I can’t seem to live up to your expectations. What exactly were you expecting me to say?

Well, you really don’t need to worry about my, or anybody else’s expectations, especially on the Internet. Enjoy your retirement. Working in tech you definitely deserved it.
As for the topic itself, when somebody asks me the same question is, I ask simple questions:
How technical you are? If they don’t know I ask a couple of questions and get the estimate.
As:
-how does the personal computer boot?
-what are rings in an operating system?
-explain OSI model for me, please.
Hehe…most fail on the first, so you know. The “normal consumer”.
In that case, as I get an impression the guy who asked the question is, there are only two options:
Find somebody to do it for you.
Do nothing.

Writing firewall rules is dependent on the situation and what’s to be protected. I gave him the generic hardware set up, the rudimentary software setup but when it comes to the fine detail that’s just not possible on this forum.

You did.
You also know that having a firewall is just a tiny bit of the overall approach to IT security.
Modern exploits don’t even care about the firewall; they travel within the allowed traffic. Let alone pure phishing and such. We know it’s a layered problem including habits, self-discipline etc. The user was, is and will always be the weakest part of the security chain.
Besides, most “IT professionals” don’t know how to write firewall rules. PC repair techs don’t care much about it, let alone software developers. Except, of course, the OS guys and “hackers”.

If he has the desire, what I provided is a good starting point for further enlightenment but one needs to work at it.

Precisely.
But, again, let’s be fair: to write proper firewall rules for new Linux installation requires learning curve the average user simply can’t do.
You could’ve recommended him installing pfSense type of package which would ease the workload but even that would soon create issues he’d need to go to forums and ask proper questions.

Different version of Linux have different preferred software for a firewall. They have different install procedures that I can’t possibly cover here.

Exactly.

Maybe I made a mistake in trying to answer his question, but at least I tried.

You did and I appreciate that (again, you don’t need to care what I appreciate or not).
I just felt he couldn’t do it, and even if he could, it only addresses one layer in the security chain. Even that requires monitoring, proper reaction, updates/upgrades.

My bottom line in such cases:
How good are you in “tech”? Usually “zero”. No prob.
What are you concerned about (what’s the REALISTIC threat)? Usually, as the guy who asked the question, malicious organizations and individuals, looking for money/mischief.
How much money are you willing to spend on the issue? Usually very little.
Could you stick to written rules, procedures etc? Usually not.
The recommendation: get a friend/acquaintance to do it for you. BTW, won’t be much, really. BACKUP your data properly and hope for the best. If/when feeling “hacked” call that guy.
End of story.

Now, small business owner asking the same question gets a quite different answer. But his stakes are higher and he’s willing to spend more money and effort on the issue.
Etc.

We both know it’s a complex issue and requires a professional approach.
We can chat here about it but that’s pretty much it. Chat, not work, and definitely not proper delivery.

I can’t seem to live up to your expectations. What exactly were you expecting me to say? Writing firewall rules is dependent on the situation and what’s to be protected. I gave him the generic hardware set up, the rudimentary software setup but when it comes to the fine detail that’s just not possible on this forum.

If he has the desire, what I provided is a good starting point for further enlightenment but one needs to work at it. Different version of Linux have different preferred software for a firewall. They have different install procedures that I can’t possibly cover here. Maybe I made a mistake in trying to answer his question, but at least I tried.

Don’t get me wrong, but……I mean…….are you taking a piss here?
Please.

Especially with:

You’ll need to set up masquerading and a firewall application.

The guy did ask nicely.

I wrote a page as a comment, read it, and trashed it.

My only advice to the guy: find a pro you trust and have him/her do the work.
More money and expertise….more security.
In his case, never above script kiddies.

This is a broad brush overview. Don’t expect to be able to bring up a firewall without spending time getting an education on the topic.

Get an old PC; almost anything will do. Install 2 network adapters (Ethernet NIC’s). Speed of NIC is really unimportant as the lowest available will be 100mbps which is more than adequate for typical web surfing. If you have some outrageously fast Internet connection then go for 1000mbps NIC’s. 8 Gig of ram is more than adequate if you can find that little in 2 sticks. Get the smallest hard drive or SSD you can find. You’ll need a monitor, mouse and keyboard for the install but once things are up and running, you can run the box ‘headless’ meaning no monitor, no mouse and no keyboard. The thing will just sit and run 24/7 sipping electricity. Linux boxes are so stable that my record at a client site was 6 years and several months on a single boot. We turned it off because we were running out of disk space. Show me a Windows box that can stay stable for 6 years without a reboot.

Download a flavor of Linux. I prefer Ubuntu 18 or the most recent flavor of Fedora. Follow the instructions to explode the download onto a USB stick. Boot the box and via the BIOS force it to read the USB stick instead of the norm which would be a drive. Once the Linux install procedure starts, you’ll have to follow the prompts for information to create a bootable Linux O/S on the drive/SSD. There’s lots to know here.

You’ll need to know things about your Internet connection like do you have a static or dynamic IP from your ISP as that will be your ‘Public’ interface. You’ll have to make up a name for the box as that will be the ‘hostname’. Then you should use 192.168.something.something as the IP address of the private side NIC. A firewall application will move traffic according to rules between the Public and Private NIC’s. The ‘something’ referenced previously is any number from 1-254. Just pick some numbers you like, eg 192.168.37.42 or 192.168.216.197 or 192.168.9.13 or … you get the idea. For a network mask, state: 255.255.255.0 .

Once the install is over, remove the USB stick and bounce the box. That’s trade jargon for reboot the machine. A Linux Operating environment should show up. First thing is to install all the available patches for the O/S. The download could be months old and Linux is updated frequently (but painlessly), so get all the patches applied to get it up to date. After the update finishes, bounce the box to load up the new software components.

Here’s where things get tricky for a newby. You’ll need to set up masquerading and a firewall application. Your personal machine/Mac/Windows/Linux/refrigerator/etc will be cable connected to the private NIC. Your Internet cable will be connected to the Public NIC.

If you insist on WiFi, cable connect a WiFi access point or other gadget to the Private NIC and it should offer a DHCP service so your personal machine can get an IP address from it. These WiFi gadgets have varying capabilities and service offerings, so I can’t give you any more info on WiFi except to say I don’t like it as it’s a security hole. If you have a smart neighbor he will be surfing on your Internet connection in no time and might attack you ON YOUR PRIVATE SIDE AVOIDING THE FIREWALL ENTIRELY because the WiFi is on your private side.

If you have more than one personal machine to connect to the Private side, either do it thru the WiFi or a small Ethernet switch where the switch is connected to the Private NIC and your boxes are connected to the switch. I prefer hard coded IP addresses instead of DHCP leases and then use those firm addresses and their MAC equivalents to tell the firewall what addresses are valid on the private network.

Good luck.

Thanks for your respectful reply. It’s infinitely preferable to gratuitous sarcasm when I am earnestly asking for help in improving my security/privacy.

That said, do you have any specific recommendations in the way of modems, firewalls for Macs – i.e., brand names, or links to products which will add layers of security?

Thanks again.

I was responding to an individual that typically doesn’t get hacked by a gov’t entity.

That’s debatable. I am sure that some people from “alt-right” spectrum could get on the “monitoring list”. In time more and more.

Corporations and gov’t entities get hacked by experts working for gov’ts and corporations ….

Yes.

When I hear of utilities being hacked I have to wonder why their command and control systems are Internet connected and accessible.
Decades ago I worked for Con Ed in New York and it supplied reliable electricity to 8.2 million people before there was an Internet. There’s no reason I can think of to connect sensitive industrial processes to the net. There should be no way for a ‘script kiddie’ to even Ping a nuclear site much less sniff out open ports, for example.

Agree.
The answer, well: management. Higher they are in the pyramid of power less they know/care about “tech”. It’s all about money (cutting costs and outsourcing) and corporate politics.

The IOT is a hackers dream come true. Your refrigerator will be used to compromise your laptop, etc.

Yes.

Corporations and gov’ts purchase computers and leave their USB ports available so a disgruntled employee can internally steal sensitive information; no Internet required. They allow all outbound traffic so a knowledgeable individual can FTP the corporate database to a competitor. These geniuses provide DHCP and WiFi access to any smartphone, Raspberry Pi, laptop, etc to get a connection. If you leave your front door unlocked and get robbed it’s your fault as much as it is the thief’s.

