Japanese steam:
Understaffed But Understood
1 hour ago
A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
If you're one of the Covidiots who believe that COVID-19 is "just the flu",
that the 2020 election was stolen, or
especially if you supported the 1/6/21 insurrection,
leave now.
Slava Ukraini!
In testimony before congress General James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, labeled the journalists whom Edward Snowden worked with to blow the whistle on the NSA as “accomplices.” A term that makes those journalists legitimate targets for surveillance, if not worse.So what does Jimmy the Perjurer think of bloggers who have been writing about the Snowden Revelations? Is he saying that he is going to go after Firedog Lake, or Emptywheel or Bruce Schneier or Matthew Green or Borepatch?
Now the war on whistleblowers has expanded to include the press.
Olin Corporation, through its Winchester Division, is recalling two (2) lots of M*22™ 22 Long Rifle 40 Grain Black Copper Plated Round Nose rimfire ammunition.Seriously bad shit, folks.
Winchester has determined the above lots of 22 Long Rifle rimfire ammunition may contain double powder charges.In other words: "Gun go 'boom' like grenade."
Atlanta (CNN) -- When snow only three fingers deep triggers an epic traffic jam, stranding motorists and school kids on interstates for hours, there's something very wrong with this picture.This morning, one of the Weather Channel dudes said that he walked 4.5 miles into work because the roads were impassable. They were covered in ice.
Two inches of snow isn't supposed to turn highways into campsites. Backups aren't supposed to last all day, through the night, and into the following morning.
And yet, here they were -- hundreds of motorists across Alabama and Georgia -- still hunched over in their cars Wednesday morning, feeling the aftereffects of a snow shower that hit the states a day earlier.
[Erik Price's] newest title, acquired this month: chairman of Frontier Services Group, an Africa-focused security and logistics company with intimate ties to China's largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group. Beijing has titanic ambitions to tap Africa's resources—including $1 trillion in planned spending on roads, railways and airports by 2025—and Mr. Prince wants in.So the trigger-happy clown who styled himself as an all-American super patriot has now climbed into bed with the Chinese Communists.
With a public listing in Hong Kong, and with Citic as its second-largest shareholder (a 15% stake) and Citic executives sitting on its board, Frontier Services Group is a long way from Blackwater's CIA ties and $2 billion in U.S. government contracts. ...
At no point does Mr. Prince address the irony of ... going into business with a state-owned firm founded as part of Communist China's Ministry of State Security.
The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.The PCLOB's entire report. The dissent is interesting, for it is a tissue of either willful blindness or lies. The NSA is, contrary to the dissent's claim, tracking cell phone locations.
A divided Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent and long-troubled liberties advocate in the executive branch, issued a report on Thursday that concludes the NSA’s collection of every US phone record on a daily basis violates the legal restrictions of the statute cited to authorize it, section 215 of the Patriot Act.
...
Not only did the board conclude that the bulk surveillance was a threat to constitutional liberties, it could not find “a single instance” in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation”.
...
The board tacitly rejected the NSA’s public claim that the bulk phone records collection may have made the difference in stopping a terrorist plot connected to cab drivers in San Diego – a rare case in which a government review body has specifically refuted the NSA’s aggressive post-Snowden PR campaign.
“We believe that in only one instance over the past seven years has the program arguably contributed to the identification of an unknown terrorism suspect. Even in that case, the suspect was not involved in planning a terrorist attack and there is reason to believe that the FBI may have discovered him without the contribution of the NSA’s program,” it found.
Justin Bieber was charged with drunken driving, resisting arrest and driving without a valid license after police saw the pop star street racing early Thursday morning, Miami Beach police said.
Ex-Virginia governor Bob McDonnell charged with corruption:The fun fact in all this is that McDonnell's cook was prosecuted for stealing food from the governor's mansion and then ratted him out.
Republican and wife allegedly accepted Rolex, designer clothes and loan of Ferrari, jet and cash from tobacco company. ... Bob McDonnell and his wife insist they gave no political favours to Jonnie Williams, who paid for their daughter's wedding, a Rolex watch, a Louis Vuitton handbag, Oscar de la Renta dresses and loaned them a jet, Ferrari, beach home and $120,000 in cash.
But less than two weeks after leaving the governor's mansion in Richmond, the couple face one of the biggest corruption trials in recent political history after federal prosecutors alleged they promoted Williams' business, Star Scientific, in direct return for the gifts.
Russia may have helped the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to reveal details of surveillance programmes and escape US authorities last year, the chairman of the House intelligence committee claimed on Sunday.Rogers is right up there with DiFi, they're both stalwart defenders of our national police state, as well as all things NSA and CIA. Neither one of them have been for any substantive reforms, at least until a groundswell of public opinion arose for reforms. So they're not exactly what one could call unbiased. If a NSA spook whispered this shit in Rogers's ear, you can bet your bippy that he'd be blabbing it to the press in a femtosecond.
