The Wall Street Journal has a headline tonight.
Trigger warning: Talk about rape below the fold. I find this very upsetting myself.
Cheryl Rofer wrote at Balloon Juice from 2017-21.
Cheryl is a retired chemist who has has been particularly active with nuclear policy. Cheryl has her own blog, Nuclear Diner, and she also posts at Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Twitter: @CherylRofer
This post is in: 2020 Elections, domestic terrorists, Election 2018, The War On Women, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Assholes, General Stupidity, Nobody could have predicted, Sexist Pricks, Sociopaths
The Wall Street Journal has a headline tonight.
Trigger warning: Talk about rape below the fold. I find this very upsetting myself.
The LaughterPost + Comments (114)
From Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony:
“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford says, her voice cracking. “The uproarious laughter between the two. They’re having fun at my expense.”
“You’ve never forgotten them laughing at you,” Leahy says.
“They were laughing with each other,” Ford replies.
“And you were the object of the laughter?” Leahy asks.
“I was underneath one of them, while the two laughed,” Ford says.
Is Susan Collins okay with her Republican colleagues laughing at her in the same way?
This post is in: Election 2018, Information Warfare, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Cybersecurity
The stories actually go beyond hacking, but that’s an adequate title for a placeholder post until Adam or Major Major Major Major can weigh in.
There are two stories, one about China and one about Russia’s GRU, their military intelligence agency.
Bloomberg has, for reasons I can’t imagine, gone with a white typeface on black background, which I find painful to read, so I’ll work from the Washington Post’s summary.
Bloomberg has just published an explosive article claiming that a secret unit in the Chinese military has compromised the motherboards (the systems of chips and electronics that allow computers to work) of servers used by Apple, a bank and various government contractors.
China’s exploit was discovered when Amazon did due diligence on a company that it was acquiring, which used servers with the compromised motherboards. Both Apple and Amazon have issued statements denying the Bloomberg claims, but Bloomberg seems confident that it’s correct, saying it has multiple sources inside Amazon and the intelligence community. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
We have long depended on China for essential electronic components. That’s seemed dangerous to me, but nobody listens to me on such things.
Also this morning, Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech at the rightwing Hudson Institute and said that China was the biggest threat to the United States. It’s hard not to see these events as being coordinated. Pence claimed, as did President Donald Trump at the United Nations, that China was trying to hack the US elections. Which probably means that they will call any Democratic wins a Chinese plot. Also, too, when you are making googly eyes at Vladimir Putin, you have to have an enemy to gin up support at home.
Also this morning, the United States, UK, and the Netherlands announced indictments against Russian members of the GRU for hacking a great many agencies, including the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and anti-doping organizations. Russia, of course, denies everything. I am also seeing bits and pieces coming across my Twitter feed from open-source investigators pointing to obvious tells from Russian agents, like using consecutively numbered passports and US $100 bills.
It looks like the GRU has gotten sloppy in their spycraft, or that Russia would like the world to know it operates with impunity.
It is the US that is bringing the indictments. It looks like parts of our government have not signed on to the googly eyes strategy and are continuing to prosecute conspiracies against our country. That’s an interesting development. Its implications for Trump are not clear, although one might think that this investigation has shared information with Robert Mueller’s staff.
Both these stories are developing.
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Rofer on Nuclear Issues, All Too Normal, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Decline and Fall
Another day, another run at nuclear war by the Trump administration.
The U.S. ambassador to NATO set off alarm bells Tuesday when she suggested that the United States might “take out” Russian missiles that U.S. officials say violate a landmark arms control treaty. (Washington Post)
Her words were
The question was what would you do if this continues to a point where we know that they are capable of delivering [the banned missiles.] And at that point we would then be looking at a capability to take out a missile that could hit any of our countries in Europe and hit America in Alaska.
This is ambiguous, and Nuclear Twitter lit up. The words are ambiguous, not clearly signaling that the bombers and missiles are flying or might any time soon. But “take out a missile,” particularly since the discussion of North Korea’s nuclear capability has been phrased that way recently, are dangerous words. It could refer to a preventive attack, or it could be a brag about more than our missile defense system is likely to be able to do. Either way, probably not a good idea to threaten our nuclear equals on the other side of the globe.