Yep.

I never set up DHCP or WiFi for clients. I wanted to know of every MAC address on the network and who was operating it. I installed firewalls at department level so departments were restricted in what they could do internally. All web surfing went through a proxy server and all accesses recorded and restricted to legitimate sites. No one was porn surfing or otherwise goofing off without it being noted on reports. All email in and out was recorded at the server level and only legitimate servers could send and receive. I even used TMDA to get rid of 99% of SPAM that chokes typical email systems.

I hear you.

But I’m old school and retired now.

You probably are. Got you wrong then. Thought you were one of the usual mid-thirties Linux fanatics.
Apologies.

5G, IOT, trash operating systems, municipal level Internet access (gov’t snooping) and new laws to make encryption illegal will eventually kill the Internet Golden Goose. And the ‘not so intelligent’ will call on gov’t to do something. There’s no hope.

I hear you.
Although, I see it in a worse light. Surveillance state. Panopticon.

Please note I didn’t use that ‘S’ work you dislike.

You know, if you are an old school retired tech, I don’t mind it. Understand perfectly.
I started my “tech” part with punched cards and mainframes, in the military. A decent career in that “world” I guess, and some years in/around civilian “tech world” afterwards. Semi-retired now but, of course, keeping in touch with both. Even get some work in the later, here and there just to keep sharp.
Or..hehe…so I say. We don’t want to make the “monitors” work that easy.

I was responding to an individual that typically doesn’t get hacked by a gov’t entity.

Corporations and gov’t entities get hacked by experts working for gov’ts and corporations to steal intellectual property or to plant fraudulent ‘evidence’ that is later ‘discovered’ for prosecution purposes. It’s like a dirty cop dropping a bag of dope in a car during a traffic stop and then arresting the innocent driver that then has a hard time convincing a jury of his innocence because a prosecutor can convince a jury to convict a ham sandwich. That’s, again, due to juries made up of average intelligence people.

When I hear of utilities being hacked I have to wonder why their command and control systems are Internet connected and accessible. Decades ago I worked for Con Ed in New York and it supplied reliable electricity to 8.2 million people before there was an Internet. There’s no reason I can think of to connect sensitive industrial processes to the net. There should be no way for a ‘script kiddie’ to even Ping a nuclear site much less sniff out open ports, for example. The IOT is a hackers dream come true. Your refrigerator will be used to compromise your laptop, etc.

Corporations and gov’ts purchase computers and leave their USB ports available so a disgruntled employee can internally steal sensitive information; no Internet required. They allow all outbound traffic so a knowledgeable individual can FTP the corporate database to a competitor. These geniuses provide DHCP and WiFi access to any smartphone, Raspberry Pi, laptop, etc to get a connection. If you leave your front door unlocked and get robbed it’s your fault as much as it is the thief’s.

I never set up DHCP or WiFi for clients. I wanted to know of every MAC address on the network and who was operating it. I installed firewalls at department level so departments were restricted in what they could do internally. All web surfing went through a proxy server and all accesses recorded and restricted to legitimate sites. No one was porn surfing or otherwise goofing off without it being noted on reports. All email in and out was recorded at the server level and only legitimate servers could send and receive. I even used TMDA to get rid of 99% of SPAM that chokes typical email systems.

But I’m old school and retired now. 5G, IOT, trash operating systems, municipal level Internet access (gov’t snooping) and new laws to make encryption illegal will eventually kill the Internet Golden Goose. And the ‘not so intelligent’ will call on gov’t to do something. There’s no hope.

Please note I didn’t use that ‘S’ work you dislike.

I’ll bait. Try to keep this “chat” above the level seen on all “tech forums”.

….the average person in the US has an IQ of 99. Frankly, that’s……. why the political class can get away with so much rubbish.

You are onto something here for sure.

That vast majority owns Windows due to force of habit, lack of desire to understand alternatives, etc.

…..Apple became a walled garden that I prefer to refer to as a totalitarian operating system environment.

True.

For Windows, the result has been …..the vast majority of exploits written specifically because ….it represents the largest pool of….machines on the planet.

..Mac fared better because they represent a sliver of a market compared to Windows.

Yes.

These days, robots hunt for exploitable machines to produce a target list for the really smart and evil hackers to concentrate on.

Got it.
You talk about protecting from a non-Government/non-Government sponsored player.
I talk about protecting from a Government-level/sponsored player.

So, yes, against malicious individuals and non-Government related players the below works:

The trick is to stay off the list. Penetration testing starts by identifying the operating system and version of a target usually using a Linux box programmed to roam the Internet looking for soft targets. When a Linux box is encountered, it is more often than not bypassed because the number of exploits is limited, Linux users patch their systems regularly because it’s so painless and easy without any fear of a bricked box and because the O/S is simply more difficult to hack. Windows and Mac are easier targets due to poor design and the hackers human nature wanting to do as little as possible for the most gain.

Back to practicalities.
For people posting on sites like this the potential penetrator/exploiter of interest, in my book, is Government or Government-sponsored player. Not necessarily the country where the author/poster is. Israel. China. Iran. Russia.Germany. Whatever.
My point is: against those players the only way to protect own privacy and/or data is NOT to connect to the Internet.
I could harden my setups and execute SOPs which will protect me from them, for example. The point is, by doing that would trigger red flags in “Five Eyes”. The local branch of that outfit could start getting interested in me. And….hehe…I just don’t think it would be good for me. I mean, they can, with ease, put anything they want on my network (even by breaking and entering) and have me processed by a domestic court. Etc.
If THIS guy can get that treatment, no need to say anything more.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/918580/ex-sas-soldiers-child-sex-crimes/
And they can do even worse.

Stating the truth is sometimes unpleasant, but it’s still the truth. From what I’ve read, the average person in the US has an IQ of 99. Frankly, that’s pretty stupid and is why the political class can get away with so much rubbish.

That vast majority owns Windows due to force of habit, lack of desire to understand alternatives, etc. Windows won the operating system battle due to slick marketing, being there at the start of the PC revolution with DOS, having 3rd party software vendors write apps to their convoluted API (Applications Programming Interface) and the ‘Microsoft Tax’ that the hardware vendors instituted that forced a Windows purchase with every computer sold. With Windows pre-installed, not many people spent the time and mental energy to replace it. Apple went after the artsy folks with slick applications tuned for them. Slowly, Apple became a walled garden that I prefer to refer to as a totalitarian operating system environment. I wouldn’t own an Apple product if they paid me.

For Windows, the result has been decades of blue screens, botched O/S upgrades, countless reboots to install anything and the vast majority of exploits written specifically because their security is so weak and because it represents the largest pool of poorly protected machines on the planet. Windows is to computers what a hollow core door is to a vault. Mac fared better because they represent a sliver of a market compared to Windows.

These days, robots hunt for exploitable machines to produce a target list for the really smart and evil hackers to concentrate on. The trick is to stay off the list. Penetration testing starts by identifying the operating system and version of a target usually using a Linux box programmed to roam the Internet looking for soft targets. When a Linux box is encountered, it is more often than not bypassed because the number of exploits is limited, Linux users patch their systems regularly because it’s so painless and easy without any fear of a bricked box and because the O/S is simply more difficult to hack. Windows and Mac are easier targets due to poor design and the hackers human nature wanting to do as little as possible for the most gain.

Maybe interesting:

Maybe I stand corrected, a bit.
You can add some value to the topic when dispensing with …ahm….adjectives and attributes of the derogative nature.

Now, I disagree with some paragraphs in the comment but no way I am going to start sparring here re “tech”.

What is interesting in the comments section, so far, is that the person you replied to probably read both your and my comments, and choose yours.
Could be my style, but I doubt it.
I think it was, more likely, wishful thinking.

Now, a little food for thought for a tiny minority reading this which understands a bit or two about tech security.
When the majority of people have their systems so easily penetrated and, if deemed prudent, exploited, what does it make of you/us who can have our systems hardened up?
Hardened up even to a point of no penetration, let alone exploit?
What could happen next?
“They” give up?
Or, they try harder, using other methods?

Just a thought.

……From what you’ve written it appears I’m on the safe side….

