Slashdot Mirror

Well done, they thwarted that one good and proper. I'm talking about one that was stopped by MI5 or GCHQ. Such as this one http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/04/northern-ireland-police-ira-mortar, stopped by security forces in Northern Ireland. Try again.

Azerbaijan and BP http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/19/bp-azerbaijan-100bn-dollars-gas-deal
http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewhulbert/2012/10/12/is-bp-on-borrowed-time-in-azerbaijan-yes-but-so-is-baku/
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/us-bp-azerbaijan-idUSBRE89N0PC20121024
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/19/bp_strikes_gas_deal_with_azerbaijan_newscred/
Complex but after fall of Soviet Union the UK got in fast and was very friendly :)
Soviet Union left a lot of oil related factories, workers apartments and did a lot of exploration.

If this work was being done by Americans who actually need to rely on the ACA for their health care coverage, you can bet your ass that it would have been done right - the first time.

I doubt it. Serco is a UK company and they're quite happy to screw up IT contracts related to the UK National Health Service which they rely on.

One example: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/sep/30/pathology-labs-takeover-failures

I don't know. Perhaps the part where you're posting, through a non-anonymous network, onto a public website, claiming this is happening without fear of reprisal?

By comparison: Iranian blogger's death in custody stirs up debate Shots fired at huge Iran protest.

Grow some perspective.

Maybe as the "climate change minister" he had no need to know?

Cabinet was told nothing about GCHQ spying programmes, says Chris Huhne

Huhne, formerly the energy and climate change minister, was jailed this year after he admitted perverting the course of justice over claims his ex-wife took speeding points for him. In February he was sentenced to eight months in prison but was released after serving 62 days.

Not sure he is entirely trustworthy.

Unless this people building this system have come up with a way to program a creative spirit into the system, I'm skeptical

Daniel Dennett made himself a career out of arguing against this kind of twaddle. Whenever I listen to him, I always wonder what he's making such a big deal about, then I head back out into the world, and sure enough, he's busy saying what needs to be said.

From Daniel Dennett: 'You can make Aristotle look like a flaming idiot':

There's a pattern here, "the story of my life", as Dennett puts it. People assume unrealistic ideals of what free will, selfhood or rationality are and then get upset when Dennett says: "It's not the overwhelming supercalifragilisticexpialidocious phenomenon that you thought it was." But it's still real enough. The problem is simply: "Both free will and consciousness have been, by my lights, inflated in the popular imagination and in the philosophical imagination," and so "anybody who has a view of either one that is chopped down to size" is accused of "a wretched subterfuge", as Kant memorably put it.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious travels under many aliases. One of these is "creative spirit". A calling card of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is that there can be no such thing as incremental progress. You either have it, or you're wasting your time. There's a grain of truth to this. It's hard to sneak up on a moving bar that travels by teleportation whenever encroached.

As I recall, Dennett goes into this in the last third of Daniel Dennett: Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. It's a virtuous and mildly tedious sermon if you already belong to the choir.

Look I'm all for the solution we've now reached but the evidence was pretty solid that the Syrian government committed the atrocity.

As for "Russia presented its evidence to the UN.", no it really didn't. It said it was going to present it's evidence to the UN which turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of opinions. Compare and contrast that to evidence from western nations and independent researchers alike who have released information openly and it's pretty damning.

I don't know how one can really side with Russia's closed accusations, the demonstrably doctored videos and so forth that supposedly showed the launch, the delay in letting the inspectors out there and so forth. It's pathetic. Russia could tell you anything and you'd believe it.

Not striking seems to be a reasonable option, but if your reasons for supporting it are "Russia said!" and "But America has used them in the past too!" then you're supporting it for the wrong reasons.

You may want to read the very article you linked all over again, because you seem to have pulled out a very small section of it and come to a conclusion based on that without reading the entire article and accompanying links.

