U.S. Government Has Spent More Than Half the Public’s Treasure on Past, Current and Future Military Operations
March 30th, 2007Free trade. The invisible hand of the market. Capitalism.
Would you like an order of Freedom Fries with that?
Via: Common Dreams:
In the words of the great economist and engineer Seymour Melman, we live in a “permanent war economy.†Since the end of World War II, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. Melman pointed out 25 years ago that, at the time, the Pentagon was paying for 37,000 industrial firms, which oversaw over 100,000 subcontractors. Then and now, Pentagon contracts come with 1) guaranteed profits (because the products are typically sold before they are produced); 2) institutionalized cost-escalation (cost overruns are business-as-usual); and 3) products that are neither goods nor services the citizenry produces and consumes. Balance sheet calculations are not relevant to weapons manufacturers and military corporations. The Pentagon is not playing by the economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a profit, then using the profit for further investment and production. The managers at the Pentagon know their financial capital – American’s taxes – is a cash cow waiting to be milked.
Or should we say bilked? American’s hand over their hard-earned dollars to the deciders in Washington who protect the permanent war economy. The military industrial complex has tentacle that spread throughout the Congressional districts in the country. Military installations, private contractors and weapons manufacturers employ people to build cluster bombs, unnecessary war planes, naval destroyers, the next generation of nuclear weapons, “kill vehicles†for space missiles, and more efficient spy satellites. Congress continues to appropriate funds to create weapons systems that range from being obsolete, to those having no hope of ever functioning, to those promising to kill more efficiently, to those promising to allow the U.S. to be the “Masters of Space†through military domination by space-based weapons.
This work often provides union jobs and health benefits (both of which are “endangered species†in America) and the false hope of job security. Local communities defend the jobs (if not the corporations) when there is a threat of loss, knowing that America has few other industrial jobs, and the service sector doesn’t provide the same standard of living.
Meanwhile, military contractors’ CEO compensation is unregulated and obscene.[1] The door revolves between the halls of Congress and the military industrial complex’s “private sector†boardrooms. [Question: If a CEO’s compensation comes primarily from the taxpayers of America, can it still be stated that he works for the “private†sector?] It’s a sweet deal as long as Americans stay afraid of an enemy, there is minimal oversight of cost overruns or failed weapons systems, and questions of ethics, morality, and effective foreign policy are ignored.
Research Credit: Life After the Oil Crash
TJX DATA THEFT: LARGEST EVER
March 30th, 2007pOwNed on an unimaginable scale.
Via: Network World:
Detailing the sheer magnitude of a crime first reported earlier this year, TJX yesterday disclosed in financial reports that at least 45.6 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen in 2005 and another 130,000 last year by hackers who have yet to be caught.
According to Gartner security expert Avivah Litan, the volume of stolen data gives TJX the dubious distinction of being the biggest known victim of hacker-based card fraud in history.
“This is the biggest card heist we’ve heard of so far,†said Litan, an expert in e-commerce-related security.
TJX, which has 125,000 employees and operates hundreds of T.J. Maxx and other stores in the United States and the United Kingdom, did not immediately return a call for comment about the investigation. Earlier this year TJX publicly stated it had contacted law enforcement in December 2006 when it “learned of suspicious software†within its computer systems.
MC Rove
March 30th, 2007I was only able to watch 47 seconds of this. How much can you stand?
Research Credit: JF
Mortgage Crisis Hits Million-Dollar Homes
March 30th, 2007Pop.
Via: Reuters:
Sheriff Leo McGuire presides over foreclosure auctions in Bergen County, New Jersey, where the bidding for a home reached $1.2 million last June — a record for one of the wealthiest counties in the nation.
Homes sold on the auction block for as much as $852,000 this month — more than quadruple the median home price in the United States. County officials believe they are close to setting another record soon.
In Troy, Michigan, Dorothy Guzek, a credit counselor since 1988, has also seen the changing face of foreclosure.
Her clients, while predominantly poor and minorities, increasingly are neither. Nowadays, homeowners holding professional careers with six-figure salaries regularly drop by her office. More and more they come from upscale Michigan communities such as Independence and Clarkston — once the summer retreat for Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Co.
“Because of the financing that was possible, so many people bought the bigger house, the million-dollar house with the bowling alley or the tennis court outside,” says Guzek, who works for GreenPath Debt Solutions, a nonprofit service based in Farmington Hills, Michigan. “People across all income brackets are having financial hardship.”
For those on the frontlines of the growing U.S. mortgage crisis, these are the early signs that the explosion of subprime loans made to mostly poorer borrowers is reaching higher ground. The damage is hitting homes financed through jumbo loans for more than $400,000 and so-called Alt-A loans that are a notch above subprime and a step below prime.
Income Gap Widening, Wealth Concentration at Pre Great Depression Levels
March 30th, 2007Via: New York Times:
Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans — those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 — receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.
The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.
While total reported income in the United States increased almost 9 percent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 percent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping $172, or 0.6 percent.
The gains went largely to the top 1 percent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than $1.1 million each, an increase of more than $139,000, or about 14 percent.
The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.
Cryptogon Reader Contributes $35 / Pookie Is Pissed
March 30th, 2007Pookie has made what she called a, “Denial of Service Donation,” and writes that she, “…is pissed as hell and believes that this is the proper response by Cryptogoners to Denial of Service attacks.”
HA!
Thanks, Pookie, for your incredible generosity and support.
I’ve spent several hours working on hardening the defenses, trying to make sure that this type of attack doesn’t happen again.
I’ll post an update on the original story about this, and if you want to leave comments, go for it there.
