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Nah, that was BS cooked up by right-wingers because France didn't want to join the 'coalition of the willing' back in 2002.

While we are at that, would suggest you having a look at commentaries on Russia affairs by Mark Ames, which are more on the information side I believe.

Thank you for that source. I read it, and it provides some very interesting facts about the murky nature of the FBI, and how that organization has been used for, what I will characterize as, political malfeasance. However, I don't agree with the author's belief that "The FBI isn't even legal". I'm pretty sure if it were, the courts, Congress, and the President would have taken note of it by now.

To clarify my comments above, let me state the following:

• Trump is irrefutably up to his eyeballs in debt to Putin connected billionaires.
• This may be embarrassing but is by no means illegal.
• The only question is the emoluments clause of the Constitution and the suddenly discovered issue of how it is to be enforced, and by whom. The Supreme Court? Congress? And what is the standard applied? Would a future president who had a credit card drawn on a non-American bank qualify?
• These sorts of issues are never even discussed dispassionately, because people just want the media to tell them how good they are compared to other Americans.
• The worse aspect of this is the ability for "validation news" to simply pretend that large scale known facts don't exist. This means you don't even have to talk around or justify facts that don't support your world view. You can just live in a media ecosystem in which they don't exist.
• While this isn't new, technology has made this tendency dramatically worse. If you won't pander to someone who is looking for fake news, someone else will. There is no more news. Only "infortainment". Edward R. Murrow must be rolling over in his grave.

And politically -- and this also applies to intelligent people as well -- nobody wants information. All they want is validation.

While we are at that, would suggest you having a look at commentaries on Russia affairs by Mark Ames, which are more on the information side I believe.

Do you know ANYTHING about Iran? WTF? The Islamic government is genuinely popular. They TRIED to have a revolution a few years ago and it went nowhere. It failed even though Western leftists changed their Twitter pages backgrounds to green in support. I know, I'm as clueless as you - how could such a move have failed?

You want to know something really chilling? Ahmedinajad won in the 2005 election because he pulled a Bernie Sanders - he promised to give free (oil) money to ordinary folks. The man is legitimately popular and he has Morality Police on the streets, with the full support of the people who voted for him. It can happen here, people.

Here it is....

HARDWARE FOR DUMMIES: V-22 OSPREY TAKES THE PEPSI CHALLENGE AGAINST F-18 HORNET

When it comes to war and its strategy I trust the in depth reporting 'war nerd' only and he published a very nice article few years back 'Hi-Tech Toys vs Fanged Vermin' and the conclusion is that powerful high-tech weapons are not that much useful in urban warfare. http://exiledonline.com/future...

A little off topic, but the reality is probably the exact opposite of that perception. If anything, 9/11 massively harmed "terrorists" (Al-Qaeda and Islamofacists in particular), rather than benefiting them.

http://exiledonline.com/wn-38-ira-vs-al-qaeda-i-was-wrong/

For the bullet points - 9/11 destroyed Al-Qaeda by basically causing the US (and most of the international community) to take notice and bomb them out of existence. Similarly, future terrorist plots now have a much higher barrier to success as a result of the increased security measures (even if most of it is security-theater). Contrast with a successful terrorist organization (the IRA) that effectively "won" and achieved their goals in part because a concerted effort to avoid mass deaths and the bad press of a 9/11-type event.

The fact that 9/11 also turned us into a society scared of its own shadow is really collateral. That doesn't get Al-Qaeda what it wants, as much as makes our society more totalitarian and fascistic.

An AC above posted a nice story ...

http://exiledonline.com/failing-up-with-citigroups-dick-parsons/

There is nothing wrong with entrepreneurial networking, the problem is that the top is littered with networks of little better than confidence men looking for fellow sociopaths to sell their cons ... and as the article shows, the very very top is by far the worst.

http://exiledonline.com/failing-up-with-citigroups-dick-parsons/

captcha: disgust

People unfortunate enough to live in certain parts of the United States are being systemically poisoned:

Bad Water, Bleeding Gum and Gangrene Legs in Victorville

The Dark Lord of Coal Country

The United States is a Third World country masquerading as a First World Country. Some so-called Third World countries are actually nicer than the US (specifically the parts of the US where unrestrained resource extraction is going on).

