RE: Using RFC 821 to despam open relays.
Declan McCullagh[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 10:29:36AM -0500, Trei, Peter wrote: If the mail server introduces an increasing delay (similar to the backoff mechanism in Ethernet) to it's response after the first 2 RCPTs, the server becomes useless for sending spam. Similarly, it could slow it's response if the rate of commands which start a new message (HELO MAIL SEND SOML SAML) from a given IP rises above a threshold. How would this work with legit mailing list servers making a delivery attempt? From what I understand, when I send something to Politech, postfix will try to connect to aol.com and deliver over a thousand messages in quick succession. That's more efficient than a thousand connections with one message each. -Declan My goal is to allow anonymity in sending via open relays to continue to exist, for low volume applications. Mailing lists are never anonymous (though some are not widely publicized). They always have a persistant nexus site. Servers used to explode mailing lists could have a whitelist for the lists they support. Agreed, this does not deal with the spam problem on cypherpunks. Since cpunks has (by policy) no restrictions on posting, everyone can and does send spam through it. Most mailing lists, however, are more restrictive, in that only subscribers can post. Peter Trei
[no subject]
Tim May wrote... the Jews will be destroyed and sent to Hell, and then JC will rise out of Babylon or Yonkers or someplace and will reign as King for 1000 years, at which point the Earth will be destroyed. Not exactly. At the last minute (ie, before Armageddon wrecks just about everything), the Jews are supposed to convert en masse as they recognize the jewish messiah (ie, Jesus). Or something like that. I will have something to say about this later... Flagg Concerned about your privacy? Follow this link to get FREE encrypted email: https://www.hushmail.com/?l=2 Big $$$ to be made with the HushMail Affiliate Program: https://www.hushmail.com/about.php?subloc=affiliatel=427
RE: Things are looking better all the time
On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Lucky Green wrote: If any terrorists had nukes, why have they not used them so far? I don't think they have nukes. Not yet. But now they're seeing plenty of reasons to get them. We're lucky they're poor, low-tech people in general.
RE: Using RFC 821 to despam open relays.
Barry Shein [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes This is a little like suggesting to the military that filling small bronze tubes with gunpowder and plugging the ends up with lead might drive the lead slugs, aimed with pipes, fast enough to penetrate Iraqi soldiers' flesh. That is, the blind leading the blind. -b If Mr. Shein chose to be a little less opaque in his comments, maybe some of us could see what he's trying to say. Peter Trei
[AntiSocial] Warblog (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Iraqi warblog chronicles Baghdad bombings March 25, 2003 Reuters A mysterious Iraqi who calls himself Salam Pax, writing a Web log from the heart of Baghdad, has developed a large Internet following with his wry accounts of daily life in a city under US bombardment. Salam Pax, a pseudonym crafted from the Arabic and Latin words for peace, came back on line on Monday after a two-day break because of interruptions in Internet access. The traffic on his Web site, http://dear_raed.blogspot.com, caused the server to go down and Salam's e-mail folder has filled with inquiries about his true identity. Salam, who writes in English, is the only resident of Iraq known to be filing accounts of the war directly to the Web. He has spoken against the invasion but clearly has no great love for Iraq's Baathist leaders. Freaks. Hurling abuse at the world is the only thing left for them to do, he said last week after media appearances by Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf and Interior Minister Mahmoud Diyab al-Ahmed. But he does not like seeing his city bombed either. The only thing I could think of was 'why does this have to happen to Baghdad'. As one of the buildings I really love went up in a huge explosion I was close to tears, he wrote on Saturday. Salam and his family have been out on reconnaissance missions around the city to inspect the damage and they report the bombing has been accurate but dangerous to civilians. Today before noon I went out with my cousin to take a look at the city. Two things. 1) the attacks are precise. 2) they are attacking targets which are just too close to civilian areas in Baghdad, he wrote on Sunday. On Saturday he reported a rare eyewitness account of Iraqi policemen setting fire to the oil in trenches dug around Baghdad, apparently to confuse the guidance system of bombs. My cousine (sic) came and told me he saw police cars standing by one and setting it on fire. Now you can see the columns of smoke all over the city, he wrote. Salam reports that the streets of Baghdad are busy but few shops are open. Vegetable prices shot up in the first days of the war but by Sunday they had fallen back to normal. In the first days of the US and British invasion, Salam gave the impression of calm resignation but his tone changed on Sunday when Iraqi resistance surfaced and casualties rose. If Um Qasar (the port of Umm Qasr in the south) is so difficult to control what will happen when they get to Baghdad? It will turn uglier and this is very worrying, he wrote. People (and I bet allied forces) were expecting things to be mush (sic) easier. There are no waving masses of people welcoming the Americans nor are they surrendering by the thousands. People are doing what all of us are, sitting in their homes hoping that a bomb doesn't fall on them and keeping their doors shut. The electricity has gone out in parts of Baghdad and the Bush administration has launched another e-mail blitz on Iraqis, sending him five messages, he reported. Three of them are to army personnel and two to the general public. In those they gave us the radio frequencies we are supposed to listen to. They are calling it 'Information Radio', he said. COPYRIGHT: (c) Reuters 2003 --- To unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe antisocial as the entire message.
