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Wake-up call

Blue screen follies

Posted

Planes grounded, cancer surgery suspended, the entire health service of a major industrialized nation paralyzed, critical databases paused, transportation systems immobilized, media on the blink, global banking shaken up, factories neutralized, first-responder call centers disrupted, courts compelled to adjourn their mischief.

Most painfully, the Department of Motor Vehicles incapacitated from generating revenue from victimized citizenry.

All because of an obscure company called CrowdStrike, that few folks have heard of. The more sophisticated technology becomes, and the more dependent on it we become, the more irremediably vulnerable we become to chaos. Its conquest is incremental. Progress is a “blue screen of death.” Revolutionary theologians are already speculating that creation was just another vendor’s accidentally wrought glitch.

The seamless operation of civilization hinges upon contractors with connections. They are politically wired. With all the impregnable layers of security and fail-safe backup systems to protect us against a precipitous relapse into a pre-industrial era, it takes so little to thwart our pooled intelligence.

CrowdStrike assured us “it wasn’t a cyberattack…. The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system.”

What a relief! And to know that many days later, they were still working their groundbreaking tails off trying to patch the boo-boo.

Who is CrowdStrike, how were they vetted and selected, and what is their history?  

According to ABC, the company is “perhaps best known for investigating the Russian hack of Democratic National Committee computers during the 2016 election. It has been at the center of false conspiracy theories since 2016.”  

It also reportedly helped Sony and tracked North Korea hackers. The Associated Press notes “the Austin, Texas, company reported that its revenue rose 33 percent in the latest quarter from the same quarter a year earlier — logging a net profit of $42.8 million, up from $491,000 in the first quarter of last year.”

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about the establishment of the “military-industrial complex.” There should be bipartisan government tweaking of this advisory. Be on the lookout for the government-technology complex. “And now for something completely different,” as Mr. Python used to say.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. An exhaustive compilation of objective and verifiable information is still not finalized. Determinations will succeed premature assumptions. Conspiracy theorists no longer bother to tarry in the wings. They rush center-stage concurrently with the rising curtain.

I’m quite sure there was no criminal conspiracy, despite malignant neglect. Neither was there a conspiracy to enable assassination by omission.

It’s been established there were too many anomalies of oversight to enumerate. Was there a machination of errors or was too much left to chance? Some elements in the supercharged spectrum may have subliminally hoped for the worst, but emotional ballistics, though in bad taste, are bloodless.

There is too much oxygen in the room of warrantless conjecture. Accusations made in the absence of substantiation backfire. But when facts speak for themselves, they must not be stifled or drowned out.

It does not bode well or encourage faith in the government’s investigative readiness, that two weeks after the event, there have been no press conferences. During Covid, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo treated us to protracted pressers. Internal inquiries tend to be erratic and hallucinatory. A meticulously vetted independent special counsel must explore and discover.

Let the chips fall where they may. Like bullet casings.

On the eve of the D-Day invasion, Eisenhower wrote a note in which he accepted accountability in the event of failure. On President Harry S. Truman’s desk were the words “The buck stops here.” At first, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle’s testimony in Congress fell a dollar short. Instead of falling on her sword, she stabbed Congress with papier-mâché mission statements.

Her replies sounded like the language that corporate human resources departments inflict on their employees. It’s cross-pollinated jargon.

On the day following her testimony and under duress, she resigned her office. She had no choice and could not have long delayed the inevitable, but perhaps, out of self-respect and pride, she didn’t want to give satisfaction to the members of Congress who could have gotten their points across without humiliating her. Her termination was justified. There was stupendous dereliction. Her captive audience was not captivated.

Numerous Democrats on the committee grilled Cheatle with the same awesome brilliance, measured indignation and disciplined insight, as their Republican peers. There was no partisanship. U.S. Reps Ocasio-Cortez, Mfume and Raskin were models of statesmanship and patriotism.

Heads of major federal agencies like the Secret Service, ambassadors and certain other posts (including some judgeships and even big city school chancellors) should not be political appointees, but rather be senior civil servants who rose from the rank and file up the career ladder. We’d get a better crop that way.

In the wake of the near assassination, there have been some sincere and credible calls to tone down the rhetoric, though not from lunatics who claim it was staged and the blood had no hemoglobin. It’s said that “all politics is local.” That’s also true of unbounded rhetoric.

When I expressed relief that Trump wasn’t killed, a friend of mind and mutual political crony practically accused me of selling my soul, switching to the dark side and being a closet fascist.  Not the case at all. But if opining that Trump is not Hitler, Stalin, Mao or the murderer of Emmett Till makes me an apologist for tyranny, and that denying Robert Kennedy Jr. Secret Service protection for so long was crass, unsporting and reckless, then bring it on.

As the spin cycle of the election cycle unfolds, let’s delete as much spite from the conversation as possible. That requires dispelling some of the enmity that is the mother’s milk of politicization.

Every sector of American life, it seems, has been infected by the flesh-eating bacteria that spreads to the red meat of our moral compass. It is particularly stubborn regarding the right and pursuit of economic justice.

Billionaires endorse a “flat tax of 15 percent” for everyone. That would be an equitable tonic for class envy, they say, keeping a straight face as they insult our intelligence. Fifteen percent for a wage slave, which is the preponderant population, is a huge shark-bite out of the hide of their quality of life and standard of living. For a fat cat, it’s an eyelash in the cosmos.

But the art of the raw deal, irrespective of the IRS code, will remain the only game in town as the players are tickled by oratory about “passing the torch.” The torch gets dropped and the American Dream gets torched.

Everyone professes to favor the leveling of the playing field for all workers, but that has come to mean the leveling of the poor second-string players, leaving them prone and prostrate to be carried off that mined field.

Yet there’s hope. But it’ll take more than an election to tweak the dream.

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