dimashq posted:ThreadThe way that Erik Prince ended up owning the former state-owned commercial fishing fleet of Mozambique is probably relevant and worth looking into.
— M Mabeuf (@mmabeuf) March 24, 2021
there's some interesting stuff in here, genuinely important questions being asked, but trying to follow the train of thought is giving me a fucking aneurysm. it's partly the inherent bite-size format of twitter and partly the irony poisoned snarky tone that is now apparently mandatory to post anything on that site.
now, maybe it would focus on the mozambique thing and maybe not, but what i WOULD like to see is an analysis of china's relationship with eric prince, written by a normal human being in human language
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:the irony poisoned snarky tone that is now apparently mandatory to post anything on that site.
authentic irony poisoning is the beatific reward of a posting veteran, shame on the stolen valor poseurs of so-called web site "Twitter"
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:dimashq posted:ThreadThe way that Erik Prince ended up owning the former state-owned commercial fishing fleet of Mozambique is probably relevant and worth looking into.
— M Mabeuf (@mmabeuf) March 24, 2021there's some interesting stuff in here, genuinely important questions being asked, but trying to follow the train of thought is giving me a fucking aneurysm. it's partly the inherent bite-size format of twitter and partly the irony poisoned snarky tone that is now apparently mandatory to post anything on that site.
now, maybe it would focus on the mozambique thing and maybe not, but what i WOULD like to see is an analysis of china's relationship with eric prince, written by a normal human being in human language
I agree, this frustrates me as well
MarxUltor posted:The official story is that wind blew it sideways. I was more suggesting that it would be that easy for a maritime worker to throw a 400 meter long wrench into the gears of international commerce. Or any nation with covert operatives and a reason to shut down traffic through the Suez canal. Some of the northern part of the Suez canal has two lanes and conveniently this happened in the southern part where one single ship of that size could jam the flow of international trade to Europe and eastern US for weeks.
This is how atlantic based aircraft carriers get to and from the Persian Gulf to do imperialisms and now the whole world sees how easily and cheaply they can be owned. If there was a navy ship stuck behind that jam they could probably be meaningfully attacked with antitank missiles. Not something they routinely practice against I would suspect. Then there would be 2 ships blocking the canal and one would be on fire and full of bombs.
If the empire has to shift their boats to going the long way around it looks like that adds about 50% travel time direct from the US, double from the UK, triples it from the navy base in Naples, and instead of stopping for food and fuel and rest in developed Mediterranean ports in fancy white tourist cities they have to try to source logistics for a whole battle fleet out of southern Africa where I'm sure huge bunkers of jet fuel are sitting around every deep harbor where such visitors are welcome, or carry everything with them. The US can do that but it would be expensive, I don't think any other euro navies could.
Whether wind or spooks it certainly seems like a convenient gift to Iranian security. It does hurt their ability to supply Syria, but isn't too bad for Venezuela.
The Ever Given had a steering issue only 18 months ago somewhere in a Dutch canal and crushed a ferry all to shit. The cool thing about a ship that size is that local authorities can't stop it and they have to get the next port to do the investigation. So it is likely this is just standard Dutch malevolence.
Even if this ends up revealed as some sort of limited hangout, it's currently rolling out like everyone expected the Epstein story to do before he was murdered. Crazy shit
Like... maybe Gaetz really is just selling a line to try to weasel out of what's headed his way, but... it's kind of weird to me that Carlson, of all people, is working overtime on damage control, when it's over someone ranting about federal government conspiracies in front of him. Gaetz's allegations are easily in the less-crazy 50% of things that Carlson has had people say to him on his show over the last four years. Usually, Carlson just nods along like the empty-headed publicity ditz he is, knowing that paranoia is how he makes his walking-around money now. But something or someone seems to have prompted the director of Voice of America's gold-plated progeny to run out ahead of his own show and say that no one should pay attention to it this time around. And the headlines that resulted are stuff like:
...so now everyone's concerned about the possible besmirching of Carlson's name with conspiracy theories? Since uh when exactly?
