A University of Texas at Austin student found a pointed protest against concealed-carry on campus:
As she recalls, the pundits on the radio were talking about how there is no conceivable solution to gun violence, that mass shootings are just something that we’re going to have to learn to live with in America.
“I felt like, you know, what a bunch of dildos,” [student Jessica] Jin says. “They were taking the safe route and not wanting to say anything that would piss anybody off or be too divisive. They act like there’s no solution or steps that we can take.”
Jin complained to friends about those dildos she heard on the radio. Speaking of dildos, she remembers telling them, I bet you can’t even brandish a dildo in a classroom in Texas without getting into trouble. “They challenged me to look up the laws,” Jin says. “And so I did. I went to the school rule book, and sure enough, they follow the state obscenity clause.” At the University of Texas at Austin, “it’s a misdemeanor to openly brandish or distribute these objects that portray the human genitalia in turgid form.”
And so Cocks Not Glocks was born: a protest to openly brandish and distribute dildos on August 24, the first day of classes at the University of Texas at Austin. Jin and her fellow activists plan to hand out several thousand phallic objects in order to protest the new campus-carry policy mandated by the state.
It really says something about Texas that they think dildos are worse than firearms in classrooms. I hope Jin's protest gets noticed.
Day two of Certified Scrum Master training starts in just a few minutes (more on that later), so I've queued up a bunch of articles to read this weekend:
Training begins again...
The Justice Department announced today that it's ending private prisons because, it turns out, they suck:
In making the decision, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates cited new findings by the Justice Department's inspector general, who concluded earlier this month that a pool of 14 privately contracted prisons reported more incidents of inmate contraband, higher rates of assaults and more uses of force than facilities run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
"They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and ... they do not maintain the same level of safety and security," Yates wrote in a memo Thursday.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, nonetheless said the Justice Department announcement represented a "major milestone in the movement away from mass incarceration."
"It has been a stain on our democracy to permit profit-making entities to be handed the responsibility of making determinations of individual liberty," Mauer said in a prepared statement. "Today's action moves us closer to a moment when government can once again assume this important responsibility."
I'm with Mauer. There are some things from which taking profits is simply immoral, and housing prisoners is one. Just watch the last season of Orange is the New Black for an only-slightly-exaggerated view.
This is one of those ways that President Obama is leaving the campsite better than he found it. Good.
Via Bruce Schneier, the NSA lost control of a crap-ton of hacking tools sometime before 2013, and managed to stop the bleeding only after discovering Edward Snowden's leak:
The exploits themselves appear to target Fortinet, Cisco, Shaanxi Networkcloud Information Technology (sxnc.com.cn) Firewalls, and similar network security systems. I will leave it to others to analyze the reliability, versions supported, and other details. But nothing I've found in either the exploits or elsewhere is newer than 2013.
Because of the sheer volume and quality, it is overwhelmingly likely that this data is authentic. And it does not appear to be information taken from compromised targets. Instead, the exploits, binaries with help strings, server configuration scripts, 5 separate versions of one implant framework, and all sort of other features indicate that this is analyst-side code—the kind that probably never leaves the NSA.
From an operational standpoint, this is not a catastrophic leak. Nothing here reveals some special "NSA magic." Instead, this is evidence of good craftsmanship in a widely modular framework designed for ease of use. The immediate consequence is probably a lot of hours of work down the drain.
But the big picture is a far scarier one. Somebody managed to steal 301 MB of data from a TS//SCI system at some point between 2013 and today. Possibly, even probably, it occurred in 2013. But the theft also could have occurred yesterday with a simple utility run to scrub all newer documents. Relying on the file timestamps—which are easy to modify—the most likely date of acquisition was June 11, 2013 (see Update, however). That is two weeks after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and six days after the first Guardian publication. That would make sense, since in the immediate response to the leaks, as the NSA furiously ran down possible sources, it may have accidentally or deliberately eliminated this adversary’s access.