You talk about publicly auditable and then you ignore the plethora of evidence from a variety of sources including from even extremely objective nations on the issue like some of those in South America and India that explains exactly why it's almost certain Assad was responsible and then you take the closed evidence from Russia which no one's sure even exists because we've never actually seen it and only heard them talk about it. We've just seen bullshit statements like in this news article which no evidence actually seemed to surface from:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/18/russia-syrian-rebels-chemical-weapons

Don't pretend you like to base your understanding on facts and evidence when you're ignoring the facts and evidence and feeding straight into bullshit with no evidence to back it up.

The first is an "everywhere, forever" statistic.
The second is a "United States in Q2 2013" statistic.

Phablets are big in Asia-Pacific

Large-screen phones prove hugely popular in India, China and other countries - creating challenge for Apple as it contemplates next iPhone release. "Phablets", the large-screened phones with screen sizes of between 5in and 7in diagonally, sold as well as tablets and laptops combined in the Asia-Pacific region during the second quarter, says research company IDC.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/02/phablets-asia-pacific-tablets-laptops-growth

Face it, the IOC is perfectly OK with corruption, oppression, censorship, and spying, as long as committee members get their payoffs, a pleasant facade is maintained while cameras are rolling, and nobody but Jews get killed.

You know, Slashdot really has taken a dive lately. We've got an anti-semetic comment hiding in plain sight, and yet this racist asshole got upmodded not once, but twice so far. And the kicker is there's no evidence presented that the IOC is anti-semetic. Of course, there's plenty of evidence about corruption and censorship, and committee members getting paid off. That's all legit; And the rest is on the level with them being an accomplice to it.

But the conclusion is also bogus. Russia doesn't "wish" they could have the "all encompassing monitoring that Beijing" had. They're allies with China. China produces tons of telecom; And I'm sure they'd be only too happy to help their ally to the west with that problem if Russia really was putting that on a 'wish list'.

Small problem though -- Russia does have the money. And they are building that surveillance network right now. Without help. Worse, while your tin foil hat "They're monitoring all the things!" might be somewhat accurate... you're utterly lacking in a good conclusion as to why. I mean, besides being evil for the sake of being evil, because it's, you know, fun and shit.

The real reason why Russia is building this network up is because historically Russia has been hyper-paranoid about foreigners. You know, that whole business with Stalin, and the USSR, and the cold war... it had a small effect on their psyche. But also, Russia doesn't have free speech; And right now it's dealing with large numbers of people protesting over Putin's one man crusade against the gay community, and the Olympics has been named as a primary target for these protesters to get the word out about Russia's oppression of these people.

So they're preparing the nets, setting the traps, and building nearby warehouses that will become jails with the flip of a switch, in anticipation of having to move a groundswell of its own citizens trying to ram their way into public view at the event. And Putin... oooh, he doesn't like that. Not. One. Bit.

So cool it with the anti-semetic crap -- this isn't about the jews, it's about the gays, and while the IOC may be a morally corrupt piece of shit for an organization, they haven't yet turned terrorist, and there is no evidence they're planning on crossing that line anytime soon. If nothing else, it would hurt their profits.

Two wrongs doesn't make a right. So in terms of growing up, the "they also did it" excuse is as mature as a six-year old who gets caught red-handed, and tries to justify his wrong-doing because the other kids also stole from the cookie-jar.

Regarding perspective, I think it would help if more people would read Bruce Schneier's "Beyond Fear". There he gives a very straight forward, for they layman, introduction to analysing risks and appropriate security measure response. In that light, it becomes clear that neither NSA's nor FSB's programs have anything to do with mitigating risks. It's not even about the pretence and security theatre any more (after all NSA's programs were mostly secret).

It's pure corruption based cocaine induced money-making and dick-swinging: "Look, our data center has a gazillion coca-bytes!"; "We'll monitor you so thoroughly, we'll know when your wife is PMS'ing"; "I want a Star Trek Command Center! Wabu-wabu!!!" See Keith Alexander's ego trip for the last one - talk about being out of touch and lacking perspective.

