Ted Turner is not happy

Gritting his teeth

Assault rifle ban?

I've kept pretty quiet about this assault rifle ban thingie, mostly because the rhetoric I've seen is so inane. However, it's gotten inane to the point where I can't keep silent. I wish someone would explain, using, like, logic and reason and stuff, just what it's supposed to do. All I hear is shrieking, and since that seems to be the only understandable thing, I'm going to do some shrieking back.

I admit that I enjoy firearms, but I'm not dogmatic about it. I don't think that the 7-11 need sell anti-aircraft missiles. So when people tell me that there's an easy, obvious, rational way of making the US safer without seriously restricting the right to firearms, I'm going to pay attention.

OK, so rifles of all kinds account for about 3% of all US murders. (Pistols account for about 47%). But the rifle, especially the assault rifle, is especially horrible and needs to be gotten rid of.

What's an assault rifle? We're talking about the Bushmaster XM-15, right? That's the one that law enforcement reported to the Wall Street Journal killed 28 people including 18 kids at Sandy Hook.

Except, of course, that the Bushmaster web site says that you can't buy an XM-15 without a Federal firearms license, which costs a lot of money, takes 60 days, and requires fingerprints. So no civilian restriction or waiting period could possibly have any effect at all.

So maybe it's the Bushmaster AR-15, which looks the same and has also been reported. Looking the same is really important. I know this, because I've seen Facebook images with all those totally obvious and common sense reasons including "military styling."

Stupid me. I thought that weapons killed because of high-speed metal projectiles powered by self-oxidizing explosives. That's what I get for taking "advanced physics" in High School. Now I know it's the styling. Maybe the black plastic overloads teal and fuchsia receptors in the brain, causing instant death.

Now we know what we're talking about. Those are the Bad Guns. They are legitimately assault weapons according to military definitions. They have unusually small bore, short barrel, and low charge, and you can hardly aim the damn things.

That is, they are designed to be LESS lethal, which is exactly what you want in an assault. But they're the Bad Guns, right?

So we get rid of them. We even get rid of the ones that nutcases can kill their mothers to steal. So now, nutcases cannot get any of the Bad Rifles, which we know are bad because they have black plastic. They can only get the Good Rifles. We know they're Good because they have nice warm wood and much more precise sights, which let someone hit the target every time. Maybe the stocks even have drawings of the 400 FUCKING POUND ANIMALS THEY ARE DESIGNED TO KILL IN ONE SHOT.

Those can't possibly make more than a tiny boo-boo on a child, right? They're MAGIC! Maybe they're like in Roger Rabbit, and they grow moustaches and talk in dialect and say, "Yeehaw, Lemuel! We can't possibly kill a kid. We're for HUNTING. It says so on the box."

It's probably hoping too much that all my friends who assert that this is all totally obvious and common-sense will come up with a rational explanation of how this makes the slightest sense whatsoever. They'll probably just say that they, unlike me of course, love children and want to do something to protect them. Bad, bad me.

Until that happens, the most reasonable conclusion is that this is all just verbal categorical bullshit, self-important posturing by people whose adrenal glands are too big and whose neocortices are too small.

And, please, don't tell me about banning large magazines. They're magazines, not rifles. They're not "assault magazines." Maybe banning large magazines is a good idea, but they aren't "assault" or "rifle," the two words that seem to set people off. Furthermore, the last time this happened, the magazine ban mostly affected Browning pistols which had a nine-round magazine in 9mm.

Marriage: Let’s break it out

mar·riage /ˈmarij/

Noun:

The formal union of a man and a woman, typically recognized by law, by which they become husband and wife.

A relationship between married people or the period for which it lasts.

I’m going to assume the definition is the Merriam-Webster definitions, from the Google search.

Now we get into the details.

Under the Abrahamic religions (Catholic/Christian/Jewish/Islamic) teachings the standard for marriage is a man and a woman. That is essentially how it is codified in the Bible, Torah and Koran. If you use the Koran it is one man and up to four women. Those are all non-secular (religious) standards.

When the United States was created, many of the states had a non-secular constitution and an established religion for that individual state. Most states dropped the established religion between 1787 and 1788 when the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the U.S. Constitution. Some still persisted, but that was written as a state’s right to do so.

No matter how much you try to find the word marriage in the federal Constitution, or even a close brush you won’t. It is a Tenth Amendment[1] issue.

So the states, for various reasons, created marriage certificates. The marriage certificate, as originally designed, was an adjunct to the church authority that gave those that were married a legal standing and exemptions, etc. But as far as the state government is really concerned all a marriage certificate is, and at implementation, was a predefined civil contract between a man and woman for inheritance, child rearing, and responsibilities between two partners. You can go into the details ad infinitum.

Over the years the marriage certificate insinuated itself into the law with the tax code, inheritance laws, the custody laws and more. If you do a Google search for gays and laws. Or even search for unfairness in inheritance you can find many of these cases.

Essentially what I’m saying is that when it comes to city hall and the church, the church is a sacrament. The civil government (city hall) has viewed the marriage certificate as a predefined contract.

