Clueless yet again

Clueless says it all regarding Trump and the so called leaders of Congress in terms of policy, governance and tech as seen by the long view approach to power evidenced by China's quiet incursion into Latin America and the Dems clueless response to Trump and company by focusing on THE RUSSIANS and the awfulness of the orange yam instead of coming up with viable ideas to attract people to vote out the trolls who are selling out America in order to get a fast buck no matter what the cost may be. To whit:

QUINTUCO, Argentina — The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.

The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.

The isolated base is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future for generations to come — often in ways that directly undermine the United States’ political, economic and strategic power in the region.

The station began operating in March, playing a pivotal role in China’s audacious expedition to the far side of the moon — an endeavor that Argentine officials say they are elated to support.

But the way the base was negotiated — in secret, at a time when Argentina desperately needed investment — and concerns that it could enhance China’s intelligence gathering capabilities in the hemisphere have set off a debate in Argentina about the risks and benefits of being pulled into China’s orbit.

“Beijing has transformed the dynamics of the region, from the agendas of its leaders and businessmen to the structure of its economies, the content of its politics and even its security dynamics,” said R. Evan Ellis, a professor of Latin American studies at the United States Army War College.

“My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

– Barack Obama to bank CEOs in 2009 (he sure protected them)

I’m only half kidding with the title here. No, I don’t think establishment Democrats are actually trying to lose, but I agree with the sentiment that they’d rather continue to lose to Donald Trump with someone like Hillary Clinton, than win with someone like Bernie Sanders.

The fight within the Democratic Party is very real and ultimately comes down to two groups with completely different understandings of reality. The big donor, Wall Street side of the party still wants to claim everything’s normal and fine with the exception of Donald Trump. As soon as he can be removed we can all go back to American exceptionalism; or something like that. Easy peasy. In contrast, the other side acknowledges things are very, very rotten and huge change is imperative. To summarize, one side wants to go right back to the Presidency of Barack Obama (with some added militarism), while the other is saying the status quo needs to go.

Forget for a moment what you think of leftist populist ideas, they’re at least willing to admit our country is systemically broken and corrupt, while the other blames everything on Trump and Russia. This isn’t a minor difference within a happy marriage, it’s the sort of conflict that ends in divorce. We remain in a justifiably populist moment in American history, and corporate Democrats want to fight right-populism with Hillary Clintonism. That’s never going to work.

In reading all of this, yours truly is truly stunned as the issues facing America and the world are serious to the max. Here's a very small listing of same:

1. Climate change: Existential says it all as we need earth, earth does NOT need us.
2. Foreign policy: Question, what has the success rate been regarding America's militaristic approach to diplomacy since the assassination of Iran's Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953?
3. Environmental degradation: Rampant pollution is slowly destroying the environment and the lifeforms that live in it.
4. Attack on science & education: Questioning reality and being educated is essential for man's survival, adherence to religion and dogma is not.
5. Over population: Earth cannot sustain 7 billion people, let alone a projected 9.8 billion by 2050.
6. Overshoot Day: The day man has used up all of earth's resources for the given year. 8/1/2018 

Remember ...

We are using 1.7 Earths.
We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests, and emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ecosystems can absorb.

Any questions?

When you think about it ...

A reality distortion field, popularized by the myth of Steve Jobs, is more than just relevant when it comes to America and how we perceive her to be as we lurch further into the 21st century. No fake news in this particular blurb but rather a connect to a very perceptive piece written by Lee Camp titled American Society Would Collapse If It Weren’t for These 8 Myths that echoes, in part, the late, great George Carlin, the 2nd greatest humorist in the nation, IMHO, after the one and only Mark Twain.



Our society should’ve collapsed by now. You know that, right?

No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a “Star Wars” movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. He could literally end world hunger for multiple years and still have more money left over than he could ever spend on himself.

Worldwide, one in 10 people only make $2 a day. Do you know how long it would take one of those people to make the same amount as Jeff Bezos has? 193 million years. (If they only buy single-ply toilet paper.) Put simply, you cannot comprehend the level of inequality in our current world or even just our nation.

