As the Civil War began to rage in 1861, the American press became enraptured with an idea—that Giuseppe Garibaldi, the gallant Italian nationalist and erstwhile New Yorker who had become famous fighting wars of independence in two hemispheres, was willing to join the Union cause.

There was only one condition: The Union had to embrace emancipation. “If your war is for freedom, I am with you with 20,000 men,” Garibaldi told an American diplomat, the historian Don Doyle wrote in The Cause of All Nations. Garibaldi was convinced that he would make short work of the armies of the decadent planter aristocracy, save the “Great American Republic,” and then move on to liberating all the enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere.

The Union wasn’t ready to commit to emancipation, however, and Garibaldi never fought for the United States—a shame for the Union army, which had to wait years for a brave and competent commander. Millions of other immigrants did fight for the Union. “Immigrants and the sons of immigrants constituted well over 40 percent of the Union’s armed forces,” Doyle wrote. As with Black troops who were fighting for a nation that did not yet recognize them as equals, many of these immigrant soldiers were defending ideals—American ideals that they held more closely than some of their native-born white brothers in arms did. One of the soldiers Doyle described, the German American immigrant August Horstmann, wrote to his family of his willingness to “die in the fight for freedom and the preservation of the Union … The freedom of the oppressed and the equality of human rights must first be fought for here!” We can spend all day listing the ways America does not live up to this ideal, but that does not make it any less worthy, or change the fact that Americans have long been willing to fight to defend it.

[From the November 2022 issue: The American idea]

Many Americans at the time regarded immigrant enlistees with suspicion, seeing them as mere foreigners. Given the contradictory nature of the American founding—one that protected slavery while proclaiming universal equality—that sentiment is perhaps understandable from the perspective of 1861. It was a little strange to see it expressed at the Republican National Convention in 2024.

The Ohio Republican Senator J. D. Vance, who once feared that Donald Trump would be “America’s Hitler,” is now a convert to Trump’s cause. Trump has always reveled in forcing former opponents to supplicate themselves, and his targets have always validated his judgment by trading their dignity for their ambitions. In his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination, Vance put forth a profoundly reactionary idea, couched in deflecting platitudes, that America is a “nation,” not “just an idea.”

You know, one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea. And to be clear, America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas, like the rule of law and religious liberty—things written into the fabric of our Constitution and our nation. But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

The first problem with this is that Vance does not believe in the rule of law, having told Vanity Fair in 2022 that Trump should simply ignore Supreme Court rulings he disfavors. Vance’s view of “religious liberty” is likewise one in which conservative Christians have the right to impose their religious dictates on everyone else. So it’s not as though Vance even upholds the good American ideas mentioned. Also, as the writer John Ganz observes, “Vance didn’t include any part of the Declaration, egalitarianism or even freedom as the ‘brilliant ideas,’ just vaguely gesturing to the ‘Constitution,’ religious liberty and the rule of law.” Vance did insist that “we will put the citizens of America first, whatever the color of their skin,” a commitment that he undermines with his definition of America. Indeed, given that Vance has embraced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory as a plot to import “Democrat voters” through illegal immigration, as though Hispanic voters are mere liberal automatons, it’s entirely fair to question the sincerity of his egalitarianism here.

The argument that America is a “nation” and not an idea is much more sinister than perhaps it sounds at first listen. If America is a creedal nation, then anyone can be an American. But if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others. I suspect that Vance wishes to have it both ways, signaling an exclusivist vision of America to his far-right allies while still including vague gestures to pluralism so he can take umbrage at anyone who extends the logic of his argument to its natural conclusion. Vance’s description of whom he includes in America as a “nation” makes this somewhat clearer, as he describes a cemetery where he plans to be buried:

Now, in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now. Now, that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

As a historical matter, this is false, but it is also not special. Human beings have been willing to fight for “their homeland” for their entire existence, from prehistory to the present day. To say that Americans are willing to fight for their plot of land is to say that they are like every other group of people that has ever existed and that exists now. It is to say that there is nothing particularly special about America or American ideals at all. But the ideals that have animated the American project have exercised such a powerful appeal around the world precisely because they speak to more universal aspirations. And the notion that some Americans are better than others is a rejection of those ideals.

