Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Trump’s legal defense is going to be a dumpster fire inside a clown car on a derailing train.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Maybe you would prefer that we take Joelle’s side in ALL CAPS?

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

The revolution will be supervised.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

When we show up, we win.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

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The Really Important Fact About Erik Prince That Everyone’s Coverage Keeps Missing: His Frontier Services Group is Funded By the People’s Republic of China

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The really important fact about Erik Prince that is not mentioned in The New York Times reporting that he has been using retired US and British spies, presumably human intelligence offers (HUMINTers), to teach James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas employees to be more effective is not that Prince founded and used to run Blackwater, nor that he’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVoss’s brother, nor that he’s very close with the President and others in the administration and the reelection campaign. The really important fact is that Erik Prince’s Frontier Services Group, the company of military contractors that he runs, is owned by DVN  Holdings, which would ultimately make Prince its chairman. DVN Holdings is owned by Hong Kong investor Johnson Ko Chun and the Chinese International Trust Investment Corporation (Citic), which is a People’s Republic of China (PRC) owned investment fund. Johnson Ko Chun is also on the board of directors of Cambridge Analytica’s spin off Emerdata Ltd along with Rebekah Mercer, her sister Jennifer, as well as former senior officials from Cambridge Analytica. Emerdata is also still tied to the former Cambridge Analytica’s parent firm SCL Group.

The important fact that everyone keeps missing is that Erik Prince’s operations are funded by the People’s Republic of China. He is now their asset. If he is involved with O’Keefe’s merry band of political ratfuckers, then he is only involved so long as Xi and the PRC want him to be. The same goes for Emerdata. And anything else that Prince involves himself with. Despite having a long history of looting his own companies and skimming from his investors and backers, such as the Crown Prince of the United Arab Emirates, Prince’s financial backing from the PRC state owned Chinese International Trust Investment Corporation means that he works for the PRC and does so only as long as he advances their interests.

Xi and the PRC conduct their influence operations – from weaponizing diplomatic, information, economic, financial, intelligence, and legal power – as a form of 21st Century warfare very differently than Putin and the Russians do. Xi’s and the PRC are subtle and precise, where Putin and the Russians are brutish and imprecise. The role of Prince’s Frontier Service’s Group in advancing Xi’s One Belt, One Road initiative, which is definitely NOT in the United State’s strategic interests, is evidence of who is in charge in this relationship. Xi and the PRC call the shots. And while they might give Prince a lot of rope to conduct business in his usual dodgy manner, it should never forget that they are the hands on the end of that rope. If Prince is paying former intelligence officers to train Project Veritas employees who will then interfere in domestic politics in the US, then he is doing it because it suits not just his or his sister’s or the President’s purposes. He is doing it because it suits Xi’s and the PRC’s purposes. Who his paymasters are and how they exert control over their assets is the really important piece of information that everyone reporting on Prince’s connection to Project Veritas and commenting on the reporting is missing.

Open thread.

 

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What I Am Watching About The New Coronavirus

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There’s a lot being written about COVID-19, the new coronavirus, maybe too much in my opinion. There’s a lot that can be said about China’s political reaction to the virus, although even there we are at the beginning of things, and there’s a lot we don’t know.

I read a short and well-written article last night in Science magazine. It got me thinking about what I’m looking for in news about the virus. The mathematics of disease transmission are similar to the mathematics of chemical kinetics, which was part of my life as a chemist. That’s where my questions originate.

There is no evidence that the virus was generated as part of a biological warfare program. Its DNA has been sequenced, and there would be clues there if that were the case. It most likely originated in bats, as has been true for other coronaviruses, and was transmitted through another animal in a live-animal market. Tom Cotton lies; but we knew that.

We know very little of the parameters that are necessary to predict how widely the virus will spread or how dangerous it will be. Epidemiologists are collecting data, but the parameters depend on statistics that we need more of or time-consuming laboratory work that may be hard to carry out while treating sick people is the first priority.