A Deconsumption Post!
March 29th, 2007Steve wrote, “Whatever decisions I might make for the future, they should only be ones I’d want to make anyway, regardless of what may actually come to pass in the world.”
How do you improve on that?
47 Large Core Columns, More Than a Dozen of Which Retained Dimensions of 54 x 22 Inches Through the 66th Floor
March 29th, 2007For the most part, I stopped thinking about the demolition of the WTC towers about three years ago. I filed that one away right next to my JFK folder. While it’s not intellectually rigorous to be content with, “The usual suspects did it. I don’t know exactly how. But They did it,” I sleep well at night now.
I’d be interested to know, however, what proponents of the official story have to say about the massive steel cores, now that the suppressed WTC blueprints have been leaked to researchers and published online.
Watch some videos of those buildings coming down again and keep this in mind about each one: 47 large core columns, more than a dozen of which retained dimensions of 54 x 22 inches through the 66th floor, and tapered in stages on higher floors.
Via: wtc7.net:
A coalition of independent 9/11 investigators and journalists today announced the online publication of a set of original blueprints of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The set is composed of over 200 never-before-published drawings, including plans, elevations, and details, given to physicist Dr. Steven E. Jones by an individual interested in a more complete analysis.
Denial of Service
March 29th, 2007UPDATE 2: In Summary – Bad Behavior
But first, I will say that I’m quite sure that this wasn’t done by the U.S. government. Why? Because a few U.S. military and government zombies were involved with the attack. If this was a U.S. government operation, I seriously doubt that they would use zombies from their own networks. I know, never underestimate the stupidity of the U.S. government, but even I don’t think they would be that stupid. Allow their machines to be compromised by a bot herder, probably a 14 year old Russian boy? Now that sounds more like it.
People with multiple propellers in their beanie caps have offered advice; everything from Apache modules to suggestions on re-writing the caching behavior of WordPress (HA!) to onion routed webservers in undisclosed locations. The best tip (in terms of ease of implementation, and chances of working), however, came from a Blue Host support tech. (Blue Host is the company that hosts Cryptogon.) I asked one of their guys to look at what happened and he suggested the Bad Behavior plugin.
I’d heard about BadBehavior, but I thought it was just for comment spam. Oh no, Grasshopper. That thing is a soup to nuts bullshit reduction system.
I like the sound of this:
Bad Behavior runs before your software on each request to your Web site, so if a spam bot does visit, it will receive nothing, and your software never runs. This reduces the amount of server CPU time, database activity and bandwidth spent on processing robots which are just harvesting your site and delivering junk.
And this:
“Online risks are becoming more complex and pervasive by the day,†says the home page of the Cyveillance web site.
Indeed, one of the risks is that your Web site might be targeted by Cyveillance.
The company says that it crawls the Internet looking for phishing scams, identity theft, illegal credit card numbers, trademark and copyright infringement, and more. It’s also been known to work on behalf of the government to spy on whistleblowers who expose waste, fraud and abuse. Some have even alleged that Cyveillance bots attempt to illegally hack into Web servers.
Cyveillance uses robots which crawl your Web site pretending to be a legitimate Web browser and completely ignoring your robots.txt file. Then it tries to figure out whether you’ve downloaded any illegal music, or said something bad about some company. It then sends you threatening letters ordering you to take your site down, even when you haven’t done anything wrong.
Bad Behavior doesn’t just block spammers. It’s meant to target any bot which overloads a Web site, attempts to hack in, delivers spam, acts in an unethical manner, etc.
By relying on analyzing the HTTP requests themselves, rather than simply the IP address, Bad Behavior has blocked Cyveillance almost from the very first release last year, regardless of what IP address range they move to in order to hide their connections. An audit of six months worth of logs shows that Bad Behavior was able to successfully identify and block Cyveillance bots even when they used previously unknown IP address ranges.
In other words, this is exactly what I need. I’ve installed Bad Behavior on Cryptogon and Farmlet…
I don’t know if this will work, but it sure seems like it will. Homeland Stupidity give this software away for free. I’m going to allocate a portion of Cryptogon’s March earnings to assist with further development of this software. Thanks Homeland Stupidity / Bad Behavior! And even more thanks to Cryptogon contributors!
– – – End Update – – –
UPDATE 1: It Stopped
It’s over. It stopped, for now. I don’t know why. Anyway, there you have it.
* Queue up the Twilight Zone theme music *
Maybe that was just the warm-up round. Now that the attacker knows how much my server will tolerate, he/she can more effectively target resources in the future? If you want to strip a bolt, it’s helpful to know how many threads it has before you start turning your wrench. Just a guess. I’m falling back on what I learned about offensive information warfare when I was in school long ago.
– – – End Update – – –
Cryptogon is experiencing a distributed denial of service attack. These aren’t junk Java spam crawlers. They’re IDing themselves as various operating systems and browsers. Each zombie runs a multithreaded get of / until BlueHost’s DOS protection system temporarily suspends my account to protect the server. The offending bots leave. Then others show up.
If you see a BlueHost page with a CPU warning, that is why.
I considered providing a list of IPs to launch strikebacks on, but I thought that fighting back might get ME in trouble. It’s also pointless. The attacker could have thousands of zombies under his/her command. The poor idiots who own the offending machines don’t even know that their systems are pWnEd by a bot herder.
I’m going to try to see what I can do about this.
Why not a plugin for WordPress? Load any single page five times in under a minute, for example, and that session is done. Is there some Apache level thing I could do with htaccess?
Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience.
Cryptogon Reader Contributes $20
March 28th, 2007Thanks MS!
