Messages

51

General Comments / Re: anyone other than DJQuag believe "the Civil War wasn't about slavery"?

« on: March 29, 2017, 11:20:16 AM »

North had a larger number of abolitionists and progressives, but they also had blatantly racist laws preventing free black people from actually getting rights as citizens. And also, lynch mobs. The North was (and still is I'd say) so prejudice that white people even discriminated against other white people [the Irish at the time].

 Town Line, New York succeeded from the union and never even came back until 1946 (granted that was mostly because of draft riots, they were mad that free blacks were exempt from the draft but white people had to pay $300 to get out of it).

Clearly the central reason for the fight over states rights was slavery, but ultimately the reason they thought they were so justified was that they didn't feel the federal government was within its constitutional rights to legislate against slavery.

In some ways arguments about this are splitting hairs... but anyone who thinks that regardless of the semantics it wasn't chiefly about slavery is probably more than a little misinformed.

52

General Comments / Re: Fake News (the fight we needed to have?)

« on: March 29, 2017, 10:00:17 AM »

I agree without inside info we can't have a truly informed opinion... but my opinion of crowdstrike has been pretty low ever since the CEO went on the interview circuit (I happened to see him on CNN) claiming they "caught them in the act".  Which seems absolutely ridiculous since they were never brought on until after the leaks (or the DNC lied about that *also*).  They could not have caught them in the act if they weren't watching yet.... and all his explanations for how they supposedly knew who they were watching were just a whole lotta technical nothing sauce.

I don't know how we are supposed to be able to believe anything anymore.... I don't know *what* happened, but I know that what we've been told cannot be true, at least not in the narrative sense (bits and pieces maybe).

53

General Comments / Re: Obamacare Repeal and Replacement

« on: March 28, 2017, 11:44:58 PM »

There is no freakin way it costs $2.5B or $5B per drug depending on what industry funded "research" you look at.  For starters all drug company R&D costs are tax exempt, thats a huge break.. not to mention all the other subsidies and thinly veiled money laundering schemes they engage in (playing shell games with overseas "investments").  All perfectly legal by the way... but IMO it is a huge rip off.  I'd be surprised if their actual cost is much more than a tenth of what they claim.  They probably spend more than that and line their pockets but it shouldn't cost that much.  Otherwise how is it that small biotech startups are able to develop things?  They don't start out with billions, but they still make things (often getting bought up by the big companies to avoid having any competition if they start making too much noise).

This is isn't an example of full development cost, but it is nevertheless an example of borderline criminal price gouging:
http://www.theeventchronicle.com/health/epipen-goes-300-30-3-opensource-3d-printing/

54

General Comments / Re: The Fake News Lie that makes Trump look like a Boy Scout in compariso

« on: March 28, 2017, 11:17:34 PM »

I think the problem here is that the CIA/NSA pretty much record every single phone call and email in the whole country at all times.  Ostensibly they use it "only for metadata" but the systems they've built allow them to pull up pretty much anyone's data with absolutely, no warrant, no special orders,  no accountability at all.  They're even allowed to just randomly hack people's computers if they feel like it and go on fishing expeditions... they just have to see you using encryption or tor or various other things that they don't like and then they can use that as justification to hack you if they want.

So it would be really easy for anyone with access (such as a president) to just ask someone to try to pull up some dirt on someone on a whim.  Whether or not it actually happened is somewhat debatable, difficult to prove, and easily denied, but the fact that they went from flat denials early on to now saying there was no "physical wiretapping" is telling.  Because anyone who knows how this stuff works these days knows that they almost never use "physical wiretapping" anymore.  There is no reason to when they already have all the data they could ever use and so many "smart" devices with microphones all over the place that can be listening devices.

The surveillance state is dangerously out of control.

55

General Comments / Re: What the CIA report *actually* says

« on: March 28, 2017, 10:58:05 PM »

"The Russian hacking story is now all over the news, especially after the joint agency report about the hacking. Many security experts aren't basing their assessment on that report, and it was most likely misdirection for public consumption having nothing to do with the actual information. In the report, they listed about a hundred IP addresses that they believe were used by Russian government hackers. The problem with those IP addresses is that a lot of them are TOR exit nodes, which could have been used by anyone." - Leo Laporte

Pretty much all the "technical explanations" they've offered seem completely bogus or wildly speculative.  Certainly in the case of those IP addresses, which I also examined myself... most are in the USA actually.  A few were tor exit nodes, some were in china... only a handful in Russia and they were just random parked domains... such inactive addresses are often hacked and used to send spam or other things...

I can't really believe any of their public statements about it because the "evidence" is so flimsy and quite a few things they say are just plain wrong. They cannot be true.

 Wouldn't be shocked if Russia's intelligence service collects data all the time, just like ours and many others, but I see nothing to support the grandiose claims in the media.