Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Giving up is unforgivable. ~Joe Biden

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The lights are all blinking red.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

The willow is too close to the house.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

You are here: Home / Politics / An Unexamined Scandal / Open Thread: President Obama Orders A “Full Review” of Russian Election Hacking

Open Thread: President Obama Orders A “Full Review” of Russian Election Hacking

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In a move essential to guarantee confidence in our electoral process, and also the proud political tradition of “Make ‘Em Deny It”, per CNN:

President Barack Obama has ordered a full review into hacking by the Russians aimed at influencing US elections going back to 2008, the White House said Friday.

“The President has directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process. It is to capture lessons learned from that and to report to a range of stakeholders,” White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser Lisa Monaco said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters Friday. “This is consistent with the work that we did over the summer to engage Congress on the threats that we were seeing.”

White House spokesman Eric Schultz added later that the review would encompass malicious cyber activity related to US elections going back to 2008…

Democrats were quick to praise Obama on Friday and pressured Trump to change his tune.
“Defending our elections from foreign meddling is more important than any political party’s advantage or disadvantage,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. “Any Administration should be deeply troubled by Russia’s attempt to tamper with our elections.”

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, California Rep. Adam Schiff, praised the administration for its move and called on the White House to declassify as much as it could.

“Given President-elect Trump’s disturbing refusal to listen to our intelligence community and accept that the hacking was orchestrated by the Kremlin, there is an added urgency to the need for a thorough review before President Obama leaves office next month,” Schiff said in a statement. “More than that, the administration must begin to take steps to respond forcefully to this blatant cyber meddling, and work with our allies in Europe who have been targets of similar attacks to impose costs on the Kremlin; if we do not, we can expect to see a lot more of this in the near future.”

Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the President’s move “constructive” and said he has no doubt about the Moscow’s role…

More detail, and video, at the link.

From that Newsweek link in the top tweet:

… Asked if Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team was not concerned enough about Russia’s influence on the election or about other threats to the United States such as infectious disease outbreaks, Monaco said it was too soon to say. As a presidential candidate, Trump praised Putin and called on Russia to dig up missing emails from his opponent, Hillary Clinton, from her time as secretary of state under fellow Democrat Obama.

Reader Interactions

172Comments

  4. 4.

    MomSense

    @debbie:

    I was thinking the same thing. I’m hoping they dig up and release all the dirt on that motherfucker.

    Given what we know bout Russian interference, collaboration between Russian operatives and Trump campaign operatives, the known hacking of emails, Elections systems, and the voting suppression and irregularities (5 out of every 9 voting machines in MI were faulty) I’m saying that this election was rigged. Believe me.

  6. 6.

    SiubhanDuinne

    I swear I am going to start a GoFundMe to get enough money to buy a radio station.

    The call letters will be WASF.

  10. 10.

    SiubhanDuinne

    BTW, that picture of President Obama up top? Of course I love him when he is grinning and relaxed and happy and joking and loose — but there’s something about that clenched-jaw, tight-lipped “don’t you start fuckin with me, mofo” look that I adore (as long as I’m not on the receiving end). If I were Republican or Russian, I would be trembling in my boots.

  17. 17.

    Mnemosyne

    But one of the trolls just told me that it’s all paranoia and if I point out the dozen or so direct connections to Russia in this election, it’s just crazy talk.

    Also, too, Schiff is my former House rep (we moved one city over and landed in the one strip that Schiff doesn’t represent). He’s a really good guy who represents a large community of Armenian immigrants, so he’s not going to put up with any bullshit from Russia.

  20. 20.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    We need Mr. Eleven Dimensional Chess now more than ever. I have given up hope that our FAIL media is able or willing to do anything other than normalize every grossly abnormal thing that person I refuse to name has done or will do, and I hope President Obama has too, and isn’t counting on getting them to do anything but continue to ignore what has been under everyone’s nose. I hope there’s enough info to go round all the traitors up.

  21. 21.

    amk

    comey is obama’s worst political mistake. Don’t know how and why he lost his usual good political acumen there.

  22. 22.

    Adam L Silverman

    @debbie: Counterintelligence investigations, including the domestic component done by the FBI’s counterintelligence officers, are under the purview of the Director of National Intelligence. They are completely compartmentalized.