People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like.

Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes.

Top-secret presentation says 'We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time' but 'with manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users'

No, because the carbon dioxide is making the ocean more acidic. And I have a link!

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-acidification-carbon-dioxide-emissions-levels

No I'm saying that the NSA may have influenced the constants used:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance

(Point 5 near the bottom)

Credibility = 0.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/microsoft-privacy-chief-nsa
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Microsoft-Gives-the-Australian-Government-Details-on-More-than-1-000-Users-388003.shtml
http://techrights.org/2011/12/26/microsoft-and-nokia-astroturf/

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-09-29/nsa-central-us-assassination-program
You also had the http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media

There is no indication that Microsoft's board would heed the wishes of the three investors, who collectively hold more than 5% of the company's stock, the sources say

Thats the CIA talking about the "CIA" in 2007 Cold i.e. 'according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials'.
Interesting thats just around the "CIA destroyed video of 'waterboarding' al-Qaida detainees" http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/dec/07/usa.humanrights
Other term used might be "Category III" techniques, "harsh techniques", "water treatment", "near asphyxiation from water" or a suggested "wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation".
Starting to see a pattern Cold? If you can define away the actual term "waterboarding", then proudly list the departments and agencies that did not engage in torture.... any gov agency can get very low "waterboarding" usage numbers :)

AC did you miss the news:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data
http://rt.com/usa/microsoft-nsa-snowden-leak-971/

UK waiting time for surgery, up to 18 weeks unless they decide "it is clinically appropriate that you wait longer. "

UK waiting time for MRI or other tests, 13 weeks.

Yay socialized medicine!

You haven't read the latest news reports:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9819096/Two-million-quit-Britain-in-talent-drain.html
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/1000-knife-crime-victims-in-london-each-month-shocking-new-figures-show-8681511.html
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/jun/12/workers-deepest-cuts-real-wages-ifs
http://rt.com/op-edge/osborne-scheme-property-market-crash-434/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2438168/Half-maternity-wards-turn-away-women-labour-Report-says-lives-risk-units-bursting-seams.html

The UK is going the same way as the USA. Everyone is fighting and clawing each other to get that "home in the catchment area of the good school" unless they can afford a private school. Which by the way is only affordable to company directors and senior government employees. Anyone who can't achieve that goal has no option but emigration.

Just a room in the edgier parts of London rents for £200/week.

You are correct in the typical sense of a musician reading sheet music playing a piece they've never practiced before. However, I could see this useful for someone learning a new song. In addition, there are some interesting technologies for blind people, such as the tongue sensor.

FreedomHosting was targeted and attacked by the FBI within weeks of other secure email providers like LavaBit and Silent Circle, both of which chose to close shop rather than cooperate with the government in selling out their users. The FBI hacked FreedomHosting and planted malware on every one of its sites (regardless of legality) meant to snare those sites unknowing visitors with a javascript vulnerabilitry that targets a firefox TOR bundle. .
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/09/14/0122218/fbi-admits-it-controlled-tor-servers-behind-mass-malware-attack

You'd have to be blind, deaf and dumb to think this is about child porn, the legislator and executor's ultimate go-to excuse for any vindictive purpose. The NSA's OWN LEAKED DOCUMENT show child porn as a go-to excuse for cracking down on TOR.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/20/exhibit-b-nsa-procedures-document

If that doesn't bother you, then congratulations! You are a king of sheep. You know what the government does when it needs a justification to go after terrorists? It creates terrorists by enabling them entirely, providing resources and motivation, and bringing them to the last step, only to then halt them and claim in the media a massive victory against the forces of terror. You should feel anger at the FBI--they targeted unknowing, innocent webgoers. Instead you side with the establishment. Why am I not surprised?

Cold fjord, is that you?

I look forward to spring each year for the fresh stinging nettles to brew up a gallon of nettle beer Surprisingly bitter and strong, but very good out of the fridge on a warm evening!