Besides, the US doesn't have as many poor people oriented businesses as a lot of third world countries. You won't find a cheap food stand with decent, nutritious food in the US like you'll find all over Bangkok, for example. Instead you have to spend a mint at Whole Foods to get non-chemically altered food..

The advantage of the US is supposed to be access to technology. Third worlder's I meet here tend to get upset at the massive weight gain they experience over here from things like juice (or rather, juice flavored corn syrup), but they will buy a few ipods to take back home. (These of course, are relatively wealthy third world people.)

Thanks for the comment, and you make several good points. Still, the fictional character "Atticus Finch" said in "To Kill a Mockingbird", "The easiest way to get shot is to carry a gun". These days, the easiest way to get nuked (or invaded or quarantined) is to have a nuclear ICBM or start building one. With one ICBM, you'd be the world's next North Korea. I know you were probably just saying that to make a point, but as a counter-point, is nuclear blackmail really the way you would want to get your liveliehood if you could do it? Do you want to be the next tin-pot dictator always waiting for the assassin's blow? Do you want to preside over a land where people are starving to death (like North Korea in the past) because you care more about power than the people? Here you are using the most advanced communications system for sharing knowledge the world has ever known (the internet, and sites like slashdot) and what you have shared right now is a strategy for nuclear blackmail. It also sounds a bit like you are trying to dissuade others from trying to make the world a more joyful and healthy and more secure place (by over-emphasizing the point that there are some anti-social people out there)?

As I write in that essay, there are new ways of thinking about security.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream. We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."

I am advocating for mutual security and intrinsic security. It sounds to me like you are re-affirming the old ways towards security, like unilateral dominance through a big military, which will be ultimately self-defeating with modern technology. What good is a US aircraft carrier in battle when one small smart missile could sink it?
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
http://www.usni.org/news-and-features/chinese-kill-weapon
Or where it could someday be infiltrated by a nanotech-based rust monster? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_monster
What good is your nuclear ICBM when someone (or something) figures out how to explode it in the silo or retarget it at your home city to make you the slave?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

The balance is changing. The world is a smaller place. I don't like to use "overpopulation" to describe the process because that implies the solution is to get rid of lots of people. I better term might be "under-resourced" or "under-landed" or "under-expanded".
http://www.juliansimon.com

Gary Brecher aka the War Nerd, on aircraft carriers, and why they're an obsolete idea.

and it was pretty interesting :

http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/all/1/

This is true. Gary Brecher said it best: http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/all/1/

Malcolm Gladwell is in the pocket of any corporate entity that feels like paying his fees. His game has already been exposed. Don't believe a word he says.

Water is typically produced by local municipalities

Except in all the places where it is not. In the Western United States, much of the water comes from one of two large sources, and piped around to various areas via aqueducts. Access to it is controlled by the federal or state governments and local access to that water supplies are not ultimately up to local officials. In these cases, all local municipalities do it treat water and handle the "last mile" distribution.

Here in central CA, farmers get their water supplies heavily subsidized, especially on the West side of the valley where, if it were not for the CA aqueduct system, the land would be barren. For the last two years, I've had to endure rantings and ravings of local water interests around here blaming Sacramento for "stealing" "their" water.

The GP's point about corporate involvement is spot on. It is corporate water interests (wealthy farmers here in Central CA) who lobby politicians to give them sweet deals on water access. Meanwhile, us plebs pay inflated costs on our household water usage to make up for those subsidies.

Exiled Online did a whole series on this.

You've described some magic country that I am not able to see. Isn't it the U.S. where the young people believe the wealth is not fairly distributed and dream of the Socialism? http://exiledonline.com/thirty-more-years-of-hell/

Yes re 'hit the target from above" pop up will be interesting
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/all/1/

Hanging off of your post a little bit, there's been some rumblings in the news about the Chinese DF-21, which is basically a straight up, straight down mortar shell designed to sink aircraft carriers (and other local battleships) within an 1100 mile radius (that includes singapore, japan, and both koreas). Sort of the same functionality as an ICBM, but with more conventional explosives attached. The big problem is that they come down at mach 2 or faster, making them difficult to detect, let alone intercept.
 
Forbes alluded to this saying "its surface vessels are increasingly vulnerable to Chinese attack"
 
While I doubt we'd unwrap the ICBMs, there's no reason to think this non-nuclear-ized technology exists. We've already retired battleships from the navy, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that Carriers are on their way out too.
 