  23. 23.

    Yarrow

    Related and of particular interest to anyone in Wisconsin: Odd Traffic on Local Websites Puzzles Officials.

    Despite the apparent ringing endorsement of the credibility of the original election process, Bay Area municipal officials have discovered a disquieting pattern of activity affecting Internet servers that the City of Ashland and Bayfield Counties use for their web presences.

    According to City of Ashland Cyber Security Consultant Eric Ellason and Bayfield County Director of Information Technology Paul Houck, both municipalities have seen an unusual amount of traffic coming to their sites from Russia.

    Ellason, who owns and operates SlickRockWeb, Inc., an Internet services firm in Ashland, has contracted with the City of Ashland to operate the city’s website. Ellason provides cyber security services to firms across the country, as well as remediation work for hacked websites.

    “With all of the talk about Russian involvement in the elections, it prompted me to go and look at the traffic recorded at the city’s website,” he said,

    That curiosity about what kind of traffic the city’s website was getting from Russia and other eastern European countries led to an unexpected result.

    “On most websites you are always going to get a little bit of traffic there, and every day there is always somebody looking for a security issue, so you are always going to see a baseline of traffic that is always a little suspect. Most of the time they don’t find anything, they are just trolling for security flaws,” Ellason said. “When I separated out just Russian traffic, there was a huge spike from about March 15 of this year.”

    Looking back further, Ellason said he could find no other comparable traffic spike from Russia.

    When Eliason discovered the issue asked Houck to check his websites and found the same spike. They don’t think they’ve had a security breach. But…

    Still it’s difficult to ascribe a non-malevolent motivation for this kind of behavior. It is difficult to see what legitimate interest computer operators in Russia would have in repeatedly hitting on computers in the Chequamegon Bay region.

    Uh huh.

    Edit: I forgot to add, they believe the activity is consistent with state sponsored effort. It’s great local reporting. Go give them a click.

  28. 28.

    Miss Bianca

    @SiubhanDuinne: I’m with you on that one. If it weren’t completely contrary to both his character and the Constitution, I’d love to see that look on his face as he declared that for the good of the nation he was declaring a state of emergency and declaring the last election null and void.

  29. 29.

    Mnemosyne

    @MomSense:

    I was suspicious of the guy from the first, but I got shouted down here. Repeatedly.

    I wonder how many of those people still find Snowden’s odyssey from Hong Kong to Moscow to be totally not suspicious in the wake of the last year or so.

  30. 30.

    mai naem mobile

    @debbie: nah that’s not how you phrase it. It’s ‘Some people,not me ofcourse, say James Comey is Vladimir Putins love child with Margaret Thatcher.’ Then you add some extraneous stuff like they had a short fling when Vlad was stationed in Cambridge where Thatcher was attending University.

  33. 33.

    schrodinger's cat

    I broke my NYT fast, much too my regret. This is what I found.

    the-world-fears-trumps-america-thats-a-good-thing

    Op-ed by some guy called Dr. Mark Moyar.

    Time for another month long fast.

  34. 34.

    Mnemosyne

    @Yutsano:

    Given how many defenders they still have on the naive left, I’m assuming that Wikileaks is trying to conflate all of the investigations to make themselves look like martyrs to Obama, Evil Destroyer of Whistleblowers. You know, like how the media piled all of Hillary’s “scandals” into a giant undifferentiated mass called “Emails!”

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @debbie: I do not know. I do not work in this area and never have. I’m just doing whatever one else is doing: observing and remarking upon what is being reported in open sources.

  37. 37.

    mike in dc

    I hope the report refers to direct communications between Russia and Trump and Russia and WikiLeaks. All 3 of them on conference call would be too good to be true.

  38. 38.

    Kathleen

    @MomSense: I think we have experienced the last stages of a coup, which gained momentum the last 8 years with the Great Republican Black Guy Freakout. and Rethugs’ intent to crash the government.

  41. 41.

    Adam L Silverman

    @schrodinger’s cat: I worked with Mark Moyar for five weeks in the summer of 2015. He’s a historian by doctoral education and training. He has written a very long book that basically sums up as: “I hate President Obama and everything he stands for, so I’ve written this book on what I think are all of his strategy and policy mistakes so everyone in the world knows I hate him and everything he stands for”. I had to edit a monograph that he wrote and it was terrible in terms of substance.

