Caught up in Operation Car Wash, which has rocked leaders in Latin America.
Peru’s former president Alan Garcia, 69, died in hospital after taking his life as police were about to arrest him at his home in a sprawling corruption case.
ABC Australia
The health ministry said Garcia died at 1.05am Thursday of “a massive cerebral haemorrhage from a gunshot wound and cardiorespiratory arrest”.
The fundamental challenge that Tocqueville’s book poses to American dogma arises from his refusal to assume that equality and freedom are always mutually reinforcing. The American creed since the Declaration of Independence and especially since Lincoln has linked the two values, assuming that an increase in one naturally accompanies an increase in the other. Tocqueville suggested that we tend to ignore the threats that equality poses to freedom. Freedom was not, like equality, a naturally expanding feature of society. Nor was it a necessary consequence of equality of conditions.
Tablet Magazine
It is too simple to say that Tocqueville presented equality and freedom as principles sometimes in tension with one another. His point was different. Equality was not merely a moral principle. Nor was it merely a material fact. More fundamentally, equality was a passion that gave rise to a certain dynamic in politics. Freedom, on the other hand, he portrayed as a set of skills and habits that required practice, an art that could be learned but also forgotten. The danger of democratic life, Tocqueville thought, was that the passion for equality would lead us to stop practicing the art of freedom.
Equality can be the byproduct of freedom only when it arises out of free association. Mandatory equality is not equality at all, for those who govern the system will be more equal than others.
The definition of a meme
Dilbert walks into a meeting and asks, “Who called this meeting?” The male coworker replies, “We thought you did.” The coworker continues, “I think we should discuss issues and assign tasks so it’s not a complete waste of time.” Dilbert responds, “Maybe meetings have become a lifeform capable of calling themselves and thus reproducing via human hosts.”
Dilbert
Can memes go extinct? If they spread by natural selection why doesn’t socialism go extinct? Or perhaps socialists would prefer this question: why doesn’t religion go extinct?
Perhaps nothing goes extinct, the dinosaurs included. They simply change form — into birds — in this case. The Tower of Babel may be with us still in the form of the GND. The Tower didn’t fall, it’s simply hidden information.
Someone else wrote: “Ideas can be spontaneously generated which is why the cannot go extinct. A lineage could die out; if the last person who believed in it and all records of it were destroyed so it couldn’t infect new hosts. But then another human could independently come up with the same idea.”
That is like the Boltzmann Brain scenario. Given enough time everything will happen again and again. And thus, even if the Greenies succeed in killing off conscious life to let Gaia live, nature will try again and eventually the Greenies lose.
ISTANBUL — The party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey applied to the country’s election commission on Tuesday for a rerun of the Istanbul mayor’s race, after two weeks of appeals and recounting of ballots still showed the opposition candidate ahead.
NYT
Maybe the biggest existential danger to humanity are UN bureaucrats with trillion dollar terraforming schemes.
As a result of global warming, winters are only going to get more severe, but there’s at least one silver lining as researchers from UCLA have come up with a way to harness electricity from all that snow.
Gizmodo
Ever since the 1975 movie “Jaws,” great white sharks have been considered the most fearsome predators in the ocean. But new research published Tuesday shows that may not be the case.
Mercury News
Instead of using visible light to spot incoming objects, Mainzer’s team at JPL/Caltech has leveraged a characteristic signature of NEOs—their heat. Asteroids and comets are warmed by the sun and so glow brightly at thermal wavelengths (infrared), making them easier to spot with the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope.
Phys.org
“With the NEOWISE mission we can spot objects regardless of their surface color, and use it to measure their sizes and other surface properties,” Mainzer said.
The man who argues interstellar object Oumuamua could have been an alien spacecraft now says a meteor that hit Earth’s atmosphere in 2014 also came from elsewhere in the Milky Way, perhaps carrying life with it. …
“The reported meteor entered the solar system with a speed of 60 km/s (134,216 mph) relative to the local standard of rest (obtained by averaging the motion of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun),” Loeb wrote in an email. “Such a high ejection speed can only be produced in the innermost cores of planetary systems — interior to the orbit of the Earth around a star like the sun, but in the habitable zone of dwarf stars, hence allowing such objects to carry life from their parent planets.”
