Eichmann was hanged for his crimes against humanity; Haspel was whitewashed and promoted to become head of the US’ department of dirty tricks. Down in their piggy, nasty brains, the people who run ICE have realized that what my accountant said is true: the only people in hell are those who were caught in the act, and those who kept records.
By now, the establishment ought to be painfully aware that the FBI/NSA retro-scope is aimed at them, as well. Sometime in the next couple of years I expect a legislative backlash, especially if it keeps being used to take down friends of the high and mighty.
People who keep scorecards don’t really know what’s happening in the world.
“Just landed – a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” [cnn]
Something seems to have clicked and I’m getting good results forming welded bar-stock, now. I’ve started to consistently and easily (it’s still work, it’s becoming predictable work) get forge-welds and I’m producing bars that harden nicely, don’t warp or blow apart, and seem to be very tough with good edge-holding properties.
We are often told we have “instincts” – behaviors that are wired into us through evolution and time. These instincts are different from operational functions like peristalsis (the rythmic clenching of our intestines) and … well, where’s the line? We’d like to think that walking is, maybe, an instinctive behavior but – has anyone who believes that ever had a baby? Is eating an instinctive behavior? Has anyone who believes that ever cleaned baby-projected food off the ceiling? It appears that there is a lot more learning going on than instinct.
In the late 1990s, the US Government was setting up a case to argue that hacking equated to terrorism. Because, while it was mostly being used for illicit state-craft, it could potentially be used by terrorists. In 1997, at a keynote for Black Hat Briefings, I warned the hacker community what was coming but – at that time – there was a great deal of “community outreach” being done by NSA – they were hiring hackers (whose work we now see leaking on a regular basis) and it was all very hip and friendly.
I feel like we typically leave big parts of our lives and motivations unexamined; sometimes, if we’re lucky, something happens that makes us engage our brains about one thing or another and we examine it and think about it enough to get an idea about how we work inside. [Read more…]
In The Year of The Pig one of the striking moments, which I focused on, [stderr] is when several of the people promoting the US’ involvement in Vietnam used the same construction for their arguments; it was clear that they were tapped into a common source – presumably what are now called “talking points memos” produced by government agencies in order to get out a consistent “message” to the public.
The Soviets briefly were ahead of the US in the “space race” and took maximum propaganda mileage from it.