And The Fun Continues
MsExPat at Corrente reports from Hong Kong that Snowden Sends a Communique from Moscow. The basic message is that the government is afraid that people are going to get angry about being spied upon by their government.
Charlie Pierce notes in The Snowden Effect, Continued, that the administration is lying to Congress as well as the American people about what they are doing, and are finally being forced to admit it.
And in Joining the Ranks of Outlaw Regimes, ‘Noz notes that in bugging the EU offices the US has violated US law because we signed the Vienna Convention that forbids that sort of thing.
Before this is over the US is going to save a lot of money as US personal are told to leave and US facilities are shut down by Europe. It’s to the point that the only thing from the US that the Europeans may be willing to accept is Edward Snowden. The Green Party in Germany has already suggested it.
Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany and was well aware of the activities of the Stasi, so she is not likely to downplay what the US has been doing. She has political problems of her own and isn’t going to borrow any from the US.
21 comments
The U.S. media has apparently given up on the whole NSA spying story because that would require, like, work, and now is engaged in pointing out that Snowden has cooties. I.e., has made some bizarre statements in the past, made some bone-headed moves, yada yada. Which has nothing to do with the NSA spying story, but it’s easy reporting, so even McClatchey hasn’t done much with the NSA story since reporting on the initial wave of details and denials and “Trust me, I’m Obama!” from the Administration.
Ferrets. We have ferrets as our media, constantly distracted by shiny things. Siiigh!
Heyyy! I had a pair of ferrets as a kid! They were very affectionate, playful (sometimes far too much so), and sneaky! And quite useful at pest control. 😉 They have value. Besides, ferrets love sniffing around for anything interesting, and frequently get themselves in trouble for getting into places they shouldn’t… unlike your media! 😛
I think you meant to say Crows (or possibly Magpies). Both are quite worthless and are especially a nuisance to farmers trying to earn an honest living. They collect shiny things in the hopes of attracting a mate, because they have nothing to offer themselves, except the ability to steal shiny things. 🙂
The smartest thing the EU could do is offer Asylum, but that would take balls and a belief in Human Rights. Not sure they have much in in either department. We’ll see. Then again, my money would be on the French. They do like to be a PITA and haven’t liked the USA for ages (if they ever did). The problem with Germany (and other States) is NATO. If the EU disbanded NATO, or at least put it under full EU control and kicked the USA out… maybe. Don’t see that happening any time soon however. 😉
Well, I think NATO just took a body blow over the Bolivian President’s aircraft. It would also give people a reason not to buy the F-35, which is a plus for their budgets.
The US media is worthless. The ABC, BBC, and CBC offer better coverage of US news than any major US outlet. You have to read to foreign press to find out what’s going on in this country. The media conglomerate isn’t interested in informing you.
The French still have Roman Polanski, so if they’ll offer asylum to a child molester, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do it for a political protestor.
Yeah, I can’t really see NATO lasting long (in it’s current form at any rate). Especially with the USA looking for any way they can to cut spending. Plus the USA really couldn’t care less about Europe right now.
It’s amusing actually, what with Putin and Russia getting stronger almost every day now. 🙂
The French still have Roman Polanski
Yeah… Well, that’s the french for you! Sexual morality was never their strong suit! But, unlike the USA, at least they were *mostly* honest about that. 😉 😈
Oh LOL! Yeah… The fun does continue! 😆
I just caught that at another blog I check occasionally (and should more often, if I had the time!)
Russian spy turned TV personality Anna Chapman ‘proposes’ to Edward Snowden on Twitter
Ahhh… This is turning into “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In”! Heh… 😀
Heh… And speaking of Obama vs Nixon, and Laugh-In… remember this Bryan? 😉
Oops! I forgot to add the attribution for that pic! Apologies…
I got it from ‘Carl Anthony Online’, and the blog has an interesting historical insight to Nixon and the era. 🙂
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In…With Nixon?
Actually appearing on “Laugh In” and saying ‘Sock it to me?’ was a very good move on Tricky Dick’s part, as it resulted in increased popularity by fooling some people into believing he wasn’t a total psychopath. I was a much better event than his meeting with Elvis Presley, whom Nixon obviously didn’t know was extremely popular.
Putin has gone petro and is playing the game very well. The Bolivian Presidential plane incident was a major win for Putin’s natural gas cartel, and will cost Europeans major money next winter, because the South American gas producers are not likely to offer Europe any deals on their gas after that.
After Afghanistan, NATO is not going to be interested in any new adventures with the US, and pretty soon they are going to get tired of paying for militaries they don’t really need.
