Free Republic

Watch his Grandson

(Sept. 30) -- The intrigue surrounding the mysterious, highly sophisticated computer worm Stuxnet got a little more Dan Brownish today with the revelation that there may be hidden messages embedded in the malware's code. The New York Times reported this morning that one of the files in the worm was called "Myrtus," which may be a reference to the Old Testament Book of Esther, in which Jews thwart a Persian plot against them. Along with mysterious Myrtus were two numbers that might be additional clues to who is behind the worm. Or, as the Times points out, they could mean...

SAN FRANCISCO: Computer security experts are studying a scary new cyber weapon: a software smart bomb that may have been crafted to find and sabotage a nuclear facility in Iran. Malicious software, or malware, dubbed "Stuxnet" is able to recognise a specific facility's control network and then destroy it, according to German computer security researcher Ralph Langner. "Welcome to cyber war," Langner said in a post at his website. "This is sabotage." Langner has been analyzing Stuxnet since it was discovered in June and said the code had a technology fingerprint of the control system it was seeking and would...

First of all, let's get this out of the way at the outset. Are we calling Obama the antichrist? Yes, of course. Nah, just kidding. Let's just say an unwitting vehicle of the antichristic principle, which anyone can be at one time or another. Please, let's be mature, and discuss this in terms of abstract cosmic principles, without getting polemical or personal. No need to demonize someone just because he's an instrument of satan. Besides, he's just the vehicle, not the driver. The surfer, not the wave.

A little contest called the Dollar ReDes$ign Project has been launched on the web and I have to say the dismal design offerings being foisted on the public are a wonder to behold. But the worst ones are by Dowling Duncan. The designs offered by Dowling Duncan envision a one dollar bill featuring a giant photo of Barak Obama and the 100 dollar bill featuring a photo of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

So far, the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero has unfolded along predictable lines, with the man at the center of the project, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, drawing attacks from the right painting him as a terrorist sympathizer with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. But meanwhile, links between the group behind the controversial mosque, the CIA and U.S. military establishment have gone unacknowledged.

There are these sudden loud noises in the hotel kitchen, one, two, three, probably a tray falling, and then there is so much screaming and a hand holding a gun high in the air and Robert Kennedy, who had walked into the gun, is on the floor with his eyes seeing nothing. On this June night in 1968 he has just won a Presidential primary and suddenly he is fit only for a gravedigger’s dirt.

And we felt some sympathy for the Tea Party types who want to march on Frankenstein’s castle and burn it down. If they ever have the misfortune to get into power, they will discover how much of the problem stems from the sloth, complacency, ignorance and incompetence of ordinary Americans. We’ve had the financial ride of our lives during the past fifteen years courtesy of the rest of the world, and now it’s over. We have to learn how to export again–and that is not going to be easy.

Link above for Dave Goldman on Kudlow

Thetruthwins.com Most Americans still appear to be operating under the delusion that the "recession" will soon pass and that things will get back to "normal" very soon. Unfortunately, that is not anywhere close to the truth. What we are now witnessing are the early stages of the complete and total breakdown of the U.S. economic system. The U.S. government, state governments, local governments, businesses and American consumers have collectively piled up debt that is equivalent to approximately 360 percent of GDP. At no point during the Great Depression (or at any other time during our history) did we ever come...

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- It may just be the summer doldrums, or the ominous occurrence of a Friday the 13 in mid-August, but the Hindenburg Omen -- a technical indicator of an impending stock market crash -- is suddenly as important a market mover as testimony from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The blog Zero Hedge, writing in a vein that seems made for professional boxing or WWE pay-per-view event hype, describes the Hindenburg Omen as "Easily the most feared technical pattern in all of chartism (for the bullishly inclined). Those who know what it is, tend to have an...

Aspecter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to an ethnic self-cleansing. Since 1992, Russia’s human numbers have been progressively dwindling. This slow motion process now taking place in the country carries with it grim and potentially disastrous implications that threaten to recast the contours of life and society in...

from the bang-head-on-wall-slowly dept This coming Wednesday I was supposed to be attending the Congressional Internet Caucus' State of the Net West event, but late last week it was announced that the event was postponed, because for only the third time in the past twenty years, the Speaker of the House (in this case, Nancy Pelosi) has called the House back into session early to vote on pending legislation. With Congress back in session the Congressional reps scheduled to attend the event couldn't make it, and it's not much of a Congressional Internet Caucus get together without Congressional reps. Anyway,...

In simple terms, the collection of links below centered on the latest Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), come to the general conclusion that the Department of Defense (DoD) can no longer think, strategize, complete staff work, or acquire the right capabilities to do what DoD is supposed to do (which is also a topic lacking consensus).

DUBLIN, Ireland ─ Like to buy a nice new airport? No? How about a railway network or a power station? Well then, wouldn't you like to have a bus company, or a harbor, or a television service or a chain of post offices? Anyone of these properties could be yours; all reasonable offers considered. They are slated to come under the auctioneer’s hammer in a fire sale of national assets in Ireland. Like a household up to its ears in debt, the Irish government is planning to sell off the family silver to make ends meet.

The title says it all.

If Pakistan's intelligence service continues to plot terrorist attacks with the Taliban in Afghanistan, as the mass of documents released yesterday by Wikileaks allege, who is responsible for covering this up for so many years? The answer, I argue in this morning's Asia Times Online, is everybody. This raises the question: Who covered up a scandalous arrangement known to everyone with a casual acquaintance of the situation? The answer is the same as in Agatha Christie's 1934 mystery about murder on the Orient Express, that is, everybody: former United States president George W Bush and vice president Dick Cheney, current...

Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes. In every industrial democracy since the end of World War II, there has been a social contract between the few and the many. In return for receiving a disproportionate amount of the gains from economic growth in a capitalist economy, the rich paid a disproportionate percentage of the taxes needed for public goods and a safety net for the majority. In North America and Europe, the economic elite agreed to this bargain because they...

I think I am very close to concluding that this whole “New Atheism” movement is only a passing fad—not the cultural watershed its purveyors imagine it to be, but simply one of those occasional and inexplicable marketing vogues that inevitably go the way of pet rocks, disco, prime-time soaps, and The Bridges of Madison County. This is not because I necessarily think the current “marketplace of ideas” particularly good at sorting out wise arguments from foolish. But the latest trend in à la mode godlessness, it seems to me, has by now proved itself to be so intellectually and morally...

As I made my way on an April morning from Harvard Square to a Tea Party Express rally on the Boston Commons, a quotation and a question wound together in my mind. The quotation is a familiar one from William F. Buckley, that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand people listed in the Boston phone directory than the two thousand who comprise the faculty at Harvard University. Buckley was not condemning intelligence or intellectual achievement. He was expressing trust in the moral intuitions and pragmatic sensibilities of ordinary Americans, and indulging in a playful bit of...