  45. 45.

    Kathleen

    @Mnemosyne: I was suspicious, too. Another instance where the media blindly followed the story line that he was a heroic whistle blower who had performed a great service, even though his “revelations” quickly veered from big bad Obama sniffing our smart phones and we can’t hazzz our civil liberteez to spying activity in other countries. His backers’ goal was to undermine Obama administration but again, mainslimer media types nodded their reptilian heads in agreement that he was a “hero”, including besotted bloggers on “the left” like Charlie Pierce.

  46. 46.

    Kathleen

    @mai naem mobile: Then you finish with Hillary Clinton spied on them with her emails. ETA Or Goldman Sachs speeches. Or some other unspeakable evil that was CAPTURED IN HER EMAILS, DAMN IT!

  51. 51.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Mnemosyne:

    I was suspicious of the guy from the first, but I got shouted down here.

    Likewise, although I don’t particularly remember being shouted down. Maybe I just kept my views pretty much to myself and didn’t share; that would be like me. Whatever, I’m not a fan of Greenwald, Snowden, or Assange.

  52. 52.

    MomSense

    @geg6:

    I remember. And it didn’t escape our notice how the defenders seemed to share a lot of characteristics of the MRA PUA crowd.

    Honestly I wish we had been proven wrong because the consequences are going to be terrible.

  54. 54.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Buying ailing newspapers may be cheaper.

    Yes, that may well be, but I think less effective than starting a broadcasting empire.

    Although at that, I may want to be looking at new media. But somehow, we need to work in the WASF call letters or identifier.

  55. 55.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Major Major Major Major:

    The Greenwald fights used to be long, drawn-out affairs, not so much any more.

    I remember that, but I never read or followed GG in the first place so I was able to read those BJ fights with a certain detachment.

    Oh, and fuck Greenwald.

    With you 100% on that.

  63. 63.

    piratedan

    @geg6: and @MomSense… I think a LOT of people got confused by the idea that we’re under constant surveillance, that our e-mails are monitored, as is our activity on the interwebs… and you know what… they are most likely. Just that they are monitored by people like advertisers that frame the ads you see based on the purchases that you make and the sites that you visit. For some reason, America doesn’t seem to give a fuck about that and who IS actually driving that bus because there’s some background noise that corporations don’t want to control you, they just want to know everything about you and then sell that data to someone else to sell you the next thing… Perhaps they paid attention during the literature class when 1984 was being discussed, who knows?

    To be fair, yeah, I think that our personal freedoms/versus the surveillance state is a very valid discussion worth having (STILL worth having today!) but what Snowden did was so incredibly freaking beyond the pale that I still have issues with his dudebro apologists…

    He could have gone to any Congressman (especially a Republican one who were scrounging about for ANYTHING to tarnish the current administration with)
    There are in fact whistleblower protocols in place, even for contractors like him

    Instead, he lied to his coworkers… obtained their passwords and downloaded every bleeping thing he could from all of them.
    Left for Hong Kong, to deal with the Chinese and then
    Russia where he bleats about our surveillance state issues from quite possible the biggest abuser on the planet… so yeah… I’m not buying it. Those that enabled and encouraged him are all safely “out of reach” and putting their heads on pikes, while satisfactory, still doesn’t solve the problem in that the GOP thinks less is better and that private is better than public and have demonstrated that to be NOT the case when it actually comes to government work itself.

    That’s what pisses me off about this the most, is that this should be a moment where it scares the ever loving crap out of me as to what’s been done and whatever has been done, has been done very quietly by this administration. Unknown if lives and assets were lost (I assume yes, but its not as if the government would (or should) admit it) and throughout, Obama has repeatedly stated that he wasn’t comfortable with the power allowed and pleaded with Congress to do something about it and for the most part, they simply fucking haven’t. To my knowledge, there’s not been a lot of reporting on this because (just like healthcare) it’s fucking complicated and these days, the media gives a fuck-all about anything other than click bait.

  64. 64.

    gene108

    @Major Major Major Major:

    The “useful idiots” do not care about the particulars, as long as their guy wins.

