Random Politics & Religion #09

Would an article from Al Jazeera be more to your liking? This one explains that this textbook problem has been happening for at least the last decade.

However, when someone uses their religion as a means of infringing on other people's rights or trying to use dogma as a means of running the country, that's when I take issue.

Ok, then let's call a spade a spade:

Terrorists who are using Islam as an excuse is creating Islamophobia, not Trump.

Can you agree to that at the very least?

Islamaphobia has been a thing before Trump, and will be a thing after. The only thing he can be accused of, at best in this regard, is spreading it with misinformation and narrow views.

So yes, I can agree.

.... You don't see Trump warning people about the Buddhists.

...

The Right and the Left agree on something!!

Violence in Milwaukee after police shoot armed black man

It's getting crazy how these protesters are completely willing to overlook the situation and just be like, a cop shot a guy! RIOT!

How far are we from "Yeah, the guy shot at the cop but all them bullets missed. The officer didn't have to shoot him!"

If you are armed and refusing to cooperate with police, you make your fate.

....
If you are armed and refusing to cooperate with police, you make your fate.

And if you are legally armed and cooperate with the police they may seal your fate anyway.

ftfy

Of course, this is not to be confused with the American "militias".

Terrorists have no religion of their own, which is why they hijack other people's religions.

Ever notice we never call a Christian terrorist, anything but domestic violence, or a simple terrorist attack, a tragedy, or mass murderer?

But we give religious names to terrorists of another creed or religion to any other but the dominant one in our own country...

Strange days indeed.

DISCUSS!

Istanbul (CNN)A vehicle exploded Monday near a police checkpoint in southeastern Turkey, killing two police officers and a civilian, said a senior government official and state-run news agency Anadolu.
Kurdish militants are suspected of carrying out the attack near Diyarbakir, the official said.

The explosion occurred on a road between Diyarbakir and the district of Bismil, about 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) east, state broadcaster TRT reported.
Monday is the anniversary of the first attacks by the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, against the Turkish state in 1984. Turkey, the European Union and the United States have designated the PKK a terrorist group.

Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump. It seems to make sense. Trump's most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalized world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labor has shifted overseas. Trump has promised to curtail trade and other perceived threats to American workers, including immigrants.

Yet a major new analysis from Gallup, based on 87,000 interviews the polling company conducted over the past year, suggests this narrative is not complete. While there does seem to be a relationship between economic anxiety and Trump's appeal, the straightforward connection that many observers have assumed does not appear in the data.

According to this new analysis, those who view Trump favorably have not been disproportionately affected by foreign trade or immigration, compared with people with unfavorable views of the Republican presidential nominee. The results suggest that his supporters, on average, do not have lower incomes than other Americans, nor are they more likely to be unemployed.

Yet while Trump's supporters might be comparatively well off themselves, they come from places where their neighbors endure other forms of hardship. In their communities, white residents are dying younger, and it is harder for young people who grow up poor to get ahead.

The Gallup analysis is the most comprehensive statistical profile of Trump's supporters so far. Jonathan Rothwell, the economist at Gallup who conducted the analysis, sorted the respondents by their Zip code and then compared those findings with a host of other data from a variety of sources. After statistically controlling factors such as education, age and gender, Rothwell was able to determine which traits distinguished those who favored Trump from those who did not, even among people who appeared to be similar in other respects....

As seen in Spokane:

I prefer "The Gipper".

(CNN)An airstrike on Monday hit a hospital in northwestern Yemen and killed at least 11 people, said humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.
Medical teams are treating the wounded after an airstrike hit the Abs hospital in Hajjah province, the aid group said on Twitter. At least 19 were injured, the group said.

"We are assessing the situation to secure the safety of patients and staff," Doctors Without Borders said. More than 4,600 patients have received medical help since the group, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF, began supporting the hospital in July 2015.
The facility has been providing a range of services and medical aid for internally displaced people, along with emergency and maternal health care and surgery, the group said on its website.
The hospital had a 14-bed emergency room, a maternity unit and a surgical unit and had seen in an uptick in wounded patients in the last weeks, most hurt in clashes and in the bombing campaign, the group said on Twitter.
At the time of Monday's attack, there were 23 patients in the surgery ward, 23 in the maternity ward, 13 newborns and 12 patients in the pediatric ward, the group said.

