -- the same table the cat always got smacked for climbing on, but the dog ... ohhh, no! It's CUTE when the dog does it! -- then make a beeline to the back lawn where it'd crap Mt. Everest. I'd have to trudge out the the back yard, shovel in hand, while the guy next door shot me the stink-eye because he was tired of fishing dog turds out of his swimming pool every day during the summer. This task is odious enough, but it's a thousand times worse when you're stoned and it's a million degrees out and you'd much rather be floating on your waterbed listening to Dark Side of the Moon in headphones while blissful AC-cooled air wafts over your twice-weekly washed body and not fighting your way through a black fog of Horseflies to reach a 1:1 scale model of Mt. Doom made entirely of a too-quickly digested overpriced slurry of meat scraps and offal that the canners couldn't fob off on Mexico.

It might not have been as bad as all that, but in my hazy recollection, it was pretty darned close.

I'm not sure why I told you all this, to be perfectly honest, but I did. So there.

Cancer isn't one disease. A squamous cell carcinoma of the skin is not aggressive and you would have to be very unlucky to die from it.
Pancreatic cancer unfortunately usually presents very late. Stage 4 - distant metastasis means they have confirmed spread to liver or lungs. It absolutely tragic. I've seen many a person 'fight it' and die a horrible death with complications of a new treatment such as radioactive beads inserted in their liver and all sorts of things that made their last months worse. I think that's what most people are expected to do, especially when they have a young family dependent on them. It just seems so random and inexplicable .

Two studies have found that at least 40% of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10% of families in the general population.

This means that even non-abusing good cops have (on average) a group of friends and coworkers comprised of 40%+ abusers in the home. 2 out of every 5. These are friends and coworkers that they would take a bullet for and defend with perjury if need be. These are the good cops.

But you know, I don't blame them? The role itself is insane. Why should humanity have the right to put all of our collective violent, physical, criminal, and tragic life events onto the shoulders of one small group of people? It's not sustainable. And it shows in the lives of those who attempt to assume that role.

Well, I guess we could always blame them for being cops. I mean, there are many other, much more effective ways to improve a culture and impact positive change. If that was their motivation for becoming a cop. That would be a positive take-away: Come up with alternate work programs to help cops stop being cops.

Do you like to "fantasize" about "idiots being wiped from the gene pool" or how to "deal with the grief from these tragic events?"

Pick one.

Really tragic. I honestly don't care if people kill themselves, but when they take someone with them, that is heart breaking.



I believe Darwinism might be the solution here:

Between Midnight and 3 am, drink driving is legal, and no emergency services will respond to accidents. It's kind of like concept of the Purge movies.

People who are dumb enough to drink and drive will wipe themselves out, and everyone else will avoid traveling during these times.

(I'm sure it's a horribly flawed concept, but I like to fantasize about idiots being wiped from the gene pool to help me deal with the grief from these tragic events).

I had to stop listening.

Sad indeed. Tragic.