June 17, 2017

Some street photography

Although I don't adhere to any particular school or aesthetic, I consider all my work to be "street photography" for the simple reason that it's all done while walking here or there. That applies to the flower photos I posted in my intro as well as more typical "street shots" like these.


Pigeon Man, Ottawa


Curiosity


Already a Star


Sartorial Monks


Practice in the Park

June 16, 2017

A couple of shots to introduce myself

Purple Clarity


Promises

I've been shooting since 1968. Most of my past work has been photojournalism, but now I've shifted my focus from "la condition humaine" to simple beauty.

Technical info: Nikon D7100. The top shot was done with a Nikkor 70-200mm f4. The bottom shot was with a Sigma 50mm f1.4 Art which is my favorite lens at this point. Photoshop as required.

June 16, 2017

Buzzfeed: From Russia With Blood

https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-14-suspected-hits-on-british-soil

The London square was still and cold when the body fell, dropping silently through the moonlight and landing with a thud. Impaled through the chest on the spikes of a wrought iron fence, it dangled under the streetlamps as blood spilled onto the pavement. Overhead, a fourth-floor window stood open, the lights inside burning.

The dead man was Scot Young. The one-time multimillionaire and fixer to the world’s super-rich had been telling friends, family, and the police for years that he was being targeted by a team of Russian hitmen – ever since his fortune vanished overnight in a mysterious Moscow property deal. He was the ninth in a circle of friends and business associates to die in suspicious circumstances. But when the police entered his penthouse that night, they didn’t even dust for fingerprints. They declared his death a suicide on the spot and closed the case.

A two-year investigation by BuzzFeed News has now uncovered explosive evidence pointing to Russia that the police overlooked. A massive trove of documents, phone records, and secret recordings shows Young was part of a circle of nine men, including the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who all died suspiciously on British soil after making powerful enemies in Russia. The files reveal that Young lived in the shadow of the Russian security services and mafia groups after fronting for Berezovsky – a sworn enemy of the state – in a series of deals that enraged the Kremlin, including the doomed Russian property deal known as Project Moscow. British police declared the deaths of all nine men in Berezovsky’s circle non-suspicious, but BuzzFeed News can now reveal that MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, asked its US counterparts for information about each one of them “in the context of assassinations”.

Earlier this week, we revealed that US spy agencies had handed the British government high-grade intelligence that the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichnyy, who died in Surrey in 2012, was likely assassinated on the direct orders of the Kremlin – but the authorities sidelined that and other evidence pointing to murder, instead declaring that he had died of natural causes. Today, we can reveal that US intelligence officials suspect a further 13 people – including Berezovsky and eight members of his circle – have been assassinated on British soil by Russia’s security services or mafia groups, two forces that sometimes work in tandem.

June 16, 2017

Meme: Mueller Time

Please share.

June 14, 2017

Trump is currently working on his next book:

"The Art of the Ordeal"

h/t to Mrs. Jackalope.

June 13, 2017

Who had their own phone legally tapped to collect evidence?

And then a government request to extend the monitoring after it was shut off was denied? Curious?

Here's the case, with identities redacted.

https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/new-york/nyedce/1:2017mc01679/402909/2/0.pdf

There is an unsubstantiated report that the "witness" in question was none other than James Comey, who was collecting evidence on Donald, Donald Jr. and Eric. If that report is even close to true it's the most galactically incredible story I've ever read, and I read a LOT of SF when I was a kid. Comey may have essentially had himself wired - had his own phone legally tapped so he could record Trump et al. Trump should definitely think twice about firing Bobby Three Sticks.

Lordy, maybe there ARE tapes!

June 12, 2017

U.S. Power Companies Warned Nightmare Cyber Weapon Already Causing Blackouts

U.S. Power Companies Warned ‘Nightmare’ Cyber Weapon Already Causing Blackouts
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newly-discovered-nightmare-cyber-weapon-is-already-causing-blackouts

Seven minutes before midnight last Dec. 17, a bomb of sorts went off in a high-voltage substation north of Kiev.

But if you were standing outside the 20 acres of gleaming metal transformers and coils, you wouldn’t have heard a bang or seen a flash. It wasn’t that kind of bomb. It was a piece of malicious software that had been hiding in a control-room computer miles away, waiting for the right time to reveal itself. At 11:53 p.m., the logic bomb transmitted a staccato burst of pre-programmed commands to the substation, popping one circuit breaker after another until a strip of houses in and around western Kiev were plunged into darkness.