Over time the government created tax credits and other things that affect or are affected by the marriage certificate. These appear in the the IRS code, inheritance rules, etc.

As a quick example: if I’m married to a person of the opposite sex and that person dies, the instant presumption is that I automatically get all the property, short of what a will says. This is a man married to a woman regardless if the family didn’t like me. The law is currently, that my estranged family has more rights in my health care than my partner for thirteen years.

I experienced this years ago. I was with my lady for 13 years. We never married for various reasons. I had a medical power of attorney, and a financial power of attorney. She passed away, unexpectedly, on a Saturday night July 2005. I called 911 and the paramedics showed up, along with the deputies. The coroner showed up as well, and issued a death certificate. Because we weren’t married, we had to call her daughter and tell her “mom was dead, what do you want to do with the body?” over the phone. I had no rights. My dead sweetheart was lying in our bed, and I had no say in what happened to her.

Now to get to the point — if you want to argue that a marriage is a union of a man and a woman — then you are arguing for religious interference in state’s rights. You are going to lose on First Amendment grounds.[2]

It is time to change the secular contract that is “marriage” to what it truly has been all along — a pre-defined contract as recognized by state and federal governments. The religious aspect is still available to those who want it. The government can recognize the social aspect by not defining the genders.

[1] — Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

[2] — First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Times have changed. The social, civil union, portion of the Marriage Certificate needs to change. The problem is that society has not separated the legal from the society. It all should be a Civil Union contract. The word marriage should be used in the non-secular arrangement.

Communism, Fascism and liberals now

John Gray review of Vladimir Tismaneanu THE DEVIL IN HISTORY Communism, Fascism, and some lessons of the twentieth century 326pp. University of California Press. $34.95; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £24.95. 978 0 520 23972 2 Published: 2 January 2013

Discussing the Declaration of the Rights of Toiling and Exploited People promulgated in the Soviet Union in January 1918, in which sections of the population regarded as “former people” were disenfranchised, Vladimir Tismaneanu writes: “It can hardly be considered a coincidence that the term byvshie liudi (former people), which became commonplace in Bolshevik speak, implied that those to whom it applied were not quite human”. The disenfranchised groups included functionaries of the tsarist police and military, class aliens who lived off unearned income, clergy of all religions and anyone economically dependent on those so far listed. Debarred from the rationing system (for many the chief source of sustenance), liable to have their property confiscated, and prohibited from seeking public office, people in these categories – along with their families, since being a former person was defined as an inheritable condition – were excluded from society. The system of categories, Tismaneanu writes, was “the prototype taxonomy for the terror that was to follow in later years”. Denying some human groups the moral standing that normally goes with being a person, this act formed the basis for the Soviet project of purging society of the human remnants of the past.

It is also one of the grounds for Tismaneanu’s belief that in important respects Communism and Fascism were at one. He is clear that “Communism is not Fascism, and Fascism is not Communism. Each totalitarian experiment has its own irreducible attributes”. Even so, the two were alike in viewing mass killing as a legitimate instrument of social engineering.

“Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal modernity on the conviction that certain groups could be deservedly murdered. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered.”

It is an observation that points to the central issue in the debate about twentieth-century totalitarianism. Ever since it was first developed by the Italian theorist of Fascism Giovanni Gentile – who approved of the system of unlimited government that totalitarianism denotes – the concept has been highly controversial. With many viewing Communist and Fascist regimes as too dissimilar in their structures, objectives and ruling ideas to be included in a single category and some seeing theories of totalitarianism as not much more than a rationale for Cold War struggles, the idea has moved from being widely contested to being distinctly unfashionable – in academic contexts, a more damningly final dismissal. For those who have lived in totalitarian regimes, this is a perplexing development. Tismaneanu writes vividly of his own experience. A child of Jewish parents who became Communist activists as part of the struggle against Fascism (his father lost an arm fighting in the Spanish Civil War, while his mother worked as a nurse), he first began thinking about totalitarianism when as a teenager in Communist Romania he read a clandestinely circulated copy of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Later, as a sociology student at the University of Bucharest, he managed to get hold of forbidden books by writers such as Raymond Aron, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski and other anti-totalitarian thinkers. Also drawn to what he calls “the occulted traditions of western Marxism”, he did a doctorate on the Frankfurt School. Leaving Romania in 1981 and settling in the United States, he revisited the country on a regular basis after the toppling of Nicolae Ceausescu. In 2006 he was made head of a presidential commission established to examine the workings of the Communist dictatorship, an appointment that proved controversial, not least because of his parents’ and his own Communist past.