So … shouldn’t there be riots in the streets every day? Shouldn’t it all be collapsing? Look outside. The streets aren’t on fire. No one is running naked and screaming (usually). Does it look like everyone’s going to work at gunpoint? No. We’re all choosing to continue on like this.

Why?

Well, it comes down to the myths we’ve been sold. Myths that are ingrained in our social programming from birth, deeply entrenched, like an impacted wisdom tooth. These myths are accepted and basically never questioned.

Read the big 8. Carlin would relate to this without question.

Evolution 101

Anchiornis was a birdlike dinosaur with four wings that lived 160 million years ago. Fossils found in China demonstrate the evolution of feathers in modern birds.

Gotta love dinos, particularly the ones leading to the modern bird. :)

Perhaps it was soft, even fuzzy. But it was also very much a dinosaur.

Anchiornis was a four-winged birdlike species that lived about 160 million years ago, and many fossil specimens have been found in China. A number of them were discovered with preserved feathers, but until recently the feathers had not been described in detail.

Anchiornis (the name means “near bird”) was about 14 inches long from its beak to the end of its tail, barely larger than a pigeon but much more impressive. It had long feathers on its four wings, and its appendages ended in claws.

Anchiornis did not, however, have the reverse toe of modern birds that allows them to perch. It climbed trees, hanging on with all four feet.

Read on, as science never disappoints. :)

The elephant in the room

Confronting Climate Change from Center for Environmental Studies on Vimeo.

BRT has, ad nauseam, discussed climate change to the max as my loyal readers know but this time, people who know about this issue in ways this rube will never know, talk about the existential issue of our own making. Check it out, it's the right thing to do.

Click here to read the bios of the people interviewed.

Algorithmic Governance

Orwell would recognize this new version of 1984 in a heartbeat as seen by China starting the next revolution in tech, algorithmic governance driven by AI, face recognition software and cameras, both on street corners and on the cops, China's 2018 version of the Stasi of E. Germany fame using bits instead of film to keep tabs on its citizens 24/7.

ZHENGZHOU, China — In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station.

In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped the police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival.

In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor.

With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.

In essence ...

China is reversing the commonly held vision of technology as a great democratizer, bringing people more freedom and connecting them to the world. In China, it has brought control.

“This is potentially a totally new way for the government to manage the economy and society,” said Martin Chorzempa, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“The goal is algorithmic governance,” he added.

1984 indeed.

Indicting a ham sandwitch

As my loyal readers know, I detest Trump but, at the same time, will give him credit where credit is due, in this case, trying to reestablish a viable relationship with Russia, a nation equipped with really powerful weapons and the means to deliver them with great efficiency against us without question, something the deep state seems to ignore at OUR peril due to their endless pursuit of money based on generating fear of our never ending enemies trying to get us with Russia as bete noire No. 1.

With this in mind, the Dems continue to flog the Russia hacking venue in support of the 2016 Trump election with the latest salvo of Mueller indicting 12 Russian intel operatives who allegedly gamed the system to the max for the orange yam but there are problems with this latest foray in blaming the Russkies based on government access to the hardware in question and the size of the files purloined from DNC headquarters back in 2016. i.e.

US courts will indict a ham sandwich, goes the proverb. Mueller indicted 13 Russians linked to the “troll farm” Internet Research Agency in February, hoping that they wouldn’t bother to appear in court, not being bound by US law or having anything to gain by participating in his show trial. But a few sent their lawyers and demanded discovery, which would have forced Mueller to reveal the evidence he had against them. Finding his own indictments riddled with errors – one of the companies named didn’t even exist at the time of the election – Mueller quietly backpedaled. Score one for the Russians.

But this time he has evidence, right? Surely he wouldn’t make that mistake again. And this time it’s Russian military operatives, not some two-bit troll-farmers! The indictment accuses them of spear-phishing Democratic staffers and using those login credentials to access the party’s servers, stealing the famous documents and leaking them to the public through Wikileaks and DCLeaks (though they seem unsure whether DCLeaks is a person or a website). Isn’t this what we’ve all been waiting for?

