It’s always easy for Ed. That’s “Easy Ed” Achorn, the Other Paper’s deputy editorial pages editor who is the equivalent of a right-wing P&J. Like P&J, he doesn’t even attempt to give his opposition the time of day or the courtesy of an explanation and, like P&J, he is astonishingly self-righteous, always correct, and anyone who disagrees with him must be evil or stupid. The only difference between your superior correspondents and Easy Ed that we can detect is that he seems to think that he’s a serious journalist while we readily identify ourselves as propagandists and unrepentant hit men.
Tuesday’s propaganda piece from Achorn was a classic. He excoriated those members of the General Assembly who would not vote for the recent legislation criminalizing indoor prostitution. It is, like the world of Ronald Reagan (who, we know, Easy Ed reveres as a mighty genius), completely black and white, right or wrong. There is no room for explaining why intelligent and thoughtful legislators like David Segal, Edith Ajello, Rod Driver, Frank Ferri, Arthur Handy, Charlie Levesque, and Rhoda Perry (to name a few) might have reasons for voting against this particular piece of legislation. In Easy Ed’s version, they have to be either stupid or evil.
We suspect that most Vo Dilunduhs are not as ignorant as Achorn must think they are to pen such a loaded piece of crap. Hey Eddie Boy, that’s what P&J do and you are free to mock us and call us whatever names you will. But what your piece shows is that you are our mirror image and we’re sure that frightens you more than anything.
CYBER JIM
A very nice star turn on the November 8 60 Minutes by our own US Rep. Jim Langevin, in what was one of the scariest pieces of TV journalism we have seen in a long while.
Langevin is the chair of a House committee on national cyber security. The show was about how hackers are invading computers through the Internet, at a level that is beyond shocking. And it isn’t just to steal some money from Dad and Mom’s checking account. The hackers have broken into the highest levels of America’s defense systems (a 2007 event which Dubya and Co. forgot to tell the American people), and many were suspected to be hackers from China and Russia. These unidentified potential terrorists have also broken into our accounting and energy grid systems. One of America’s top experts on cyber security and cyber crime and terrorism said he had no doubt they had broken in almost everywhere, and likely have planted software in the system that could be used at a later date to crash the system or make certain items inoperable. (If it makes you feel better, another expert admitted that we had done the same to our adversaries’ computers, of course.)
This is also happening to big-time banks and investment companies, where it could conceivably blow out our country’s entire financial system, probably about the same time as the East Coast goes dark, but these guys were as shy as Dubya about admitting it, lest people lose confidence in them and their profits go down. Cyber Jim’s committee had called them on the carpet several months ago and asked if they had been following President Obama’s charge to tighten up the ship and start improving their security, which they said they were doing. However, after some investigation, the bigwigs were hauled back to Langevin’s committee, where they admitted they had in fact lied to Congress the first time around. Nice, boys.
Two of the more chilling aspects of the report were that if these matters are being aired in the public domain, imagine what we don’t know about how bad and insidious things are at a mega-level. A case in point was an experiment done by US cyber pros, which was like a sci-fi like twist on HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this case, through use of the Internet getting into the computer system of an enormous electrical generator, they made the machine self-destruct — film of the experiment showed it shaking, smoking, and essentially exploding, all on its own. Paging Arthur C. Clarke.
