The End of the American Century?

[mokong10101]

A financial collapse followed by a global systemic collapse is coming. Probably within the next 12-18 months.

 

Think 500 pesos (or more) = 1 kilo of rice.

 

The age of paper money is about to end. Anyway the average age of paper currencies is about 40-45 years. Money that is based on nothing is a tool for committing mass fraud.

 

The catalyst for this collapse will be when the countries which lend money to the US decides that a new reserve currency is required.

 

A former high-ranking World Bank employee exposed that there are moves for a single global currency that will be electronic in nature is underway.

 

The truth is, the disaster is much nearer than you all think.

[Bugatti Veyron]

Where life imitates art? I thought it was the other way around.

 

A remarkable tribute to Chris Farley's death anniversary by Toronto mayor's Rob Ford during his rambunctious and fulminating tirades towards city council.

 

Although you're a bit early sir, you've still got a month to work on your cartwheels.

 

You can appear as a guest on Saturday Night Live and play - yourself.

Apparently, Filipino politicians aren't the only ones with thick skins. If this guy had any sense of shame and honor, he would resign.

[Bugatti Veyron]

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated at precisely 12:30 PM Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963 (a Friday) in Dallas, Texas. That was at 2:30 AM in Manila, November 23. That was exactly 50 years ago to the very minute of this post. It's now exactly 2:30 AM in Manila.

 

 

 

May he rest in peace.

[sonnyt111]

Want to share this link regarding the first Pan Am Clipper flights between the United States and the Philippines. A bit of history linking both nations.

 

http://www.lougopal.com/manila/?p=1463

[wackyracer]

no, you don't need to debate anything with me. i just thought you might relish the chance to explain which among the tea party's arguments vs implementing Obamacare is moronic. thought you might also know, since it is the law like you rightly say, why or how the president changed the law so that certain corporate entities got a waiver? and if corporations got it, why can't individuals get the same waiver? after all, isn't that what republicans want? a one-year waiver until they figured out all the effects the act would have?

 

It is unfortunate that your reply came after the Government Shutdown and the Debt Ceiling Crisis was resolved, albeit, temporarily with the capitulation of the Republican side.

 

You misread me. Nowhere did I touch on the topic of Obamacare, much less, the Tea Party arguments against it so there is no chance I'd be able to call it "moronic." The main focus of my post which you replied to is about the Government Shutdown and how the U.S. budget is being held hostage by an extremist faction of the Republican Party.

 

It seems to me you are itching to discuss the Affordable Health Care Act. Feel free to do so and educate us. I have not read this voluminous law and not really keen on doing so as it is an American Law that does not really impact me as a Filipino. I have avoided posting on this thread because it seems the Tea Party people have gone amok here with their gobbledygook and conspiracy theories. You seem to be a more reasonable poster, maybe you could expound on the salient points of the Healthcare Act. What I have heard so far is that Obamacare is endangering the Freedom of America. Why so? The latest I've heard from the Republicans, the banning of Transfats in food products is also endangering the Freedom of America.

[dungeonbaby]

i also asked, since you called the Tea Party a bunch of morons over, yes, the shutdown, what you thought of the GOP's proposals to keep the fed funded.

 

it's not like the shutdown silently crept up on that whole lot (the congress), and yet only one party gets blamed. incidentally, why was the white house happy to be winning that debate, when the truth was the whole nation was losing. it's not gobbledygook when the administration issues directives to "make [the shutdown] hurt," prompting the government to mistakenly shut down a private park, or keeping visiting veterans away from a war memorial, just to make a point.

 

it seemed to me, listening to both sides in the weeks leading to the shutdown and in the weeks after, that what the GOP wanted was to cut spending, reduce debt, and yes...fight Obamacare. as a small-government kind of gal, i get that.

 

as for the budget proposal riders you spoke of, to "sabotage" Obamacare, recent events show clearly why the "morons" wanted to stop that. now if it were me in congress, i would've let the Affordable Health Care Act through cleanly, let the people see just how much they love losing their coverage or their doctors, and let them vote accordingly in the next election. that's me, i'm reprehensible that way. but some tea party senators, like ted cruz, were voted in specifically because they ran on platforms promising to do something about problematic laws and unfair exemptions to democratic "friends" like what we've touched on here.

 

i also replied to the editorial you quoted from that bastion of objectivity, the Phil Daily Inquirer, on the issue not just of the shutdown but of Obamacare as well, calling insurgent republicans racist. for someone who does not have skin in the game you sure quote some vile things, the racist tag is no light matter. and you sure are relentless in mocking the tea party and other conservatives. anyway, i thought i would reply to such a base, misguided, and unfounded generalization made by the Inquirer, hence bringing the discussion back to Obamacare. i'm not itching to discuss anything, there are more fun threads than this, but some things just bear replying to.

 

the short of it is, Republicans will continue to get blamed for most everything going wrong under this administration. that one-sided, inevitable blame loomed over the GOP for years, and they've finally called the Democrats' bluff, at great, great cost. cue liberal media coverage. cue you and your apparent disdain for the Tea Party.

 

despite this, i'm pretty sure you were being facetious in your oversimplification of the Republican agenda. i'll admit lashing out against a ban on transfats sounds lunatic. but in the context of protecting the citizens' freedom to choose how to live their lives, it's really not such a crazy thing to fight for.

[dungeonbaby]

I think a hole just ripped through my pants from a soupcan-rection. I don't know.

 

why thank you, mtf, that is the best compliment i've ever gotten in these parts! lol. but i think your condition may be due to 1) a long deployment away from sturdy, available females and 2) a strong drive to make librarians blush.

[dungeonbaby]

Or (3), a long deployment away from a sturdy, available librarian who likes to do more than, blush? 🍆 Aubergine Audrey?

 

lol. i don't blush, alliterating airman.

 

full disclosure: mtf owes me please don't mind us.

[wackyracer]

i also asked, since you called the Tea Party a bunch of morons over, yes, the shutdown, what you thought of the GOP's proposals to keep the fed funded.

 

it's not like the shutdown silently crept up on that whole lot (the congress), and yet only one party gets blamed. incidentally, why was the white house happy to be winning that debate, when the truth was the whole nation was losing. it's not gobbledygook when the administration issues directives to "make [the shutdown] hurt," prompting the government to mistakenly shut down a private park, or keeping visiting veterans away from a war memorial, just to make a point.

 

it seemed to me, listening to both sides in the weeks leading to the shutdown and in the weeks after, that what the GOP wanted was to cut spending, reduce debt, and yes...fight Obamacare. as a small-government kind of gal, i get that.