Perhaps it would be, if the FBI had actually encountered the servers firsthand. Government investigators (from both the FBI and the DHS, which also wanted in on the action) never even laid eyes on the “hacked” servers belonging to the DNC and DCCC, instead relying on the assessment of a computer security firm headed by a Russian expat with an ax to grind against his former government. Dmitri Alperovitch’s CrowdStrike specializes in attributing malware attacks to state actors – a no-no in the computer security industry, and something he was discouraged from doing by former employer McAfee (whose founder has personally commented on the lack of evidence implicating Russia in the DNC hack). Alperovitch launched CrowdStrike to offer his attribution services to clients like the US government which might care more about blaming a hack on a government than finding out how to protect against such hacks in the first place. 

It gets better.

Mr. Trump’s visit to confer with Russian President Putin in Helsinki seems to have provoked a kind of last-gasp effort to keep the increasingly idiotic Russian election meddling story alive — with Robert Mueller’s ballyhooed indictment of twelve “Russian intel agents” alleged to have “hacked” emails and computer files of the DNC and Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta. The gaping holes in that part of the tale have long been unearthed so I’ll summarize as briefly as possible:

1) the bandwidth required to transfer the files has been proven to be greater than an internet hack might have conceivably managed in the time allowed and points rather to a direct download into a flash drive device. 2) the DNC computer hard drives, said to be the source of the alleged hacking, disappeared while in the custody of the US Intel Community (including the FBI). 3) the authenticity of the purloined emails by Mr. Podesta and others has never been disputed, and they revealed a lot of potentially criminal behavior by them. 4) Mr. Mueller must know he will never get twelve Russian intel agents into a US courtroom, so the entire exercise is a joke and a fraud. In effect, he’s indicted twelve ham sandwiches with Russian dressing.

I'll have mine with pickles on the side.

As tech backup, https://consortiumnews.com/tag/veteran-intelligence-professionals-for-sanity/
is a great resource to learn what hacking is all about in this era of fake news and bloviation.

Blurb 2. check out Ray McGovern's approach to the Russian Hack scenario here. Most illuminating to say the least. Here's an excerpt from his article.

This time around, on the off-chance I do get the nod, I have taken the time to prepare the agenda for my first few days as CIA director. Here’s how Day One looks so far:

Get former National Security Agency Technical Director William Binney back to CIA to join me and the “handpicked” CIA analysts who, with other “handpicked” analysts (as described by former National Intelligence Director James Clapper on May 8, 2017) from the FBI and NSA, prepared the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of Jan. 6, 2017. That evidence-impoverished assessment argued the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his minions “to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.”

When my predecessor, CIA Director Mike Pompeo invited Binney to his office on Oct. 24, 2017 to discuss cyber-attacks, he told Pompeo that he had been fed a pack of lies on “Russian hacking” and that he could prove it. Why Pompeo left that hanging is puzzling, but I believe this is the kind of low-hanging fruit we should pick pronto.

The low-calorie Jan. 6 ICA was clumsily cobbled together:

“We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence … used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data obtained in cyber operations publicly and in exclusives to media outlets and relayed material to WikiLeaks.”

Binney and other highly experienced NSA alumni, as well as other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), drawing on their intimate familiarity with how the technical systems and hacking work, have been saying for a year and a half that this CIA/FBI/NSA conclusion is a red herring, so to speak. Last summer, the results of forensic investigation enabled VIPS to apply the principles of physics and the known capacity of the internet to confirm that conclusion.

Any questions as to why Mueller's take on this affair is somewhat questionable?

Finally, here is a short excerpt from the year and a half Intel Vets Challenge link detailing some rather interesting details regarding the alleged hack into DNC hardware.

Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.

Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack. Of equal importance, the forensics show that the copying was performed on the East coast of the U.S. Thus far, mainstream media have ignored the findings of these independent studies [see here and here].

