originally recorded in 1923 by Fiddlin John Carson. Share, like and subcribe!
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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Papa’s billy goat.
Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Fiddlin John Carson, Papa's billy goat | Leave a Comment »
Your Credit Card is at Risk because of this hacking device!
Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022
This a real thing. It happened at our local fair.
I used to use sleeves. Now I use RFID blocking wallets.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: credit card, hacking, RFID Blocking | Leave a Comment »
Putin’s ‘Winter War’ on Ukraine
Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022
For us, the greatest stake in this Russia-Ukraine war is not who ends up in control of Luhansk, Donetsk or Kherson, but that we not be drawn into a military conflict that would put us on the escalator to a war with Russia, a world war and perhaps a nuclear war.
Nothing in Eastern or Central Europe is worth a major U.S. war with Russia that could go nuclear and cost millions of American lives.
Winter has often proven an indispensable ally of Mother Russia. The impending winter of 1812-13 forced Napoleon’s withdrawal from Moscow, a retreat from which his Grande Armee never recovered. The winter of 1941-42 sealed the ultimate fate of the invading armies of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.
Vladimir Putin’s new strategy in the war he launched on Ukraine in February is to conscript the coming winter of 2022-23 as an ally of his failing army. For weeks, there have been reports of Russian air, missile and drone strikes on power plants in every major Ukrainian city.
The false report that a Russian-fired rocket had landed in Poland, killing two civilians, came on a day when 100 Russian bombs, rockets, missiles, and drones hit “infrastructure” targets across Ukraine. It was the heaviest Russian barrage to date in the nine-month war.
Putin’s goal: As the Ukrainian army battles the Russian army in the Donbas and Kherson, the power grid upon which the Ukrainian nation and people depend is to be systematically attacked, shut down, destroyed. Without electric power, there will be no light or heat in Ukrainian homes, hospitals, offices or schools. Without electricity, food cannot be preserved, stoves do not work, water cannot be pumped. Without power, light, and heat, Putin’s expectation is that the Ukrainian people, who have patriotically supported their army, will, in the tens of thousands this winter, be at risk of freezing to death in the dark.
Winter, from mid-December to mid-March, is the coldest and darkest of the seasons, and it begins in four weeks. On Friday, CNN reported that, after the latest wave of Russian strikes, 10 million Ukrainians, a fourth of the nation, were without power.
“Russia is turning winter into a weapon, even as its soldiers flail on the battlefield,” wrote The New York Times on Sunday. “In a relentless and intensifying barrage of missiles fired from ships at sea, batteries on land and planes in the sky, Moscow is destroying Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, depriving millions of heat, light and clean water.” Ukraine’s state energy company adds: “Due to a dramatic drop in temperature, electricity consumption is increasing daily in those regions of Ukraine where power supply has already been restored after massive missile strikes on November 15 on the energy infrastructure.”
The U.S. stance in this war is that the fighting stops and peace talks begin only when Kyiv says the fighting stops and the negotiations begin. But Americans, whose support for Ukraine has been indispensable in this war, also need to have a voice in when the war ends.
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Kevin McCarthy, House Panderer
Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022
But McCarthy managed to sink even below those very low standards of propriety that ought to be in force among congressional leaders. He did more than grovel in the way that politicians often practice their art. He decided to punish members of the Foreign Relations Committee for criticizing a foreign government, about which McCarthy feels impelled—for his own advantage—to say only nice things.
For once in my life, I’m on the side of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). Despite this lady’s expressions of loathing for the white Christian West and for the country that gave her asylum and masochistically elevated her to a congressional seat, I stand with Ilhan against Kevin McCarthy, who (God help us!) may be the new Republican Speaker of the House.
McCarthy, in a well-publicized oration at a Jewish Republican conference in Las Vegas last month, stated his intention to remove Congresswoman Omar from her position on the House Foreign Relations Committee. McCarthy planned to take this radical step because Omar had rashly criticized Israel in public statements. She claimed that Israel had “hypnotized the world” and that, given the treatment of the occupied West Bank by the Israeli government, boycotting Israel is like “boycotting Nazi Germany.”