Tismaneanu has produced numerous studies of Stalinism, nationalism and totalitarianism, but it seems to be the parallels between the Ceauzescu regime and interwar Fascism that have come to preoccupy him. “Although Romania was a socialist state committed to Marxist tenets and thus ostensibly left-wing, especially after 1960, the ruling party started to embrace themes, motifs, and obsessions of the interwar Far Right.” After Ceausescu came to power in 1965, “the ideology came to blend residual Leninism with an unavowed yet unmistakable Fascism”. As Tismaneanu came to realize, “This was only an apparent paradox”. European Fascism was a mishmash of mad and bad ideas – clerical authoritarianism and anti-liberal Nietzschean atheism, a neo-primitivist cult of “thinking with the blood” and modernist worship of technology, among others. But ethnocentric nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism have been features of Fascism in all its varieties, and it is the Communist embrace of these far right themes that forms the background for The Devil in History. If his parents joined forces with Communism in order to resist Fascism, it has fallen to Tismaneanu to grapple with the fact that Communism acquired some of Fascism’s defining characteristics.

An ambitious and challenging rereading of twentieth-century history, The Devil in History is most illuminating in showing that parallels between the two totalitarian experiments existed from the beginning. Tismaneanu confesses to being baffled by what he describes as “the still amazing infatuation of important intellectuals with the communist Utopia”. “It is no longer possible to maintain and defend a relatively benign Lenin”, he writes, “whose ideas were viciously distorted by the sociopath Stalin.” Unlike Stalin, Lenin showed no signs of psychopathology. Rather than being an expression of paranoia, methodical violence and pedagogic terror were integral features of Bolshevik doctrine. By their own account, Lenin and his followers acted on the basis of the belief that some human groups had to be destroyed in order to realize the potential of humanity. These facts continue to be ignored by many who consider themselves liberals, and it is worth asking why.

Underlying academic debates about the adequacy of totalitarianism as a theoretical category, Tismaneanu suggests, is a question about evil in politics. Rightly, he does not ask which of the two totalitarian experiments was more evil – an approach that easily degenerates into an inconclusive and at times morally repugnant wrangle about numbers. There is a crucial difference, which he acknowledges at several points in The Devil in History, between dying as a result of exclusion from society and being killed as part of a campaign of terror and being marked out for death in a campaign of unconditional extermination – as Jews were by Nazis and their local collaborators in many European countries and German-occupied Soviet Russia. Numerical comparisons pass over this vital moral distinction. While the stigma of being a former person extended throughout families, it was possible to be readmitted into society by undergoing “re-education”, becoming an informer, and generally collaborating with the regime. When Stalin engineered an artificial famine which condemned millions to starvation and consigned peoples such as the Tatars and Kalmyks to deportation and death, he did not aim at their complete annihilation. Around one in five adult males is estimated to have spent time in the Gulag, along with unnumbered children after the age of criminal responsibility was lowered (along with liability to capital punishment) to include twelve-year-olds in 1935, as well as a massive influx of “female thieves” (war widows) after 1945; but most who spent time in the camps survived to return to what passed as normal life. Though there were sections of the Gulag from which few emerged alive – such as those described by Varlam Shalamov in Kolyma Tales – there was no Soviet Treblinka.

Lenin may have held to a version of humanism, but it was one that excluded much of actually existing humankind

Tismaneanu’s account of Communist totalitarianism will be resisted by those who want to believe that it was an essentially humanistic project derailed by events – national backwardness, foreign encirclement and the like. But as he points out, the Soviet state was founded on policies which implied that some human beings were not fully human. Lenin may have held to a version of humanism, but it was one that excluded much of actually existing humankind. It was not simply because they could be expected to be hostile to the new regime that priests, merchants, members of formerly privileged classes and functionaries of the old order were deprived of civil rights. They represented a kind of humanity that had had its day. There is nothing to suggest that the Bolsheviks viewed the fate of former persons as the tragic price of revolution. Such superfluous human beings were no more than the detritus of history. If radical evil consists in denying the protection of morality to sections of humankind, the regime founded by Lenin undoubtedly qualifies.

We are left with the question why so many liberals disregard these facts. Clearly a part of the explanation lies in the utopian character of the Communist project. In politics, the other face of radical evil is an inhuman vision of radical goodness. Lenin envisioned a world without states or markets in which power relations had ceased to exist. Hitler imagined a world in which power reflected an immutable racial hierarchy. It is hard to imagine any decent human being embracing the hideous Nazi vision – a mix of the völkisch chimera of a seamless “organic” culture, fraudulent “racial science” and revolutionary anti-capitalism – but the appeal to large sections of the German people of the fantasy of a conflict-free, homogeneous society cannot be denied. Lenin’s very different view of the future was in some ways no less hideous. Authentically Marxian in its most essential features, it left no room for the diverse forms of activity that humans have devised to create meaning in their lives. Religion and the practice of science and the arts for their own sake would be left behind. The little that survived of the human inheritance would be yoked to collective welfare and communal labour. It is a horribly impoverished vision, which fortunately has no prospect of being realized.

Liberals will object that Communist and Fascist projects are inherently opposed – one emerging from Enlightenment universalism, the other from Counter-Enlightenment ideas of racial purity. There is a difference, but there are commonalities as well. If Nazism repudiated Enlightenment values of human equality and universal emancipation, the Nazi project of racial hierarchy continued some influential strands of Enlightenment thinking. Nazi “scientific racism” had precedents in the Positivist plans for a science of society grounded in physiology, and in theories of human inequality and eugenics promoted by nineteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Galton and (in more explicitly racial terms) Ernst Haeckel. Lenin’s egalitarian project also claimed a basis in science – the ersatz science of historical materialism.