 

as for the budget proposal riders you spoke of, to "sabotage" Obamacare, recent events show clearly why the "morons" wanted to stop that. now if it were me in congress, i would've let the Affordable Health Care Act through cleanly, let the people see just how much they love losing their coverage or their doctors, and let them vote accordingly in the next election. that's me, i'm reprehensible that way. but some tea party senators, like ted cruz, were voted in specifically because they ran on platforms promising to do something about problematic laws and unfair exemptions to democratic "friends" like what we've touched on here.

 

It cannot be over-emphasized that passing the budget is a mandatory job of Congress. In July of 2013, Republican House Speaker John Boehner approached Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and offered to pass a clean Budget Resolution (without any Obamacare riders) if the Democrats agree to a $70 Billion spending cut. The Democrats agreed and the deal was cut. The Republicans eventually reneged on this agreement because according to Boehner, they decided to make a stand against Obamacare. (As pointed out previously, Obamacare has nothing to do with the Budget Act. The Affordable Health Care Act does not depend on the Budget Act for its funding and so can be taken on by the Republicans as a separate issue to deal with.) The short of it, they decided to hold hostage the U.S. government by withholding the funding up until their demands are met on de-funding Obamacare. Upping the ante, they threatened to let the U.S. government default on its debt by not acting on the debt ceiling. Surely, not funding the U.S. Government and pushing it to default on its debt was the quickest way to k*ll off America -- not the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

 

The Republicans reneged on a deal and decided to take a stand as admitted by Boehner. They should own up to it. This is not Harry Reid's government shutdown, not President Barrack Obama's government shutdown, it is without a doubt a Republican Tea Party government shutdown. The Republicans are fully aware of the consequences of a Government Shutdown that is why senior Republicans were against it up until they caved in to the 80 Tea Party representatives in August (because of personal political considerations with the incoming elections). They shut down the government but expect a few select government programs that they like to continue running. I wouldn't call that smart.

 

The Republican goals to cut spending and reduce the deficit are worthy, and at this time, necessary goals. However, everyone except a minority conservative base believe that shutting down the government and inducing a debt default will help in achieving these goals. The fact that Speaker Boehner trimmed down $70 Billion from the proposed Budget Act proves that it can be done through compromise. The government shutdown was estimated to have cost the economy $16 Billion and 120,000 new private sector jobs and shaved off 0.2-0.6 from the GDP. This does not yet take into account the impact of the government shutdown on consumer and business confidence.

 

The avenues attendant to a working representative democracy was and is available to every American, especially the Tea Party. They can turn to the law-making (or law-repealing as in this case)powers of Congress or the oversight powers of the Supreme Court or the electoral vote (by electing another president such as in 2012)to make their voices heard about their views on the ACA. In fact, they did (although they have been rebuffed quite a number of times but then they are free to try again). It can be done without torching the U.S. economy and the global economy along with it.

 

 

SIDE ISSUES

 

++ What exactly are the GOP proposals put forward to keep the government funded? I've read some and I think I've answered that by saying that discussions on the Affordable Care Act should be separate from the Appropriations Act. If you're talking about the piece-meal funding for select government programs proposed during the Government Shutdown, I believe that giving in to those would just encourage the Republicans to prolong the shutdown. And we all agree that the Government Shutdown is bad for all involved.

 

++ The "government directive" to make the shutdown hurt is sketchy at best. It was being used as a Republican ploy for sympathy in the early part of the government shutdown. True or not, closing up the War Memorial or the Panda cam is an inconvenience I deem minuscule to the real damage being done to all Americans by prolonging the government shutdown. If inconveniencing a few park visitors would bring out an immediate end to the government shutdown, that's not a bad bargain.

 

Here are the Republicans complaining that the government is squeezing them by shutting down memorial parks and yet conveniently forget that they are the ones doing the squeezing by withholding the budget. That if it were not for them, the parks would not have been shut down in the first place.

 

++ The idea that the White House was happy about the government shutdown is not accurate and is a derivative of a Wall Street Journal article quoting a supposed still-unnamed senior WH official thus: "We are winning ... It doesn't really matter to us" how long the shutdown lasts "because what matters is the end result." The quote was promptly disavowed by WH Press Secretary Jay Carney. (I would understand, however, if in private, they are amused at how the Republican Party is self-destructing.) But I know of at least two House Republicans happy about the shutdown:

 

Rep. Michelle Bachmann on Fox News:

"We're really very energized today, we're really very strong. This is about the happiest I've seen members for a long time."

"We're very excited. It's exactly what we wanted and we got it."

 

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz) on Face the Nation:

Said he thinks the government shutdown was a good idea. "It's about time."

[harmless0810]

Just in, from a concerned citizen, or in the words of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, a terrorist.

 

Hello. I'm Becky Gerritson. I've been asked to explain how Obamacare will affect you all in five minutes. I think I can do it in less than one.

Remember Lord of the Rings?

Well, we are all happy hobbits. Washington, DC is Mordor. Barack Obama is Sauron. Kathleen Sebelius is Saruman. The hideous, despicable army of evil orcs would be the IRS. And the Affordable Care Act is their plan to reorganize the Shire.

That metaphor works for several reasons. I love it because it highlights a certainty that many of us would prefer to ignore: a battle is coming.

As natives of the Shire, we don't like conflict. We like to work hard. We like to take care of our families. We like our churches. We like our communities. When we see a neighbor struggle, we like to band together and bear each other up.

But outside forces think they know better. They've announced their new edict. Very soon, they will commence its enforcement. And now, we are being forced to make a choice: submit or fight.

And what does submission require?

Obamacare may begin with health care, but it's much more than that — more than your individual policy, more than a government takeover of 1/6th of the American economy.

Try not to focus on the politics of the moment. Forget about your personal relationship with your family doctor. Forget about broken promises. Forget about the technical failures of healthcare.gov. The real nightmare arrives when Obamacare starts to function properly.

Complying with Obamacare means that your tax dollars will directly fund abortions as of January 1st, 2014. It means that religious institutions will have to violate their consciences if they want to keep their doors open.

If the government orders you to k*ll a baby would you do it? No? Then why would you agree to pay someone else to do it?

What is religious freedom if the government can force you to violate your religious convictions?

Maybe you're not religious. And maybe you don't care about abortion. Are you comfortable with the government redefining freedom whenever they change their mind about the "greater good?"

