We also agree that the big push since 9/11, with the Dept. of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, among other things, are an absolute joke. Prior to 9/11, this country did infact have the capabilities to stop the attacks prior to their commission. Instead of addressing the fact that our current serves were poorly utilized and disfunctional, they added a new law enforcement division, and a wide array of tools for them to use. However, prior to 9/11, they were unable to use the tools that they were provided in the first place. So what do we end up with? More public money spent with increasing abuses of authority, with little positive gain.

One of the changes since 9/11 was the growing suspicion of photography. Most of us have heard of, or seen footage of, videographers getting arrested for filming cops. I won’t delve too much in this subject, but to make it plain and simple, if you are an officer, and you don’t want to be filmed, then quit. You either have issues that should prevent you from being an officer in the first place, or you are knowingly doing something illegal. If you have a problem being under the microscope of the public eye, tough shit. You got your power through us (by proxy of our elected representatives), and we have and will use our right to ensure that you are not abusing your power. That is absolutely what the 1st amendment was for. And if you don’t care or disagree, once again, you need to quit. Because eventually you will end up like officer douchebag of the Suffolk Police, who arrested a man for “obstruction” because he was filming. “I been a cop for thirty years…” “you can hold nothing over me.” Oh, except that fact that you got proven wrong in FEDERAL COURT. How does a man become a 30 year law enforcement veteran without understanding the law? Beyond me.

But videographers aside. Photography of public places considered to be “infrastructure”  has become a hot topic amongst LEO since 9/11. Is it possible that that man over there is taking pictures (of video) of this stuff to potentially sell to a terrorist organization? Let’s detain him and find out. Case in point, the video below.

It’s amazing that that LEO didn’t know the rules, couldn’t properly ID even one terrorist event that involved photography, nor even come up with a logical reason for detainment in the first place. “How do I know you not are taking pictures of infastructure to sell to al-qaeda?” First off, there is nearly no way to ID that from the detainment. None. Zip. Zelch. Oh, unless he had a text message on his phone from Bin Laden himself (who was still alive at this time) stating he needed this guy to take pictures of a random f’n subway in LA. But really, why would al-qaeda pay this guy to take these pictures? Need to do survelliance and figure out these facts? It’s called GOOGLE. Or Yahoo! or Bing. Or “The Jihadest Search Engine of Potential Targets.” Just click here and see if you can gather this “senstive information” that terrorrists are paying people for. They were smart enough to highjack 4 airplanes and successfully crash 3 of them into high profile targets, but they are too dumb to use google? Wonder what kind of recon they would need to blow up that subway? Try a pack of explosives and a train schedule. Is it sad to say that this officer could probably fail terrorist training camp? Yet he has a badge and a gun and authority? It scary really.

Stopping people for photography is really, well, Nazi like. Can’t think of a better word. “Show me your papers.” The Supreme Court ruled that stop and ID laws are only legal is there is reasonable suspicion that a crime has been or will be committed. Hate to say it, but the liklihood in this case of a crime being committed is 0. If this is a valid excuse, then “oh sir, you are carrying a briefcase, I will need to detain you to determine that you are carrying explosives,” becomes just as valid. Oh wait, this is the Police States of America 2011, so I’m sure it is. Nevermind. I guess that stuff that our ancestors fought and died for all those years ago doesn’t mean anything. If the police’s job is to protect us from bad guys (news flash, the Supreme Court said that that wasn’t their job either), then who is supposed to protect us from the cops? According to a USA Today article, federal prosecutors only go after 2% of all reported police brutality cases. And the numbers being reported have gone up from 2001-2007. It’s a serious problem. So apparently we are on our own, and until something is done about it, we will continue to have law enforcement try to intimidate us into submission to their interpretation of the law. Not the law itself. Or the even more primitive “right or wrong.”

Getting the economy to a well tuned machine...

The system is broken. Obviously it has been broken for a long, long time, sustained by a series of patches and hotfixes throughout the years. The Great Depression, The Great Recession, and all the recessions in between. The good news is we are not the only one suffering. Free and centrally planned markets have always proven that they are no match when pitted against the true sources of the market’s force, the consumers and the investors (and other elements as well). Sometimes people want to buy stuff, and everyone always wants to make more money.