There is another respect in which Communism and Fascism were alike. At one in claiming a basis in science, they were both fuelled by millenarian religion. As Bertrand Russell recognized in his neglected classic The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (published in 1920 after he had visited the Soviet Union and talked with Lenin), Bolshevism was more than a political doctrine, however radical or extreme. With all its militant secularism, the Bolshevik drive to transform society was powered by apocalyptic myths. As Tismaneanu writes, with reference to Norman Cohn’s seminal work on millenarian movements, “both Leninism and Fascism created millenarian sociological and psychological constellations. Both were militant chiliasms that energized extraordinary ardor among unconditionally committed followers”. The chiliastic character of Communism is not a novel theme, and here as elsewhere in his book, Tismaneanu fashions a powerful synthesis of existing critiques. What he does not fully explore is the function of Communism in channelling religious myth in a modern secular form – a role that goes some way to explaining its continuing attraction.

Citing Boris Souvarine, Tismaneanu praises the heterodox Marxist for his account of “the strange blending of barbarism and derailed modernity in the ideological despotism of the extreme Left and Right”. In the context of the argument of The Devil in History, however, it may be the idea of derailed modernity that is strange. Elsewhere in the book, Tismaneanu recognizes Communism and Fascism as alternative forms of development, unquestionably barbaric but still fully modern. His ambiguity on this point reflects a gap in his account of contemporary liberalism. Throughout much of his argument, he takes for granted that the recycling of religious myth as secular political doctrine that occurred in Communism does not occur in advanced liberal democracies. But Western-led policies were based on the belief that after a brief period of economic shock therapy, post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe would revert to a normal path of development and adopt liberal values – an idea with no basis in history. In Russia and much of Europe, liberal values have never been “normal”. “In the end”, Tismaneanu writes, “‘the return to Europe’ heralded in 1989 stood for ‘normalcy and the modern way of life’.” However, if post-Communist countries have returned to normal it is to a version – so far relatively mild, but real enough – of the toxic normality that prevailed in much of the continent during long stretches of the twentieth century.

The blind spot in The Devil in History is the power of myth in liberal societies. “The demise of Communism in Europe”, Tismaneanu writes, “allowed space for alternative political mythologies, which left a proliferation of fantasies of salvation.” He is referring to post-Communist countries where the Soviet collapse left a vacuum that was filled by ethnocentric nationalism and a post-Holocaust variety of anti-Semitism that demonizes Jews in countries where hardly any Jews remain. But the impact of the collapse was also felt in Western democracies, where it boosted the belief that liberal societies are the only ones that can be fully modern. Commendably, Tismaneanu refuses to play “the obsolete pseudo-Hegelian tune of the ‘ultimate liberal triumph’”. However, the issue is not whether liberalism is destined to prevail – a stale debate about historical inevitability – but whether liberal societies can escape what he aptly describes as “a contagious hubris of modernity”. For those possessed by the idea that the Communist collapse was a triumph for the only truly modern way of life – a species of eschatological myth rather than any kind of empirical observation – the question did not arise. For them, liberalism was the riddle of history solved, and knew itself to be the solution.

The same myth – a hollowed-out version of a religious belief in providence – underpins the abiding appeal of Communism. One of the features that distinguished Bolshevism from Tsarism was the insistence of Lenin and his followers on the need for a complete overhaul of society. Old-fashioned despots may modernize in piecemeal fashion if doing so seems necessary to maintain their power, but they do not aim at remaking society on a new model, still less at fashioning a new type of humanity. Communist regimes engaged in mass killing in order to achieve these transformations, and paradoxically it is this essentially totalitarian ambition that has appealed to liberals. Here as elsewhere, the commonplace distinction between utopianism and meliorism is less than fundamental. In its predominant forms, liberalism has been in recent times a version of the religion of humanity, and with rare exceptions – Russell is one of the few that come to mind – liberals have seen the Communist experiment as a hyperbolic expression of their own project of improvement; if the experiment failed, its casualties were incurred for the sake of a progressive cause. To think otherwise – to admit the possibility that the millions who were judged to be less than fully human suffered and died for nothing – would be to question the idea that history is a story of continuing human advance, which for liberals today is an article of faith. That is why, despite all evidence to the contrary, so many of them continue to deny Communism’s clear affinities with Fascism. Blindness to the true nature of Communism is an inability to accept that radical evil can come from the pursuit of progress.

John Gray is Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics. His books include Black Mass: Apocalyptic religion and the death of Utopia, 2007, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the strange quest to cheat death, 2011, and, most recently, The Silence of Animals: On progress and other modern myths, which is due to be published next month.

What have we learned?

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance."

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."


- Cicero , 55 BC So, evidently we've learned nothing in the past 2,067 years.

