CBS 60 Minutes: US in grave danger of cyber shutdown; Agassi interview

Tonight, Sunday Nov. 8, CBS 60 Minutes presented a frightening report, “Sabotaging the System”, primarily comprising an interview of former admiral Mile McConnell by Steve Kroft. The story link has web URL here with the title “U.S. Unprepared for Cyber Attacks.”

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Hackers could bring down the electric power grid and keep it crippled for months, he warns. (Some conservative have warned that rogue terrorists could accomplish the same with an EMP attack.) It’s not clear how they could get in from the public Internet, but one problem is that US power companies get so many critical components from overseas, and the hardware is not easily replaced if sabotaged.

The report covered two major blackouts in Brazil (kept secret) in 2005 and 2007. It also covered infiltration of Pentagon systems by rogue flash drives, now banned.

The report says that one of the greatest dangers is not just the looting of individual bank accounts by hackers, but the corruption of the reconciliation system in banking, which must operate in real time immediately.

The report was a “pre 9/11 moment” with respect to cyber terror.

Then Katie Couric interviewed tennis champ Andre Agaassi, with a new memoir (“Open”), who admits now that he grew up “hating tennis” because of his father, and then sunk for a period into crystal meth before making a comeback. The segment shows his physical transformation, which was so dashing at 18, when he was already going bald and wearing a hairpiece. It seems that over the years that as he went down he lost almost all his hair, literally – catching the notice of “The Advocate” at one point.

ABC Nightline: detailed account of Fort Hood Incident

ABC Nightline, on Friday Nov. 5, covered the Fort Hood incident minute by minute, including descriptions of what Major Nidal Malik Hasan looked like, with facial expressions, during the incident before he was shot down by a civilian policewoman, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, reportedly a mother of two girls. The main ABC story is by Sarah Netter and Alice Maggin, link here. The title is “Fort Hood Hero Kimberly Munley's Gunfight With Major Nidal Malik Hasan: Wounded in Both Legs and Wrist, Sergeant Kept Firing”.

Earlier Friday, both Larry King Live and Anderson Cooper 360 had covered the incident, with reports that Maj. Hasan was still alive, in military police custody, paralyzed and possibly in a coma. There has been wide discussion elsewhere about his blog posts, and the legal difficulties the government has in pursuing them, given the First Amendment. But apparently Hasan was secretive (despite his blogging) and did not allow people into his home, and sometimes worked on a neighbor’s home computer. Police have seized all of his computer files and other home equipment and possessions to investigate the possibility of other conspirators, but the Army already believes he likely acted alone. Likewise, his service record as a military doctor and psychiatrist was underwhelming, to say the least. The Uniformed Services University of Health Science had been covered in early 2008 in Terry Sanders’s film “Fighting for Life” (movies blog, March 20, 2008).

CWTV's "Supernatural" explores Multiverses

The Supernatural episode tonight “Changing Channels” went into some interesting conceptual stuff as far as physics is concerned – enough to please Dinesh D’Souza. The Trickster puts Sam and Dean into an alternate universe (using some of the seven “other” dimensions) where they are living inside a few television shows, including a medical drama requiring scrubbing. Sam and Dean find they must live inside the world of these shows to transcend it. That’s an idea that I explored myself in a screenplay called “Baltimore Is Missing” in which the protagonist rides a train that goes astray back into time, and then finds he is a puppet in a model railroad run by an old nemesis. The link is here/

Dean (Jensen Ackles) has said that he no longer trusts Sam (Jared Padalecki), even though in earlier seasons the younger Sam seemed to be the steadier of the two brothers.



Wikipedia attribution link for Multiverse drawing in public domain

"V": ABC remakes 1980s miniseries: what happens to V-creatures in a disco?

“V” was a mildly controversial miniseries on NBC in 1983 from Kenneth Johnson and Warner Borthers television. This time, ABC gets to do the rerun, with politics brought up to date by 20+ years, directed by Yves Simoneau. We all known by now that “V” stands for both “visitors” and “victory.” Somehow, the concept reminds me of the 1984 potboiler film “Red Dawn.”

It’s pretty sudden, all the earthquakes, as the spaceships hover over major cities on V-Day, hanging in the air rather like those of “Independence Day” or “District 9”. The face of Anna (Morena Baccarin) hangs on the spaceship as an image, and journalist Chad Decker (Everwood’s Scott Wolf) gets an interview with her. (The 1983 version had started with rolling spaceships moving across the American desert southwest.) The website for the new series is this.

