ancianita

ancianita's Journal

April 15, 2017

Bill Nye Promotes The Solutions Project

Why wait.

The context of this great idea:

Ruffalo had read a Scientific American article that Prof. Jacobson had published in 2009 that proposed, on a macro level, the feasibility of a nationwide transition to 100 percent renewable energy...

... Fox convened a conference call between Professor Jacobson and prominent Cornell Professors Anthony Ingraffea and Robert Howarth who agreed to work on the study in the hopes that it would provide an alternative to fracking in New York state. [7] Initially, Jacobson, referring to his busy academic schedule, promised only "a few paragraphs."[7] But the following day, Ruffalo found a 40-page feasibility study from Jacobson

... Krapels in turn created a business model from this study. Jacobson also created studies for California and Washington State ... A science team then employed basic calculations derived from these existing plans to create plans for the remaining 47 states....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solutions_Project

April 9, 2017

Syria's Conflict Participants and Their Global Supporters

Skip to the 2:00 mark is you haven't the patience for the intro. I know I didn't. But the rest presents us with the positive human side of Syria that our media do not.

As CNN has asked: What would make us care?

April 9, 2017

Syria: Who Is Fighting And Why -- The Timeline Since 2011

April 9, 2017

The Navalny video that lit up Moscow protests -- viewed 18,000,000 times

This video was published by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti Corruption Foundation, and features documentation of $1 billion in property that Putin's puppet, Medvedev, accumulated through the use of ‘puppet charity foundations’.

In the video, Putin's political opponent, Navalny, explains how an email hack allowed investigators to expose the Medvedev’s lavish spending.

Starting with a pair of Nike sneakers, the video delves through the Prime Minister’s vast properties, including a Tuscan vineyard, a ski chalet and two yachts ...

We need to remember that Putin might or might not care about a video that makes his former president puppet look as corrupt as he is, or how little Putin cares for the opinions of the West.

But. Popular uprisings like this are Putin’s worst nightmare. Muscovites hate reliving the old tsarist days of oligarchic looting.

The oppressed Russian people, not their dictator, Putin, need support from the West.

April 8, 2017

No Appeasement: Garry Kasparov's "Winter Is Coming" 2015

This former world chess champion offers us what I am convinced is the progressive Russian view of events over the last twenty years:

1. the oligarchic capture of Russia's government during its democratic years under Yeltsin,

2. Putin's world view and governing practices inside Russia,

3. Putin's malevolent treatment of his neighbors and the West,

4. why Western leaders' dealings with Putin are misguided,

5. how much Russians hate Putin.

6. why every single country must listen to its dissidents.

Kasparov's book is a warning, not a prediction. He deeply respects the West's efforts to defeat the enemies of freedom during the Cold War, even as he shows irreverent wit and amusing turns of phrase.

He reminds us that the internal fights for freedom in Russia and former Iron Curtain countries continue. With his chronology of Putin's mafia use of his police state and murderous military incursions of his neighbors, Kasparov reminds us that we must not forget others who seek to be as free as we in the West. Recent Moscow protests show us how much Russians want the West to see the 'Putin problem.'

The best sections of this excellent read are Kasparov's intro and concluding solutions for how the West can successfully rid the world of dictators. It won't be through the globalization of capital, but the globalization of a Modern Magna Carta.

Kasparov offers new ideas for dealing with those he calls "time travelers," what he calls groups or nations stuck in the historical times they desperately, violently try to preserve for all time -- whether they are ISIS, Kim Jong-Un, Boko Haram, drug producers, oligarchic dictators -- that they fight against the globalization of modernity, even as they use its technology as tools of their fight.

This book should be required reading for everyone in the West, not just Americans.

March 1, 2017

Rachel Maddow: To Diagnose the Russian Problem And To Fix It Is Not The Same Thing.

This is too relevant to not bear repeating, because its conflict of interest ethics and U.S. national security implications seem complicated.

Maddow provides background on how and why the Trump administration might give Putin parts of the Ukraine and stop being mad about his invasions of old U.S.S.R. lands.

Maddow summarizes the ducking and dodging and lying historical context that keeps a potential evidence trail from being complete in making a case for treason against Trump or his "associates."

She asks, after this recount: Why is the president's personal lawyer involved in these proceedings? And why is ex-felon Sater working in the White House for Trump, after all his previous Russian business dealings?

I still don't know what the Austrian court's ruling was on Dmitri Furtash.

GOP non-support for this inquiry reports through mainstream media that there's nothing to see, and ultimately that Congressional investigations won't turn up anything. So Sessions won't have anything to recuse himself about.

By even the "appearance" of any standard of ethics and leadership conduct, we need to press for this to go as far as the law allows for the sake of our national security.