Vance’s narrow tribalism is an expression of contempt for not only the America that exists, where people of different backgrounds have found love and community with one another, but also for the universalist ideals that Americans have fought and died for. It is a history that, by his own description, Vance cannot even fathom.

[Tom Nichols: The moral collapse of JD Vance]

The Union won the Civil War in part because people were willing to fight for what Vance calls “abstractions.” Immigrants from around the world enlisted, fought, and died wearing Union blue for the cause of human freedom, even when many of their native-born white comrades did not share their beliefs. It was not the first or last time in American history that immigrants would, because of their intense patriotism and idealism about America, remind those of us who have been here for generations how precious ideals such as democracy and pluralism truly are. One almost wonders whether it is that very patriotism and commitment to American ideals that Vance finds repulsive and inconvenient.

In Vance’s definition of what it means for America to be a “nation,” these people who sacrificed their lives to preserve the republic are less American than the soldiers of the slaver army that sought to destroy it. Some of those Union veterans are buried in cemeteries like the one Vance describes, after being forced to bear the kind of nativist bile spewed at the RNC. Vance’s definition of America is less a nation than an entitlement, something inherited, like a royal title or a trust fund. The irony is that Vance’s idea of the nation is as much an abstraction, an imagined community, as the American creed he disdains; it is simply narrow, cramped, and ugly. Unfortunately, people fight and die for those too.   

Vance did give a brief nod to pluralism, saying, “It is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” Who the “we” and “them” are here is left implied but unsaid. The idea that Trump and Vance are interested in protecting the rights of Americans “whatever the color of their skin” clashes with their conception of true American citizenship as containing a kind of grandfather clause, dependent on having a particular ancestry from a particular time.  

Either we have a commitment to equal rights for all or there is a hierarchy of Americans who inherit greater status because they happened to be born to the right families.

Which of these ideals, do you think, are Trump and Vance genuinely committed to?

With the latest MySQL Innovation Release, we decided that it was time to remove the remaining weak authentication plugin: mysql_native_password.

We previously deprecated it and made it not default loaded in MySQL 8.4 LTS and, now, in 9.0 it’s gone!

Reasons

Oracle places significant attention on the security of all its products, and MySQL is no exception. The removal of the weak authentication plugin has been carefully considered, we had some extra time for the LTS release as it was initially intended for version 8.4, but it is now fully effective.

But why is the mysql_native_password considered as weak compared to more modern authentication methods like the default caching_sha2_password:

1. Weak Hashing Algorithm: mysql_native_password uses the SHA-1 hashing algorithm to hash passwords. SHA-1 is considered weak and vulnerable to certain types of cryptographic attacks, such as collision attacks, where two different inputs produce the same hash output (see SHAttered).
2. No Salt: mysql_native_password does not use salting when hashing passwords. Salting adds random data to the password before hashing, which makes it more difficult for attackers to use precomputed hashes to crack passwords. The lack of salting makes this authentication method more vulnerable to such attacks.
3. No Iterations: more secure hashing methods use multiple iterations of the hash function to slow down the hashing process, making brute-force attacks more time-consuming. mysql_native_password does not use multiple iterations, which makes it faster to compute and therefore easier to brute-force.

Implications

In practice, this means that old connectors that were already struggling with MySQL 8.0, like PHP 7.2 for example, won’t be able to connect to MySQL 9.0.

Let’s have a look at this simple PHP example:

<?php
$servername = "192.168.56.1";
$username = "test_user";
$password = "xxxxxxx";


echo "PHP version: " . phpversion() . "\n";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password );

if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error . "\n");
}
echo "Connected successfully\n";

echo "MySQL version: " . $conn->server_info . "\n";

$conn->close();
?>

The script is running on a fresh Oracle Linux 8 with PHP and php-mysqlnd installed:

