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The Skinner Box With Icons

April 24, 2025 2 Comments

I am not a deep thinker. I’m more of a deep drinker. My education is scattershot. I often boil concepts down to thumbnail sketches and run with them. Take childhood development. Yeah. Take my childhood development, please, as Rodney used to say.

Ugh. Forget about me. I meant normal people. I’ve boiled down the process of raising anklebiters to two interesting takes on the subject: Jean Piaget and B.F. Skinner. They’re more or less opposite poles on the child-rearing compass.

Both guys had some complicated ideas behind their snot-wiping advice. I’m a simpleton, so I’ll oversimplify it so even I can understand it: Piaget thought children developed mostly internally, if you encouraged them a little, and Skinner thought they developed mostly from external factors, like whacks on the knuckles or candy, depending on what kind of mischief they were getting up to.

I ate lunch with Skinner way back when. He asked me altogether too many questions about how I ended up the way I was. I figured eventually he was going to stuff me in a box and feed me corn kernels only if I pressed the correct button, so I stopped eating lunch at his house pretty quick.

I’m sort of interested in Piaget’s thang, though. His ideas about child development seem to align with my own ill-considered opinions here and there. His ideas about how very small children proceed through a series of stages seems pretty believable. These preliminary stages are cognitive egocentrism, anthropomorphism, finalism, and animism. These stages happen between the ages of 2 and 7, more or less. They’re called the pre-operational phase. You’re not yet ready to begin thinking concretely and logically until you go through these steps.

1. Cognitive Egocentrism

In Piaget’s theory, egocentrism refers to the inability of young children to see things from perspectives other than their own. This means they believe that everyone sees the world exactly as they do.

It highlights that young children can’t fully grasp that others have their own thoughts, perspectives, or knowledge.

2. Anthropomorphism

Anthropomorphism is when children attribute human characteristics or emotions to non-human things (animals, objects, or even forces of nature).

Piaget saw this as a way for children to make sense of the world. Since they can’t fully differentiate between human and non-human behaviors at this stage, they project human traits onto everything around them.

3. Finalism

Finalism refers to the child’s belief in the idea that things happen for a purpose or that everything has an ultimate end or goal, even if it might not make logical sense.

Children in the preoperational stage often struggle to understand cause and effect in the logical, scientific way adults do. They tend to think more in terms of intentions or purposes behind events, even if those events don’t have clear goals.

4. Animism

Animism is the belief that inanimate objects or natural phenomena have a life-like quality, or even a soul.

Animism reflects a developmental stage where children can’t fully separate the properties of living things from non-living things. It’s another sign of their egocentrism and their tendency to humanize the world around them.

I got to thinking about all this because I’ve been watching women clutching smartphones like they were heart-lung machines, while acting like preadolescents, and I’m trying to make sense of their behavior. I see it out and about in my own life, but I also went down one of those YorubaTube ratholes that had loads of women being arrested and thrown out of airports and wrecking fast food restaurants and similar hijinks.

I didn’t associate these behaviors with Piaget right away, but the chronically addicted social-media-loving smartphone clutchers all seemed to have the same worldview to me: solipsism, anthropomorphism, scapegoating, and paganism. I realized I was just renaming Piaget’s four stages of preadolescent development. I had to go back and look it up, and torture it a bit (thanks, B.F.!) to get it to fit, but it’s pretty close.

You have to remember that for a toddler dealing with the world using Cognitive Egocentrism, the little bastard is just doing the best they can. They’re not yet capable of moving on to more nuanced views of the world and the people in it. Solipsism is an adult-ish version of this worldview. You’re technically capable of understanding other people’s ideas and motivations, you just don’t give a shiny shite about anyone but yourself.

Anthropomorphism is plenty easy to spot. I’m regularly informed that so-and-so’s daughter has acquired a “grand-dog.” This animal was “adopted,” of course. And “rescued,” natch. Grandma now buys it Christmas presents and bakes birthday cakes for it, and babysits it. “My computer totally hates me” is a different but easily recognizable signpost on the anthropomorphic highway. And by the way, you should totally argue with that bitch in the GPS while you’re zooming down the anthropomorphic highway.

