JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalHere are some links about HB Gary vs. Wikileaks/Anonymous/Greenwald
Sorry about that, the host for the images is down and thus my commentaries make little sense. Punch-and-Judy:
1) When Aaron Barr of the security firm and private military contractor HB Gary Federal threatened to expose the alleged leadership of Anonymous (his guess was wrong),
2) Anonymous retaliated by hacking Barr's mail accounts and throwing it on the Web,
3) allowing everyone to discover Barr's pitch to Bank of America for how HB Gary and two other security firms in an alliance called "Team Themis" could end their Wikileaks problem for them.
Barr's idea, gleaned from his own power point presentation, was to conduct multiplatform surveillance, spoofing and harrassment of Assange and Wikileaks, including of his family and his network, which Barr decided must include Greenwald as the main US supporter.
When this and other similarly criminal plans were exposed, BoA and other entities like Chamber of Commerce promptly denied having accepted any of Barr's pitches. Although Barr was initially recommended to BoA by their own fancy law firm. So who knows?
ON EDIT: Fixed some language, added more links...
Some stories off the Google:
http://gezellig.info/neighbourhood-watch-2-anonymous-militaryindustrial-complex/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/02/spy/
Very in-depth technical version (excellent!)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/how-one-security-firm-tracked-anonymousand-paid-a-heavy-price.ars/1
Greenwald's reaction
http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/
Greenwald talks about it on Colbert
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/375429/february-24-2011/corporate-hacker-tries-to-take-down-wikileaks---glenn-greenwald
I can't see the video anymore (Flash issues) but if it includes Colbert's initial summary of the case, it's excellent.
Following thread has much more material compiled, if you can get past the silly in-jokes at the start...
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=31176
How many levels of meta are we allowed to acknowledge?
I knew that was a joke, so does it count as a pledge or as something that everyone knows is a snow-job? Only thanks to the rules of etiquette, you must pretend otherwise to remain within the pale of acceptable discourse. You can't just say, bullshit! Like during the same campaign when he said he wouldn't "nation-build," he had me cracking up. Of course his already well-known Iran-Contra crew was about starting as many big wars as they only could.
It's like when Republicans use coded racism, and everyone gets the message, both supporters and detractors, but liberals can't call them on it because by whatever ridiculous media rules they've maintained plausible deniability.
Or like when his father came out and said, "I want to be the education president!" I mean, seriously, does transparent crap like that have to be dignified until he "proves" otherwise?
Or the Happy Skies initiative, or whatever the Bush policy to allow more pollution was called. Or, of course, the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. Or announcing Operation Iraqi Liberation for an hour, and then pretending they hadn't noticed what it spelled and switching to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
It's the difference between blaming a gadfly...
and confronting a coup d'etat in power. Under American conditions, the latter was not very dangerous to the individual, but it did challenge liberal assumptions about "democracy." It hurts to admit a group of criminal bullies crashed the process, seized the prize (rather easily), and then started some wars to get everyone behind them. It's easier to beat up Nader.
Yes, rhetoric like "screw the troops."
Everyone knows what else was in the bill, it's in the title.
By this argument, any insanity can be implemented just by working it into a bill considered too important to veto.
Bullshit. The precious military would have received its overbloated funding request regardless of a veto. No troops would have been "screwed" unless the Pentagon decided to manufacture a crisis by cutting off their payments first.
No one has an excuse for cooperating in this, when human rights as fundamental as habeas corpus, due process and trial by jury are being undone.
Is that what you're saying? "Screw jury trials! Screw due process!"
Disagree with the assumption.
Perhaps there are 47 million voters who grew up as Catholics (sounds low to me), but it doesn't mean they are "Catholic voters" in the sense that Catholicism influences their voting (as opposed to other factors like class, region and culture, actual politics, ethnic identity, etc.).
For example, this is questionable:
"The winner of eight out of the past nine elections has captured a majority of Catholic votes (they voted for Al Gore in 2000)"
Well first of all, Al Gore won the popular vote, so that makes nine out of nine!
However, given the large size of this "bloc," this would also be the result if "Catholic voters" simply voted along the same lines as the overall population.
I'd be more impressed if it could be shown that the results among "Catholic voters" differed significantly from the results among all voters. Only then would they be a separate bloc that could be captured as such.
It's a long time since 1960.
You're highlighting the need for RICO.
These scams relied on diffusion of responsibility. Participants expect to get away with it because they're each doing only one part of it that can be passed off as innocent in the process, long as they can pretend they don't know about the other stages: only selling mortgages, only packaging them, only rating the securities, only selling the securities, only betting against the securities. Where you've seen settlements for the basic scam of selling off toxic assets and betting against them at the same time (as with Magnetar, Paulson/Goldman, and the current Citi settlement delayed by the courageous Judge Rakoff) is precisely where they had enough evidence to proceed with criminal investigation. The SEC is complicit in helping the worst criminals escape.