Qanons Learn How Old The Epstein Victims Were Challenge pic.twitter.com/idcdv9Oe35
— jeremy (@jeremythunder) March 31, 2021
cars posted:Why would he get involved in this sting he's alleging he was part of, then? "Hey, you're a federal officeholder up for election every two years, wanna pretend to be a child molester on tape for us?" "Sure yes I will definitely do that"
gonna be frank here, "let's just ask for voluntarily submitted blackmail material and see who bites" sounds like an extremely believable FBI scheme
but he's absolutely guilty
cars posted:it's kind of weird to me that Carlson, of all people, is working overtime on damage control, when it's over someone ranting about federal government conspiracies in front of him. Gaetz's allegations are easily in the less-crazy 50% of things that Carlson has had people say to him on his show over the last four years. Usually, Carlson just nods along like the empty-headed publicity ditz he is, knowing that paranoia is how he makes his walking-around money now. But something or someone seems to have prompted the director of Voice of America's gold-plated progeny to run out ahead of his own show and say that no one should pay attention to it this time around.
because Carlson isn't an idiot, he knows the difference between the usual easily disavowed fiction he peddles on air and someone who is truly in deep shit and dead to rights. I don't find it surprising at all.
1) that Carlson complained about his own nutty-sounding interviewee after the fact and had the entire anti-Trump establishment listen to him at all,
2) that Carlson's distaste was pseudo-"leaked" through supposed third-party sources to reporters writing an entire wave of headline stories about how vehement and thoroughgoing and therefore believable & relatable Carlson's anger supposedly is, and
3) that voices like CNN are writing those stories while framing Carlson as a victim, instead of what they'd usually do in this situation, link Carlson to Gaetz out of sheer opportunism, mocking Carlson as a Trump-style dead-ender while ignoring his protests to the contrary.
Like, the idea of Carlson being a pedo in the FBI's sights is just me making fun of his weird bloated toddler-man aura. I think it would be completely unnecessary to blackmail the literal kid of a VoA director as long as it's all suggested to him from the right corners—that Carlson should lure Gaetz in front of what Gaetz and his people will rightly assume is a conspiracy-theory-hungry Republican audience potentially sympathetic to his story, then kneecap Gaetz in public as many times as he can to show Gaetz how futile it is to keep rambling about anything that happened behind the scenes. Or, sure, maybe Gaetz really did take him by surprise.
But I think it's inarguably strange that suddenly, in the midst of this Gaetz business, there appears a whole different story where the anti-Trump Washington press establishment rides, as one, to the defense of one of their favorite punching bags. It's manufactured completely from Carlson's ass-covering opinion about an interview he gave, filtered through a "source" that might as well be Carlson himself (assuming it isn't), and there's no reason for CNN, the Washington Post, etc., to act out of charity here. One of their favorite stories, and their readers' favorite stories, is still "Tucker Carlson, etc., had some crazy criminal on to say crazy things, because the post-Trump Trumpers are still crazy criminals." Carlson interviewing Gaetz is a golden opportunity to sing their favorite song.
In comparison, "poor Tucker Carlson" seems about as likely as "poor Vladimir Putin" as a united media blitz from those quarters, yet here it is, drowning out everything and anything inconvenient Gaetz might have burbled during that interview while trying to cover his own ass.
shriekingviolet posted:gonna be frank here, "let's just ask for voluntarily submitted blackmail material and see who bites" sounds like an extremely believable FBI scheme
but he's absolutely guilty
I agree that Gaetz is likely guilty, and it's in part because while that plan may be something the FBI would try to do, I doubt they'd find many takers for purely patriotic self-incrimination among a three-generation family of sleaze-ball politicians. The Gaetzes are apparently notorious slimeballs of the quintessentially Floridian type. But to put it mildly, they're not famous for selflessness.