Scapegoating is pretty close to Finalism. It’s a question of degree, I guess. Children wonder what motive force is behind everything, because they don’t know how the world works. Adults assumes there’s a motive force behind everything, and they know damn well who it is. He’s in their social media feed with a Hitler mustache photoshopped in.

Animism is just paganism without portfolio. By the way, did you buy an Earth Day present for your grand-dog?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the average American woman has a smartphone slapped into their hand more or less exactly when they’re reaching the end of their pre-operational phase. The phone, and all the stuff it shotguns into her synapses, ensures that she never progresses any further. The development of iPhone Barbie is seven years of Piaget followed by the rest of their life subjected to B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning, courtesy of Steve Jobs’ festering corpse.

Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which behavior is shaped by its consequences. Developed by B.F. Skinner, it focuses on how actions are influenced by rewards (reinforcements) or punishments.

Reinforcement increases the likelihood of a behavior happening again. It can be:

Positive reinforcement: Adding something pleasant (like giving a treat).

Negative reinforcement: Removing something unpleasant (like turning off a loud noise).

Punishment decreases the likelihood of a behavior happening again. It can be:

Positive punishment: Adding something unpleasant (like giving extra chores).

Negative punishment: Taking away something pleasant (like taking away screen time).

In operant conditioning, behaviors are learned through the consequences they produce, and these consequences can either strengthen or weaken the behavior over time. It’s used widely in both animal training and human behavior modification.

The woman in the video is completely calm, in an unreasonable sort of way, until around the 9:00 minute mark. She’s going to jail over nothing, but the only thing that can get a rise out of her is being separated from her phone. It’s her Precious. It tells her everything she needs to know, succors her, protects her, and assures her she’s going to get a discount, not arrested. There’s even a name for this phenomenon now: nomophobia.

Nomophobia (short for “no mobile phobia”) is a word for the fear of, or anxiety caused by, not having a working mobile phone. It has been considered a symptom or syndrome of problematic digital media use…

I’d explore the effects of male smartphone use, but it’s a waste of time. Men don’t progress past being 7 years old anyway, no matter what they’re clutching.

So Many Tuesdays. So Little Trash

April 22, 2025 5 Comments

I don’t make anything anymore, except maybe trouble.

I used to build things and make things and cobble things together. This had a tendency to produce leftovers. Trash. While I used to squeeze every bit of use out of everything, and burn whatever was left over from the leftovers for heat, it was inevitable that we produced some trash.

Living in an apartment doesn’t generate trash like that. Of course we’re different from our neighbors. They seem to get everything delivered to them in a cardboard box, including food, and food for their dogs. We’ve never had an Amazon lifestyle, and we’re not going to start now.

I once had over 1,000 square feet of floor space dedicated to table saws and wood racks and lathes and sanders and chop saws and shapers and mortising machines and who knows how many hand tools. There was another 600 feet square of random storage underneath it. I bet I owned 160 different bevel squares, bought one after another after a weekly hour-long session of where is the bevel square. I now have a tool set that fits in a cardboard shoebox on the shelf in the closet.

I’m an environmentalist’s dream. I waste nothing, because I make nothing.

So now I’m reduced to taking out a bag of pixels from my browser bookmarks to the WordPress landfill every week. It’s ain’t much, and I’m not sure I’d call it honest work. But it sure is something.

The complex origin story of domestic cats: Research points to Tunisia

Two new large-scale investigations, one led by the University of Rome Tor Vergata in collaboration with 42 institutions and another led by the University of Exeter with contributors from 37 institutions, reveal a more complex history than previously imagined. Both point to Tunisia as the likely origin of the domestic cat.

Sippican’s research shows that cats are like strippers. They’ll display their belly to you, but I wouldn’t rub it if I were you.

Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training

While athletes endanger their careers and well-being in attempts to gain small benefits with illicit or inconvenient practices, a legal, nonprescription alternative has been largely ignored by athletes, coaches and exercise physiologists alike. Cigarette smoking has been shown to increase serum hemoglobin and hematocrit levels, increase lung volume and stimulate weight loss — characteristics all known to enhance performance in endurance sports.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please — Twain

Half of Teens Now Say Social Media Hurts Their Generation

Social media connects teens but may break their spirit. A new Pew Research survey reveals 48% of U.S. teens believe social media harms their generation – a sharp rise from 32% in 2022

Half says it hurts, the other half refused to look up from their phones to answer the question.

