Am off to bed having seen 30 minutes of the first US Presidential debate. Anyone who wants to watch more of it should seek counselling. In terms of content it is impossible to distinguish what either of them is actually proposing on taxation policy. What comes over to me is the lack of any divergence from a neo-liberal economic model.
But in terms of style and presentation, which I presume this is about, rather to my surprise Romney is coming over the better. He is glib whereas Obama is stuttering a lot; they are both achingly dull, but Obama’s phrases seem curiously disconnected and there are gaps when you can see the gears meshing in his head. Neither of them shows any evidence whatsoever of charisma.
Four years ago Obama was talking with apparent belief about the need for change and inspiring people to follow him. He may even at the time have believed much of what he promised, but given the speed of abandonment of principle in office, I doubt it. Now Obama is just trying to present as a more managerially competent neo-con; a managerially competent neo-con competition is about the only one Romney can actually perform in.
I don’t really care who wins – debate or election.
Mandelbrot Set. I claim £5…
@Anon – yes, Craig or Expathos should have tweeted – I suspect they thought the outage would be much shorter. Craig’s not a Twitter user however, we just have a widget here that auto-tweets his posts.
@Komodo – have a virtual fiver! I believe Clark generated it himself.
Jon – ethanks! I wrote a Basic program to generate it it on a Sinclair QL (remember them? Probably not) some years ago. It would probably take about 5 seconds for 40 iterations at full screen resolution nowadays. Then and there it took several hours…
Oh good, we’re back. The only place I know where anyone is actively showing concern about shipping people who have not been tried or found guilty off to another country where a brutal show trial, and/or endless isolation, awaits them.
How many people are the US holding in lifelong isolation? (I know of at least one person, after the so-called 9/11 trials; will look) Can one get a more refined form of barbarism?
Corgie;
“No evidence for that at all” Thanks for the edit. Transposed letters often happens.
Now to your point—what was it?
In 1983, Bill Bain asked Mitt Romney to launch Bain Capital, a private equity offshoot of the successful consulting firm Bain & Company. After some initial reluctance, Romney agreed. The new job came with a stipulation: Romney couldn’t raise money from any current clients, Bain said, because if the private equity venture failed, he didn’t want it taking the consulting firm down with it.
When Romney struggled to raise funds from other traditional sources, he and his partners started thinking outside the box. Bain executive Harry Strachan suggested that Romney meet with a group of Central American oligarchs who were looking for new investment vehicles as turmoil engulfed their region.
Romney was worried that the oligarchs might be tied to “illegal drug money, right-wing death squads, or left-wing terrorism,” Strachan later told a Boston Globe reporter, as quoted in the 2012 book “The Real Romney.” But, pressed for capital, Romney pushed his concerns aside and flew to Miami in mid-1984 to meet with the Salvadorans at a local bank.
It was a lucrative trip. The Central Americans provided roughly $9 million — 40 percent — of Bain Capital’s initial outside funding, the Los Angeles Times reported recently. And they became valued clients.
/..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/mitt-romney-death-squads-bain_n_1710133.html
ttya, my apologies. The stress of the situation during the outage led to a bout of paranoia for me; I put it down to dealing with too many anonymous entities. You didn’t help with that, either; how is anyone supposed to ask you to act as a consultant when you won’t even provide an e-mail address? Anyway, I stopped monitoring both incoming comments and moderators’ e-mails, as I just couldn’t handle it. I’ll look at your edit requests and see what I can do.
My sincere apology for how things went. I’m none too happy myself about the situation that the rest of the team left me in.
ttya, a description from my point of view may help you to understand. I did not know, among site organisers, the hosts and their staff, who could see the site and who couldn’t. I circulated the hosts file trick, but no one came back to say if it had worked for them or not.
When you arrived, you used the site’s IP address as your handle, which could be taken as something of a threat or a taunt. I looked in the mods’ interface, but you had apparently been quite careful to use a once-off IP address yourself, so I had no idea who you were.
I therefore started pasting your comments into e-mails to the hosts and the moderation team… but no replies arrived. I’d send out the e-mails and then go off for a bit to permit replies to arrive, rather than monitoring my Inbox. I requested that the host come to talk to you in person.