  • How many cases are there? Some cases have been carefully diagnosed with appropriate laboratory tests. The reported number shot up during the past week when China loosened the criteria for reporting. Some people may be infected without symptoms or may have minimal sniffles and may not be counted. This website from Johns Hopkins gives confirmed cases, deaths, and recoveries.
  • How contagious is the virus? This is represented by R0, the measure of how many people one person with the virus infects. We don’t know whether the virus is contagious before people show symptoms. We don’t know how long the incubation period is. R0 is derived from observations, so it is likely to change as more information comes in. I have seen a wide range of estimates for R0.
  • What happens to the virus as the seasons change? Some common cold viruses, including coronaviruses, become less infective as the weather warms in spring. But not all coronaviruses, and we just don’t know about this one.

Every day, there is more information available, but I doubt there will be a reliable R0 for some time. Each case can provide a bit of data – I particularly hope that good records are being kept on that cruise ship in Japan.

James Palmer is a good Twitter follow on the subject for the big picture. He’s lived in China.

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Today’s Coronavirus Update

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This is like cancelling Christmas, if Thanksgiving and maybe Amity Island‘s Independence Day were also celebrated at the end of December. (Despite the obvious snark potential for Westerners, remember that the astrological symbol for the new Year of the Rat does not have the same negative connotations in Asia.) Good news is, the relevant authorities are taking this with all due seriousness. Bad news — seems to be pretty damned serious.

It’s reached the stage where the NYTimes is running live updates:

The authorities greatly expanded a travel lockdown in central China on Thursday, essentially penning in more than 22 million residents in an effort to contain a deadly virus that is overwhelming hospitals and fueling fears of a pandemic.

The new limits — abruptly decreed ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, China’s busiest travel season — were an extraordinary step that underscored the ruling Communist Party’s deepening fears about the outbreak of a little understood coronavirus.

Chinese health officials reported on Friday that there had been 26 deaths from and 830 cases of the coronavirus, a sharp increase.

The official death toll increased by more than a half-dozen in 24 hours, while the number of confirmed cases jumped by more than 200.

On Thursday morning, the authorities imposed a travel lockdown in Wuhan, the industrial city of 11 million at the epicenter of the outbreak. Airlines canceled hundreds of flights to Wuhan, leaving thousands of people stranded. Later in the day, officials said they would also halt public transportation in the nearby cities of Huanggang, Ezhou, Zhijiang and Chibi, which are together home to more than nine million residents. And by Friday, restrictions had extended to Xiantao, Qianjiang and Enshi, three other cities that include large rural populations.

[Only] Two deaths have been confirmed outside the virus epicenter.

One patient died in the province of Hebei — more than 600 miles north of Wuhan — after contracting the coronavirus, the provincial authorities announced on Thursday. Another death was confirmed in Heilongjiang, a province near the border with Russia more than 1,500 miles from Wuhan.

The disease had also been diagnosed in patients in Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.

In Wuhan, where the outbreak began, anxiety and anger prevailed as worried residents crowded into hospitals and teams of medical workers in hazmat suits sought to identify the infected…

As a corollary, it’s becoming harder to pick up anything useful from a basic google or twitter search — there’s too many random individuals forwarding guesses, half-truths & conspiracy theories. From the first dozen mentions I saw, I figured the ‘special hospital construction’ story was fear-mongering, but the People’s Daily seems to be a legit news source:

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Today’s Wuhan Coronavirus Update: SNAKE FLU

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(Dr. Wang said he thought he was exposed because he was masked, but not goggled. Researchers are now wearing goggles.)

Pending further updates, of course… this seems like a positive development. Snakes, as I understand it, are a significant winter ‘health’ specialty meal, but banning commerce in snake meat would be much easier than — as has happened before — having to shut down live-poultry markets.

You don’t have to say the relevant authorities have gotten good at dealing with these crises, but you have to admit they’ve gotten more practiced.

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Pandemic Paranoia Open Thread: Presenting the ‘New’ Wuhan Coronovirus

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To quote every single article I’ve seen so far: And just in time for the mass migration during Lunar New Year, too!

(Mandatory disclosure: Yes, I am preternaturally interested in pandemics, so YMMV.)

