Ok, we know Roseburg is a small town that used to advertise like crazy here for people from California to retire there.
• The local community college has about three thousand students.
• The killer is reported as dead and has been for several hours. They won’t release his name.
• Plus this from Fox News
Kortney Moore, 18, told the News-Review she was in her Writing 115 class in Snyder Hall when a shot came through the window. Moore said she saw her teacher get shot in the head. The shooter then reportedly told the students to get on the ground before asking people to stand up and state their religion. He then began firing. Fox News Article
Conclusion, the guy is named Mohammed or something else of similar origin.
Let’s see if this is called terrorism (if I’m right).
Over the weekend, I made the trek to Anaheim to attend the Board meeting of the California Republican Assembly. I may find the time to blog on the particulars at a later date but this article is not about the meeting per se or the stupid comments posted by other bloggers that didn’t attend the meeting. No this blog is about water.
Over the last few years, many Republicans in elected office have adopted the mantra that the drought in California is manmade disaster. This claim was repeated at the Board meeting several times by Republican Legislators.
While government has mismanaged the usage of water and failed to build more storage since the time Governor Brown’s father was in office, this claim by Republicans is intellectual laziness.
Without rain, storage is only going to get your so far. Yes government could do more but to place all blame on Democrats is dishonest and lazy.
Consider this:
• When Republicans ran the California Legislature, did this issue get addressed and fixed? NO
• When Republicans occupied the Governor’s Office, did this issue get addressed and fixed? NO
• When Republicans have run Congress both House and/or Senate did this get fixed? NO
• When Republicans have occupied the White House did this get fixed? NO
• Is there a comprehensive Republican fix awaiting passage at the State or National level? NO
Lakebed of Indian Valley Reservoir Feb 15, 2014 #1
Lakebed of Indian Valley Reservoir Feb 15, 2014 #2
So the obvious rebuttal to this claim is: “Hey Republicans, what the hell are you waiting for?”
The truth is Republicans have done nothing in decades. For example, the last meaningful action taken on the Auburn Dam was by Assemblyman David Knowles in the 1990’s. Since then I don’t know of any efforts to move the issue. Clearly, Republicans would rather have the issue than see it solved.
Back when Dan Lungren was a big deal in Congress, I tried to talk with him about water; specifically, desalinization so that Southern California could be less dependent on water from the North. He shut me down and wouldn’t even engage me in a conversation. It was just the two of us in a Republican booth in Elk Grove and he wasn’t interested. As far as I can tell, Republicans still aren’t.
Clearly we need more storage but that is not enough. We need a “Manhattan Project” styled effort to make Southern California water self-sufficient. The largest body of water on the planet is on your doorstep, use it. If you want to save Mono Lake, Hetch Hetchy, little fishes and whatever else, then this is the logical way to do it.
Republican rhetoric is not going to solve anything. We need meaningful action. Unfortunately, none is forthcoming on either the State level or the national. Republican control of both the House and Senate has never resulted in a bill being passed.
Republicans are not serious about the issue. If they were, they would get it done and not worry about who got the credit. That is the Reagan way. Reagan had this plaque on his desk for a reason, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
Apple rolled-out their new phones and tablets today. It’s clear that they’re missing Steve Jobs because their stuff today was boring, old, and overpriced.
Both the phone and tablet announced today, are lower in specifications than existing products already offered or announced by Microsoft. Oh, on the new Apple tablet demoed today, they were using Microsoft Office as their proof they could do something besides games on the new tablet.
Phone
The new Windows phones are capable of running any apps available for Windows 10 (phone, tablet, and desktop). If the programmer writes his code properly, the app can run on any Windows device.
Oh, the Continuum feature means your phone can function as a desktop computer including HD monitor, keyboard and mouse.
With just over a week to go until the next meeting of the California Republican Party, the lack of noise coming from the Just Us Brothers is noticeable. What looked to be a carefully orchestrated beginning to their California Impact Republicans (CIR) has gone dark. After announcing three chapters—none of which was from Placer County—not a peep has been heard.
What many thought would be a systematic roll-out of the requisite ten chapters and 200 statewide members prior to the grand announcement of the CIR submission of an application for recognition with the California Republican Party has instead become a non-starter.
