Cultural Issues, Socialism, and the Democrats

                                  Cultural Issues, Socialism, and the Democrats

Anyone who loves this country and follows what is happening to it cannot fail to be alarmed.

President Trump, for all his unique personality, egotism, buffoonery and braggadociousnesss, has done, and is trying to do right for the country.  Other than the raw tweets and rhetoric, Trump seems to a reasonably well balanced and moderating chief executive.  He is hated by the more and more leftist/democrat-socialist opposition for his uncompromising and “in your face” personality.  His main accomplishments relate to the economy, where lifting a tangle of restrictions by executive order have resulted in robust economic and stock market growth.  Obstructionists in congress shouting “resistance” (as if they were in Vichy France), have hampered much positive legislative action, even relating to the increasingly dire immigration and southern border situation.

The democrats want socialism for the country, apparently forgetting that this brand has failed miserably wherever it has been implemented, and has resulted in over 100 million human deaths in the 20^th century.  Leftists cite socialist Scandinavia in the 1970’s, rather than fully capitalist modern Scandinavia, as the model for what they reference as “successful” socialism.  Socialism, as defined by Marx and Engels has never been successful.  It has always failed wherever it was attempted.  Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela are current examples of failed states due to socialism.  There is no doubt whatever, that socialism will not only fail here.  It will go a long way toward ruining this country.

And we have failed cities, wherever leftist regimes govern.  Large parts of major cities on the West Coast are littered with garbage and human excrement and urine.  They are breeding grounds for disease not seen since the 14^th century.  Chicago is literally a war zone as far as shooting deaths go. Parts of NYC has been taken over by rats.  These are democrat and socialist politics in action.  These cities defy the federal government in apprehending and deporting criminal aliens from all over the world.  Parts of these cities have literally become cesspools under democrat administrations.

The cultural war that is tearing at the fabric of American society is bad enough.  The continual attack on the moral and ethical values that made, and continue to make this country great erode the very foundations of the country.  It seems insufficient to say that every American citizen, regardless of ethnic background, skin color, etc. has equal rights under the law in this country, and can speak their mind in lawful assembly.  The so called “politically correct” leftist neo-fascists would have us denigrate “toxic males”, people with non-leftist opinions and anyone else not in line with the group-think of the mob, - and they would elevate “marginalized” groups, including aliens here illegally, and others as defined by the leftist mob.

It seems that the anti-Trump hatred of the left have driven the normal opposition democrats into a leftist socialist frenzy, inspired by young, inexperienced congresswomen, with seemingly no perspective of history.  Democrats seem to be outdoing themselves as to how far toward Marxist socialism they will go.  They have mixed hatred of Trump, cultural and environmental issues and Marxist socialism into a dangerous and destructive political brew that can’t fail to do real harm to our country.

Ray Gruszecki
June 25, 2019

Stuxnet and Ramifications

Stuxnet and Ramifications

I just finished reading “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon” by Kim Zetter, about the Stuxnet cyber worm and variants, that succeeded in setting back the Iranian nuclear program by several years.

Stuxnet is a malicious computer worm, first uncovered in 2010, that targets SCADA systems and is believed to be responsible for causing substantial damage to Iran's nuclear program. Although neither country has openly admitted responsibility, the worm is believed to be a jointly built American/Israeli cyberweapon.

Stuxnet specifically targets programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which allow the automation of electromechanical processes such as those used to control machinery and industrial processes including centrifuges for separating nuclear material. Stuxnet functions by targeting machines using the Microsoft Windows operating system and networks, then seeking out Siemens Step7 software. Stuxnet reportedly compromised Iranian PLCs, collecting information on industrial systems and causing the fast-spinning centrifuges to either tear themselves apart, or spin irregularly and fail sooner than normal. Stuxnet Has really opened up a can of worms (sic), since it could be tailored as a platform for attacking any modern supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and PLC systems (e.g., in factory assembly lines or power plants), the majority of which reside in Europe, Japan and the US.

Stuxnet reportedly ruined almost one fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges. Targeting industrial control systems, the worm infected over 200,000 computers and caused 1,000 machines to physically degrade.

Stuxnet has three modules: a worm that executes all routines related to the main payload of the attack; a link file that automatically executes the propagated copies of the worm; and a rootkit component responsible for hiding all malicious files and processes, preventing detection of the presence of Stuxnet. Versions of Stuxnet incorporated up to four or five “zero day” exploits and several stolen, digitally signed certificates for device drivers, both unheard of in the normal “hacktivist” world.  It is typically introduced to the target environment via an infected USB flash drive, thereby crossing any air gap. The worm then propagates across the local or wider network, scanning for Siemens Step7 software on computers controlling a PLC. In the absence of either criterion, Stuxnet becomes dormant inside the computer. If both the conditions are fulfilled, Stuxnet introduces the infected rootkit onto the PLC and Step7 software, modifying the code and giving unexpected commands to the PLC while returning a loop of normal operations system values feedback to the users.