That's the most troubling aspect of Obamacare. It's not just an enormous government welfare program that asks younger Americans to pay for the decisions of an older generation. Obamacare presents a competing system of values that cannot co-exist with our local values.

I like to make my own decisions about my life and family. But if I'm forced to deal with a collective, I would rather trust the strangers in this room than federal bureaucrats. And that is exactly what Obamacare forbids: individual decision-making and communities expressing local values. With Obamacare, the moral decision-making occurs in Washington. We just follow their orders. As such, Obamacare is the keystone to a fundamental transformation of our culture.

If you think I'm being dramatic, I urge you to remember the name Ezekial Emanuel. He's the chief architect of Obamacare. He's also the author of the Complete Lives system. That system is his blueprint for how health care dollars should be allocated to benefit the most productive in a society. He says his program will serve the "greatest good." Emanuel believes that too much money is spent on the elderly. He also believes that children born with serious disabilities and illnesses siphon off more than their share of collective dollars that could be better spent elsewhere. In short, the Complete Lives system would focus health care expenditures to aid the most productive in society (roughly those between 18 and 50) at the expense of the elderly and the infirm.

When it comes to sick kids and grandparents, sometimes difficult decisions must be made. I think those decisions should be made by families. Obamacare will leave the decision to a panel of bureaucrats.

I believe that Obamacare will be deeply destructive — both to American health care and to American culture — but Obamacare is just a vessel. It is not nearly as sinister and threatening as the idea behind it: social justice. Over the last five years, you've heard the term "social justice" uttered by President Obama and his czars and czarinas somewhere around 14 billion times. The president can't complete a sneeze without mentioning it.

As a concept, social justice means that we have an obligation to those less fortunate than us. On the surface, there's nothing especially new about that. Christians and Jews believe something similar. We know that the poor will always be with us, and it is always our duty to reach out and be charitable.

I urge you not to fall for this. Christianity calls individuals to be generous to the less fortunate. Christianity is concerned with each individual soul. Though social justice cloaks itself in similar language, it asserts that some debt exists between one citizen and another. This is an enormous difference. Recipients of charity are grateful. Those who believe that they have been denied justice are not.

If social justice exists, where are the courts? If a debt exists between citizens, how much is owed? And who owes it? If these questions can't be answered, then social justice is a fraud, and those who propagate it are promoting violence between citizens.

Obamacare was sold under the banner of social justice. In nearly every speech, President Obama suggests that part of the population has taken more than its fair share. Conversely, he is telling part of the population that they have been robbed. This is a morality fairy tale spun by a man who doesn't understand the free market or respect American traditions.

I know the Shire, and I know Shire folk. We're generous and hospitable to those in need. We're happy to support charitable causes, near and far. But submitting to outsiders is not generosity. It's surrender. And I won't play a part in it.

As I said at the beginning, a battle is coming. If you're interested in joining the resistence, we need your help.

[maxiev]

I always thought foreign diplomats were immune from arrest. Which is why I find this article a bit disturbing.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/indian-official-diplomat-39-arrest-nyc-barbaric-105440734.html

 

Indian official: Diplomat's arrest in NYC barbaric

 

NEW DELHI (AP) — The arrest and alleged strip search of an Indian diplomat in New York City escalated into a major diplomatic furor Tuesday as India's national security adviser called the woman's treatment "despicable and barbaric."

 

Devyani Khobragade, India's deputy consul general in New York, is accused of submitting false documents to obtain a work visa for her Manhattan housekeeper. Indian officials said she was arrested and handcuffed Thursday as she dropped off her daughter at school, and was kept in a cell with drug addicts before posting $250,000 bail.

 

A senior Indian official confirmed reports that she also was strip-searched, which has been portrayed in India as the most offensive and troubling part of the arrest. The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

 

India was ready to retaliate against American diplomats in India by threatening to downgrade privileges and demanding information about how much they pay their Indian household staff, according to the Press Trust of India news agency.

 

Police also removed the traffic barricades near the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, a demand by the Indian government in retaliation for Khobragade's treatment, PTI reported. The barriers were a safety measure.

 

"We got orders to remove the concrete barriers," said Amardeep Sehgal, station house officer of the Chanakyapuri police station, the one nearest the embassy. "They were obstructing traffic on the road." He refused to say who had given the orders.

 

Calls to the U.S. Embassy were not immediately returned Tuesday.

 

National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon slammed Khobragade's treatment in New York.

 

"It is despicable and barbaric," he said.

 

Prosecutors in New York say Khobragade, 39, claimed she paid her Indian maid $4,500 per month but actually paid her less than the U.S. minimum wage. In order for diplomats and consular officers to get a visa for their personal employees, known as an A-3 visa, they must show proof that the applicant will receive a fair wage, comparable to employment in the U.S., U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement last week.

 

Federal prosecutors say Khobragade told the housekeeper she would be paid 30,000 rupees per month — about $573, or $3.31 per hour. The woman worked for the family from about November 2012 through June 2013, and said she worked far more than 40 hours per week and was paid even less than 30,000 rupees, prosecutors said.

 

Khobragade has pleaded not guilty and plans to challenge the arrest on grounds of diplomatic immunity, her lawyer said last week.

 

If convicted, Khobragade faces a maximum sentence of 10 years for visa fraud and five years for making a false declaration.

 

Her case quickly became a major story in India, with politicians urging diplomatic retaliation and TV news channels showing the woman in a series of smiling family photos.

 

That reaction may look outsized in the United States, but the case touches on a string of issues that strike deeply in India, where the fear of public humiliation resonates strongly and heavy-handed treatment by the police is normally reserved for the poor. For an educated, middle-class woman to face public arrest and a strip search is almost unimaginable, except in the most brutal crimes.

 

Far less serious protocol complaints have become big issues in the past. Standard security checks in the U.S. regularly are front-page news here when they involve visiting Indian dignitaries, who are largely exempt from friskings while at home.

 

India's former speaker of Parliament, Somnath Chatterjee, once refused to attend an international meeting in Australia when he wasn't given a guarantee that he would not have to pass through security. Chatterjee said even the possibility of a security screening was "an affront to India."

 

The treatment and pay of household staff, meanwhile, is largely seen as a family issue, off-limits to the law.

 

The fallout from the arrest was growing. On Tuesday, Indian political leaders from both the ruling party and the opposition refused to meet with the U.S. congressional delegation in New Delhi. The Indian government said it was "shocked and appalled at the manner in which the diplomat had been humiliated" in the U.S.