CNET
It’s not new. The Soviets funded the Communist Party of Italy, the 2nd biggest postwar, for a long time.
According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, four out of the 28 European countries do not have any restrictions on foreign donations to political parties. They are Belgium, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands. This means that, for example, an Italian political party could receive funding from a third country, without it being illegal.
Eleven other countries have partial restrictions to foreign donations. And only 13 have full bans in place….European officials are paying particular attention toward Russia, given the conclusion from U.S. intelligence agencies that the Kremlin did interfere in the U.S. 2016 presidential election.
CNBC
French President Emmanuel Macron has already staked out his position on talks: Europe should not negotiate a trade deal with a country that is not part of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate.
CNN
Macron says that unless Trump signs up, the USA will have a competitive advantage over Europe. Trump must ‘wake up’ before talks can start.
“Macron argues that it wouldn’t be fair for only one party of a trade deal to follow the strict environmental standards agreed in Paris. France voted against opening trade talks on Monday, but was overruled by a majority of EU member states.”
But it’s the French who want the border to come with Brexit, hence Pelosi is essentially saying the UK should stay in the EU.
She added: ‘First of all it is very hard to pass a trade bill in the Congress of the United States, so it’s no given anyway.
Daily Mail
‘But if there were any weakening of the Good Friday accords there would be no chance whatsoever, a non-starter for a US-UK trade agreement.
‘The Good Friday accords ended 700 years of conflict.
‘This is not a treaty only, it’s an ideal, it’s a value, it’s something that’s a model to the world, something that we all take pride in.
‘It was a model and other people have used it as a model and we don’t want that model to be something that can be bargained away in another agreement.’
A Federal Court judge has ruled James Cook University acted unlawfully when it sacked physics professor Peter Ridd after he publicly criticised the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the global warming impact on the Great Barrier Reef …
Judge Vasta found that a clause in the university’s enterprise agreement, which upholds academic freedom, justified Professor Ridd’s conduct. “This trial was purely and simply about the proper construction of a clause in an enterprise agreement,” he said.
Australian
Judge Vasta also said the university had misunderstood “the whole concept of intellectual freedom”.
“In the search for truth, it is an unfortunate consequence that some people may feel denigrated, offended, hurt or upset,” he said.
A penalty hearing will be set for a later date.
The university tried to keep the disciplinary process itself under wraps.
On 24 August 2017, he was told that he could not mention anything to
Ridd vs James court document
do with the disciplinary process to anyone who was not a support person.
When he queried whether he could talk to his wife about the matter, he
was told in an email on 27 August 2017, that he could not.
Meanwhile the climate change activists shut down Central London.
A total of 290 climate change activists have been arrested for blocking roads in central London, amid protests aimed at shutting down the capital.
BBC
A second day of disruption is under way after Extinction Rebellion campaigners camped overnight at Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square and Oxford Circus.
Police said 500,000 people had been affected by the diversion of 55 bus routes in London.
The Met said 290 people had been arrested by 21:30 BST on Tuesday.
Three men and two women, in their 40s and 50s, arrested on suspicion of criminal damage at Shell’s headquarters on Monday, have since been released under investigation.
The Jack Ryan novel, True Faith and Allegiance, is a fictionalized account of just how destructive the OPM hack could be. The power of data fusion is amazing, especially when deployed against clueless persons who don’t even know what they’ve lost, or those determined to minimize the extent of what they’ve lost to avoid embarrassment.
Until the last years of the Obama administration officials simply turned a blind eye to Chinese hacking.
Spalding says he made it his mission to get the word out to other government agencies. But even in 2015, he says, he was met mostly with a shrug.
NPR
He says he went to the departments of Commerce and the Treasury, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. State Department.
“The two responses we got were, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really bad.’ And the second one is, ‘That’s not my job,'” Spalding says. “That was almost the universal answer we got every time we went to a senior leader. Bad problem but not my problem.”
