Trump
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NYTimes Connections
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NY Times Strands
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Israel
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Wordle - daily game
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Radio Paradise Comments
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Today in History
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Photography Forum - Your Own Photos
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May 2024 Photo Theme - Peaceful
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• • • The Once-a-Day • • •
- Isabeau - May 20, 2024 - 2:16pm
Things You Thought Today
- ScottFromWyoming - May 20, 2024 - 2:12pm
What Did You See Today?
- Steely_D - May 20, 2024 - 1:24pm
Baseball, anyone?
- ScottFromWyoming - May 20, 2024 - 12:00pm
USA! USA! USA!
- R_P - May 20, 2024 - 10:05am
Mixtape Culture Club
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Rock mix sound quality below Main and Mellow?
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Shawn Phillips
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The Corporation
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Name My Band
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Positive Thoughts and Prayer Requests
- GeneP59 - May 19, 2024 - 4:08pm
What can you hear right now?
- GeneP59 - May 19, 2024 - 4:07pm
China
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What Makes You Laugh?
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TV shows you watch
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Music library
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The Obituary Page
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Paul McCartney
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Virginia News
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Gnomad here. Who farking deleted my thread?
- Red_Dragon - May 17, 2024 - 5:59pm
The Dragons' Roost
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Upcoming concerts or shows you can't wait to see
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DIY
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Other Medical Stuff
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Dialing 1-800-Manbird
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Bug Reports & Feature Requests
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Your Local News
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Alexa Show
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Joe Biden
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Climate Change
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Strange signs, marquees, billboards, etc.
- KurtfromLaQuinta - May 15, 2024 - 4:13pm
how do you feel right now?
- KurtfromLaQuinta - May 15, 2024 - 4:10pm
What the hell OV?
- oldviolin - May 15, 2024 - 12:38pm
Song of the Day
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Science is bullsh*t
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NASA & other news from space
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Artificial Intelligence
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Human Rights (Can Science Point The Way)
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Play the Blues
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Animal Resistance
- R_P - May 14, 2024 - 6:37pm
2024 Elections!
- R_P - May 14, 2024 - 6:00pm
Fascism In America
- Red_Dragon - May 14, 2024 - 4:27pm
punk? hip-hop? metal? noise? garage?
- thisbody - May 14, 2024 - 1:27pm
Social Media Are Changing Everything
- Red_Dragon - May 14, 2024 - 8:08am
Internet connection
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Congress
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Ukraine
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What The Hell Buddy?
- oldviolin - May 13, 2024 - 1:25pm
Surfing!
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Bad Poetry
- oldviolin - May 13, 2024 - 11:38am
See This Film
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Podcast recommendations???
- ColdMiser - May 13, 2024 - 7:50am
News of the Weird
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Those Lovable Policemen
- R_P - May 12, 2024 - 11:31am
Vinyl Only Spin List
- kurtster - May 12, 2024 - 9:16am
The All-Things Beatles Forum
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Poetry Forum
- ScottN - May 12, 2024 - 6:32am
Beer
- ScottFromWyoming - May 10, 2024 - 8:58pm
It's the economy stupid.
- thisbody - May 10, 2024 - 3:21pm
Oh dear god, BEES!
- R_P - May 10, 2024 - 3:11pm
Tornado!
- miamizsun - May 10, 2024 - 2:49pm
The 1960s
- kcar - May 10, 2024 - 2:49pm
Marko Haavisto & Poutahaukat
- thisbody - May 10, 2024 - 7:57am
Living in America
- Proclivities - May 10, 2024 - 6:45am
Outstanding Covers
- Steely_D - May 10, 2024 - 12:56am
Democratic Party
- R_P - May 9, 2024 - 3:06pm
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Index »
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R_P
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Apr 24, 2022 - 7:43pm |
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Former Intelligence Officials, Citing Russia, Say Big Tech Monopoly Power is Vital to National SecurityA group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies â Facebook, Google, and Amazon â would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S. by Russia as illustrated by the invasion of Ukraine, and it repeatedly points to the dangers of Putin and the Kremlin to justify the need to preserve Big Tech's power in its maximalist form. Any attempts to restrict Big Tech's monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow. (...)
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R_P
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Apr 16, 2021 - 2:59pm |
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Why Spy Agencies Say the Future Is Bleak
Climate change, technology, disease and financial crises will pose big challenges for the world, an intelligence report concludes.Every four years, at the start of a new administration, American intelligence agencies put out âGlobal Trends,â a weighty assessment of where the world seems headed over the next two decades. In 2008, for example, the report warned about the potential emergence of a pandemic originating in East Asia and spreading rapidly around the world.