Oh my.
Impressive. I do mean that.

The physical aspects of how you get your Internet connection don’t matter much. Be it wired or wireless makes little difference. Once you have a connection, your box is visible to the entire world via it’s IP address. Anyone can interrogate your box to discover which ports (services) are open (advertised).
Most people have no idea how communications actually work between machines. The average person has never heard of SSH, FTP, SMTP, etc and what they offer and represent. Operating systems that are promiscuous by design, like Windows and Mac, to be ‘user friendly’ are thus insecure by design. Later version of those operating systems incorporated rudimentary changes to offer better security, but those are just patches atop a system that was originally not designed with security in mind.
Layers of security are the best approach. Your Internet connection should go to a stringent firewall that sits between your computer and the outside world. That firewall is your first line of defense. Think of it as a heavy door between you and an attacker. The more doors separating you from the attacker the better. Breaking down one door leads to another.
Realistically, most people don’t have a true firewall. They pretend that starting a firewall application on their one and only machine is equivalent to having a real firewall. That’s simply not true. Most people also don’t have the knowledge to write the rules for a firewall, and even if they did, their desire for a user friendly operating environment usually means they’ll drill logical holes into their firewall to allow them the ease to do things without too much hassle.
Linux was designed from the ground up as a secure platform. That’s why the vast majority of Internet servers are Linux boxes. People running Linux work stations for their personal computing are those folks that have a native desire to understand how the tech works and not just that it does work. Windows and Mac were designed for people who wanted to stay ignorant of how the tech worked as long as it did work. Sadly, the history of security issues with Windows especially is very long. Mac has done a better job. In general, the older your operating system is, the weaker is its security capabilities even if turned on.

Thanks for this very revealing (not to mention disconcerting) post.

But it’s got me wondering. I’m on an iMac desktop which I purchased in mid-2011. It’s the last year a DVD/CD player was incorporated into the unit. Also, I still use a landline (AT&T – but not U-verse) and only a wired modem. From what you’ve written it appears I’m on the safe side, though I would welcome any additional security – anything reasonably priced for someone of meager means, now that I am retired.

Question: given my setup, is it advisable to add more layers of security, and if so, do you have any specific recommendations? I would really appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks again!

95Theses

Duh. Who cares.

people dumb enough to use the Windows operating system

Stopped reading there. You are not a serious person.

Yeah. Whitehead is good.

A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

Well said.

Why say he is intentionally lying or senile? If Congress has considered a bill, yet that bill failed, which you are not disputing, then Congress is considering such bills.

And, knowing Congress, they will introduce another in which all the parties involved get to more fairly distribute the plunder amongst themselves and figure out how “sell it” to the people since this is always the sticking point for bills.

“the Constitution of the United States itself has even been publicly described by the president as ‘archaic’ and ‘a bad thing for the country.’ ”

This one is also false (the cited “independent” article even had many commentators calling it out as fake news). Seems that some in the media get a kick out of fomenting reader anger over things that did not actually happen.

And “Osama” is the government itself anyway.

Yea, verily yea!

I have not traveled via commercial airlines in four years, due to an extra high-radiation treatment then while my wife was being groped by dykes. We were both “pre-check”. I have no intention of breaking that streak until TSA is abolished. In other words, never.

Meanwhile–in the stopped clock dept.–congressperson Ilhan Omar has proposed to abolish DHS outright. Send me the petition asap!

That is a failed bill from the previous Congress. You see the 2017-18 up top?

PG claim is:

“Congress is considering bills that will make criticism of Israel a crime”

I say he’s either intentionally lying or so senile he lacks the most basic knowledge of the topic he obsesses his whole life on. Pretty easy to prove me wrong. Please show me where “Congress is considering bills that will make criticism of Israel a crime”

It’s OK though, I can see how a Russian could be confused by this. Here’s the truth: in America we love both our freedom of speech, and as the New Zion we also love the Original.

…build a straw man.

…that would be stupid.

…The average person has an IQ of 100. Pretty dumb. That person will use a garbage

…. management is primarily made up of average IQ people

..I’m a retired white hat hacker.

… shitcanned the traffic.

…firewall was as clear as glass to ALL traffic because their IT staff had never written any rules..

…Windows security always has been trash…

Moving on.

Don’t put words into my mouth so you can build a straw man. I never claimed that Linux was invincible as that would be stupid. When comparing the major operating systems, Windows is at the very bottom of the heap for security. Mac is a nit, so who cares? Linux is head and shoulders above all the possible operating systems a normal person or corporation might want to use.

The average person has an IQ of 100. Pretty dumb. That person will use a garbage operating system like Windows with little regard for security until the lack of security bites them. Corporations use Windows because management is primarily made up of average IQ people that are not interested in security; they want bells and whistles, ease of use, shiny sparkly BS.

The recent ransom payoffs by municipalities is evidence that their systems are wide open to hackers.

I’m a retired white hat hacker. I installed a very customized firewall for a major Dallas area defense contractor’s employee recreation/gym facility. As soon as I plugged it in the logs started growing. I though I messed up. I investigated only to discover the huge volume of traffic coming in from foreign countries on protocols that scream HACK. I reported this to management and they told me not to mention it further. That firewall stayed in place and shitcanned the traffic, but no one was interested in reviewing what systems those attackers had access to via their compromised network before the firewall.

At another site, I got a contract to attempt to break into a corporate network. Long story short, I was in in a few minutes and left a message on one of their servers. Next day, I got call from the corporate offices to show up for a meeting that afternoon. When I explained that their very expensive hardware based firewall was as clear as glass to ALL traffic because their IT staff had never written any rules, the HMFIC fired 8 people on the spot in my presence.

You can’t buy canned security. You have to work at it and monitor what’s going on. With Windows, you had better put a Linux firewall in front of it because Windows security always has been trash.

The reason for this is that when more and more people realize that the regime is corrupt, the many good people that were once part of the regime start dropping out one by one. After a period of many years, the regime reaches a point where all the good people have departed and there is no one left except bad people.

Very good observation, it also coincides with my own (not really, Tolstoy already sort of got it) theory of the high density of the ass-holes in political space, and the United States political space certainly reached toxic density (I would say between 0.7 and 1.2 asshole per cubic meter of D.C. space) some time in 2003-2005. I am not being facetious; OK, just teeny-weeny bit and yes, your observation is spot on.

Regimes often get more oppressive in their last stages. The reason for this is that when more and more people realize that the regime is corrupt, the many good people that were once part of the regime start dropping out one by one. After a period of many years, the regime reaches a point where all the good people have departed and there is no one left except bad people. Once this point is reached, there are no longer any good people to restrain the bad people who are now running everything. So the regime becomes increasingly vicious and evil.

As for breaking into systems to listen in on every keystroke, that does exist and is made possible by people dumb enough to use the Windows operating system and their joke of a firewall.

You believe that running ANY version of UNIX-like OS will prevent that type of exploit?
O.K.

And, more, I guess that UNIX like system calls get executed by firmware running on top of digital electronics hardware. Two additional layers where “they” can put whatever they want. Even in the factory.

Speaking of the former a question for somebody, perhaps:
Had a chat with a friend who is a network security specialist (firewalls and such) over the weekend. We got into a chat re:”O.K. I know they can compromise my systems. To exploit it properly they’d need to send some data back to somewhere. Now…..what piece of hardware/software can we put somewhere from our machine NIC to the router to see, recognize, that traffic”.
I mean, at the end of the day it must be an Ethernet (I guess for 99,99 % of people) frame.
We decided it’s possible but requires just too much work…hehe…
But, then again, both of us aren’t THAT good in this game. Maybe somebody here is. So, what would you suggest we could do and which doesn’t require a lot of work, even on a daily basis?
Just to recognize the exploit communicating with the outside world.

As for the later:
With the current level of integration, can any non-major Government player, with certainty, recognize what electronics on the chip does?
Say: this is Control Unit; this is Floating Point unit; this is….I don’t know. Let’s do some tests and see what THIS part of the chip does. Possible?
Hehe…I remember the days of old PDP types when you could trace any signal and know exactly what “this” piece of digital electronics does. Not so sure it’s even possible anymore today.
Bottom line, easy to put, I guess, some “proprietary” hardware backdoor type.
Anyone?