Spalding, who retired from the Air Force last year, says in the final years under Obama and now under President Trump, agencies are finally starting to take some action. The Justice Department is bringing criminal cases, the trade representative’s office is investigating China’s dealings and both administrations have brought concerns to the Chinese directly.
But, Spalding says, it may have come 10 years too late.
“We all missed it,” he says. “We have to understand the problem and get to work on it.”
Maybe the good old global world wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Moving a university from curtailing free speech on campus to protecting it is a momentous task. It often requires years of effort from students, professors, administrators, and public policy organizations…
Taylor said the most difficult obstacle to overcome was administrative inertia rather than hostility or active resistance to change.
Despite a dearth of evidence that he was complicit in Moscow’s hacking, President Trump was forced by the Justice Department and the FBI, urged on by congressional Democrats, to endure a two-year investigation and to govern under a cloud of suspicion that he was an agent of the Kremlin. Now we have Assange, as to whom there is indisputable evidence of complicity in the hacking conspiracy, but the Justice Department declines to charge him with it — instead, positing the dubious Manning conspiracy that may very well be time-barred.
National Review
What is going on here?
That was my first impression too. Which is why I remarked that the whole thing seemed to have more angles than a protractor. But if I were to make a wholly unsupported guess based on nothing but speculation, I would suspect this is legal cleanup code. They want all the objects they created for the Collusion routine to go out of scope. Assange is being put through the meme destructor. His usefulness is over.
Economic growth won’t last as the U.S. labors under the burden of growing entitlement programs and weakness around the world, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told CNBC.
CNBC
The long-time central bank chief repeated his warnings about the weight that Social Security, Medicare and other programs are having on what have been otherwise solid gains over the past few years.
“I think the real problem is over the long run, we’ve got this significant continued drain coming from entitlements, which are basically draining capital investment dollar for dollar,” he told CNBC’s Sara Eisen during a “Squawk on the Street ” interview.
“Without any major change in entitlements, entitlements are going to rise. Why? Because the population is aging. There’s no way to reverse that, and the politics of it are awful, as you well know,” Greenspan added.
Opposition to conservative political commentator Michael Knowles on the University of Missouri-Kansas City campus required the intervention of law enforcement after a protester attempted to squirt Knowles with an unidentified white substance.
The Young Americans Foundation invited Knowles to the Kansas City campus on Thursday, where he delivered a lecture titled “Men are Not Women.” However, the university posted on Twitter that while Knowles was speaking, protesters disrupted the event. …
After the incident, Knowles posted on Twitter that the protester got him “a bit in the face and on the side” and said, at first, he thought the substance was paint because of how it smelled. Initially, he assumed it was bleach, but after speaking with the police officers, he posted on Twitter that it was an “unknown odorous liquid.” …During his speech, Knowles argued that the statement, “Men are not women,” should not be considered controversial. … Critics argued that his speech touted transphobic ideology.
Newsweek
The long-running debate over the relationship of Huawei to the Chinese government took an interesting and unexpected turn last week, as the Justice Department disclosed (in the context of the prosecution of Huawei and its CFO for bank fraud and sanctions-busting) that it had obtained orders under Title I of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, targeting the company. …
Two major accounts of that risk have emerged (both of them similar to arguments we also have seen in the context of the Kaspersky-Russia relationship). The most straightforward account turns on the fact that all Chinese companies have comprehensive obligations under Chinese law to comply when the Chinese government seeks information or assistance for national security purposes. The other account goes much further, arguing that there are deep ties between Huawei and Chinese intelligence services and suggesting that Huawei therefore might act as an agent of those services rather than as an independent company with an arms-length relationship with its government.
Lawfare Blog
Problems arise because companies like Huawei and Washington lobbyists perform trusted actions for the users of their system; in this case 5G or the political process respectively. In a ‘trustless’ system anyone can verify the entire chain of actions performed, or the system itself may be powerless to alter it.