So, yeah. The NSA had a bigger problem than Edward Snowden until he broadcast his leak and sent their plumbers into overdrive. And even then, they didn't properly secure the data.
So says New Republic writer Bill McKibben:
We’re used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, “We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don’t like.” But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. (Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.) It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But it’s a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict--except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planetwide occupation that follows.
The question is not, are we in a world war? The question is, will we fight back? And if we do, can we actually defeat an enemy as powerful and inexorable as the laws of physics?
Meanwhile, scientists are saying that only about 30 major cities will remain cool enough to host the 2088 Olympics:
[Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at University of California, Berkeley] and his colleagues looked the climate conditions of 645 cities in the Northern Hemisphere that are eligible to host the Olympics. Cities that had fewer than 600,000 in population were excluded, as were those that exceeded 1,600 meters (or roughly 5,250 feet) in elevation. They used data from two standard climate models to calculate the temperatures and humidity of those cities over the next century, assuming the levels of greenhouse gas emissions would remain high. With those numbers, they then estimated each city’s wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), a measure of heat stress that takes into account temperature, humidity, heat radiation, and wind.
Cities are considered to be of high to medium risk if their WBGTs exceed 26 degree Celsius (or 78.8 degree Fahrenheit), which the researchers say is the maximum temperature to safely hold marathons, considered by some to be the most demanding events in the Olympics. (That’s actually a conservative measure; a 2010 study put the temperature threshold of risky marathons at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Another analysis, based on data from more than 2 million marathoners, found the ideal temperature to be as low as 40 to 50 degrees.)
London and San Francisco meet the grade. Chicago is "medium risk." No cities in South America or Africa will be "low risk" by then.
Sometimes, when I'm really busy, I click on articles I want to read. Right now I have a lot tabs open:
So, altogether, not entirely about the election.
We had nearly-perfect weather this past weekend, so I'm just dumping a bunch of links right now while I catch up with work:
Back to the mines.
Voters in Kansas yesterday called borderline-crazy Tea Partier Tim Huelskamp home from the U.S. House:
Frustrated voters in a sprawling Kansas congressional district sent a blunt message on Tuesday that might yet break through the din of this election: At some point the government needs to do something for them.
That sentiment was delivered in the harshest possible terms to Representative Tim Huelskamp, a firebrand Tea Party conservative who lost in a primary landslide after spending most of his six years in Washington feuding with his own leaders. He was so difficult to work with and troublesome that he was kicked off the Agriculture Committee.
The loss of that crucial legislative post, and his vote against a long-term farm bill, did not endear him to the powerful farming interests in a state that likes its federal agricultural aid.
Farm groups joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and another deep-pocketed advocacy group to get behind Roger Marshall, a political novice who promised to work on behalf of Kansas rather than rabble rouse.
In other words, he got fired for lack of job performance. Good riddance. And a dozen other races in Kansas went to moderates, smacking ideologue governor Sam Brownback over the nose with a newspaper.
Could this be the beginning of the end of the crazy?
I thought earlier today that this was unique. James Fallows, who knows more about the presidency than most living journalists, agrees:
To the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has ever happened before.
Presidents of one party call nominees from the other party “bad choices” or “wrong for America” or “risky bets” or in some other way second-best options to their own preferred candidate.
As far as I am aware, none of them has previously declared a major-party nominee categorically unfit.
Again we have two possibilities. Either Barack Obama, with a career’s worth of hyper-deliberate careful phrasing behind him, has suddenly made a lurch toward hyperbole. Or Donald Trump does in fact merit classification in an unfit category of his own.
Obviously I believe the latter is the truth. We’ll get to the pushback and ramifications in subsequent installments, including President Obama’s question to the Republican leaders who “rebuke” Trump but still support him: “What does it say about your party, that this is your standard bearer?”
For now, this is one more for-the-record note of how Campaign 2016 has crossed one more previously unexplored frontier.
It's really that bad.