[root@mysql1 ~]# cat /etc/oracle-release 
Oracle Linux Server release 8.6

[root@mysql1 ~]# rpm -qa | grep php
php-mysqlnd-7.2.24-1.module+el8.2.0+5510+6771133c.x86_64
php-cli-7.2.24-1.module+el8.2.0+5510+6771133c.x86_64
php-fpm-7.2.24-1.module+el8.2.0+5510+6771133c.x86_64
php-pdo-7.2.24-1.module+el8.2.0+5510+6771133c.x86_64
php-common-7.2.24-1.module+el8.2.0+5510+6771133c.x86_64
php-7.2.24-1.module+el8.2.0+5510+6771133c.x86_64

Now let’s run the script that connects to our MySQL 9.0 server where the test_user has been created:

SQL> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 9.0.0     |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.0005 sec)

SQL> select user, host, plugin from mysql.user where user='test_user';
+-----------+------+-----------------------+
| user      | host | plugin                |
+-----------+------+-----------------------+
| test_user | %    | caching_sha2_password |
+-----------+------+-----------------------+
1 row in set (0.0009 sec)

[root@mysql1 ~]# php test.php 
PHP version: 7.2.24
PHP Warning:  mysqli::__construct(): The server requested authentication method
 unknown to the client [caching_sha2_password] in /root/test.php on line 9
PHP Warning:  mysqli::__construct(): (HY000/2054): The server requested
 authentication method unknown to the client in /root/test.php on line 9
Connection failed: The server requested authentication method unknown to the client

Solutions

The only valid, supported, and recommended solution if you want to use MySQL 9 is to upgrade your connector. For this example, it will be required to upgrade to a more recent PHP.

A man who knows is worth two!

You can also continue to use MySQL 8. MySQL 8.4 is an LTS version that is still supported for many years (extended support will end in April 2032).

If you don’t use any support and if you run MySQL on your own, in the end, MySQL is Open Source and pluggable, you can write your own authentication plugin and why not backport the mysql_native_password one? This is not recommended of course as it won’t make it more secure but it’s feasible. Everything is (almost) feasible and that’s the reason why MySQL is cool.

This is an example:

Enjoy MySQL and enjoy secure connections to MySQL 9.0!

CHICAGO — Local pooch Hamburger is reportedly hiding under his home’s kitchen table from Fourth of July fireworks, not due to fear of the sound, but because of the jingoistic, colonial mindset that they represent, skeptical sources confirmed.

“The state of our nation’s affairs is absolutely abhorrent,” said the four-year-old rescue before pausing to bark at a squirrel and stare into the distance for 30 seconds. “How can we stand by and wave little flags of Stars and Stripes that were made in factories overseas by underpaid workers as we continue to funnel billions into our military, deny our citizens their basic rights, and raise kids full of so much hatred and vitriol for one another? I can’t celebrate this country and neither should you. Good boys stand against fascism in all forms.”

Hamburger’s owner, Kevin deLoane, reaffirmed the dog’s political activism.

“I thought he just hated fireworks because they are so fucking annoying and they scare the crap out of him when he’s trying to nap, but this seems to be a deeper issue,” said deLoane. “Last week he chewed up mail from the Clinton foundation, bit our neighbor with the thin blue line sticker on his car, and spent ten minutes aggressively barking at the American flag outside the post office. The most troubling thing now though is he won’t poop unless it’s on a well-manicured lawn with Trump or Biden sign. And when he finally does poop he stares at the sign and unleashes powerful turds that I need more than one bag to clean up.”

John Peterson, the neighbor who was bitten by Hamburger last week believes the dog needs proper training to learn to love this country.

“That dog is out of control. I know for a fact he was brought up here from Mexico illegally by a local dog rescue, so if Hamburger doesn’t like America he can leave. Kevin needs to raise a more patriotic dog. If you can’t depend on a dog to defend this country, then it won’t defend your home,” said Peterson while walking his Rottweiler named. “Tank here knows what this country represents. He only marks his territory on a strip of grass that looks like Puerto Rico. But these coddled dogs can’t handle when their treats aren’t organic, or when people only celebrate the greatest day of the year.”

Following the rise of opinionated dogs, TNT Fireworks is reportedly piloting a firework that emits a frequency that only certain dogs can hear called “The Quake Maker Dog Whistle.”