Kim Zetter’s book traces the discovery of a version of Stuxnet in an Iranian personal computer by Sergey Ulasen, of VirusBlokAda a small security company in Belarus, to unpacking and reverse engineering Stuxnet and variants by the Symantec and Kaspersky security groups over a number of years.  She also discusses the ramifications of what amounts to a cyber-attack by one nation-state against another, and the fact that this technology is now available in the wild for possible further use.

Ray Gruszecki

May 8, 2019

Gruszecki Surname, Peerage, List of Noble Families

Gruszecki Surname, Peerage, List of Noble Families

Having been born with a Polish surname like Gruszecki, it has been interesting through the years to hear American English speakers murder the pronunciation.  It’s groo-zek-eee in English, and groo-zshets-eee in Polish or Russian.  Since Polish was the first language that I heard from my mother, who was born there, the Slavic combined consonants that twist American English speakers’ tongues come somewhat naturally to me.

I’ve always looked the name up when I travelled in the past, but I could never find it in the phone books of any large cities like New York City, London, Paris, Rome or various other large western cities.  Until about the 1980’s when suddenly there were Gruszeckis all over this and other countries.  Someone, somewhere, “went and multiplied”.

I joined Ancestry.com several years back, and traced my paternal and maternal lines back as far as I could, which meant as far back as this country (Ellis Island, etc.), would allow.  The trail ended in Europe, at least as far as normal research was concerned.  There was no way without accessing records from Poland without going there, and even then, there were no guarantees, since Nazis and Russians had both occupied that part of Poland, and it was dubious as to what records still existed.

All of the above was several years ago.  A recent dive into Ancestry.com revealed that now, a raft of genealogical records were available in Poland in digital form, online, since the Roman Catholic church had made available their birth, marriage and death records going back for several centuries.  The Gruszecki surname has primarily Catholic, but also some Jewish roots.  I was able to trace the family lines in Poland back to the early 1800’s.

Another thing I recently found was that the Gruszecki name Is rooted in Polish peerage, and derives from the knight Maciej – Chorąży, or flag bearer, of the King of Poland Jogaila.   The King had given him the village Gruszka Duża, in eastern Poland, in favor of knightly merit, in 1411, presumably after the definitive battle of Grunwald, or Tannenberg, which defeated and drove back the Teutonic Knights.

The Gruszecki name appears in lists of both noble Polish and Russian families.  The Gruszecki coat of arms: 

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Polish_noble_families

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Russian_noble_families

Ray Gruszecki

April 28, 2019

Measles in 2019?

Measles in 2019?

Measles? Malaria? Smallpox? Plague? These are diseases that were wiped off the face of the earth by advances in science and medicine and inoculation techniques developed in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.  And along came Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962, and the ensuing environmental hysteria, and lo and behold, DDT was banned and malaria was back.  Tens of millions died of malaria in Africa and South Asia.

In the 1950’s pseudo-science postulated a perceived and anecdotal link between MMR vaccination of 12-18 month-old toddlers, and the onset of autism.  Basically, “if autism happens when the child is vaccinated, the vaccine must have caused the autism”.  The popular press, fueled by the environmental movement, picked up and spread this idea, creating a marked resistance over the years to vaccinating children.  Hence, the return of measles as a public health concern, right now, in the NY/NJ area.

There are similar other deleterious ramifications of the environmental movement that are based on pseudo-science, rumors, falsehoods and politics, rather than on scientific or medical principles.  For example, addition of GMO’s to crops to increase yields to feed the world is a case in point of such a charged issue, as are politicized discussions around the human role in climate change.

Ray Gruszecki

April 26, 2019

Bernie

Bernie

I watched Bernie Sanders, the old snake oil salesman make his pitch last night for socialism in an hour long Fox News Town Hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  As I’ve said before, this guy is no dummy.  He came out of Brooklyn to Vermont with his Marx, Alinsky, Russell and Debs firmly tucked away in his repertoire. He makes his pitch to the average person so appealing and sugar coated, that I was almost saying “where do I sign?”.