The latest report, Global Trends 2040, released last week by the National Intelligence Council, finds that the pandemic has proved to be âthe most significant, singular global disruption since World War II,â with medical, political and security implications that will reverberate for years. Thatâs not schadenfreude. Itâs the prologue to a far darker picture of what lies ahead. (...)
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R_P
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Jan 1, 2021 - 2:00pm |
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The Man Who Refused to SpyThe F.B.I. tried to recruit an Iranian scientist as an informant. When he balked, the payback was brutal.
Iranians visiting or residing in the U.S. routinely hear from the Bureau. Half a dozen Iranian nationals and Iranian-Americans have described such approaches to me, and they have typically done so with trepidation, because the Iranian government sees any returning national who has had dealings with a U.S. intelligence agency as a potential spy. Some Iranians told me of polite conversations with federal agents, cards exchanged, refusals accepted. Others described repeated demands, veiled threats, and legal trouble lasting years. The Bureau recruits counterintelligence assets in much the same way it turns witnesses in domestic racketeering cases: agents look for vulnerabilities to use as leverage in pressuring people to become informants. They find discrepancies in immigration paperwork or identify petty sanctions violations, sometimes threatening an indictment to bolster their demands.
(...)
If there was ever a force equal to Asgariâs will, it was the bureaucratic inertia of ICE. The immigration attorneys he consulted were largely stymied by the agencyâs impenetrable structure. One said, âIâm just throwing shit at a wall, and every once in a while the wall throws something back.â Another fruitlessly chased Asgariâs paperwork from one office to another: ICEâs Enforcement and Removal Operations, the F.B.I., Customs and Border Protection, the ICE regional headquarters in Detroit, the local headquarters in Cleveland. At one point, Asgari urged me to call ICE officials in Detroit and Cleveland who had signed documents addressed to him. None of them ever answered their phones.
ICE occasionally sent representatives to meet with detainees and discuss their cases. They were just following procedures, they told Asgari, and had no authority to evaluate the logic or the justice of the measures they enforced. Asgari answered the representatives by telling them an Iranian joke. A man sees two groups of workers, one digging a trench along the road and the other following behind to fill it up and cover it. The bystander, confounded, asks the workers what they are doing. They say that the government hired three contractors: one to dig, one to install a pipeline, and the third to cover it. The second contractor never showed up, a worker says, adding, âSo we are doing our job.â Such, Asgari concluded, was ICE.
(...)
Asgari still viewed America with affection. He marvelled that, in every prison, he could pick up a phone and talk to journalists, and that journalists could publish what they wanted without fear of being censored. But what he appreciated most was the independence of the American judiciary.
âI appeared as an Iranian in front of an American judge,â he reflected. âThis American judge ruled against an F.B.I. agent in my favor. I was privileged to witness the way he handled the trial, from jury selection to the end, the way he advocated impartiality and fairness. I believe these are global values that should be respected by all governments, including my own.â He added, âMy attorneys, who put their heart into this thingâthey were employees of the same government that was on the other side of this case.â
(...)
Prison was a crucible of human relations, and for the most part Asgariâs faith in them had emerged stronger from the experience. In a pod, you couldnât hide behind an avatar, a bank account, or an accomplishmentânot even behind the self-importance of a busy schedule. Governments might seek to dominate or obliterate one another, but human beings, forced into intimacy and the roughest equality, tended to be coöperative, Asgari had found. He had always been a scholar of microstructures, and now he understood that the atoms of a societyâfrom which all its properties emanatedâwere people in their elemental state. The bonds among them were the structureâs deepest source of strength.
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R_P
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Jul 16, 2020 - 2:05pm |
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R_P
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Jul 15, 2020 - 12:07pm |
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Secret Trump order gives CIA more powers to launch cyberattacksThe secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, gives the spy agency more freedom in both the kinds of operations it conducts and who it targets, undoing many restrictions that had been in place under prior administrations. The finding allows the CIA to more easily authorize its own covert cyber operations, rather than requiring the agency to get approval from the White House.
Unlike previous presidential findings that have focused on a specific foreign policy objective or outcome â such as preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power â this directive, driven by the National Security Council and crafted by the CIA, focuses more broadly on a capability: covert action in cyberspace.