More reading:
  http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-china-joins-the-yacht-club/
  http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

Hanging off of your post a little bit, there's been some rumblings in the news about the Chinese DF-21, which is basically a straight up, straight down mortar shell designed to sink aircraft carriers (and other local battleships) within an 1100 mile radius (that includes singapore, japan, and both koreas). Sort of the same functionality as an ICBM, but with more conventional explosives attached. The big problem is that they come down at mach 2 or faster, making them difficult to detect, let alone intercept.
 
Forbes alluded to this saying "its surface vessels are increasingly vulnerable to Chinese attack"
 
While I doubt we'd unwrap the ICBMs, there's no reason to think this non-nuclear-ized technology exists. We've already retired battleships from the navy, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that Carriers are on their way out too.
 
More reading:
  http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-china-joins-the-yacht-club/
  http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

http://exiledonline.com/an-exiled-exclusive-the-martin-amis-pre-eulogy-to-christopher-hitchens-the-man-whose-pharynx-was-horrorized/
and for Kim http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpF5-mBmI0c

Funny, exiledonline doesn't seem to think Meg is so hot.

http://exiledonline.com/how-meg-whitman-failed-her-way-to-the-top-at-ebay-collecting-billions-while-nearly-destroying-the-company/

Farm subsidies maint a stable food cost.

Well, some of them do. Some of them funnel money into the pockets of rich New Yorkers who don't farm.

Yeah that, plus the fact that people these days don't seem to get that when we used to talk about "holy wars" and rib each other about using a PC or an Amiga, or Atari, etc. it was all in good fun, a joke. Here's a clue for the people who go around calling others "fanbois" and slinging insults: you don't get it. That goes double for people who refer to apple users as a cult. It's an in-joke ! Nothing worse than people who take a joke seriously.

This one too, http://exiledonline.com/inside-wikileaks-revenge-of-the-second-banana/, a few months old, but enlightening in retrospect, great insights (I hadn't see this one before yesterday):

his whole OpenLeaks model is designed to keep as much heat away as possible from the website operator, who’s little more than a go-between between the leaker and the media. Domscheit-Berg isn’t even likely to get a threatening letter from someone’s attorney. ... Dickhead or not, at least Assange can deal with pressure. He’d rather go fugitive, sleep rough and live on his wits than surrender his servers. This is the guy I’d trust in a guerrilla war campaign, the old “inflict-and-endure.”

Remember, Wikileaks has successfully battled in court before to ensure the leaked materials on its site would remain published.

Glasgow airport attack

The Bilal Abdullah / Kafeel Ahmed attacks really were mystifyingly stupid. I mean, it seems clear now that Al Qaida made itself vulnerable by operating in the flashy way it did, resulting in being thoroughly penetrated by intelligence agencies and many of the A-Team members who really knew what they were doing being arrested or killed, but these people were a DOCTOR and an ENGINEER STUDYING FOR A PhD IN COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS respectively. They must have been fairly intelligent, and wrote papers that they had to research. How was it, then, that they somehow thought that petrol + propane cylinders = effective anti-personnel bomb? Okay, a propane cylinder will cook off eventually, after a lengthy fire that's given everyone plenty of time to leisurely retire and for that matter probably time for the fire service to attend and put it out, but come on. Did they even type "bomb" into google? Any 12 year old who's read some incarnation of The Anarchist's Cookbook - as dangerously incomplete / inaccurate as it is - knows that to make an effective bomb you need, y'know, actual explosives. At the very least they should have found an abandoned quarry somewhere to test their crazy gas canister idea (on a smaller scale with a camping gas burner, perhaps.)

Not that I'm complaining, I mean their 3 stooges antics that managed to hurt nobody but themselves were quite hilarious, but I really find this odd.

Seriously, Slashdot is linking to the Washington Post? As if it were a reputable news source?

Let me put it this way, does Bat Boy have any comment on China's High Speed trains?

There's also the clusterfuck that is MERS. Basically it deems all mortgages to be held by a sort of meta-corporation. This enabled mortgages to be resold and repackaged a hundred times over in fraudulent derivatives without paying any filing fees for the privellege, since they were theoretically still owned by MERS. This highly artificial tax avoidance / toxic debt disguising scheme is legally dubious at best, and we now have a situation where i)nobody knows who the fuck owns people's mortgages anymore and ii)many homes could become foreclosure-proof as MERS' legitimacy is increasingly being challenged in the courts.