I think someone like Gaetz might go along with the FBI if they approached him and might even provide an associate to take the fall, but I doubt he'd offer up himself with an aw-shucks naivete like he's presenting to the press right now. If there really ever were a FBI sting in which Gaetz was involved, I think the pattern would likely have been the FBI's usual at that level, the Murtha-Abscam set-up, where Gaetz was next in line in a series of takedowns but agreed to dig dirt on others. Though if that's what kicked all this off, Gaetz maybe didn't do as good a job as Murtha did at the negotiating table, but Murtha's a Pittsburgh Democrat who had to be pried out of his district's seat by the angel of Death, so it's hard to be slicker than him.
That's what made the difference here, otherwise it's just some doomed pedo digging himself a hole, even if we disagree on how likely Carlson is to be (and imo, he's genuinely skilled at) soft-peddling comparable stuff to a receptive audience day after day without endorsing it directly. Again imo, you can look at that Twitter thread that's being mocked in my post to see how Carlson's audience sees it as the same stuff, how they remain genuinely receptive and sympathetic to Gaetz's tale of innocence, since QAnon isn't non-partisan in its conspiracy theories—it couldn't be, because Trump's its rallying point, and all the pedo-circuit shit that implicates the Clintons also implicates the Trumps. I think Carlson and his people recognized that, that's why they had Gaetz on at all, and Carlson could have ever-so-softly peddled his story to the viewers' delight while (near-farcically) feigning objectivity, since in most cases, he'd be condemned by most of the press for having a likely soon-to-be-indicted Republican like Gaetz on at all, because Carlson's Carlson and he sided hard with Trump, and boy are the press still sore they couldn't nail Trump to the wall as a rapist, molester, etc.
But I can see how that is a reasonable difference of opinion on where what Gaetz said falls in comparison to how Carlson has recently earned his checks.
However, I think we might also agree it's still interesting, if not surprising, that for the exact same reason Carlson felt obligated to make a big fat deal this time—the alphabet factor—every single big-time media outlet in Washington is all of a sudden putting up their dukes for one of Trump's biggest best good boys. And while it doesn't make me wonder at all if Gaetz is an innocent angel being set up by the mean ol' FBI, it does make me wonder why they're making the story about Carlson's chagrin instead of what Gaetz said and how Carlson had him on to say it. If everything Gaetz says, or every angle that might be accidentally suggested by what he's saying, is just hilarious nonsense that would otherwise make both him and Carlson look bad and get clicks and load ads and so on for CNN's Trumper-hating "media junkie" audience, why run interference for Carlson instead?
It's not even like Carlson is saying, "Wow, this pervert's dissembling and agency-bashing makes me, Punished Tucker, think about how wrong I was about Trump," which is what would usually trigger this weird flip-flip redemption narrative from Washington's press circuit. This is all about the Gaetz interview, and Gaetz. Gaetz's goose is cooked. So why is he being treated like a dangerous dude to be placed outside even the soft-QAnon "mainstream"?
Flying_horse_in_saudi_arabia posted:what are the odds that this ties into the epstein ring?
there's more than enough pedophile antics in washington to go around without everything tying back to epstein
certainly true - just had some similarities with the blackmail, ties to alphabet boys and past fed judges/DAs, stories of jet-setting sex crimes, an individual that has already had some pretty obvious crimes ignored/swept under the rug. then after posting that i saw this:
In 2019, before Epstein was arrested, Matt Gaetz said that Epstein's sweetheart deal from Alex Acosta should NOT be reexamined, arguing that it would be "dangerous" to do so. https://t.co/SjR9YwLh81 pic.twitter.com/toRVRcHlkM
— Gumby, JD (murdered) (@gumby4christ) March 31, 2021
not at all conclusive - could still fit right in with flying horse's point - but doesn't make it any less likely that this somehow ties back. it could be completely unrelated, or could be somehow connected to some bit of the epstein ring/story that are still working their way through the courts. but the similarities i noted do make me think that there is at least some similarity in the situation: my vague guess is that this is some kind of controlled demo of an asset/blackmail ring or inter/intra agency conflict that we are just witnessing the most public facing aspect of.