NATO is already tired of paying for militaries they don’t really need. Most military budgets in NATO are now well under 2% GDP (during the highest spending part of the War on Error U.S. military spending approached 7% of GDP including the “special appropriations” for Iraq and Afghanistan), only Britain and France continue to insist upon spending around 2.5% of GDP on their military (current U.S. military spending is at around 5% GDP). That evil China, BTW? 2% of GDP. Which is why I laugh at the people who claim China will someday be a military threat to the United States — not at their current levels of military spending, which are nowhere near the level needed to build a military capable of projecting power.
Nixon appeared on Laugh-In. Obama appeared on Saturday Night Live. More parallels. Except that Laugh-In was actually funny :).
There was a time when SNL was funny, but then people got famous.
China can field a massive land army, but that’s only a real threat to Russia.
The US wanders around looking for a fight to justify what it spends on the military. The cost of the military was one of the things that doomed the Soviet Union, and it isn’t helping the US. We need to build roads and bridges, not weapons to blow them up.
China’s massive land army also poses a threat to Japan and Taiwan — if China’s soldiers figure out the trick to walking on water :twisted:.
Making an opposed landing without the proper vessels is pretty much just another form of suicide. It would take a long time to build the navy needed to invade any of the islands, and there is no way of hiding that kind of construction and the necessary training. They know how to cross the Amur River.
The Chinese also know how to cross the Yalu River, as the 8th Cavalry found out the hard way during the Korean War. But right now neither South Korea nor China want the hoard of ignorant brainwashed starving peasants that is North Korea, so I think we can rule out use of their massive army on that front.
Yeah, at least until China decides it wants Sth. Korea’s ship building &other high-tech industries, and don’t feel like paying for it. 😉 😀
I came across this interesting article in San Jose Mercury News:
Silicon Valley long has had ties to military, intelligence agencies
Nothing some of us didn’t already know. 🙂
I think we can agree that the batshit crazy leadership of North Korea is protecting South Korea from Chinese acquisition. Having to deal with the North Koreans is too much of a hassle to make taking South Korea worth it.
OTOH, if they nuke North Korea, South Korea becomes a target. They really want land more than industry. They can easily con Western capitalists into building modern construction facilities and training Chinese workers before they are thrown out. The South Koreans need to import more of the necessary raw materials than China does, so South Korea isn’t a serious target at the moment.
Kryten, let’s just say that I know of some people high up in some of the major players who are NSA assets. They don’t say it, but they don’t need to. I got to know some of them during that whole encryption export battle at the end of the 90’s, there were basically two factions within the NSA at the time, those who said that the cat was already out of the bag and foreign countries had encryption as good as American encryption now so might as well let American companies implement strong encryption and make American products more secure against bad guys’ snooping, and the others wanted to keep things as insecure as possible so that the NSA could snoop more easily. The first group (for relaxing the encryption export restrictions) won. And later I noticed a number of the faces I’d gotten to know from that battle high up in places like Google, Lycos, Facebook, and so forth, as well as in some smaller startups focused on analytics. Hmm. Just coincidence, I’m sure :).
Bryan, I think the Chinese right now are operating on a “beat them with capitalism” strategy. They have (perhaps correctly) identified significant weaknesses in today’s crony capitalism environment in the West and are exploiting them. As far as South Korea goes it’s unlikely that they’d be interested in invading even if North Korea wasn’t in the way, because their current game plan calls for South Korea (and everybody else in the region) to be assimilated economically, not militarily.
Kryten, China wants to build their own ship-building industry. Conquering South Korea for their ship building industry would be dumb, because those facilities would not survive the war (the Americans would blow them up if the South Koreans didn’t) and the remaining workers would disappear, leaving China with so much rubble to ponder. China thus far is not making many dumb moves… and that would be a dumb one.
Why pick through what would be left from a war when Western corporations will build them on your land, and train your people, and then you can just take them with a piece of paper. The Chinese have figured out the corporate mindset and have been using it effectively for years.
Everyone who points this problem out to upper management at US corporations gets marginalized for having no ‘vision’ and being unable to think ‘outside the box’. After the assets are seized upper management gets really annoyed if you walk into their office and start covering their desks with the memos you wrote telling them this was going to happen.
