The New Yorker Strongbox

The following is cut-and-pasted from an article in The New Yorker:

The New Yorker Strongbox

Strongbox is a new way for you to share information, messages, and files with our writers and editors and is designed to provide you with a greater degree of anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.

To help protect your anonymity, Strongbox is only accessible using the Tor network (https://www.torproject.org). When using Strongbox, The New Yorker will not record your I.P. address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will we embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser.

You can read our full privacy promise here.

The New Yorker Strongbox is powered by SecureDrop. To get to Strongbox and begin using it to contact writers and editors at The New Yorker, just follow these two steps:

1. Download and install software to access the Tor Project: https://www.torproject.org. This should only take a few minutes.

2. Once you have access to the Tor network, go to Strongbox at http://strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion, where you will find further instructions on how to submit files and messages to The New Yorker.

You will be assigned a randomly generated and unique code name as part of the process. If a writer or editor at The New Yorker wants to contact you about the information you have submitted, he or she will leave a message for you in Strongbox. These messages are the only way we will be able to reach you, and this message can only be accessed using your code name.

Our privacy promise

The New Yorker's Strongbox is designed to let you communicate with our writers and editors with greater anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail.

When you visit or use our public Strongbox server at http://strngbxhwyuu37a3.onion, The New Yorker and our parent company, Condé Nast, will not record your I.P. address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will we embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser.

Strongbox servers are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Condé Nast.

Strongbox is designed to be accessed only through a “hidden service” on the Tor anonymity network, which is set up to conceal both your online and physical location from us and to offer full end-to-end encryption for your communications with us. This provides a higher level of security and anonymity in your communication with us than afforded by standard e-mail or unencrypted Web forms. Strongbox does not provide perfect security. Among other risks, if you share your unique code name, or if your computer is compromised, any activities, including communications through Strongbox, should be considered compromised as well.

The system is provided on an “as is” basis, with no warranties or representations, and any use of it is at the user's own risk.

Excellent GoPro Tutorial

Arctic Sea Ice, Minimum Volumes, 1979-2015

Will the polar bear go the way of the dinosaur? Extinction is forever.



Albedo is the fraction of solar energy (shortwave radiation) reflected from the Earth back into space. It is a measure of the reflectivity of the earth's surface. Ice, especially with snow on top of it, has a high albedo: most sunlight hitting the surface bounces back towards space.

Less ice, lower albedo; increased absorption of solar energy into the atmosphere. Over the last several decades, the volume of Arctic Sea ice has reduced by something like 80%.

David Brooks Gets It Right!

Wow! What a blockbuster! In an article entitled The Republicans' Incompetence Caucus, The New York Times columnist David Brooks, who runs closely behind Bloody Bill Kristol (of The Weekly Standard) as being dependably wrong about everything, got one right for a change! Click here!

Over the past 30 years, or at least since Rush Limbaugh came on the scene, the Republican rhetorical tone has grown ever more bombastic, hyperbolic and imbalanced. Public figures are prisoners of their own prose styles, and Republicans from Newt Gingrich through Ben Carson have become addicted to a crisis mentality. Civilization was always on the brink of collapse. Every setback, like the passage of Obamacare, became the ruination of the republic. Comparisons to Nazi Germany became a staple.

And again:

Republicans developed a contempt for Washington and government, but they elected leaders who made the most lavish promises imaginable. Government would be reduced by a quarter! Shutdowns would happen! The nation would be saved by transformational change!

Says Brooks, "This anti-political political ethos produced elected leaders of jaw-dropping incompetence."

Welcome to Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and the Freedom Caucus.

Pigs fly! Hell freezes over! David Brooks acknowledges that over the last 30 years, the Republican party has become steadily more insane!

GoPro Hero4 Silver Tutorial

Republicans Split: Rebuild The Village, Or Burn It Down?

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Peter Wehner (who served in the last three Republican administrations) entitled "Seeking President, No Experience Necessary."

People who would never board an airplane piloted by a person who has never flown before, or even used a flight simulator, apparently want to elect as president someone who has never served in public office.

It was a huge shock to Republicans when Obama was reelected in 20012. Wehner says this was a psychological blow like that suffered by Democrats in 1984 with the reelection of Reagan; could be, but I find a more recent parallel in the 2004 reelection of Dubya. Okay, he stole it in 2000 with the help of his father's Supreme Court, and Kerry was an unappealing candidate -- but Dubya??!

... by 2012, President Obama was viewed by Republicans as a complete failure whose repudiation was inevitable. The fact that he easily won re-election, with 332 electoral votes to Mitt Romney’s 206, was a huge psychological blow to Republicans, much like the one Democrats experienced in 1984, when Ronald Reagan — despised by many liberals — won re-election in a landslide.

When the Republicans swept the House and Senate in 2014, low-information Fox News voters were led by demagogues into believing that the policies Obama's administration had enacted in the previous six years would be undone; they have reacted with impotent rage against the Republicans they elected, who of course were constrained by the checks and balances of the U.S. constitution. Without a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the Affordable Care Act can't be repealed, as some lying politicians promised; neither can the legislation legalizing gay marriage or the executive order on nuclear weapons with Iran (which lying demagogue politicians, pundits, and hate radio jocks are characterizing as Obama having handed Iran The Bomb).

The way this has worked itself out is in rage directed at Republican lawmakers. Many on the right refuse to recognize the institutional constraints that prevent lawmakers from doing what they want them to do, which is use their majority status in Congress to reverse the early achievements of the Obama presidency. One telling example: Advocates for the 2013 government shutdown insisted that doing so could fully defund the Affordable Care Act, when in fact no such thing was possible. Obamacare’s subsidies are an entitlement whose spending levels are not set by the annual appropriations process, meaning a shutdown could not unilaterally defund or eliminate it. No matter; with Republicans in control of the House and Senate, the Obama agenda was expected to be undone root and branch. The fact that it could not be undone created fury.

Hence the popularity of Trump, Carson, and Fiorina.

Home Of The Brave?

Click here for a Charles Blow article in The New York Times entitled "On Guns, Fear is Winning."

Fear: What would Fox News do without it?

Krugman On Energy Policy

Nobel-winning economist and columnist at The New York Times, Paul Krugman writes another winner: an article entitled "Enemies of the Sun." Click here for his critique of Republican energy policy (drill, baby, drill; frack, baby, frack -- oh, and as Don Blankenship would say, "Run coal").

Krugman points out that the energy policies of Bush and Rubio specifically (but the other candidates' policies are along the same lines) are to the right even of Dick Cheney, of all people, as expressed in Cheney's report derived from deliberations with oil, gas, and coal company executives in secret early in the Bush years.

One factor in the bullheaded Republican insistence on "Old Energy," says Krugman, is the general widespread antipathy toward the subject of climate change, which is a principle of Republican dogma that poisons from the get-go any discussion of renewable energy.