Car found parked in hangar of sunken WWII ship, baffling historians.

The baffling discovery was made Saturday, April 19, when NOAA Ocean Exploration sent a remotely operated camera inside the massive wreck, about 1,000 miles northwest of Honolulu. Yorktown was an 809-foot-long aircraft carrier, known to host about 2,200 personnel, 90 aircraft … and apparently, one car.

Unusual things in the hold are only baffling if you never watched Kelly’s Heroes.

The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death

“These little animals, which had appeared to be completely dried and lifeless, were restored to motion upon the addition of water, as if they had never suffered any harm,” van Leeuwenhoek wrote. Microbiologists would later find that some species of rotifers are able to reanimate after up to nine years of desiccation.

When I first read the headline, I thought they might be referring to married men.

Simultaneous alcohol, cannabis use may fuel more drinking

A recent study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine found that people may perceive fewer negative effects of alcohol if they are also using cannabis at the same time, potentially leading to alcohol use disorder, alcohol-related harms and drunk driving.

I’ll consider this study as incomplete until they add the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data.

Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’

The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that he was suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers. That tool, originally called Interview Coder, is now part of their San Francisco-based startup Cluely. It offers its users the chance to “cheat” on things like exams, sales calls, and job interviews thanks to a hidden in-browser window that can’t be viewed by the interviewer or test giver.

If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying — Eddie Guerrero

No needles needed: Wearable glucose monitors could reveal early diabetes warning signs missed by blood tests

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have identified a simple, noninvasive method for assessing blood glucose regulation—an essential factor in diabetes risk. Their approach, based on continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data, could improve early detection and risk assessment for diabetes without relying on blood samples and expensive or complex procedures.

Once again, I’ll wait until they integrate the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data

The Rise of Scotland Yard in Victorian England

As Scotland Yard became a larger, organized force, they made consistent innovations in the work of policing. Scientific and forensic attempts made elsewhere were taken, used, and refined. The study of ballistics, of using blood hounds to track and identify evidence (and criminals!), blood spatter and blood stain analysis, as well as toxicology. The modern Victorian home was a quagmire of poison waiting for its next victim, from the arsenic used in fashionable wallpaper and clothing to the white lead powder contained in cosmetics, and police had to discern accidental poisoning from intentional poisoning. This led to advances in understanding poisons and toxins.

I’m not sure if Scotland Yard adumbrated, or simply perfected the cry, “Stop! Or I shall yell Stop! again!”

The 21-Day Myth

In 1960, Dr. Maxwell Maltz published his bestseller book “Psycho-Cybernetics” in which he defines happiness as a habit and claims that “it usually requires a minimum of about 21 days” to form a new habit.

Once again, I’ll have to wait until the author integrates the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, and Cool Ranch Doritos to their data

Well, that’s it for this week’s cleanup. Feel free to try the simultaneous use of alcohol, cannabis, Cool Ranch Doritos, and the commenting box down below.

The High-Risk, High-Reward Milieu

April 19, 2025 7 Comments

This video might be interesting to any number of people from most any walk of like. It’s like catnip to anyone who ever constructed a commercial building. I think it’s the greatest example of construction, ever. You can build things taller, or wider, or goofier (I’m looking at you, Gehry), or more expensive, or more elaborate, but you can’t ever surpass what was accomplished by so few men in so short a time, resulting in a more iconic building. The Empire State Building in New York City is the greatest office building in the world, and has been since the day it opened.

The lady out in the harbor with the lantern jaw, wearing a bathrobe, holding an ice cream cone, and beckoning every country on Earth to use America as their recycling bin has nothing on the Empire State Building. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the population think the Empire State is named after the building, not the other way around. The only structure as iconic as the Empire State Building might be the Eiffel Tower, and that’s nothing but a radio antenna, when you really look at it. Big deal.

The Empire State was completed during the Depression. They didn’t have trouble finding people willing to take risks to earn a living just then. So you’d be forgiven if you assumed that they’d look at workers as kind of expendable. You assumed wrong, however. Up to 3,500 people worked on the building at any one time. Four people died during construction. That’s 3,500 people working two shifts, day and night, to complete the tallest building in the world in one year and 45 days. Four deaths.