False.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1697/text

Excerpt:

(3) POLITICALLY MOTIVATED.—The term “politically motivated” means actions to impede or constrain commerce with Israel that are intended to coerce political action from or impose policy positions on Israel.

The bill is about opposing those “politically motivated” “actions”. By actions, of course, a lot of things could be (mis)construed as. Especially by armies of Israeli-first lawyers. It is also funny against the background of the US sanctioning the rest of the world to the left and to the right. For people having a revulsion towards US Congress casuistry (that is while being totally in the pockets of US Israeli-firstres), the video of the 23 standing ovations by US “servants of people” to the most trivial bromides about “democracy” and US-Israeli “alliance” by Bibi could be a good insight into the mechanism of decomposition of American Republic due to its utter corruption with active participation of Israeli lobbies in the US.

You’re right. We seem to enjoy it. It makes us feel like we are part of this righteous war against some implacable foe. SMH

I say the boomer cuckservatives and the boomer commies have destroyed this country worse then if china and russia invaded from the east and west coast. the strangulation of tons of regulations the loss of liberty the EPA NSA TSA homoland security multi trillion dollar police /spying state multi trillion dollar wars for israel homo marriage tranny rights . the “greatest” generation started the ball rolling in early to mid 60’s with civil rights voting rights then the worst immigration reform act. then passed the whole pile of shit to the doomers

Any competent programmer can write an encryption algorithm that no supercomputer can decrypt. All it takes is imagination. The problem with that code, however, is that it’s unique to the parties that agree beforehand to use it and therefore does not have the ability to function between non predetermined contacts. I suspect that type of encryption is used all the time by criminal organizations and gov’t, but I repeat myself.

As for breaking into systems to listen in on every keystroke, that does exist and is made possible by people dumb enough to use the Windows operating system and their joke of a firewall. Security and robustness is why the entire Internet runs on Linux. If people want security, it’s available, but you actually have to know something about computers and security to use it. Therefore the artsy people who can’t balance a checkbook prefer an Apple or Microsoft product. It’s the ‘don’t know anything technical and don’t want to know anything technical’ people that are the political class, the entertainment industry, media, finance, etc that run the world.

…and all based on the transparent lie of 9/11. But I wouldn’t grieve too much over stupid Americans who, instead of protesting, rather enjoy their captivity.

Please post this stuff under Mr. Derbyshire’s and other racebaiters’ columns.

It’s apparent that you’re trying to distract or discredit here.

“Congress is considering bills that will make criticism of Israel a crime”

False.

You mean it’s already a done deal?

Given the US government’s successful & unquenchable appetite to destroy citizens’ constitutional rights, it simply amazes me that other nations still debate, in all seriousness, the relative virtues of a written bill of rights.

There used to be intelligence directives that ruled out “reading the mail” (voice, e-whatever) once it could be determined to have no national security value, but google probably demonstrated that serious money could be made by mining all that previously out-of-bounds traffic, which is why all the post 11 September legislation quietly over-ruled earlier prohibitions. Even with statutory cover for a wider array of previously probited practises, the spooks were cheating to get past any prohibitions that still remained.

Since I retired I am often asked if I like to travel:

My response–in a private jet with no airport security screening–yes. Cramped like a sardine and treated like one by airport security–ah no thanks.

There actually is screening in Executive terminals, but in most it is minimal and the persons doing it seem almost to be embarassed to do it.

On one flight from a small airport with, for god knows what reason, “airport-terminal style” security, when they came across and objected to our liquids, I said the magic words, “I’m the pilot in command; I authorise these.” Then they came across my tac-knife and objected to it, and I chanted the magic words, “It’s safety equipment … as pilot in command, I authorise it.” Since they were driving us directly to the aircraft on the ramp, they didn’t put up much of a fight, though their driver did pull the luggage hatch down on my shoulder as we were unloading our baggage.

Phil is right.

I think I wouldn’t mind since odds are she’s a better human being than you. I’m sure you’d present yourself as a pleasant fellow to rub elbows with in the next passenger seat, but I’d hate to risk catching the perception distorting virus embedded in your cortex.

“Congress is considering bills that will make criticism of Israel a crime”

False.

How would you like to fly seated next to this thing? Or be its patient?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/us/black-woman-american-airlines-cover-up.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

John Whitehead is probably the countries leading chronicler of the States crimes in this area
https://www.rutherford.org/

Mr Author I take you want to help here and have to dumb down the message for the target audience. Appreciated, but you are fundamentally wrong.

As far as online privacy there is one, and really, just ONE rule:
There can be none.

Nothing “tech” any of us can do can make the real difference.
If “they” want to snoop on you they shall.

The only, ONLY, way not to get snooped is not to connect to anything. Not even your own WAP.

Simple as that.

Here is a scenario for you:
You do use encryption. They compromise your machine so they intercept keys input before the encryption process.
You know:key press->keyboard controller-bus->chipset->buffer->CPU=>timer trigger->switch context to encripton code->read the buffer->encrypt the data there=====>
Yes, yes, I know, but let’s not get too complicated. 90% of people reading this don’t get even that.

And after decryption of incoming data has been completed anwhere from that buffer to the actual analog hardware on display.

Makes sense?

Doesn’t’ matter if it doesn’t. Just stick to the only rule that matters.
There…….is………..no……….online……….privacy……..outside…………of…..LAN. Excluding WLAN. Just wires within your local area network.

Now, if they are really onto you even that won’t matter much. They’ll “bug” your house.
And if they can’t they ask you in person. Picture THAT.

Now, of course, it’s possible to maintain privacy. But, that goes way above and beyond encryption, tech-related laws etc. It’s an ever-evolving mix of tech, PROCEDURES, and vigilance. Hard and tricky game.
Very rare people can do it and only up to the point. Nobody on this Webzine I am sure.
Me, just too lazy. And, of course, not keen to tempt the knock at the door. Or worse.

Because, at the end of the game, there are “snatch squads” and “rendition”.
Just keep that in mind. If you want, of course.

osama made The Beast attack its own citizens.

osama won.

Since I retired I am often asked if I like to travel:

My response–in a private jet with no airport security screening–yes. Cramped like a sardine and treated like one by airport security–ah no thanks.

All true to one lesser or greater extent or the other. However, the root cause of unpleasant airline travel is all the low IQ uncultured rabble of the world who can now travel by plane or get a job at the airport.

Imagine have to sit next to Sheila Jackson Lee, Fareeq Abdula Abkar, or even being in the same passenger screening line with that family from Disneyland. (with them getting waved through by TSA and you getting shaken down like a cocaine smuggler)

Whose fault is it that, until now, doctors made it extremely difficult for patients and insurances to take their business elsewhere? If American doctors would have had patient’s freedom at heart, getting the records to the patients, before they walk out the office door, in a format that could be useful if they decide to switch providers, would have been the default. Instead, it is a chore that takes money and time. Patient’s records are being held hostage by the “carers”, much like their performance data, and even their fees, because American physicians don’t like open competition. Long story short, they can’t compete.

It’s even more impressive when you consider how filthy rich are the American physicians. Their salaries cost as much as the salaries of everyone else combined (nurses + janitors + administrators + management). Obviously, the nurses and the janitors couldn’t care less if you went to a different hospital, and don’t have the means to support portable, private EHR. Doctors do have the means, but their biggest financial concerns are the acquisition of more expensive cars and younger wives.

Yes, we can talk about surveillance as long as you want, even though Google and Facebook scripts, loaded by unz.com on the side, by default, make sure I have no privacy while typing. This is not about privacy. If anything, it will make the patient more free, allowing them to go to a different doctor more easily. That is so sad!

This process of consolidating all personal information in one place is advancing on other fronts and is quite far along. This is the entire real purpose of the enhanced driver’s licenses, a virtual national identity card. This is also the reason why Obamacare mandated that health records be digitized. Eventually it will all be there in the chip implanted in your wrist granting access to everything there is to know about you, biometric data, medical records, criminal history, your grades in elementary school, your purchases, your parking tickets, your comments on articles.

Unless you tell the hospital or the clinic “Lo siento, pero no tengo un social.”

This is pointless. As if all your medical information isn’t tied directly to your Social Security number, anyway. A number of years ago, a hospital refused to treat my then juvenile son unless we supplied his social security number. All your medical records are linked to it.