    You need to keep 10,000 blacks from voting, because they did not respond to something in the mail? SOUNDS LIKE PLAN!!!!

    You need to make it impossible for U.S. citizens, especially blacks, to get ID, in order to vote? GREAT IDEA!!!!

    You want to make, mostly blacks, stand in line for 8 hours to vote? YOU ARE THE BEST!!!

    Russia’s mindfucking the Democrats, on our behalf? JUST AWESOME!!!

    Seriously, they are so fucking scared, pissed off and out of touch with reality they would rather cede our elections to foreign governments, than have a Democrat win.

  69. 69.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @gogol’s wife:

    In addition to the ones you named, I used to enjoy reading Gail Collins, but she has turned into total Milquetoast recently.

    Blow and Krugman are the only one I bother with these days.

    And the obituaries. NYT still gives great obituary.

  70. 70.

    gene108

    @piratedan:

    I think a LOT of people got confused by the idea that we’re under constant surveillance, that our e-mails are monitored, as is our activity on the interwebs… and you know what… they are most likely. Just that they are monitored by people like advertisers that frame the ads you see based on the purchases that you make and the sites that you visit. For some reason, America doesn’t seem to give a fuck about that and who IS actually driving that bus because there’s some background noise that corporations don’t want to control you

    Corporations cannot put you in jail (yet), because they don’t like something, something about you.

    I think that’s the big difference between corporate surveillance and government surveillance.

  71. 71.

    geg6

    @Major Major Major Major:

    Ugh. That argument sends me into a blind fury. Oh, you say the NYT is undermining the republic and becoming nothing less than a propaganda rag for anti-democratic oligarchs in the service to a fascist regime? That’s horrible and we should really boycott them but I just can’t give up my crossword puzzles, so what can I do?

    Fuck that quisling bullshit.

  72. 72.

    Yarrow

    So Giuliani is out of a job in the administration. You can read the official letter here.

    First Christie, now Giuliani. Any one who is considering working with this guy is crazy. He’ll knife them in the back for any or no reason at all. Sadist.

  73. 73.

    geg6

    As if things couldn’t get worse, the fucking cork on my wine bottle broke.

    My karma is horrible and I’m clueless as to why.

  76. 76.

    Yutsano

    And just to make life more interesting…there’s no CR and no sign of one coming. SHUTDOWN ANYONE???

  77. 77.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Yutsano:

    And just to make life more interesting…there’s no CR and no sign of one coming.

    That was supposed to happen by midnight tonight, yes?

    Ah well, FIDO as Raven would say.

  80. 80.

    NR

    @Mnemosyne:

    But one of the trolls just told me that it’s all paranoia and if I point out the dozen or so direct connections to Russia in this election, it’s just crazy talk.

    Investigating whether Russian hacking occurred is reasonable since there’s grounds to suspect it’s real.

    Saying that Bernie Sanders is a Russian plant because his campaign manager worked in the Ukraine seven years ago is 100% weapons-grade, pants-on-head stupid.

  83. 83.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @NR:

    Saying that Bernie Sanders is a Russian plant because his campaign manager worked in the Ukraine seven years ago is 100% weapons-grade, pants-on-head stupid.

    Link?

  84. 84.

    JPL

    This year really sucks.. A good friend of my son went home from the hospital today. She has an one year old and is now on hospice care. My younger son is a hope spring’s eternal type of guy, and it’s difficult for him. Yup, this sucks.
    He and his wife are there for support for her husband, and will be for the long haul.

  85. 85.

    MomSense

    @SiubhanDuinne: @geg6: @JPL:
    I’m even more fucked. I was drinking a lovely Malbec election night and now I can’t look at, smell, or drink red wine. It used to be one of my great pleasures.

  87. 87.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    I’m so sorry. That’s awful.

    I can’t link, unfortunately, but there is a new New Yorker cartoon of a family gathered around a 2016 Advent Calendar. The mom opens today’s window and says “For crying out loud, another turd?”

  89. 89.

    hovercraft

    @Adam L Silverman:

    “I hate President Obama and everything he stands for, so I’ve written this book on what I think are all of his strategy and policy mistakes so everyone in the world knows I hate him and everything he stands for”.