Independent analyst Skip Folden, who retired after 25 years as the IBM Program Manager for Information Technology, US, who examined the recent forensic findings, is a co-author of this Memorandum. He has drafted a more detailed technical report titled “Cyber-Forensic Investigation of ‘Russian Hack’ and Missing Intelligence Community Disclaimers,” and sent it to the offices of the Special Counsel and the Attorney General. VIPS member William Binney, a former Technical Director at the National Security Agency, and other senior NSA “alumni” in VIPS attest to the professionalism of the independent forensic findings.

The recent forensic studies fill in a critical gap. Why the FBI neglected to perform any independent forensics on the original “Guccifer 2.0” material remains a mystery – as does the lack of any sign that the “hand-picked analysts” from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, who wrote the “Intelligence Community Assessment” dated January 6, 2017, gave any attention to forensics.

Interesting is it not?

Last but not least, who is Guccifer? Maybe the FBI knows because we don't. Here is yet another post supporting the leak theory by the same intel vets who know how intel is done without the need for partisan politics.

BRIEFING FOR: The President
FROM: Ray McGovern, former CIA briefer of The President’s Daily Brief, and William Binney, former Technical Director at NSA
SUBJECT: Info Your Summit Briefers May Have Missed

We reproduce below one of our most recent articles on “Russia-Gate,” which, in turn, draws from our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Memorandum to you of July 24, 2017.

At the time of that Memorandum we wrote:

“Forensic studies of “Russian hacking” into Democratic National Committee computers last year reveal that on July 5, 2016, data was leaked (not hacked) by a person with physical access to DNC computer. After examining metadata from the “Guccifer 2.0” July 5, 2016 intrusion into the DNC server, independent cyber investigators have concluded that an insider copied DNC data onto an external storage device.

Key among the findings of the independent forensic investigations is the conclusion that the DNC data was copied onto a storage device at a speed that far exceeds an Internet capability for a remote hack.”

“We do not know who or what the murky Guccifer 2.0 is. You may wish to ask the FBI,” we wrote. However, we now have forensic evidence that shows the data provided by Guccifer 2.0 had been manipulated and is a fabrication.

We also discussed CIA’s cyber-tool “Marble Framework,” which can hack into computers, “obfuscate” who hacked, and leave behind incriminating, telltale signs in Russian; and we noted that this capability had been employed during 2016. As we pointed out, Putin himself made an unmistakable reference to this “obfuscating” tool during an interview with Megan Kelly.

Our article of June 7, 2018, explains further:

“Still Waiting for Evidence of a Russian Hack”
If you are wondering why so little is heard these days of accusations that Russia hacked into the U.S. election in 2016, it could be because those charges could not withstand close scrutiny. It could also be because special counsel Robert Mueller appears to have never bothered to investigate what was once the central alleged crime in Russia-gate as no one associated with WikiLeaks has ever been questioned by his team.

The truth is out there if we know where to look. Read the piece, you will learn a lot without question.

The 919 Evo

It's all about speed. :)

After Porsche won Le Mans for the third time with the 919 Hybrid—bumping to 18 its total overall wins at the French race—the car maker decided to end the 919 Hybrid racing program. But instead of just sticking the race cars in the museum, Porsche decided to see how fast they could really go. New engine management software and no need to abide by a fuel-flow restriction bumped the 919's turbocharged V4 engine output from 500hp (373kW) to 720hp (537kW). The hybrid system is 10-percent stronger at 440hp (328kW).

Active aerodynamics at the front and rear have increased downforce in the corners and decreased drag on the straights. The suspension has been beefed up to cope with higher loads, and the traction control and brake-by-wire systems have been enhanced. About 86lbs (39kg) of weight was removed, and Michelin even made a bespoke tire for the car. Obviously there had to be a point to all of this, and there is: a farewell tour for the car, now named the 919 Evo, with the goal of setting some new lap records.

Mark & Don would appreciate this without question.