Unfortunately medicine has become another corporate big business, with similar efficiencies for the average person as Wall Street’s. That is, more for them, less for everyone else, as by Adam Smith’s Vile Maxim.

“Because traditional journalistic activity does not extend to helping a source break a code to gain illicit access to a classified network, the charge appeared to be an attempt by prosecutors to sidestep the potential First Amendment minefield of treating the act of publishing information as a crime,” reported a pleased New York Times.

But of course. No one broke any codes or gained access to any computer networks in exposing, say, the Pentagon Papers for instance. Nothing remotely similar. Move along now.

Dear Fred:

It’s great that you not only travel to China, but also know so much about China and Chinese culture.
But just don’t mention Mousey Dung, or you may have a new occupation with pickax and wheelbarrow in a punishment mine (just kidding (!?)

No argument from me.

Abolish the TSA and grind it into dust. The flying public is now subject to a level of intrusiveness that would have shocked even Stalin and horrified Hitler.

The real, occult purpose of the TSA has nothing to do with safety. It is really about conditioning the American people to take orders, and to participate in government mandated rituals, like the requirement to remove one’s shoes. Why? Do we, like Moses, enter holy ground when we enter TSA territory? Because one single individual (out of the 7 billion inhabitants of this earth) made a lame attempt to ignite his shoes, hundreds of millions of airline passengers had to remove their footwear. How monumentally stupid is that? What about Chertoff’s cancer machines/radiation scanners? Yes, exposing people to potentially deadly radiation is keeping them safe. Of course.

Yet, there is no shortage of blubbering, obese (both mentally and physically) sheeple who actually believe this is about “keeping us safe.”

I would like to think that the vast majority of the American people would prefer to live with a highly improbable risk as opposed to being treated like criminal cattle, but I am harassed with doubts about that.

I agree totally that it’s time to abolish the TSA. Some of them take their jobs and themselves far too seriously. When I was flying out of Chicago last November a black TSA agent that resembled William the Refrigerator Perry was walking around barking orders at everyone in ebonics. Then I was mildly upbraided by another Napoleonic negro for not disclosing that I had a Kleenex in my pocket (I forgot).

Some of the other TSA people looked like they were on work release from the Cook County jail.

But the libertarian claim that the airlines can provide security that is both better and less intrusive and cheaper all at the same time is more libertarian wishful thinking. The airline industry is pretty cutthroat and will cut corners on security by hiring low quality people at low pay so they can offer cheaper fares and not cut into their profits. This wouldn’t be a problem in a nation that is 80% white with some blacks and hispanics but not with Muslims and the rest of the third world.

The airport security debate circles back to the fatal racial diversity that (((they))) have imposed on us from above and to a lesser extent our foreign policy that provides the impetus for some Muslims to commit acts of violence against Americans and American targets.

We’re actually lucky, #724, that the US government IS as incompetent as it is. Even with that Do Not Call Registry, did you feel like the government would be very discreet with your phone information and never, ever put any information in a database besides those numbers you don’t want to hear from? Why give the US Gov’t your phone #? Make it at least a little bit harder for them, having to get ahold of the NSA.

Whenever you think of turning something over to the government, ask yourself one question “How is the National Do Not Call Registry working for me?”

That’s an excellent point, Colin. You may end up 1 hour early at the gate for 75% of your trips, just due to making sure you didn’t miss those 25%, that you would have. If you add in the stress – for most just the worry about the flight, but for the real Americans the anger at the whole idea of being subjected to unreasonable searches and seizures*, you would find that this is probably killing as many or more people a year as died on that day.

I’d say:

– For a one leg flight, any trip less than 250 miles is probably better done by car.
– For a two leg flight, any trip less than 400 miles is probably better done by car.

.

Not to mention physical seizures later on due to the loss of ones medication at the check-point ;-}

Hey, it keeps otherwise dangerous people off the streets. Oh, wait … I forgot about the VIPR teams harassing motorists at rest stops.

The worst thing about TSA is that the uncertainty over how long you’ll have to wait in line contributes to the increasingly absurd lengths of time you have to allow to make sure you get on your flight.

Adding up all the man hours wasted in this way makes one realize the true cost of it all. At some point now a good decade back, the actual losses on 9/11 ceased to be the bulk of the expense, either financially or in terms of human life. How much longer is all this going to go on?

To this discussion of government employees, I will add a remembrance of January 13, 1982. Lenny Skutnik, of the govt budget office. Into the icy Potomac he swam, to make the rescue, while others watched. The Air Florida crash. Mr. Reagan honored Lenny at the SOTU, the first SOTU honoree. There is a Youtube of Mr. Reagan and Lenny. Modest, humble Lenny was awarded the very rare Coast Guard Gold Lifesaving Medal. God bless Lenny, and the spirit of his action.

I’ve got nothing to argue specifically with Ron Paul’s good comments here on private industry vs. Feral Gov’t in this regard. I don’t think Dr. Paul was ready to go all the way with this, in that he didn’t mention the simple truth regarding weapons and airplanes:

The bad guys can always bring weapons of some sort. It’d be wise for the good guys (the 99.9999%) to be ready for that. Let me put it this way – there would be no column here, nor comments under it, nor TSA, nor Motherland Security Depts, if just ONE guy, ONE guy, on each of those planes on 9/11/01* had been carrying a handgun. Sure, the flights were 1/2 empty, as I recall, but that still means only 1% or so.

The American government has learned nothing, as 17 years later, people are still being disarmed at the entrance of airports. Maybe “learned nothing” is really not the explanation. In reality I don’t think any of the elites cares about, or wants Americans to actually be able to defend themselves. It’s not in the plan. Motherland Security is.

Some thoughts to go alone with this Ron Paul post, from Peak Stupidity called 16 Years of Spreading Democracy – They still hate us for our freedoms(?), on the 16th anniversary of 9/11.

.

* I’m just riding on the official Gov’t story here. This is not a Ron Unz 5,000 word, 1000-comment post here, and it’s neither the time nor place for that whole discussion.

TSA workers strategically lack common sense when assessing threats. They target the weakest, most helpless people because it’s easy, much easier than confronting the young, strappin’ males who might be able to give them some resistance, possibly accusing them of racism, aggressively, in a foreign language. This caused them to famously target an elderly, white, former professional in a wheel-chair, humiliating her by forcing her to take off her Depends.

That said, TSA workers got their jobs due to the woefully lax and extremely underpaid temp / contract workers that private industry employed to screen the 9/11 terrorists. They were hired to save a buck. There are some hard workers in America’s many low-wage / temp / churn jobs who get nothing but abuse for their hard work except from grateful customers, but when employers cheap out, they often get what they pay for except in government work, where they often get less than they pay for. It is stupid to cheap out on safety.

But cheaper, more accessible air travel facilitates the globalist economy, wherein almost all of the rewards accrue to the top 20%. If elites are burdened by TSA or any other aspect of air travel, you can’t prove it by their actions. They are constantly trundling around the globe via the friendly or un-friendly skies, seeking business opportunities abroad, but they create so few jobs in the USA that the average employed person works part time at 34 hours per week, meaning half of all employed citizens and noncitizens in the USA work even fewer part-time hours, mostly at low-as-you-go wages.

Set aside the fake environmentalists, separating out their recyclables like all of the other good yuppies, the dual-earner couples on their 8th excused 2-week vacation for busy-working parents per year. Much of their travel is the carbon-foot-print-heavy type, the type that requires large amounts of jet fuel to go between continents for “work” and on every holiday, like the upscale mommy at the store explaining in a loud voice that her family chose to go on a 3-day jaunt to Barcelona for Christmas ‘cause her toddler had developed a taste for European architecture.

I agree about TSA. And I will elaborate upon Disclaimer’s migration comments because there is a connection. Burgos of Harvard has written: We wanted workers, but we got people. Here in California, I see a replacement culture that is not only less proficient and less conscientious, but also, less polite. Both the TSA culture and the migrant culture are often supercilious, sanctimonious, and grave. They do not accept smiles. The Ivy League has spoken on this; they prefer thugginess and funkiness, and reject decency. All if this can be contagious. Eliminate TSA. Thc TSA people can find work at DMV or at medical front offices.