CNN, this evening — “First US case of Wuhan coronavirus confirmed by CDC”:

The United States has its first confirmed case of a new virus that appeared in Wuhan, China, last month, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Tuesday. The coronavirus has already sickened hundreds and killed six people in Asia…

The patient, who is not being named, is in isolation at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. He is in his 30s and lives in Snohomish County, Washington, just north of Seattle. He had recently returned from Wuhan.

He arrived at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on January 15, before any health screenings for the Wuhan coronavirus began at US airports. He sought medical care on January 19. The CDC and Washington state are now tracing the people he was in contact with to see if he might have spread the disease to someone else…

The patient became ill four days after arriving in the United States and sought care. Based on the patient’s symptoms and travel history, doctors suspected the novel Wuhan coronavirus and sent specimens to the CDC in Atlanta, where tests Monday confirmed the virus.

The patient is faring well but is still being kept in isolation out of an abundance of caution, health officials said.

Soon, passengers from Wuhan to the United States, whether on direct or indirect flights, will only be allowed to land at one of the five US airports doing health screenings. Screenings include a temperature check and observation for symptoms such as a cough and trouble breathing.

Last weekend, the CDC started health screenings for Wuhan passengers arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport. Starting this week, Wuhan passengers will also be screened at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport…

This is actually good news — authorities *have* learned from previous scares, and sensible precautions are being slotted into place with due speed.

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Information Security Is Essential!

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The Guardian has now reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hacked Jeff Bezos’s cell phone, which is what many of us who work in the information warfare area of national security had assessed shortly after The National Enquirer ran their hit piece on him. What we got in today’s reporting, however, were important and disturbing details! (emphasis mine)

The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian.

The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis.

This analysis found it “highly probable” that the intrusion into the phone was triggered by an infected video file sent from the account of the Saudi heir to Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post.

The two men had been having a seemingly friendly WhatsApp exchange when, on 1 May of that year, the unsolicited file was sent, according to sources who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity.

Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos’s phone within hours, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Guardian has no knowledge of what was taken from the phone or how it was used.

WhatsApp is notoriously insecure and should not be used! It is now owned by Facebook and there are serious concerns about what Facebook may be doing with the data from the app, including the personally identifying information (PII), of its users. Another security flaw is that the app itself isn’t encrypted, just the information while it is in transit from device (user) to device (user). So any spyware, on either the device on the sending or receiving end of the transmission, can pick up what is being sent and/or received.

The larger issue here is that WhatsApp is very popular. We know from reporting that Jared Kushner uses it to communicate with Muhammed bin Salman, as well as others. From the late Congressman Cummings’ March 2019 letter to White House Counsel Pat Cipollone:

During this period the Committee obtained additional information raising even more concerns about the use of private email and messaging apps by Jared Kushner and other White House officials.

For example, during a meeting with Mr. Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Lowell confirmed that Mr. Kushner has been using the messaging app WhatsApp as part of his official White House duties to communicate with foreign leaders.

Jared isn’t the only US official using WhatsApp.

Multiple Trump administration officials are known to have used WhatsApp to carry out sensitive conversations, raising the prospect that their communications have been intercepted.

Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union and a key figure in in the administration’s campaign to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations that would benefit the president, communicated with other US diplomats about the effort over WhatsApp. During Trump’s run for the presidency campaign chairman Paul Manafort regularly sent polling data to a Russian associate via the app.

The problem isn’t isolated just to Jared and other US officials.

Senior government officials in multiple U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) WhatsApp to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the messaging company’s investigation.

Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach said a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. Many of the nations are U.S. allies, they said

Rudy Giuliani and Lev Parnas were also using WhatsApp!

WhatsApp messages from Parnas to Giuliani and Republican congressional candidate Robert F. Hyde are included in the evidence.

Let’s see what the President’s Cybersecurity Advisor and the First Name in Cybersecurity has to say:

Ruh Roh!

