Some friends recently were saying my theory about KKK signaling in the open is just a theory. It’s true, I am proposing theories that are meant for dialogue, rather than saying I’m the final word on hidden signaling.

Nonetheless, hidden signaling of hate speech is a very real thing. It takes training and some careful observation to reveal the obfuscated messages without looking like you’ve lost your eyesight. Trust depends on establishing some clear explanations, or getting a fancy degree.

It has become sort of a running joke among friends for me to qualify what I say with “I may not have gone to Harvard, but my analysis is still good” after a professor at Harvard dismissed my points with “I haven’t seen someone at Harvard write that”.

With the Harvard-centricity of knowledge caveat out of the way, and without revealing how I ended up with equivalent or better training in militant symbols (shouldn’t matter anyway), let me relate to you the type of behavior that I believe needs greater scrutiny.

I’m not the first to write about Nazi tees hiding in plain sight, of course. A descendant of Nazi soldiers literally sent me a Mel Magazine article about Neo-Nazi apparel and asked me if there was anything I wanted for Christmas:

At a cursory glance, the T-shirt looks like an ad for Sea World. An orca, triumphantly jutting out of the sea, splashes water above the words “Antarktis-Expedition.” It takes just a second longer to notice the bold text hovering above the orca: “Save the White Continent.”

The shirt was created by the German label Thor Steinar, one of a few clothing brands that cater to neo-Nazis. Like Ansgar Aryan and Erik and Sons, Thor Steinar uses coded references to obscure events in Nazi history, veiled threats and playful imagery to flout German hate-speech laws, which forbid explicit references to the Third Reich.

So let’s just say I’ve been, and remain, in the right circles to know when I see something fishy. And that is why, while walking through an airport the other day, I could not help but notice someone wearing a giant 5th SS Panzer-Division symbol on a T-shirt.

First, I will explain the Nazi symbolism I am referencing. There are three parts: the SS, the Wiking and the Panzer-Division. An easy way of explaining these three symbols is to look at the marketplace of Neo-Nazi merchandise.

You perhaps can see how a SS, Wiking, and Panzer-Division ring has been segmented into the three parts around the finger, which makes it kind of unwieldy and large.

Now I will explain these three symbols on the ring, left to right:

• SS (schutzstaffel) = a criminal militant organization of the Nazi Party directly involved in numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity
• Wiking = “Nordic” volunteers commanded by Germans
• Panzer-Division = the 5th Panzer-Division of the SS Wiking, a motorized (tank and artillery) infantry

Here’s an example of the SS Wiking symbol on a tank, for some historic perspective, as it rolls its way towards committing war crimes

And here is a pamphlet from the same time period

Second, I was walking through an airport just the other day when to my great surprise I saw someone wearing a Nazi symbol. Unlike the ring, however, three symbols have been combined into a single giant one.

And here is a closer view, as I had to find out who was wearing this thing and why

Most people I’ve explained this to call it an unfortunate oversight, or poor (ignorant) choice in design.

One guy thought it couldn’t possibly be intentional as the words surrounding the “Nazi rune” (his words) were so peace inspiring. I found that logic to be a bit like saying a hunter isn’t going to shoot a deer because a camouflage suit seems so nature-loving.

The Nazis infamously broadcast peace slogans into France right before invasion, and even convinced some people in America that Nazis are pacifists (see America First propaganda).

Of course I had to walk up to this woman and ask her “what’s with the Nazi SS symbol?” She gasped and said “Oh no. Oh my god. Don’t look. I don’t mean to offend anyone” and then walked away.

Simply Southern is based in North Carolina and describes itself as a “brand to reflect the values of a southern lifestyle“. In their “giving back” section of the website they curiously depict black children next to marine animals.

There’s something not quite right about a BBC article about the death of Fernando Corbato.

First, the meat of the story describes sharing models of compute.

Using computers during the 50s was an exercise in frustration because the huge, monolithic machines could only handle one processing job at a time.

In a bid to overcome this limitation, Dr Corbato developed an operating system for computers called the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).

Rather than have the machine dedicated to one person, CTSS divided up the processing power of a computer into small slices so it could do little bits of work for lots of people.

Given all that…the BBC decided to run their story with a title of “Computer password inventor dies aged 93”.

Password inventor?

A lot of people think of the late Corbato this way, yet I’m not sure why that’s a good idea to keep saying it. The BBC could do better.

We are in an age where sharing systems are wildly popular and everyone hates passwords. Perhaps people think focusing on the password story will get more clicks? I don’t like how it distracts from the bigger picture.

It’s a bit like calling the guy who invented police (another sharing system) the inventor of the nightstick. Why focus on the latter when the former was their actual intent and more notable contribution? Even if there were other sharing systems around that time, Corbato’s sharing system work was seminal and very influential.

Second, the BBC describes antique compute power as “so fast”.

Even in the 50s and 60s computers were so fast that no user noticed they were only getting a small portion of a machine’s processing power at any one time.

WE have both “an exercise in frustration” because jobs had to be stacked, and yet at the same time “no user noticed they were only getting a small portion”. I find it hard to reconcile how frustration drove a user to solve something that no user noticed. Was it frustrating or was it invisible?

Also the story at this point ignores the development of batch processing in the late 1950s.

Anyway Wired describes the situation entirely differently, suggesting that slow speed actually led to hacking passwords.

In the spring of 1962, Scherr was looking for a way to bump up his usage time on CTSS. He had been allotted four hours per week, but it wasn’t nearly enough time to run the detailed performance simulations he’d designed for the new computer system. So he simply printed out all of the passwords stored on the system.

That makes more sense.

And finally, third, this whole narrative misses the point that Dr Corbato himself describes the use of a secret to gain entry as an obvious solution for shared systems.

He was reluctant to take credit for passwords, which begs the question why people are so intent on sticking it to him, instead of credit for a compute sharing model that can uniquely authenticate people.

I’ve seen some people reference IBM in the 1950s, when really there should be an investigation into Philco, RCA, ERA, NCR, GM NAA, Tymshare, National CSS, Dial Data and Fairchild computers from that time.

Many computer systems under development in the late 1950s were serving the US military. So by way of example, here is a page from a 1956 US Army FM26-5 booklet on the language used to handle access to an “internal” shared resource:

During WWII the 6888th (SixTripleEight) Central Postal Directory (CPD) all-black women battalion cleared nearly 20 million messages for Allied forces, The battalion adhered to the motto “No mail, low morale”.

Despite exceptional performance and historic significance they have not been fully recognized…and now a documentary aims to correct that oversight.

Service medals weren’t given to members of the battalion until 2014 and only last year a monument was dedicated in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This year the battalion finally received an Army Meritorious Unit Citation…although the US Army history site makes it seem like a lot more has happened during the prior 70 years.

The California Historical Society has made an event announcement for tomorrow, Weds evening:

Siler tells the story of both the abolitionists who challenged the corrosive anti-Chinese prejudices of the time and the young women who dared to flee their fate. She relates how the women who ran the Cameron House defied contemporary convention by physically rescuing children from the brothels where they worked or by snatching them off ships as they were being smuggled in–and how they helped bring the exploiters to justice.

You can read an excerpt here:

They hurried toward Nob Hill, where the grand mansions of California’s railroad and mining barons had been replaced by hotels with names like Fairmont and Mark Hopkins. Their size and sheer opulence were almost unimaginable to a girl raised in poverty in Hong Kong. After pushing through shoppers and workers returning home, they climbed the five steps to the bolted door of 920 Sacramento Street, a squat building straddling a steep hill.