Know that this has been a few years in the making.......

http://www.businessinsider.com/stores-cl...rs-2016-12

Page 1 (except for DHS and FBI logos which I have no desire to duplicate)

TLP:WHITE
JOINT ANALYSIS REPORT
DISCLAIMER:

This report is provided “as is” for informational purposes only. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not provide any warranties of any kind regarding any information contained within. DHS does not endorse any commercial product or service referenced in this advisory or otherwise. This document is distributed as Subject to standard copyright rules, information may be distributed without restriction. For more information on the Traffic Light Protocol, see https://www.us-cert.gov/tlp.


 (Comment: official publications of the federal government created by federal employees in official duties are not subject to copyright protection but may be denied in accordance with concerns for national security, judicial process, or law enforcement)


Reference Number: JAR-16-20296

December 29, 2016

GRIZZLY STEPPE – Russian Malicious Cyber Activity


Summary

This Joint Analysis Report (JAR) is the result of analytic efforts between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This document provides technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence Services (RIS) to compromise and exploit networks and  endpoints associated with the U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. Government, political, and private sector entities.  The U.S. Government is referring to this malicious cyber activity by RIS as GRIZZLY STEPPE.

Previous JARs have not attributed malicious cyber activity to specific countries or threat actors. However, public attribution of these activities to RIS is supported by technical indicators from the U.S. Intelligence Community, DHS, FBI, the private sector, and other entities. This determination expands upon the Joint Statement  released October 7, 2016, from the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security.

This activity by RIS is part of an ongoing campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at U.S. government and its citizens. These cyber operations have included spearphishing campaigns targeting government organizations, critical infrastructure entities, think tanks, universities, political organizations, and corporations leading to the theft of information. In foreign countries, RIS actors conducted  damaging and/or disruptive cyber-attacks, including attacks on critical infrastructure  networks. In some cases, RIS actors masqueraded as third parties, hiding behind false online personas designed to cause the victim to misattribute the source of the attack. This JAR provides technical indicators related to many of these operations, recommended mitigations, suggested actions to take in response to the indicators provided, and information on how to report such incidents to the U.S. Government.  

Page 1 of 13.

Read it and weep.

My comment:It is bad enough that foreign interests may have decided the electoral results for us. Just think of how bad things can be if the 2020 Presidential election turns into a contest between Chinese and Russian actors trying to manipulate the Presidential and Congressional elections with more concern for getting or keeping amenable stooges in power. In such a scenario the United States of America is no longer truly  really independent.

This is not about Americans or about public policy as established by the President and Congress.

So I had this thread going on in the former forum, so I thought about bringing over that iscussion over to this forum now.

It's about Vaporwave, or whats known as neo-dadaism. What do you think about it so far?

(12-22-2016, 03:23 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-22-2016, 02:47 PM)taramarie Wrote: Omg guys give it a rest. It is Christmas. Can't you be civil for at least a few days?

 I thought we were remaining pretty civil myself. I haven't ripped into Playdude as much as I could rip into Playdude in real life. Have you ever wondered how long Playdude/Eric/PB would last here, if I was able to write better and type faster and much more into doing stuff like this competitively?

It looks as if some Trump supporters (including some local Republican Party cells) don't appreciate academic freedom. Above a certain level of sophistication of students (roughly middle school) teachers in some subjects are likely to introduce potentially-controversial positions. Academic freedom does not protect teachers or professors from losing jobs for incompetence (let us say a biology teacher asserting that a frog is a mammal or a teacher of any kind denying the Holocaust) or teacher misconduct (like lewd behavior). Teachers are rightly protected from student misconduct, and are not expected to change their positions on current issues just because there is a new President or that the majority has changed in Congress or the State Legislature. Teachers have the right to their opinions but of course must recognize that there usually is another side (unless a dry fact or a controversy settled definitively decades ago).

Even as a substitute teacher I have had to deal with homophobia, including a time in which a student bragged that he loved to beat gays with a baseball bat. I of course called him on it because such is a crime (assault, potentially murder) and he accused me of being a homosexual. Eventually I turned most of the class against him, which I would never do on a trivial issue. Ordinarily one does not embarrass a student in the presence of his peers because such betrays the teacher-student bond -- but he betrayed that bond by exposing me as a homosexual who deserved to be beaten up. (I dodged the issue of whether I was a homosexual or not because violent crime is consummately dangerous, and I could have never satisfied him that I was straight. I could state that homosexuality was de facto legal in Michigan because nobody has been arrested for homosexual acts per se unless they involve some deed that would be illegal for a straight person, like messing with a child). I got my point across when I said that attacking gays for being gay was as senseless as attacking people for being "dentists or plumbers".

But I know what academic freedom is and is not. I follow the basic rules and the lesson plan, and if someone wants to assert that evolution is a hoax, then I have resources at my disposal... such as that from the neck down we humans are stereotypical apes, that pig valves can be used as heart valves in humans, that DNA dictates what life is, and that Linnaeus created a system of classifications that demonstrate the relatedness of all living things. If someone wants to disparage evolution as contrary to the Word of God, then I must ask whether God forged evidence of evolution to trick otherwise-upstanding people into a damnable sin... God as a Deceiver? I want nothing to do with such a god.

I am about to set up a news story. We may see more of this.

I found this article on Astrolada. Here is the URL: http://www.astrolada.com/articles/predic...music.html

Under the thread titled, "America Is a Sick Society," Eric the Green has provided an excellent reference to a book about neoliberalism.  The link is repeated below for those posters who missed it the first time:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/a...?CMP=fb_gu

Neoliberalism is the political/economic philosophy that has held sway in America, the United Kingdom, and indeed in much of the Western world since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Only in Latin America was any political resistance offered to neoliberalism, and that has met with only mixed--and in some cases, ephemeral--success.

