France has errupted in protests against their elected president Macron. Mainstream sources are characterizing the protests as being centered around fuel prices though a cursory scan of banners being held by "yellow jacket" protesters present in photos by these same organizations suggest deeper disatisfactions are involved (archived).
Category Archives: Africa
Gavin Quits And Disbands His Proud Boys After FBI Terrorist Classification
Vice Magazine cofounder Gavin McInnes has quit and effectively disanded his "Proud Boys" after the FBI moved to classify the group as a right wing/white supremacy terrorist organization. The group known primarily for its ethnically diverse membership styled itself as a self improvement and self defense club for men, but fell into trouble with "law enforcement" for defending themselves against less capable aggressors during protests.
USG.NASA Probing Upstart Contractor After Achieving Substantially Better Delivery History Than Old Guard Contractors
Upstart NASA launch services and vehicle contractor SpaceX, by Elon Musk, has found itself selected for an invasive comparative investigation of their safety culture against more established contractor Boeing (archived). While Musk's rocket venture has suffered growing pains and explosions in the past, the firm has managed to settle into a stable routine of launches at a pace and cost that is frankly humiliating for established legacy USG aerospace contractors including Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Given recent USG action against his once darling rechargable battery venture Tesla,1 Elon Musk appears to have been targeted for dekulakizaton across the board.
Conveniently for the takers these problems started when the venture began approaching a positive cash flow. ↩
Tumblr Removed From Apple Store Over Child Porn
The Tumblr app has been removed from the Apple App store over the Verizon subidary's hosting of child porn images (archived). As child pornography is at the same time a high priority USG prosecution target and only of interest as an article of consumption to "law enforcement" officers and bureaucrats, it remains to be seen how many cops and bureaucrats Verizon communications will give up for prosecution… provided their own executives manage to avoid lockup.
In Filing Begging For Sealed Charges Copy/Paste Mishap Confirms Assange As Target Of US Prosecutors
In a petition to the US District Court for Eastern Virginia, US Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger and Assistant US Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer argue for issuing sealed charges in a case titled "United States of America v. SEITU SULAYMAN KOKAYI" with SEITU SULAYMAN KOKAYI presumably being a pseudonym for the defendant who may not be named. Except further down in the document a failure in redaction yields gold:
Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.
And a bit further down:
The complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, as well as this motion and the proposed order, would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.
And so any order to seal the charges being leveled at Julian Assange is moot. If there are not already sealed charges against Assange in different pseudonymously obscured case, it can be assumed there will be in another regardless of the determination in this one. Full text below: Continue reading
US: Our 'Military Edge' Has Eroded
After 17 years of refocusing to combat rural adversaries fighting as small units, and still more years of procurement boondoggles, a report commisioned by the United States congress suggested the US is positioned to lose wars against either Russia or China (archived). While the US is looking to procure Latino combat aircraft to counter the non-perforance of their decades long F-35 development disaster, it turns out that other countries were making procurement decisions on criteria other than how many congressional districts manufacturing can be spread across.
France's Macron: Nationalism Is A Form Of Treason
While hosting an assembly of other fiat criminal organization leaders to commemorate the centennial of the 1918 Armistice, France's Macron stated that nationalism is a form of treason against "our values" (archived). He repeated tired Pantsuit talking points in a effort to cleave nationalism out of the definition of patriotism, by suggesting patriotism involves necessarily loving the Nation of Africa as much as one's own country. Further, the proponent of femal senior intergenerational marriage called for an era of progess built from "science", presumably using the common Pantsuit misconception of science as a belief system.
Malibu Burns
Today the "entertainment" press is clogged with stories of which celebrity homes have burned, and which are next in line to be consumed by a wildfire tearing through the Pantsuit fiat-affluent left coast stronghold of Malibu. A number of washed up has beens long out of the paparazzi eye including Martin Sheen suddenly found renewed attention as "missing" persons for evacuating without press escorts.
Onboard SSD Crypto Demonstrated To Be Homeopathic On Numerous Drives
Researchers at the Netherland's Radboud University, total enrollment 19,904 students, have confirmed the safe assumption that the onboard encryption offered by a number of SSD makers is indeed homeopathic and useless (archived). They describe what they refer to as a "pattern of critical issues" which allow them the freedom to read nominally encrypted volumes on a number of Crucial and Samsung drive models. Users of Microsoft Window's "Bitlocker" drive encryption are especially vulnerable since "Bitlocker" trusts onboard SSD encryption engines and will forgo applying its own software encryption when an SSD offers to do the encrypting. The "Make Security Theatre Again" movement is alive and well with mainstream hardware and software vendors.
Pot To Kettle: Please No Decades Of Pain (That Was Our Schtick)
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is begging China to "act like a normal nation" and avoid capturing developing nations in a debt trap leading to decades of pain widely distributed around the world (archived). This appeal seemingly crafted to tear at the heartstrings is void of a certain necessary context: Trapping developing nations in debt and amplifying their pain is the US and EU's schtick and they would very much like China to step back and get out of their way.
Chinese foreign investment isn't always without controversy where it occurs, but it tends to have a transparency the old IMF scheme lacked. Raw materials for otherwise inaccessible finished goods is a rather kind deal compared to what was on offer before.