Allow me to say the obvious here: I do not agree with Omar’s over-the-top attack on the Israelis and find her comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany breathtakingly inappropriate. Given the source, however, I am not surprised by Omar’s less than carefully considered statements. The “anti-Semitic” comments she made last year, for which McCarthy also intends to punish her, seem somewhat blander than her later statements.
Omar’s earlier charge that the Israel lobby bribes politicians with “Benjamins” may in fact be a crude way of telling us the truth. Although Omar may have chosen her words more thoughtfully, she is right that there is an Israeli lobby and Zionist donors in the U.S. who will act in accordance with what they—correctly or incorrectly—perceive as Israeli interests. I don’t think these defenders and promoters always represent Israel’s interests accurately or that they act in all cases on instruction from Israeli leaders. But they do try to isolate critics of Israel in the U.S. McCarthy is acting in such a way that he seems to be doing this lobby’s bidding with slavish obedience.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Ilhan Omar, Kevin McCarthy, Panderer | Leave a Comment »
How the Global Spyware Industry Spiraled Out of Control
Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022
The market for commercial spyware — which allows governments to invade mobile phones and vacuum up data — is booming. Even the U.S. government is using it.
Do ya think Israeli spyware is spying on the ones using Israeli spyware?
https://archive.vn/gsLpQ#selection-473.0-499.150
By Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv and Nicosia, Cyprus, and Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels, Athens and Nicosia.
The Biden administration took a public stand last year against the abuse of spyware to target human rights activists, dissidents and journalists: It blacklisted the most notorious maker of the hacking tools, the Israeli firm NSO Group.
But the global industry for commercial spyware — which allows governments to invade mobile phones and vacuum up data — continues to boom. Even the U.S. government is using it.
The Drug Enforcement Administration is secretly deploying spyware from a different Israeli firm, according to five people familiar with the agency’s operations, in the first confirmed use of commercial spyware by the federal government.
At the same time, the use of spyware continues to proliferate around the world, with new firms — which employ former Israeli cyberintelligence veterans, some of whom worked for NSO — stepping in to fill the void left by the blacklisting. With this next generation of firms, technology that once was in the hands of a small number of nations is now ubiquitous — transforming the landscape of government spying.
One firm, selling a hacking tool called Predator and run by a former Israeli general from offices in Greece, is at the center of a political scandal in Athens over the spyware’s use against politicians and journalists.
After questions from The New York Times, the Greek government admitted that it gave the company, Intellexa, licenses to sell Predator to at least one country with a history of repression, Madagascar. The Times has also obtained a business proposal that Intellexa made to sell its products to Ukraine, which turned down the sales pitch.
Predator was found to have been used in another dozen countries since 2021, illustrating the continued demand among governments and the lack of robust international efforts to limit the use of such tools.
The Times investigation is based on an examination of thousands of pages of documents — including sealed court documents in Cyprus, classified parliamentary testimonies in Greece and a secret Israeli military police investigation — as well as interviews with more than two dozen government and judicial officials, law enforcement agents, business executives and hacking victims in five countries.
The most sophisticated spyware tools — like NSO’s Pegasus — have “zero-click” technology, meaning they can stealthily and remotely extract everything from a target’s mobile phone, without the user having to click on a malicious link to give Pegasus remote access. They can also turn the mobile phone into a tracking and secret recording device, allowing the phone to spy on its owner. But hacking tools without zero-click capability, which are considerably cheaper, also have a significant market.
Commercial spyware has been used by intelligence services and police forces to hack phones used by drug networks and terrorist groups. But it has also been abused by numerous authoritarian regimes and democracies to spy on political opponents and journalists. This has led governments to a sometimes tortured rationale for their use — including an emerging White House position that the justification for using these powerful weapons depends in part on who is using them and against whom.
The Biden administration is trying to impose some degree of order to the global chaos, but in this environment, the United States has played both arsonist and firefighter. Besides the D.E.A.’s use of spyware — in this case, a tool called Graphite, made by the Israeli firm Paragon — the C.I.A. during the Trump administration purchased Pegasus for the government of Djibouti, which used the hacking tool for at least a year. And F.B.I. officials made a push in late 2020 and the first half of 2021 to deploy Pegasus in their own criminal investigations before the bureau ultimately abandoned the idea.