Mike Rogers, a Republican representative from Michigan, interviewed by NBC’s Meet the Press, said Snowden was “a thief whom we believe had some help”, and added that there was an “ongoing” investigation into whether Russia had aided Snowden.
Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned a New Jersey mayor earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc.As Booman points out, the current mayor of Hoboken became the mayor because a certain U.S. Attorney (Christie) prosecuted the former mayor for shenanigans related to real estate development.
The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.Great, so the NSA knows where I went for lunch and who I ate with, since that was all the subject of text messages this morning.
The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.
The NSA program, codenamed Dishfire, collects “pretty much everything it can”, according to GCHQ documents, rather than merely storing the communications of existing surveillance targets.
The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.
Dear NSA, you pack of illegitimate bastards:
I could probably go into a lengthy discourse about freedom and liberty and the Constitution and your acting as the American Stasi, but let's cut to the chase, shall we: May you all die in painful crotch fires.
Happy New Year.
We have developed a long-range 6-12m iris stand-off capture system that can capture subjects anywhere in a 6-12m capture volume with enrollment quality images.Oh, nobody there can conceive of the evil fuckery that sort of technology will permit? It's not that they just can ID you from a retinal scan taken at a distance (think of the billboards in the movie Minority Report), they can take a photo of your fucking eyeballs from 40 feet away and then put that into their biometric database.
A federal appeals court has struck down Federal Communications Commission rules that prohibit Internet service providers (ISPs) from restricting access to legal Web content.I know a number of people who have kept their broadband service but have dumped their cable TV service. If it is now legal for ISPs to restrict traffic, I bet that the very first thing they will do is crack down on Netflix, and then, Hulu Plus.
An FBI spokesman said the agency does not comment on specific investigations but confirmed that there are ongoing fraud investigations related to Newtown.I'm in favor of using some alternative forms of punishment on these fraudsters. I'm thinking along the lines of mounting their heads on pikes and letting the crows peck at them.
Los Angeles (CNN) -- Justin Bieber got some unexpected visitors Tuesday morning: sheriff's deputies with a warrant to search his home.Egging a house caused $20K in damages? How the hell can that be? $20K to wash the eggs off the siding? Or did some of the eggs go in through a window and damage stuff inside? I dunno.
Investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were looking for video from Bieber's security cameras that might show what happened Thursday night when eggs were thrown at a neighbor's home, according to a sheriff's statement.
A judge gave deputies a felony search warrant, which they carried out Tuesday morning, the sheriff's statement said. ... One of Bieber's house guests was arrested when deputies allegedly found cocaine during their search. ... "The purpose of the search warrant is to seek video surveillance or other possible evidence in the vandalism that occurred on January 9, 2014," the sheriff's statement said.
The vandalism damage to the house of Bieber's neighbor was about $20,000, [Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Dave] Thompson said. The cost of repairing the damage to the house is a key factor in determining the severity of the charge. Any damage of more than $950 would qualify the charge as a felony.
The NSA's justification for the massive spying on Americans is now "well, we might need to read your personal shit someday". It's all bullshit. And fortunately, some legislators are coming to realize that. Sen Heinrich, for one, was formerly in the House of Representatives, and he is calling "bullshit" on the pro-NSA's statists who have been claiming that everyone was fully briefed on what the NSA has been doing.But is it really the case that the U.S. intelligence community didn't have the dots in the lead up to 9/11? Hardly.
In fact, the intelligence community provided repeated strategic warning in the summer of 9/11 that al Qaeda was planning a large-scale attacks on American interests.
Here is a representative sampling of the CIA threat reporting that was distributed to Bush administration officials during the spring and summer of 2001:
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations," April 20
-- CIA, "Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent," June 23
-- CIA, "Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays," July 2
-- CIA, "Threat of Impending al Qaeda Attack to Continue Indefinitely," August 3
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is facing questions over the use of Superstorm Sandy relief funds.When you take Federal money for things like that, there are rules about using the lowest bidder (a point famously made by Alan Shepard after his flight in Freedom 7). Selecting the bidder who bid nearly twice as much without a damned good reason is a major no-no in the Federal contracting world.
CNN has learned that federal officials are investigating whether Christie improperly used those relief funds to produce tourism ads that starred him and his family. ... The winning $4.7 million bid featured Christie and his family in the advertisements while the losing $2.5 million proposal did not feature the Christies.