The Just Us Brothers seem to find themselves in a moral dilemma. Should they keep going down this path? It seems fruitless when they can’t get Placer, Sutter-Yuba, and Yolo CIR chapters off the ground. These folks are literally in their backyard and were in their back-pocket on May 30th, but four months after they did their “final exit” from CRA, they still have nothing to show. Aaron’s prediction of a mass exodus from CRA has proved to be a figment of his fertile imagination. Contrary to his earlier statements, CRA has added units and members since the Just Us Brother left.
The other choice the Brothers can consider now is one they railed against when Karen England tried her hostile takeover of CRA in 2011. However, it does go with Aaron’s theme of “an advertisement with us carries an automatic endorsement.” They could let candidates buy an endorsement with the sponsorship of any CIR chapter in their district.
This option might be a win/win/win for the Brothers. They could get some badly needed loot from candidates, look legit to the casual observer in the CRP volunteer organizations committee, and because the CIR chapters would exist only on paper, they could maintain indefinite control of the group. This pay-to-play formula might be their logical move for 2016.
Since the CIR website still won’t offer even basic information on joining, it’s clear this group is a private club not a Republican organization open to interested voters.
CIR is an epic failure.As a straight-up group it is dead. The question now is will it be resurrected next year as a zombie puppet to financially benefit the Brothers?
Kim Davis, the defiant Kentucky county clerk that refuses to issue marriage licenses, is helping to separate the Presidential wannabees into sheep and goats.
Davis is exactly the type of person that we should rally around. Why, exactly because she is an elected official.
Carly Fiorina revealed her lack of understanding of Western (Christian) Culture when she uttered this non-sense yesterday.
“And, while I disagree with this court’s decision, their actions are clear. And so I think in this particular case, this woman now needs to make a decision that’s conscious — is she prepared to continue to work for the government, be paid for by the government, in which case she needs to execute the government’s will, or does she feel so strongly about this that she wants to sever her employment with the government and go seek employment elsewhere where her religious liberties would be paramount over her duties as a government employee,” Fiorina declared. carly-fiorina-says-kentucky-clerk-should-issue-gay-marriage-licenses-or-resign
I have met Carly before and have a great deal of respect for her but she is just plain wrong on this issue. The two main reasons are: Federalism and “the doctrine of the lesser magistrate.”
Federalism means that both the States and the national government have their proper roles. Since the national government is a creature of the States, states retain their sovereignty.
Point number one is that this is a state issue. Under Kentucky law, Kim Davis is right. Kentucky law (as is California’s) is that marriage is between one man and one woman. This provision is in accord with thousands of years of human history. Kentucky’s law is valid because it agrees with Scripture; any law contrary to Scripture is illegitimate.
Point two is that religious values have an integral role to play in the public square. Modern humanists have tried to redefine freedom of religion into freedom from religion. They contend that religion has no place in the establishment of public policy. However, this is an ignorant position to claim when all law is inherently religious.
Point three, the US Supreme Court is only a legitimate body when it abides by the boundaries of the Constitution. The biggest problem with the Court is that its function is poorly defined by the Constitution and they often will not confine themselves to matters properly within their jurisdiction.
All power that the Court has was given to it by the Court. This is the problem with the Court. Together the President and Congress have the power to limit the Court to matters specifically given to it by the Constitution but they rarely ever act to limit the judiciary. The Constitution doesn’t even give the Court the power to declare a law “unconstitutional”, the Court took this power upon themselves very early in the Republic.
Congress is intended to have the most say in the National government. Co-equal branches and checks and balances don’t work quite like the Founders envisioned. The concept that the Court is the final word in all its decisions is just political laziness. Only in cases and controversies where they have original jurisdiction is the Court the final word. Congress can strip the court of jurisdiction of any other matters with a simple majority vote. Yep, they can strip the Court of the power to decide marriage, abortion, and lots of other issues any time they want too.
