0.4 B US greenbacks lost in Yemen when the rebels overturned the US friendly government. So as in Iraq where we spent basically 1000 B dollars arming ISIS, we’ve armed the Yemeni rebels with state of the art equipment.
Secondly, the overturned government allowed US drone strikes. I wonder if that had something to do with them being overturned. No blowback there from civilians objecting to random buzzing death from the skies, I suppose.
Nothing can possibly go wrong with the plan of arming “moderate” Syrian rebels to fight ISIS, even if they are on the side of evil dictator Bashar al Assad.
We’ve now spent more not rebuilding Afghanistan after an undeclared war than we did rebuilding Europe after something widely known as World War II. In inflation-adjusted dollars.
Seems like something good could have been done with that money. Like rebuilding Europe after we destroyed it with a banking crisis. Or heck, just rebuilding the long-neglected infrastructure here in the US. Or having universal health-care.
Also, the NSA has broken the internet. Not unreasonably, since the NSA has shown that it will hack hardware to install a backdoor, or simply issue a NSL to have the company do it in hardware or software, China is demanding to see the source code from any company wanting to do business there. I’m sure this works out to China’s advantage and they’re working it for all they’re worth, but the NSA gave them the hammer and took off their shoe and said there’s the big toe.
Science giveth, and science taketh away.
Kepler finds a ancient twin of the solar system, and gives us η = 0.1 [0], but (maybe) gamma-ray bursts sweep most galaxies clean of advanced life [1]. Also explaining the Fermi Paradox [2].
On the same /. page, no less.
[0] Which coincidentally is what we used to assume as a reasonable guess.
[1] as we know it, Jim. Extra-terrestrial life-wise, we’re in the business of looking for our keys under the streetlight. Because we have no way of knowing what any other sort of life would look like.
[2] Where is everyone?
I give it six months. If the cartels are using drones to fly drugs over the fence before Amazon Prime gets drone delivery figured out, it won’t be more than six months before ISIS is using drones.
Yes, we started this fire.
If they’re to be believed (which they’re not), the NSA knew about the Sony hacks before they occurred.
So why not a word to the wise? I understand sources. Methods. But if you’re willing to go to cyberwar over something like this, maybe your intelligence services should try to prevent cyber attacks.
In either case, again, the NSA proves its uselessness. It either didn’t know and is just lying, or it did and is utterly useless.
Same logic as the Paris attacks. Are they more incompetent for knowing and being ineffectual, or just being ineffectual?
It’s not cost-free. This all comes at the cost of the Constitution. And anything the NSA can do now, China will be able to do next year, and your friendly Russian hackers about six months after that.
Oh, by the way, the DEA has been illegally listening in to every international phone call from 1998-2013. And passed this information on to everyone else (see “parallel construction”). So even if the NSA didn’t have a rubber stamp from the FISA court, they could just ask their buddies at the DEA to give them the information. Supposedly it’s stopped. Pull the other one.
Of course no one will ever be held accountable or go to jail. And in terms the DEA being just as useless as the NSA, there’s always this.
And it’s MLK day. We have holiday for the man that the FBI illegally spied upon and tried to get to commit suicide. If you think similar things are not happening right now, you’re not paying attention.
This headline says that the executive branch approved of the hacking of the legislative branch computers, but what the report really says is that the CIA informed the White House after the fact.
Effectively, the CIA has no oversight. They hack into legislative branch computers. They destroy evidence. They perjure themselves under oath. They do what they want with no concern about the executive approval pre- or post-. They simply inform.
At best they inform. All evidence suggests that in most cases they don’t inform. Not just the CIA/NSA, but also CBP. Unaccountable.
Actual terrorists in Paris and Belgium. Lots of them. Going back and forth between ISIS, Syria, and our allies. And the NSA has zero clue.
So what is the NSA there for? It is completely incompetent at its actual mission. All it’s good for is obviating the fourth amendment.
Burn it. Raze it. Salt the earth.
R.I.P. Sweet Ires, 10 Jan 2015
A lab when you threw the ball, a pit if you got testy, and always game, even when she couldn’t make the jumps anymore. Besties with friends old and new.
She loved the beach, the mountains, the dog park, and riling everyone else up. Ires always went for it. Sometimes she didn’t make it and took the fall, shook herself off, and tried again, long nails scrabbling.
Every time we went climbing, she was an inspiration to me to be more like Ires.