Re: Most Americans believe Hussein the mastermind behind 9/11
At 12:34 PM 03/24/2003 -0800, Major Variola (ret) wrote: At 02:25 PM 3/24/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Pretty amusing. Beyond Doublethink, as not even the US government claims this... http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2cid=127ncid=742e=7u=/ucru /20030320/cm_ucru/the_moron_majority Its the result of a stack overrun. People have limited buffers, and they are easily overrun by too frequent hate-campaigns. Sometimes the remnants fuse. That's why the Two Minutes Hate is so _important_ - it keeps us Focused! We've _always_ been at war with Osama bin Laden, and his buddy Saddam!
Re: Things are looking better all the time
-- James A. Donald: If the US trys to avoid civilian casualties, this is not out of fear and weakness. Indeed, when we observe the recent past, it seems that it is failure to commit sufficient murder that provokes these attacks. On 24 Mar 2003 at 17:41, Eugen Leitl wrote: This is dire lunacy. Currently US is perceived as an agressor by the majority of the world, Exactly so. If the US murdered as many people as those it is perceived as aggressing against, then, like the Soviet Union, it would no longer be perceived as the aggressor, no matter how many people it subjugated or countries it invaded. It would get a free pass for its crimes, as the Soviet Union did. Recall that the he Soviet Union was slaughtering Muslims in enormous numbers, and today's Russia continues to murder them in numbers vastly greater than comparatively modest murders that Israel commits, and no one thought to launch terror attacks on the Soviet Union. There are a few terror attacks on todays Russia, but far fewer than on Israel. What is the moral? The moral is, murder more innocents, suffer less terror, less protests. Does anyone recall a protest against the Soviet Union when it was murdering Muslims by the trainload? If today's Russia murdered as many innocents as the former Soviet Union, they would have no terror problem at all. If you do not murder women and children, people think you are weak. So they attack. The more Iraqi children the US napalms, the safer every US resident who works in a tall building will be, and less our cities will be troubled with protests. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG ZrkGvOGLQpALrU1KE9QX1mfd34aksVSnAZZd+OeA 4jz+JQJq45RkQt+yyCz+4rOM/aJdGQKZrYYsZTmp8
Re: About Christers versus Ragheads
Neil Johnson wrote: On Monday 24 March 2003 06:32 pm, Tim May wrote: can be destroyed, ushering in the the Rapture and Christ's Dominion on This whole rapture bit always amused me. Rapture isn't even mentioned in the Bible. It's all based on TWO (count'em TWO) verses in the New Testament. Actually, the pre-millenialist rapture ideas have been going out of fashion amongst so-called fundamentalist Christians for a while. The peak of them was probably the 1970s. For the last 30 years a lot of the new churches (keywords charismatic Toronto Experience restoration vineyard etc) have reverted to the older position that the rule of the saints can be established on Earth by everybody being converted - which sounds just as heavy, but does mean that they think that things can get better, so it is worth getting involved in the world. The rapture ideas came in as part of dispensationalism in the 19th century (Google for Scofield Reference Bible) and, even in the United States, has probably never been the majority view amongst Christians though it might have got pretty near it in the 60s/70s/80s (Eve of Destruction (Barry McGuire became a Christian evangelist IIRC) Ken Brown (evil lefty Christian wimp) Rumsfeld, Blix Barada Nikto!