As I said Badtux… It’s nothing some of us didn’t already know. 😉
I don’t doubt for a minute that China don’t want a war. They are winning quite well without the hassle. I also don’t doubt that they have contingencies. They have, after all, been doing this for many centuries longer than the USA, and most of the World for that matter. 🙂 They have decided to play the long game, and it’s working quite well, too well actually. 🙂 And that a problem for them. There is such a thing as winning too easily, and being too successful. As the USA is discovering, albeit slowly. If the USA does descend into chaos, China will have to ensure all that hostility is directed elsewhere, perhaps the Mid-East (though China want to stabilize that region as it’s probably their next biggest market), Nth Korea or Russia. My guess would be NK & Russia. China would have to (secretly) help Putin & Russia grow to be a credible threat once again, then sit back and watch you all duke it out and pick up the pieces. Assuming there are any pieces left, which is the downside of any such plan given the state of the crazies running the USA and Russia & NK! 😀 So no, I doubt very much China wants a war. Because they know the nuts are in charge of enough weaponry to turn the Earth into asteroids. Not a good thing for China. And let’s not forget the crazy Israel, Pakistan & UK. It seems everyone with nukes these days is crazy. The only thing stopping any of them from using Nukes, is they are not yet completely suicidal. Give it time… There are plenty of hints that self-preservation is slowly becoming less important.
Now there is a cheery thought before everyone goes to bed! 😆
Doesn’t bother me. *shrug* I’ve known the World is mostly insane for decades, and getting worse each generation. It’s one of the reasons I got out of the game… There wasn’t any point.
The only way China can win, is to figure out some way to stabilize or control the crazies. Good luck with that.
Here’s another shot from the EU (from SpeedMatters):
EU VP thinks NSA spying undercuts U.S. cloud companies
“European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes warned U.S. cloud hosting companies that NSA spying might weaken their appeal”
Bryan, as bad as your Internet/Phone service is, it could be a lot worse (if Verizon get’s it’s way):
“Verizon’s Voice Link ploy running into its own superstorm”
There are some other items on the SM blog this week that should be of interest to some here.
“Blog wrap up for the week of 07/08/2013
Verizon’s plan to eliminate landlines in parts of New York state has raised the ire of groups like CWA and the AARP, as well as the attorney general’s office and hundreds of individuals. FCC commissioners voted unanimously to approve Sprint’s acquisition of Clearwire stock and SoftBank’s merger with Sprint. The U.S. Supreme Court denied Cablevision’s request for a stay of the National Labor Relations Board hearing in its dispute with Brooklyn workers wishing to join CWA. The European Commission’s vice president Neelie Kroes warned at a conference that U.S. cloud hosting companies are harmed in the European market by the revelation that they’re being used by the NSA to spy on individuals around the world. And Acting FCC Chair Mignon Clyburn aims to “close our education system’s bandwidth gap” by improving the E-Rate program.”
Link to the above blog articles:
SpeedMatters
If China wants to calm things down they might consider adding Xanax to their food products instead of lead, mercury, cadmium, ethyl glycol, and melamine.
Oh, yes, the US telcoms are all trying to milk the last penny out of their existing systems, rather than modernizing or expanding them.
We both know that companies have had concerns about US providers for a while, and this just crystallizes the problem for many corporations based around the world. It isn’t just the spying, it is also the aging infrastructure. Until the backbone companies get serious about upgrades, US vendors are at a serious disadvantage. I have a feeling that the reason I can’t get fiber is because it doesn’t belong to the duopoly, is probably belongs to the military and their contractors.
The U.S. backbone is actually in pretty good shape due to all the “dark fiber” laid down during the dot-com boom, which has been slowly activated over the years as traffic increased. It’s the “last mile” that sucks donkey dung.
I think most of the European regulators have long been concerned about the U.S. SAS providers (note that I say SAS — Software As a Service — rather than “cloud” because I use the term “cloud” to refer to the infrastructure that these services run upon, not the services themselves). It is quite clear that none of the US-based providers truly comply with EU privacy laws and it was likely assumed that they were all being snooped by the NSA all along. The main problem with the EU is fragmentation, both linguistic and cultural. Parisians may be issued handbooks instructing them on how to not be snobby about a Facebook-like service written by Germans, but said handbooks would soon litter the streets of Paris, unopened. Germans, similarly, would refuse to use a Facebook-like service run by those effete Frenchmen. And so forth. The end result is that none of the services originating in the EU have managed to get the scale to be competitive in the world market. (Estonia — Skype — is *NOT* in the EU, though they incorporated in Luxembourg to get the European market).
Like it or not, the English-speaking market is still the largest single market on the planet, so services that originate in the English-speaking countries have significant advantages over competitors from places like Germany or France. The EU is going to be hard pressed to get their users to not use Facebook… its international reach is unsurpassed by any of the parochial services that they’ve tried to create themselves. Facebook is like the Microsoft of social media… you can’t live with it, and, if you need that kind of connectedness, you can’t live without it.
So it goes…