Forgetting the anti-Trump rhetoric, socialism always starts out with dissatisfaction of the status quo, and with idealistic promises for the future.  Everyone is entitled to “free stuff”, particularly those that are deemed to have been culturally denied in the past.  This includes free health care, free abortion, free education and a myriad of other free social services, including a guaranteed job and at least a $15/hr minimum wage.  Additional little fillips are “wealth taxes” on “the rich” and on successful corporations, reparations for minorities and forgiveness of college loan debt.


How are these all to be paid for?  Why, by increased taxation, of course, coupled with a redistribution of wealth from the capitalist “fat cats”.  In other words, socialism proposes to penalize the wealthy innovators to provide “free stuff” to everybody else, including those who are idlers in society.


Obviously this does not come naturally, so other means are necessary.  It is absolutely essential to take the guns away and disarm everyone.  Speech disagreeing with “politically correct” social justice mundanity must be curtailed and termed as fascist or “white supremist”.  Laws against emigration and movement by wealthy people and companies need to be enacted.  Stronger government and erosion/cancellation of individual and civil rights must lead the body politic toward totalitarianism and away from any remnants of democracy.  These drastic measures are necessary because taxation can only go so far.  Confiscation requires a strong, dictatorial government.  Socialism, communism and fascism require a commitment to the use of force.  You cannot decide what to do with the other guy’s money unless you are committed to use force to take that money from him. All socialist programs are mandatory and enforced by the government.  This is the reality of socialism — a pseudo-religion grounded in pseudo-science and enforced by political tyranny.


So it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why socialism never works in the long term, and always leads to the Maduros, Stalins, Maos, Castros and other dictatorial butchers, and to the deaths of over 120 million of their own people in the 20^th century.  Alternatively, socialism/communism morphs into market-oriented dictatorships like China, Vietnam and Laos.


 And yet socialism is no longer a parlor game for academics but a political alternative taken seriously by millennials and other thinkers, who don’t recognize that much of what they enjoy in life is a result of free market capitalism and would disappear if socialism were to be implemented.  We can maybe excuse some youngsters like AOC’s naiveté because of youth and inexperience.  How do we excuse people like Bernie, Markey, Krugman, Reich and others who should know better?


Ray Gruszecki

April 16, 2019

Why Leftist Hatred

Why Leftist Hatred

We Americans have always had political parties, to reflect our disagreements.  From Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, through Henry Clay’s Whigs and Andrew Jackson’s Democrats, and on, to Lincoln’s Republicans and a continuation of the Jackson Democrats, finally nuanced by history to our current Republicans and Democrats.

Most times, and ideally, we were able to debate and settle our differences at the ballot box, and within the framework of our government, but not always.  In the mid nineteenth century, we had a debilitating war costing nearly a quarter million American lives over our differences.  Sometimes, as in the mid twentieth century, riots in the streets and burning cities related to civil rights and the Vietnam war punctuated our disagreements.

So, by those precedents, the current rift and rancor in our politics may seem mild by comparison. 

Well, it doesn’t feel mild.  One has to ask the question, why does the secular, “woke” left hate republicans and particularly conservatives and libertarians, with such an unreasoned, burning hatred, which is now exacerbated and magnified by that big target, Donald Trump?  This irrational hatred is not reciprocated by most of the opposing right, who certainly disagree with the other side on issues, but are normally willing to debate these issues in a rational and civilized fashion. The left will not debate.  They cling to their world-changing belief with a religious fervor.  They “unfriend” people.  They punctuate their radicalism by denying free speech at our universities, by violence in our streets and by continuing lies in the mainstream media.  Any efforts to counter their hardly camouflaged groupthink movement is termed by the shopworn epithet, “racist”.

It almost seems as if this continuing hatred of the right is rooted in an inability by the leftists to accept the results of the 2016 election.  They refuse to acknowledge that Trump won the election, and that in spite of his outsize personality and personal foibles, he is the true and bona-fide president of the United States.  He is not here because of “Russian collusion”.  He is not a Russian spy committing “treason”.  He is the republican President of the United States.  Since he or his campaign did nothing illegal during the 2016 election campaign, he was rightfully angry at the injustice of a special counsel investigating his activities.  His railing, cursing and tweeting against the investigation, while called “unpresidential” by some, reportedly did not constitute “obstruction of justice”.

A striking characteristic of the left is how mercurial and hypocritical they are.  A recent example of this is how they almost deified Robert Mueller while they thought that his investigation would find Trump guilty of all sorts of crimes, and how they quickly turned him into a villain when his report found Trump not guilty of any illegality.  Other examples relate to a dual system of justice for democrats and republicans.  Hillary Clinton obstructed justice in too many ways to count – permanently deleting emails, smashing Blackberries and hard drives, and on and on.  No charges were brought against her – yet.  Trump got pissed off at the Mueller investigation and Nadler wants to impeach him for it.