 

Indian Foreign Secretary Sujata Singh summoned U.S. Ambassador Nancy Powell to register a complaint.

 

In Washington, U.S. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said Tuesday that the department's diplomatic security team followed standard procedures during the arrest. After her arrest, Khobragade was handed over to U.S. marshals for intake and processing, she said.

 

Harf also noted that there is diplomatic immunity and consular immunity. Under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the Indian deputy consul general enjoys immunity from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts only with respect to acts performed in the exercise of consular functions, she said.

 

Khobragade's father, Uttam Khobragade, told the TimesNow TV news channel on Tuesday that his daughter's treatment was "absolutely obnoxious."

 

"As a father I feel hurt, our entire family is traumatized," he said.

 

Indian External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said there were "larger issues" involved in the case, but did not elaborate.

 

"We will deal with them in good time," he said.

 

___

 

Associated Press writer Colleen Long in New York contributed to this report.

Edited December 17, 2013 by maxiev

[oscartamaguchiblackface]

http://news.yahoo.com/report-nsa-intercepts-computer-deliveries-160237344--finance.html

 

 

Report: NSA intercepts computer deliveries

 

 

LONDON (AP) — A German magazine lifted the lid on the operations of the National Security Agency's hacking unit Sunday, reporting that American spies intercept computer deliveries, exploit hardware vulnerabilities, and even hijack Microsoft's internal reporting system to spy on their targets.

 

Der Spiegel's revelations relate to a division of the NSA known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, which is painted as an elite team of hackers specializing in stealing data from the toughest of targets.

 

Citing internal NSA documents, the magazine said Sunday that TAO's mission was "Getting the ungettable," and quoted an unnamed intelligence official as saying that TAO had gathered "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen."

 

Der Spiegel said TAO had a catalog of high-tech gadgets for particularly hard-to-crack cases, including computer monitor cables specially modified to record what is being typed across the screen, USB sticks secretly fitted with radio transmitters to broadcast stolen data over the airwaves, and fake base stations intended to intercept mobile phone signals on the go.

 

The NSA doesn't just rely on James Bond-style spy gear, the magazine said. Some of the attacks described by Der Spiegel exploit weaknesses in the architecture of the Internet to deliver malicious software to specific computers. Others take advantage of weaknesses in hardware or software distributed by some of the world's leading information technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Inc. and China's Huawei Technologies Ltd., the magazine reported.

 

Der Spiegel cited a 2008 mail order catalog-style list of vulnerabilities that NSA spies could exploit from companies such as Irvine, California-based Western Digital Corp. or Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Inc. The magazine said that suggested the agency was "compromising the technology and products of American companies."

 

Intercepting computer equipment in such a way is among the NSA's "most productive operations," and has helped harvest intelligence from around the world, one document cited by Der Spiegel stated.Old-fashioned methods get a mention too. Der Spiegel said that if the NSA tracked a target ordering a new computer or other electronic accessories, TAO could tap its allies in the FBI and the CIA, intercept the hardware in transit, and take it to a secret workshop where it could be discretely fitted with espionage software before being sent on its way.

 

One of the most striking reported revelations concerned the NSA's alleged ability to spy on Microsoft Corp.'s crash reports, familiar to many users of the Windows operating system as the dialogue box which pops up when a game freezes or a Word document dies. The reporting system is intended to help Microsoft engineers improve their products and fix bugs, but Der Spiegel said the NSA was also sifting through the reports to help spies break into machines running Windows. One NSA document cited by the magazine appeared to poke fun at Microsoft's expense, replacing the software giant's standard error report message with the words: "This information may be intercepted by a foreign sigint (signals intelligence) system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine."

 

Microsoft said that information sent by customers about technical issues in such a manner is limited.

 

"Microsoft does not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customer's data," a company representative said in an email Sunday. "We would have significant concerns if the allegations about government actions are true."

 

Microsoft is one of several U.S. firms that have demanded more transparency from the NSA — and worked to bolster their security — in the wake of the revelations of former intelligence worker Edward Snowden, whose disclosures have ignited an international debate over privacy and surveillance.

 

Der Spiegel did not explicitly say where its cache NSA documents had come from, although the magazine has previously published a series of stories based on documents leaked by Snowden, and one of Snowden's key contacts — American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras — was listed among the article's six authors.

 

No one was immediately available at Der Spiegel to clarify whether Snowden was the source for the latest story.

 

Another company mentioned by Der Spiegel, though not directly linked with any NSA activity, was Juniper Networks Inc., a computer network equipment maker in Sunnyvale, Calif.

 

"Juniper Networks recently became aware of, and is currently investigating, alleged security compromises of technology products made by a number of companies, including Juniper," the company said in an email. "We take allegations of this nature very seriously and are working actively to address any possible exploit paths."

 

If necessary, Juniper said, it would, "work closely with customers to ensure they take any mitigation steps."

 

___

 

Geir Moulson contributed to this report from Berlin. Ryan Nakashima contributed from Los Angeles.

 

 

[Bugatti Veyron]

http://news.yahoo.co...4--finance.html

 

 

Report: NSA intercepts computer deliveries

 

 

LONDON (AP) — A German magazine lifted the lid on the operations of the National Security Agency's hacking unit Sunday, reporting that American spies intercept computer deliveries, exploit hardware vulnerabilities, and even hijack Microsoft's internal reporting system to spy on their targets.

 

Der Spiegel's revelations relate to a division of the NSA known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, which is painted as an elite team of hackers specializing in stealing data from the toughest of targets.

 

Citing internal NSA documents, the magazine said Sunday that TAO's mission was "Getting the ungettable," and quoted an unnamed intelligence official as saying that TAO had gathered "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen."

 

Der Spiegel said TAO had a catalog of high-tech gadgets for particularly hard-to-crack cases, including computer monitor cables specially modified to record what is being typed across the screen, USB sticks secretly fitted with radio transmitters to broadcast stolen data over the airwaves, and fake base stations intended to intercept mobile phone signals on the go.

 

The NSA doesn't just rely on James Bond-style spy gear, the magazine said. Some of the attacks described by Der Spiegel exploit weaknesses in the architecture of the Internet to deliver malicious software to specific computers. Others take advantage of weaknesses in hardware or software distributed by some of the world's leading information technology companies, including Cisco Systems, Inc. and China's Huawei Technologies Ltd., the magazine reported.

 

Der Spiegel cited a 2008 mail order catalog-style list of vulnerabilities that NSA spies could exploit from companies such as Irvine, California-based Western Digital Corp. or Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Inc. The magazine said that suggested the agency was "compromising the technology and products of American companies."