The issues of federalism and limited government have been written about extensively by many others so nothing I’ve said should be news to my readers. However, it appears to be news to folks like Carly Fiorina and Michael Reagan. Yeah, Reagan is reportedly sounding the same call as Carly. michael-reagan-jailed-christian-clerk-should-quit-her-job
The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrate
The doctrine of the lesser magistrate is a concept in Protestant thought. A lesser magistrate is a ruler such as a prince who is under a greater ruler such as an emperor. According to many figures of the Reformation and Post-Reformation eras, the lesser magistrate has the authority to rebel against the tyranny of a supreme ruler.
The doctrine of the lesser magistrate finds its origin in John Calvin, who wrote that whereas private Christians must submit to the ruling authorities, there are “popular magistrates” who have “been appointed to curb the tyranny of kings”. When these magistrates “connive at kings when they tyrannise and insult over the humbler of the people” they “fraudulently betray the liberty of the people” when God has appointed them guardians of that liberty.
The lesser magistrate is prominent in the Lutheran Magdeburg Confession of 1550, which argued that the “subordinate powers” in a state, faced with the situation where the “supreme power” is working to destroy true religion, may go further than non-cooperation with the supreme power and assist the faithful to resist.
The doctrine of the lesser magistrate became important for the justification of the Dutch Revolt. According to Johannes Althusius in 1603 work, Politica, resistance to a supreme magistrate by lesser magistrates is justified in the case of tyranny. Althusius argued that the provincial authorities of the United Provinces were in this situation. Description Lesser Magistrate
Kim Davis is not issuing marriage licenses to anyone—gay or straight—but few media reports will tell you that. Some folks disagree with this position. Lesser Magistrate Blog
Let’s go back to Carly’s quote.
“…this woman now needs to make a decision that’s conscious — is she prepared to continue to work for the government, be paid for by the government, in which case she needs to execute the government’s will…”
Carly talks of the government as a monolithic structure that must be obeyed because the Court has spoken.
Where is the federalism?
More importantly, where is the stand against tyranny?
Kim Davis is trying to do the right thing and the fact that so many weak-kneed politicians are hiding behind five un-elected people in black robes is really sad. Kim won’t be the last Christian sent to jail for her beliefs, she is among the first of many.
This case is a challenge to all of us to decide where to draw the line where we say “this far and no further”. As a California resident, I know my turn is coming soon.
Although not mentioned in the email quoted below, clearly some state employees got caught in the hack of the Ashley Madison website. The odd thing is that the email sent out statewide is entitled “Phishing Scams.” The Ashley Madison hack was just that, a hack. It had nothing to do with phishing scams. I don’t know which is more troublesome, state employees using a website like Ashley—which by the way is blocked for 99% of network users—or that the head security guy is wrongly calling this a phishing scam.
Anyway, here is the email. Please note that links to state intranet sites were removed for this copy. Also, I added emphasis to portion on “data dump”.
Attention CDCR Email Account User,
The CDCR Information Security Office was recently made aware that several CDCR email accounts were published to a public Internet site in a data dump that was hacked by a third-party organization. The compromised email accounts were used as logons by the users for non-CDCR related activities. Although corresponding passwords or other personal information were not believe to have been exposed, we ask all users to:
• Do not use the same password for your CDCR account for any non-CDCR purposes such as personal email – this will reduce the risk of having your CDCR account compromised (best practice)
• Do not use the CDCR work email address for personal use such as use your email account to sign up for non-CDCR business related purposes.
Because of this data dump is available to the public, please also take the time to review regarding how to prevent against phishing attacks.
Additionally please:
• Do not enter sensitive or confidential information into any internet website unless it can be verified that the site is authentic,
• Do not reply to emails requesting any sensitive or confidential that originate from an unknown source, and
• Do not provide any sensitive or confidential information over the telephone during conversations that were not initiate by yourself.
If you have any further questions or concerns regarding this email please contact the CDCR Agency Information Security Office.
Tina Turner had a hit many years before her trip to Thunderdome when she asked, “What’s love got to do with it?” After being married to Ike, maybe she really felt that way.
Supposedly other women do too. If you believe their marketing, a vast number of unhappy and promiscuous women are available on the Ashley Madison website for any man married wanting a fling. This website whose motto is: “Life is short, have an affair” was recently hacked.