The Invasion of the Chinese Cyberspies

Monday, Aug. 29, 2005

By Nathan Thornburgh/Washington

It was another routine night for Shawn Carpenter. After a long day analyzing computer-network security for Sandia National Laboratories, where much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is designed, Carpenter, 36, retreated to his ranch house in the hills overlooking Albuquerque, N.M., for a quick dinner and an early bedtime. He set his alarm for 2 a.m. Waking in the dark, he took a thermos of coffee and a pack of Nicorette gum to the cluster of computer terminals in his home office. As he had almost every night for the previous four months, he worked at his secret volunteer job until dawn, not as Shawn Carpenter, mid-level analyst, but as Spiderman--the apt nickname his military-intelligence handlers gave him--tirelessly pursuing a group of suspected Chinese cyberspies all over the world. Inside the machines, on a mission he believed the U.S. government supported, he clung unseen to the walls of their chat rooms and servers, secretly recording every move the snoopers made, passing the information to the Army and later to the FBI.

The hackers he was stalking, part of a cyberespionage ring that federal investigators code-named Titan Rain, first caught Carpenter's eye a year earlier when he helped investigate a network break-in at Lockheed Martin in September 2003. A strikingly similar attack hit Sandia several months later, but it wasn't until Carpenter compared notes with a counterpart in Army cyberintelligence that he suspected the scope of the threat. Methodical and voracious, these hackers wanted all the files they could find, and they were getting them by penetrating secure computer networks at the country's most sensitive military bases, defense contractors and aerospace companies.

Carpenter had never seen hackers work so quickly, with such a sense of purpose. They would commandeer a hidden section of a hard drive, zip up as many files as possible and immediately transmit the data to way stations in South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan before sending them to mainland China. They always made a silent escape, wiping their electronic fingerprints clean and leaving behind an almost undetectable beacon allowing them to re-enter the machine at will. An entire attack took 10 to 30 minutes. "Most hackers, if they actually get into a government network, get excited and make mistakes," says Carpenter. "Not these guys. They never hit a wrong key."

Goaded by curiosity and a sense that he could help the U.S. defend itself against a new breed of enemy, Carpenter gave chase to the attackers. He hopped just as stealthily from computer to computer across the globe, chasing the spies as they hijacked a web of far-flung computers. Eventually he followed the trail to its apparent end, in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. He found that the attacks emanated from just three Chinese routers that acted as the first connection point from a local network to the Internet.

It was a stunning breakthrough. In the world of cyberspying, locating the attackers' country of origin is rare. China, in particular, is known for having poorly defended servers that outsiders from around the world commandeer as their unwitting launchpads. Now Chinese computers appeared to be the aggressors.

If so, the implications for U.S. security are disturbing. In recent years, the counterintelligence community has grown increasingly anxious that Chinese spies are poking into all sorts of American technology to compete with the U.S. But tracking virtual enemies presents a different kind of challenge to U.S. spy hunters. Foreign hackers invade a secure network with a flick of a wrist, but if the feds want to track them back and shut them down, they have to go through a cumbersome authorization process that can be as tough as sending covert agents into foreign lands. Adding in extreme sensitivity to anything involving possible Chinese espionage--remember the debacle over alleged Los Alamos spy Wen Ho Lee?--and the fear of igniting an international incident, it's not surprising the U.S. has found it difficult and delicate to crack these cases.

In Washington, officials are tight-lipped about Titan Rain, insisting all details of the case are classified. But high-level officials at three agencies told TIME the penetration is considered serious. A federal law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation says the FBI is "aggressively" pursuing the possibility that the Chinese government is behind the attacks. Yet they all caution that they don't yet know whether the spying is official, a private-sector job or the work of many independent, unrelated hands. The law-enforcement source says China has not been cooperating with U.S. investigations of Titan Rain. China's State Council Information Office, speaking for the government, told TIME the charges about cyberspying and Titan Rain are "totally groundless, irresponsible and unworthy of refute."

Despite the official U.S. silence, several government analysts who protect the networks at military, nuclear-lab and defense- contractor facilities tell TIME that Titan Rain is thought to rank among the most pervasive cyberespionage threats that U.S. computer networks have ever faced. TIME has obtained documents showing that since 2003, the hackers, eager to access American know-how, have compromised secure networks ranging from the Redstone Arsenal military base to NASA to the World Bank. In one case, the hackers stole flight-planning software from the Army. So far, the files they have vacuumed up are not classified secrets, but many are sensitive and subject to strict export-control laws, which means they are strategically important enough to require U.S. government licenses for foreign use.

Beyond worries about the sheer quantity of stolen data, a Department of Defense (DOD) alert obtained by TIME raises the concern that Titan Rain could be a point patrol for more serious assaults that could shut down or even take over a number of U.S. military networks. Although he would not comment on Titan Rain specifically, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman says any attacks on military computers are a concern. "When we have breaches of our networks, it puts lives at stake," he says. "We take it very seriously."