 

Intercepting computer equipment in such a way is among the NSA's "most productive operations," and has helped harvest intelligence from around the world, one document cited by Der Spiegel stated.Old-fashioned methods get a mention too. Der Spiegel said that if the NSA tracked a target ordering a new computer or other electronic accessories, TAO could tap its allies in the FBI and the CIA, intercept the hardware in transit, and take it to a secret workshop where it could be discretely fitted with espionage software before being sent on its way.

 

One of the most striking reported revelations concerned the NSA's alleged ability to spy on Microsoft Corp.'s crash reports, familiar to many users of the Windows operating system as the dialogue box which pops up when a game freezes or a Word document dies. The reporting system is intended to help Microsoft engineers improve their products and fix bugs, but Der Spiegel said the NSA was also sifting through the reports to help spies break into machines running Windows. One NSA document cited by the magazine appeared to poke fun at Microsoft's expense, replacing the software giant's standard error report message with the words: "This information may be intercepted by a foreign sigint (signals intelligence) system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine."

 

Microsoft said that information sent by customers about technical issues in such a manner is limited.

 

"Microsoft does not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customer's data," a company representative said in an email Sunday. "We would have significant concerns if the allegations about government actions are true."

 

Microsoft is one of several U.S. firms that have demanded more transparency from the NSA — and worked to bolster their security — in the wake of the revelations of former intelligence worker Edward Snowden, whose disclosures have ignited an international debate over privacy and surveillance.

 

Der Spiegel did not explicitly say where its cache NSA documents had come from, although the magazine has previously published a series of stories based on documents leaked by Snowden, and one of Snowden's key contacts — American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras — was listed among the article's six authors.

 

No one was immediately available at Der Spiegel to clarify whether Snowden was the source for the latest story.

 

Another company mentioned by Der Spiegel, though not directly linked with any NSA activity, was Juniper Networks Inc., a computer network equipment maker in Sunnyvale, Calif.

 

"Juniper Networks recently became aware of, and is currently investigating, alleged security compromises of technology products made by a number of companies, including Juniper," the company said in an email. "We take allegations of this nature very seriously and are working actively to address any possible exploit paths."

 

If necessary, Juniper said, it would, "work closely with customers to ensure they take any mitigation steps."

 

___

 

Geir Moulson contributed to this report from Berlin. Ryan Nakashima contributed from Los Angeles.

 

 

Seems like the American public's tolerance for government intrusion into their lives is getting stronger by the day.

[oscartamaguchiblackface]

Maybe "dumb phones", where you can only call and text, might make a come back what with all the hacking that's going on today.

 

http://theweek.com/article/index/254602/this-is-how-the-nsa-gets-unrestricted-access-to-your-iphone

 

 

 

 

 

[oscartamaguchiblackface]

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/nsa-cisco-huawei-china/?mbid=synd_yfinance

 

 

 

 

U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack

 

The headline news is that the NSA has surreptitiously “burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture” sold by the world’s largest computer networking companies, including everyone from U.S. mainstays Cisco and Juniper to Chinese giant Huawei. But beneath this bombshell of a story from Der Spiegel, you’ll find a rather healthy bit of irony.

 

After all, the United States government has spent years complaining that Chinese intelligence operations could find ways of poking holes in Huawei networking gear, urging both American businesses and foreign allies to sidestep the company’s hardware. The complaints grew so loud that, at one point, Huawei indicated it may abandon the U.S. networking market all together. And, yet, Der Speigel now tells us that U.S. intelligence operations have been poking holes in Huawei networking gear — not to mention hardware sold by countless other vendors in both the States and abroad.

 

“We read the media reports, and we’ve noted the references to Huawei and our peers,” says William Plummer, a Huawei vice president and the company’s point person in Washington, D.C. “As we have said, over and over again — and as now seems to be validated — threats to networks and data integrity can come from any and many sources.”

 

Plummer and Huawei have long complained that when the U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in October 2012 condemning the use of Huawei gear in telephone and data networks, it failed to provide any evidence that the Chinese government had compromised the company’s hardware. Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Center for Foreign Relations, makes the same point. And now we have evidence — Der Spiegel cites leaked NSA documents — that the U.S. government has compromised gear on a massive scale.

 

“Do I see the irony? Certainly the Chinese will,” Segal says, noting that the Chinese government and the Chinese press have complained of U.S hypocrisy ever since former government contractor Edward Snowden first started to reveal NSA surveillance practices last summer. “The Chinese government has been hammering home what they call the U.S.’s ulterior motives for criticizing China, and there’s been a steady drumbeat of stories in the Chinese press about backdoors in the products of U.S. companies. They’ve been going after Cisco in particular.”

 

To be sure, the exploits discussed by Der Spiegel are a little different from the sort of attacks Congress envisioned during its long campaign against Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese manufacturer. As Segal and others note, Congress mostly complained that the Chinese government could collaborate with people inside the two companies to plant backdoors in their gear, with lawmakers pointing out that Huawei’s CEO was once an officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, the military arm of the country’s Communist party. Der Spiegel, by contrast, says the NSA is exploiting hardware without help from anyone inside the Ciscos and the Huaweis, focusing instead on compromising network gear with clever hacks or intercepting the hardware as it’s shipped to customers.

 

“For the most part, the article discusses typical malware exploits used by hackers everywhere,” says JR Rivers, an engineer who has built networking hardware for Cisco as well as Google and now runs the networking startup Cumulus Networks. “It’s just pointing out that the NSA is engaged in the practice and has resources that are not available to most people.”

 

But in the end, the two types of attack have the same result: Networking gear controlled by government spies. And over the last six months, Snowden’s revelations have indicated that the NSA is not only hacking into networks but also collaborating with large American companies in its hunt for data.

 

Jim Lewis, a director and senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adds that the Chinese view state-sponsored espionage a little differently than the U.S. does. Both countries believe in espionage for national security purposes, but the Chinese argue that such spying might include the theft of commercial secrets.

 

“The Chinese will tell you that stealing technology and business secrets is a way of building their economy, and that this is important for national security,” says Lewis, who has helped oversee meetings between the U.S. and the Chinese, including officers in the PLA. “I’ve been in the room when they’ve said that. The last time was when a PLA colonel said: ‘In the U.S., military espionage is heroic and economic espionage is a crime. In China, the line is not that clear.’”