At some point, two parties that I will not name sorta vaguely suggested that I should delete your contributions. No one was specific about what should go and what could stay. Personally, I was convinced that it was all publicly available information; your contributions were educational and informative. I wrote back, defending your comments and requesting clarification. At this point, responsibility was dumped entirely upon myself with no advice whatever.
I had no good reason to delete your comments, just the vague fears of other team members who were more experienced than myself. So I rationalised. Such info may be public, I told myself, but hostile parties that may wist to interfere with Craig’s site may not have technical expertise themselves. They may find ttya’s information valuable in finding pressure points.
So I proceeded to delete informative comments pretty haphazardly.
ttya, this is not the whole story from my point of view. It was the weekend, and I was intoxicated and distracted. I feel thoroughly ashamed of my performance, and personally sorry that your work came to be deleted. On the other hand, you could have done a lot to reassure me by contacting me by e-mail, or possibly posting under a name you’ve used before. If it’s any consolation, I developed a migraine on Monday night from which I’m still recovering.
Glenn Greenwald again, telling it like it is.
Martha Raddatz and the faux objectivity of journalists
Establishment journalists are creatures of a highly ideological world and often cause ideology to masquerade as neutral fact
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/raddatz-debate-objectivity?cat=commentisfree&type=article
Re Raddatz on the Biden Ryan ‘debate’
A bleak view of things from America. No choice.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/12/america-on-the-cusp-of-fascism/
Clark,
Well I decided to give this exchange a rest, so I am only now seeing your explanations and taking them in. I appreciate your sincere apology, though it doesn’t seem you quite grasp the core sense I had of your responses leading me on and keeping me waiting hours for a very simple favour which would have helped identify the true state of the DNS record update.
Looks like even more misapprehensions thrown up calling for yet more reiterations. It would be nice to somehow reach a more peaceful resolution and recover some enthusiasm for posting and leave a less skewed record of the exchanges that transpired.
Now how to get there in few words and not so much time spent in attempting to bridge this large communication gap?
After all, I had only posted here with goodwill having diagnosed the DNS failure and responded to your question “What’s going on?” by indicating the point of failure in an appropriate technical way.
http://www.salon.com/2012/10/17/green_party_candidate_arrested_outside_debate/
Wednesday, Oct 17, 2012
Green Party candidate arrested outside debate
Jill Stein and her running mate were handcuffed to a metal chair in a police warehouse for eight hours
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein and her running mate Cheri Honkala were arrested Tuesday night attempting to enter the grounds of the Hofstra University presidential debate.
Stein and Honkala were met by a line of Nassau County police as they approached the debate grounds entrance with a group of supporters. “We are here to bring the courage of those excluded from our politics to this mock debate, this mockery of democracy,” Stein said in an impromptu press conference before her arrest.
Stein and Honkala attempted to enter the debate hall but were pushed back by police. They were eventually arrested for blocking traffic when the two sat down in the street outside the university.
According to a release from the Green Party, their presidential and vice-presidential candidates spent eight hours in police custody “handcuffed to a metal chair in a remote police warehouse on Long Island.” Honkala, a renowned anti-poverty advocate, called her incarceration, “extremely uncomfortable, but standard for what so many Americans face on a daily basis in our corrections system.”
The Green Party nominees will appear on 85 percent of ballots on election day and are polling at around 2 – 3 percent. Stein has earned the endorsement of Noam Chomsky and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges. However, the Commission on Presidential Debates stipulates that a candidate must garner at least 15 percent in national polls in order to participate in debate events like Tuesday night’s at Hofstra. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate complained earlier this year that the CPD is designed “to protect the interests of Republicans and Democrats.”
Watch video of Stein and Honkala’s arrest below
Greenwald : The lame rules for presidential debates: a perfect microcosm of US democracy
http://members5.boardhost.com/medialens/thread/1350516205.html
ttya! I monitored this thread for some days, looking for a reply from you, and eventually decided that no more comments from ttya would arrive, so I took a rest from this thread, too. So apologies that this reply is as late as your previous response was.
I should correct an inaccuracy in my explanation of 10 Oct, 8:41 pm. I didn’t actually delete your comments; I merely hid them by moving them to the moderation queue; I’d hoped that a consensus decision might be arrived at later. Susequently, however, I discovered that they’d been deleted from the queue. I don’t think I have access to them any more.
