Dr. X's Free Associations

Criminal Hackers Are Outraged Over Being Hacked

Eamon Javers is a senior D.C. correspondent for CNBC.

There’s an absolutely bonkers flame war going on in the dark web right now. It’s nuts, but American companies and government agencies might want to pay attention. Because (likely) Russian hackers are venting rage against the US and vowing revenge.

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) October 22, 2021 It all started earlier this week when the US government reportedly launched a coordinated attempt to bring down the servers of the ransomware group REvil.

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 But today the Conti hacking group has issued an epic screed against the US government - complaining that it is unfair and illegal to hack them.

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 That’s right - the hackers are complaining about hacking.

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 In their post, the group says “First, an attack against some servers, which the US security attributes to REvil, is another reminder of what we all know: the unilateral, extraterritorial, and bandit-mugging behavior of the United States in world affairs.”

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 They say journalists operate in the “Twitter brothel” - which, you know, is fair. But they also say the Americans who attacked REvil are “vampires drunken and intoxicated by impunity and blood.”

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 Remember, this is a group that brought down the Irish health care system and closed hospitals during a pandemic. So.

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 At about the same time, a group called Groove put up a post in Russian urging fellow hackers to strip competing and unite to destroy the state sector of the US to show “who is the boss” of the internet.

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 They also make an oddly specific and quite vulgar threat against president Biden.

Eamon Javers @EamonJavers · Oct 22 So all that is to say, watch your servers this weekend, folks. The hackers are angry.

Audible

I've been working so much lately, I've had little time to read. Since I commute by car most days, I decided to give audiobooks a try. I subscribed to Audible, which doesn't have everything I'd like to "read," but so far, I've gotten through Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame (Patricia DeYoung), How Emotions Are Made (Lisa Feldman Barrett), and The Genetic Lottery (Kathryn Paige Harden). All three are excellent, though if I were making recommendations, I'd say everyone should read Harden's book, Feldman Barrett is optional, and DeYoung's book should be on every psychodynamic, self-psychologist, and relational psychologist's reading list.

Audible was fine for the first two books, but The Genetic Lottery is thick with studies that Harden unpacks, so it requires hard copy reading, which I'll get to. Harden is a clinical (research) psychologist at the University of Texas Austin, where she leads the behavioral genetics lab and runs a twins study. In this book, she draws upon research across multiple disciplines.

Otherwise, I've got the late psychoanalyst Steven Mitchell's book, Can Love Last? in the hopper. Also in the cue are Hanya Yanagihara's a Little Life, Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads, and Trauma and Dissociation by Elizabeth Howell.

I prefer to read books or books on Kindle, but audiobooks are doing the job for now.

I might write about Harden's controversial book if I get a bit more free time. Behavioral genetics has gotten much more sophisticated in recent years, and I can see both liberals and conservatives hating on the book. But every thoughtful person should read it because it will inform and challenge your thinking on the subject.

Donald Trump on the Death of Colin Powell

A former President of the United States wrote that, and there are Americans who worship him.

Link, link, link, link

Wouldn't It Be Nice If Legislators Knew Things

4.3 million workers quit their jobs. We need to quit paying folks not to work.

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) October 14, 2021

Tim Burchett is the US congressman from Tennessee's 2nd District. He made it to age 57 without knowing that you can't collect unemployment when you quit your job, yet he can vote on policy pertaining to unemployment benefits.

We don't know for sure why 4.3 million workers quit their jobs, but speculation is that they're feeling unsafe at work, or COVID pay boosts have been scaled back, or they're rethinking work-non-work life balance. Anyone who quit believing they would receive unemployment benefits will be sorely disappointed. Moreover, the extended federal unemployment benefits for those who were involuntarily unemployed during the pandemic ended six weeks ago.

Fools

Defund the police is a stupid position to take, but this is right up there. Defunding the police is theoretically possible, even if foolish, but how is defunding the media even possible unless everyone stops consuming media? The person posting this approvingly (based on her other posts) is literally posting it on social media, which is making money off her/our eyeballs and tweets.

🇺🇲🚨 PROTESTERS IN NYC HAVE SURROUNDED NEW YORK TIMES HQ AND ARE CHANTING "DEFUND THE MEDIA" 💥⚡ pic.twitter.com/U20DCMSUbz

— bristolblues (@BristolBlues32) October 16, 2021

Stephon Marbury to Kyrie Irving: Ali would be proud of you for vaccine refusal

“Ali would be proud of you”

- Stephon Marbury’s message to Kyrie Irving pic.twitter.com/lCLrkotP7t

— NBA Central (@TheNBACentral) October 14, 2021

Yeah... um... maybe not.

Muhammad Ali's vaccine mandate commercial. He urged compliance with the law.

What Did This Accomplish?

.@MTG and @RepDebDingell just got into screaming match on steps of Capitol after MTG heckled Democrats holding a press conf after passing legislation responding to Texas abortion law pic.twitter.com/Kq11xko04r

— Scott Wong (@scottwongDC) September 24, 2021

Marjorie Taylor Greene just started yelling at Debbie Dingel, who was holding a press conference outside the Capitol. Greene is known for launching verbal tirades at people who've had no interaction with her. Maybe MTG's ranting impresses her supporters, but I think the greater effect is to make the GOP look more unhinged in the eyes of the suburban swing voters.

This Did Not Need To Happen

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare has implemented crisis standards of care, which means care is now being rationed using a complicated system of choices intended to save the greatest number of lives instead of providing the highest level of care to all patients. The rationing is necessary because of the high numbers of unvaccinated hospitalized COVID patients, but all patients are part of the rationing plan regardless of diagnosis. This is one way your personal decision to pass on vaccination is no longer personal.