As cyberspying metastasizes, frustrated network protectors say that the FBI in particular doesn't have enough top-notch computer gumshoes to track down the foreign rings and that their hands are often tied by the strict rules of engagement. That's where independents--some call them vigilantes--like Carpenter come in. After he made his first discoveries about Titan Rain in March 2004, he began taking the information to unofficial contacts he had in Army intelligence. Federal rules prohibit military-intelligence officers from working with U.S. civilians, however, and by October, the Army passed Carpenter and his late-night operation to the FBI. He says he was a confidential informant for the FBI for the next five months. Reports from his cybersurveillance eventually reached the highest levels of the bureau's counterintelligence division, which says his work was folded into an existing task force on the attacks. But his FBI connection didn't help when his employers at Sandia found out what he was doing. They fired him and stripped him of his Q clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of top-secret clearance. Carpenter's after-hours sleuthing, they said, was an inappropriate use of confidential information he had gathered at his day job. Under U.S. law, it is illegal for Americans to hack into foreign computers.

Carpenter is speaking out about his case, he says, not just because he feels personally maligned--although he filed suit in New Mexico last week for defamation and wrongful termination. The FBI has acknowledged working with him: evidence collected by TIME shows that FBI agents repeatedly assured him he was providing important information to them. Less clear is whether he was sleuthing with the tacit consent of the government or operating as a rogue hacker. At the same time, the bureau was also investigating his actions before ultimately deciding not to prosecute him. The FBI would not tell TIME exactly what, if anything, it thought Carpenter had done wrong. Federal cyberintelligence agents use information from freelance sources like Carpenter at times but are also extremely leery about doing so, afraid that the independent trackers may jeopardize investigations by trailing foes too noisily or, even worse, may be bad guys themselves. When Carpenter deputized himself to delve into the Titan Rain group, he put his career in jeopardy. But he remains defiant, saying he's a whistle-blower whose case demonstrates the need for reforms that would enable the U.S. to respond more effectively and forcefully against the gathering storm of cyberthreats.

A TIME investigation into the case reveals how the Titan Rain attacks were uncovered, why they are considered a significant threat now under investigation by the Pentagon, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security and why the U.S. government has yet to stop them.

Carpenter thought he was making progress. When he uncovered the Titan Rain routers in Guangdong, he carefully installed a homemade bugging code in the primary router's software. It sent him an e-mail alert at an anonymous Yahoo! account every time the gang made a move on the Net. Within two weeks, his Yahoo! account was filled with almost 23,000 messages, one for each connection the Titan Rain router made in its quest for files. He estimates there were six to 10 workstations behind each of the three routers, staffed around the clock. The gang stashed its stolen files in zombie servers in South Korea, for example, before sending them back to Guangdong. In one, Carpenter found a stockpile of aerospace documents with hundreds of detailed schematics about propulsion systems, solar paneling and fuel tanks for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the NASA probe launched in August. On the night he woke at 2, Carpenter copied a huge collection of files that had been stolen from Redstone Arsenal, home to the Army Aviation and Missile Command. The attackers had grabbed specs for the aviation-mission-planning system for Army helicopters, as well as Falconview 3.2, the flight-planning software used by the Army and Air Force.

Even if official Washington is not certain, Carpenter and other network-security analysts believe that the attacks are Chinese government spying. "It's a hard thing to prove," says a network-intrusion-detection analyst at a major U.S. defense contractor who has been studying Titan Rain since 2003, "but this has been going on so long and it's so well organized that the whole thing is state sponsored, I think." When it comes to advancing their military by stealing data, "the Chinese are more aggressive" than anyone else, David Szady, head of the FBI's counterintelligence unit, told TIME earlier this year. "If they can steal it and do it in five years, why [take longer] to develop it?"

Within the U.S. military, Titan Rain is raising alarms. A November 2003 government alert obtained by TIME details what a source close to the investigation says was an early indication of Titan Rain's ability to cause widespread havoc. Hundreds of Defense Department computer systems had been penetrated by an insidious program known as a "trojan," the alert warned. "These compromises ... allow an unknown adversary not only control over the DOD hosts, but also the capability to use the DOD hosts in malicious activity. The potential also exists for the perpetrator to potentially shut down each host." The attacks were also stinging allies, including Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where an unprecedented string of public alerts issued in June 2005, two U.S. network-intrusion analysts tell TIME, also referred to Titan Rain--related activity. "These electronic attacks have been under way for a significant period of time, with a recent increase in sophistication," warned Britain's National Infrastructure Security Co-Ordination Center.

Titan Rain presents a severe test for the patchwork of agencies digging into the problem. Both the cybercrime and counterintelligence divisions of the FBI are investigating, the law-enforcement source tells TIME. But while the FBI has a solid track record cajoling foreign governments into cooperating in catching garden-variety hackers, the source says that China is not cooperating with the U.S. on Titan Rain. The FBI would need high-level diplomatic and Department of Justice authorization to do what Carpenter did in sneaking into foreign computers. The military would have more flexibility in hacking back against the Chinese, says a former high-ranking Administration official, under a protocol called "preparation of the battlefield." But if any U.S. agency got caught, it could spark an international incident.