 

But here in the United States, we now know, the NSA may blur other lines in the name of national security. Segal says that although he, as an American, believes the U.S. government is on stronger ethical ground than the Chinese, other nations are beginning to question its motives.

 

“The U.S has to convince other countries that our type of intelligence gathering is different,” he says. “I don’t think that the Brazils and the Indias and the Indonesias and the South Africas are convinced. That’s a big problem for us.”

 

The thing to realize, as the revelations of NSA snooping continue to pour out, is that everyone deserves scrutiny — the U.S government and its allies, as well as the Chinese and others you may be more likely to view with skepticism. “All big countries,” Lewis says, “are going to try and do this.”

 

 

 

[harmless0810]

Greta van Susteren and Michelle Rhee (education reformer) are a few of the liberals that I like. I learned a lot from the next lady; a libertarian-progressive, culture commenter and academic.

 

 

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

 

The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

 

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

 

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

 

Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).

 

http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-AX505_winter_DV_20131227185352.jpg

 

 

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

 

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

 

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

 

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes "women are at fault for their own victimization." Nonsense, she says. "I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters." She calls it "street-smart feminism."

 

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

 

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.

 

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

 

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

 

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

 

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.

 

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

 

" Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," says Ms. Paglia. What's driving the push toward universal college is "social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window."

 

Ms. Paglia, who has been a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984, sees her own students as examples. "I have woodworking students who, even while they're in class, are already earning money making furniture and so on," she says. "My career has been in art schools cause I don't get along with normal academics."

 

To hear her tell it, getting along has never been Ms. Paglia's strong suit. As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess. Discovering pioneering female figures as a teenager, most notably Amelia Earhart, transformed Ms. Paglia's understanding of what her future might hold.

 

These iconoclastic women of the 1930s, like Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, remain her ideal feminist role models: independent, brave, enterprising, capable of competing with men without bashing them. But since at least the late 1960s, she says, fellow feminists in the academy stopped sharing her vision of "equal-opportunity feminism" that demands a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections for women.

 

She proudly recounts her battle, while a graduate student at Yale in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band over the Rolling Stones: Ms. Paglia loved "Under My Thumb," a song the others regarded as chauvinist. Then there was the time she "barely got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left before dessert."

 

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's issue.

 

By denying the role of nature in women's lives, she argues, leading feminists created a "denatured, antiseptic" movement that "protected their bourgeois lifestyle" and falsely promised that women could "have it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.

 

But Ms. Paglia's criticism shouldn't be mistaken for nostalgia for the socially prescribed roles for men and women before the 1960s. Quite the contrary. "I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender code," says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

 

Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying the real "facts of life," especially for girls: "I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

 

For all of Ms. Paglia's barbs about the women's movement, it seems clear that feminism—at least of the equal-opportunity variety—has triumphed in its basic goals. There is surely a lack of women in the C-Suite and Congress, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who would admit that he believes women are less capable. To save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women's movement should return to its roots. That means abandoning the "nanny state" mentality that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts. The movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one "open to stay-at-home moms" and "not just the career woman."

 

More important, Ms. Paglia says, if the women's movement wants to be taken seriously again, it should tackle serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are "more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus."

 

Ms. Weiss is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.

[Bugatti Veyron]

Greta van Susteren and Michelle Rhee (education reformer) are a few of the liberals that I like. I learned a lot from the next lady; a libertarian-progressive, culture commenter and academic.

 

 

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

 

The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

 

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

 

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

 

Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).

 

http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-AX505_winter_DV_20131227185352.jpg

 

 

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

 

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

 

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

 

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes "women are at fault for their own victimization." Nonsense, she says. "I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters." She calls it "street-smart feminism."

 

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

 

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.

 

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

 

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

 

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

 

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.

 

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

 

" Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," says Ms. Paglia. What's driving the push toward universal college is "social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window."

 

Ms. Paglia, who has been a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984, sees her own students as examples. "I have woodworking students who, even while they're in class, are already earning money making furniture and so on," she says. "My career has been in art schools cause I don't get along with normal academics."

 

To hear her tell it, getting along has never been Ms. Paglia's strong suit. As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess. Discovering pioneering female figures as a teenager, most notably Amelia Earhart, transformed Ms. Paglia's understanding of what her future might hold.

 

These iconoclastic women of the 1930s, like Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, remain her ideal feminist role models: independent, brave, enterprising, capable of competing with men without bashing them. But since at least the late 1960s, she says, fellow feminists in the academy stopped sharing her vision of "equal-opportunity feminism" that demands a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections for women.

 

She proudly recounts her battle, while a graduate student at Yale in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band over the Rolling Stones: Ms. Paglia loved "Under My Thumb," a song the others regarded as chauvinist. Then there was the time she "barely got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left before dessert."

 

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's issue.

 

By denying the role of nature in women's lives, she argues, leading feminists created a "denatured, antiseptic" movement that "protected their bourgeois lifestyle" and falsely promised that women could "have it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.

 

But Ms. Paglia's criticism shouldn't be mistaken for nostalgia for the socially prescribed roles for men and women before the 1960s. Quite the contrary. "I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender code," says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

 

Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying the real "facts of life," especially for girls: "I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

 

For all of Ms. Paglia's barbs about the women's movement, it seems clear that feminism—at least of the equal-opportunity variety—has triumphed in its basic goals. There is surely a lack of women in the C-Suite and Congress, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who would admit that he believes women are less capable. To save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women's movement should return to its roots. That means abandoning the "nanny state" mentality that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts. The movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one "open to stay-at-home moms" and "not just the career woman."

 

More important, Ms. Paglia says, if the women's movement wants to be taken seriously again, it should tackle serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are "more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus."

 

Ms. Weiss is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.

Today, only women can get away expressing such views publicly. If Ms. Weiss were a man, she would have been condemned as a male chauvinist pig.

[harmless0810]

Miss Paglia, a liberal, is well-respected and much talked about in conservative circles. Always an interesting read. This was her original post:

 

 

It's a Man's World, and It Always Will Be

The modern economy is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author

 

By Camille Paglia Dec. 16, 2013

 

 

 

If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct — unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where women clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks and pit vipers.

 

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men's faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.

 

Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

 

From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today's punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism.

 

It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling or demonizing men. History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men's hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery.