Re: Things are looking better all the time
On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 10:31:14PM -0800, James A. Donald wrote: The more Iraqi children the US napalms, the safer every US resident who works in a tall building will be, and less our cities will be troubled with protests. I assume you're joking. If you're not, what you say may be true (but hardly moral) if (a) all the innocents from that nation or ethnic group can be killed and (b) it can be kept quiet or other nations don't care. Neither condition is true. -Declan
RE: Things are looking better all the time
At 04:37 AM 03/25/2003 +0100, Lucky Green wrote: If any terrorists had nukes, why have they not used them so far? Because they've been able to achieve Shock and Awe without them and keep most of the rabble in line by threatening to blow up other nuclear-armed terrorists in mutually assured destruction. Oh, wait, those weren't the terrorists you were talking about One of the things that really frustrated me about 9/11 was that after 45 years of nuclear terrorism and cold war, we'd had close to a decade without anybody threatening to destroy the world, except for occasional small patches of it just to remind everybody to pay their military-industrial-complex dues, and we'd had this nice economic boom (though it was obviously winding down), and while the Bush League was trying to do everything they wanted, even so, things were starting to look like maybe our species could act somewhat civilized for a while. But no, it's back to the same old same old, and so much for civil liberties in America as well.
Re: Web hosting recommendations (Verio?)
On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 02:13:58AM -0500, Greg Newby wrote: Rackspace.com looks good, but pricey. I've used Rackspace for Politech since 2000. I'd recommend their tech support -- a live human 24 hours a day, any day. They are a little pricey. I've never had any content based complaint from them although occasionally I post controversial stuff. Another alternative is to use something like the Well if you don't mind hanging something off of your personal account (well.com/~declan). It's run by good folks and they won't unilaterally remove something. -Declan
Re: Things are looking better all the time
Declan McCullagh wrote: Or perhaps we'll see someone take a GPS-controlled small plane, which can carry 1,000 lbs, and turn it into a flying bomb or delivery system for something quite noxious. These planes can be rented by the hour at hundreds of small to medium sized airports around the U.S. Though I don't know if the autopilot is configurable enough to let an attacker program it to head to a certain altitude at a certain location and then bail out via parachute. Another novel that came out with the idea - and the first one to explicitly mention GPS AFAIR - was The Moon Goddess and the Son by Donald Kingsbury from 1987 (incorporating parts from stories in Analog back in the 1970s) which has an Afghan refugee studying aero engineering in the US and setting up light planes to autopilot an attack on the Kremlin. (To be honest when I first heard the news about 9/11 that's what I thought might have happened - until I saw a TV screen I didn't realise they were passenger planes) A good book which got less attention than it deserved. Contains a brilliant idea for what should have been done in LEO after Mir. I suppose it has been eclipsed in the memory of sf fans both by really happened to the Soviet Union and perhaps also by Mary Jane Engh's Arslan (AKA The Wind from Bukhara) which overlaps in subject matter a little. Rumsfeld, Blix Barada Nikto!
Re: CDR: Web hosting recommendations (Verio?)
On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Greg Newby wrote: It's time to change Web hosting services for some domains I run. Does anyone have experiences to share about a hosting service that doesn't suck too badly? I remember cryptome.org is hosted by verio, and I admired their policy of not pulling JYA's plug for a complaint. These days, they're owned by NTT and are looking a little scarier (but maybe my best choice). Rackspace.com looks good, but pricey. It would be nice to find a hosting (dedicated or otherwise) company that has good services (aka, very solid tech) AND that won't shut you down if they ever get a copyright complaint or whatever. I'm not planning on doing anything illegal or even questionable, but most sites have policies to take down your domain first, and ask questions after. I've had it with ma pa hosting services, and am looking to either move to one of the big boys or find a dedicated professional hobbiest with a fat pipe. Seeking mid-range hosting, or low-end dedicated/virtual server. Thanks for ideas...Greg Savvis is profoundly content neutral, and provides 10 day cure periods for DMCA (all they require from their user is a DMCA counter-notice to make them go away. The only thing they don't tolerate, even a little, is spam/open mail relays. Everything else is welcome, and closeley guarded. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Things are looking better all the time