irt to comments on the specifics of gaetz and tucker made above i had a couple thoughts:
from my reading of whatever gaetz was trying to do on tucker, he admitted to being guilty of everything short of the individual(s) involved being a minor. it seems to me like he thought he fbi would help him keep it quiet/cover it up and make the blackmail disappear.
imo tucker is cia. i never bought his self-told backstory of "failing to join the cia and turning to journalism" with that as a starting point i think the way that cnn and wapo have swung in to his defense makes perfect sense. they are two sides of (ideologically if not actually mockingbird style) controlled media that take swipes at each other for the public's amusement, but have no real interest in sinking each other. tied in with my vague guess above, gaetz might be done-for, sold out, burned, but whoever has arranged or accepted that loss isn't interested in burning amerikkka's #1 tv personality/fascist propagandist/asset in this conflict. wait a week and tucker will have put out some other statement half-endorsing a conspiracy or otherwise inflamatory comment that CNN/wapo/etc can get their clicks over - no need to try score that off this situation
Edited by solidar ()
Good lunch table at Pace HS today! pic.twitter.com/zze4knhK3U
— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) August 16, 2017
tears posted:the fbi got Gaetz hooked on valkyr
Mr. Gaetz has sought to divert attention from the Justice Department investigation by claiming that he and his father were the targets of an extortion plot by two men trying to secure funding for a separate venture.
The men — Robert Kent, a former Air Force intelligence officer who runs a consulting business, and Stephen Alford, a real estate developer who has been convicted of fraud — approached Mr. Gaetz’s father, Don Gaetz, about funding their efforts to locate Robert A. Levinson, an American hostage held in Iran. They suggested to Don Gaetz that Mr. Levinson’s successful return could somehow be used to secure a pardon for Matt Gaetz if he were charged with federal crimes, according to a copy of their proposal provided to The Times.
Soon after, Don Gaetz hired a lawyer and contacted the F.B.I. Matt Gaetz said his father wore a wire and taped a meeting and a telephone conversation with Mr. Alford. An email exchange between Don Gaetz’s lawyer and the Justice Department provided to The Times appears to confirm he was generally cooperating with the F.B.I. as it looked into his claims.
Mr. Kent denied the Gaetzes’ assertions. He said he had heard rumors that Matt Gaetz might be under investigation and mentioned them only to sweeten his proposal. “I told him I’m not trying to extort, but if this were true, he might be interested in doing something good,” Mr. Kent said in an interview.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/us/politics/matt-gaetz-justice-department.html
liceo posted:in other news, there was another attack at the capitol building today. at least one officer killed, another struck, perhaps will succumb to injuries (inshallah). ameriKKKa is fucked and is accordingly the land of the Fucked so who knows, but my assumption is that all of this fanfare surrounding the capitol and D¢ in general is that all of this is staged (wittingly or not by the actors) in order to enhance the image and ideology that the kkkops are important safeguarders of demoKKKracy and that ma$$ $ecurity and $urveillance is fundamental to upholding it. especially after the summer of appropriated cries of abolishing police, this, in my view, is simply PR
at least theyre willing to take down some kkkops while theyre at it
JUST IN - Oil tanker, the Minerva Nike, briefly runs aground in the Suez Canal, causing further delays. The second incident today.
— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) April 6, 2021
WORKERS OF THE BOATS UNITE, YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOOSE BUT YOUR ANCHOR CHAINS
cars posted:tom runs
Unlikely
Let’s say there were a potentially human-extinction-level impact event from outer space incoming within the next 10 to 20 years, and somehow (this is the less likely part) some significant sector of the bourgeoisie worldwide were able to unify just enough to enact a global, security-state-backed conspiracy to hide the truth from most of the public until ~1 year before the impact. Somehow this conspiracy prevents independent observation and recognition of this event’s cause by those outside the conspiracy, at least to the degree that it would lead to an early public outcry beyond their control, and they enact propaganda meant to pursue whatever they see as their own ends in the lead-up to the event.