Trump should get rid of the TSA and Homeland Security. There was no problem with security agencies we had before 911 and they were effective in what they were doing. After 911, the US government used it as an excuse to turn the US into a police state. The excessive government powers that we have suffered under for the past 18 years need to go and we need to return to sanity. Rather than this stupid wall which will never be effective (even if built) we should concentrate on instant deportations and a zero tolerance policy on illegal immigrants. Once it got back to potential illegals that the US government meant business, there would be far fewer trying to get in. If a wall is built, ways will be found how to get around it, like coming across the northern border which is 5000 miles long and not 1500 like our southern border. Another problem that needs to be addressed is, why are these people coming here? Our government should try to promote ways of creating wealth in the countries where the economic refugees are coming from by sponsoring governments that have business-friendly policies that invite foreign investment and create jobs. Many third-world countries suffer from what I call the “Philippine syndrome”, where a few powerful crony-capitalists control almost all of the productive industry in a country. Nothing can get done without mountains of red tape and the greasing of palms all around. If the Philippines had the economic freedom of Taiwan, they would’ve also become an “Asian Tiger” with a high standard of living instead of being 125th in the world. The same goes for many Latin American countries. Costa Rica and Panama are shining examples.

In an amoral era under a virtue-signaling mask, it is interesting how the justification for war, or other major defensive measure, has shifted from what is necessary to defend the American people from invasion to what is necessary to protect the profiteering of the 1% donor class and the lucrative side gigs of our six-figure, globetrotting, professional-meddler political class.

If the Japanese had not bombed Pearl Harbor, we would never have gone to war with them. It is apples and organes to compare a defensive response to a mass-murdering attack on American soil to the endless, costly interventionism in umpteen Third World nations that today’s corrupt Uniparty politicians pursue.

Whereas the Japanese became our allies after a justified defensive war, the neoconservative interventionism of today only stokes hatred of the USA. It might boost profits for a few 1%ers, managing to capitalize on the mechanics of war, but for the bottom 80% of wage earners in the USA it just means competing for part-time / temp / churn jobs with more welfare-eligible legal migrants who—along with carvans full of womb-productive / welfare-eligible illegal migrants—drive wages down for underemployed US citizens in a quickly automating labor market.

Migrants do this by having one instant-citizen kid after another to increase their monthly welfare allotment in the hundreds and their refundable child tax credit allotment to the max of $6,431, thereby enabling them to undercut Americans by working for less pay than non-welfare-eligible citizens can afford to accept while keeping a roof over their heads.

Democrats want to keep up these senseless wars—even in parts of the world where we get no economic benefit whatsoever, and even at the cost of American lives and the lives of foreigners who have not attacked us—while claiming the moral high ground. They want to do this stuff that has nothing to do with defending their country from invasion, but do not want to use US troops to man their own country’s southern border. Nor do they want to put the US corporations with military-support expertise to good use, actually serving US interests by building the defensive Trump Wall.

You can keep the moral high ground when your party is run by people with some moral grounding, like FDR, Truman and JFK.

Your party can’t climb on the moral high horse when the greedy leadership is just interested in the following:

1) padding their own pockets with money from globe-trotting speechmaking adventures, etc.;

2) padding their pockets with lobbyist money from offshoring and / or wage-slave-staffed US-owned multinationals that show contempt for underemployed American job seekers;

3) making sure they keep their $174k jobs by keeping voter rolls stacked with block-voting groups—group-loyalty voting blocks gained not based on making logical arguments to immigrants as voting individuals, but by pandering to them based on racial loyalty.

Democrats are ready to go to war anywhere, anytime, as long as the people in question aren’t invading their own country. They are willing to do it due to the lucrative pocketbook fallout for a few politicians and corporations. Yet, war-ready Democratic leaders refuse to defend the southern border in their own country from the yearly, resource-draining, mass-scale, wage-eroding invasion of illegal immigration. They don’t see any money in the Trump Wall for themselves or their donors. They don’t see any readymade votes in it for Democrats.

It is very easy to explain why this type of technology exchange takes place. It is called NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION and the E.U. is a big part of it. It only benefits the super-elites

I agree overall with the comparison. However, I see that the author shows a bias against the US. It seems he believes that China is more virtuous and its policies are more in touch with Chinese people than what exists in the US. Unfortunately he does not see the elephant in the room staring at all of us. It is Called NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION and both nations are a big part of it. Both nations are ruled by an OLIGARCHY and CLEPTOCRACY of an elite cabal that do not care about their people. Both nations more or less have implemented a system of COLLECTIVISM that benefits a small group of elites. All this talk about trade war, etc, is a distraction. The real threat to the US deep state is RUSSIA not CHINA. That is why the powerful transnational US corporations are still doing great business in China with their sweatshop factory cities there, and the Chinese elite are happy with the arrangement, making sure the Chinese masses are kept under control with breadcrumbs while the super elites are reaping 99% of the profits.

I have no idea why Germans would give them a fast train and the know how, but that is what they did.

Usually, a fair amount of money is exchanged in these types of knowledge transfers, so…

Peace.

It’s not JUST German tech, though.

Chinese-built trains are the best parts of German, Japanese and French technology, combined and optimized.

Then manufactured with the usual China “economies of scale” (make a whole lot, cost per item goes down, same with anything else).

So they make them pretty cheap, but pretty good.

I keep hearing/seeing China and fast trains.
Nobody cares that they got that from Germany. I have no idea why Germans would give them a fast train and the know how, but that is what they did. Now the Chinese can peddle fast trains and Germany can look at the moon.

Having been to China several times, I believe I can attest that one of China’s biggest blind spots is its surprisingly intense racism. A Caucasian in Hefei or Guangzhou — supposedly China’s most cosmopolitan city — is seen as an inferior being. We encountered no-white zones just like the old Jim Crow South.

I laughed and almost blew soda out my nose when I read Fred’s comment that China has good engineering. There is no place in China where the water is safe to drink. In every city where I traveled, I took photos of electric utility infrastructure built so poorly that it’s a miracle it’s working and not on fire. The biggest man made disaster in all of history took place in China (the Banqiao dam failure), and even bigger calamities are being built right now with the Three Gorges Dam and another one that is planned of slightly larger scale. I visited one shop in Kunming where the owners lived in the rear of the building, and a city sewer vent opened into the living quarters.
It smelled like what you’d expect. The famous White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou had to be shut down and largely rebuilt because the foundations busted to pieces. China’s civil engineering is no good, very bad, and outright sorry as hell. And high speed rail is a waste of money. Jets are faster and cheaper.

Much to be admired, however, was China’s economic freedom. Any guy can set up on the sidewalk and start selling live eels out of a washtub. Try that in New York City, and you’ll be arrested. You can go to Wal-Mart in China and buy any pharmaceutical you can name without a prescription. We needed a round of Cipro (antibiotic) for food poisoning — because one of our party ate a salad washed in the city water system. The Cipro was over the counter and cost 2 yuan, or about 33 cents in American money. Try THAT in America!

Last time I heard that we bombed Japan to save lives okeydoke was back in the 7th grade. It was impossible to believe even then (although top marks in class, and a helpful career-minded shove ahead of the pack, awaited any kid who could manage to buy into said okeydoke. Preferably with a superior smile plastered on their mugs)

Very interesting concept, and I fully admit my general ignorance regarding the genetic origin of the chinese people. Although I am aware that northern chinese people tend to (unsurprisingly) have more siberian admixture than people from the rest of china, which probably explains the well known “volatile” and heated temperament of the northern chinese vis a vis chinese from other regions

yes, you are absolutely right that my geography wasnt very precise. I was merely using central asian as shorthand to refer to siberian/mongolian descent ethnicities out of convenience, but yeah my nomenclature of choice wasn’t exactly correct.

Couldn’t you have stayed in bed a little longer? (Or did you wake up bleary eyed and with fogged brain to utter that?).

Now give your brain some exercise and see what you can make of the election victory comeback by the 93 year old Mahathir Mohamad and his one time protegé Anwar Ibrahim bearing in mind Mahathir’s notorious antisemitism. Gee whiz, there could have been more involved in the downfall of the massively corrupt Najib than a few alleged comments on the relation of an air crash to Sino-Malaysian relations.