    Is Mark Moyar, the nom de plume of every elected gop member of the house and senate?

  90. 90.

    Yarrow

    @MomSense: That poor wine. :( Think how hard it working to make that night a good night. And it failed. And now you’re blaming it and won’t touch it. Will no one think of the poor Malbec.

  91. 91.

    JPL

    @MomSense: She was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was pregnant, and did receive chemo, but it was a more aggressive cancer than they thought.
    Until ten days ago, they were still trying to get into new studies.

  96. 96.

    MomSense

    @Yarrow:

    Please don’t make me think of the poor Malbec. It makes me feel nauseous.

    I hope someday my taste for wine returns.

  97. 97.

    Roger Moore

    @Mnemosyne:

    Given how many defenders they still have on the naive left, I’m assuming that Wikileaks is trying to conflate all of the investigations to make themselves look like martyrs to Obama, Evil Destroyer of Whistleblowers.

    I assume it’s more a matter of Assange* still trying to deny that Russian intelligence had anything to do with the hacks. He can’t very well deny being involved in the emails’ release, so the only path to avoid looking like a shill for Russian intelligence is to claim that it’s all a calumny cooked up by Obama to discredit him.

    *I’m not going to talk about “Wikileaks” as if it’s some kind of a cooperative organization. It may have more people than just Assange, but he’s the only one making decisions there.

  99. 99.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @JPL:

    How terrible.

    Again, I’m sorrier than I can be. I wish her only the best — whatever that looks like.

  100. 100.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    NR has reading comprehension problems, but we already knew that. Either that, or he thinks Tad Devine and Bernie Sanders are secretly the same person.

  101. 101.

    Yarrow

    @MomSense: Yeah, that’s too bad. How about a lovely umbrella drink? Brought to you while you’re sitting on on a tropical beach? By a gorgeous cabana boy? Does that help?

  102. 102.

    GregB

    Correlation is not causation but the President announced the investigation and then we hear that Giuliani is out of the running for Sec. of State.

  103. 103.

    MomSense

    @JPL:

    And I think sometimes breast cancers can be more aggressive in younger women.

    Her husband and friends, like your son, will be so important in keeping her memory alive for her child. Heartbreaking.

  105. 105.

    JPL

    The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-orders-review-of-russian-hacking-during-presidential-campaign/2016/12/09/31d6b300-be2a-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?tid=sm_tw&utm_term=.41081a68a5e0

    I’m shocked.. just shocked

  106. 106.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @MomSense:

    I love a nice Malbec. It is seriously a shame if the very thought of it is so closely associated with the late night unfoldings of November 8th in your mind that you feel you can no longer indulge.

    Too sad.

  108. 108.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @GregB:

    Correlation is not causation but the President announced the investigation and then we hear that Giuliani is out of the running for Sec. of State.

    But it would be irresponsible not to speculate.

  109. 109.

    Mnemosyne

    @MomSense:

    There are some nice Malbec-based rosé wines out there now. I’ve become quite fond of rosés as being a nice compromise between a white and a red.

  110. 110.

    Steeplejack

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    I saw that this morning when I did my drive-by to read Krugman. It gets worse: Moyar is credited as the director of the Center for Military and Diplomatic History at the Foreign Policy Initiative.

    Ah, the “Foreign Policy Initiative.” No doubt a sterling group of impartial academics churning out rigorous policy analysis to aid our geopolitical discourse. Wait, what? Wilipedia tells us that the FPI was founded in 2009 and its board consists of Eric S. Edelman*, Dan Senor*, William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Do any of those names sound familiar? Yeah, it’s basically a rebranding of the neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The executive director is Christopher J. Griffin, a former legislative director for Sen. Joe Lieberman. He replaced Bush-era National Security Council staffer Jamie Fly, who moved over to Sen. Marco Rubio’s staff in 2013.

    From Wikipedia there is a link to a knowledgeable 2009 piece in the Brattleboro (VT) Reformer that says: “Considering how much damage PNAC did to American foreign policy while George W. Bush was president, why would anyone take its leaders seriously now? Because in Washington, you can never go wrong supporting the aggressive use of U.S. military power, whether it’s necessary to do so [or not].” That gets it about right.