I’m very sorry that you felt “led on”; it wasn’t exactly my intention, though it was good to see a Hacker in action. And I thank you for your effort which was educational for me. My request for less terse clarifications was to ensure that I understood what you were telling me. I’ve been looking at the man pages for dig and whois. whois is a bit out of date, isn’t it? It looks like it needs to be linked to additional on-line databases for the newer top-level domains. Have I got that right?
I don’t know how familiar you are with moderation. I find it rather demanding, because there are many more contributors than moderators. The moderators’ “Comments” page helps by showing all incoming comments in one place, but once I’ve noticed a comment that may require attention, I still need to visit the appropriate thread in order to see it in context. In just the time taken to deal with one comment, the incoming stream may have moved on by many more.
Anyway, you may have noticed that being “a moderator” has thrown another hassle at me now. If not, you can find it here:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/10/a-real-treat-in-store/#comment-372135
………….
I agree. What would help to restore your enthusiasm? Post it here and I’ll circulate it among the team. But please remember that they might not agree to it, no matter what my own opinion is.
I still think you should e-mail me. I won’t pass on your e-mail address and I won’t drag you into blog administration. It would be a reliable method of bringing your communications to my attention more quickly.
Happy Hacking!
Clark,
thanks for responding. I think it is advisable not to start calling people Hackers, given the context of this blog and the general ignorance of the true meaning of the term, which has become confused with Crackers. Somewhat ironic, since those most to blame for the linguistic misuse are the true Hacks themselves, who share the same roots in Hacking away at the keyboard to write their stuff. Perhaps the News International scandal will come to similarly taint the term Hacks. 🙂
Myself, I’d not even say looking up dns records was worthy of the term “a Hacker in action”.
Another reason I’ve taken some time was I did indeed see you had your hands full; I hesitate in saying anything, and like many am still left guessing if it was simply a protracted exchange over a moderation refusal. Some clarity on such basics early on would have helped contain the insinuations.
My first concern would be to ensure that you have a good support team there when needed and that you are not headed for burn-out or worse. There seems to be a whole range of issues that may benefit from a meeting in person with Craig to discuss agreed practices and where to draw limits and to consider the effects, also on the less robust readers and posters.
Do comments close at the start or end of the stated day? (GMT?)
I’d better post now before I get interrupted again…
Clark, (ctd.)
well here am I not being dragged into admin 🙂
yes the whois unix cmd may need to be told where to look, like “-h host”, but often the commercial registrars don’t support it and force people to use non-standard web based lookups and have ads shoved in their face etc. Although there are some concerns with harvesting and privacy etc, not providing proper whois lookups is a poor show. Admins want the info in seconds in a standard form from the standard command.
Which reminds me, as I was asking, I was curious if the expathos.eu dates in whois showed it had expired some days or weeks before all the dns caches dropped it on the Sat.? That would explain it being sluggish. You’re very reluctant to even give the dates?
Please try to comprehend some of us are uneasy on personal privacy grounds with the extent of IP etc. logging and data mining these days by various parties and where it is heading, or indeed that you make no claim to delete your server logs in say 24h and keep them encrypted and the site under your total control and managed over ssh only. So we’d rather not have our posts conveniently linked to an email address, especially when this site has political overtones.
Apart from that, it is also simply a matter of setting personal limits to manage time and demands. My remarks about consulting were a comment on the standards I’d expect, not a solicitation. Using the IP no. just being clever.
Let us know when the moderation hassle is less pressing…
ttya, I saw your 10:08 pm comment, and began composing this, and then your 12:00 comment arrived; the order of my replies has got a bit, er, non-linear. You wrote:
Ah, but if we avoid using that term, how will it ever be reclaimed? It is possible to be too timid. Courage is contagious!
But it was not merely your digging, it was your attitude.
Sorry, please clarify. Guessing about what? The delay between my replies? And what is a “moderation refusal”?
Sorry, I’ve never examined the behaviour of the system closely enough to be able to tell you. But I’ve set this thread such that comments will not close until someone closes them.
I very much agree. Are you suggesting that you would attend? You do seem rather, er, isolationist, maybe even distant.
So the answer to my previous question would be “no”, then. Oh well.
Sorry. I wish all of these were different, but it is not my decision to make.
