I don’t think the word “strategy” works for the US’ policy in Syria, unless there is some secret deep master plan, it’s just the futile thrashing of an imperial power that has failed to learn that military ‘solutions’ are not always efficient, hardly ever clean, and always expensive.
Now that Trump has fired Comey, who’s his likely replacement?
NSA chief says they watched the Russians hack the French Elections.
A bit more detail has come out about one of the American spies in North Korea. And the story’s not fascinating and full of interesting trade-craft. There’s a bunch of clueless christian privilege.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved the magic of movies. There was a long time when I wanted to go into SFX (specifically, to wrangle weaponry for movies, after seeing so many stupid ray guns and anachronisms, like sterling 9mm submachineguns firing blaster bolts or MG42 ‘smart gun’ pulse rifles – and don’t even get me started on mis-balanced swords!) I started buying Cinefex when it first came out and only stopped when the pile got too heavy to move.
Movies are magic. So, you can imagine me squeeing long and hard when I got a chance to wander around the back lot at a major Hollywood studio.
Jean Meslier
Whoever has formed true ideas of the ignorance, credulity, negligence, and sottishness of common people, will always regard their religious opinions with the greater suspicion for their being generally established.
I’m a moral nihilist, which is not to say that I kick puppies and punch grandmothers – it’s just because I am unconvinced by the attempts to establish systems of ethics that I’ve encountered, so far. I’m a fan of “the golden rule”, i.e:
“That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.”
Apparently we’re going to have to have regular discussions about email security, until politicians get their heads out of the sand and realize that they are targets and regular victims of mid-skill-level attack, and they need to level up their game if they don’t want to periodically look stupid.
Email security is not hard. I’d say “it just takes a little attention to detail…” but it doesn’t even take that much. I can only conclude that politicians are just blockheads about information technology and politics and it just shows how eminently qualified they are to lead high-tech civilizations. [stderr]
The world of web-scraping ‘bots and click-farming results in weird stuff, sometimes. I got an email from a friend asking me what my involvement might have been in setting this up:
We all need one now and again. So here’s a young Carl Sagan, in his pre-turtleneck days, talking about aliens visiting us: