Saturday has turned into an embarrassment of riches. Between the new Gekko/Galt ticket and Ted Nugent’s campaigning for it, the laughs just keep coming.
Ted Nugent:
We are heartbroken that the basis of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the 10 Commandments and the Golden Rule has been abandoned for a terrible socialism that has ruined every life it’s come in contact with …
Everybody dead in Aurora was unarmed and helpless. Everybody dead in Milwaukee was unarmed and helpless … That’s what gun control is . . . It’s literally opening the door as wide as possible for evil to do to unarmed and helpless victims what they want.
Mitt Romney made the terrible mistake of banning a certain type of firearm in the past — what they call assault weapons, which is not what they are. But he has seen the light … I spoke with him at length. I am convinced in my absolutist Second Amendment heart and soul that Mitt Romney will never even consider any more infringements on guns, ammo, fire power, access of guns ever again for Americans. He’s learned his lesson … Compared to Barack Obama and his team, Mitt Romney is indeed Michael the Archangel.
Nice bit slyly referencing the Prez as Satan, Ted. Never saw that one coming, no sir.
In it Nugent also espouses the crackpot’s Agenda 21 theory that the UN is conspiring to take small arms and everything else away from American citizens. Developed by the John Birch Society, it has crept into the mainstream as part of the awesome parcel of insane rubbish believed by Tea Party Republicans.
Blessed be and glorious day! Mitt Romney has picked John Galt Jr! Wealthiness, next to Godliness, that’s what Jesus taught. Now it’s time to whip the poor, you know what to do!
Sometimes the paint truck can’t stop in time. Sometimes there ain’t enough men to have one out in front as roadkill catcher. Austerity. Gotta trim those local union workers.
And I have a song for that. Roadkill. And I still play it.
Mr. O’Reilly recently stated on his TV program, “The O’Reilly Factor,??? that anyone in America can go out and buy a machine gun or bazooka without any reporting requirements at all …
I sent Bill a note and challenged him that I would donate $10,000 to the charity of his choice if anyone on his staff can go out and legally buy a machine gun or bazooka in the next 30 days without the federal government knowing about it …
There are roughly 250,000 legally owned machine guns in America — half are owned by private citizens and the other half are owned by police departments …
Today, again from the Atlantic where the editors and writers are chosen from the most senseless and fit for the job, someone named Derek Thompson, 1 percent society shoeshiner and “a visiting research fellow at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation.”
Let’s count some of the ways it is important: for merchants and for customers. For merchants, point-of-sale technology is awful, outdated, and expensive … Paying for stuff shouldn’t be such a chore…
These are innovations of convenience, mostly, but they arguably build a gateway to bigger things: for data, for advertising, and for, yes, society. The data created with millions of digitized interactions could provide deeper records of what people are buying and how much they’re paying for it — the sort of information that would be important to corporate research departments …
I think the answer is two-fold: (1) Innovations that save time, even just a little bit of time, are real innovations, because in any advanced economy time and attention are currency and creating more of them can make us all richer …
A cashless economy can make us richer: “One 2003 study estimated that moving from a wholly paper-based network to a completely electronic one could save an economy 1 percent …
A cashless society can make us richer. Innovations that save us even trivial increments of time can make us richer. The insipid passed off as critically insightful through the genius of repetition and judging progress by anything alleged to make all thicker in the digital wallet. The very intersection of magical thinking and blowjob journalism.
That’s everyone in society including the forty seven or eight million people on foodstamps, right?
A notable number of them Starbuck’s employees, too, because, like Wal-Mart and so many other US multi-nationals, the company doesn’t pay its floor and wait staff enough to make a single living, in say, Pasadena.
A problem smartphones haven’t seemed able to fix.
But if you’re the guy writing for the Atlantic, waving your nice gadget in the direction of the minimum wage servant, the quick cashless innovation that adds half a minute to your self-gratification time in the corporate coffee house makes us all more wealthy. Well, maybe not today. But soon. I’m just sure of it.
Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based anti-virus firm which co-discovered the Flame state-sponsored spyware, says it’s found another cyberweapon: a sophisticated banking Trojan that Kaspersky has dubbed “Gauss.”
Gauss is designed to steal credentials for bank accounts at half a dozen Lebanese banks, Kaspersky says, and shares a USB-stick infection method with another state-sponsored bug — the Stuxnet worm that the U.S. and Israel used to attack Iran.
“After looking at Stuxnet, [the Stuxnet relative] Duqu and Flame, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Gauss comes from the same ‘factory’ or ‘factories,'” Kaspersky said in a FAQ posted on its website. “All these attack toolkits represent the high end of nation-state sponsored cyber-espionage and cyberwar operations, pretty much defining the meaning of ‘sophisticated malware.'”
It’s not entirely clear that Gauss is indeed state-sponsored. The evidence that Kaspersky presents proves that Gauss is fairly sophisticated, yet not out of the reach of the creators of such well-known criminal-controlled banking Trojans …
“Differences in degree of sophistication are probably not particularly important at this stage,” George Smith, a senior fellow with the Alexandria, Va.-based defense-policy research organization GlobalSecurity.org, told SecurityNewsDaily. “[Gauss] looks like it’s fitting into the historical pattern. Just because the malware writers are working for a country doesn’t make them different than their older brethren” …
“Maybe it’s a criminal tool,” Smith said. “However, the national arguments about cyberwar have always talked about opposing nations hitting banking and financial systems. So it is not really a surprise they would be making things to do the same.”