At 12:03 AM 3/25/2003 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote: Someone else pointed out that this has been discussed in a novel (wasn't aware). I hardly mean to say my prediction is unique. It's just one response to the question that the counterterrorism folks must ask themselves all the time: How to delivery a deadly payload of sufficient size to a target that's primarily defended against car bombs? I seem to recall that with sufficient knowledge and commonly available detonators shaped explosive charges can be configured to hurl heavy explosive payloads, much like a mortar, with fair accuracy, great distance or very high velocity. I can't seem to find the reference on-line but I vaguely recall that a 50kg payload could be accelerated to multi-mach speeds with a device that could be placed in a car trunk. A poor man's howitzer. steve War is just a racket ... something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small group knows what its about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. --- Major General Smedley Butler, 1933
Re: Things are looking better all the time
-- On 24 Mar 2003 at 22:05, Declan McCullagh wrote: I fear that's right. We have substantially increased our number of enemies capable of causing us serious damage (and have the requiste means, motive, and opportunity) Observe the marked decline in terrorist acts. Recollect that 9/11 was the second attempt to bring down the two towers and one of many large scale terrorist acts directed at Americans. Since Afghanistan, there have been no comparable attempts. The Australians got a bit of terror for their actions in East Timor, whereupon they threatened the Indonesians that if they did not clean up Indonesia, the Australians would do it for them. Since then, they have had no further significant problems either. All of the terrorists, and most of the protestors, think that if one do not kill innocents, it is a sign of weakness, and they strike at weakness. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG SKftD3iO5jEjgK/DD7/KHtmYPRg6AxRM6VoCCMVd 4EwomPyztP4ywyl/PXmpq8ssvNutxjj3lMHHPmEb2
Re: Using RFC 821 to despam open relays.
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 At 10:07 PM -0500 on 3/24/03, Declan McCullagh wrote: How would this work with legit mailing list servers making a delivery attempt? From what I understand, when I send something to Politech, postfix will try to connect to aol.com and deliver over a thousand messages in quick succession. That's more efficient than a thousand connections with one message each. Unfortunately, if we ever went to sender-pays, we'd probably climb an authentication hierarchy which got us exactly that. First you sign your messages, to cryptographically authenticate them against a whitelist. Then you encrypt a coin in a message to the recipient's public key. At this point you've definitely made every message unique. Some kind of modified SMTP process decrypts that message, redeems/reissues the coin, and, if the postage is enough, lets the message through. This assumes SMTP on every machine, no POP per se, which is consistent with the always-on, end-to-end net we all want anyway. You need on-line mail handling, because you need on-line double-spending prevention. All of the above presupposes a lot, obviously. In the meantime, some kind of sender-pays book-entry-settled clearinghouse agreement between large-volume SMTP processors will do a reasonable job of killing most spam, and it would do so transparently to most users. Of course, as Steve has noted already, people with legitimate commercial offers will just pay for the privilege, which, frankly, is as it should be. The cost of anything is the foregone alternative. Ultimately, if you send a lot of mail using SMTP, you get a bill. If you receive a lot of mail, you send a bill. A clearinghouse consolidates and crosses all the bills and net-settles on a batch cycle. Even cross-border transactions could be handled this way, because, frankly, volume senders will get a bill or get kicked out of the settlement system. You get black-holing, but you get black-holing with an audit-trail, and a measurement of actual monetary damages, to boot. It wouldn't take long for that to result in a refusals to peer with someone upstream of a known spammer. You've identified spammers and choked them off, economically, at their point of origin, which solves the problem at its cause, the mis-pricing of an asset. Cheers, RAH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPn/1FsPxH8jf3ohaEQJZhwCg/4/Wj34DYEoxjJDmTW6Z/YSCih0AnRNI f+gfsiHvUOlelEeXmzzRHOV+ =ZW2o -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- - R. A. Hettinga mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/ 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA ... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience. -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
faking WMD evidence
Apparently the CIA and MI6 have been faking WMD evidence for quite a while: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030331fa_fact1
Re: Things are looking better all the time
At 10:53 PM 3/24/03 -0800, Steve Schear wrote: I seem to recall that with sufficient knowledge and commonly available detonators shaped explosive charges can be configured to hurl heavy explosive payloads, much like a mortar, with fair accuracy, great distance or very high velocity. I can't seem to find the reference on-line but I vaguely recall that a 50kg payload could be accelerated to multi-mach speeds with a device that could be placed in a car trunk. A poor man's howitzer. A shaped charge would probably destroy any projectile other than the collapsed liner. Which does move very fast -faster even than the detonation velocity of the brisant, which can be a few thousand m/sec. Nothing like a hypersonic slug of molten tungsten to start the day. However, see _The Irish War_ for a few practical, tested homebrew mortars you can fire out of a van. Moonroofs are terrorist equiptment.