The post Dog Doesn’t Like Fireworks “Because of What They Represent” appeared first on The Hard Times.

Joe Biden must resign the presidency. The last person to do so was Richard Nixon, who left in disgrace after abusing the powers of his office. Nixon had to resign because he led an assault on American democracy. Biden must resign for the opposite reason: to give American democracy its best chance of surviving.

The American right has spent every day since Biden was nominated in 2020 presenting him as an incompetent, doddering old fool, incapable of discharging the responsibilities of the office. Biden’s task at the first presidential debate, on Thursday, was to dismiss those allegations as mere smears, as he did in 2020. Instead, he confirmed that he has aged dramatically over the past four years. Biden was very old to begin with, and at the debate he appeared far more  visibly diminished than he has in the past.

[Read: It wasn’t just the debate]

Subsequent reporting has confirmed that Biden’s condition is worse than Democrats had been willing to publicly admit. Yesterday, The New York Times reported that “in the weeks and months before President Biden’s politically devastating performance on the debate stage in Atlanta, several current and former officials and others who encountered him behind closed doors noticed that he increasingly appeared confused or listless, or would lose the thread of conversations.” Similar claims have been reported elsewhere.

Now perhaps it really was just a bad night, and Biden remains as sharp as he was in 2020. If that’s the case, then he should be able to make the kind of public appearances necessary to quell these complaints. If he proves himself capable of doing so, I’ll happily acknowledge error. But after a week of disastrous coverage about his mental fitness, he has not. That is unavoidably ominous.  

Biden was behind in the polls prior to the debate. A strong performance might have calmed fears about his age rather than confirming them, and although it remains early, polls taken after the debate show his support softening. As the political scientist Lee Drutman writes, “Biden’s debate performance has, of course, cemented the number one concern that most voters have about re-electing him: he is way too old to be president. Once a negative impression sets in, it takes much more work to dislodge that impression.”

The Trumpified Supreme Court’s decision on Monday granting imperial powers to any president unscrupulous enough to use them has raised the stakes of the election tremendously, and they were already too high. As it stands, Donald Trump’s advisers are already indicating that a Trump victory in November would result in not the inauguration of a president but the coronation of a caesar. If Trump wins, he will have the presidency Nixon wanted, one in which nothing the president does is illegal. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which aspires to staff a future Trump administration, has made clear that the MAGA right contemplates using this newfound imperial power to employ political violence against its opposition. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the far-right network Real America News. Trump’s supporters seem less to wish to govern than to rule indefinitely by force, and they believe that the Court has given them its blessing.

[Read: Something has gone deeply wrong at the Supreme Court]

For that reason, Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas on Tuesday called for Biden to withdraw from the race. But that is insufficient. If Biden is incapable of campaigning because of his deterioration, he is also not capable of being president. And if he is incapable of being president, then he should resign and allow Vice President Kamala Harris to take the oath of office.

Whoever holds the office should be in full control of their faculties. It does no good to point out that Trump was deranged but energetic at the debate, that he rambles incoherently, that he is a criminal, an authoritarian, and a racist. It is obviously, incontestably true that a senile president with a competent and ethical staff would be preferable to an authoritarian one who wants to fill his administration with guys who sound like school-shooter manifestos. But unfortunately Trump is propped up by a cult of personality whose members will not abandon him no matter what he does, and if Biden is unfit to debate and campaign, then he is also not fit to govern.

The earlier Biden resigns, the faster the Democratic Party can move to reunite behind the new nominee and concentrate its efforts on keeping Trump from returning to the White House. Harris would become the party’s presumptive nominee, enjoying the prestige and advantages of incumbency. She is also the only candidate who can legally access the financial war chest the Biden campaign has amassed. As Brian Beutler writes, “it’s impossible to identify the most prudent path forward with certainty.” There is no clear way to know if Harris is a politically riskier option than Biden. But if Biden’s mental state is as bad as it appeared at the debate, then there is no other choice.

