Friday, March 24, 2017

Stories below the fold

somalia is in danger of massive deaths from a local famine. Like most "famines", it is war/corruption, not global warming behind the problem (although climate change related drought has been a problem in the region for about 10 thousand years.)

A few days ago, AlJ, which is full of American leftists, complained that the west was not giving enough to Somalia, and that they should follow Turkey's lead.

I suspected they were missing something, and they were: Turkey can shoot the bad guys stealing all the aid money and food and get away with it (whereas if the west did this, the Arab press would be in an uproar).

StrategyPage confirms this:

The local outlaws and Islamic terrorists quickly found that the Turks were as tough as their reputation implied. Al Shabaab still makes threats against the Turks in Somalia, but usually chooses a less dangerous target.

they also discuss the new Somali president who is trying to fight both the bad guys and the rampant corruption there.

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Over 100 bomb threats were phoned etc to Jewish community centers etc. in the US in the last six months. The MSM blamed a Trumpie supporter, of course.

But more recent reports said the threats were from overseas. The alt/r press blamed the Muslims, of course.

ALJ now reports the suspect has been arrested: An American Israeli kid who was angry because the Israeli army turned him down.

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Improbable research notes a 1908 paper saying that 40 percent of people can learn how to wiggle their ears.

Wilson found that around 40% of experimental subjects were able to move the outer rim of their pinnae, 2-3 mm or so, by purposely shifting their eyes either extreme left or extreme right.*

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The Daily Wire on the wiretap stories. 

analyzes the spin. Of course someone was spying. They spy on everyone. The problem is not the spying but that someone released the information for political purposes.

and not only is big brother quietly watching you (but keeping quiet about what he reads) but three days before Trump became president, President Obama made a rule that the information could be shared with a lot of other agencies, which is the government equivalent of a "free TVs" sign. (steal and leak please).

headsup Instapundit


UPDATE: Wikileaks page on Vault7 release.

hmm... maybe I should go back to using Ubuntu.

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related item: Senate moves to stop privacy rules. Now your cable company doesn't have to ask if they can steal your private data.

But it is not about you, it is about they are mad because Google and Facebook can know everything about you but they can't.


Cable companies, cellphone carriers and the advertising industry attacked the rules as an overreach. If the permissions requirements went into effect, it may have been more difficult for telecom companies to build advertising businesses that could serve as stiffer competition to Google and Facebook, as they want to do. Internet companies like Google doesn't have to ask users' permission before tracking what sites they visit.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-03-senate-votes-undo-privacy-user.html#jCp

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te "casino heist", where Bengladesh money was transferred to the Philippines to a casino bank account and then whisked away by Chinese gamblers, has taken another twist: WSJ vis the Manila Bulletin: It has a North Korean link:



Federal prosecutors are building cases that would accuse North Korea of directing one of the biggest bank robberies of modern times, the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last year, according to people familiar with the matter.
 The charges, if filed, would target alleged Chinese middlemen who, prosecutors believe, helped North Korea orchestrate the theft, the people said....

includes backstory:
Private security researchers have traced the Bangladesh heist to a hacking group known as Lazarus, which, they say, was also behind the Sony hack. In 2014, the FBI blamed North Korea for the Sony breach, which exposed embarrassing emails and led the studio to pull from theaters a movie that involved a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “The whole security community has said that the attack tools and techniques used in Sony are the same ones used in Bangladesh,” said Eric Chien, an engineer with security vendor Symantec Corp. 
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  in times of trouble, people prefer macho men to wimps:


new research from Aarhus BSS at Aarhus Universit shows that support for dominant leaders is not born of fear, but of a wish to handle the country's problems by aggressive means.... "Our research indicates that supporting a dominant leader is a sign that you are prepared to solve conflicts by offensive rather than defensive means. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-03-people-conflict-dominant-leaders-stage.html#jCp

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