When Anna tells Chad that she can’t be asked any questions that would put the visitors in a bad light, Chad has to explain the nature of terrestrial journalism—objectivity. But it’s clear quickly that Anna promises utopia (“universal health care” is a great buzzword, isn’t it?) in exchange for slavery and political subjugation. Already there is a hint of Marxism in the visitors’ system.

There are, of course, “the kids” – Logan Huffman plays Tyler, who gets a ride on an extraterrestrial chopper into the mother ship, inside which there is a kind of synecdoche, a model city, that is rather interesting to look at – all reminding me of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama”. In fact, why not make Clarke’s “Childhood’s End” into a film, starting with a landing of utopian creatures from a bird-world, ready to set up a group mind on Earth.

Well, birds (as dinosaurs) are post-reptilian, and underneath the surface, the V-people, buff as the men may look, are reptilian or lizard-like. At least that’s what I remember from the 80s. Imagine some dirty dancing in a disco, and someone gets too aggressive with the kneading and pulls away not just the hair but the skin, revealing the scales underneath. That’s how I would write this. V-creatures would never survive Halloween in a gay disco. Imagine them as in reverse costumes.

I don’t think that the premise of the series is as intriguing as that of “Flashforward”, but we’ve seen this series before, and the big red “V” is bound to generate interest.

Picture: spaceship model at NASA museum in Chantilly, VA

CBS 60 Minutes shows H1N1 vaccine manufacture in PA

CBS “60 Minutes” gave a tour of the only H1N1 vaccine manufacturing plant in the United States, in Pennsylvania, owned by French company Sanolfi Pasteur. Filmmakers had to don bodysuits and hairnets, and a very young man was supervisor.

The company says it has solved the problem that led to slow vaccine production at first.


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The locations of farms producing eggs for vaccine manufacture is a national security secret.

The segment also showed the recovery of a 15 year old football player from Arkansas who was on a ventilator for 17 days and is only slowly recovering.

Larry King Live, on Monday Nov. 2, presented brief interviews about H1N1 with opposing viewpoints on the vaccine, but also interviewed the parents of a seven year old who died of septic shock. Sanjay Gupta said that deaths in children usually result from complications of staphlycoccal pneumonia, a superbug, resulting in blood poisoning and collapse of circulation. A relapse of a fever that has gone away in a child is a possible warning sign of dangerous bacterial complications.

People over 55 or 60 seem much more resistant, and may have been exposed to a similar virus antigen in the 1940s. Seasonal flu vaccine may boost H1N1 immunity in older people only.

PBS Globe Trekker shows technical climb in Grand Tetons

The PBS Pilot Productions series “Globe Trekker” presented a particularly interesting segment of America’s best hikes, climbing the second highest peak of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, hosted by Justine Shapiro. There is a Blogger site for climbing in the Grand Tetons here. The Globe Trekker index is here, but I could not find the episode in the index. Here is a Wyoming PBS reference link. What's interesting is that an "average hike" in this very steep range (no foothills) requires some technical skill.

However, the program showed a technical climb the first day, with some ropes and crampons toward the end, to reach a hut at around 11000 feet, which was quite well supplied and packed with people. The host has some altitude sickness the first day but adjusts overnight, and reaches the summit the second day after starting at 5:30 AM. I understand that when people climb Mr. Rainier, they start the climb the second day at 2 AM to beat the thunderstorms.

The episode also showed a horseback ride through the Sangre De Cristo’s with a lot of manual trail work and hut building, and also a glider trip.

Attribution link for Wikipedia link for Grand Tetons Wide Angle Picture.


I visited Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons area in May 1981.

CNN Larry King Live and "ghostbusters"

"Larry King Live" tonight covered “ghostbusters”, bringing on a number of guests.

The show started out with interviews of “plumbers” Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson. There was a discussion of an event where a “paranormal” entity pulled a cord out of a socket.

Then Larry interviewed medium Chip Coffey, and psychic Mary T. Browne, and then Joan Rivers.

But the meat of the program was the investigatory group “Everyday Paranormal” with the Klinge Brothers (Brad and Barry Klinge) from the Discovery Channel’s “Ghost Lab”, link here. There was an investigation of ghosts in a hotel near the Alamo in San Antonio, TX, and of an incident where ghosts from Union soldiers in Gettysburg PA appeared while one of them was filming.

The basic LKL Halloween blog is here.

The interest in the paranormal is heightened this week by the film “Paranormal Events” (movies blog).