Well, seeing that the U.S. media is totally in the bag for Obama, it's not too much of a surprise.

Seymour Hersh himself - a man who would know and who spent his entire life rooting out government crimes - just said in The Guardian: "There are some people - the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would ... it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."

In addition to Alef's comment

That Guardian article where he teaches everyone, including terrorists, how to avoid the NSA, undoing 10 years of infiltration work:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance

Also, he's been helping anti-surveillance campaigns including NO2ID for years.

Yes, we see the same behavior daily from Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus...

Wellll, maybe not exactly daily, but since you insist... yes, yes, and yes (I'm just mad about saffron, she's just mad about me...), we do...

Sorry, I don't buy this. The Russian Federation is way below the US in math and science:

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/dec/07/world-education-rankings-maths-science-reading

September 27, 2013

Hersh On The Osama Raid

What does Seymour Hersh know that we do not know?

Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media

Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends "so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would" – or the death of Osama bin Laden. "Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011.

Posted by b on September 27, 2013 at 11:30 AM | Permalink

Comments

That's great, SH, but at this rate the world will have an intelligent and honest discussion about the false flag attacks of 9/11 in say about 2065.

Posted by: JSorrentine | Sep 27, 2013 11:48:12 AM | 1

Here's what I believe, have believed since 2003: we got Bin Laden at Tora Bora. But that was too quick and we needed him to hang around for a while to justify our continued GWOT (global war on terror). The U.S. would put out tapes, reputedly produced by Bin Laden whenever the Bush Admin needed a little "spice" to keep people focused. Obama comes along and decides to "kill" Bin Laden as he is no longer useful; at leaast he can get a boost in the ratings - one last gift the Bin Laden legacy could provide before putting that story to bed. Seriously, where was the body? Where are the photos of the body? We had no problem showing photos of a hanged Saddam, or a tortured Qaddafi, but we wanted to show Bin Laden some respect and dump him in the ocean?? Puhlease...

Posted by: skuppers | Sep 27, 2013 12:01:18 PM | 2

great article on hersh. thanks!

Posted by: james | Sep 27, 2013 12:43:12 PM | 3

Watch for Hersh's sudden and mysterious demise.Hope he prints it quick.

And of course there was some kind of scam,as this whole WOT is a scam.

Posted by: dahoit | Sep 27, 2013 12:43:24 PM | 4

@2

Every level/incident of America's War on Terror has been found to have been based up whole-cloth lies and fabrications - every one - yet we are told to believe that The Event that got everything rolling is the God's honest truth and the mainstream parameters of our discourse are strictly modeled according to said tenet. Humanity can slowly keep peeling the onion for years and years - all the while ever newer layers of incidents/lies accrete and the criminals peacefully die off in their beds - or it can take a huge leap forward and start framing the entire War on Terror - including/beginning with 9/11 - as the largest act of aggressive war since 1939.

Posted by: JSorrentine | Sep 27, 2013 12:45:44 PM | 5

Think about it;From no air defense to tails 1 half? mile away from fuselage,to the twin towers falling exactly? on their footprint,to miraculous passports,to dancing Israelis,24 hr picts of alleged perps,building seven,airline futures,radio screwups,command center screw ups,wreckage shipped to China,the zero in charge,wh

The vast majority of that money comes from industries with a publicly well-known, vested interest in denying global warming.

Again, show me this alleged money. I see empty assertions. But when I look at actual visible budgets, the World Wildlife Fund, a group promoting climate change theory, by itself receives more in public funds than the entire "climate deniers" cottage industry.

A comparison of the two links shows that billionaires have supposedly donated $120 million to the cause of climate denying over ten years while the WWF received $41 million in public funding just last year.

Greenpeace apparently received $2.2 billion (though not in public funding) over the same time period that billionaires were kicking out $120 million.