Recessions are not all that bad though. You can always learn more from failure than success. That’s if we take away lessons learned.

Before we can learn things, we need to figure out what went wrong, bad enough to shake every market in the world. Yes every market, because even the great survivors are getting hit now with inflation and bubble fears of their own. No economy is immune.

So let’s first think about the market’s in the terms set out in “A Beautiful Mind,” a wonderful movie by Ron Howard about John Forbes Nash Jr., the author of the “Nash Equilibrium.” There are 6 guys, one smoking hot babe, and her 5 average friends.

• Centrally planned (the former Soviet Union) – The government matches 5 guys to the 5 average girls, arrests guy number 6 and takes the hot one for themselves.
• Limited centrally planned (China) – The government gives each guy a choice of one of two girls, but the one who gets the hot one gets arrested and the government takes her too
• Free Market (theory) – Best interest for the guys to decide which girl they should take, with the hottest girl going to the hottest guy. Other way around, the girls choose their man in a similar fashion. Men (investors) make rational decisions.
• Free Market (reality) – A couple of guys decide to choice average girls, the other all fight for the hottest. The losers spend a lot of money and time wooing the remaining girls.

There you have it in a nutshell.

But to further expand on this idea, let’s change this to engineering ideas.

• Centrally planned economies think of themselves as Swiss watch makers, know for precision devices.
• Reality is that the pieces don’t quite fit, so these economies either fail or allow for more error in their thinking. Modern China probably has the lead on this technique
• Free market economies relate more to a set of different shaped children’s blocks. Each shape fits only in its whole, and the markets forces everyone to come out correct
• In reality, sometimes the circle makes it through the square hole. If the government realizes this enough they regulate. If they don’t, eventually the entire system fails

Theory to realilty always sucks for economists, because their models are still far too concrete to comprehend in subjectiveness of the forces. Prices set by supply and demand, determined by investors who make rational decisions with their money. More like supply, demand, fear, greed, speculation, etc. Rational thinking is far too subjective for 1′s and 0′s.

But what can we do? Any good enigneer knows that any system that is to operate is designed must work within constraints. They also realize that these systems will be different in real life than in design. Tolerances, deformation due to stresses, vibrations, thermal expansions, etc. etc. etc. A lot can be accounted for, but at some point assumptions will still need to be made. And this is with a far more exacting science than that of economics. But the idea still remains.

I am still a firm believer in a free market system, but to operate closer to its model, it should be constrained. This is not to be confused with regulated. Constrained. While all of the variables to be constrained and hwo to set those constraints are outside the scope of this post (and well outside the amount of time I am willing to put into this for FREE!), some are fairly easy to see.

• Oil futures
  • At one time these prices were regulated. We enjoyed fairly consistent gas prices, and quite often benefitted from local price wars amongst gas stations. I still remember getting gas in the 60-70 cent range, and this was the late 90′s, early 2000′s. Nowadays, this market is unregulated, and extremely volatile. Although it should be considered that consumption is much higher than it was then (with the emerging Chinese middle class and their 60 mile traffic jammed highways), that can’t explain everything. Once again, supply, demand, fear, greed, speculation, etc. A better solution than strict regulation would be a constraint, possibly similar to the current constraint on the yuan (it can only move so much a day against the dollar, and only to a threshold). Allow it to be constrained to within a certain percentage, tied to some measure (or measures) of the economy.
• Food commodities
  • A similar constraint as with gas prices. Part of the cost of food commodities is transportation cost. Properly constraining could also potentially include a government subsidy, driven off of the constraint.
• Interest rates
  • Need I say more

A properly constrained free market economy can - even with pieces being imperfect - allow it to operate more as an expensive swiss watch than a can of blocks. The secret is in using the constraints to allow the pieces of the economy to fit each other in an orderly fashion when looked at from a macroeconomic viewpoint.