The âvery aggressiveâ finding âgave the agency very specific authorities to really take the fight offensively to a handful of adversarial countries,â said a former U.S. government official. These countries include Russia, China, Iran and North Korea â which are mentioned directly in the document â but the finding potentially applies to others as well, according to another former official. âThe White House wanted a vehicle to strike back,â said the second former official. âAnd this was the way to do it.â
The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversariesâ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants, and to engage in the kind of hack-and-dump operations that Russian hackers and WikiLeaks popularized, in which tranches of stolen documents or data are leaked to journalists or posted on the internet. It has also freed the agency to conduct disruptive operations against organizations that were largely off limits previously, such as banks and other financial institutions.
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R_P
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Jun 14, 2020 - 11:38am |
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Barr also directed the JTTF to âidentify criminal organizers and instigators,â even though antifa has no organizational structure and the FBIâs own internal assessments donât support the claim that antifa is somehow weaponizing protests
(...)
Eli Anderson, a 19-year-old college student on summer break back home in Cookeville, decided to organize an impromptu Black Lives Matter rally in the Cookeville public square on Tuesday, June 2. A little after 3 p.m., Anderson and his friends announced on their Instagram stories that there would be a peaceful protest in the city square at 5 p.m. A friend picked Anderson up at 4:30 p.m. to head to the rally when he got a call from his mother saying, âThe FBI is here and I donât know what is happening.âAnderson rushed home. By the time he got there, the two agents were gone and his mother was in a state of panic. She told Eli they had flashed FBI credentials.
âThe agents told her they had been monitoring my social media and believed that I might have information about antifa coming to town,â Anderson said. âIâm like, âWhat the fuck is antifa?â I had never even heard of it before.â
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R_P
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May 27, 2020 - 5:19pm |
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R_P
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May 14, 2020 - 12:16pm |
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R_P
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Feb 11, 2020 - 5:43pm |
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The CIA's âMinervaâ SecretThe U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA and the German intelligence agency, BND, according to reports today by the German public television channel, ZDF and the Washington Post.
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Proclivities
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Apr 12, 2019 - 11:11am |
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R_P
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R_P
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Jan 6, 2019 - 1:10pm |
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R_P
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Nov 13, 2018 - 2:29pm |
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Secret CIA Document Shows Plan to Test Drugs on Prisoners
Perhaps the most striking element of the document is the CIA doctorsâ willful blindness to the truth of what they were doing. CIA doctors decided that waterboarding actually âprovided periodic reliefâ to a prisoner because it was a break from days of standing sleep deprivation. Similarly, CIA doctors decided that when a different prisoner was stuffed into a coffin-sized box, this provided a ârelatively benign sanctuaryâ from other torture methods. CIA doctors described yet another prisoner â who cried, begged, pleaded, vomited, and required medical resuscitation after being waterboarded â as âamazingly resistant to the waterboard.â Incredibly, CIA doctors concluded that the torture program was âreassuringly free of enduring physical or psychological effects.â
The truth is that CIA torture left a legacy of broken bodies and traumatized minds. Today, with a president who has vocally supported torture and a new CIA director who was deeply complicit in torturing prisoners, itâs more important than ever to expose the crimes of the past. Recognizing the roles played by the lawyers, doctors, and psychologists who enabled torture is critical to making sure it never happens again.
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R_P
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Nov 9, 2018 - 9:54am |
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ScottFromWyoming
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May 25, 2018 - 9:10pm |
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R_P wrote:
Well, you can tell by the way I use my walkI'm a Hoover man, no time to talk
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R_P
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May 25, 2018 - 6:17pm |
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R_P
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May 17, 2018 - 8:47pm |
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Bipartisan scumbaggeryGina Haspel confirmed as CIA director after key Democrats vote in favor(...) Haspel received robust backing from former intelligence, diplomatic, military and national security officials. Among those who supported her nomination were six former CIA directors and three former national intelligence directors.
On the opposing side are groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which says she should have stood up against the interrogation practices then. More than 100 former US ambassadors who served both Republican and Democratic presidents sent the Senate a letter opposing Haspel, saying that despite her credentials, confirming her would give authoritarian leaders around the world the license to say US behavior is “no different from ours”.
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R_P
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May 9, 2018 - 10:19am |
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R_P
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Mar 20, 2018 - 11:56am |
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The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents RevealInternet paranoiacs drawn to Bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency. Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, Bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of Bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order. It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target Bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents. Although the agency was interested in surveilling some competing cryptocurrencies, “Bitcoin is #1 priority,” a March 15, 2013 internal NSA report stated. (...)
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R_P
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Mar 16, 2018 - 10:27pm |
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