The strike on the hospital comes on the heels of Saudi-led coalition planes bombing two schools in northern Yemen on Saturday, killing at least 14 children. The coalition insists the target of the airstrikes was a militia training camp.
The country has become a proxy battleground between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Arab coalition began launching airstrikes in support of the Sunni government against the Shiite Houthi minority rebels in March 2015. UN-led peace talks reached a dead end last week
It is not the first time a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders has been hit in Yemen. In January, at least five people were killed and 10 others, including three Doctors Without Borders members, were injured when a hospital was hit in northern Yemen.
Amnesty International called the hospital attack a "deplorable act" and potentially a war crime.

"Today's airstrike appears to be the latest in a string of unlawful attacks targeting hospitals highlighting an alarming pattern of disregard for civilian life," said Magdalena Mughrabi, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program. "Deliberately targeting medical facilities is a serious violation of international humanitarian law which would amount to a war crime. The circumstances of this attack must be thoroughly and independently investigated."
The U.S. State Department is "deeply concerned" about the reported hospital strike and is conferring with Saudi officials about civilian casualties, said spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau.
"We call on all parties to cease hostilities immediately," Trudeau said. "We would note that the Saudi committee that was designated to look into civilian casualties ... did share its findings with the UN. We believe that's a step forward in transparency, and as we've previously underscored we also call on them to publicly release those reports."

The NSA develops high-powered hacking tools. Now a hacker claims to be selling a stolen batch of them.

On Saturday, a load of computer code -- whose purpose is to break into other computers -- was leaked to the public by an anonymous entity called "The Shadow Brokers."

The same mysterious entity also promised an upcoming "cyber weapons auction" -- the digital equivalent to putting stolen military missiles up for sale.

The gang claims the stolen hacking tools were developed by "the Equation Group" -- a spying entity widely thought to be the U.S. National Security Agency and spying departments from four international allies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Together, that group is called the "Five Eyes."

Computer security experts worldwide now worry that sensitive NSA spying tools are accessible to common criminal hackers.

"It definitely looks like a toolkit used by the NSA," said Matt Suiche, a French computer researcher who has been reviewing the leaked code.

Of particular importance: These hacking instruments are in the form of a neatly packaged tool, which means they're ready "to use easily against a target," said Suiche, who runs the UAE-based cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies.

"This is dangerous," said New York University computer security professor Justin Cappos. "People who want to launch attacks but were not aware how to do it now have the tools and information available to do this."

On the popular computer coding website Github, where the group initially made its statement, the hacker post starts with this: "!!!! Attention government sponsors of cyber warfare and those who profit from it !!!!"

Then came the implications of danger: "How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons?" it said in a cheeky style. "We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things. You find many intrusions."

Cybersecurity researchers around the world have been intensely and rapidly studying the leaked information.

"This appears to be legitimate, and a framework designed to take control of routers and firewalls," said Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute. "The likely conclusion is that the code was stolen from the NSA itself or a 5EYES ally with access to this particular code."

After examining the leaked computer code, Weaver believes this batch of tools was stolen from the NSA or its partners in 2013.

Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, a computer science assistant professor at New York University, has experimented with some of the samples the hacker made public. He said one tool matches "pretty well" with a top secret NSA tool that was described in documents leaked by ex-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"If it's fake, someone put a huge amount of work into it," Dolan-Gavitt said about the leak.

The FBI declined to say whether it's investigating the potential theft of sensitive information. The office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, did not return requests for comment.

Computer security experts noted that the vulnerabilities exploited by these hacking tools are at least three years old and might be stopped if people, corporations and governments keep their software updated.

"How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things. You find many intrusions."

As seen in Spokane:

Forgetting the language barrier in many places, here's the problem for conservative thinkers that talk about leaving the country: they don't really have places to go that are less liberal AND have lower tax rates without going to Islamic nations or developing/war-torn countries.