I retrieved the publicly available information shortly after you asked me to. I shall post the result I obtained in the next comment.
whois info for expathos.eu from the web based whois at http://www.eurid.eu
Name expathos
Status REGISTERED
Registered October 9, 2006
Expiry Date October 31, 2012
Last update October 6, 2012, 4:58 am
Registrant technical contacts
Name Richard Kastelein
Organisation Expathos
Language English
Address
Organisation Key-Systems GmbH
Website http://www.key-systems.net
Name servers
domain.idotz.net
expired.idotz.net
——————–
Sorry it’s so messy. HTML rendering strips out the spaces, I think.
Please tell me why me? You could have asked any one of many people to do this.
ttya, I wrote:
It seem inconceivable that you couldn’t obtain this information without me being the one to do it. That suggests that this was all a test of me, personally.
Clark,
thanks for that, you have done a fine job with the quoting. Please try not to get argumentative or closed minded with me. Last things first for now:
Firstly I thought I had explained a few times that it was awkward for me due to javascript and host blocking to get past the captcha, so as I was helping you diagnose why YOUR site was”down”, and to answer your question “What’s going on?” in an educational way, and at the time there were few others on the site and they would not have had the same self-interest as you, and it was really a pretty tiny request, I really still don’t get what all the fuss is about. Why are you so affronted? My antagonism had dissipated, but you are now stirring it up again.
Secondly, which I have reflected on and am next to write about, the whole exchange was framed from the very start by your initial response to me which strongly gave certain clear impressions about your role in the situation, which has since revealed a different picture. I was clearing a path to get to that.
To clear up for now one other point, which has nothing to do with our exchanges or delays, I was referring to the situation in another thread you referred to in the previous post thus:
“you may have noticed that being “a moderator” has thrown another hassle at me now.” (19 Oct, 12:41 pm)
By a “moderation refusal”, I meant a (probably justified) refusal to “publish” a posting, or more specifically a PM or email from the moderator to the poster stating this, perhaps with a reason. Clearer?
Clark,
please feel free to trim the above whois post down – what I’m looking at are the dates like this:
———–
Domain Name expathos
Status REGISTERED
Registered October 9, 2006
Expiry Date October 31, 2012
Last update October 6, 2012, 4:58 am
Name servers
domain.idotz.net
expired.idotz.net
———–
If that is Calif. time, is 5am on Oct 6 about when it went down when they changed the proper nameservers to these 2 dummy ones?
Hmmm … so what does it show now? Expiry anniversary on Oct 8, 2013 and Last Update on Oct 8, or what ??
ttya, here is what I have just retrieved from eurid.eu:
Whois Result
Domain
Name expathos
Status REGISTERED
Registered October 9, 2006
Expiry Date October 31, 2012
Last update October 8, 2012, 6:45 pm
Looking at that, only the “Last update” time has changed, and we get taken off the air again on spooky Halloween, presumably at midnight. On my previous visit to , it showed this:
Whois Result
Domain
Name expathos
Status REGISTERED
Registered October 9, 2006
Expiry Date October 31, 2012
Last update October 6, 2012, 4:58 am
So maybe the designers of the eurid.eu web interface took the Mayan calendar hype seriously, and designed the page so it couldn’t count beyond 2012.
ttya, this seems to confirm what our host told us, that he updated the domain registration on Saturday 6 Oct. It would seem that the update wasn’t implemented because it was the weekend. When they got around to it on Monday 8th, it got backdated to the date/time the host first contacted them.
However, I thought that someone established that Monday 8th was a public holiday.
The eurid.eu page didn’t say which time-zone the displayed times are relevant for.
+++++++++++++++
I’ve restored your comments, and I have resigned as a moderator.
Clark,
thanks kindly!
The “Last update October 8, 2012, 6:45 pm” would be when they restored the nameservers from the dummy ones to the real ones, presumably:
Name servers:
ns1.expathos.eu
ns2.expathos.eu
Given the timezones, that is something like Oct 9 2:45 am (+- 1h), which fits my memory of it being back up on Tues 9th UK time. So I agree that is a question about the holiday. It does look like the issues are with the work practices of idotz, or this key-systems company, which are now another layer – Gmbh looks like a German company.
However to me the question is why was it shut down early if the anniversary day was Oct 8/9, if the initial registration is anything to go by.