Re: pgp in internet cafe (webpgp)
Delurking... Jesus. Stop picking at the guy (not just you, I mean everybody). Why not use your brains and suggest a few workarounds? Like: 1: Superencrypt beforehand. 2: Don't type if you can cut and paste. 3: Use one-time hard passwords 4: Use throw-away one time free email addresses 5: Use proxies to connect to privacy services you don't own 6: Use Regulatory (and other) arbitrage 7: Wear gloves, Margaret Thatcher halloween mask, leave no DNA, etc, etc. /flame off/ On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 10:51:49 -0500 (est), Sunder [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: And (dumbass) you would trust the keyboard and display of an internet cafe is safe to type in your passphrase? Never heard of keystroke capturing? You're better off trying to find a WiFi access point - i.e. Starbucks or whatever cafe and using that instead with your own trusted hardware. That said, you can use hushmail... --Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ --*--:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sunder.net On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Anonymous wrote: Assumptions: - I have https (SSL) access to a trusted unix box - I trust SSL - I'll take a risk of unknown machine running http client being subverted I want to use PGP while checking/sending e-mail via web interface on someone else's machine (say, internet cafe). So in one window I have webmail interface, and in the other window I have webpgp interface, and I paste ciphertext back and forth. The https-ed webpgp interface should authenticate me via some sort of passphrase and then I can submit ciphertext for decryption (encryption also requres authenticatin, in order to avoid browsing of my keyrings.) The question is - do I have to code this or has someone already done it ? -- contrary [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Things are looking better all the time
-- Declan McCullagh: what you say may be true (but hardly moral) if (a) all the innocents from that nation or ethnic group can be killed and (b) it can be kept quiet or other nations don't care. No need to keep it quiet. The French would kiss our feet as they kissed the feet of the Nazis. The New York Times glories in a pulitzer prize received for laudatory reporting of similar activities by the communists, and would doubtless drop its present anti war stance for similarly laudatory reporting. Indeed, to keep it quiet would be useless. Were the US to burn every Iraqi child alive, the intent and purpose would be to have everyone strongly suspect, so that the world would learn to let sleeping giants lie. Similar tactics were repeatedly employed throughout the the twentieth century, and were invariably highly effective, and welcomed everywhere in the finest universities, amongst the very best people, and the most prestigious publications, with glowing praise. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 3ugzZZGkxDJMCzgCZSym0TNHDvLJtovGA0GdGNLC 4eZu4NvyASZJK56sH1lBkFMLUv6ARCl1r7M/m6epB
Re: [IP] Risks of Iraqi war emerging Some officials warn of a mismatch between strategy and force size. (fwd)
(snip) If these guys fight and fight hard for Baghdad, with embedded Baathists stiffening their resistance at the point of a gun, then we are up the creek, said one retired general. Exactly. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com We are now in America's Darkest Hour. http://www.oshkoshbygosh.org hoka hey!
Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
Besides, can't you achieve something vaguely similar with simple tarpitting? If I understand tarpitting, I believe it is slowing down the SMTP communication with the sending mail server. Even if each transmission were slowed to one minute per message, consider a massive server that can be partitioned into hundreds or thousands of virtual servers that could each be sending mail. I'm not sure, but maybe each VS could have it's own IP address, appearing as a unique mail server. Just some thoughts... I'm probably missing something. :) http://ganns.com _ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Things are looking better all the time
-- James A. Donald: The more Iraqi children the US napalms, the safer every US resident who works in a tall building will be, and less our cities will be troubled with protests. Declan McCullagh I assume you're joking. I am stating a fact. It should be obvious I do not conclude that the government should round up every Iraqi child, and every male in America with an arab sounding name, and burn them alive, but were the government to do so, that would be very effective in making us safe from arabs and Muslims though far from effective in making us safe from our government. Similar measures were successful for communists, and met wide acceptance from Western intellectuals and newsmen. Still do to this day. One of the many Pulitzer prizes the New York times still boasts of to this day was given for laudatory reporting of similar measures. Similarly the French kissed the feet of the nazis, and spat on the graves of the heroes who brought them freedom. There is a regrettable but widespread human inclination to feel that only those whose hand are red with the blood of innocents are deserving of wealth and power, and to therefore strike out anyone with wealth and power whose hands are not red, and that attitude is very visible in the speeches of Bin Laden, among the protesters, and among some of those who posted to this list objecting to the US adventure in Iraq. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 4dP6/9Fhfmcs0iNekbG0Bt8hi7nnExY+o8L9PChE 4kZFmvALzX6VS72SUAlVBMzbNJRjFm2x/ClOJIcg+
The Highway of Death II
[long message elided] I am watching this clusterfuck train wreck unfold with amazement...it's happening better than I had hoped for. * The U.N. is shown to be ineffectual. They must be hoping Ted Turner has enough more billions left over to keep them afloat, because the American taxpayer is not likely to. * NATO is seriously divided. No matter the outcome of the War on Some Dictators, the divide is very great. People I see here in California are sharply polarized between wanting to hang Bush and Cheney and wanting to nuke Paris and Berlin. I can't see any outcome patching over this situation. (The bad news for me as a person of whiteness taxpayer is that the Demoncrats are possibly going to win the 2004 elections if this War goes badly (in terms of budget and body bags, not whether Saddam is still alive or not).) * As for the war, I'm not a military buff, but this 400-km convoy snaking across the desert looks to be a classical logistical nightmare. With only one entry point, a tiny strip of beach where Kuwait is, all supplies are passing up along this desert path. So much for the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force. As the referenced article points out, the U.S. was expecting a quick roll-up of Iraqi forces through grateful surrender and We Love America! banners. This isn't happening, and was predictable (in 1991 the troops who didn't surrender could just pull back into Iraq and mostly be safe...today, they know they are fighting for their lives, many of them). * Sandstorms, long supply lines, exhaustion, and fighting a guerilla force of irregulars (which the U.S. has the gall to claim are illegal--one assumes their Brit comrades are laughing uproariously at U.S. whines that soldiers must be dressed in official uniforms). * The U.S. and British news organizations are coy about not saying where this 400-km convoy is located, but it's clear to the Iraqis, from telephone calls from natives, from combat encounters, from knowing precisely where the path must be going...and from French and Russian satellite imagery. * This could turn out to be Highway of Death II. (A reference to the first Highway of Death, in 1991, when a similar, but shorter, Iraqi column was trapped and destroyed.) * Meanwhile, airlines are teetering on insolvency, California still faces a $35 billion budget shortfall, and trade wars are brewing. Glorious chaos! --Tim May
RE: Things are looking better all the time
At 10:42 AM 3/25/03 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Lucky Green wrote: If any terrorists had nukes, why have they not used them so far? I don't think they have nukes. Not yet. But now they're seeing plenty of reasons to get them. We're lucky they're poor, low-tech people in general. Are you sure you know where all your irradiators, isotope batteries, soviet agricultural sprouting-inhibitors are? Just asking. (And yes, dispersal weapons are not nuculear explosives, but since the major effects of either are due to panic, they're good enough for (anti) government work.)
Re: [IP] Risks of Iraqi war emerging Some officials warn of a mismatch betweenstrategy and force size. (fwd)
Eugen Leitl reposted an article by someone: From: Dave Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Risks of Iraqi war emerging Some officials warn of a mismatch between strategy and force size. By Joseph L. Galloway Inquirer Washington Bureau Knowledgeable defense and administration officials say Rumsfeld and his civilian aides at first wanted to commit no more than 60,000 U.S. troops to the war, on the assumption that the Iraqis would capitulate in two days. The total combat force now numbers about 180,000 troops. Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Hussein once the Americans attacked. Much as I love to say it, one of the things I hope to come out of this war is sufficient egg on the faces of Rumsfeld and the other PNACs so that it's be at least another 100 years before anyone listens to them. Those of us who aren't in the USA sleep safer in our beds if we know that the US realises there are huge costs to war. I don't want a world where anybody - even the good guys - thinks that they can start a war with no risk. The officials said Rumsfeld also made his disdain for the Army's heavy divisions very clear when he argued about the war plan with Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the allied commander. Franks wanted more and more heavily armed forces, said one senior administration official; Rumsfeld kept pressing for smaller, lighter and more agile ones, with much bigger roles for air power and special forces. Our force package is very light, said a retired senior general. If things don't happen exactly as you assumed, you get into a tangle, a mismatch of your strategy and your force. Things like the pockets [of Iraqi resistance] in Basra, Umm Qasr and Nasiriyah need to be dealt with forcefully, but we don't have the forces to do it. Though this might be wrong. If the pockets are in cities, and if you don't want to kill thousands of civilians, what use are heavy weapons? For literal street-fighting you want units like the British Paras Royal Marine Commandos, or the Gurkhas. And guess just who is in Basra now?
