Grammy's Candy Bowl (My Brain Feels Like)

It's all kind of crappy and stuck together, but you're compelled to check it out anyway to see if there's anything worthwhile.

What a week.

• The Ghost of Michael Anthony Hall Past attempts to kill the next President of the United States.

• The Republican Convention welcomes the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Instagram influencer who invented SlutWalk, Kid Rock, and a shirtless Hulk Hogan.

• Crowdstrike, a company trusted by half the Fortune 500 to protect its computer infrastructure against malicious attack, maliciously attacks its entire client base and shuts down half the Internet for 24 hours.

• The Democratic Party foments a color revolution against itself.

• The opening shots in the War of Right-Wing Cancellation Aggression are fired.

There’s no through-line here. This is all just random chaos seeping into our houses, so I’m not going to try to make any sense of it. Time to just sketch out an improv riff a la John Coltrane and let ‘er rip.

I’d like to say this is the most baffling music score I’ve ever seen, but I’d be lying.

Donald Trump is almost killed on live TV

I don’t have anything brilliant to say about this. I’m not a security expert, I’m not even related to current or former LEO, and I’ve never been shot at except laser tag. Which I sucked at, by the way. But here’s a thing I noticed: a lot of other people online who also weren’t security experts or current or former LEO all of a sudden had many very firmly held opinions about what went wrong and who was to blame and how this was Proof of a Deep State Conspiracy to off The Donald or The Evidence We Finally Needed that DEI is Killing People or You Gun Nuts Finally Got What You Deserved…Almost.

Almost coincidentally to this, the following tidbit fluttered across my feed.

I respect Miranda Devine a great deal. She has broken many a story that mainstream outlets ignored or suppressed. I believe she is one of those rare journalists who has maintained her integrity and still cultivates sources that supply her with real information. On this occasion, though, she’s missed the mark. If she’d asked any pilot in the Mid-Atlantic they could have stopped her from making this mistake. From Memorial Day to Labor Day the Bidens are almost always in either Wilmington or Rehoboth at least four days a week. It would have been far more unusual for them to be scheduled to stay in the White House for those days. And it is standard procedure for those VIP TFRs to be published 48 hours in advance.

Gell-Mann Amnesia is a bitch.

Republican Convention Pitches Big Tent. Matt Walsh Hardest Hit.

I really have nothing to add here, other than whiny bitches like Matt Walsh only make money when they’re being contrary. Welcome, Amber! Love the earrings!

Crowdstrike Crowdstruck: When They Tell You Who They Are, Believe Them

When I’m not pouring my heart and mind out on Substack, I do something else that I don’t talk about here much because Reid Hoffman is spying on me and my employer would probably be unhappy with some of my opinions. But I’ll loosen up a little and let my readers know that I spend 45-60 hours a week sitting in front of a computer slaving away for one of the largest defense contractors in the world. I’m good at my job and I give good value. Unless I wake up on a Friday morning and, like millions of other people, log in to this.

And because it’s 07:15EDT and I haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet, I assume it’s something I did. Oh crap, I didn’t accept that Avanti update last night…wait — was there an Avanti update last night? So I called the central help desk. I think they’re in Connecticut.

So…not only am I hosed, not only are all the other 111,000 end points hosed…central IT is hosed? Sounds like an excuse to day drink.

And like any responsible, mature corporate functionary….I fire up Reddit and head over to r/crowdstrike. Holy smokes were they on fire. Reading through the timeline, it hit Australia first — they were the ones waking up and starting business right when this started propagating through the wires. You could read through the history and reconstruct how it radiated with the sun traveling west. By the time I logged on there were 30,000 enraged IT bros screaming for George Kurtz’s head on a pike and also day drinking.

The guidance we got from our IT department — after they scolded us for trying to call them to find out what was going on — was to send an email and wait to be contacted. It became clear that this wasn’t going to be solved with a network rollout. The fix required hands-on intervention at the individual machine. At some point, a random unidentified peon posted self-service instructions that included:

• Obtaining a Bitlocker recovery key from IT

• Assigning admin privileges to edit windows\system32

• Removing the offending .sys file

• Rebooting

OK fine. So now 110,000 employees whose endpoint security was formerly centrally managed now know their Bitlocker keys and have root write authority. What could possibly go wrong.

I followed the instructions and was freed from purgatory at about 16:00EDT on Friday. I still haven’t got a callback from IT.

Democrat on Democrat Action

As I write this, poised between Saturday night and Sunday morning and with more than enough rum on board, can I just ask…what the hell is going on with the Democrats? Half my feed is declaring Biden’s digging in his heels, a quarter is warbling about Kamala, and the other quarter is convinced Hillary’s back in. I thought you were supposed to be the grown-up responsible adults in the room. This is starting to look like a struggle for directorial control in a community theater production in Ottumwa Iowa.

Home Depot MeeMaw: Do We or Don’t We?

Dissident Right Substack’s more prolix auteurs were mostly preoccupied this week with the following ethical conundrum: should we get some pathetic inarticulate working class woman fired from her job at Home Depot because she posted a half-assed approval of the idea of shooting Donald Trump on Facebook, or should we go all the way and hunt down her offspring and sterilize them to prevent her genes from polluting the pool.

I get it. Social media cancel culture is profoundly retarded, and many real people have suffered real harm at the hands of these unhinged leftoids. It’s natural, and not that unhealthy, to long for retribution and a swing of the pendulum back to normalcy.

But unleashing the power of the internet mob on Home Depot cashiers with a GED and a 90 IQ is just…unseemly. Go back to harassing Taylor Lorenz and Robert Reich. Punch your own weight for God’s sake.