That's why Carpenter felt he could be useful to the FBI. Frustrated in gathering cyberinfo, some agencies have in the past turned a blind eye to free-lancers--or even encouraged them--to do the job. After he hooked up with the FBI, Carpenter was assured by the agents assigned to him that he had done important and justified work in tracking Titan Rain attackers. Within a couple of weeks, FBI agents asked him to stop sleuthing while they got more authorization, but they still showered him with praise over the next four months as he fed them technical analyses of what he had found earlier. "This could very well impact national security at the highest levels," Albuquerque field agent Christine Paz told him during one of their many information-gathering sessions in Carpenter's home. His other main FBI contact, special agent David Raymond, chimed in: "You're very important to us," Raymond said. "I've got eight open cases throughout the United States that your information is going to. And that's a lot." And in a letter obtained by TIME, the FBI's Szady responded to a Senate investigator's inquiry about Carpenter, saying, "The [FBI] is aggressively pursuing the investigative leads provided by Mr. Carpenter."

Given such assurances, Carpenter was surprised when, in March 2005, his FBI handlers stopped communicating with him altogether. Now the federal law-enforcement source tells TIME that the bureau was actually investigating Carpenter while it was working with him. Agents are supposed to check out their informants, and intruding into foreign computers is illegal, regardless of intent. But two sources familiar with Carpenter's story say there is a gray area in cybersecurity, and Carpenter apparently felt he had been unofficially encouraged by the military and, at least initially, by the FBI. Although the U.S. Attorney declined to pursue charges against him, Carpenter feels betrayed. "It's just ridiculous. I was tracking real bad guys," he says. "But they are so afraid of taking risks that they wasted all this time investigating me instead of going after Titan Rain." Worse, he adds, they never asked for the passwords and other tools that could enable them to pick up the investigative trail at the Guangdong router.

Carpenter was even more dismayed to find that his work with the FBI had got him in trouble at Sandia. He says that when he first started tracking Titan Rain to chase down Sandia's attackers, he told his superiors that he thought he should share his findings with the Army, since it had been repeatedly hit by Titan Rain as well. A March 2004 Sandia memo that Carpenter gave TIME shows that he and his colleagues had been told to think like "World Class Hackers" and to retrieve tools that other attackers had used against Sandia. That's why Carpenter did not expect the answer he claims he got from his bosses in response to Titan Rain: Not only should he not be trailing Titan Rain but he was also expressly forbidden to share what he had learned with anyone.

As a Navy veteran whose wife is a major in the Army Reserve, Carpenter felt he could not accept that injunction. After several weeks of angry meetings--including one in which Carpenter says Sandia counterintelligence chief Bruce Held fumed that Carpenter should have been "decapitated" or "at least left my office bloody" for having disobeyed his bosses--he was fired. Citing Carpenter's civil lawsuit, Sandia was reluctant to discuss specifics but responded to TIME with a statement: "Sandia does its work in the national interest lawfully. When people step beyond clear boundaries in a national security setting, there are consequences."

Carpenter says he has honored the FBI's request to stop following the attackers. But he can't get Titan Rain out of his mind. Although he was recently hired as a network-security analyst for another federal contractor and his security clearance has been restored, "I'm not sleeping well," he says. "I know the Titan Rain group is out there working, now more than ever." --With reporting by Matthew Forney/Beijing and Brian Bennett, Timothy J. Burger and Elaine Shannon/Washington

HERE'S WHY THERE ARE MOSQUES IN ROME, BUT NO CHURCHES IN SAUDI ARABIA- WHEN TOLERANCE IS ONE SIDED

Could this be true?

"As far as the matters of religion are concerned we know for sure that only Islam is the true religion in the eyes of God. In 3:85 it is mentioned that God will never accept any religion other than Islam. As far as the building of churches or temples is concerned, how can we allow this when their religion is wrong? And when worship is also wrong? Thus we will surely not allow such wrong things in our country." Da'wa expert Dr. Zakir Naik

اليكم السبب في وجود مساجد بروما، ولكن لا يسمح ببناء الكنائس في المملكة العربية السعودية أو حتى الاعتراف بوجود مسيحين او لادينيين، انه التسامح من جانب واحد

"" نحن نعلم علم اليقين أن الإسلام هو الدين الوحيد الصحيح في نظر الله. سورة 3:85 وذكر الله أنه لن يقبل أي دين آخر غير الإسلام. أما بخصوص قضية بناء المعابد والكنائس، كيف يمكننا أن نسمح لهذا عندما يكون دينهم خطأ؟وعبادتهم باطلة؟ وبالتالي فإننا بالتأكيد لا نسمح بمثل هذه الأشياء الخاطئة في بلاد الاسلام. "الداعية والدكتور الخبير ذاکر عبدالکریم نائیک

How Muslims Created Islamophobia

Tahir Gora

journalist, poet, translator

The debate as to who speaks for Muslims in the West has festered among the minds of the western intelleigentsia and politicians since Islamists have capitalised on this question.

There are hundreds of Islamic organizations in North America and each one wants to take ownership of it. Is it all about ownership? It shouldn't be. Is it all about portraying a better image of Muslims? I doubt it. Is it all about challenging the self-created fear of Islamophobia? Perhaps.

What do I mean by "self-created fear of Islamophobia"? Do I dare to say that Islamophobia actually doesn't exist at all? Yep, it didn't exist but some of our Islamic centres created the term and spread it around through their actions.