Some readers many ask why I am spending time on this data breech of a sleazy website. Why? Because thus far, this is the biggest known data breech in the world…ever. Besides, how many websites do you know that dedicate themselves to violating one of the Ten Commandments.
These guys are dirtbags. They are marketing adultery with a money back guarantee.
Affair Guarantee Program Rules
•Under the AshleyMadison.com Affair Guarantee Program, (the “Affair Guarantee Program” or the “Program”) if you don’t find someone within the initial 3 months after purchasing the “Affair Guarantee” Membership Package, we’ll refund you the amount you paid AshleyMadison.com for participating in the Program (the “Refund”).
• The Guarantee Program is available for a limited time only, and open to anyone.
The cost of sin is high. In this case $249 CDN/$199 USD Source Article
A year ago, the website was claiming 13 million active users. Oh, no cost for women to join. Prices above are the rates men are willing to pay. Source Article
Those with memberships were promised that for a fee of $19, their account would be deleted.
Ashley Madison sold the delete feature for $19, The Guardian reports, promising users it would remove their profiles from the site, including search results. BuzzFeed discovered that the site made close to $2 million for the service in 2014 alone when 90,000 requested such profile deletions.
However, it turns out that Ashley Madison kept a treasure trove of information for each user that’s good enough to identify that person. The company did remove the real name, username, email and profile information as promised but it retained sensitive data that can be used to find out whether a person may have had an account on the extra-marital affairs site.
The company “retained the date of birth, city, state, post- or zip code, country, gender, ethnicity, weight, height, body type and whether the user smokes or drinks,” The Guardian writes. BGR Article
The hackers of this website call themselves The Impact Team. This manifesto—including locations of the data—can be viewed here. Impact Team Manifesto
According to Toronto Police, employees of Canadian based Avid Life Media—the owners of Ashley Madison and some similar websites—first became aware of the hack on July 12.
In the news conference, the police detailed how users were targeted in an attack that began July 12, when employees of Avid Life Media arrived at work. When the employees opened their laptops, they were met with the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC, and an accompanying message demanding that Avid Life shutter both websites. New York Times
The hackers then provided samples of the hacked data to prove their claims of hacking the website were genuine. Avid Life refused to take down two of their websites so on August 20th, the hacked data was posted.
Impact Team released a 9.7GB data dump that contains over 30 million Ashley Madison user records. This includes names, addresses and emails, but it is thought that credit card details have not been compromised. Not all the email addresses are real, but up to 24 million are said to be active.
The data was posted to a Tor website meaning that it is not accessible to the general public, as well as to peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent. However, details are starting to leak onto the open web via screenshots on social media.
Analysis of the cache has also uncovered a number of government and military email domains. For example one researcher said that over 6,000 of the email addresses were registered as us.army.mil.
“The website has found 1,716 email addresses from universities and further education colleges using the .ac.uk suffix; 124 using .gov.uk; 92 using .mod.uk; 65 local education authorities and schools using .sch.uk; 56 National Heath Service emails and less than 50 police emails,” reported The Telegraph.
Meanwhile, security blogger Robert Graham searched the database to determine the gender balance.
“I count 28 million men to five million women, according to the ‘gender’ field in the database (with two million undetermined). However, glancing through the credit card transactions, I find only male names,” he said.
The Ashley Madison hack is bigger in scale than the recent breach at the US Office of Personnel Management that resulted in the loss of 21 million federal records. V3-UK
A few days later, the hackers posted a second data dump of 20 gigabytes. These were all internal records of Avid Life Media. This data breech was code of the websites, Google drives of managers, emails, and other internal documents. The Sony data breech was larger in terms of size of the data files but in terms of names this is the biggest in the world.
As a result of the data breech, two people listed on the website have reportedly committed suicide. This from the police news conference mentioned earlier. Their spokesman is Mr. Bryce Evans.
Mr. Evans also said that the police have received two unconfirmed reports of suicides related to the data breach. Security experts had warned the revelations contained in the breach could lead to suicide and violence.