Idaho has the lowest state rate of fully vaccinated (41%) residents in the entire nation, which is even lower than the global rate of 43.9%.

Jim Souza, chief physician executive of the St. Luke's hospital system in Idaho, described the crisis standards as "an unprecedented even in modern medicine." Buzzfeed:

As the Delta variant of the coronavirus tears through Idaho and the rest of the US, Souza said he and his St. Luke’s colleagues have noticed several important differences from the December 2020 surge. Patients are younger (averaging 58 years old, down from 72), they are sicker and require more mechanical ventilation, they are staying in the ICU longer, and they are dying more frequently (the ICU mortality rate has jumped from 28% to 43%). Some 80 people have died from COVID in St. Luke’s hospitals in just the past three weeks.

“In a really morbid exercise, just in the month of September, if you look at the ages of the people we have lost and you apply to them average lifespans, we have lost more than 1,100 life years,” Souza said. “Can you imagine that? And for the people who say, ‘We all die sometime.’ Yes, we do. But these people didn’t need to die now. They didn’t need to die like this.

Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani Pushed Knew Dominion Claims Were False

"Days before lawyers allied with Donald Trump gave a news conference promoting election conspiracy theories, his campaign had determined that many of those claims were false." Court filings in a Dominion defamation suit reveal an internal Trump campaign memo had already debunked the claims.

Not that this will matter to anyone who believes the conspiracy theories. Once conspiracy theories take hold, evidence to the contrary does not dislodge them. That's what's so insidiously destructive about Donald Trump's compulsive lying to his supporters. Among those who've embraced him as a cult leader, the accumulation of lies is impervious to scrutiny and evidence.

On so many levels...

Breitbart is running a piece that says - I am not kidding - that the left is mocking the unvaxed so they'll dig in and never get vaxed and die and shift political power to the left.
This is so weird on so many levels that I am tempted to dive in on it, Inception style. https://t.co/DiFZ6ZAbnT

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 19, 2021

Let us consider for a moment what one of Breitbart's Big Thinkers is admitting
1. Vaccines work
2. Vax resistance is almost entirely partisan
3. Unvaxed people are dying in large numbers

He then gets from this to: THIS IS THE LEFT'S ENTIRE PLAN!
/1 https://t.co/NzE7bkfEjM

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 19, 2021

This would be a whole lot easier if everyone would just listen to their doctor instead of worrying about whether their political opponents are playing 9-dimensional chess.

Latest Data Continues To Show High Efficacy Of Vaccinations

WaPo:

People who were not fully vaccinated this spring and summer were more than 10 times more likely to be hospitalized, and 11 times more likely to die of covid-19, than those who were fully vaccinated, according to one of three major studies published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that highlight the continued efficacy of all three vaccines amid the spread of the highly contagious delta variant.

A second study showed that the Moderna coronavirus vaccine was more effective in preventing hospitalizations than its counterparts from Pfizer-BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson. That assessment was based on the largest U.S. study to date of the real-world effectiveness of all three vaccines, involving about 32,000 patients seen in hospitals, emergency departments and urgent-care clinics across nine states from June through early August.

Who Got Us Through The Pandemic?

Daily Northwestern:

The Daily spoke with several Evanston residents about their opinions on the Good Neighbor Racial Equity Fund. Many were pleased with the financial support it will bring, though there were some criticisms.

“It’s about damn time,” resident Denise Barreto said of NU’s decision to give money toward racial equity. 

Barreto, a board member of the local artists’ organization Evanston Made, said she was thankful the fund recognizes and financially supports the arts, which she said are an important part of the fight for racial justice. 

“We all know that artists got us through the pandemic,” Barreto said. “I 100 percent believe that artists are people who pursue their art and pursue justice through art. It’s a form of resistance to capitalism. It’s a form of resistance to these systems that have been trying to crush us.” 

Is she referring to NetFlix and Prime? Seriously, I don't know what she means unless she's referring to streaming entertainment, but this would be a lofty view of corporate movie and TV production.

Me? I had work, books, lots of walks, some streaming and people. Most of all, people.

One Month Ago, Trump Said That He Started The Process Of Troop Withdrawal, And They Couldn't Stop It

Trump speaking about the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan one month ago:

I started the process, all the troops are coming home, they couldn’t stop the process. 21 years is enough. They couldn’t stop the process, they wanted to but couldn’t stop the process.

And in April:

I (Trump) made early withdraw possible by already pulling much of our billions of dollars and equipment out and, more importantly, reducing our military presence to less than 2,000 troops from the 16,000 level that was there... Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do... I planned to withdraw on May 1st, and we should keep as close to that schedule as possible.

Whether the US should have withdrawn the rest of our troops or whether we should have done so differently is debatable, but to be clear, Biden finished the last part of what Trump began. He just did it three months later than Trump said he would do it.

Freedom

In Dallas County, TX, Judge“ Clay Jenkins said yesterday:

"We have zero ICU beds left for children. That means if your child’s in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have COVID and need an ICU bed, we don’t have one,” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins. Your child will wait for another child to die. Your child will just not get on the ventilator, your child will be CareFlighted to Temple or Oklahoma City or wherever we can find them a bed. But they won’t be getting one here unless one clears.”

Meantime, Gov. Greg Abbott is sticking to his guns, still prohibiting counties, cities, towns, and school districts from instituting local mask mandates in response to local conditions.

Meanwhile, In Johnston County, Kansas

So this happened at a city board of commissioners meeting regarding masking in schools last week. (Link to board’s original post in comments) pic.twitter.com/vcQ2VxwHsI

— Jerri🌻Jamz (@JerriJamz) August 13, 2021