At this point what's essential in keeping the rage alive over this criminality, even if the criminals get away with their past crimes, they're still in the same offices committing their current crimes, and setting up the next crash. It's guaranteed: the big banks are still insolvent, holding much the same toxic assets and living as zombies thanks to "mark-to-model" and unlimited Fed loans at near-zero percent. This edifice will tumble, almost did when Greece came close to a disorderly default. It's far too unstable. When the next crash hits, from whatever direction, it's essential then that the people not passively accept (even as they grumble) the next rescue effort. That's when everyone has to hit the streets and demand the liquidation of the zombie banks, debt cancellations, public banking and a new financial beginning.
You can be certain it is not the racism, or the extreme Manchester capitalism...
as these are within the Republican mainstream. Other Republican candidates are just as bad on these scores. It's impossible to claim Paul is less racist than Gingrich or Santorum or Bachmann, and the truth is Mittens is just more sophisticated in not looking the part as he caters to the same racist base. Since 1968, a conscious appeal to racism has been central to all Republican campaigns. For this reason I wouldn't vote for any of them, including Paul.
Nevertheless, why does Paul enrage "mainstream" Republicans?
Paul says he wants to end the empire, legalize drugs, roll back the war-on-terror police state (even if he'd support state-based police states) and end the Federal Reserve (piggy bank to Wall Street).
These positions do not only enrage Republicans who otherwise have no problems with Paul's right-wing extremism. They also enrage many Democratic "liberals" who have joined in the bipartisan support for empire and war, for drug war, for the PATRIOT Act and other measures violating the Bill of Rights, and for rescuing the bankster regime with Fed bailouts and thus allowing the worst criminals to continue running the financial sector.
Above all, the bipartisan consensus not to question the permanent-warfare state is being upstaged by a right-wing maniac. That harms the self-image of the self-declared liberals who believe they are peaceful people (nothing like those armed yahoos from rural Texas!) and yet have supported wars and "humanitarian intervention."
Apparently you feel free to fabricate that I "support Republicans."
The same logic: Anyone who opposed the Iraq war supported Saddam.
Anyone who opposed Bush supported the terrorists.
You're striving for an greater extreme.
Anyone who doesn't support Obama on all points, even critique from the left - especially from the left! - supports Republicans.
PS: Oh, and "supporting Obama" means conducting non-stop witchhunts for heretics. Because that's the way to sway the undecided readers who might wander in here!
On the matter of well-paid...
Security is a form of pay. I'm not sure the biggest difference in the meaning of pay levels is in the greater American appetite for consumption (of Nokia phones, perhaps?).
If you're not worried about your rent, health care, college tuitions, pensions, job security, essential costs like food, or what happens if you are disabled or have to care for a sick family member, if you know having a child or an accident won't promptly bankrupt you, then the lower disposable income at the end of the month seems like plenty. It's all yours. In the US, the higher disposable income may be an illusion, promptly eaten up by your rent and insurance costs.
But anyway, that's a general difference between the societies that goes beyond education.
The biggest point about the success of Finnish schools seems to me to be that they have almost twice as many teachers per capita and accordingly smaller class sizes. A cream-of-the-crop teacher, as you call her, who is stuck with 35 students (and their parents) is going to fail with many more of them than two average teachers who only have to handle 18 each (and their parents).
This is a universal. I don't believe it's hindered by cultural differences, or must be.
Now I know the problem here with the anti-intellectualism (high achievers mocked). But if that's really such an obstacle we may as well give up from the start.
Several other points I believe are also translatable: such as putting the child at the center, and not the performance of the child (at least until much later). Finland starting school at 7 and abjuring homework and grades and testing until much later is part of that. It's saying, let them grow up under loving, unstressful conditions that promote learning for its own sake, and when they're bigger they'll be able to handle the tests better than kids who have grown up under pressure of punishment and taught that only performance matters.
Substance? Really?
Two quotes from Swanson, uncommented, followed by ROFL smilies, inviting us to mock.
This is pure argument from ridicule. It is anti-intellectual and smug, not at all substantive, and all-too typical of this poster.
She seems to have appointed herself chief ideologist and witch-hunter, with obnoxious interventions in almost every thread that mentions one of her targets. Merely thoughtful or qualified support of Obama is not enough, and already grounds for suspicion. Any critique is treated as traitorous: critics no matter what the basis of their critique will always be accused directly or indirectly (depending on the rules) of being Republicans. She struts about like a junior commissar in search of thought-crime. All must howl equally at her choice of heretics, or be themselves condemned. She will start several original posts at a time to target a given writer (usually a leftist heretic who is insufficiently loyal to Obama). Not just occasionally, which might have its reasons, but every single day. This constitutes flooding. It's an attempt to set a daily agenda of which designated enemy to hate.
It's probably all within the rules, and the less alerts and meta discussions, the better for all. But this is persistently abusive rhetoric that makes a relaxed atmosphere of discourse difficult.
Perhaps this kind of behavior was acceptable on GD: P. I don't know, I stuck to GD. On DU2, we had GD and GD: P, and thus people who want to talk left-liberal politics without constant politicking had their forum, while people who want to ardently politick 24/7 had theirs. Why not go back to that?
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