Maybe I might spend some more time developing this idea. I might not be a schizophrenic genius, but you don’t always have to be

TSA Employee viewing the image from a full body scanner.

Full body scanners or intensive pat-downs, that is the question. The answer by an overwhelming number of Americans is neither. And for good reason.

America was founded as an ideal nation, a land of the free. Our forefathers had the insight from experience that a government that abuses its people in the name of authority was an evil enterprise. Even the noblest of intentions lead to inproprietaries against the people. Eventually, those good intentions paved the paths of hell that many Europeans faced at the time.

Freedom. Liberty. Ownership. Privacy. These were values so ingrained in their minds that they are the cornerstones of the foundation of this country. Our Constitution did not just set forth laws in the land, but also the rights than every single American were to enjoy. Since then, the government has made its path to define and limit those rights, bringing idealism into reality.

Welcome to 21^st century America. Once again, those rights are under assault by the same government, formed over 200 years ago, that wrote them in stone. Ever since 9/11, our freedoms, our liberty, our ownership rights, and our privacy, have continually been assaulted and diminished, under a new “cornerstone” they have tried to implement: security.

Last time I read the Constitution, I didn’t read anything about the right to security. Well, not that provided by the government at least.

The problem with Security as a cornerstone is that it is not a fundamental right. We were not born with security. And those who rely on others to provide the bulwark of their security, without being willing to fight for it themselves, forfeit their rights. Benjamin Franklin once said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Safety. Security. There are natural methods to these, such as the police and military. Yet neither proactively protect safety. A man breaks into your house and robs you. The police show up. Yet if you live in an area with overly restrictive weapons law, this is your only fate. The government has made a promise to your safety and security it cannot make, at the expense of a fundamental right (gun ownership, 2^nd Amendment of our Constitution). Changes to that system are being made, under McDonald vs. the City of Chicago, but that is an entirely different story in and of itself.

The point being, the government far too often believes it can ultimately provide for the safety and security of the people. In doing so it over-reaches, and in the end, makes us less secure. Our founding fathers gave credit to the people of this country, knowing that the people are a genuine part of the safety and security measures. The Revolution wasn’t won by large, well-trained armies, but by everyday Joe’s who came together in arms and fought for what was their’s.

Yet our government today gives us a vote of no-confidence. Not only are we restricted on protecting ourselves, our property, and our country, but we are continually being denied our fundamental rights. Freedom. Liberty. Ownership. Privacy. The terrorists won their battle, not by driving fear in the hearts of every American, but driving fear into the hearts of politicians, who give into demands that strip us our rights, and even deeper, our self-respect.

There is no sound reasoning that can justify full body scanning and intrusive pat-downs for every law abiding citizen that walks through the gates at the airport. Even if it provides a temporary level of safety, for giving in we give up our own liberty and safety. We were protected from unreasonable searches, yet we give men and women the ability to look upon our fully clothed naked bodies, or allow others to fondle in inappropriate areas, as if we were criminals.

Even worse, they are subjecting our children to this same level of disservice. “Susie, no one is allowed to touch you in those areas, unless they work for the government.” I am a parent, and I refuse to allow my child to fly. My child will not be subjected to radiation, and if anyone, even a TSA worker, would to touch my child in an inappropriate fashion, that person would not get that hand back.

Our government needs to wake up and get the message. Treating millions of Americans as common criminals does nothing to improve the safety of this country, especially when doing so, we are required to forfeit our fundamental rights. Doing so only creates tension and anger, which can be a bigger threat than from the terrorists. Or else we might as well pack our troops up and bring them home, because we have already lost the war.

Edit 11/16/2010:

This post originally had a picture that included a woman that had been scanned, then the scan inverted to show clear details of unmentionable body parts. Unfortunately, this picture has been determined to be a hoax. You can read up more on that at Just Get There.us.

Shirley Sherrod, former USDA employee, and victim of the Tea Party Movement

The USDA (and the White House) are learning that the hard way. Shirley Sherrod, who had been canned by the US Department of Agriculture because of “racist’ comments, has continued to be vindicated for the harsh way she was booted out because of fear of political reprisals, instead of investigating the truth.