 

What is troubling in too many books and articles by feminist journalists in the U.S. is, despite their putative leftism, an implicit privileging of bourgeois values and culture. The particular focused, clerical and managerial skills of the upper-middle-class elite are presented as the highest desideratum, the ultimate evolutionary point of humanity. Yes, there has been a gradual transition from an industrial to a service-sector economy in which women, who generally prefer a safe, clean, quiet work environment thrive.

 

But the triumphalism among some — like Hanna Rosin in her book, The End of Men, about women's gains — seems startlingly premature. For instance, Rosin says of the sagging fortunes of today's working-class couples that they and we had "reached the end of a hundred thousand years of human history and the beginning of a new era, and there was no going back." This sweeping appeal to history somehow overlooks history's far darker lessons about the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations, which as they become more complex and interconnected also become more vulnerable to collapse. The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

 

After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

 

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

 

Paglia's opening statement at the Munk Debate, "Resolved: Men Are Obsolete," held in Toronto

 

 

[wackyracer]

A Deadly Mix in Benghazi

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

December 28, 2013

New York Times

 

... Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

 

... Fifteen months after Mr. Stevens’s death, the question of responsibility remains a searing issue in Washington, framed by two contradictory story lines.

One has it that the video, which was posted on YouTube, inspired spontaneous street protests that got out of hand. This version, based on early intelligence reports, was initially offered publicly by Susan E. Rice, who is now Mr. Obama’s national security adviser.

 

The other, favored by Republicans, holds that Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

 

The investigation by The Times shows that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.

 

FULL STORY

[wackyracer]

The Facts About Benghazi

 

By THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: December 30, 2013

 

An exhaustive investigation by The Times goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

 

The report by David Kirkpatrick, The Times’s Cairo bureau chief, and his team turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group had any role in the assault, as Republicans have insisted without proof for more than a year. The report concluded that the attack was led by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s air power and other support during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and that it was fueled, in large part, by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

 

In a rational world, that would settle the dispute over Benghazi, which has further poisoned the poisonous political discourse in Washington and kept Republicans and Democrats from working cooperatively on myriad challenges, including how best to help Libyans stabilize their country and build a democracy. But Republicans long ago abandoned common sense and good judgment in pursuit of conspiracy-mongering and an obsessive effort to discredit President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may run for president in 2016.

 

On the Sunday talk shows, Representatives Mike Rogers and Darrell Issa, two Republicans who are some of the administration’s most relentless critics of this issue, dismissed The Times’s investigation and continued to press their own version of reality on Benghazi.

 

Mr. Issa talked of an administration “cover-up.” Mr. Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has called Benghazi a “preplanned, organized terrorist event,” said his panel’s findings that Al Qaeda was involved was based on an examination of 4,000 classified cables. If Mr. Rogers has evidence of a direct Al Qaeda role, he should make it public. Otherwise, The Times’s investigation, including extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack, stands as the authoritative narrative.

 

While the report debunks Republican allegations, it also illuminates the difficulties in understanding fast-moving events in the Middle East and in parsing groups that one moment may be allied with the West and in another, turn adversarial. Americans are often careless with the term “Al Qaeda,” which strictly speaking means the core extremist group, founded by Osama bin Laden, that is based in Pakistan and bent on global jihad.

 

Republicans, Democrats and others often conflate purely local extremist groups, or regional affiliates, with Al Qaeda’s international network. That prevents understanding the motivations of each group, making each seem like a direct, immediate threat to the United States and thus confusing decision-making.

 

The report is a reminder that the Benghazi tragedy represents a gross intelligence failure, something that has largely been overlooked in the public debate. A team of at least 20 people from the Central Intelligence Agency, including highly skilled commandos, was operating out of an unmarked compound about a half-mile southeast of the American mission when the attack occurred. Yet, despite the C.I.A. presence and Ambassador Stevens’s expertise on Libya, “there was little understanding of militias in Benghazi and the threat they posed to U.S. interests,” a State Department investigation found. The C.I.A. supposedly did its own review. It has not been made public, so there is no way to know if the agency learned any lessons.

[maxiev]

The Facts About Benghazi

 

By THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: December 30, 2013

 

An exhaustive investigation by The Times goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

 

The report by David Kirkpatrick, The Times’s Cairo bureau chief, and his team turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group had any role in the assault, as Republicans have insisted without proof for more than a year. The report concluded that the attack was led by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s air power and other support during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and that it was fueled, in large part, by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

 

In a rational world, that would settle the dispute over Benghazi, which has further poisoned the poisonous political discourse in Washington and kept Republicans and Democrats from working cooperatively on myriad challenges, including how best to help Libyans stabilize their country and build a democracy. But Republicans long ago abandoned common sense and good judgment in pursuit of conspiracy-mongering and an obsessive effort to discredit President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may run for president in 2016.

 

On the Sunday talk shows, Representatives Mike Rogers and Darrell Issa, two Republicans who are some of the administration’s most relentless critics of this issue, dismissed The Times’s investigation and continued to press their own version of reality on Benghazi.

 

Mr. Issa talked of an administration “cover-up.” Mr. Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has called Benghazi a “preplanned, organized terrorist event,” said his panel’s findings that Al Qaeda was involved was based on an examination of 4,000 classified cables. If Mr. Rogers has evidence of a direct Al Qaeda role, he should make it public. Otherwise, The Times’s investigation, including extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack, stands as the authoritative narrative.

 

While the report debunks Republican allegations, it also illuminates the difficulties in understanding fast-moving events in the Middle East and in parsing groups that one moment may be allied with the West and in another, turn adversarial. Americans are often careless with the term “Al Qaeda,” which strictly speaking means the core extremist group, founded by Osama bin Laden, that is based in Pakistan and bent on global jihad.

 

Republicans, Democrats and others often conflate purely local extremist groups, or regional affiliates, with Al Qaeda’s international network. That prevents understanding the motivations of each group, making each seem like a direct, immediate threat to the United States and thus confusing decision-making.

 

The report is a reminder that the Benghazi tragedy represents a gross intelligence failure, something that has largely been overlooked in the public debate. A team of at least 20 people from the Central Intelligence Agency, including highly skilled commandos, was operating out of an unmarked compound about a half-mile southeast of the American mission when the attack occurred. Yet, despite the C.I.A. presence and Ambassador Stevens’s expertise on Libya, “there was little understanding of militias in Benghazi and the threat they posed to U.S. interests,” a State Department investigation found. The C.I.A. supposedly did its own review. It has not been made public, so there is no way to know if the agency learned any lessons.

Politics seems to be playing a major role in the investigation process. In this case, Republicans seem to put the blame on the Obama administration for the Benghazi tragedy. Finger pointing should be set aside in favor of an objective investigation as to why there was a failure in intelligence.

