Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Brave Australia rejects Beijing’s South China Sea claims, backing US

A. B. Paterson said it best


Watching Farmer wants a wife, (We) had to google where Goolgowi is

Banjo said it best, when he wrote

"We'd have to stop!"  With bated breath
We prayed that both in life and death
Our fate in other lines might fall:
"Oh, send us to our just reward
In Hay or Hell, but, gracious Lord,
Deliver us from Booligal!"

— A. B. "Banjo" Paterson, Hay and Hell and Booligal

~ Via LM

 

Surely they still teach Banjo in schools these days. . .

 

WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE: Nine Lessons Learned from Re-Watching Classic Star Trek.

 

Whose century? Adam Tooze, LRB. “In 1949, ‘Who lost China?’ was the question that tortured the American political establishment. Seventy years later, the question that hangs in the air is how and why America’s elite lost interest in their own country. Coming from Bernie Sanders that question wouldn’t be surprising. But it was more remarkable to hear William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, describe American business as ‘part of the problem’ because its corporate leaders are too focused on their stock options and have lost sight of the ‘national view’ and the need to ensure that ‘that the next century remains a Western one’. He warns corporate executives lobbying for China that they may be treated as foreign agents.” Well worth a read.

US agents force their way into China’s consulate in Houston as diplomats pack up SBS News (KW).

National security law: EU proposes cutting off Hong Kong’s access to goods used in surveillance and ‘internal repression’ SCMP

Goldman to pay Malaysia US$3.9bil over 1MBD scandal The Star. That’s real money. Why can’t we do that?


Why Class Formation Occurs in Humans but Not among Other PrimatesHuman Nature (dk). “Our goal here is to regard a class as an alliance and use this idea to extend a model of coalition formation among animals (we use “coalition” to refer to social interactions and ‘alliance,’ to long-term relationships; a class is therefore an alliance). Specifically, we aim to show that in animal groups, dominants merely exclude subordinates from critical resources (access to which increases fitness), whereas in humans, the emergence of two or more classes is inevitable in any group in which individuals can profit from exploiting the resources produced or possessed by others, who are prevented from leaving the group.'” So anthropology, isn’t? Worth reading in full. 

A Job Guarantee Costs Far Less Than Unemployment Pavlina Tcherneva, Foreign Affairs

Beyond Moldy Jam: The Inside Story of What Went Wrong at Sqirl The LAnd

‘Spread out? Where?’ Smithfield says not all plant workers can be socially distanced Reuters

NLRB’s GM Ruling Gives Employers More Slack to Punish Speech (1)Bloomberg. Awesome. Anything that gives HR more control over workers is good.

The psychology of misinformation: Why it’s so hard to correct First Draft 



From police chief to VP? Inside Val Demings’ unlikely path AP

 

The Media Manipulator: Why Trump’s Distractions May Not Save Him This Time Patrick Cockburn


US flag lowered for last time at Chengdu consulate as China retaliates for Houston closure SCMP


In praise of negativity Crooked Timber


Why Class Formation Occurs in Humans but Not among Other PrimatesHuman Nature (dk). “Our goal here is to regard a class as an alliance and use this idea to extend a model of coalition formation among animals (we use “coalition” to refer to social interactions and ‘alliance,’ to long-term relationships; a class is therefore an alliance). Specifically, we aim to show that in animal groups, dominants merely exclude subordinates from critical resources (access to which increases fitness), whereas in humans, the emergence of two or more classes is inevitable in any group in which individuals can profit from exploiting the resources produced or possessed by others, who are prevented from leaving the group.'” So anthropology, isn’t? Worth reading in full. 

A Job Guarantee Costs Far Less Than Unemployment Pavlina Tcherneva, Foreign Affairs

Beyond Moldy Jam: The Inside Story of What Went Wrong at Sqirl The LAnd

‘Spread out? Where?’ Smithfield says not all plant workers can be socially distanced Reuters

NLRB’s GM Ruling Gives Employers More Slack to Punish Speech (1)Bloomberg. Awesome. Anything that gives HR more control over workers is good.

The psychology of misinformation: Why it’s so hard to correct First Draft (TH).

In praise of negativity Crooked Timber


The Australian state propaganda outlets are as unrelenting as their Chinese counterparts

Australian media loves to publish and broadcast stories about Chinese protest rallies. On the 13th of July, Su-Lin Tan, an Australian journalist now working for the South China Morning Post, published a story of Chinese protesters rallying in Adelaide titled ‘Asian-Australians hold protests as community faces rise in racist attacks’.

Continue reading 


Ex Victorian public servant Darrell Fraser convicted of fraud

RESOLUTION: A former deputy secretary of the Department of Education and Training has been sentenced to a two-year community correction order and 300 hours of community service.



JOHN MACARTHUR’S CALIFORNIA CHURCH WILL DEFY NEWSOM’S CHURCH BAN: ‘Christ, not Caesar, Is Head of the Church.’


Subject: Iran-Linked Hackers Left Their How-Tos on the Web
Source: Gizmodo
https://gizmodo.com/iranian-hackers-left-5-hours-worth-of-hacking-how-tos-c-1844421276

There’s a lot of intrigue and ~mystery~ surrounding the public conception of hacking, but the truth is, even the most elite hackers are regular people. And just like regular people, they screw up on the job more than you might think. We’ve seen cybercriminals screw themselves over in some of the dumbest ways imaginable over the years, but for some reason, we still see the same mistakes made time and time again.Case in point: A team of researchers out of IBM’s X-Force IRIS cybersecurity team have reported finding a server full of unencrypted data left out in the open by a hacker group affiliated with Iranian state authorities. According to the team, the trove included, among other things, roughly five hours’ worth of video explaining how to compromise accounts belonging to folks in the U.S. and Greek armed forces and how to siphon sensitive data out of those accounts once they’re crippled.

Apparently, the IBM team counted at least 75 websites that these Iranian ops tried to crack. At the end of the day, the IBM team suggests that the best way to protect yourselves from these sorts of shenanigans is to use a password manager capable of resetting your passwords at regular intervals, and ideally one that can use more than 14 characters, since longer passwords are all the tougher to crack. They also suggest using two-factor authentication as a last line of defense, in case your passwords get into the wrong hands.