“We are in the last days of the Roman Empire.”

Richard Ketchum was a brilliant teacher, head of Communications and English at Humber College. He was originally from the United States of America.
He knew exactly which country I was speaking of.

It took longer than either of us expected.

“There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.” This by Adam Smith, quoted in a book on the collapse of ancient civilizations. I have it in mind that a British leader quoted this also. Thatcher?

There are signs of impending disaster around the globe. I will list some scary ones that I happen to see.

Turkey is moving toward martial law and dictatorship. To circumvent election term limits, its leader is moving power to his new post.

Syria is a mess. Warring factions kill civilians. Russia and the West bomb et cetera on apparently discordant definitions of ‘sides.’

The annexation of Crimea in the Ukraine has had only sanctional effect on Russia. Since Vladimir Putin is a hero for standing up to the west, economic sanctions do not weaken his hold on power.

Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal. Once ‘PIGS’ and still in economic shock.

Bolivia. Civil war. Disguised as rebel factions.

Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela. Economic disasters and food shortages, government debts unpayable.

Ecuador. Selling out the Galapagos Islands because the government is broke.

Costa Rica. Going that way soon.

Japan. In a slump for decades.

Brexit. Economic uncertainty. Currency fluctuations. Recriminations and political division.

Now is the time when a national leader with global reach and uniting persuasiveness is required. Instead we get this:

Trump. The politics of division. The statesmanship of ‘say anything.’ The diplomacy of personal attacks (and say anything, hopefully divisive, in them.)

Trump. Who today said he might pull the US out of the protection of NATO countries.

Trump who would build a wall and (somehow) make Mexico pay for it. Trump who would (with gracious exceptions to specific political figures) prevent Muslims from entering the United States.

Trump, the disuniter. Trump, the international non-leader. Trump, the surprise low-card winner.

We are in the last days of the Roman Empire. America’s day of influence is ending.

The rest of the world, or that portion that counted on US influence and steadying power, can totter along unaided. America will be far too distracted to give a damn.

Given the vast reservoir of anger at home, tapped and fanned by the Trump campaign, this will be a bloody sunset in the West.

Given the economic inequality, with clearly defined losers much more numerous than the easily found winners, it will be a long and dark night.

Have a nice day.

The ancient board game Go has just been mastered by a computer. The world’s champion human player lost most of the games in a match.

Go is a game with simple rules that allow long combinations of moves to be calculated. Thus it is perhaps more complex than chess.

What’s special about Go is the “ko” rule.

It is not permitted to make a move that recreates the immediate preceding position. (Some jurisdictions don’t allow any preceding position, same player to move, to be recreated.)

This rule comes into effect when a captured stone, by being replaced, captures the stone that captured it.

Boring, you say. Perhaps; but what happens in the game can be quite interesting.

Winning a ‘ko’ situation can decide a lot of territory for the victor. So having to move elsewhere creates a challenge.
The solution: make a threat at least ‘as large’ as the territory at risk at the ‘ko’ situation. The opponent will, presumably, answer that threat; then the ‘ko’ position can be retaken.

The other player may use the same tactic: make a threat, and then retake.

All this to explain what a ‘ko threat’ is.

In a game of go, a threat that can adequately be countered is not actually made. Instead, it is saved in case it’s needed later in a ‘ko’ battle.

Politicians do this all the time. I will give a few examples.

Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was accused, I think during the Airbus scandal, of accepting a bribe that was paid into his Swiss bank account. Government parties asked Swiss authorities for substantiating evidence about that account’s activity.

Mulroney was a lawyer. He sued the government for the wording in the standard request letter. (This letter’s wording had been used multiple times, and was probably used while Mulroney was Prime Minister.)
It was claimed that the wording was, I think, defamatory. As I recall, Mr. Mulroney won the suit.
(His triumph was mute: he never disclosed his Swiss bank account deposits.)

My point here: the weakness of the government’s standard request letter was kept by Brian Mulroney for later use as a ‘ko’ threat. A sort of get-out-of-jail card.

Relevance in the US Election?