    * Edelman is a former undersecretary of defense for policy (2005-09). Senor was the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq (and is Mr. Campbell Brown!).

  111. 111.

    Mnemosyne

    @JPL:

    Ugh. You have completely accidentally reminded me of the worst part of my childhood, because that’s pretty much what happened to my mom. They caught the initial breast cancer relatively early, but the fucker came back and she died when I was 7.

  112. 112.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @MomSense:

    And I think sometimes breast cancers can be more aggressive in younger women.

    It is my understand that this is the case. A good friend from law school found a lump in October (just before her wedding) and was diagnosed in November. Her family was able to pull strings to get her into every treatment, standard and experimental, that was available. She died around Labor Day. She was 27.*

    *I was a groomsman in my first Jewish wedding and a pallbearer in my first Jewish funeral in the space of a year.

    @JPL: I am so sorry.

    Fuck cancer.

  113. 113.

    Yarrow

    In Trump’s American they are going to use every means to destroy anyone who speaks up. Apparently the Russians are planing child pr0n on dissidents’ computers. (NYT story)

    In April last year, the veteran Soviet dissident, a onetime confidant of Margaret Thatcher, finally found out what was going on: The Crown Prosecution Service announced that he faced five charges of making indecent images of children, five charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of possession of a prohibited image.

    The case was supposed to go to court in May in Cambridge but, after Mr. Bukovsky, 73, entered a not-guilty plea it was delayed until Dec. 12. This followed a prosecution request for more time to review an independent forensic report on what had been found on Mr. Bukovsky’s computers and how an unidentified third party had probably put it there.

    “The whole affair is Kafkaesque,” Mr. Bukovsky said in an interview. “You not only have to prove you are not guilty but that you are innocent.” He insisted that he was the victim of a new and particularly noxious form of an old K.G.B. dirty trick known as kompromat, the fabrication and planting of compromising or illegal material.

  115. 115.

    debbie

    @JPL:

    I’m so sorry. My youngest brother’s best friend died of cancer when they were in their early 20s. It hit him very hard and was such a rude awakening because it was his own age group.

  123. 123.

    Steeplejack

    @Steeplejack:

    And while I’m on the subject, please consider making a donation to Wikipedia. If you go there now you get hit by a request, and you can give via credit/​debit card, PayPal or Amazon. I gave them some money a month or two ago, as I think they are an invaluable resource in the struggle against the forces of darkness. Just being able to look up some op-ed writer or innocuously named think tank and get at least some of the story behind the story is very much worth it.

  131. 131.

    mai naem mobile

    @debbie: I should have used Angela Merkel being that shes from East Germany.
    @Omnes Omnibus: I actually was making stuff up like the RWingers do. Also, from memory weren’t a lot of the Cold War spies from Cambridge?

  133. 133.

    hovercraft

    @Yarrow:
    So we are all about to become the next Comet Ping Pong child pornographers/ sex traffickers. Something to look forward to.

  134. 134.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Really? Thanks, will start checking them out. The only thing I really love about the Telegraph is the daily (cryptic) crossword, and apparently we’re not allowed to mention that any more.

  135. 135.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @mai naem mobile:

    Also, from memory weren’t a lot of the Cold War spies from Cambridge?

    Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt all were.

    ETA: Cambridge was traditionally less conservative that Oxford. Many of the leading lights of Puritanism was from Cambridge. Most of Cambridge’s colleges were sided with Parliament in the Civil War; only one of Oxford’s did. In the ’20s and 30s, Cambridge leaned to the left in comparison to Oxford.

  136. 136.

    Roger Moore

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    It is my understand that this is the case.

    It seems to me that perhaps the opposite is a more correct way of thinking of it, that slow growing cancers are only likely to be found in older people. An aggressive cancer might show up in somebody of any age because they don’t take very long to grow from one cell to something noticeable, but a cancer that takes decades to grow can by definition only be found in somebody who’s lived that long.

  142. 142.

    JPL

    @Roger Moore: According to studies, that is true. A female can have a mammogram that doesn’t detect anything, and then be diagnosed with an aggressive cancer a few months later. I’m not saying that mammograms are useless, because they do detect slow growing cancers. Family history is important and in the case of my son’s friend, where there was no history, they are looking at hormone treatment.