Let’s compare that to the World Trade Center Project in 2001. One World Trade Center, which is as ugly as a home-made suit, took 8 years to build. It had somewhere between 4,000 to 5,000 workers, and depending on who you ask, had 5 worker deaths. If you do the math, the fatality rate per worker is essentially identical to the Empire State Building. Other big buildings like the Burj Khalifa and the Shanghai tower claim lower fatality rates, but I don’t trust stats about worker safety from closed societies, thank you very much.

So you can see the guys in the video working on the Empire, hanging all over it like King Kong would a few years later. They didn’t fall off much. They didn’t have OSHA, or any number of other safety foofaraws that are in place today. So how did they manage to stay in one piece while working four times as hard as people would in the future?

It’s simple, really. They were smarter than people are now. Not the kind of smarter that’s in vogue nowadays. None of them was plucked from any Ivy League admission offices. They were predominately Irish and Italian immigrants, at least from what I’ve read. They had nerve. They had skills. Mad skills, by the look of it. They had experience building things like railroads, mining ore, or erecting steelwork, even if it was a little closer to mother earth. Many were craftsmen, with prodigious hand skills developed by long experience. They were used to working around heavy machinery and keeping their fingers out of the gears.

By comparison, modern workers are skilled at avoiding risk, instead of managing it. They’re more conversant with technology-driven tasks. They crave automation, standardized working conditions, and lunchtime. They’re not really skilled in navigating dangerous situations in the way their predecessors were. But they died at the same rate, because building great big things is inherently dangerous, and having little experience with true danger make them vulnerable to brain farts, as we used to call them.

The Empire State Building was constructed in a truly high-risk, high-reward milieu. Men with a high tolerance for risk, or whose desperation for work overrode their tolerances, needed mental toughness, and relied on their experience in risky environments to stay safe. Modern workers rely on a rulebook that only the shop steward has read. The investors, who didn’t stick one spud into a rivet hole, were also working in a high-risk, high-reward mode. The building didn’t start to turn a profit until the 1950s.

We could use a few guys like the men who financed and built the Empire State Building just now. God knows where we’re going to find them.

Is Niagara (1953) a Good Movie? Beats Me

April 18, 2025 9 Comments

We have a very large collection of movies, many of them old. The movie business isn’t ancient. It’s possible to be fairly conversant with its entire history if you have a big enough hard drive, and skip Fletch movies and similar shallow puddles of pixels. I used to think that the average person must have seen every movie and TV show ever made, simply based on the amount of time they spent going to the movies, watching television, cable TV, VHS, DVDs, and then streaming stuff. But I learned later that most people just watch the same things over and over again. We’re just as likely to re-watch things as the next person, I guess. We just re-watch different things, and fewer. Our relatives have a tradition to watch Christmas Vacation every year, ye gods. We watch It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve long since come to terms with the fact that for many people, anything older than about 1990 might as well be silent movies.

But we like the older stuff. It’s not vegetables we choke down because they’re healthy. They’re entertaining, and often illuminating. They understood the concept of spectacle better than the CGI mavens do now. Part of the appeal of old movies is survivor bias. We have lots of good movies from the 1950s, but I’m sure there were just as many bad ones made as good back then. It’s just that no one bothered to put the dreck out on VHS or DVD or load it up for streaming. Stuff disappears. Nothing you see on Tubi will still be around 50 years from now.

An exception is when dreck becomes exalted simply because it’s widely available. Do I really like the Three Stooges, or do I like them because they were the only thing on TV when I got home from grammar school? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. I think way too many people who are in charge of making entertainment these days watched Kimba the White Lion instead of Moe, Larry, and Curly while eating their Handi-Snacks. They could use a few  good blows to the head.

Many movies are interesting enough to watch multiple times, with an appropriate interregnum. I’ve noticed that anything that has Netflix, or Apple, or the Amazon logo in the opening credits is never worth a second look. Most don’t deserve even a first look. Their descriptions alone are generally enough to elicit a hard pass. What, exactly, qualifies a streaming service, or company that buys telephones from the Chinese, or an online dollar store, to make movies? It’s especially silly for streaming services. In 1950, Louis B. Mayer didn’t hire projectionists and ticket booth girls to direct movies, and for good reason.