In a statement to The Times, the Drug Enforcement Administration said that “the men and women of the D.E.A. are using every lawful investigative tool available to pursue the foreign-based cartels and individuals operating around the world responsible for the drug-poisoning deaths of 107,622 Americans last year.”
Steven Feldstein, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, has documented the use of spyware by at least 73 countries.
“The penalties against NSO and its ilk are important,” he said. “But in reality, other vendors are stepping in. And there’s no sign it’s going away.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: C.I.A., Drug Enforcement Administration, Israeli spyware, NSO Group, Paragon, predatory government, Spyware Industry | Leave a Comment »
Smile! TSA has yet another boondoggle to make traveling more painful
Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022
But what harm could there be in permitting TSA to scrutinize people’s faces? TSA already spent a billion dollars on behavior detection officers who furtively circulated in airports to detect travelers who were sweating, hand-wringing, yawning, staring too intently, or avoiding eye contact. The inspector general said the program was a complete waste of money and never caught any terrorists.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/08/smile-tsa-has-yet-another-boondoggle-to-make-traveling-more-painful/
By
Why would any law-abiding American balk at permitting the feds to vacuum up his biometric data at the airport? The Transportation Security Administration is running a pilot program in which travelers stand in photo kiosks that compare their faces with a federal database of photos from passport applications, driver’s licenses, and other sources. TSA promises its new airport regime, which could vastly expand next year, will respect Americans’ privacy.
If you believe that, I can sell you a bridge in Brooklyn really cheap.
TSA has long been one of the most intrusive and inept federal agencies. For 20 years, every TSA boondoggle has been shielded by a bodyguard of bureaucratic lies.
“Trust us” is the TSA mantra for the new program. “TSA hasn’t actually released hard data about how often its system falsely identifies people, through incorrect positive or negative matches,” the Washington Post notes. TSA will be relying on photo-identification systems that have a misidentification error rate up to 100 times higher for blacks and Hispanics.
TSA has had plenty of profiling debacles, including targeting black males with backward baseball caps in Boston. At Newark Liberty Airport, TSA agents fabricated false charges against Hispanics to boost the program’s arrest numbers.
The TSA scanning system could be a big step toward a Chinese-style “social credit” system that could restrict travel by people the government doesn’t like. Actually, TSA has already been caught doing that. In 2018, the New York Times exposed a secret watchlist for anyone TSA labels “publicly notorious.” TSA critics to the end of the line — forever?
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: biometric data, boondoggle, Social Credit, tsa | Leave a Comment »
The Tool of Tools – Kunstler
Posted by M. C. on December 10, 2022
“The DNC and Biden Team knew they had friends at Twitter who would do their bidding during the election. And Twitter lied to the FEC about that influence…. But that’s just at the surface….” —TechnoFog on Substack
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-tool-of-tools/
James A. Baker
At what point in his arduous take-over of Twitter did Elon Musk realize that the package came with a joker in the deck: James A. Baker, formerly general counsel of the FBI? Did he wonder: what is this guy doing here? Were there any conversations between the two? Or did Mr. Musk just quietly observe his presence at a remove in nervous wonder, as one might, say, upon discovering a scorpion in the corner of his hotel room?
Mr. Baker, you understand, was notoriously at the center of the FBI’s FISA court fuckery that got the ball rolling in the Crossfire Hurricane operation, Act One of RussiaGate, as well as the Alfa Bank caper concocted by Hillary Clinton (disclosed this year by special counsel John Durham), and probably every other sedition pie the FBI cooked in its oven in those years, considering Mr. Baker’s position as chief legal advisor to Director Chris Wray. When the alt-news media caught onto Mr. Baker’s nefarious activities, he became inconvenient to the agency, was re-assigned to some nebulous task (polishing Mr. Wray’s cuff links?), and quit in May, 2018. He landed temporarily — or was he, rather, parked out-of-sight? — at the shadowy R Street Institute, an Intel Community cut-out, one of its countless PR channels in the DC Swamp.
But then, mysteriously, Mr. Baker got hired by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in June of 2020 — the heat of a presidential election — to work under Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s general counsel (and chief of “legal, policy, and trust” [ha!]), where he remained until just the other day. Is it a stretch to imagine Mr. Baker’s former employer, the FBI — which, let’s face it, operates as a sort of blood-brotherhood — purposely installed Mr. Baker in that sensitive job at Twitter to help “moderate” the national conversation in the central forum that public debate had moved to in our time?