On the “Expiry Date October 31, 2012” –
Indeed, I concur with your conclusions about midnight on 31st Oct 2012 being a concern, so perhaps if someone perfers not to find out after the fact, they will bring this to the attention of a suitable admin at expathos to chase it up with idotz. (I get the joke, but what maters is not the web interface but the underlying whois record, and the records kept by idotz used to control that. Maybe it was a hand update and they forgot to change the Expiry when they fixed the nameservers.)
You conclude:
“I’ve restored your comments, and I have resigned as a moderator.”
I am baffled by the conjunction of those two statements. I take it they are merely for my information on two points.
As to my comments, I was simply wanting a peaceful resolution and one or
two ones restored that expressed my hopes to help make this site more robust.
I guess I’ll find more on another thread about your resignation. I did express my sincere concern, so was trying to be supportive as you seemed to be under a lot of pressure from runaway threads and a few difficult posters. I sensed that coming back at me even though I tried to be polite and patient; it is hard to convey tone and also deal with technical matters and maintain privacy. So I hope you have or will get to meet Craig in person, and that this works out for the best for you.
kind regards and take care!
Attention Jon, expathos admins,
See above – the expathos.eu DNS record may still need attention to avoid problems in 7 days from now on October 31, 2012.
I tried to post in the Outage thread but it has closed on me before the end of the day. Please reply here if you see this.
thanks.
Hi @ttya
Many thanks, I’ll drop them a line tomorrow.
Hi Jon,
As an aside, I don’t “get” this @person addressing – and I surmise you don’t “get” that ttya is a unix reference – for the last few decades we’ve always used it for @hostname , and certainly not for @devicename either. 🙂
See the details in the last few posts above. Kindly keep us posted with the outcome, such as the whois info for expathos.eu from the web based whois at http://www.eurid.eu .
I’ll check here occasionally. I hope Clark is fine and you now don’t get overloaded yourself.
Yes, I think I started the practice of using the at-symbol – since I often use lowercase for usernames, it seems an easily-understood way of differentiating between a word and a username. Twitter handles are often expressed this way. Wasn’t aware of the Unix origination of your name, no – one learns something new every day.
Will keep you informed. Much appreciate your kind words for Clark, yes he did get a bit overloaded, but it wasn’t your questions that did it!
I’ve emailed Expathos.
Hi Jon,
for clarity, I should have written “…always used it for user@hostname”. One finds it not only used for email, but for various commands like ftp, rlogin, ssh and rsync, and then also in URL’s when needed. So twitter’s use of it in the confines of their “messaging” website (not an internet protocol in itself) goes against longstanding convention, as well as ordinary English usage of “at”.
My Nym was referring to /dev/ttya which is often the first serial communications port.
Happy to hear it wasn’t my questions. How are matters getting on?
Looks like this thread still keeps closing every 3 days.
Clark wrote – “But I’ve set this thread such that comments will not close until someone closes them.”
ttya, hello again. Sorry I baffled you by conjunction of my two statements. You can see the incident that led to my resignation here:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2012/10/a-real-treat-in-store/#comment-372135
That left me in a difficult position. If I’d denied Zoologist’s account of our meeting, as Zoologist challenged me to, that would have amounted to impugning Zoologist’s honesty, the response to which would apparently have been the publication of our private e-mails in the comments section. Catch 22. They couldn’t have been left there; there are seventy two of them, some quite long and messily and repeatedly interspersed with replies to points made earlier. But of course deleting them would have opened me to accusations of hiding something. I could have published them on my web-space, and then what? Be accused of having altered them?
Jon communicated privately with Zoologist, apparently giving no weight to my version of events, and expressed disapproval of private communications with contributors (which seems self-contradictory). I have a number of friends I have made through this blog, so I didn’t know how to respond to that. My stress levels rose, my tolerance fell, criticism of me continued, and support for me remained low, so eventually I asked to be locked out of the blog software.
I’m a lot less stressed now, and not being a “moderator” saves me a lot of time and effort. Probably I’d outstayed my welcome in any case.
I’m pretty sure that I did set comments to stay open on this thread; maybe someone else changed it back again. I’m glad to see that the comments I restored have been permitted to remain.
TTYA, I am advised, is commonly used for “talk to you after”. Anyway, TTFN, ttya, and Happy Hacking.