What do you think that cover-up would look like in terms of propaganda phenomena and epiphenomena? Like what would suddenly be the focus of state-actor-managed Wikipedia articles? Ecstatic religion? Quietism? Pipe dreams about Elon Musk flying everyone to another planet?
Would they just say “fuck it” and let everyone know in the hope they could mobilize the world’s existing power structures to save themselves? This seems to be the premise of a lot of written sci-fi on the topic: there’d be some publicized plan to try and preserve an elite-selected sliver of the human species and, barring some outsized result from an unforeseen cascade of events, the world would more or less accede. I wonder how much of that, though, is just a legacy of Western post-WWII Atomic Age fiction where great trust is put in the power of nerds to scientifically determine everything, including the moral necessity of mass deaths in the face of catastrophe, and where it’s also taken for granted that the world’s leaders, outside of a few corrupt “bad apples”, would follow whatever advice the nerds gave them.
In any case, it seems to me like the bourgeoisie “in the know” would never accept their own demise, but I’m not sure how much of their own ideology they’d believe in the face of certain doom. I think this is a sort of foreshortened parallel to a lot of less dire scenarios that actually exist in the world. So I’m curious to read the thoughts of the posters. the Planet’s dyin’, Cloud
cars posted:KKKonspiracy wild speculation time with cars:
Let’s say there were a potentially human-extinction-level impact event from outer space incoming within the next 10 to 20 years, and somehow (this is the less likely part) some significant sector of the bourgeoisie worldwide were able to unify just enough to enact a global, security-state-backed conspiracy to hide the truth from most of the public until ~1 year before the impact. Somehow this conspiracy prevents independent observation and recognition of this event’s cause by those outside the conspiracy, at least to the degree that it would lead to an early public outcry beyond their control, and they enact propaganda meant to pursue whatever they see as their own ends in the lead-up to the event.
cars posted:This seems to be the premise of a lot of written sci-fi on the topic: there’d be some publicized plan to try and preserve an elite-selected sliver of the human species and, barring some outsized result from an unforeseen cascade of events, the world would more or less accede. I wonder how much of that, though, is just a legacy of Western post-WWII Atomic Age fiction where great trust is put in the power of nerds to scientifically determine everything, including the moral necessity of mass deaths in the face of catastrophe, and where it’s also taken for granted that the world’s leaders, outside of a few corrupt “bad apples”, would follow whatever advice the nerds gave them.
here we go
That real estate has since more than quadrupled to 175 million addresses — about 1/25th the size of the current internet.
”It is massive. That is the biggest thing in the history of the internet,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik, a network operating company. It’s also more than twice the size of the internet space actually used by the Pentagon.
After weeks of wonder by the networking community, the Pentagon has now provided a very terse explanation for what it’s doing. But it has not answered many basic questions, beginning with why it chose to entrust management of the address space to a company that seems not to have existed until September.
The military hopes to “assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” said a statement issued Friday by Brett Goldstein, chief of the Pentagon's Defense Digital Service, which is running the project. It also hopes to “identify potential vulnerabilities” as part of efforts to defend against cyber-intrusions by global adversaries, who are consistently infiltrating U.S. networks, sometimes operating from unused internet address blocks.
The statement did not specify whether the “pilot project” would involve outside contractors.
The Pentagon periodically contends with unauthorized squatting on its space, in part because there has been a shortage of first-generation internet addresses since 2011; they now sell at auction for upwards of $25 each.
Madory said advertising the address space will make it easier to chase off squatters and allow the U.S. military to “collect a massive amount of background internet traffic for threat intelligence.”