As a whole, neoliberal policies--privatization, deregulation, free trade, tax cuts, austerity, to name just a few--have been in force in Western economies for over 35 years, regardless of the party in power. Ronald Reagan was a neoliberal, though he would never have referred to himself as such, as the very root word "liberal" would have been anathema to his conservative constituents.  Bush 41 and 43 were also neoliberals.  Bill Clinton, too.  And, yes, even Obama.  Hillary Clinton would also have fit the bill had she been elected president.  Sadly, the only real challenge to neoliberal orthodoxy in the US has been the insurgent presidential campaigns of Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders, both of whom fell well short of overturning neoliberalism as a guiding political and economic philosophy.  And now, Trump is assembling an administration that, from all indications, threatens to send neoliberalism into hyper-drive. 

Make no mistake, neoliberalism is the old civic order that must be scuttled if America--and much of the West--is to ever regenerate itself politically and economically.  As a governing philosophy, it almost crumbled in the wake of the financial crisis.  The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and Brexit were all challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy, each in its own way.  Yet neoliberalism lives on, and may enjoy a last desperate gasp with the policies and team that Donald Trump is now putting into place.

Who are the best leaders for the Democrats, which will make a comeback to power possible?

Should they be bold progressives, or mainstream compromisers?

Should they be Bernie Sanders, Michael Moore, Keith Ellison, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, etc?

Or should they be Labor Sec. Perez, Gov. Cuomo, Tim Ryan, Sen. Manchin, Chuck Schumer, Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi, et al?

Will it be important for our presidential candidate to have a good horoscope score? Or, in non-astrological layman's terms, someone who knows how to appeal to the American people? What does this look like? Who is the reverse Trump, or the new Obama/Bill Clinton? And not a Hillary or a Kerry or a Dukakis/Mondale/McGovern etc.?
(see the candidate scores here http://philosopherswheel.com/presidentialelections.html under who scored what)

Is someone from show biz, like Trump, the right answer to Trump? Seth Meyers, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Moore, or Stephen Colbert? (these are the best-scoring such alternatives from this realm so far)

Michael Moore has a disadvantage of Saturn born at his Nadir, and Colbert of a Saturn Return due in 2023-24.

Does appeal to the Rust Belt and the working class conflict with appeals to disadvantaged groups or "identity politics?" Why should there be a conflict?

Are there newcomers to the realm of presidential politics or on the horizon that might appeal, like Sen. Stabenow or Gov. Cooper? Gavin Newsom or Antonio Villaraigosa?

Eric Satt shared a link to the group: Democratic Open Forum.
18 hrs · 


The Electoral College was Founded, with Roots Grounded in Slavery!

James Madison, slave owner from Virginia and the nation's 4th President, proposed that we needed this Electoral College to give southern plantation owners, an equal shot at winning the White House. His fear (and other slave owners' fear) was that there were far more free, White males who could vote in the northern states and that they would control the presidency if each man received an equal vote.

First thing the framers of the Constitution did was count each slave as 3/5 of a person (instead of not being counted at all, which is how it should have been since they had no voting rights...The Three-Fifths Compromise). There were 500,000 slaves in the South. Counting 60% of their population towards votes and creating an Electoral College system that placed an inordinate number of Electors in the South, especially in Virginia, gave the them an unfair advantage towards the presidency. In fact, during the first 32 of 36 years after our Constitution was ratified, the presidency was won by a Virginian!! 

Jefferson beat Adams in 1800, because of the Three-Fifths Compromise and Electoral College.

Fast forward. Slavery ended in 1865 yet the institution of the Electoral College still exists. It's a holdover from a terrible time in our nation's past. Slavery is gone so why are we keeping this outdated relic and allowing it to decide Presidents?

In the last 16 years, we have seen two USA Presidents selected, not by the people but by the Electoral College - Bush and now Trump. The former was, by most accounts, an abysmal failure. I don't expect much better from the latter.

http://time.com/4558510/electoral-colleg...y-slavery/

Let's allow Americans to make decisions for America. Kill the Electoral College.

Eric Satt shared a link to the group: Democratic Open Forum.
18 hrs · 


The Electoral College was Founded, with Roots Grounded in Slavery!

James Madison, slave owner from Virginia and the nation's 4th President, proposed that we needed this Electoral College to give southern plantation owners, an equal shot at winning the White House. His fear (and other slave owners' fear) was that there were far more free, White males who could vote in the northern states and that they would control the presidency if each man received an equal vote.

First thing the framers of the Constitution did was count each slave as 3/5 of a person (instead of not being counted at all, which is how it should have been since they had no voting rights...The Three-Fifths Compromise). There were 500,000 slaves in the South. Counting 60% of their population towards votes and creating an Electoral College system that placed an inordinate number of Electors in the South, especially in Virginia, gave the them an unfair advantage towards the presidency. In fact, during the first 32 of 36 years after our Constitution was ratified, the presidency was won by a Virginian!! 

Jefferson beat Adams in 1800, because of the Three-Fifths Compromise and Electoral College.

Fast forward. Slavery ended in 1865 yet the institution of the Electoral College still exists. It's a holdover from a terrible time in our nation's past. Slavery is gone so why are we keeping this outdated relic and allowing it to decide Presidents?

In the last 16 years, we have seen two USA Presidents selected, not by the people but by the Electoral College - Bush and now Trump. The former was, by most accounts, an abysmal failure. I don't expect much better from the latter.

http://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Let's allow Americans to make decisions for America. Kill the Electoral College.