In addition to the Lebanese banks, Gauss is also engineered to steal online credentials for Citibank and PayPal …
The US government has put in place sanctions proscribing banks from
doing business for Iran. Using cyberspace to hit middle eastern banks clandestinely would conceptually fit into such a strategy.
Or maybe it’s all just coincidence.
If you follow these stories at a more fine grain level you’re now seeing a resentment, perhaps fueld by a covetous envy, towards Kaspersky Labs in competing vendors and experts.
A research report compiled earlier this year by a group of social scientists working for the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System found that members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) are largely seen by U.S. soldiers as unmotivated, highly dependent and making little to no progress …
Soldiers responding to the survey are quoted as stating that the “ANA doesn’t care, they are lazy??? and the “ANA have no motivation to do anything.??? One U.S. Staff Sergeant said that the ANA are not interested in taking on more responsibility, adding that “We do the heavy lifting, they put a face on it.??? Nearly half of soldiers surveyed said the ANA has little, not much or no motivation at all to fight. This lack of motivation often causes coalition forces to take the lead even on missions that are supposedly led by the ANA …
In fact, 62% of soldiers responding to the survey said that so-called “ANA-led??? missions are rarely or never actually planned and executed by Afghan forces.
You would have thought the US military has some institutional memory re the “local fighting forces” of propped-up client states with corrupt central government and populations that want the occupiers out.
Now that Cybersecurity 2012 has failed — it deserved the fate — there’s not much point in the big gun lobbyists for it to continue the sales pitch.
Which means NSA director Keith Alexander has, for a moment, disappeared. There’s no immediate need for more scamming.
Which shows you the nature of the rigging. The financial system could be attacked. The water could be made something bad. The electricity turned off! But they failed to get what they wanted so it’ll wait until next time.
Nevertheless, PBS recently covered it, painting the failure to arrive at legislation a national tragedy, putting everyone at risk.
So how serious are the threats to America’s infrastructure? How easy would it be to take down one critical element, water supplies, electricity grid?
JOEL BRENNER, author, “America the Vulnerable”: We have seen a real spike in the attacks on the industrial control systems that run a lot of these — this infrastructure. When DHS began keeping…
MARGARET WARNER: Department of Homeland Security.
JOEL BRENNER: …Department of Homeland Security began keeping figures on this in 2009, there were four such attacks. Last year, there were 198. The numbers are pretty — they really tell the story.
MARGARET WARNER: And how many have actually — how many times have elements been penetrated?
JOEL BRENNER: I’m talking about attacks that really in many cases get in.
And, you know, there are different levels of penetration, and I’m — but I’m not talking just about pings on — knocks on the door. I’m talking about more significant, concerted attempts to get into infrastructure. And we have seen it in water supply stuff, as well as in electricity.
MARGARET WARNER: And who are the major — major perpetrators?
JOEL BRENNER: We — I can say what has been publicly disclosed is that a number of people in the intelligence business have seen the Iranian, the Chinese and the Russians inside of some of our critical systems, and we know the Iranians are trying …
Everything we do, including the air conditioning in this building and the switches on the subway systems in every major city, are reachable through the Internet. It’s very dangerous.
No, not the air-conditioning! It’s been triple digits in Pasadena the last three days!
Readers will note it takes some quality of sophisticated mendacity most of us lack to be the flunky on television telling viewers Iranians are attacking the US in cyberspace when the overriding news stories have been about our government-written viruses dispatched for work in Iran.
And, the classic example of an obviously planted question, alleged to be from a random member of the hoi polloi:
MARGARET WARNER: We did get some emails, email questions from viewers.
Kathryn Creedy of Melbourne, Florida, said, “Reports are that most companies are ignoring the significant threat of cyber-attacks or at least have it on the back burner, owing to costs.” She said, “I find this shocking, since it’s their fiduciary responsibility to protect the stakeholders of any organization, employees, customers and shareholders.”
Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, huh? Yeah, that’s something a legitimate man or woman in the street would ask. For sure.
Media rigging on the cybersecurity beat is usually obvious. But the PBS piece goes just a little bit above and beyond.
Get off the street. Get a job. You’re making a mess. You are under arrest for annoying corporate businesspeople.
That’s the common message for anyone expressing legitimate dissent. It’s how you get around free speech when the message is writ large, as it apparently was in Vegas with hijacked billboards.
Billboards there, protesting Wall St. and the collapsed economy, were adorned by mannequins made to look like someone hung himself from a stanchion, one entitled “Dying for Work.”
Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns another sign that was affected, said they pulled the display immediately and plan to work with law enforcement to punish whoever is responsible.
“We condemn the destructive behavior against one of our billboards because it is illegal and punishes our advertisers,” Clear Channel Outdoor spokesman Jim Cullinan said in a statement.
Someone punishes our advertisers, so the down on their luck but very inventive perpetrators must be punished. No visible symbolic unpleasantness allowed during rush hour.
Just a few weeks ago, I spotted a rather paranoid ad that read: “47yo patriot discovers ‘weird’ trick to slash power bill & end Obama’s power monopoly.” (I’ve heard Obama accused of many things, but being an electricity cartel kingpin is a new one.)
I wonder how this trend came to be. Was there some marketing study on the clickability of different phrases, and “weird trick” came out on top? Especially if the weird trick came from moms, dads, patriots, and other salt-of-the-earth folks? The implicit rejection of professional expertise here frankly says a lot about our culture. Don’t need no fancypants scientist telling us how to lose our flab!
