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sedachvon FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup

Because that is what the book is about. Specifically, about the history of the Islamic Center of Munich, regularly attended by Mahmoud Abouhalima, the 1993 WTC bomber, and Al Qaeda co-founder and bin Laden mentor Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. I don't know what you are trying to imply. As suggested previously, read the book.

sedachvon FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup

I recommend reading the book (Ian Johnson's A Mosque In Munich: Nazis, The CIA, And The Rise Of The Muslim Brotherhood In The West) because it is the first (and, AFAIK, so far only) study where all the "tangentially related links" are explained in context. Johnson did an excellent job of perusing West German and newly declassified CIA documents, as well as tracking down and interviewing surviving participants of the events. It is not something you can credibly explain in one post.

sedachvon FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup

https://archive.org/details/mosqueinmunichna0000john_a7m7/pa...

https://ian-johnson.com/a-mosque-in-munich

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Ministry_for_the_Occupie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_SS_volunteer_forma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaukasisch-Mohammedanische_Leg...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Caucasian_and_Mountain-C...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkestan_Legion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idel-Ural_Legion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23rd_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_Waffen_Mountain_Division_...

sedachvon FBI agents accuse CIA of 9/11 coverup

It started much earlier than that, when the CIA took over Nazi Muslim terrorist networks after WWII, and from that started working with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s. Ian Johnson's _A Mosque In Munich_ is a must-read if you are at all interested in why 9/11 happened:

  Privately, President Eisenhower seemed concerned about how to reach the Muslim world. He wrote to his confidant, the Presbyterian church leader Edward Elson, that Islam and the Middle East were always on his mind. “I assure you that I never fail in any communication with Arab leaders, oral or written, to stress the importance of the spiritual factor in our relationships. I have argued that belief in God should create between them and us the common purpose of opposing atheistic communism.” In White House meetings he was more blunt. Speaking with the CIA covert operations czar Frank Wisner and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Eisenhower said that Arabs should dip into their own religion for inspiration in fighting communism. “The President said he thought we should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,’ according to a memo outlining the conversation. “Mr. Dulles commented that if the Arabs have a ‘holy war they would want it to be against Israel. The President recalled, however, that [King Ibn] Saud, after his visit here, had called on all Arabs to oppose Communism.” The Operations Coordinating Board — the body set up to imple- ment covert plans by the CIA and other agencies — took up Islam. It had already produced a detailed study of Buddhism and how that religion could be used to further U.S. interests. In 1957, the board established an Ad Hoc Working Group on Islam that included offi- cials from the U.S. Information Agency, the State Department, and the CIA. According to a memo on the groups first meeting, its goal was to take stock of what public and private U.S. organizations were doing in the field of Islam and come up with an “Outline Plan of Operations.’ The plan had two main components, both of which were echoed in CIA actions in Munich. First, the United States would shun traditional Muslims in favor of “reform” groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood. Then, as today, the Brotherhood’s radi- cal political agenda of a return to a mythic state of pure Islam was obfuscated by its members’ use of modern symbols, such as West- ern clothing and rhetoric. “Both the Chairman and the CIA mem- ber felt that with the Islamic world being divided as it is between reactionary and reformist groups, it might be found profitable to place emphasis on programs which would strengthen the reformist groups.” In May, the coordination board passed the inventory and plan of action. Its statements were clear and simple: Islam is a natural ally, communists are exploiting Islam, and Islam affects the balance of power. The paper listed a dozen recommendations for strengthen- ing ties with Islamic organizations, especially those with a strong anticommunist bent. As always, the operations were to be covert. “Programs which are indirect and unattributable are more likely to be effective and will avoid the charge that we are trying to use reli- gion for political purposes,’ the report concluded. “Overt use of Is- lamic organizations for the inculcation of hard-line propaganda is to be avoided”

sedachvon I have complicated feelings about TDD

_Test Driven Development: By Example_ certainly had the highest ratio of dumb unnecessary jokes to contrived unconvincing examples of any programming book I have read. My copy of TAOCP volume 3 doesn't even begin to compare. Clearly Knuth was doing something wrong.

sedachvon I have complicated feelings about TDD

You just copy-and-paste the relevant input-output and there is your test. There isn't a need for any extra tools when using the REPL to come up with regression tests (obviously a REPL cannot be used to do TDD).

sedachvon I have complicated feelings about TDD

TDD use would be a lot different if people actually bothered to read the entirety of Kent Beck's _Test Driven Development: By Example_. It's a lot to ask, because it is such a terribly written book, but there is one particular sentence where Beck gives it away:

> This has happened to me several times while writing this book. I would get the code a bit twisted. “But I have to finish the book. The children are starving, and the bill collectors are pounding on the door.”

