This  covers most of it: Soleimani Killing Makes no Difference; Politics Muddys; Remember Pearl Harbor.

If an individual embodies an ideology, a system, or a non-transferable web of control, then assassination, death, or removal from power can potentially change the course of history.  Examples:

• Hitler is preeminent in  cult of personality,  the then-extant oath of personal loyalty to the “fuhrer”, nontransferably embodied in a unique individual.
• Stalin, who ranks close behind, survived by devouring his subordinates; many think he was assassinated by Beria.
• Hirohito, embodiment of the divine, whose position in postwar Japan was preserved by MacArthur to facilitate governance.
• Countless cult leaders, scaling in size from Charles Manson to David Koresh to Jim Jones to Father Charles Coughlin.
• Osama bin Laden is a special case. His liquidation was effective, for particular reasons you may ponder.

Cases that made little or no difference:

• Qasem Soleimani.
• F.D.R., whose death occurred late in the war, long  after isolationism restrained U.S. commitment.
• J.F.K., disputed by those who argue he would have withdrawn  U.S. forces from Vietnam.
• Martin Luther King, whose martyrdom could not halt the tide of civil rights.
• Abraham Lincoln; who many polls identify as the most widely admired person in the world.

Various megachurch preachers straddle the line.  Some terrorist leaders are irreplaceable, while others are not. An attempt to distill a simple rule can be frustrating. Cults of personality are simple. Other cases are more complex. In some societies or groupings, it is possible for the image of a public figure to be broadly delegated, along with principles and causes. In other societies, the mission or cause is  is inextricably embodied in the living individual. Or the image could be a role, interchangeably filled by many aspiring actors. See Baghdadi Dead; the Role Looking for an Actor.

Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas are not characterized by cults of personality or acting jobs. Broad delegation is fostered, which implies that assassinations cannot cause  functional change.

It pays to know the difference, if you can figure it out.

(CNN) Who was behind the sabotage of France’s railway network? Here’s what we know.

Absent  concrete clues, there is a persuasive argument for Russian responsibility:

• Known Russian intent to disrupt the Olympics. See (PBS) French authorities detain Russian man accused of plotting to ‘destabilize’ Olympics.
• Deniability serves Russian goals, failing to provide the adversary with a logical platform for escalation or retaliation.
• The modus serves the  known Russian tactic of inducement of societal malaise.
• Synchronization over great distance.
• Freedom to execute at a time of maximum impact. Less sophisticated  entities lack undetectable loitering capability.
• Little or no forensic evidence.
• Conformity with other notable successes in industrial sabotage.

Russia’s covert operations in Western Europe have two distinct tracks:

• Low budget, amateurish, espionage.
• High budget, professional industrial sabotage.

The rail attacks exemplify Russian covert expertise.

(CNN) Boeing, NASA may have found ‘root cause’ of Starliner spacecraft’s issues, but astronauts are still in limbo. Quoting,

“There is a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner,” Stich said after noting that NASA does have contingency options if Starliner is not approved to bring the astronauts home.

“We need to get through the process,” he added. “We have another critical Starliner mission management team to review all the thruster data that we just talked about.”

“Of course, I’m very confident we have a good vehicle to bring the crew back with,” Nappi said.

My bullshit detector went off.  The movie Airplane 2 is a comedic take on the first flight of a flawed lunar passenger shuttle. See:

Airplane 2: The Sequel (5/10) Movie CLIP – Don’t Panic (1982) HD

The line between comedy and tragedy is razor thin.

(CNN) Global tech outage disrupts airlines, banks, hospitals, 911 services.

Frank Sprague,  an early developer and manufacturer of electrical equipment has been credited with the dead man’s switch, a safety device for electric trolley cars, rail locomotives , elevators, and buses. The operator is required to keep his foot on a pedal or hand on a grip.  If the operator is incapacitated or dies, his foot or grip relaxes, which causes the vehicle to automatically stop. Analogous hardware would have prevented global meltdown.

Crowdstrike undoubtedly has a software analog of the above, detecting loss of functionality.  If the analog runs on the same machine it protects, it cannot report all kinds of failure. Sometimes the murder victim manages to leave a note;  usually not. So this massive update kept running without informing Crowdstrike it was killing machines.

There used to be a simple way of checking whether a remote machine was still alive. The ping network utility causes a dialog with a remote machine a little like the  dialog  of harmoniums in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan:

Query; “Here I am, Here I am, Here I am.”

Response: “Yes you are, Yes you are, Yes you are.”

Now days, with computers protectively hidden behind routers with complex routing rules, it is not advisable to expose to pinging from outside connections. Given the large size of most Crowdstrike clients, it is entirely feasible for an organization to have a dedicated hardware box that reports to Crowdstrike if their automatically pushed update is causing mass death.

The absence of dedicated dead-man hardware  is technological hubris.