Some Democrats fear the prospect of a Harris candidacy—perhaps even enough to wish for Biden to hang on until the election, despite the dangers. They worry that she will only exacerbate the appeal of Trump’s implicit promise to restore racial and gender hierarchies. Indeed, Trump’s brain trust designed his 2016 campaign around the belief that the recent Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney had failed to mobilize demoralized white voters because they had not been overtly racist enough, and that the path to victory lay through deliberate racial polarization.

Given Biden’s condition, the Trump campaign will try to stoke irrational fears about a potential Harris presidency anyway. And the hypothetical, driven as it is by lurid right-wing fantasies, will necessarily be worse than the reality. That is, Harris can begin to defuse apocalyptic right-wing arguments against her—that she is some kind of left-wing radical who will render the country unrecognizable—by governing wisely for the remainder of the term. The strongest rebuttal to the racist caricatures of Barack Obama was always his own public conduct. Besides, as The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie notes, passing over Harris with a brokered convention or some other process would also risk demobilizing key Democratic constituencies by confirming the worst caricatures of the party: that since Obama, the party is content to have ethnic minorities as foot soldiers, surrogates, and subordinates, but not as leaders.

If Biden merely steps aside as the nominee, then the Trump campaign can play on racist fears of what a Harris presidency might bring, in a dark echo of the lurid 19th-century warnings of “Negro domination.” The phrase “DEI president” will be on Fox News faster than the Millenium Falcon can do the Kessel Run. But if Harris has actually governed the country—albeit for a short time—then those warnings become less believable. Americans will be able to judge her intentions for themselves. In picking a running mate, Harris should follow Obama’s example when he chose Biden, and select a moderate who can help assuage the inevitable smear campaign she will face, charging that she is a closet radical. Harris, by her own example, is best positioned to defuse any race-baiting in which the Trump campaign engages. Although a new vice president would have to be confirmed by the House and Senate, rendering her choice vulnerable to Republican obstruction, the Senate rules can be altered to eliminate the chance to filibuster such a choice. The House is a bigger risk, given the GOP majority’s fealty to Trump.

[From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem]

Biden’s inner circle will probably feel that this is all deeply unfair to him. After all, the president’s domestic-policy success has been underappreciated. Wages are up, unemployment is low, manufacturing is increasing, the economy has been growing for four years, and the alternative-energy industry that may mitigate the impact of climate change and divest America from its dependence on fossil fuels is booming. Biden has been an enthusiastic supporter and protector of organized labor. The United States had the strongest post-pandemic economic recovery of any Western nation, and although the supply shock that followed the pandemic induced a period of painful inflation, even that has begun to subside, with wages outpacing inflation.

If the basis of Trumpism were simply economic rather than social and political, Biden would be something close to the president Trumpist intellectuals said they wanted. He has put money in the pockets of low-wage workers, revitalized American industry, and, thanks to recent agreements with Mexico, stemmed a rise in illegal immigration that has been the subject of hysterical right-wing propaganda. Even crime is down dramatically from the Trump era. But Trumpism is about offering status, hierarchy, and domination to its rank-and-file voters in exchange for an upward redistribution of power and income to its elites, and that is not what Biden is offering.

I understand that many liberals and Democrats feel that the political press has been out to destroy Biden. I’ve observed that newsrooms have moved right in framing and tone since 2020, likely a reaction to the common criticism that they were too harsh on Trump and too supportive of the protests that followed George Floyd’s death. The coverage incentives have also shifted—the Biden era has been bad for the media business, but panicked, highly educated liberals are loyal readers, subscribers, and sharers. But more than that, there’s the simple bias toward novelty: Compared with Biden’s apparent deterioration, Trumpist criminality and authoritarianism is old news. These incentives, which have shaped the negative coverage of the Biden presidency, will not entirely change if Harris assumes the office; she will face her own gantlet of negative coverage and harsh scrutiny, some of which is a necessary part of running for president.

But the simple fact remains that if one believes Biden cannot campaign or debate successfully, then he cannot run the country presently. The Constitution contemplates a scenario in which someone would need to take the place of a president who is so diminished, and that someone is the vice president. Biden should step aside from both the campaign and the presidency, and allow Harris to take her best shot at saving the country from those who would destroy it.