  143. 143.

    Yarrow

    @hovercraft: Yeah, except they didn’t have anything planted on their computers, phones, etc., did they? This story is about people where it’s been taken that one step further. I’m not sure the average protester has the means to protect themselves from it. As the tech guy in Wisconsin said in that article I posted above, “I am not going to pretend that I am smarter than some of the best cyber-hackers in the world.”

  145. 145.

    Major Major Major Major

    @Yarrow: the thing is, the Feds don’t need to do any of this to take your stuff, detain you, interrogate you. The FBI has that authority already. And there will always be something on your computer they can charge you with or hold you for. Or they can plant it then.

    That’s all established law and normal planting methods. There’s no reason to get exercised about Russians hacking into your phone to put kiddie pix there because the FBI doesn’t need to do that to grab you.

  148. 148.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @schrodinger’s cat: Cambridge may well have been more friendly to math and science, but it would not be something like Harvard vs MIT. You may be interested in reading C. P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series of novels. Specifically, The Masters which deals with the election of a new head of a college and whether it will continue to modernize or return to the past.

    ETA: Yes, C. P. Snow the chemist.

  152. 152.

    Steeplejack

    @JPL:

    Huh. I’ll have to check those out. I wonder if they’re as good as those Vac-u-Vin wine stoppers. I seem to remember the gadget guru on America’s Test Kitchen saying that, if you’re going to finish the bottle within a few days—almost a certainty around here—just sticking the cork back in works as well as all the fancy gizmos. So these would be great to have on hand.

    I had a scare because just after reading geg6’s comment I ran into a crumbly cork on the bottle of Conte Priola Rosso I was opening. Took some extra care and it came out fine. Just a little crumbly at the top.

    The Conte Priola turns out to be a nice Tuscan red blend. Never had it before. I think it was about 10 bucks. Now it’s making me want to order pizza.

  153. 153.

    Feathers

    @MomSense: A former roommate was an oncology nurse. She said pre and post menopausal breast cancers should almost be considered different diseases. The younger you are, the worse a diagnosis it is.

  154. 154.

    petesh

    @Omnes Omnibus: Cambridge leaned to the left in comparison to Oxford.
    Mm, yes, maybe. But neither of them reached vertical, both are in any important sense lying down to the right. (And of course deny it.) ETA One is an Oxford man, oneself. And emigrated.

  158. 158.

    Feathers

    @Steeplejack: I got some of the beer bottle covers recommended by America’s Test Kitchen and I’ve been very happy with them. I use them for hard cider, not beer. It’s my TV watching tipple of choice, but a whole bottle is too much. This lets me happily spread it out over a couple of nights. Of course, flat cider is not as much of a problem as flat beer, so YRMV.

  164. 164.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @jurassicpork: I notice that you do two things: 1. Post some dude bro, leftier than thou shit and then disappear. 2. Post an “I am so broke” bleg and disappear. Not interested in your grift.

  169. 169.

    Ruckus

    @MomSense:
    A lot of cancers are faster growing in younger people. It looked I might have cancer in my mid 40s and if it had been true the chances of reaching 50 were very small. Turned out to be a very stressful 4+ months till we knew-negative. 20+ yrs later, not so negative and not as fast growing with more time to attempt to deal.
    In children and young adults some of the processes that can slow or not allow cancer to start have not matured, so if something goes wrong it can get serious fast.

  170. 170.

    Anne Laurie

    @Adam L Silverman:

    This is for my maskirovka post on Sunday.

    I’m looking forward to that!

    (And not just because it means I don’t have to attempt to post about it myself, since you are much more expert on the topic.)

  171. 171.

    Applejinx

    @NR:

    Saying that Bernie Sanders is a Russian plant because his campaign manager worked in the Ukraine seven years ago is 100% weapons-grade, pants-on-head stupid.

    On the other hand, seven years isn’t a long time. Saying that Bernie walked right into a problem and didn’t clue in to it because the people were saying things he wanted to hear, is fair. I, and most, supported his economic arguments (still do). I didn’t see him as the most deft politician, and still don’t. He’s laser-focussed on problems I consider important, to the exclusion of other important things that also exist.

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