In the re-run department, we’ve watched Niagara (1953) multiple times over the years. I’m not sure why, exactly, but we have.

It’s a straight noir plot, if a little muddled. Scheming temptress wants to throw over her slightly shellshocked hubby for a hubba-hubba guy with two-tone shoes. Everything except hilarity ensues. It breaks the cardinal rule of noir without losing anything in the bargain. It’s in Technicolor. I don’t know why more directors didn’t try to adapt noir plots to Technicolor. The three-strip process had a way of making colors look way more lurid than any black and white movie ever accomplished in the yeah, see genre. And there can’t possibly be anything more lurid than a closeup of Marilyn Monroe in Technicolor after Ben Nye got done with his brush and roller work.

Niagara was the first movie that gave Monroe top billing, and from watching the trailer, you can tell the producers figured Marilyn’s butt on the screen would put butts in the seats. They weren’t wrong. Niagara was a money-maker when it was released, even though reviews of the film were somewhat mixed. Jean Peters, who was once Miss Ohio, and married to Howard Hughes, was cast as the plain Jane wife of about the goofiest character ever set to celluloid, played by Max Showalter. Max exuded tons of sexuality, don’t get me wrong, but not the kind of sexuality that was going to do Jean Peters any good. So how do you make Jean Peters look average-y? You slam the battleship Monroe into her side.

I gather that the generations that followed my parents and mine don’t “get” Marilyn Monroe in quite the same way. She entered the pantheon of weird notoriety that Fat Elvis and Michael Jackson and Santa Claus reside in. Andy Warhol’s paean to her cemented that status way back in 1962, with the Marilyn Diptych:

It’s not an accident that Warhol’s literally reverential treatment of Monroe was cribbed from a publicity still from Niagara:

That look, there. Sleepy eyes, a smile that could mean anything. She perfected it. Her face is a circus poster pasted on a brick wall. God only knows what goes on in the building itself. But it’s a brick shithouse, that’s for sure.

It’s beyond my ability to explain the appeal of Marilyn Monroe. Whatever recipe she’s using was more closely held than Colonel Sanders ever managed. I think Lawrence Oliver, who hired her to star in The Prince and the Showgirl, and maybe wished he hadn’t, is the only person who truly understood what was going on. And even he, completely aware of how acting works, how actors behave, how notoriety works, and constantly surrounded by the most attractive female humans in the world, admits he was flummoxed by her.

Some movies like Niagara make excellent cultural artifacts. By watching them, and trying to immerse yourself in the time and place they sprang from, you can understand the vibe that produced them. Niagara is modestly entertaining as a story. It’s got Niagara Falls for a backdrop, which is monumental. It’s fun to watch. And Marilyn Monroe is in it. I have no idea why that matters. But it does.

Tuesday. Let’s Take Out the Trash, Pixel Style

April 15, 2025 2 Comments

Well, the bookmarks are overflowing again. I really did intend to read them. I guess. Whatever. I’ve been reading Huckleberry Finn in Spanish, and it’s giving me an aneurysm, so I’ve fallen behind, or lost interest, or something. Pike County accents don’t seem to translate well into castellano, never mind what Jim adds to the mix. I feel like I’m tilting at windmills. Oops, that’s the other book I’m reading. I read it fifty years ago, but I can’t recite it anymore, so I thought I’d brush up. Funny, the Don doesn’t seem the least bit unhinged this time around. Maybe it’s me. On to the bookmarks!

Researchers recently sequenced the genomes of two naturally mummified women found in Libya

Their analyses revealed the green Sahara individuals likely branched off from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans roughly 50,000 years ago. Then, somehow, they remained genetically isolated for tens of thousands of years—a revelation that still perplexes researchers.

I thought it was in very bad taste for the article to lead off with a picture of Nancy Pelosi.

Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

“Acquiring these competitive threats has enabled Facebook to sustain its dominance—to the detriment of competition and users—not by competing on the merits, but by avoiding competition,” the FTC wrote in a filing.

Duh. I can solve this problem easily. It is hereby illegal for one corporation to buy another corporation. See? Now you can close the antitrust division, and save some dough.