You might want to read this- Similar to how during the revolution, the fancy pants British army was picked off by bands of snipers in the woods, we are considerably more vulnerable than we think:

http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

Here's a more recent article by the War Nerd on the same topic: http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/ Seems the fact that aircraft carriers are elaborate floating targets that cannot be effectively defended is a well-known fact even to the Navy.

Its way off topic but the oil fixing vs tech fixing is fun.
http://exiledonline.com/a-peoples-history-of-koch-industries-how-stalin-funded-the-tea-party-movement/
The idea to create wealth out of been in the middle of any new tech is always a good read.
You would think with quality from SandForce, trim and hardware supply from low wage regions things would be looking good from a software/firmware/hardware point for the end user.
No more controller cartels or pro sumer chip limits.
Just market forces, good PR for a low, medium or hi end unit.

Water can be good fun too
http://exiledonline.com/water-wars-billionaire-thugs-scheme-to-pull-off-katrina-style-wealth-transfer-that-could-destroy-california/
The problem with the EU telcos is they want to be a "Telstra" an Australian bell and cash up on every packet in and out of their EU thiefdom using exclusive pipes.
The "you can select any isp you want" but they all touch our wholesale at some point dream.
End users and optical peering should cover all their costs ..
So the question to some smart EU journalist is 'where is the leak' - why is the cash flowing out so fast that subscribers and 'free' peering is showing the telcos to be running on empty?
Did the cost of some telco trace decree for bulk Nokia Siemens monitoring kit prove to expensive to hide?

All these companys want you to be totally loyal to the company. The job comes before your life, friends, and everything else. They demand loyality above everything. And yet... are most companys loyal to the employee? Fuck no! You're 100% replaceable.

http://exiledonline.com/this-is-why-workers-shoot-their-employers/

Time to read :
http://maxkeiser.com/
http://cryptogon.com/
http://cryptome.org/
http://exiledonline.com/
http://www.truthnews.us/
Get a few days or weeks or months heads up on what the tame mainstream press with 'discover' if and when they are allowed to.

Probably around U.S. $200,000. I can see these vehicles for sale at Walmart,
after I had ingested LSD.

Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout

"Maybe not Terrorists, but our Naval Superiority, , does play a lot into our relationship with China."

Not anymore it doesn't.

http://www.exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/

Government broadband YOU.

Obama bailout will soon tank.

Keep spending U.S. $ on your stupid foreign fiascos.

Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout.

Stuff's That's Very Old .

I asserted N.S.A. spied on everyone and was MODDED down.

Slashdot is DEAD. Use
  Google News

Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout

The biggest contributor to the LACK of office productivity since the invention of desktop computers.

Microsoft User: A desktop computer user who replicates their industriousness with paper and pencil with software.

Cordially,
Kilgore Trout

the violence committed by the world's MOST dangerous person.

I hope this help the war crimes indictments.

Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout

Slashdot: News From Other Places, Stuff That's OLD.

Cordially,
Kilgore Trout.

The New York Times has Labs? Amazing. However, such an entity is somewhat orthogonal to the New York Times loss in readership. Most of your readers will, in five years, be mostly Asians and Europeans; the U.S.ians having migrated to Russia or Canada or South America to escape the collapse of the Gulag.

Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout

Get some GUNS.

I this helps your grades.

Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout

When the Gitmo detainees file suit in U.S. federal court for
damages against BushCo.

Let the ulcerations begin !

Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout

This is VERY OLD NEWS. However, thanks for trying for
trying.

Cordially,
Kilgore Trout

matter.

Obviously, Slashdot doesn't want to tell its readers that
there are NO IT jobs.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for nothing.

PatRIOTically,
Kilgore Trout

to get the diesel.

Conservationally Yours,
Sarah Palin, Former Republican Presidential-VICE Candidate

I discounted any significant sales of Tesla less than a year ago and was modded down.

So much for Slashdot business sense.

Cordially,
Kilgore Trout

by the criminals-in-Congress.

P.S.: Vote For Flight Safety: Vote AGAINST John "POW" McCain.

still a junkie.

Is Obama still a junkie?