US vs God?
Actually, it's fun to play the Biblical prophecy game...remember it can be played from either side! For instance... Rev 13:3 And I saw one of his heads as though it had been smitten unto death; and his death-stroke was healed: and the whole earth wondered after the beast; The US and economy as a result of 9/11/01. 13:4 and they worshipped the dragon, because he gave his authority unto the beast; and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? And who is able to war with him? Self-explanatory, no? The people of the world worship power, which is given to the US. 13:5 and there was given to him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and there was given to him authority to continue forty and two months. 13:6 And he opened his mouth for blasphemies against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, even them that dwell in the heaven. The US is allowed to run amok for a while, and of course might makes right, so US leaders interpret this as proof of our special divine status. 13:7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and there was given to him authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation. Obviously a reference to the Cypherpunks (except Tim May..he ain't no saint by any stretch of the imagination!). 13:8 And all that dwell on the earth shall worship him, every one whose name hath not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that hath been slain. 13:9 If any man hath an ear, let him hear. Humm...I wonder if this book is encrypted? From: Neil Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: About Christers versus Ragheads Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 20:45:12 -0600 On Monday 24 March 2003 06:32 pm, Tim May wrote: can be destroyed, ushering in the the Rapture and Christ's Dominion on This whole rapture bit always amused me. Rapture isn't even mentioned in the Bible. It's all based on TWO (count'em TWO) verses in the New Testament. Mathew Chapter 24 vs 40 41 (40) Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. (41) Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left. That's it. And out of this (and the book of Revelations, which is about 10-12 pages WITH footnotes) we get what, 10 (No, 11!, there's another coming out in April !) books in the Left Behind Series. I've read a few chapters and decided I liked Stephen King's, The Stand better. -- Neil Johnson _ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
Re: Things are looking better all the time
What decline? The tower attacks were separated by about 8 years, There is no adequate sampling to justify that statement. On 24 Mar 2003 at 23:31, James A. Donald wrote: Observe the marked decline in terrorist acts. Recollect that 9/11 was the second attempt to bring down the two towers and one of many large scale terrorist acts directed at Americans.
Boycotting the Unwilling
Wired News has an article on a US company refusing to honor winning eBay bids from Canadians because Canada doesn't support Shrub's war for Oil, Regional Hegemony, and a Greater Israel. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the US will happily throw Americans in prison for refusing to do business with Israel, because Congress has made it illegal to support any boycott of the Beanie-Headed Land Grabbers. Seems like a bit of a double standard to me. http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,58190,00.html - VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- On eBay, the highest bid wins -- unless the item on sale is a laser printer from CompAtlanta and the bidder happens to be Canadian. That's what a tax consultant discovered last week when he tried to buy a printer over eBay, but was refused by the vendor when it was iscovered he lived in Vancouver. ... -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law
Re: US vs God?
On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 10:04:00AM -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: Humm...I wonder if this book is encrypted? Duh! You've never heard of the Bible codes? Certainly the Old Testament is encrypted. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com We are now in America's Darkest Hour. http://www.oshkoshbygosh.org hoka hey!
RE: Things are looking better all the time
If any terrorists had nukes, why have they not used them so far? --Lucky Well, one idea worth considering is that these terrorists are not merely mindless killing machines. Their goal (at least as bin Laden has stated it) is to get the US out of the middle east, and stop us from pretty much propping up the likes of the Saudi royal family, Saddam Huessein, and so on. Thus, killing 3,000 in the WTC is pretty dramatic enough...more can be tried if this doesn't get our attention. And then again, there's the possibility that they don't have a lot of nukes and are waiting for the appropriate moment (such as when 100,000 troops are tightly clustered around somewhere they can set one off). -TD _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