Some cybersecurity experts have speculated that the Pentagon may be using the newly advertised space to create “honeypots,” machines set up with vulnerabilities to draw hackers. Or it could be looking to set up dedicated infrastructure — software and servers — to scour traffic for suspect activity.
“This greatly increases the space they could monitor,” said Madory, who published a blog post on the matter Saturday.
What a Pentagon spokesman could not explain Saturday is why the Defense Department chose Global Resource Systems LLC, a company with no record of government contracts, to manage the address space.
“As to why the DoD would have done that I’m a little mystified, same as you,” said Paul Vixie, an internet pioneer credited with designing its naming system and the CEO of Farsight Security.
The company did not return phone calls or emails from The Associated Press. It has no web presence, though it has the domain grscorp.com. Its name doesn’t appear on the directory of its Plantation, Florida, domicile, and a receptionist drew a blank when an AP reporter asked for a company representative at the office earlier this month. She found its name on a tenant list and suggested trying email. Records show the company has not obtained a business license in Plantation.
Incorporated in Delaware and registered by a Beverly Hills lawyer, Global Resource Systems LLC now manages more internet space than China Telecom, AT&T or Comcast.
The only name associated with it on the Florida business registry coincides with that of a man listed as recently as 2018 in Nevada corporate records as a managing member of a cybersecurity/internet surveillance equipment company called Packet Forensics. The company had nearly $40 million in publicly disclosed federal contracts over the past decade, with the FBI and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency among its customers.
That man, Raymond Saulino, is also listed as a principal in a company called Tidewater Laskin Associates, which was incorporated in 2018 and obtained an FCC license in April 2020. It shares the same Virginia Beach, Virginia, address — a UPS store — in corporate records as Packet Forensics. The two have different mailbox numbers. Calls to the number listed on the Tidewater Laskin FCC filing are answered by an automated service that offers four different options but doesn’t connect callers with a single one, recycling all calls to the initial voice recording.
Saulino did not return phone calls seeking comment, and a longtime colleague at Packet Forensics, Rodney Joffe, said he believed Saulino was retired. Joffe, a cybersecurity luminary, declined further comment. Joffe is chief technical officer at Neustar Inc., which provides internet intelligence and services for major industries, including telecommunications and defense.
In 2011, Packet Forensics and Saulino, its spokesman, were featured in a Wired story because the company was selling an appliance to government agencies and law enforcement that let them spy on people’s web browsing using forged security certificates.
The company continues to sell “lawful intercept” equipment, according to its website. One of its current contracts with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is for “harnessing autonomy for countering cyber-adversary systems.” A contract description says it is investigating “technologies for conducting safe, nondisruptive, and effective active defense operations in cyberspace.” Contract language from 2019 says the program would “investigate the feasibility of creating safe and reliable autonomous software agencies that can effectively counter malicious botnet implants and similar large-scale malware.”
Deepening the mystery is Global Resource Systems’ name. It is identical to that of a firm that independent internet fraud researcher Ron Guilmette says was sending out email spam using the very same internet routing identifier. It shut down more than a decade ago. All that differs is the type of company. This one’s a limited liability corporation. The other was a corporation. Both used the same street address in Plantation, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.
“It’s deeply suspicious,” said Guilmette, who unsuccessfully sued the previous incarnation of Global Resource Systems in 2006 for unfair business practices. Guilmette considers such masquerading, known as slip-streaming, a ham-handed tactic in this situation. “If they wanted to be more serious about hiding this they could have not used Ray Saulino and this suspicious name.”
Guilmette and Madory were alerted to the mystery when network operators began inquiring about it on an email list in mid-March. But almost everyone involved didn’t want to talk about it. Mike Leber, who owns Hurricane Electric, the internet backbone company handing the address blocks’ traffic, didn’t return emails or phone messages.
Despite an internet address crunch, the Pentagon — which created the internet — has shown no interest in selling any of its address space, and a Defense Department spokesman, Russell Goemaere, told the AP on Saturday that none of the newly announced space has been sold.