What were those actions? By not denouncing armed Jihad against those Western societies where they are abode now, by not calling a spade a spade such as honour killings, Taliban's attack on Malala Yousafzai, AlQaeda's sectarian war against minorities in the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Afghanistan, etc,.

However, the fact that over 90 per cent of Muslims are not associated with any Islamic organisation or mosque and visit it no more than once or twice a year. That alone should make America skeptical of Islamist groups like CAIR, ISNA, ICNA and MSA.

Ihsan Bagby, a professor and an imam at Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. wrote after 9/11, "There are a large number of Muslims that hold on to their identity as Muslims, but choose not to practice, not to act out their beliefs in everyday life...a large portion of the American Muslim community are in this group."

The report by prof Bagby, "The Mosque in America: A National Portrait," revealed that of the six million Muslims in the United States, only about 350,000 on average attend the Friday midday prayers.

Thus the incessant drumbeat by Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood legacy groups in the U.S. about rising Islamophobia is reflecting the mindset of the mulla and his scant followers in America, not me or the 90 per cent who have little interest in praying behind misogynist and homophobic clerics.

Even if it were true that Islamophobia exists, the next question would be: What should we do now?

My answer is that all Islamic organizations should make a resolution for 2013 that they would preach to fellow Muslims to live a normal life instead of preaching the addiction of victimhood.

You may ask, what do you mean, a normal life here?

A normal life for a Muslim should be a life without obsessions. Free of all obsessions such as identity crises, niqab, hijab, jihad, alienation and gender segregation and contempt for joy.

As Muslims we should identify ourselves with the culture and land we associate with. Islam also teaches this but unfortunately Islam's true liberal teachings are not being told to us by our traditional Islamic organizations in the West that are in the hands of mainly Islamists.

Similarly Niqab, armed Jihad, alienation and segregation are not endorsed by original version and modern interpretations of Islam but sharia-bound Islamists use them in order to further their agenda.

A critical question arises here that since a majority of Muslims in the West live a normal life then why are we concerned about our abnormal image in the West?

Unfortunately, that majority is not visible in the media. Nor that majority is recognized by Western politicians and policymakers. Same is the case here in Canada and the USA.

So the responsibility lies to the power cores of the Western world as well for not recognizing the majority of the regular Muslims that are essential fabric of the societies. Rather, our media would like to portray the picture of a Hijabi or Niqabi clad or a long kurta wearing a beard man in order to show a Muslim representation. Likewise, our politicians hug and have photo sessions with such typical faces to tell us how much they love diversity.

A recent example is Canada's Liberal Party Leadership Candidate Justin Trudeau's participation and speech in Revival the Islamic Spirit Conference in Toronto.

It was suggested by liberal Muslims that he should not endorse the medieval agenda of revival the Islam Spirit conference for the fact that that mob never respects gay rights, equality and true freedom of men and women and true essence of freedom of expression, etc.

But Justin Trudeau chose to go there and opened his speech with the statement, "I am here today because I believe in freedom of expression."

That was a nice statement without any context but the same crowd cheered that never acknowledges Salman Rushdies' rights of free expression. Shallow Politicians like Justin Trudeau would never realize the depth of these core issues.

So it's a responsibility of secular liberal Muslims in Canada and the US to come forward in 2013 and form new voices against ongoing Islamism that wants to take away the normal way of life from majority Muslims.

Remember, no more than 10 per cent of Muslims fit the Muslim stereotype of the bearded man dressed in medieval attire and women in hijabs with blue mascara and deep red lipstick wearing stilettos. The rest of us are just like you. We go to the ball game, eat our hot dogs warm and drink our beers cold.

Follow Tahir Gora on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TahirGora

Titkosított dokumentum az RKP archívumából, ami előírányozza Marosvásárhely etnikai összetételének a megváltoztatását betelepítések útján

Wikipedia

Vajon valódi?

Scary movie 3 rap battle lyrics

Now everybody in the 202, throw your hands in the air 'cause Fat Joe is through / Now everybody in the 202, throw 'em up! Check it out / I'm a white boy, but my neck is red / I put Miracle Whip on my Wonder Bread / My face is pale, nah, I've never been in jail / Me and Buffy spend every winter at Vail / How many bitches have I slapped? Zero. Unh! / And Martha Stewart happens to be my hero / I grew up on a farm and I was born with no rhythm / Dr. Phil's my uncle and I like to hang with him / I can't dance / I wear khaki pants / My middle name's Lance / My Grandma's from France / So maybe I'm wack / 'Cause my skin ain't black / But you can't talk smack / 'Cause whitey just struck back

View from my window/Kilatas az ablakbol

Ezt lattam az ablakbol egy mostani uton/This is what I saw on a recent trip

Hiromi Oshima

Deliciously lithe, busty, and enticing brunette knockout

Happy Birthday, Hiromi!

Time for bed...

Side-boob!

Flower child

Yummy...

Two girls, one sub...what to do

with Kari Nautique

so cute...

...and my very favorite: