I have to admit, living in Massachusetts, where coronavirus is definitely a thing, that I only wear a mask indoors. I didn't wear one at the beach, nor do I normally wear one walking around outdoors (maybe if it's really crowded).

If I did accept a mask from some wierd dudes on the beach, I would have to disinfect if first.

The bright blue bandana gets me. I've heard of wierd shit being used to identify yourself in an attempt to avoid getting fragged, but that thing just yells "shoot me".

On the other hand, I'm sitting in an office and she's not even shaking after this close miss, so...

That said, does anyone know what that orange plate on the PSO1-M2 (?) is, right on the elevation adjustment knob?

Nope, me neither.

Which is sort of the point. It's unheard of that all of these agencies came to the same conclusion on a specific matter. Some may take this as an indicator of how damning the evidence really is, others see this as an indicator that the "assessments" were made on hierarchical levels reserved for political appointees.

The absence of dissent supports the second point of view. No group of analysts in their right mind would create a report without also strongly pointing out contradictory facts, inconsistencies, and separating fact from interpretation. That's what Hersh is referring to. This is not an NIE, it's an opinion piece. This memo by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (wierd name) goes down the same route:

As you will have gathered by now, we strongly suspect that the evidence your intelligence chiefs have of a joint Russian-hacking-WikiLeaks-publishing operation is no better than the “intelligence” evidence in 2002-2003 – expressed then with comparable flat-fact “certitude” – of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Now, an opinion piece might be sufficient if it came from credible institutions and had a moderatly important subject. But this is throwing serious accusations at a sovereign nation in times when diplomatic relations are stressed as it is. And that's not going into the credibility problem of many of these agencies, who have a very dubious track record on these issues.

Ian Welsh had a piece the other day on the CIA vs Trump, and his take on intelligence agencies is pretty close to what mine has been since I learned about the Stasi some 20 years ago:

The CIA and NSA are not the friend of any left-wing worth having: they are innately anti-democratic, anti-privacy, and anti-rights. Secret agencies are anathema to any open government. At an existential level, intelligence agencies are at best a double edged sword, and by their nature, they always wind up serving the interests of the few, against the interests of the people.

What kind of balance are you speaking of? For the sake of argument, I'll assume that you mean spending somewhat equal time and effort on different sides of an argument.

That kind of balance can be expected from a news outlet. Many of them, especially American ones, overcook is massively by refusing to make judgements on the validity of opposing arguments. If argument A is backed by empirical evidence and argument B is smoke and mirrors, argument B should receive ridicule, not the same kind of respect that A receives.

Now, applying this kind of balance to individuals strikes me as wierd. They are not obliged to give a balanced view: they are obliged, as journalists, to present facts, and offer interpretations. The issues we're talking about here are not disputes between neighbours. We are talking about the war on terror, macroeconomics, propaganda, things of the utmost importance. And the media is doing a woeful job at presenting any dissenting view.

Thing is, you can get the major consensus narrative from countless news outlets out there. Want to here about the supposed benefits of multinational trade agreements? The NYT and the WaPo have dozens upon dozens of articles with praise of TTIP and TPP. If, however, you would like to hear about the consequences of previous trade agreements, or just some hard math on the numbers they like to throw in there, you won't find any. You'll have to go to Dean Baker at the CEPR, to Yves Smith at NakedCapitalism, you'll read Rick Wolff's take on it.

These people do everything in their power to restore the balance that the media drowned in buckets of party-line puff pieces. People recognise RT for propaganda, but somehow think propaganda stops when ownership is private.

Try to find proper articles about the global assassination program (drone warfare) and its effect on sovereign people abroad -- won't find anything in the media, you'll have to go to Jeremy Scahill.

Try to find proper articles about the desolation brought to communities in the developed world by (the current form of) capitalism, the epidemic of loniliness, the breaking apart of the social fabric, the monetarisation of every aspect of life -- silence. What about the slavery-like conditions it creates through indebtedness? The absurd inequality? Nothing.

What about the massive atrocities in Jemen? There was plenty about the atrocities committed by Russia in Syria, but when Saudis use US weapons to destroy an entire country, mum's word.

There is no balance in the media. They are the gatekeepers of knowledge, and anything outside the establishment's agreed upon consensus is ignored, marginalised, ridiculed, or straight up demonized.

CJ Hopkins had a great piece at Counterpunch the other day, titled Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works. He puts it more succinctly than I ever could. Reality doesn't matter, not for the mainstream media. The narrative matters.

And that's why I listen to dissenting voices like Chris Hedges, Abby Martin or Thom Hartmann, even when they are employed by a state propaganda outlet.

Now this... well, this is twelve levels of wierd, if not more:

http://www.thecanary.co/2016/10/20/extraordinary-plot-wikileaks-founder-foiled-new-evidence-comes-light/

The allegations themselves were wierd enough, but this and the underlying "investigations" bear so much resemblence to shit you read in 1$ crime stories that I can't make heads or tails of it. Wierd as fuck.

Did you follow any of that wierd Krugman/Friedman/CEA feud over the last few days?

If not, nevermind.

But if you did, take a look at Bill Black's latest on the matter. Both Bill Black and Jamie Galbraith had already torn Operative K a new one over this, yet Bill just keeps on pounding. It's quite brutal, and supremely entertaining.