I’m willing to debate nearly all of the points of contention between democrats and republicans – socialism, healthcare, immigration, sanctuary cities, gender issues, metoo, “your truth”, guilt and innocence, etc.  I will not debate abortion, which kills more human beings than any other cause, and that’s a personal issue with me.

Other than debating differences, what gets me angry and sends me more toward Trump than I would normally be, are the blatant lies, hypocrisy and this duality of justice between right and left.  This is exacerbated by 90% of the mainstream media propagandizing on behalf of the left, and refusing to acknowledge when they have been so obviously wrong, as in the Mueller affair.

Ray Gruszecki

April 22, 2019

No Collusion, No Criminal Obstruction, No Further Indictments

No Collusion, No Criminal Obstruction, No Further Indictments

No Collusion, no criminal obstruction, no further indictments of anyone.  What a betrayal by the saintly Robert Mueller and his band of lawyerly democrats!

But Trump thought bad thoughts.  He said nasty things. He cursed and swore at the enemies massed against him.  He almost used his Article II powers to fire more than just Comey.

In this bizarre “1984” or “Fahrenheit 451” or “Animal Farm” or “Brave New World” scenario, this latter is not allowed, and the groupthink police as represented by the democrats like Nadler and Schiff, backed by Pelosi and Hoyer, will attempt to punish Trump and his minions based on the cultural principles of leftist group identity politics and “social justice”.  It’s not enough that Mueller wasted two years and 25 million dollars to prove nothing, the leftists in the House need to provide fodder for the mainstream media propaganda mills by spending additional time and money re-litigating the Mueller investigation. 

Americans, other than the inveterate and unshakable Trump haters, might say “enough already”, and continue to stray away from the leftist propaganda-laden CNN and MSNBC to Fox News, the only cable outlet that has told the truth about what has been happening with Trump, Mueller and the whole process, for the last two years.  Some might stay with CNN and MSNBC, for the sheer entertainment value of seeing eight to twelve talking heads bobbing up and down in agreement in their blind hatred of Trump, with not one word of dissenting argument allowed, unlike Fox with their Juan Williams, Jessica Tarlov, Marie Harf, Donna Brazile and many other dissenting leftist voices.

President Trump could hold the key to eternal world peace in one hand, and the cure for cancer and other major diseases in the other hand, and the democrats, or socialists, or what they call themselves today, would be convening a hearing on whether Trump helped Jared Kushner to get a security clearance.

The pure hatred of Trump by the leftists and their mainstream media cohorts is so great, that you simply cannot find an honest, balanced view of Trump and his doings anywhere but in a very few middle of the road or right-leaning media outlets.  Just turn on CNN or MSNBC any time of the day or night, for a propaganda-laden litany of anti-Trump rhetoric, with no opposing views.  Thank goodness for AP, Reuters, USA Today, WSJ, Fox News, National Review, because without these we would be completely inundated and indoctrinated by the preponderance of the leftist mainstream media. 

Why this unbalanced and irrational hatred that some call “Trump derangement syndrome”?  It would be easy to simplify and say “because he won the election”, or because he expresses conservative values.  But it’s more than that.  Trump flies in the face of the leftist cultural warriors and relishes it.  He does not give lip service to the leftist inspired erosion of inalienable rights and associated moral values.  He opposes the leftist attacks on our American way of life, and loudly exposes and fights the associated hypocrisy.  All to the cries and wails, and now the HR committee actions by the obstructionist left.

Not that Trump has always been some crusading angel.  It’s obvious to anyone who has been around a while, and has some street smarts, that he has cut whatever corners he could legally get away with to attain and retain his wealth. Its “water under the dam”, but the majority HR leftists would sure like to open all past indiscretions to embarrass him.  So far he has stayed one step ahead of them, in spite of harassment not endured by a president since Lincoln’s days.

Trump is a showman.  He is flamboyant.  He embellishes.  He lies.  He does not neatly fit into a political slot.  Leftists call him a “racist”, based on some of his campaign verbiage.  His actions belie that fact.  Although he has not been given credit, he has done much more for minorities than the “philosopher king”, Obama.  

In spite of overwhelming opposition, business and the stock market and the GDP are booming, employment is at record highs (including minorities), wages and take-home are higher, ISIS is defeated, NOKO is dormant, trade is being re-balanced to our benefit – and on and on.

Ray Gruszecki

March/April, 2019