“Others might find the thought that their membership of the site — even if they never met anyone in real life, and never had an affair — too much to bear,” Graham Cluley wrote on his security blog last week, “and there could be genuine casualties as a result. And yes, I mean suicide.” New York Times
Hack Touches Virtually All of the United States
Gawker’s Gabrielle Bluestone has uncovered that there are precisely three ZIP codes across the country that have no record of Ashley Madison users. That’s ZIP codes, not area codes. And what do they have in common? They’re partially lacking two things: the internet and a large number of people. Yahoo Finance
Doriana Silva
Thus far we have learned that there are roughly six men for each woman listed on the website. However, the number of women is a matter of some dispute. Many of the female profiles on the website are reportedly fake. Some of the male profiles are also fraudulent.
In 2012, Doriana Silva filed a lawsuit that was later thrown out. Her claim of fraudulent profiles is receiving renewed media interest in the wake of this hack. Below are portions of a news article from New Zealand.
Doriana Silva
A former employee of the Ashley Madison adultery website has claimed she was told to create hundreds of fake profiles of female “members” to entice men to join up.
Doriana Silva, who worked at the company’s headquarters in Toronto, Canada, tried to sue the firm after claiming she suffered repetitive strain injury (RSI) after being given a month to input 1,000 bogus memberships.
Ms Silva, who is Brazilian, was recruited by Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media to help launch a Portuguese language website in her home country.
According to court documents in Toronto: “Her allegation is that her job entailed concocting phony profiles of alluring females and inputting these profiles into the appellants’ online dating service in order to attract male subscribers.”
She claimed she was given three weeks to create 1,000 fake profiles.
Her claim stated: “The purpose of these profiles is to entice paying heterosexual male members to join and spend money on the website.
“They do not belong to any genuine members of Ashley Madison – or any real human beings at all.”
She said she was led to believe “that doing so was some sort of a normal business practice in the industry” but found her workplace “oppressive and unethical”.
Ms Silva launched the case in 2012, claiming £10 million in damages. Avid Life counter-sued her, denying her claims, and the two sides eventually agreed to drop their cases earlier this year.
Ashley Madison claims to have 1.2 million users in the UK, which would equate to almost one in 20 of all adults between the ages of 18 and 50. Increasing numbers of supposed members whose details have been published online by hackers say they had never even heard of Ashley Madison.
Online security experts have suggested the company could have bought bulk email addresses from marketing companies to make it appear that their membership – and their choice of possible partners – was far larger than the reality.
A source close to the FBI investigation into the leak has told The Daily Telegraph that examinations of the database suggest many of the female profiles on the site were created by a relatively small number of individuals.
Ashley Madison says on its website that it cannot “guarantee the authenticity of any profile”. It relies wholly on men for its profits; women can join for free, but men pay a minimum of £39 to be able to contact other members, though there is no guarantee that they will get a response from people they message.
Peter Sommer, a visiting professor at the De Montfort University Cyber Security Centre, said: “A number of internet dating agencies are known to artificially boost the number of profiles they have in order to make them more attractive.
“They take publicly available information from other databases and added it to their own. People then pay to be able to contact other ‘members’ and it’s not until they get to that stage that they realise a lot of them are duds.”
Bulk email addresses can be bought from marketing companies for as little as 10p each. New Zealand Herald
Identity Theft
Another possible explanation is that people using the site have simply stolen other people’s email addresses so they do not have to give their own name. People can even browse the site using entirely fake email addresses, because no verification emails are sent out by Ashley Madison to check the email is genuine.
Among those who believe they may have been the victims of identity theft is Oliver Coppard, who stood as Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Sheffield Hallam against Nick Clegg earlier this year.
He said an email address for him that appears in the leaked data is one he has not used for three years.
“It’s a bit of a mystery to me,” he said. “I have never been on the site and I’m not even married so I would have no need to use it. It doesn’t really matter to me, but I don’t know how it has happened.”
Please be aware that this hack is creating a secondary market in scammers and malware sites.
Remember that email addresses are not verified by Ashley Madison so tread lightly before accusing folks of being actual clients. There is a chance they are innocent.
For a business that is predicated on secrecy and then is hacked with the outpouring of personal details then it no longer becomes a viable business. New Zealand Herald