And from right wing think tanks with bottomless pockets that fund studies trying to disprove AGW and still are forced to conclude by the evidence they gather that it is quite likely occurring.

Didn't happen. Read up on it. Yes, there was such a study and yes, the Koch brothers were funding it. But right wing think tanks with bottomless pockets weren't involved.

T'he thing that is apparently so easy to forget is that there are far bigger corporations (though not corporations as are usually considered on Slashdot) out there than Big Oil and other fossil fuel businesses. For example, the European Union is one such with a captive market of almost 400 million people and backed by the power of a few dozen developed world countries, all themselves powerful corporations in their own right. Similarly, there's the United States which again has a captive market of roughly 340 million people.

These deep pocketed organizations which employ tens of millions of people and have budgets, which can range into the trillions of dollars, can easily outspend the entire fossil fuel industry. And my take in the climate change debate is that they have done so.

He says he's encrypting everything, these days

Precisely, because encryption still works, regardless of what the media has convinced you.

He doesn't trust vpns

Please, please read the articles more carefully; you are missing what is actually being said due to the amount of hysteria that was whipped up. Here is what he actually said:

TAO also hacks into computers to recover long-term keys. So if you're running a VPN that uses a complex shared secret to protect your data and the NSA decides it cares, it might try to steal that secret. .....How do you communicate securely against such an adversary? Snowden said it in an online Q&A soon after he made his first document public: "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on."....
I have five pieces of advice:...
2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec

Schneier is SPECIFICALLY recommending the use of VPN and HTTPS to protect yourself, and this recommendation was made a whopping 3 weeks ago. It would be awfully strange for a crypto expert to recommend the use of a broken technology, especially one as paranoid as Schneier. The "risk" hes identifying is that, as has ALWAYS been the case, adversaries do not attack encryption head on; they look for side-channels or ways of recovering the keys so that they do not have to brute force, and in this case the NSA apparently relies on trying to hack the endpoint and recover the VPN keys (the "shared secret" he references) for high-value targets.

He thinks RC4 has been cracked.

I dont believe he ever said that. This says "dont panic yet, but start to move away from RC4".

He is no where near as complacent as you are.

Im not "complacent", im just not ready to buy some rubbish speculation that "all VPNs" are vulnerable even though the relevant encryption algos havent been cracked yet and schneier is recommending we use IPSEC (probably the most widely used VPN tech out there).

That's not very hard really - just lay a cable to Europe.

And not via the UK either.

There is no silver lining. People running around insisting that SSL is not compromised are delusional, or the NSA's useful idiots. Or both.

A classification guide for NSA employees and contractors on Bullrun outlines in broad terms its goals.
Project Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.

Get over it. SSL is gone.

And I have no faith in VPNs either:

Documents show that Edgehill's initial aim was to decode the encrypted traffic certified by three major (unnamed) internet companies and 30 types of Virtual Private Network (VPN) – used by businesses to provide secure remote access to their systems. By 2015, GCHQ hoped to have cracked the codes used by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs.

True it never says explicitly that they have cracked all VPNs, but when their initial target was 30 different types of VPNs and their new target for 2015 is 300, that clearly suggests they have made good progress against those 30.

Get over it. VPNs are gone.

You might not like the Guardian or the NY Times. But they are talking to Snowden, and you are not.

Or perhaps, the mobile business is a very stinky place to be in right now, if you're not Apple, Samsung or a cheap Chinese OEM.

Between iPhone at the high end and Chinese OEMs at the low end, and Samsung in the middle, every other company is suffering.

Motorola switched to Android and is increasing it's losses bringing down Google's earnings.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/07/19/google-earnings-ad-rates-motorola-losses/

HTC's profit is down 98% and is barely ekeing out a profit.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/11/htc-profit-slump-samsung-apple-smartphone

LG isn't doing that well either.

The less said about Blackberry, the better.

Meanwhile, MS partners like Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, Acer, IBM/Lenovo etc. have made billions of dollars in profit in the past three decades by selling Windows PCs. Or take even HTC which started off as a Windows Mobile OEM.

After all, extraordinary claims of something being "outright false" require extraordinary proof.

You have that completely reversed - it is you who made the extraordinary claim. I picked one your citations at random - the zdnet one - and the only relevant part is actually a reference to your first citation at the NY Times - the line:

" Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

"And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone," Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency's mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information. "

Funny thing, he also said:

"Computer security is still in such a [bad] state that you don't need to insert a back door," said Paul Kocher, a US cryptography expert. "If the front door is locked, you can just go in through a side window."

Given that more complete context, it doesn't look like he thinks SSL is compromised, just the end points.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0054adb2-1709-11e3-9ec2-00144feabdc0.html

Furthermore, if there was one person speaking publically about this stuff who would know, it would be Snowden. The man who said, "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it."

That is outright false. I challenge you to provide a citation to a reasonably authoritative site saying that - basically anybody who isn't a kook. You can't.

Clearly you phrased it that way so you could reject any site I offered, based on your own myopic view point.

So here are the rules:
You don't get to reject any source! You have to invalidate every one of these and all of their claims.
After all, extraordinary claims of something being "outright false" require extraordinary proof.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/16/has-https-finally-been-cracked/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/05/nsa_gchq_ssl_reports/
http://www.zdnet.com/has-the-nsa-broken-ssl-tls-aes-7000020312/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/20/leaked-nsa-doc-says-it-can-collect-and-keep-your-encrypted-data-as-long-as-it-takes-to-crack-it/

STFU and do your research,

Your source (emphasis mine):

In the category of protecting user privacy in the courts, Google deserves special recognition this year for challenging a National Security Letter.

My source:

No telecommunications company has ever challenged the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court's orders for bulk phone records under the Patriot Act, the court revealed on Tuesday.

Now, do you want to split hairs and argue that "maybe Google isn't a 'telecommunications company'" or "maybe the orders they got weren't for 'bulk phone records'," or do you want to maybe acknowledge that the industry in the US doesn't give a flying fuck if nobody is looking (or is even allowed to look)?

Amen Brother!

Thankfully articles like this one put those canards to rest where they should:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/23/terrorism.iraq

So you are blaming the US for a problem started by the Soviet Union, continued by Egypt, and made worse when the Egyptians spread chemical weapons to Iraq and Syria

Are their other guily parties? Sure. All I was saying is that a military dictatorship such as the Egyptians used to suffer, which was completely dependent on US diplomatic and military support (and likely still is, since the latest military coup) would never dream of doing any dealings that would offend their, eh, benefactor. Besides, did you forget that the US were squarely on the Iraqi side of that whole Iraq-Iran debacle?

Did Turkey and Brazil intended to do anything about the chemical weapons?

No, because it was an initiative for a Middle East without nuclear weapons.

Well, neither idea was going to go anywhere. Iraq wouldn't have bought in. Iran wouldn't have bought in either. There are probably other countries that wouldn't have bought in, such as Syria. .

The Turkish/Brazilian initiative had Iran on board: see this for example. They did not need Iraq on board, though I think they might have been.

Iran and Israel got along well until the Iranian Islamic revolution after which Iran decided to be Israel's enemy and threaten genocide.

Iran and Israel got along fine as long as Iran was a Western backed brutal dictatorship. The fact that the revolution which ended that was an Islamic one was as predictable as it was unfortunate (in my opinion) -- for the Iranian people, that is, in the long run. When did Iran threaten genocide? Are you aware that one of the largest Jewish populations live in Iran, rather happily and unoppressed I might add? Please don't bring up that discredited mistranslation on the part of their previous leader (who is a nutjob, no argument there).

There is little liklihood that the Turkish / Brazilian initiative would have gone anywhere.

You got that right. But that's only because, shall we say, certain non-signatories of the Non-Profileration Treaty, made sure it was nipped in the bud, as it would actually impose restrictions on their nuclear facilities as well as the Iranians'.