Instead of realizing that Kent Beck stretched out an article-sized idea into an entire book, because he makes his money writing vague books on vague "methodology" that are really advertising brochures for his corporate training seminars, people actually took the thing seriously and legitimately believed that you (yes, you) should write all code that way.

So a technique that is sometimes useful for refactoring and sometimes useful for writing new code got cargo-culted into a no-exceptions-this-is-how-you-must-do-all-your-work Law by people that don't really understand what they are doing anymore or why. Don't let the TDD zealots ruin TDD.

sedachvon Fully Dockerized Linux kernel debugging environment

There are much better tools for doing that, such as Guix profiles and nix-shell, which also happen to be better tools for making container images. Linux container images are a distribution mechanism that does not do anything to address package and dependency management other than shifting the problem somewhere else.

sedachvon Wisp: Whitespace to Lisp

Languages where blocks are indicated by indentation are not context-free (you have to keep the current and previous line indentation level as state). Everything about them is more tedious because you can't do structured editing.

sedachvon Botanists are disappearing – just when the world needs them most

From the article: "It has been over a decade since a student was enrolled in a botany degree in the UK."

Botany is a very different specialty than genetics.

sedachvon Botanists are disappearing – just when the world needs them most

The paradox is this is at a time when the population has never been more numerous and the economy more prosperous. There should be more specialists in all kinds of areas, not fewer. Instead capitalism is reducing people's horizons and impoverishing their choices of vocation and lifestyle, destroying the landbase while simultaneously driving the people that try to maintain the landbase and natural systems out of work, and in many cases into prison slave labor. It is a self-destructive cycle steering us into civilizational collapse.

sedachvon The Zen Playboy: The Life and Times of Stewart Brand

There is a whole lot more to John Brockman's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein than just Brockman's Edge Foundation:

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/t...

David Gelernter is a whole other piece of work. He did co-author a pretty good textbook on parallel programming (_How To Write Parallel Programs_), but the guy was basically a huckster when it came to distributed systems research. The real ironic thing is that it can be hard to tell Gelernter's Wall Street Journal op-eds from Kaczynski's manifesto.

sedachvon Malls adding apartments to offset dwindling numbers of shoppers

> where you would walk out of your apartment and be able to visit your local coffee bar, diner, park, grocery store, etc

You mean, like, a normal city?

sedachvon IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

> If there was a very simple IF on my prescription

This was supposed to be solved by rule-based/expert systems in the 1980s AI bubble.

sedachvon Are you sure you want to use MMAP in your database management system? [pdf]

This is a bad idea from the 1960s: IBM TPF, MUMPS, Pick. As soon as the hardware changes it becomes slower and more complicated.

sedachvon Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Matrix flight search app

Google acquired ITA in 2010. Cape Air switched their entire flight reservation/departure control system to ITA/Google in 2012. Google discontinued the system in 2013.

sedachvon Google 20% time volunteers have been rewriting the ITA Matrix flight search app

The reason Google continued to offer API access after the acquisition was because a 5 year stipulation was in the contract to get it approved by the Department of Justice. Of course once the 5 years were up that was it. ITA had also built a reservation system for Air Canada. Air Canada never used it, but Cape Air switched in 2012. In 2013, Google discontinued it.

The whole acquisition was a huge failure on the part the DoJ Antitrust Division.

sedachvon Trying to get a job in a labor shortage is harder than you think

They are not conspiring. It just makes a lot of sense to keep operating under-staffed (your labor costs are now a fraction of what they were) as long as the revenue keeps rolling in, using "labor shortage" as an excuse to customers for why quality has gone down, and to employees for why they need to work overtime. A lot of it is also PPP loan fraud - PPP loan forgiveness terms let you weasel out of actually re-hiring staff as long as you make and document some effort at trying to hire (https://quickbooks.intuit.com/r/coronavirus/rules-for-rehiri... I assume the rules are similar for second draw). Also, why would you hire someone at what you believe is an "unreasonably" high wage right now, given that you believe that wages will go back down in the near future? If I was running a small business in the US with employees right now, I would be doing the same, no conspiracy necessary.

sedachvon IPv6 Progress Top Sites 2021

It's not just speculating, there is even large-scale IPv4 address allocation fraud going on:

https://www.internetgovernance.org/2021/08/19/a-fight-over-c...

sedachvon IPv6 Progress Top Sites 2021

> the struggle would be legendary

You just assign a ULA address to an interface and that's it. There is no "struggle."

sedachvon IPv6 Progress Top Sites 2021

> There isn't one until IPv6-only ISPs (or plans) pop up offering cheaper connectivity because you don't need an expensive v4 address.