The perimeter of the Butler, PA venue was incorrectly defined, so it was not properly secured.  The perimeter should have been defined by a rigid, yet practical set of rules, which were disarmed by erroneous intuition of low risk. What is the root of this mistake?

The root of the error is as old the Renaissance, the rebirth of intellectual freedom after the  thousand years of  the religious hegemony of the Dark Ages. The Modern Era was born in the cities, which fermented social philosophies of radical social change. Even  movements with substantial rural presence  incubated first in the cities. The reasons:

• Anonymity, living next to neighbors with completely impersonal relationships, is viable. This allows nonconformity with  issues that, as cores to social order, carry the potential  of violence.
• Social networks are not reliant on blood and kin.
• Speed of communication was formerly critical. The revolutions of 1848 coincided with the development of high speed printing presses.

Yet even after 600 years of modernity,   social patterns of the past, of the “village”, persist in rural America, in the form of the small town:

• Anonymity is impossible, which induces conformity.
• In-person social networks continue to function, even in the acid bath of social media.
• Conservatism dominates. Social change is strictly an import. Notables do not find their personal fire in the cradle of the small town.  Intellectual ignition occurs during some period  of urban relocation.

Butler is a small town, the American approximation of a village. It may not be the place where everybody knows everybody, but it tends in that direction. With village culture comes the definition of the outsider, and the misplaced confidence that one would be recognized if he showed up. When Thomas Matthew Crooks showed up, he was similar enough to disarm the instincts of law enforcement. Had he not been so similar, he might have been stopped for any number of pretexts, most notably, hanging around the magnetometers.

The would-be assassin has inspired astonishment for:

• The current lack of discovery of even traces of social media disclosure.
• The absence of prior acting out.
• The seeming total encapsulation of means and motive in a single individual.
• The ability to  circumvent the innate defenses of village culture and the formal competences of the U.S. Secret Service.

As with Lee Harvey Oswald, this is perfect brew for conspiracy theories. The brew  is weak; Thomas Matthew Crooks was well within the variability of nature and nurture.

The man on the roof,  Thomas Matthew Crooks, will, in innumerable references, be labeled a coward. This misnomer, associating evil with cowardice, detours  from consequences that follow by a brutal but impeccable logic. The man on the roof was evil, stupid, and brave.

The extreme right will also label the man on the roof a coward. But it will start an itch in some of their inferior minds. The man on the roof did not merely talk the talk, if, indeed, he talked at all. He walked the walk. This event will jar some small but significant statistical fraction of the extreme right from the obsessive comfort of their hates, to reciprocal acts that prove that they, too, can walk the walk.

We were introduced to this misnomer, “coward”, on 9/11, when terrorists first hurt us beyond comprehension. Terrorists and assassins willing to die for their evil beliefs are not cowards. They inspire loathing beyond words. Exceptions may be made for GRU/KGB poisoners.

Courtesy of the man on the roof, the risk of political violence is now enhanced. I am at a loss for an appropriate label. If you need a description that elevates the rest of us by comparison,  try animal.

(CNN) Earth’s core has slowed so much it’s moving backward, scientists confirm. Here’s what it could mean. The headline is false. The core is not moving backwards.

See (CNN) Earth’s inner core may have stopped turning and could go into reverse, study suggests. Quoting,

This is baloney. The cited study, Multidecadal variation of the Earth’s inner-core rotation, claims no such thing. Quoting from the abstract,

Differential rotation of Earth’s inner core relative to the mantle is thought to occur under the effects of the geodynamo on core dynamics and gravitational core–mantle coupling.

The word in red is omitted. CNN, you could have used “relative.”

The difference in the speeds of rotation of the inner  core and the mantle, regardless of direction, is about that of a near-frozen inchworm. If you were looking at it, you would see nothing.

How much must be lost in translation?

The body of the new article contains the error. Quoting,

This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves — its rotation speed and direction — has been at the center of a decades-long debate.

The direction of rotation has never changed or been the subject of inquiry, only the speed relative to the mantle. The difference is very small, a few hundred yards per year at the core/mantle boundary, which the article fails to mention. Contradicting itself, the article also  contains a correct statement:

“Differential rotation of the inner core was proposed as a phenomenon in the 1970s and ’80s, but it wasn’t until the ‘90s that seismological evidence was published,” said Dr. Lauren Waszek, a senior lecturer of physical sciences at James Cook University in Australia.

Differential  is key. Do the article authors understand how key it is?

This reporting, with the repetitive propagation of scientific falsity, stands in stark contrast to  CNN’s impeccable politics.  Perhaps it echoes the conceit of Socrates, who, as one of the first humanists, claimed he  could learn every thing of  importance from “the man in the city.”

The world inhabited by Socrates was nontechnical, powered by slaves, animals, and war. Our world is highly technical. Errors such as the above are not as harmless as they seem. In the minds of the public,  such errors corrode the scientific concept of objective truth.

We last paid the price with COVID.