Hilary Clinton’s eMail server has been discussed for ages. This tempest has now been fully let out of the bottle, to mix metaphors. Why now?

and

Expect more. More revelations. More saved attacks.

If you’re in a hurry, scroll down to Warning. This is background:

There are several computers in this house. My son maintains ancient ones so the grandkids can play games on machines nobody really cares about.

I look after three (or four) of these machines. Two of them were on Windows 7. I decided to upgrade for these, probably common, reasons:

• Windows 10 has a good reputation from some sources. Beta bugs did get fixed.
• Windows 7 will be deprecated and lose support.
• The free upgrade offer may actually expire. or not.
• Windows 7 Updates took forever.
• Reminders of Windows 10 were really annoying, intrusive even.

I have been ‘change control’, ‘iteration manager’, ‘test manager’, and been called other things, on large data processing projects. I do not take change lightly. I try to cover all bets and make sure I can recover from unexpected mishaps.

So, I potentially replaced my ancient WinXP netbook with a v. nice Asus Zenbook. Running Windows 10. I used this to learn Win10 first, so I could find stuff and know how to change things.
Part of this was making a backup (on a USB 3 hard disk drive) and making a recovery CD (on a USB CD/DVD drive.)

I used Backup and Restore (Windows 7) to do this.

I am morally certain that I was ‘at the point’ of recovery after figuring out how to get the Zenbook to actually boot from the Recovery CD.

So I thought I knew how to back up Win10.

This is where things got interesting.
I did the Windows 10 upgrade on my wife’s desktop PC. Win10 had never been ‘reserved’ on that machine. But it updated without question. There was a hiccup and rollback due to ZoneAlarm, so I told ZA to go away and retried the upgrade. Success. (Win10 said ZA would not work in Win10, but knew it would as it was running on the Zenbook. Win10 is a mixed experience. ZA got running OK.)

Eventually, everything seemed fine and stable on this desktop. I did a backup onto the internal second disk drive. I made a Recovery CD so the initial Win10 situation could be reverted to, if necessary, later. This using “Backup and Restore (Windows 7)”
I should mention that, not that long ago, I did recover this machine from a Win7 Recovery CD and a Win7 backup on the same internal second disk drive.

Upgrading my own desktop was a bit trickier. I’d been offered, almost tricked into, upgrade to Win10 after ‘reserving my copy,’ and then that noise stopped. Windows Update said there were no updates. Upgrade to Win10 was not on offer. This on the machine that reserved the upgrade months ago.
There is a downloadable helper from Microsoft that did, in fact, pull down the upgrade. I turned off ZA before starting and turned it back on afterward.

Then I did a Win10 backup (similar: internal second hard disk; create recovery CD).

Then I made what I thought was a big mistake and decided fix it by rolling back to the early point in Win10.
This is where the warning comes in.

I could boot from the Win10 Recovery CD. But I could not use it: at one point, it presents a blue screen listing keyboard choices and asking me to make one.

There is no way to provide input to this screen. Not mouse, not keyboard.

I shut down the machine, switched to the original Acer keyboard , and tried again. No dice.

There is an option to hold shift while clicking on Restart (in the Win10 power menu.) This boots some sort of rescue mode. It leads to the same blue screen where a keyboard choice can not be made, and the screen cannot be exited. BRS time.

OK, so I tried booting my wife’s very similar desktop from the Win10 Recovery CD made there. Same result: blue screen of keyboard options that cannot be chosen from.

Warning. If you upgraded to Win10 from Win7, there is a very real chance that you cannot boot from the recovery CD and actually recover from a backup.
My sample is small, but 2 out of 2 feels like ‘good’ odds.

Solution: Try and see if you can actually boot the recovery CD and get to the point of cancelling the restore.
– if you can, you’re done. Back up whenever it would hurt not to keep what you’ve got.
– if you can’t, do what I did. Buy a backup package. I picked one based on PCMag and other website accolades. There was a 3-machine discount on the already reduced price.

I am now backed up.

I hope you are.

Footnote.