Anyone and everyone who has messaged Muhammed bin Salman using WhatsApp have likely had their phones or tablets compromised. And there is no telling what he collected, who he collected it from, and what he intends to do with it. Though we can be pretty sure it isn’t anything good. WhatsApp is not a secure form of communication. You should not be using it. More importantly, US government officials – from political appointees to civil servants to uniformed personnel to contractors – should not be using it either. Not for personal communications and certainly not for official and work related communication. That the President’s advisors, both those in the White House like his son in law Jared Kushner and those outside of it like Rudy Giuliani, and his other political appointees like Gordon Sondland are using WhatsApp means that over three years worth of official US communications have been compromised. And Muhammad bin Salman is not the only one whose intelligence and security services have compromised WhatsApp. Both the Israelis and the Russians have compromised WhatsApp, So have the Chinese.

Whatever information that Muhammed bin Salman or the Israelis or Putin or Xi have managed to pull off of the phones of US officials, as well as those of other governments, that use WhatsApp is a ticking political warfare information bomb. We don’t know when this information will be used. We don’t know how it will be used. But we do know that it will be used. It may be used subtly to try to force US officials to do something they ordinarily wouldn’t. Or it might be used, as was the case with Bezos’s data, in an almost brutish assault. But it will eventually be used.

Does anyone really want to contemplate what Mark Zuckerberg might do with the information transmitted via WhatsApp, which he owns? Zuckerberg has the ability to blackmail and extort everyone who uses his social media products because those products are designed to suck up everyone’s information and data so that Zuckerberg can monetize it. That is not a good thing.

Every one of these government officials that are using WhatsApp, from Jared Kushner to Ambassador Sondland to those we don’t even know about should have their security clearances suspended pending a full counterintelligence investigation. They have made themselves into insider threats by refusing to follow best information and operational security practices. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t have a security clearance to suspend, but he and his associates who have been using WhatsApp all need to be subjected to a full counterintelligence investigation as well given Giuliani’s pro-bono work as the President’ private attorney and all the activity he has been up to in Ukraine and other parts of Europe.

Open thread!

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Spy vs. Spy Open Thread: Miles Kwok, Once Again

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First time I ran across Guo Wengui’s saga, I compared it to “a Trollope novel, as written by John le Carre”. The Trickster God is a lazy scripter in general, but the crossovers by every A-list GOP grifter seems particularly rich here:

… Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who also goes by Miles Kwok, fled to the United States four years ago after learning an associate had been arrested on corruption charges. He is now one of China’s most-wanted, accused of myriad crimes by the Chinese government, including paying bribes and sexual assault. He maintains his innocence, saying the charges are politically motivated.

Guo, who made his money in real estate, has long promoted himself as a dissident being hunted by the Chinese government for his opposition to the ruling Chinese Communist Party. He is currently seeking political asylum in the United States, where he reportedly avoided deportation by the Trump administration after the president learned Guo was a member of Mar-a-Lago.

Now, filings in a civil case, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, suggest Guo may not be the dissident he claims. “Instead, Guo Wengui was, and is, a dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent in the service of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party,” according to federal court papers filed on Friday.

The Chinese spy allegations against Guo surfaced last week in a contract dispute — rife with international and political intrigue — between a Hong Kong-based company, Eastern Profit Corporation Limited, and an Arlington, Va., research firm, Strategic Vision US, LLC.

Guo denied the allegations through his attorney, saying the claim “utterly lacks credibility.”

“This lawsuit is about a contract between Eastern Profit and Strategic. Strategic is now abusing the litigation privilege to slander Mr. Guo,” wrote Guo’s attorney, Daniel Podhaskie, in a response to the Miami Herald. He claimed the slander was retaliation after Strategic’s counterclaim was dismissed. Podhaskie pointed to Guo’s frozen assets in China as proof that he is not working with the Communist Party…

Strategic Vision, headed by CEO French Wallop, the widow of the late Wyoming GOP Sen. Malcolm Wallop, was fired by Eastern Profit in February 2018 after the research firm provided information that was mostly publicly available on the probe’s targets, the suit says. Eastern Profit demanded the return of its $1 million deposit for the research work, accusing Strategic Vision of breaching their contract.

Strategic filed a counterclaim not only against Eastern Profit but also against Guo, alleging he is actually a Chinese government spy whose “origin story is untrue.”

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