China has more. They have enough that this is a drop in the bucket. While they might be as blatant and ineffective as Russia by interfering with an election, they want a low profile and to maximize capture of revenue, so they are more about making money than trying to put feces on the face of the American political process.
You people should pick your battles. It would help if you knew the battlefield first.
How - the special counsel Mueller has subpoena authority.
First link from indictments in list form. The one I saw on TV was that guy with Hillary in a cage in parades - he was paid by Russians to make it. I also remember reading about the pro and anti gun rallies at that Texas state park - the Russians made the Facebook page for both sides in that little incident.
https://mashable.com/2018/02/16/indictment-russian-trolls-in...
Presumably Mueller used that subpoena on Facebook and internet providers and the Russians didn't try to hide very hard and used mostly Russian ip addresses.
There's also the fact Facebook admitted it sold ads and post promotion to Russian agencies and told Congress the reach of those ads and posts. Recently Facebook revealed to all users in North America whether or not they had interacted with those ads/posts. Several news organizations have independently found the data from other sources including actual interviews with the people working in Russia.
There was also several different Facebook campaigns where they got Africans with pidgin English to pretend to be Americans and try to inflame white nationalists and latent racists fears.
I've heard all sorts of the juicy details, it makes a great story there's no doubt. What I'm looking for is some substantial, verifiable evidence to overcome my suspicions at how perfect of a story it is, as well as some of the inconsistencies.
For example:
> Presumably Mueller used that subpoena on Facebook and internet providers and the Russians didn't try to hide very hard and used mostly Russian ip addresses.
So on one hand, article after article tells us how sophisticated these hackers are, yet these very same hackers didn't hide their ip addresses, and also openly posted links on twitter that were supportive of Russia. Doesn't something about that seem a little off to you? If it does, you'll be the first person I've encountered who think it does, everyone else is completely confident that this is an open and shut case. Yet, none of these same people can point to any specific evidence that could convince me. Sure, everyone has some articles full of juicy stories, usually containing confident statements from high ranking government officials assuring us crimes have been committed and they have proof, but I've never been able to find a person who could point me directly to any proof.
This feels a bit like some things we've experienced in the past, where the "facts" about an enemy, that we're are assured are 100% completely true and verified, trust us turn out to not be true several years down the road. But by then, we've already spent trillions of dollars and waged a war killing thousands of innocent people.
I'd rather not go down that path again, so I'm sorry if I can't join in the party vilifying the evil Russians, because based on the information I have so far, it seems like classic misdirection with the primary beneficiary once again being military budgets, and everyone is just a bit too enthusiastic to believe anything they're told.
EDIT: There is no shortage of internet downvotes for people like me who aren't willing to go along with this story, but there is a severe shortage of people who will put me in my place with actual content. You can probably imagine the effect this might have on the certainty I feel in the correctness of my stance. Unlike others, I'm open to having my mind change, but for some reason no one can muster any effort beyond a condescending and intellectually lazy "let me google that for you".
The leader of Cambridge Analytica bragged about breaking US and UK law by reporters posing as prospective clients.
I guess that could be faked ala deepfakes or whatever but it looks pretty definitive.
https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-revealed-t...
They have some of the Russians who worked for the RIA interviewed for newspapers and admitting what they did, which kind of blew my mind. I guess one could claim those were faked, like the moon landing conspiracy theorists.
From your own example which I presume is about the Iraq war, there is nothing that an ordinary citizen can do to prove that powers in the US, UK, and Kuwaiti governments (and Iraqi agents working in favor of an attack on Iraq) falsified the evidence they presented to the public for a compelling argument for invading Iraq without relying on sources that cannot be verified by an ordinary citizen without access to the journalists/non proliferation experts/government agents responsible and nothing an ordinary citizen can do to prove US claims that Iraq had an active WMD program and mistreated Kuwaiti babies as claimed at the time (by what we know now was a state actor who lied for Kuwait) in congressional testimony after the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. Even the New York Times and that one reporter famously lied flat out about Iraqi weapons programs and abuses in the build up to the war. But there were plenty of people who were investigating the claims of Iraqi WMD who said there was nothing there and that led to a lot of people protesting against the war. I don't see any investigators for the FBI or NSA coming out and being a whistle blower and saying this Russian thing is faked, on the contrary, the only whistle blower who came out so far, actually showed the internal NSA documents that said the USA elections was under cyberattack by Russia. The most reputable guy who came out for the Iraq WMD was possibly Colin Powell. Less well know is that he was also the first US Army investigator who looked into the My Lai massacre and he found that nothing was done wrong, so he was kind of used to this type of thing by then. It took a second Army investigator to reveal what happened there.
Or more contemporaneously there is nothing a citizen can do to prove that the recent Russian spy who was released to the UK and attacked was poisoned with a Russian only sourced nerve agent. And if it was the Russian nerve agent (that the Russians offically proclaimed to have destroyed all stockpiles of), there's no way for a citizen to prove it was Russian government behind it or that some other power was responsible for usage of it.