Why add faulty reasoning to not reading what was said and the ample easily accessible online discussion of the issue? Who said anything about what “an international flight crew” did?

The excellent Canadian series “Air Crash Investigation” showed how it could be done. Not that it needs more than common sense once you know that the cockpit door can be locked by one person still in there. Do you really think it would be hard for a senior captain to get his First Officer/copilot to leave the cockpit for some reason so that he could be locked out?

Perhaps there is something called “Pan-Siberianism”, a concept that pulls in Asian Siberians, Manchurians, Tungus, Mongolians, Asian Turks and Koreans. An interesting concept.

Careful though, since the Han themselves from earliest times have very strong Siberian/Steppe admixture. And even the Yamato fall into this category of strong admixture.

The Han, as far as I’ve read, were an ethnicity that arose in pre-history via a melding of nomad tribes from the steppes, alpine tribes from the Tibetan plateau and farmers from the provinces facing Taiwan. The Japanese “Yamato” are apparently also migrants from mainland Asia with admixture from the steppes.

So with Pan-Siberianism, you might usefully exclude the Han and the Yamato as being “not of pure prehistoric-Altaic stock”.

A linguistic/geographical clarification: Central Asia starts in Xinjiang, or more precisely WEST of Mongolia. Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, Kyrghizstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, North-East Iran, a large swathe of Pakistan – these are “Central Asia”. Mongolia eastward is “East Asia”. Russian Siberia is “North Asia”.

Post mh370,
PM Najib declared ,
Someone is trying to drive a wedge bet Malaysia/China !

Do you know where’s he today ?

Sorry,

ZG = zhou gong, the god of dreams in Chinese folk lore,
meaning its past my bed time,

In theory should apply (albeit to a lesser extent due to admixture with the ainu) to the japanese as well. Here is a comment that I found while reading through the comments section of an old unz.com article which articulates my thoughts best about the matter. You might find it interesting as well:

http://www.unz.com/runz/how-social-darwinism-made-modern-china-248/

comment #37

This brazen Jason Liu speaks of his own Chinese, with a few glances to the left and right, and says “East Asians”. It would seem he’s a self-identified “(East) Asian American” proudly invested in this membership, but what he supposes to be a unitary racial entity is in truth a mishmash of unlikes.

We Koreans are not of the same substance as you. No, I’m afraid we are not one kind. Maybe your crowning point – “In general, East Asians are not nearly as emotional. This is by far the most important thing.” – is your apt judgment of Hans, but with it you make clear your ignorance of the irrepressible and very much Korean capacity for passion, volatility, fanaticism, and ebullience, hates and bitternesses and loves that are not more muted or circumscribed than those of occidentals but often overflow them.

There is more to the Korean character than the perfect gentleman-scholar and Confucian proper place – there is the rejoicing in brutal stone fights* that up until not too long ago had a government-sanctioned fortnight reserved for them each spring; the ecstasies of shamanic possession and dancing on knives; a reverence for divisions of rank and grades of human worth that not only exceeded those of the Chinese Confucians but largely (in genuine caste, with hereditary aristocrats, huge numbers of born chattel slaves, and ritually polluted untouchables) had their basis in something else entirely. I make no apologies. This is not cause for lamentation but a point of pride.

The depth of our schizophrenia, how our ruling strata made a cargo cult of outdoing the Chinese in wen, in Chinese formulations of cultured virtue, is obvious to see. We sought to pass ourselves off as crisped to the great maw, to the alimentary state that divided all barbarians into “raw” and “cooked”, and took pride in our score lines. So I am all the more glad for that which is wild, unreasonable, unpragmatic, and uncringing in us. They mean the failure (at least the incompleteness) of Sinitic civilization’s program of human domestication.

During my time in Central Asia and in particular East Turkistan/Xinjiang, I always found myself somehow much more immediately at home, much more at ease, amongst North and Inner Asians – assorted South Siberians, Mongols, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, and indeed even the half-Caucasoid Uyghurs of the Tarim oases – than among Han Chinese or any kind of Southeast Asians. There were, in our sensibilities, our potentials for creation, our forms of expression, our instinctive understandings, so many primal congruences – reminders that there is more one way of being Asian, even East Asian, than the Sinitic. These moments would arc into me with an electric twinge, a goring on the Sibero-Scythian prongs of those crowns of buried Silla, a reminder of what could, and would, have been.

What stood out to me about this quote was that I share the same experience as a korean individual upon meeting other people from central asian backgrounds. I indeed feel more similar on a fundamental level to these people than I do to chinese people. I honestly thought I was the only person who felt this way but apparently there are other korean people out there who understand that korean people are but one culture out of many that belong to a larger overarching altaic ethnic and cultural umbrella. I think this is something that is particularly striking to korean americans since by default we automatically clump ourselves in with a default east asian (quasi-sinitic) identity when the truth is that we are quite different than chinese people, however due to the lack of contact most korean americans (even korean people back in korea) have with central asian/mongolian/siberian people we are unable to discover the overarching culture which we really fall closer to and instead just identify with the default east asian (quasi-sinitic) culture even though it is actually an imprecise fit for us.

FWIW

Nothing. Nothing at all.

The idea that an international flight crew is going to allow one person to take down the whole Clipper is bogus. The people of Cathey Pacific are obviously back on the bottle.

I have heard experts say that we do not have enough translated literature on Asian art in the West—not on Chinese art, not on Japanese art, not on any of it, even though Japanese art had a huge impact on the Impressionists and their forerunners, with Manet including a rendering of a Japanese print in one of his famous portraits, the one of Emile Zola.

Japanese art is so different from Chinese art. From what I know about traditional Chinese art, it is much more athletic than traditional European art. They do not regard complex, methodical layering, resulting in illusionistic effects, like depth and volumetric form, as necessary for a successful painting. Traditional Chinese paintings do not appear to reproduce the effects of a directional light source. All great artists in all timeframes are concerned with formal aspects, like color schemes and strong composition, but the great, traditional Chinese artists were expected to work quickly and precisely, getting it done in one stroke, like some modernists in the West who regard that approach as requiring greater mastery.

It is apples and oranges; one type of artistic greatness does not exclude another.

There is also the Chinese applied art tradition, including the fine porcelain that they exported to the West hundreds of years ago. The inventors of paper, ink and the first durable porcelain, this is not the first exporting-culture rodeo for the Chinese.

It is the first time that an America Last leadership class, interested mostly in increasing their own fortunes, have exported the hard-won American middle class to China.

I am not sure about the current Chinese building spree. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Chinese were exporting like crazy—even custom manufacturing—to fulfill the demands of European aristocrats for their kaolin-clay-based porcelain. They did it until Westerners finally discovered their manufacturing secret. But that was what economists might call an organic market, springing up naturally out of supply and demand, whereas some say that, along with an Orwellian surveillance state, today’s Chinese .gov is creating uninhabited ghost towns, just to keep underemployment among males down, preventing social strife, rioting, etc. If I understand correctly, many of the loans are not backed up with enough collateral, and the Chinese government’s bank just creates money out of thin air, like the Fed.

Thank you for saving me from wasting my time by reading you in future. It is quite a feat to encapsulate in one post the evidence of your being ill educated, ill mannered, inattentive to what others write and, as to cognitive/analytical abilities definitely high on the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome.

Listen dimwit, why don’t you read up on the Opium Wars and the related Indian Sepoy Rebellion which took place between the two Opium Wars? Then let’s see if your non-point about colonialism still stands?

As far as I know, The British used their superior military to impose “free trade” at gunpoint. In this case, free trade refers to monopoly prices on an addictive drug. And don’t go all libertarian either, cause the British had the wisdom to ban opium in their own nation.

You could make the assertion that the USian empire never colonized the Latin American banana republics–With your piss poor logic you’d be right. It just overthrew anyone it suspected of economic nationalism and replaced them with a pliant comprador class.

He has overplayed his hand, confronted the US 10~20 years too early,

I doubt the confrontation was at Xi’s initiation. The CIA has good people watching China’s rise.

ZG, does that mean zero gravity?

Supposing not, having not kept up with all netspeak in recent years (can usually work most out), and never being expert in or user of CB, I do not know the term.

Fair enough, and my sense is much closer to yours than the Chinese people interviewed in that video.