Intel sells 51% of Altera to Silver Lake; CEO Rivera replaced

Specifically, Intel is selling 51% of Altera for roughly $4.46 billion in a deal that values the full company at around $8.75 billion, a far cry from the $16.7 billion Intel paid for Altera 10 years ago in what remains the largest acquisition in the history of the company. Also, Altera is replacing Sandra Rivera, who had guided the company as CEO through its lengthy process of transforming from Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group into a newly-independent company.

It seems to me that the word “guided” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last sentence. Maybe she can go start a business with Ginni Rometty and Marissa Mayer.

N. Korean smartphones add screenshot function with notable exceptions

Previously, North Korean smartphones lacked screenshot capabilities. Authorities likely blocked this function to prevent information from being shared with or leaked to the outside world. However, as smartphone usage has grown in North Korea, screenshot functionality appears to have been added to improve user experience.

We’re reading a news item about North Korean smartphones. These are truly the End Times.

What Is the Song of Solomon About?

Many readers believe Solomon wrote the book, though it seems more likely that it is a compilation of poems that a woman and her man had written for each other. The female voice contributes most of the content, and the male voice responds. He does not seem to be Solomon, though the book mentions his name seven times. The book depicts an exclusive relationship where the lovers only have eyes for one another, and Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines, is not a likely contender (1 Kings 11:1-3). Some scholars have suggested that the Song of Songs should be understood as a book in the wisdom tradition of Solomon, rather than authored by him.

I imagine Solomon stopped at 700 wives, because more than that might be considered bigamy.

Meet Boston Corbett, the self-castrated hatmaker who was John Wilkes Booth’s Jack Ruby.

His rash tendencies exhibited themselves in strange ways. One day while he was ministering in the summer of 1858, Corbett was ogled by a pair of prostitutes, and the lower half of his body responded invitingly. He went home, took a pair of scissors, snipped an incision under his scrotum, and removed his testicles, then headed out to a prayer meeting.

Mercury is a helluva drug.

Man Hospitalized After Sniffing Dirty Socks Made Fungus Grow in His Lungs

During questioning, the man—identified in local media reports under the pseudonym Li Qi—casually revealed that he had a habit of sniffing his used socks after taking them off at the end of the day. And it wasn’t just a one-off. This was apparently part of his everyday routine. Years of sock-sniffing.

A Mexican man enters a department store in the US, looking for socks. He walks up to the woman at the counter and says, “Quiero calcetines.” The woman can’t understand him, but won’t admit it, and she starts showing him everything in the store. The man keeps saying, “No. Quiero calcetines!” After going through the whole store, the man starts to leave, but he sees some socks as he passes the underwear counter. He looks at the woman and says, “Eso si que es.” The woman says, “Why didn’t you spell it in the first place?”

CT scans could cause 5% of cancers, study finds; experts note uncertainty

Based on data from 93 million CT scans performed on 62 million people in 2023, the researchers estimated that the CT scans would lead to 103,000 future cancers. To put that in context, those 103,000 cancers would account for about 5 percent of cancers diagnosed each year, based on the current cancer rates and the current usage of CT scans. And the estimate puts CT scans on par with alcohol consumption and obesity in terms of risk factors for developing cancer.

According to my mother, the other 95% would be caused by sitting too close to the television.

Normal boyhood is ADHD

Nearly a quarter of seventeen-year-old boys in America have an ADHD diagnosis. That’s crazy. But worse than the diagnosis is that the majority of them end up on amphetamines, like Adderall or Ritalin. These drugs allow especially teenage boys (diagnosed at 2-3x the rate of girls) to do what their mind would otherwise resist: Study subjects they find boring for long stretches of time. Hurray?

School is for girls now, and that’s that.

China accuses US of launching ‘advanced’ cyberattacks, names alleged NSA agents

Police in the northeastern city of Harbin said three alleged NSA agents to a wanted list and also accused the University of California and Virginia Tech of being involved in the attacks after carrying out investigations, according to a report by state news agency Xinhua on Tuesday. The NSA agents were identified by Xinhua as Katheryn A. Wilson, Robert J. Snelling and Stephen W. Johnson. The three were also found to have “repeatedly carried out cyber attacks on China’s critical information infrastructure and participated in cyber attacks on Huawei and other enterprises.”

That’s silly. The NSA is not about to take time away from spying on US citizens to bother with Chinese people.

Month: April 2025

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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