Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Washington Post puts out online booklet on Texas flooding, many photos and videos and personal stories
Here is a special Washington Post “booklet” online about the
Houston floods, “Where Are We Supposed to Go?”, link.
It contains many videos, which include Rockport, TX, where
the Category 4 hurricane came ashore.
One family says they have lost everything, have to start
over.
There is going to be a lot of criticism of the way Houston
was overdeveloped on land that mostly flood plain.
OANN correspondent Trey Yingst has been reporting from Texas
on Twitter.
Wikipedia attribution link for p.d. picture by US Army Lt Zachary West.
Sunday, August 20, 2017
Atlantic, New Yorker examine unraveling of American social and political stability
Today’s “book” will be a collection of a few periodical
articles hitting the press shows Sunday.
First, for The Atlantic, Sept. 2017.
Most important is “How America Lost Its Mind” by Kurt
Andersen. Truth from science and logic was for the
robotic elites; human truth came from
the gut. That sounds to me like the
balanced personalities (Rosenfels-speak) won out – those attuned to reacting to
social needs around them than to what is their own heads. The “Age of Reason” weakened starting in the
60s. We saw this with doubts about
civilized living and modernity from the terrorists. Eventually we got a huckster like Donald
Trump who could win other people under his wing. Young men find that the modern world offers
them little, so they get picked off.
Then why are a number of talented young men that I know in the arts and
sciences, very much into their own worlds, still so sociable? Alan Truing, remember, with his Asperger
nature and outside the normal world of social interaction, still had enough
charisma to use his brains to save us from the Nazis.
Also Peter Beinart leads off with “The Rise of the Violent Left” with his piece on Antifa on p. 13, where he emphasized the supposed
anarchy of the group as playing into the hands of authoritarians. Look at how the “Unite the Right” event in
Charlottesville goaded them to fight, into tragedy. Antifa believes everyone who doesn’t join
them against “systematic oppression” is an enemy.
The New Yorker, on Aug. 21,asks “Out of Action: Do ProtestsWork?” (p. 70) The general answer might be, well, no. Heller manages to review Mark Lilla and “The
Once and Future Liberal” (Harper) who was on CNN this morning. I’ll leave the long piece on Wikileaks and
Julian Assange for another time.
But the previous issue by Robin Wright (Aug 14) had asked “Is America Headed to a New Kind of Civil War?” which she discussed this morning on Reliable
Sources on Jake Tapper’s CNN. There are
estimates of a 35% chance of major breakdowns of law and order in the next few
years, but we already saw that with Sandtown in Baltimore, and with Ferguson.
Friday, August 11, 2017
Siemens publishes e-book on cyberattacks to power stations in Washington Post
Siemens Energy (from Germany) has authored a little e-book that
demonstrates how cyber attacker can shut down power stations. The Washington Post has published the e-book
pdf here. Call it “Power Grid Systems
Shutdown”.
This pamphlet would fit well into Ted Koppel’s 2015 book “Lights
Out”.
The potential capacity of a hostile rogue state to hack into
a corporate utility internal network, much of it not connected to the Internet,
is shocking.
Hackers (insiders) use a device called a “PlugBot”.
Donald Trump has said “No computer is safe.”
Saturday, August 05, 2017
Interesting forum on self-publishing at 2017 Outwrite LGBT Book Festival in Washington DC
Today I visited the 2017 Outwrite LGBT Book Festival in the
DC Center office space and surrounding atrium at 14th and U Streets
in Washington DC.
This year I did not have my own table; I’ll get into this elsewhere.
The most interesting part of the visit was a presentation in
DC Center’s largest room (on 14th Street ground level) from LGBT
book publishers and literary agents.
There was a discussion of what an author goes through if
he/she wants to control the process. It’s
usually necessary to hire a copyeditor and a typesetter (who is often the
same). It’s necessary to find a book
manufacturer, and prices can vary a lot (many companies exist in the Shenandoah
Valley and down in the North Carolina Piedmont). It seems that Milo Yianopoulos has controlled
the production of his book “Dangerous” after Simon and Schuster dropped him
after a controversy.
There was discussion of “guerrilla marketing”, and of the
tendency recently for trade publishers not to offer advances, which typically
have to be recovered from book sales.
There was mention of the use of pseudonyms and pen names,
and that in a real world some authors really need to keep their identities
secret, usually for reasons other than just being LGBT, like workplace conflicts or possible
security concerns for themselves or others around them. This is rather alarming.
There was discussion of “sea turtle authors”, often
introverts, who do not like to be pressed to sell aggressively, and are
perfectly content to let their “eggs” lie dormant.
I asked about print-on-demand publishers, like Author
Solutions. The group did not think well
of this business model, and referred to it as a “shadow industry” They felt money should go to authors
directly,, but that only works if the author owns the publishing entity. I did refer to the fact that POD companies
have been pressing authors harder to buy copies of books and build their own
stores and credit card operations, rather than depend on Amazon and Barnes and
Noble.
I did mention the SESPA bill from the Senate and the implicit threat to web speech, including eventually author websites.
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