February 28, 2017

The New Yorker: "Trump, Putin and The New Cold War"

This comes out March 6 but is already getting criticism from Glenn Greenwald and others who want to get out in front of the Left's historical memory and intellectual power.

Because I want my party to win again, I'd be on the lookout for our party's tendencies to liberal bias confirmation. I want honest scrutiny and reality to guide this party.

The article probably wouldn't exist if Clinton were president. If it did, it would likely be a response to some Republican-led House investigation (about "Russian hackery" during the election) which wouldn't get media traction because they'd be so "BENGHAZI!" in their approach and method.

We need peace-driven more than conflict-driven geopolitics, which is why this informs.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war

February 17, 2017

Andrew Sullivan: The White House Mole

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the-white-house-mole.html?mid=facebook_nymag

There's a clarity here that's helpful to everyone.

Andrew Sullivan -- a fine writer and fine human -- has lately presented one perspective on Trump, Trump supporters and -- in the context of the power contests -- the mentality of that world that opponents in media and around here call chaotic and mentally unstable. This article is particularly worth a read because of the compassion that all of us can feel toward those dealing with global dynamics of energy, politics, law and the controlling of masses of humans.

I like Sullivan's look at how religious world views posed in HBO's The Young Pope -- I'm one atheist who totally 'gets' that show -- also inform us about the depth of believers' instinct to stay loyal to this president until the furor (in contrast to seeing just fuhrer) of his constructing of his administration becomes clearer.

January 16, 2017

Cyberwar, Inc. -- Private Hacker Firms Turn Email Hacking Into Weapons For Hire

From last week's NYT Magazine -- an important read:

The White House, C.I.A. and F.B.I. have all claimed that, based on classified evidence, they can trace the hacks of Podesta’s email account (and other hacks of people close to the Clinton campaign) back to the Russian government. But with the rise of private firms like Hacking Team, penetrating the email accounts of political opponents does not require the kind of money and expertise available to major powers

A subscription-based website called Insider Surveillance lists more than a dozen companies selling so-called ethical malware, including Milan-based Hacking Team and the German firms FinFisher and Trovicor. Compared with conventional arms, surveillance software is subject to few trade controls; a recent attempt by the United States to regulate it under a 41-country pact called the Wassenaar Arrangement failed. “The technology is morally neutral,” says Joel Brenner, a former inspector general of the National Security Agency. “The same program that you use to monitor your babysitter might be used by Bashar Assad or Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to keep track of whomever they don’t like.”

Hacking Team has fewer than 50 employees, but it has customers all over the world. According to internal documents, its espionage tool, which is called the Remote Control System, or R.C.S., can be licensed for as little as $200,000 a year — well within the budget of a provincial strongman. After it has been surreptitiously installed on a target’s computer or phone, the Remote Control System can invisibly eavesdrop on everything: text messages, emails, phone and Skype calls, location data and so on. Whereas the N.S.A.’s best-known programs grab data in transit from switching rooms and undersea cables, the R.C.S. acquires it at the source, right off a target’s device, before it can be encrypted. It carries out an invisible, digitized equivalent of a Watergate-style break-in.

The United States government is almost certainly the world’s most formidable repository of hacking talent, but its most powerful cyberweapons are generally reserved for intelligence agencies and the military. This might explain why, according to company documents, at least two federal law-enforcement agencies have been Hacking Team clients: the F.B.I., beginning in 2011, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, beginning in 2012. The F.B.I. contract paid Hacking Team more than $700,000; the D.E.A. appears to have used the software to go after targets in Colombia.

Our innovation comes back to bite us. No more labeling people paranoid CT's around here, because this shit's been going on for at least ten years. My oldest son sells firewalls for Palo Alto Networks to combat this crap.

As well, the EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) tries to globally promote and nationally enforce the founding hacker ethics historically chronicled in Fred Turner's must-read book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

Again. As others on DU have asked:

If the GOP went to SCOTUS over hanging chads 16 years ago, why hasn't the Democratic Party gone to SCOTUS over classified intel to invalidate the 2016 election?!

This election, compromised by a foreign government, is at least as great a constitutional crisis as hanging chads ever were. Ever.

As capitalism's last-gasp efforts cause chaos, disinformation and geopolitical drama, corporate and state cyberwar will continue to be a big fucking deal. Obama reminds us: stay vigilant, not afraid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/magazine/cyberwar-for-sale.html

January 16, 2017

World Champion Chicago Cubs Honored By President Obama

The last official White House event was so classy, sassy, and fun!

The best of America: Martin Luther King, baseball, Chicago, the Obama family and that

Yes-We-Can hope!!

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Hometown: New England, The South, Midwest
Home country: USA
Current location: Sarasota
Member since: Sat Mar 5, 2011, 12:32 PM
Number of posts: 36,023

About ancianita

Human. Being.

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