Encryption allows people to use any email system without the need to trust it because security is not dependent on the transport. Similarly public block chain systems allow anyone to verify the entire sequence of transactions for themselves to make sure the results are right. So no trust is involved.
From the information point of view irrespective of the legal definitions, a ‘foreign agent’ is any entity that is more likely to act for a hidden client than for the overt one. In the context of public policy the most obvious solution is to lay bare enough of lobbying transactions so the key parts become ‘trustless’, ie anyone can verify it for themselves.
The ‘trust’ problem goes beyond subjective intent. The inability to maintain security of private information affects the well intentioned and the malicious alike. The data breach at the Office of Personnel Management was one of the most devastating blows against US national security even though it may have resulted from incompetence.
China is mining intelligence from an estimated 23 million records of American federal workers, including intelligence and security personnel, stolen in cyberattacks against the Office of Personnel Management, according to a member of Congress.
Free Beacon
Rep. Chris Stewart (R., Utah) said the Chinese are easily gaining information from the stolen records. …
The first official confirmation that China’s government carried out the cyberattacks was made by White House National Security Adviser John Bolton in September.
The office is the repository of federal government personnel records, including social security numbers and documents known as SF-86s that contain personal information about people who apply for security clearances. …The federal government sent notices to the millions of security clearance holders notifying them of the compromise of their personal data. The loss of the sensitive clearance records also includes information on the relatives of security clearance applicants because details about an applicant’s offspring are part of the application process.
The breach involved the extraction from OPM networks of an estimated 23 million records of federal workers, including those who were being evaluated for access to classified information. About 20 million records related to SF-86s were stolen.
This is conceivably the biggest headline that never was. Quite a feat in an admin that counted Snowden, Manning, the rollup of the CIA network in China, missing the rise of ISIS and Benghazi.
The theft at OPM came in two parts, neither of which were prevented by Katherine Archuleta. “She had previously served as National Political Director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Prior to that, she had been Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation in New Mexico, had co-founded the Latina Initiative, had worked at a Denver law firm, and had worked in the Clinton Administration as chief of staff to the Secretary of Transportation, Federico Peña.”
[Obama Spokesman Josh] Earnest said Ms. Archuleta had resigned “of her own volition,” adding that while she had been an “effective director, Mr. Obama believed that new leadership at the agency was “badly needed.” He also noted that she does not have “this particular expertise” in cybersecurity.
NYT
Beth Cobert, the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget and a former longtime management consultant at McKinsey & Company, will step in temporarily to replace Ms. Archuleta while a permanent successor is found, Mr. Earnest said.
Ms. Archuleta, who assumed her post in November 2013, had been under pressure from lawmakers in both parties to resign since last month, when she announced the first of two separate but related computer intrusions that compromised the personnel files of 4.2 million current and former federal workers.
When you combine the litany of disasters with what we now know about lobbying for foreign governments in Washington it’s probable that Collusion has been out of control for some time. It’s a design defect. DC was architected as a national capital, not the capital of the world, which it has become.
Its systems require too much trust to guarantee the necessary integrity. We have to convert such portions as possible into trustless systems. The ‘trustless’ system still relies on trust: it’s just not in parties trusting each other. It’s in the system itself.
One way to achieve this is to create immutable transaction ledgers in which the steps leading to the entries can be independently and repeatedly reproduced.
Craig, for example, wanted to keep his work for foreign governments off the books, in a private ledger. There was not even a way to come to a universal understanding of what he was doing for the Ukranians. That is apparently par for the course. In other words there was no consensus mechanism in DC. The idea was that politics would enforce eventual consistency by forcing the right sequence over rival narratives. One can argue that’s what it eventually did via the upheaval of 2016.
But the price of eventual consistency was a system crisis. Because so much went on with private reckoning when clearing time came there were two sets of incompatible transactions. The whole Mueller thing was an attempt to roll back the ‘wrong transactions’.
The Trump administration pressured the Department of Homeland Security to release immigrants detained at the southern border into so-called sanctuary cities in part to retaliate against Democrats who oppose President Donald Trump’s plans for a border wall, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN on Thursday.
CNN