This has been happening for years with VPSes.

sedachvon Ultrawhite BaSO4 Paints and Films for Daytime Radiative Cooling

> Farther north in Ontario, the heating season is way longer than the cooling one, so it does kind of make sense to optimize for heat retention. The other side is that having a roof which warms itself in winter is better for reducing snow accumulation.

So much wrong here. Asphalt shingles neither "retain heat" nor "warm themselves." You really do not want either property in a roof covering in a climate where it snows because that will cause the formation of ice dams. If you have snow on your roof, it obviously covers the black shingles - now you have a white roof anyway. If it is winter and you do not have snow on your roof, it is still not worth it - solar irradiance at 50° latitude (approximately Timmins, Ontario) is going to be about a factor of 7 less in January than in June. You are much better off with a white roof in northern Canada to reduce peak heat stress in the summer, which will continue to get worse and worse due to greenhouse gasses.

sedachvon IPv4 vs. IPv6 FAQ

Have you heard of unique local addresses? Most of the LAN "problems" you describe are solved by using ULAs. Yes, even name resolution - the hosts file becomes useful again. PCP (the 2013 replacement for NAT-PMP) supports IPv6 port opening; UPnP has supported it since IGDv2 (2015). Any ISP that does not do IPv6 prefix delegation ("your ISP only gives you a single v6 address"), might as well stop claiming IPv6 support.

I am not sure why you think multihoming is a bad thing. That is one of the major things that in my experience makes IPv6 LAN configuration a lot more useful and robust than IPv4 with private addressing. It sounds like you misunderstood some basic IPv6 assumptions - configuring an IPv6 LAN is not that much more difficult than an IPv4 one. I would never go back to IPv4 for my LAN.

sedachvon The Connection Machines CM-1 and CM-2 (2015)

There was also Gary Sabot's work on Paralation Lisp (really interesting approach to declaratively specifying data locality), and later Guy Blelloch's NESL (the first programming language to really deal with nested parallelism) for the CM-2.

sedachvon Show HN: Minimal versioned log structured relational DB in Common Lisp

https://www.cs.umb.edu/~poneil/lsmtree.pdf

sedachvon BLisp: A Statically Typed Lisp Like Language

> meaning that the macro always literally expands to (+ x x)

Make that three bugs. The macro is called "double," but the numeric result is square.

sedachvon Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

> I believe they were just using it as a method to prove available funds while waiting on the traditional banks / lawyers to do their thing.

That sounds really vague. A proof of funds letter has nothing to do with money transfers. You can walk into a bank branch and get a signed proof of funds letter right there. The people actually selling the property that require a proof of funds letter are going to be either a trustee or court auction (foreclosure), or when making an offer to a bank for an REO/bank-owned property (what some people mistakenly call foreclosures).

It would be really interesting if those parties started accepting stablecoin signed messages as proof of funds letters, but I do not know of any that do. The real interesting part in that scenario would have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies - it would mean the widespread acceptance of public key cryptography for legal and financial documents and transactions. Once that happens there would be even less reason for the really shitty distributed database part of cryptocurrencies anymore. Not a popular opinion, but one I have held for a long time, and if you think the system through it is hard not to arrive at the same conclusion. "You mean this all could be done with PGP in the 1990s?"

What it sounds like is happening is that third-party companies involved in foreclosure buying are accepting stablecoin signed messages to act as financing intermediaries. That really does not mean a lot - there are even financing companies out there specializing in supplying "instant" proof of funds letters to house flippers that are really conditional loan offers.

sedachvon Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists

> A friend who works in real estate foreclosures told me that everyone he works with is using stable coins now for this very reason.

How exactly does that work? Have trustees started accepting stablecoins for deposits? Are there auctions where you can pay with stablecoins? Or is it just for payments from foreclosure buyers to their representatives who make bids on the buyers' behalf?

sedachvon How to Start Disrupting Cryptocurrencies: “Mining” Is Money Transmission

> then there was at LEAST $60,000 of value created by the transaction.

That is not value creation, that is wealth transfer from Alice to Bob. Alice has to earn that excess $60,000 through labor, or exploiting labor.

sedachvon Intel and AMD Contemplate Different Replacements for x86 Interrupt Handling

Probably not. Shadow stacks don't really have anything to do with privilege levels or interrupts. And Intel only started shipping CPUs with "Control-flow Enforcement Technology" (which has their implementation of shadow stacks, and other things) last year.