tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

More info on #ConnectAround from @volexity

https://www.volexity.com/blog/2024/01/10/active-exploitation-of-two-zero-day-vulnerabilities-in-ivanti-connect-secure-vpn/

- Exploitation dates to at least late 2023
- Chinese nation state actor

Loads of info in the blog.

Mandela left Ethiopia safely, but had only returned to South Africa incognito for a few months, when he was detained. He would stay behind bars for 27 years.

US diplomat and CIA spy Donald Rickard revealed just prior to his death in 2016, that the CIA had tracked Mandela's movements and passed them on to the Apartheid regime which arrested him. He said they did so because they feared he would facilitate the spread of communist ideology across Africa.

And that is that.

"To understand this extraordinary spasm of violence as an act of national self-defense, you’d have to accept that Israel’s only chance for safety depends upon #Gaza being crushed and emptied of virtually all Palestinians." https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/12/opinion/israel-icj-genocide-south-africa.html

It's not possible to understand the actions of a government, or maybe anything in the human world, via a priori theory. The only way to understand is via facts and constantly tested interpretive models.

E.g. it's a commonplace that "homeless encampment sweeps make no sense." In this context making no sense means contradicting a theory. Maybe "municipalities intend to end homelessness" or "the purpose of government is to meet people's needs". An attractive way to reconcile the contradictions is assuming that governments are dumb or incompetent.

It's necessary to assume that facts make sense. If they keep on doing something that seems senseless it's the theory that has to go, otherwise it's impossible to understand what's really going on. They don't want to end homelessness. They're not in the needs-meeting business, at least not the needs of the unhoused, and they're made up of people and people aren't dumb or incompetent.

What they're really doing is a much more complex and difficult problem. I don't have all the answers and they're not necessarily easy to explain, but attaining a deep instinctual acceptance of the principle that theories never trump facts, that actual facts always make sense, is the first step towards understanding.

ℹ️ Update: It has now been 24 hours since the #Gaza Strip fell largely offline, in the ninth major telecoms outage since the start of the war; metrics indicate that the situation is ongoing, leaving most residents cut off from the rest of the world 📉

"who knew poop shaming was even a thing?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/LateStageCapitalism/comments/194trv8/who_knew_poop_shaming_was_even_a_thing/

#DisciplinaryTechnology #Bossware #SIgns #Poop

Starship Enterprise implies the existence of Starship Free, Starship Personal, Starship Cloud (Most Popular), Starship Cloud Pro, Starship Cloud Pro PLUS, and Starship On Premises (Contact for pricing).

Kenya's UBI trial data is in.
people dont stop working when they have a UBI.
lump sum UBI had the greatest economic benefit, creating a lot more entrepreneurs.

we have conclusively verified humans can be trusted to make excellent financial decisions.

now it is time to fix economic policies to connect people with money directly, not manage it for them out of mistrust.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3x329k32DXVjasx1zSqApH?si=RslQjGSeRYK0osae88yJig

An astronomer team has observed some of the youngest planetary disks ever seen. Designated as Class 0 and Class 1, these are planetary systems younger than 300,000 years old. Even at this early stage of star formation, the protesters are surrounded by disks with rings and spiral structures that indicate where new planets could be forming. It was previously believed that planets couldn't form before the first million years, but there they are.

https://public.nrao.edu/news/early-evolution-of-planetary-disk-structures-seen-for-the-first-time/

The IPCC should hire the BBC’s graphics team for AR7.

I opened the first IPCC report, released in 1990, and copied their scenario graphs for CO2 and CH4 emissions.

I marked the latest data with a red dot. Methane emissions in 2022 were 580 Mt and carbon dioxide emissions in 2023 were 40.7 GtCO2 (= 11.09 GtC).

Whatever you think about the IPCC you must admit their business-as-usual calculations were pretty robust.

#ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #Climate #IPCC

#ClimateCrisis #climate

I often criticize Bill McKibben's newsletter "The Crucial Years", but this time I'm just going to quote large blocks of test from the Jan 9 2024 one because I agree with them. This is about US #LNG exports:

1. They produce an ungodly quantity of greenhouse gas emissions. Just the next proposed plant, CP2 in Louisiana, will produce 20 times more emissions than the controversial Willow oil complex over its lifetime. If the industry gets everything they’ve asked for, US LNG exports will produce more greenhouse gas emissions than…Europe. All of it. This is the biggest fossil fuel expansion project currently underway on planet earth.

2. It’s even dirtier than coal—you get carbon when you burn it, and methane when it leaks before you burn it. And since we now live in a world where solar and wind energy—which produce no greenhouse gas emissions—are the cheapest power, that’s almost criminally dumb.

3. We told the world in Dubai last month that the time had come to “transition” off fossil fuels. No possible definition of transition includes building giant terminals for the export of fossil fuels that are designed to last a half century."

(omitted 4-6 for length)

Eric Schmidt, long time top dog at Google and Alphabet, considered Henry Kissinger to be his best friend.

(Photo shows text from Wall Street Journal opinion page)

The X-ray telescope XRISM just released two high-quality images taken at the end of its commissioning process (aka first light).
Launched on Sep 7, 2023, the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM, pronounced "crism") is an X-ray space telescope mission developed by JAXA in partnership with NASA and participation from ESA and other international orgs. It is similar to but more sensitive than the aging 24-year Chandra X-ray space telescope.

https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2024/01/20240105-1_e.html
#XRISM
1/n

Like in real life, also in extragalactic astronomy there are VIPs*. If you are into clusters of galaxies, the top of the VIP probably is the
Coma clusters of galaxies, aka Abel 1656.

Let's do a small #AstroPhysicsFactlet to see why

#astrodon
#astronomy

*=Very Important Potential (wells)

PFFFF :D

It also implies there is still something worth considering about Nazism, something that has not been defeated yet – as an idea, as a way of ordering society. But, look, no ideology has been studied more, and the first half of the twentieth century actually happened. 9/

The temperature widget for Apple Weather is not able to show double-digit low and high temperatures at the same time.

Designed by Apple in California where there’s no winter.

@RustyBertrand

Interesting and unfortunate that Mennonites have become one of the major deforestation threats in Peru. https://twitter.com/Ecocentristas/status/1741507820472684601