I just love open conflict between heterodox economists and defenders of the orthodoxy.

The mixture of valid points, exaggerations, ignorance of context and completely false information makes it a bit... difficult to digest.

Generally speaking, a lot of errors were made regarding Cologne.

The police fucked up entirely and basically was unable to maintain control of the square in front of the central train station where shitloads of theft, sexual harassment and even a few rapes were committed.

The public media did not report on it properly. They did, in fact, refuse to report it at all at first. But that doesn't stem from an obession with PC nor is it special treatment for refugees/immigrants -- it's good old-fashioned pro-government bias. A few days later, they were all playing the same tune again: bad immigrants, bad muslims, need more law-and-order, close the borders, need new laws, etc. Same shit as always.

And yes, you cannot expect all these refugees to be model citizens from the get-go. Different culture, different language, segregation, no work permit, no familiy, maybe first-hand experience with war -- they are bound to commit crimes, assuming otherwise would be naive.

And accepting a million refugees might have been a bad idea after cutting down public personnel and services for two decades straight. But what's done is done. The question now is what can be done to improve the situation for everyone involved. What doesn't help is further segregation (refugee camps), private security (aka mobs hunting brown people, happened in Cologne already) or downplaying the massive problems.

As for that wierd tirade from 1:07 onwards about true Germans: except for all the people from Bohemia, Prussia and Silesia, aka Poland; or the millions of immigrants from Italy and Turkey; or the folks from former Yugoslavia; etc. Two thirds of the bloody country has family names that mark them as n-th generation immigrant. Half of my extended family is from what is now Russia (Kaliningrad) while my family name is distinctively Dutch. "Paid German taxes" gives a hint to his motivations. Folks in East Germany didn't pay German taxes: do they count? Refugees from former German enclaves ("Russlanddeutsche") didn't pay German taxes, nor did they speak proper German: do they count?

All in all a very misguided rant, too eager to abuse real fuck-ups for his own ideology. Rape culture, SJW, PC -- doesn't apply in this case. It's small government, media with establishment bias, a general inability for open discussion of problems, and a shitload of incompetent arseholes in positions of power (e.g.: chief of police in Cologne, gone now).

By the way, he forgot to mention the hundreds(!) of refugee shelters that were set on fire during the last few months. Bands of immigrants committing crimes are a problem, bands of Germans committing crimes are a problem.

We had a six digit number of prime suspects for trouble already: young, male, unemployed, un(der)educated, no fucking hope. It's the main cause for the persisting problems with Nazis in East Germany: no hope. Adding a million additional people, lots of them with equally bad prospects, without any serious effort to integrate them is bound to blow up in our faces eventually.

The best thing that can happen for the entire Eurozone would be a massive integration program in Germany. And by massive I don't mean a meagre billion Euros. We're talking 15-20 billion a year, for at least five years. The more the better. Even in the current economic regime, it would be much cheaper than the repercussions from staying the current course: doing fuck all.

Well, it seems as if the election of Corbyn encourages some military officials to channel their inner el-Sisi:

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/645531319376719872
https://twitter.com/ronanduffy_/status/645354992765935617

And here I thought Cameron calling the newly elected leader of the opposition party a "threat to national security" was as wierd as it gets. I should have known better...

Friend of mine gave me a plant the other week. Wierd little thing, just a corm and nothing else. No maintenance at all. Today, while I was at work, it blossomed.

Now I know that it's a voodoo lily. And that it smells like a dozen rotting carcasses. Seriously, my entire fucking apartment smells like Zombieland.

When I called her about it, she was laughing her ass off...

No idea. Most of the economic and legal aspects are way above my pay grade.

Edit: After reading the comment sections below those two TAN articles, I'm none the wiser. Good food for thought though.

Edit #2: The more I let it marinade, the more it strikes me as wierd enough to allow the different governments to bamboozle the public into acceptance. Might be just the thing to let everyone keep face while not solving any real problems. The usual dragging along just at the edge of a cliff. Schäuble would strike it down in a second.

At least in Australia, all chutes are required by law to have this. It deploys your backup chute.

Chute is a wierd word...

chute chute chute.

....chute.

Still alive after four days of too much info to process and too little sleep. So I'll just dump a list of talks here that might interest you:

- Richard Stallman: Freedom in your computer and in the net
- Jake Appelbaum/Laura Poitras: Assassination lists, planetary surveillance
- Tobias Engel/Karsten Nohl: SS7, the backbone of mobile networks, is fucked beyond repair (two talks, same topic: one, two)
- Laura Poitras and others: cryptography for high-profile journalists
- Bill Scannel: Inside Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg (NSA spy post - wierd talk)
- internet of toilets
- What Ever Happened to Nuclear Weapons?

It sure does, cheers for the heads-up. The footage itself begins around the 22 minute mark.

Wierd as hell to see Schmitz and Greenwald on the same stage...

This haz probably gotta 2 b my fav noo Wierd Al song sinse "Eet it."

Latest WikiLeaks release about TISA: https://wikileaks.org/tisa-financial/

What struck my eye was the list of partners on the left. It includes, amongst others, a public broadcaster from my country. So our government is moving mountains to keep all these trade agreements secret, yet a public broadcaster with a board of directors made up of mostly the very same politicians is working with WikiLeaks to expose it.

Wierd shit...