If so, he apparently did a crackerjack job, and just at the right time, too, after the FBI discovered, in emails they ripped off Rudolph Giuliani’s purloined cloud account, that Donald Trump’s attorney possessed of a copy of the laptop hard-drive of one Hunter Biden, son of presidential candidate Joe Biden — said computer (the FBI knew full-well by then) being stuffed not just with pornographic photos of crack orgies and other personal infelicities, but also a trove of emails and deal memos laying out a bribery and money-laundering scheme that the younger Biden was running all over Eurasia as a family business.
Of course, the FBI had that selfsame computer in its possession for the better part of a year when The New York Post broke the news of its existence days before the election of 2020. In fact, the Bureau had had possession at the very time that Mr. Trump was busy getting impeached for daring to suggest to Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Bidens were involved in some shady business worth investigating with the Kiev-based Burisma gas company. Evidence of that and much much more — including way-bigger shady deals with CCP cut-outs — lay moldering in the laptop the FBI just silently sat on. Isn’t it a little strange that during the dragged-out impeachment ordeal neither Attorney General William Barr nor FBI chief Chris Wray volunteered to Mr. Trump’s legal defense that they held exculpatory evidence on that laptop for the very thing he was impeached on?
That was January, 2020, many months before The New York Post took the laptop’s existence public. And whaddaya know… by June of that year, James A. Baker was in place at Twitter, ready to serve! As election day approached, he apparently succeeded in stifling transmission of the Post’s laptop story plus any-and-all conversation about it in the Twitterverse, and was careful not to leave a memo trail of his heroic interventions. Do you suppose he might have had some conversations about all that with his old colleagues at the FBI? At the same time, you understand, the FBI was leaning successfully on that other social network giant, Facebook, to likewise smother the laptop story. And Google, too, having become an Intel Community tool, was avid to tailor its search algorithms to steer the curious away from Hunter’s laptop. And so was fortune’s fool Joe Biden inserted into history….
Amazingly, after all that huggermugger, James A. Baker still remained in place last week at Twitter — even as his putative boss, censor-in-chief, Vijaya Gadde, got drop-kicked out the door — just as Elon Musk prepared to release a trove of information detailing Twitter’s censorship activities of recent years. Yes! And, evidently, Mr. Baker functioned as a sort of one-man clearing house for all the documents getting shoveled to independent reporter Matt Taibbi, whom Mr. Musk had designated to be the news conduit for these awaited revelations. And, yes, there is every reason to suspect that Mr. Baker censored, or perhaps even tried to destroy, the very documents that Mr. Musk ordered released.
Was that not like leaving a wolverine in Twitter’s henhouse? How could Mr. Musk not know how absurd it was for Mr. Baker to moderate that release? Well, the chatter is that Mr. Musk was seeking a way to encourage Mr. Baker to inculpate himself, so as to foreclose any lawsuits he might think to bring against Twitter for wrongful termination. I have to say, Mr. Musk would be an idiot if he did not have copies of the server that James Baker had access to and had the opportunity to delete stuff from. I guess we’ll find out.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: crossfire hurricane, FBI, FISA Court, James A. Baker, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
The NDAA Rip-Off Is Huge!
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022
Kevin McCarthy-Another Raytheon boardmember candidate.
https://rumble.com/v1zn7yy-the-ndaa-rip-off-is-huge.html
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Why the Left Must Destroy Free Speech – or Be Destroyed – LewRockwell
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022
In totalitarian societies, wrote Hayek, truth is not something that is discovered by learning, education, self-study, research, and debate and discussion. Instead, it is “something to be laid down by authority . . .”
It isn’t just the Left. I see John Bolton is rearing his ugly head.
In Hayek’s famous 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, he warned that the intellectual and political classes of the democracies of that time were embracing some of the same ideas that inspired Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Stalin’s Russia: comprehensive government planning, hyper regulation of industry, nationalization, welfare statism, and collectivism in general. He did not predict that these societies would end up “in serfdom,” however, as some have mistakenly claimed. Quite the contrary. In his first chapter he clearly stated that he hoped the ideas in the book would help these countries to avoid that disastrous fate. He hoped the ideas of the book would be a roadblock on the road to serfdom.
The eleventh chapter of The Road to Serfdom is entitled “The End of Truth,” about the historical imperative in all totalitarian states throughout history to destroy freedom of speech so that the only true belief is “the social plan” imposed by the state, whatever that may be. This is achieved by relentless institutionalized lying and propaganda, coupled with harsh censorship of all contrary ideas or even questions about the propriety of forcefully imposing one single “social plan.” This is American society today, in other words, in case you haven’t noticed. (Socialism, Hayek said, has always been about substituting the plans of politicians for the plans that all of the citizens make for themselves. It’s not a matter of planning versus no planning, but who is to do the planning).
The significance of propaganda in totalitarian countries, Hayek wrote, is that “If all the sources of current information are effectively under one single control, it is no longer a question of merely persuading people of this or that. The skillful propagandist then has power to mold . . . minds in any direction he chooses . . .” Jeff Deist, among others, has commented that America today has become a “post-persuasion society” and he is right, almost eighty years after Hayek issued this warning. The Left is no longer willing to seriously debate anything – at least for the time being while they control the universities, all three branches of government, the media, (laughingly-named) “entertainment” industries, and more. Even dopey Prince Harry publicly denounced the First Amendment in a pathetic attempt to ingratiate himself with Hollywood Leftists like his wife shortly after divorcing himself from his family and moving to Hollywood. If you disagree with their latest version of socialist totalitarianism (“woke-ism” coupled with green hysteria and calls for worldwide central planning), then you can be canceled, smeared as a racist, a white supremacist, or even fired from your job and prevented from getting a new one.
The moral consequences of totalitarian propaganda are even more profound. It is “destructive of all morals” because it “undermines one of the foundations of all morals: the sense and respect for the truth.” An avalanche of Official Lies has always been the tool of “various theoreticians of the totalitarian system,” wrote Hayek, citing Plato’s “noble lies” and “social myths” championed by the French philosopher Georges Sorel. The ends justify the lying means to totalitarians everywhere. When was the last time a “White House spokesperson” did not lie in public? (See my 1992 book, Official Lies: How Washington Misleads Us, with James T. Bennett).
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: free speech, Hayek, John Bolton, the left, The Road to Serfdom | Leave a Comment »
How the Mainstream Media Misses the Money Quote – Antiwar.com Original
Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022
The mainstream media’s money quote missed that France, one of the two most powerful members of the EU, insists that a negotiated settlement to the war addresses Russia’s security concerns about NATO at its door and weapons at its border.
Macron is no different. Tell the US one thing, tell his constituents another and keeping to himself what he really thinks.
https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2022/12/08/how-the-mainstream-media-misses-the-money-quote/
by Ted Snider
On December 1, French President Emmanuel Macron went to Washington for the first state visit of the Biden administration. After the pageantry, presents, hand holding and flattering words of fraternity and solidarity, Macron faced the gathered press.
“We will never urge Ukrainians to make a compromise that will not be acceptable for them.” “That,” said Helene Cooper of The New York Times, “is the money quote.”
But it wasn’t the money quote by several euros. The money quote came days later when Macron was not standing shoulder to shoulder with Biden in front of an American audience, but standing on his own addressing a French audience. Macron told the French television network TF1, in an interview filmed during his visit to Washington but aired as he left, that “We need to prepare what we are ready to do, how we protect our allies and member states, and how to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.” Then Macron made his full meaning clear: “One of the essential points we must address – as President Putin has always said – is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia.”
The money quote was that, despite the display of solidarity, there was a canyon between the leader of the US and the leader of the loyal European opposition. The canyon was so wide that it included disagreement over the causes and solutions of the war. Biden and Macron both “strongly condemn Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.” But for Biden, in the beginning, that war was wholly unprovoked, and, in the end, the settlement must reflect that and protect core US values. For Macron, though the war was illegal, Russia had legitimate security concerns that NATO had been pushing, and the settlement must reflect that too.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Emmanuel Macron, mainstream media, Money Quote, Ukrainians | Leave a Comment »
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