It turned out that she was talking about a threat that Tom Cotton and a few other warmonger senators have made: If Russia builds a missile that violates that Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and we think they may be doing that, then we will build something equivalent. This is a dumb response to a treaty violation, but that is the timeline we are living in now.
I’ve had some respect for Kay Bailey Hutchison in the past. What bothers me is that the US Ambassador to NATO should understand the current status of missiles relevant to the INF Treaty, Russian sensitivities about the possibility of a first strike, and how to handle the English language. It appears that all three of these were absent from the speech.
The Ambassador To NATO Should Know Better Than ThisPost + Comments (35)
This post is in: Dolt 45, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Assholes
So that nobody’s surprised.
Starting at 2:18 pm ET, the test wireless alert message will be sent with the header “Presidential Alert” and text reading: “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” https://t.co/Dyv9XDJXGR
— Axios (@axios) October 3, 2018
And open thread.
PSA: Today Is The Day You Get A Trump Message On Your PhonePost + Comments (144)
This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads
Here are Ric and Zooey being sweet to each other. This morning they started playing in my closet for no particular reason – they had had their time outside – which wasn’t so sweet in my view.
I haven’t been posting much because I am so bummed out. Maybe I will write about that later, but now I am headed out to a Democratic Party meeting.
This post is in: America, Dolt 45, Domestic Politics, Immigration, Nazis- I hate these guys
Children are being awakened in the middle of the night so that they can be moved with minimum public notice to a concentration camp near Tornillo, Texas. They have no school and minimal access to legal aid. Although this latest article has no overall numbers, what I have seen is in the range of 13,000, spread across who knows how many “shelters.”
It’s pretty clear that the administration has no plans for dealing with these children, only an intention to make people who try to cross the border miserable. Accommodations have been ad hoc from the start.
What happens as more children are collected and those in custody stay there? This is a large number of people to take care of. They are emotionally traumatized. They are not receiving schooling. There will be sexual and other assaults.
What happens as there is no provision to get them back to family? What happens as the numbers grow?
There are two relatively recent historical answers to the questions. During World War II, between 110,000 and 120,000 Japanese were extracted from their homes and made to live in camps in the interior of the country. Most of them made it back to something like normal lives, although many lost most of their property. The children were interned with their families.
The other historical example does not end even that well.
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Not Normal
Finnish government websites, and a few others, were just under DDoS attack. This is a developing situation, so some of this information may be inaccurate.
Finnish customs, tax office, police, social insurance institution, patent and registration office reporting phone blackouts or web services down.
via @VirpiHeikkila pic.twitter.com/0wCX2SuL8j
— Aki Heikkinen (@akihheikkinen) September 25, 2018
Note: https://t.co/oEGT0W0bJP e-identification being hit does not affect phones. It's wider attack.
— Aki Heikkinen (@akihheikkinen) September 25, 2018
https://t.co/Od3eayUxH7 identification services back up, attack thwarted. https://t.co/Ct30zBLXPM
— Aki Heikkinen (@akihheikkinen) September 25, 2018
Over the weekend, several Finnish government agencies carried out a raid on a company called Airiston Helmi Oy, which owns property in the Turku Archipelago. Here’s a map.
Helsinki is southeast of this map. The Finnish National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), local police, Tax Administration, Border Guard, and Finnish Defense Forces all participated in the raid. The publicly stated reasons were money laundering and illegal labor practices, but Airiston Helmi has been up to other things, including building what it called one-family homes that look like small hotels and buying Finnish naval surplus vessels and not repainting or renaming them, as is required.
The property holdings are not far from a petroleum refinery at Naantali and major sea lanes (indicated by dotted lines). Airiston Helmi is believed to have Russian connections. The Finnish government has been silent on security ramifications.
FBI Director Christopher Wray was in Finland last week, conferring with NBI and other security officials. (h/t to @Michael_Ellis__)
A much longer account of the complicated situation can be found here.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.