In the long ago, as a mere programmer in the IBM Canada Laboratory, I observed that all projects assumed that the Lab computer team’s backup (weekly) was sufficient.

I am a bit of a bastard. I carefully backed up one or two of our project’s disks, then ran into the computer room panting and said we’d lost a drive. Please get it back. ASAP.

It turned out that practically no project could recover from the backup. The reason was quite innocent:

Backup was done onto tape. Jobs were initiated and controlled by JCL: card decks. Each project had a set of card decks for each disk pack they used. The card decks were in sets of three, which were rotated by operations staff, so there were always two good backups even while the third was being created.

Each card deck mentioned a specific tape drive; these were mountable and had ‘volume serial numbers’ on them and could be distinguished by the operating system. Thus every disk pack was backed up on one, of a set of three, 2400′ tapes, one each week.

What nobody realized was, eventually the growing disk contents would exceed the capacity of a single tape.
At this point, the backup program would cause the system to ask the operator to mount a labelled scratch tape, which he or she would do.
Using the same scratch tape for the latter part of everyone’s backup.
Thus there was only one complete backup: the last one run that week.

Later that same IBM Canada Ltd. laboratory ran a simulated disaster, wherein every project lost a disk. Recovery was, er, ‘interesting’ to watch.

My point here is twofold.

1. The only real backup for a running system is a second running system. Anything less is hope: that recovery can be done, that compatibility has not been lost, et cetera.
2. If you’re in the ‘hope’ category, test the recipient of your faith. Do this when it’s cheap (new machine, for example) so you know how to recover when the chips (and machine) are down.

I mean self- as in self-regulating.

Automoron is a term I propose (like oxymoron) to indicate a word or prefix that, by being there, pretty much denies what comes immediately after.

Examples of self-regulation, self-investigation, self-auditing, self-inspecting, are all to common and generally have the same automoronic effect: lax regulation, shallow investigation, cursory auditing, flattering assessments.

Doctors investigating each other is one anti-favourite of mine.
The Special Investigations Unit investigating serious police actions is another.

I am going to apparently change topic here, but it will all make some sort of coherent sense at the end.

No matter what you think of Michael Moore and his video Sicko, you should watch the part where a woman doctor of significant achievement and standing is crying while testifying to the US Congress.

“I think of how often I wrote those fateful words: Denied.”

She had been hired by a US health insurance firm to manage claims. At first, there was a general understanding that some ten percent of claims are bogus. Then there was publication of every worker on the floor’s claims rejection rate. Then there was pressure to make a ten percent rejection rate. Then it became like a quota system.

Then the rejection rate required kept being increased.

It was her job, a professional physician, to find ways to deny a claim, ways that might either stick, or discourage the claimant from trying for redress.

Now I am returning to the original topic of self-inspection.

Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, or WSIB, is an Ontario government body that, in the words of its own website,

Oversees workplace safety education and training, provides disability benefits, monitors the quality of health care, and assists in early and safe return to work.

WSIB was recently challenged for the way in which it rejects claims.

This work is contracted out.
It is performed over the telephone.
Claims are rejected when no face to face interview has taken place.
The rejection rate is now about fifteen percent.

WSIB ‘audited itself’ and discovered that it’s practices in this regard are perfectly OK and are fair to the claimants.
I wonder if they conducted this self-inspection by telephone without meeting any of the contractors who reject injury claims by telephone.

What’s really got my attention here is the fifteen percent rejection rate.

• This is a public number (like the ten percent starting rate in the US health insurance testimony)
• Contractors cannot possibly be motivated to increase their client’s costs.
• Rejection by telephone seems to be to be the flimsiest possible evidence on which to assume (and essentially convict of) application fraud
• 15% seems high. More than one in seven claims is bogus?
• Bonuses in large organizations, including large bureaucracies, is based on increased income and/or reduced costs.
• Could there possibly be pressure to raise that 15% bar?

I think we need a real audit of

• this rejection rate
• this method of assessing claims
• this method of assessing how we asses, at WSIB

Comments? usual rules apply.