A Southwest Airlines flight from Chicago's Midway Airport was scheduled to land at Branson Airport in southwest Missouri on Sunday night. Instead, the Boeing 737-700 touched down at Taney County airport -- about 7 miles away, and with a runway significantly shorter.Back when I was getting my license, there was a general-aviation airport that was ten miles from a SAC base. The runways were aligned the same way. The main runway at the SAC base was about a mile longer and twice as wide and the ramp had B-52s and KC-135s on it, but that didn't stop a couple of pilots a year from landing at it (and being greeted by Air Police with leveled M-16s).
FBI Director James Comey on Thursday pushed back against proposed changes in a controversial investigative tool he called key to fighting terrorists. ... In Fiscal 2012, the FBI issued 21,000 national security letters. They are a form of administrative subpoena, issued without court order. ... "I don't see anything that is broken," Comey said.First off, it's ludicrous to even submit that the FBI submitted 21,000 NSLs in one year alone solely for "fighting terrorists". That's just bullshit. The FBI submits NSLs for every kind of investigation they do. They submit NSLs on a whim and the FBI has had its dick slapped more than once for abusing NSLs.
Instead of declaring "law enforcement" as its "primary function," as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists "national security" as its chief mission.The biggest hit to what the FBI used to do has been in prosecuting white collar crime. This has been going on for some time:
- Overall, the number of criminal cases investigated by the FBI nationally has steadily declined. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 - a 34 percent drop.The banksters and the other "white collar" criminals did far more damage to this country than Al Qaeda could ever have hoped to do. Those assholes stole trillions of dollars and they are still at it.
- FBI investigations of white-collar crime have also plummeted. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases - a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000.
- Had the FBI continued investigating financial crimes at the same rate as it had before the terror attacks, about 2,000 more white-collar criminals would be behind bars, according to the P-I analysis, which was based on Justice Department data from 1996 through June 2006.
Private messages between Governor’s Christie’s deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock.There is no shortage of stories from New Jersey that have chronicled that Christie has a skin thinner than the cell wall of a red blood corpuscle. He's got a reputation of being quick to take offense at the most trivial of slights and eager to have revenge for any perceived slights.
The messages are replete with references and insults to Fort Lee’s mayor, who had failed to endorse Christie for re-election and they chronicle how local officials tried to reach the Port Authority in a vain effort to eliminate the paralyzing gridlock that overwhelmed his town of 35,000 which sits in the shadow of the bridge, the world’s busiest. ... “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” Bridget Anne Kelly, one of three deputies on Christie’s senior staff, wrote to David Wildstein, a top Christie executive at the Port Authority, on Aug. 13, about three weeks before the closures.
Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states.It costs $40 to download a full copy, which is a little too rich for my blood. (Update: Thanks to a reader, I've seen a copy. I can't stress this enough: Save Your Money!)
A New York-based satanic group has made a hell of a request.I suspect that Oklahoma will end up removing the Ten Commanderments monument. They likely can't deny the request without running afoul of the First Amendment.
The Satanic Temple unveiled designs Monday for a 7-foot-tall statue of Satan it wants to put at the Oklahoma state Capitol, where a Ten Commandments monument was placed in 2012. The group formally submitted its application to a panel that oversees the Capitol grounds, including an artist’s rendering that depicts Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, wings and a long beard that’s often used as a symbol of the occult. In the rendering, Satan is sitting in a pentagram-adorned throne with smiling children next to him.
New York (CNN) -- Liz Cheney, whose upstart bid to unseat Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi sparked a round of warfare in the Republican Party and even within her own family, is dropping out of the Senate primary, she said in a prepared statement Monday morning.I'm guessing that the "serious health issues" have more to do with the health of her election campaign.
"Serious health issues have recently arisen in our family, and under the circumstances, I have decided to discontinue my campaign," she said.
A partisan poll commissioned in November showed that Cheney garnered the support of just 17 percent of likely primary voters, compared to 69 percent for Enzi, the incumbent.She ended her campaign with the usual dollop of self-serving bullshit, but that's kind of to be expected from anyone who is pulling a Palin. Don't be too surprised if she's already called the movers to come pack her shit up to head back to her home in Virginia.
Almost one year after air pollution in Beijing literally went off the charts, the country’s top research agency, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has released a study clearly identifying fossil fuel combustion as the biggest contributor to the deadly smog.China has over 2,300 coal-fired power plants. We have 600 and it's a reasonable bet that ours have better scrubbers.
The annual New York celebration, which this year featured performances from artists such as Miley Cyrus, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Blondie, has become part endurance sport because post-9/11 security measures force spectators into pens at least 12 hours in advance, with no food, warmth or bathrooms.Crimus people, stay the fuck home or go to a private party. Being locked into an open-air prison for half-a-day, with no facilities? Idiots.
European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent.You're here, you've consented. If you don't like it, go read some other goddamn blog. It's not as if you're paying me.