The Healther movement

It appears that the anti-Obama crowd has morphed the so-called “Birther” movement into the “Healther” movement. The basic premise of this new approach is to deny the Obama administration the political power and influence that it could derive from passing national healthcare reform legislation. The primary strategy of this Healther cult, and this label simply replaces the more accurate label of “anti-Obama” cult, is to disrupt the effort to accurately understand the issues, constraints, and options surrounding healthcare in America.

At first, they attempt to terminate any debate or discussion of the topic; breaking up or disrupting efforts at public debate is a primary strategy. When forced to participate in any discussion, they shy away from reasonable contributions and rely on the wild and the whacky: for many of them, Obama is apparently the latest anti-Christ or a Hitler reborn. For some, the proposal to reform healthcare is the advent of socialism (which is apparently an evil thing even though a significant part of the national economy is dominated by socialistic enterprises like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid). It appears they are willing to deny the nation any sort of healthcare reform until their fellow travelers win majorities in the national elections and can dictate their own solutions.

It remains to be seen if they fall by the wayside as the Birthers now seem to have done.

Global Cyber-warfare in process

This latest report, Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries, from the NYT, provides an update on the progress of the next world war: a war that will focus on information.

Note that the information targeted includes email communications: the researchers documented systematic searching and pilfering of email contents. Note that the use of the stolen communications are applied to counteract other information or shape decision-making of allies or enemies.

Consider this:

“… after an e-mail invitation was sent by the Dalai Lama’s office to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the diplomat discouraging a visit. And a woman working for a group making Internet contacts between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet, shown transcripts of her online conversations and warned to stop her political activities.” [NYT, same article noted above]

It is interesting to see that the reporter and several persons quoted in the article, noting that this particular operation apparently originated in China, “cautioned against concluding that China’s government was involved.”

Who is kidding whom, here?

Not entirely innocent, are we?

While government leaders debate a Wall St. bail-out and everyone else decries the greedy bankers, some of the basis of this “crisis” can be discovered by looking in the mirror: see Hanson’s article in RCP.

Hacking Palin’s email account

The news yesterday that VP candidate Palin’s email account at yahoo was hacked got my attention quickly.  I was curious not about the information that was obtained (it was mundane) or the target (who cares?) but how someone got the data.  How does someone hack into a major email service provider?

It took a little surfing and digging but I got a possible true summary of what happened from a michelle malkin blog post where she may have received a communication from the hacker.  To confirm this story, one needs to understand the yahoo.com methodology for password re-setting (of which I am unfamiliar).

The hacker obtained Palin’s email address and then attempted access to the account, via the password recovery routine,

after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)

the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…[michelle maklin post; see above]

So, the implication is this hacker used some relatively manual brute search techniques to get the answers to Palin’s challenge questions: what is your birthday? what is your zipcode? and where did you meet your spouse?

If this is how it was done, I would conclude that yahoo does not have a limitation on the number of tries for successful challenge question answers.  The ability to bang away with any number of answer combinations seems like a weak security feature. There is also a lesson for us all in how we select challenge questions and the answers.

Hillary delegates for McCain?

One of the unfathomable new stories of this latest presidential campaign is the alleged preponderance of unsatisfied Hillary Clinton delegates who are so upset with the outcome of the Democratic Presidential nomination process that they are proclaiming they will be voting for McCain.

It is unclear to me, on the surface, how any true-supporter of Clinton could even contemplate voting for the Republican ticket or for John McCain specifically.  My first explanation is that the media is over-emphasizing the number of Hillary delegates in this category; in any group of humans, there is bound to be some wackos whose agendas are not very clear or logical.  Our media process is good at locating these contra-stories, especially if the subjects are vocal and saavy at media manipulation.

So, what if this is not media-generated “news?”  I can only conclude that anti-Obama/Hillary-delegates are either racists, feministas, Republican moles, or seriously mixed-up citizens whose minds may have been destroyed by too many hours of TV viewing.   The notion of a citizen professing strong emotional allegiance toward Sen. Clinton’s aspirations turning around to be anti-black is a real stretch.  There may be a few rigidly anti-male feminists among them but there can’t be many.  Similarly, the number of elected delegates that could be Republican agent provocateurs has to be minuscule.  That leaves the seriously mixed-up.

While it is believable that there is a number of seriously mixed up delegates in the mix, how can a significant number ignore the directions of Sen. Clinton herself, who unofficially and officially released her delegates from voting for her and, to her credit, pointed out that anyone supporting her causes, such as universal healthcare and woman’s rights, should be voting for Mr Obama.

It seems to me that this notion of “Hillary delegates for McCain” is not relevant and an example of manufactured news.