Technicians responded to the Pivnichna substation and took the circuit breakers off computer control, restoring power a little after 1 a.m. It was only the second confirmed case of a computer attack triggering an electrical blackout, and compared to the first, 12 months earlier—also in Ukraine—it was a fizzle, affecting far fewer customers and for a fraction of the time. In the six months since the Kiev attack, security researchers have wondered why the hackers even bothered with such a fleeting disruption and speculated that someone was using Ukraine as a testing ground for a more serious attack.

Now that dark assessment seems to be confirmed. Researchers at two security companies on Monday announced they’ve finally found and analyzed the malware that triggered the Kiev blackout, and it’s far worse than imagined. The computer code, dubbed “CrashOverride” by Maryland-based Dragos, and “Industroyer” by ESET in Slovakia, is a genuine cyber weapon that can map out a power station’s control network and, with minimal human guidance, issue malicious commands directly to critical equipment. Only once before has the world seen malware designed for such sabotage, with the 2010 Stuxnet virus used against Iran’s nuclear program. CrashOverride is the first to target civilians and the first such malware built to target a nation’s power supply.

It’s unclear who created CrashOverrride. Both ESET and Dragos say it was built from scratch, leaving none of the usual fingerprints that allow analysts to link one hacking campaign to another. Ukraine has faced a near-biblical plague of cyberattacks since entering into hostilities with Russia three years ago, and many have led unequivocally to Moscow. But not so with CrashOverride. The only thing that’s certain, says security researcher Robert Lee, CEO of Dragos, is that the malware wasn’t built as a one-time weapon. It’s designed from the ground up to be easily reconfigured for a variety of targets and contains some payloads that weren’t even fired off in the Kiev attack.

“It’s a nightmare,” Lee said. “The malware in its current state would be usable for every power plant in Europe. This is a framework designed to target other places.”

June 11, 2017

Not a conspiracy theory any more.

Some things (think "Grassy Knoll" and "9/11" here) stay mysteries due to the lack of evidence. The political catastrophe in America is not a mystery any more. All the evidence needed is being collated by Bobby "Three Sticks" Mueller and his sidekick "Samurai" Schneiderman.

Just as this is not a mystery any more, it is also not a "conspiracy theory". It's simply a conspiracy. A conspiracy to disrupt the national integrity of the United States for concurrent financial profit - involving a variety of enemies foreign and domestic, including "Two Scoops" Quisling the Puppet POTUS.

This has been an attempt to create the largest Disaster Capitalism scenario in human history.
Thanks to the free world's intelligence communities, it's failing.

June 9, 2017

Total vindication? Not so fast...

Special counsel Robert Mueller has recruited the Justice Department’s top criminal law expert to help with his investigation of ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials.

Deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben, who has argued more than 100 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and oversees the Justice Department’s criminal appellate docket, will be assisting Mueller on a part-time basis, according to sources familiar with the arrangement.

The move signals that Mueller is seeking advice on the complexities that have arisen already in the investigations, including what constitutes obstruction of justice.

"Michael Dreeben is to criminal law what Robert Mueller is to investigations,” former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said Thursday night. “Literally the very best. Yet another sign of how serious Mueller is about this matter." Now a partner at Hogan Lovells, Katyal has been a key figure in challenging President Donald Trump’s travel ban.

http://www.nationallawjournal.com/id=1202789177543/Mueller-Enlists-Top-Criminal-Law-Expert-for-Russia-Probe

It looks like there are fireworks in our future!

June 9, 2017

How we got here, and what do we do about it?

The Russians waged information war on the US election, and had considerable success. However, I don't think they would have succeeded as much as they did unless a segment of society was susceptible to the messages they used. Here are some thoughts on why they were so vulnerable to the Russian/Trump message.

To be as fair as possible (?) to Trump's voters, they have been subjected to relentless brainwashing through AM radio and other media for a generation and a half now. The brainwashing is a form of the technique called "psychic driving" developed by Dr. Ewan Cameron for the MK Ultra program in the 1950s and 60s. It 's a very simple technique that involves relentless exposure to a single repeated message or theme. Success depends on there being no counterbalancing information available to the subject.

There is an arc that runs from the Powell Memo of 1971, through the co-opting of public discourse by business interests, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, media consolidation, the rise of monolithic right-wing AM radio networks, and finally to the Citizens United ruling. That set of interlocking events created the necessary information bubble, and plowed and fertilized the social soil in which the malignant seed of Trumpism germinated and flourished.

I think the social damage can be undone, but it will require a wholesale reset of laws governing business, the media and politics. If that can be accomplished - which is a tall order on its own - and a deprogramming effort instituted, then a generation and a half later some semblance of sanity may return.

Once the immediate problem of Trump has been resolved, we are still left with a society in which a large number of people appear to have deeply flawed perceptions of reality. Where do we start to fix the broken pieces of our society?