Am I the only one having a hard time keeping up with all the news?

[Gabi Hayes]

11. check out what they've accomplished in Sweden and France, and

are up to in the Netherlands

Russian Hackers May Now Be Mucking With European Elections
France, Germany, and the Netherlands could be vulnerable.

When the US intelligence community released a report in early January laying out the evidence for Russian meddling in the US election, US officials warned that this wasn't a one-off attack, and that Russia could soon set its hacker corps loose to disrupt elections in other countries. "Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future efforts worldwide," the report said, "including against US allies and their election processes."

Putin didn't wait long to fulfill that prediction. On February 22, the Moscow Times reported that the Russian government had "created a new military unit to conduct 'information operations' against Russia's foes." Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said, when announcing the unit, that "propaganda should be smart, competent and effective." There's no concrete evidence yet, but it appears that Russia may be now attempting to weaken NATO and to divide Europe by destabilizing elections in France and Germany, two of the EU's strongest members.

"This form of interference in French democratic life is unacceptable and I denounce it," Jean-Marc Ayrault, France's minister of foreign affairs, said on February 19 in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, a French newspaper. "The French will not accept that their choices are dictated to them," he said while discussing Russian actions in Europe and attempts to weaken non pro-Russian candidates ahead of the country's presidential election in May.

Ayrault was responding to reports that the Russian government may have been targeting the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, a centrist "pro-liberal and pro-Europe" candidate who has a chance of defeating Marine Le Pen, a right-wing nationalist, in the hotly contested French presidential elections this May. Le Pen has promised to pull France out of the European Union, and, much like Donald Trump, has advocated a better relationship with the Russian government. Macron's campaign has said its computer systems have been attacked, and that "fake news"—that include allegations of a homosexual affair and attempts to connect Macron with American financial interests and Hillary Clinton—has been spread throughout France by Russian-owned media, such as Sputnik and RT

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as I heard somebody say on the radio today, for the cost of (some sort of) bigass, bloated navy white elephant ship, the russians can hire five THOUSAND hackers

that frickin USS Ford has run up over seventeen billion so far, including about 5 bil in RandD, and it's not over.

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