I don't know about that, but at least one professor at Cambridge predicted the ice would be gone by 2015-2016.

I guess when your country does things like create stuxnet, you could probably expect a repercussion or two, huh?

Correction: Stuxnet was the repercussion, it was Iran's nuclear program that was the provocation.

Iran nuclear report: IAEA claims Tehran working on advanced warhead
Q&A: Iran nuclear issue

Dealing with your 'blockquote' style is way too hard. I suspect this is a rathole, and nobody else is reading it, and that you know what you said, so I'll omit the quotes.

So, your assertion is that changes in CO2 levels is NOT caused by human activity, or that the contribution by humans is negligible. Sadly, most authorities disagree with you. I have no way of measuring the effect, so I can't weigh in, other than to mention that I trust folks who do this for a living far more than I trust you. Here are a few links:

EPA
IPCC
NOAA
More IPCC
RealClimate

According to folks that study this, the sea level is rising. Here are some links:

Union of Concerned Scientists
National Geographic
EPA
NASA, scroll down.

The ice core mystery has been explained in such a way that the time differences are in the noise. Here is a link that attempts to explain it: arstechnica. However, one obvious reason why CO2 might follow temperature rises is that lots of CO2 is released in the arctic tundra when the permafrost melts. As solar cycles cause warming CO2 is released. However, it could easily be a situation where small changes in temperature cause CO2 spikes, which then contribute to a feedback loop. Since nobody was there, nobody really knows for sure. However, this article describes a paper in Nature 2012 that describes the feedback loop. Note the paper assumes that excess CO2 causes temperature rises. That is pretty much not contested at this point, I believe, due to a strong theoretical understanding of the interactions. Since there were no excess sources of CO2 in the Pleistocene, the temperature rise precedes the CO2 rise. Since we are artificially increasing CO2, we trigger the warming effect without a requirement for excess solar radiation.

I have read 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' by Taubes. The book is very convincing. The view of nutrition as a power game, with no real science behind it is quite interesting. Sadly for your case, there is LOTS of science to back up the assertions of Global Warming caused by human activity. Too many to simply dismiss.

If there is no problem with CO2 causing global warming, and we are going to be ok despite these emissions, well, that would be wonderful. Due to lobbying by Koch and friends, that is probably what we are going to end up with anyway. However, if there is only a 1% possibility that the worst will happen, and hundreds of millions of people will die because of it, I will still support doing whatever we can to prevent it. Can you really be so sure of your facts, many of which are supported by papers paid for by Koch subsidiaries who have a real financial interest in stopping any action on climate change?

Just to add one more detail to your argument. You write that killing Android on Nokia is what forced Microsoft to just out-right buy Nokia, and that's grounds for legal action. What about not selling the N950 ever, anywhere?

It was the N9/N950 running Meego which is what started the whole burning oil platform memo/argument from Elop. Elop did everything he could to bury that device and the entire team that developed it, because he wanted to sleep with Microsoft so bad, and do an exclusive. Yet the Meego team did deliver and despite Elop it did go on sale, not in the US or EU but only in a few places like Saudi Arabia and South Africa, thanks to Elop. The US and EU countries were only allowed to buy crippled Microsoft Windows Phone 7.8 OS phones; while Microsoft took more time to finish Windows Phone 8 at Nokia's timely expense.

When the N9 launched, very shortly thereafter Elop even publicly trivialized it by demo'ing a Windows Phone prototype, with his own hands at the Communasia Communications Symposium in Singapore, on June 22, 2011.
http://youtu.be/r1lsJOwdmfA
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2011/jun/23/nokia-n9-windows-phone-tease

That's a major Osborne directly attributable to Elop.