I didn't vote either way on your comment, it just seems like an impossible standard.
I honestly don't think wanting to see verifiable evidence before forming a decisive opinion on something is anything near an impossible standard, especially since as you've noted, our governments and newspapers are known to lie to citizens. Anyone who's done any reading on the topic outside of the mainstream knows what you see on TV in the west is a slanted version of the truth at best. And yet, look how absolutely certain people are about their beliefs, but when asked to provide some of the hard-factual content they read to form this rock solid opinion, almost no one has anything other than a downvote. To me, this looks like some sort of a classic mania, and it's quite concerning.
As they should, but I read another Authoritative Proof that many people assured me I should take Very Seriously that used the posting of pro-Russian propaganda as the proof that Twitter bots that interfered with the election were Russian.
I don't doubt at all that there is a government sponsored organization in Russia that promotes Russian interests via cyber operations, as I'm sure there is in the United States. I'm looking for proof that:
a) this isn't a 3rd party posing as Russians
b) The harm or danger of this meddling is proportional to the airtime and Very Serious Tones of Voice we've been subjected to 24x7 for the last year.
Do you know of any compelling (and verifiable by a civilian) evidence that could help me with that?
How much reading are you willing to make time for? I've collected a very large number of links to source, research, & analysis material on Russia's ongoing active measures campaign over the last 14 months (though ironically, I still haven't gotten around to reading the recent indictment). This is a complex issue, and my perception is that a full proof of all the claims alleged about Russia's operation will require much more detail and logical inferences than most people who keep harping about "where's the proof? where's the smoking gun?" really expect. But if you want to keep the scope limited to just your a) and b), then I can probably dig up some compelling and hopefully verifiable public evidence in support of them (at least in support of your point a - for b, the only people who have metrics & data on how effective and impactful this operation has been on our country are probably the IRA, Russian intelligence services, and Cambridge Analytica. So point b is tougher for me, but I could at least point you to proof of the dark seriousness of their intent and goals). It might still be a lot of material to go over, though. Fair warning.
a) Feel free to read the indictment, some detail there. I assume there will be far more at a later point.
b) I have no idea what effect it had. I personally am not sure it did have any effect that made a difference. Coverage is still warranted because attacks from foreign nations are newsworthy regardless of success.
Hydrogen has hard risks, and high costs. Density. Corrosion. Tunneling/leaking. A new trillion-dollar distribution infrastructure to replace the fluid-version we use for petrol.
What about methanol? We can convert hydrogen to hydrocarbon. Liquid is dense, much less dangerous, less acidic, less leaky, and our current trillion-dollar infrastructure already uses it as a substantial additive.
Is it in common use as such? Meaning 92 octane is 88 buffered with methanol? If it’s just in those little octane booster bottles, I would not consider that a “substantial additive“ in the context of the trillion dollar petroleum industry.
Welfare is engineered to fail, and it fails.
You can't build a system by American political committee and expect it to actually work.
There are known good solutions for poverty that work reliably and consistently well. That isn't what the US welfare system is engineered for. It is engineered to put money in the hands of political donors, not resolve poverty.
The solution to resolving poverty, much like the Buffet rule for politicians, would work overnight, but will never be implemented. Buffet says a law that says no standing politician is eligible for re-election in a year when minimum true GDP year-over-year growth for the last 2 years has been below 3% would work. He is right.
A similar law, based on "theory of constraints" and directly extractable from the pages of "the goal" would work for poverty, but has (sadly sadly) the same political palatability as drinking a gallon of raw sewage.
Dang this lost, broken, wrecked political system and the scoundrels who are in power and abuse it.
> Buffet says a law that says no standing politician is eligible for re-election in a year when minimum true GDP year-over-year growth for the last 2 years has been below 3% would work. He is right.
There is no way Buffet isn't aware of Goodhart's Law. He is smart. Are you sure you didn't misunderstand him somehow?
Sounds like you're answering "What strategy may work to solve poverty?" or something close to that. OP said there are "known good solutions for poverty that work reliably and consistently well". I'm interested to hear what is known to work, not what might work.
No science and technology are the only things that has been shown to work. Since the industrial revolution the same playbook has been applied successfully in country after country. Look at China. It was not until they allowed science and technology to be used to its full capacity did they drag the vast majority of people out of grinding poverty.
The parts of the world where poverty is still high are those where science and technology have not yet arrived.
...how well do we use our freedom to choose the illusions we create? -Timbuk 3
Oscar Wilde says:
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Does the soul change?
It is a vast organization with vast bureaucratic momentum and organizational inertia. Can leadership change those? Not even a little. Intel can't change. Emerson can't change. And they have huger and more existential force pushing for change against a smaller mass.
Is the soul any different today than yesterday?
Nope.
In ten years you can ask again, and the answer might be maybe.
So the question behind the question is "what is the real soul of the NSA?". Look at their deeds. Words and actions over time tell truth. Look at the trend of their deeds over time.