The people who made that video are themselves Asian and have no agenda – so at least it does seem likely many Chinese do not well understand the position of whites in China, as perhaps many white Americans don’t really understand the nuances of the Asian position in the US (they see only that Asians are doing great in tech jobs, and not that they massively underperform their credentials and energy investment and rarely make it to the top) – and thus may not understand bitterness and anger of someone like you.

Its hard to say this early how strong the case is – if it turns out to be very weak, you may have a good point. Time will tell – let’s also remember that information on the arrest is being withheld on request of Meng.

China operates in Iran all the time with the full knowledge of the US – that isn’t the issue, I agree.

The way this was being perceived by many was that the arrest was simply about Huawei operating in Iran – I agree that would be an insane escalation on the part of the US, an act of pure bullying.

I don’t know the details – perhaps it wasn’t feasible to deal with Huawaei the way ZTE was dealt with? Perhaps HW is no longer dependent on US technology and is selling previously acquired tech with a sense of impunity….or maybe for some other reason it wasn’t feasible.

I can certainly imagine scenarios where an arrest may have seemed necessary.

My original point was really only to correct the misperception that this is in response to HW simply doing business in Iran and point out that, based on what we know now, this arrest may well be a rational and measured response.

Whether it is that, we will only know as the details of this complex case emerge.

That’s interesting. What about Japanese? I know for certain Chinese are not related to the altaic. Most Chinese I see, even north Chinese, look like Vietnamese with lighter skin.

korean people and central asian, mongolian etc people are closely genetically related. We are all part of the altaic culture, this is why its not uncommon to see mongolians, kazakh, kalmyk etc who look vaguely korean and vice versa.

Sorry but not going to watch that video, sounds like bullshit to me. There’s a lot of variance in how whites are viewed by Chinese locals.

And LOL, there are very few whites in China, and much fewer in seriously high level jobs. You can’t really do anything in China without knowing the language and having connections within the system. My guess is that most of the whites in China live in their little expat bubble, mostly working for non-Chinese companies in China. That’s basically like not even being in China. Just like Chinese in America in their academia/STEM bubble where they seldom have to interact in a non-trivial way with Americans, where at least half the people are foreigners.

Your sloppy grammar and diction looks like a fair measure of your sloppy thinking. If your “over the past few years” had been “over the previous few years” it might at least have conveyed a sensible meaning. But it is your “The moment I heard…. *my first thought was*….. *it must be a black op* conveying a certainty no government has managed and which has been almost totally at odds with actual evidence that truly marks you as a frivolous troll.

FWIW a Cathay Pacific pilot friend, now, four and a half years later, says the professional consensus is that it was a murder-suicide by the Captain. Whose black-op would that be?

I don’t think any jury of the literate would agree that Mao’s goal or purpose was implied by the title “Mao’s Great Famine” and I suggest to you that it is simply accusing him of being the person most responsible for the bad decisions which caused the famine. It seems to be true also that the author found plenty of evidence of Mao’s callousness though you can never be sure that expressions regarded by most as callous weren’t calculated to have some not so obvious effects, as well as maybe even covering up real angst on the part of the person appearing to be heartless.

As to America’s (alleged) deliberate obstruction of attempts to relieve famine the reasons are likely to be more complicated than childish resentment at having been driven back to the 38th Parallel and stalemate in Korea. The advertising of the consequences of messing with America is a more plausible motive. As to the (alleged) embargo it is worth considering it in the context of blockades like that against Germany in WW1 and the German’s U boat warfare against Britain’s food imports in both Work Wars. There was after all a serious Cold War. Not that I am making a case for or against.

so extreme was its persistence in not fulfilling its commitments

Correct regarding ZTE. Possibly not applicable in regards to Huawei.

The burden is now to prove that Huawei is guilty of selling actual American-manufactured components to Iran, not merely Huawei products derived/copied from the U.S.

Huawei, in addiction to its own large R&D, probably uses tech from Taiwan, S. Korea, Japan, Germany, the U.S., a host of other countries, and indeed even other Chinese competitors like ZTE or Xiaomi.

In fact, any Huawei product, or any product from anyone, is likely an optimized hybrid-synergy of many technologies from many sources. That’s simply the modern, inter-connected supply chain in action.

Exactly who is to way that a certain process or technique could only have come from the United States?

So it seems we have quite the legal task ahead of us, and the case for violating an agreement not to sell U.S. technology to Iran seems weak indeed.

As to violating U.S. sanctions on Iran – it goes without saying that’s not even a thing for non-Americans.

For my part, I wonder if we haven’t overplayed our hand – does the Huawei agreement give us the right to actually extradite employees? Fining the Huawei corporation and denying them American technology, that is one thing. The ZTE treatment, if you will.

But arresting and trying employees, aka actual PEOPLE – well, that crosses a very ugly line.

You are one of many on UR thresds who uses “colonization” and its cognates in a loose way that sometimes makes it unclear what is being asserted and always weakens the argument.

Colonies were originally Greek settlements around the Mediterranean or Black Sea which allowed a group of immigrant Greeks to work and trade and enjoy autonomy. That meaning fairly accurately describes English and French settlement and colonization in the New World and in Australasia. The word doesn’t need much stretching to cover Kenya where there were white farmers, Malaya with its rubber plantations or Fiji where the working colonists were mostly Indian. But to attribute Cjina’s problems, even its backwardness compared to Japan, to colonization is bizarre. Concessions in Shanghai, and separate rule of the once insignificant Hong Kong could only have been advantageous for a country which hadn’t been messed up by ccourt Mandarins, feckless Emperors and war lordism.

In India’s case imperialism is a much better term than colonialism to convey useful ideas.

The title of that book cleverly implies that famine was Mao’s goal when it was not. The USA’s attitude was to sanction China in the 1960’s when the Americans could have sold them grain for cash. Instead, the US psychos, still sore from being denied a ‘military victory’ in Korea ( despite the US killing of 20% of North Korea’s population by aerial bombing ), forced the Aussies and Canadians to curtail the shipments of grains.

The moment I heard of a Malaysian airliner the mh370 ‘disappearance’ with 250 cHINESE passengers aboard, my first thought was…
it must be a black op.

But Who’s the likely culprit ?
Cui BOno ?

Here’s a clue…
‘Located on the geostrategic Malacca Strait, Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim oil-producing nation with a “Look East” policy allying itself with Japan and China. Last year the Malaysian and Chinese governments established an economic alliance, which includes Asian access to world oil reserves. In the eyes of Washington and its allies, these are sufficient grounds to treat Kuala Lumpur as an adversary.

Even though the Malaysian police force has cooperated closely with the US Embassy in the war on terror, which led to arrests of top-ranking Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, that is not good enough. The late Moammar Gaddhafi of Libya and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also aided Washington in post-911 anti-terrorism, and look where it got them. It is not enough to be a friend of America. For a leader to survive, he must be a groveling yes-man, a political slave – and never mind America’s long-forgotten principles of sovereignty or self-determination.

Warnings from Washington were repeatedly given to Malaysia over the past few years. In late August 2013, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel flew to Kuala Lumpur last year to pressure the Defence Ministry to cooperated with the strategic pivot through joint naval-and-air exercises directed against Chinese forces in the Malaysian-claimed islets in the Spratley group. These spits of rock and sand located off of Sabah, the Malaysian state in northwest Borneo, have names longer than their diameters, for instance, Investigator Reef and Mariveles Reef.

https://rense.com/general96/mh370.html

Many ‘conspiracy theorists’ pointed to Diego Garcia, I think its very plausible.

ZTE was sanctioned and now even has to have its board vetted by the US – which seems to me like an unprecedented humiliation for a foreign nation – so extreme was its persistence in not fulfilling its commitments.

Nevertheless, this was apparently not sufficient to deter Huawei. This arrest is a necessary escalation.

It should also be noted that for some time China has been arresting or detaining citizens of Western countries, and for far more trivial reasons – albeit usually of Chinese ethnicity. It was really only a matter of time until other countries followed suit.

China has a massive sense of grievance – and a sense of grievance often leads to reactive bullying – people with a strong sense of grievance aggress against others while framing it as justice.

I’m not rooting for America, but I also don’t make the mistake of thinking the opposition to America is necessarily good.