So yeah, minority partner Microsoft at the behest of former Microsoft manager S. Elop and Nokia CEO does seem to have driven OS choices on multiple occasions. But l forgot until now what a lovely piece of evidence the N950 is. The N950 which wasn't even allowed to be sold, yet was finished and made available for developers. How much money would a wider release of the N9 generated, and ignoring that for a moment, how much revenue would have been generated if the N950 would have gone on sale even if only in the limited markets the N9 was allowed to be sold in? Why wasn't the N950 ever allowed to be sold anywhere? Look for yourself at what a lovely device it is:

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Nokia-N950-16GB-/171130186470?

How popular would this device have been, along with the N9 given sufficient resources & marketing love? We're talking iPhone and Android killers, because along with features like tethering 3g over low-power bluetooth, and low-power SIP support in the OS, Nokia was way ahead of their time. (disclaimer: I use 3g SIP over bluetooth w/ my N9 w/ Ubuntu 12.04 a lot, and battery life is great).

As long as Stephen Elop was Nokia CEO, Nokia handset division was going to be a 100% Microsoft shop. A real CEO should have remained focused to prior Meego efforts and strategy, and worked to fix problems along those lines.

I dream of Elop defending himself in court against the charges you have suggested, *while* he is active CEO of Microsoft, taking them down with him. (But no way will Bill let him be CEO of Microsoft, because aside from delivering Nokia to him, his actual performance was abysmal).

In response to the detention of Miranda, he said something along those lines:

the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa

This was probly at the request of Nigel Farage, given his opinion on Belgium and attempts to "..be the quiet assassin of European democracy and of European nation states.".

That probably isn't the whole story.

There is some evidence that there is a loose confederation of well-funded lobbyists and influence-mongers who have a vested interest in casting doubt on science in general, the so-called "merchants of doubt". The same organisations tend to be behind denial of acid rain, anthropogenic climate change, and the danger of tobacco.

Denying evolution indirectly helps the bottom line of tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies and so on. Why wouldn't they help out the cause?

If you seriously think that backdoors in OSs are tinfoil hat material in this day and age, then I would love to know what rock you've been living on. I'd like to join you there if you don't mind.

Every time you see something that discounts global warming impacts EG: Growth of ice in Antarctica increasing. It rapidly gets dismissed as "oh that is just natural variation" but you get the opposite EG: Loss of ice in the Arctic and it is end of the world global warming doom all the way down.

Who said anything about natural variation? One thing you should expect with a global climate change is for wind patterns and currents to change.

This is from 2007.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/feb/18/climatechange.theobserversuknewspages

So yes this is someone saying "Global warming can cause increases in ice and decreases in ice." But that's not ridiculous in the slightest. If you have a refrigerator you can safely say "this refrigerator will reduce the temperature inside the fridge while raising the net temperature of the system."

West Germany drastically reduced its technological and industrial production by abandoning the free market (the same that happened with the Nordic countries). They are still economically well mainly because they still have a lot of money to burn and a lot of industry to trash, unlike Sweden and Finland, for example, but as it is the case with the latter their economic model is unsustainable. Just a quick reference:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/08/number-one-problem-economy-europe

And although humans have organized in societies throughout human history there was never and never will be a monolithic group called "collective". Human civilization evolved as groups of individuals getting together to accomplish common goals and fighting to the death clubbing one another when their needs conflicted. Believing in this fairy tail of "collective needs" is what can be called stupidity. There are no collective needs or wishes, there are only individual needs and wishes that are accomplished by group efforts.

It's not as conspiracy-theory cool as magical backdoors implanted in every piece of hardware, but this is how the NSA actually breaks into systems... they do it the same way everyone else does, just on a much larger scale and with even less fear of legal repercussions that the cyber criminals.

Oh really? I don't see "everyone else" spending millions to deliberately subvert encryption standards , either.

  And since the CAs have been co-opted, SSL is laughable. Try Steve Gibson's cert "fingerprint" service and see for yourself. I tried it, and he gets a different cert for www.google.co.nz than I do. Is it the NSA? Who knows, but someone is up in my business >:-(