[wackyracer]

Politics seems to be playing a major role in the investigation process. In this case, Republicans seem to put the blame on the Obama administration for the Benghazi tragedy. Finger pointing should be set aside in favor of an objective investigation as to why there was a failure in intelligence.

 

Politics or extreme partisanship seems to be the main agenda of the Republicans in the Obama era. This was clear from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's pronouncement November 2010:

 

 

Since the first objective failed miserably, they are looking ahead to 2016 with Hillary Clinton as the new target. So even with the absence of any proof, the Benghazi issue continues to be one of the talking points of Fox News in the hopes that it would damage the stature of presidential contender Hillary Clinton.

Edited January 5, 2014 by wackyracer

[maxiev]

Politics or extreme partisanship seems to be the main agenda of the Republicans in the Obama era. This was clear from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's pronouncement November 2010:

 

 

Since the first objective failed miserably, they are looking ahead to 2016 with Hillary Clinton as the new target. So even with the absence of any proof, the Benghazi issue continues to be one of the talking points of Fox News in the hopes that it would damage the stature of presidential contender Hillary Clinton.

So our politicians aren't the only ones who love to throw mud around. Politicians are the same everywhere. No wonder they're the butt of jokes and looked down upon.

[arnel_gumaru]

this may not be the first time that the US has compromised the hardware of other nations. remember Gulf War 1, US-made photocopiers used by Iraq's military contained homing beacons used by the US Air Force making their smart bombs more accurate.

 

 

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/12/nsa-cisco-huawei-china/?mbid=synd_yfinance

 

 

 

 

U.S. to China: We Hacked Your Internet Gear We Told You Not to Hack

 

The headline news is that the NSA has surreptitiously “burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture” sold by the world’s largest computer networking companies, including everyone from U.S. mainstays Cisco and Juniper to Chinese giant Huawei. But beneath this bombshell of a story from Der Spiegel, you’ll find a rather healthy bit of irony.

 

After all, the United States government has spent years complaining that Chinese intelligence operations could find ways of poking holes in Huawei networking gear, urging both American businesses and foreign allies to sidestep the company’s hardware. The complaints grew so loud that, at one point, Huawei indicated it may abandon the U.S. networking market all together. And, yet, Der Speigel now tells us that U.S. intelligence operations have been poking holes in Huawei networking gear — not to mention hardware sold by countless other vendors in both the States and abroad.

 

“We read the media reports, and we’ve noted the references to Huawei and our peers,” says William Plummer, a Huawei vice president and the company’s point person in Washington, D.C. “As we have said, over and over again — and as now seems to be validated — threats to networks and data integrity can come from any and many sources.”

 

Plummer and Huawei have long complained that when the U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in October 2012 condemning the use of Huawei gear in telephone and data networks, it failed to provide any evidence that the Chinese government had compromised the company’s hardware. Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Center for Foreign Relations, makes the same point. And now we have evidence — Der Spiegel cites leaked NSA documents — that the U.S. government has compromised gear on a massive scale.

 

“Do I see the irony? Certainly the Chinese will,” Segal says, noting that the Chinese government and the Chinese press have complained of U.S hypocrisy ever since former government contractor Edward Snowden first started to reveal NSA surveillance practices last summer. “The Chinese government has been hammering home what they call the U.S.’s ulterior motives for criticizing China, and there’s been a steady drumbeat of stories in the Chinese press about backdoors in the products of U.S. companies. They’ve been going after Cisco in particular.”

 

To be sure, the exploits discussed by Der Spiegel are a little different from the sort of attacks Congress envisioned during its long campaign against Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese manufacturer. As Segal and others note, Congress mostly complained that the Chinese government could collaborate with people inside the two companies to plant backdoors in their gear, with lawmakers pointing out that Huawei’s CEO was once an officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, the military arm of the country’s Communist party. Der Spiegel, by contrast, says the NSA is exploiting hardware without help from anyone inside the Ciscos and the Huaweis, focusing instead on compromising network gear with clever hacks or intercepting the hardware as it’s shipped to customers.

 

“For the most part, the article discusses typical malware exploits used by hackers everywhere,” says JR Rivers, an engineer who has built networking hardware for Cisco as well as Google and now runs the networking startup Cumulus Networks. “It’s just pointing out that the NSA is engaged in the practice and has resources that are not available to most people.”

 

But in the end, the two types of attack have the same result: Networking gear controlled by government spies. And over the last six months, Snowden’s revelations have indicated that the NSA is not only hacking into networks but also collaborating with large American companies in its hunt for data.

 

Jim Lewis, a director and senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adds that the Chinese view state-sponsored espionage a little differently than the U.S. does. Both countries believe in espionage for national security purposes, but the Chinese argue that such spying might include the theft of commercial secrets.

 

“The Chinese will tell you that stealing technology and business secrets is a way of building their economy, and that this is important for national security,” says Lewis, who has helped oversee meetings between the U.S. and the Chinese, including officers in the PLA. “I’ve been in the room when they’ve said that. The last time was when a PLA colonel said: ‘In the U.S., military espionage is heroic and economic espionage is a crime. In China, the line is not that clear.’”

 

But here in the United States, we now know, the NSA may blur other lines in the name of national security. Segal says that although he, as an American, believes the U.S. government is on stronger ethical ground than the Chinese, other nations are beginning to question its motives.

 

“The U.S has to convince other countries that our type of intelligence gathering is different,” he says. “I don’t think that the Brazils and the Indias and the Indonesias and the South Africas are convinced. That’s a big problem for us.”

 

The thing to realize, as the revelations of NSA snooping continue to pour out, is that everyone deserves scrutiny — the U.S government and its allies, as well as the Chinese and others you may be more likely to view with skepticism. “All big countries,” Lewis says, “are going to try and do this.”

[Ryuji_tanaka]

A financial collapse followed by a global systemic collapse is coming. Probably within the next 12-18 months.

 

Think 500 pesos (or more) = 1 kilo of rice.

 

The age of paper money is about to end. Anyway the average age of paper currencies is about 40-45 years. Money that is based on nothing is a tool for committing mass fraud.

 

The catalyst for this collapse will be when the countries which lend money to the US decides that a new reserve currency is required.

 

A former high-ranking World Bank employee exposed that there are moves for a single global currency that will be electronic in nature is underway.

 

The truth is, the disaster is much nearer than you all think.

 

Got anything to back this up?