Articles on CNN and MSN highlight the embarassment that was felt because of instead of properly investigating a serious accusation, they moved straight to forcing her to resign.

In case you don’t remember the case, Ms. Sherrod was the USDA’s rural development director in Georgia. A ultra-conservative blogger named Andrew Breitbart, attacked her taking a 1986 speech to the NAACP out of context, portraying her a bigoted black woman, who refused to help a farmer to the full extent because he was white. The reality of the matter, that was a small section of a speech which covered racial tensions that ended up becoming dissolved, and really helped to bring everyone to a better place.

Now that the NAACP has provided the full video of the speech, a lot of people are eating crow. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who forced her out several months back, offered her a position. She declined, however she may be interested as working as a consultant in civil rights work with the agency.

The crow was not limited to Mr. Vilsack however. NAACP to the White House and Obama have had to unceremoniously remove their feet out of their respective mouths. And as for our whiley tea party blogger who underscores how selfishly disturbed that movement is? Sherrod is suing him, as she should. I’m not sure of his intentions, but it underscores how the tea party movement has sought to pervert our ideals, under the guise of returning us to the “christian’ nation that we once (never) were.

Oral arguments in McDonald vs The City of Chicago were made March 2nd, 2010

As much as I love Chicago, I couldn’t live there. No point moving to a city where the bad guys (correction, kids) can shoot you, and you can’t do much about it. That’s right, the wonderful 1982 handgun ban. Obviously these kids never got the memo, because murders committed by handguns has only increased since the ban was enacted. Imagine that.

Otis McDonald is challenging this ban in the U.S. Supreme Court. The big question is if the 2nd Amendment applies to states as well. Uh, yea. Hopefully the court will agree with my position.

Now don’t confuse me with the gun radicals, who think anyone and everyone should be allowed to own any gun that they damn well please. Obviously guns should be kept out of the hands of convicted felons, mentally deranged/depressed/etc., and we have no need for fully automatic guns. But we do have a right to protected, or to protect ourselves. It is not the police department’s duty to protect individual citizens. As one Illinois court put it, such a duty “would put the police in the position of guaranteeing the personal safety of every member of the community.” (Detroit News). Banning legal citizens from handgun ownership, yet not giving provisions for the protection of those same citizens. It’s a recipe for disaster.

For the moral crusaders who support the gun ban, put this in your pipe for a moment. Pretend I’m a person planning on killing someone. I shoot them dead. Am I concerned about possessing a handgun? Probably not.

Now consider the other side of the equation. You have Otis McDonald, a 76 year old from Chicago. His house has been burglarized, his life’s been threatened. What can he do to protect himself and his property? They have the guns. Maybe the police can stake out his place for a while, right? Good luck on that one. If you want, go hold your breath and I’ll come and get you when the police arrive.

That’s why all law-abiding citizens in Chicago, especially in the city’s highest crime districts, should be hoping that McDonald wins. In fact, those in other cities with tight handgun restrictions should be hopeful too. If the Supreme Court shoots down this ban, many places are going to have to make some major changes.

As they should. I am a law abiding citizen, and a handgun owner. I am thankful we have  laws here to provide for legal gun ownership. I’m not running around the hood shooting people because I’m an idiot who thinks its cool to be a gangbanger. But it someone tries to come bursting through my door, trying to put my family’s life and property in danger, they need to reconsider. I have a right, an unalienable right, to protect myself. It is a cornerstone that this country was founded on…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – Declaration of Independence

Gun bans go against this, signing away our rights to hoodlums and gangbangers, anyone who refuses to accept the laws that the common of the people agree to live by.  As law abiding citizens, we have a right to protect ourselves, and a right to reasonably choose how we would want to do so. As the old adage goes, “in order to have peace, you must prepare for war.”

A full transcript of the oral arguments made before the court in the case of McDonald vs. The City of Chicago (08-1521).

More information on the history and implications of this case and the ban in Chicago is available at CNN.

Amanda Knox is driven into court at midnight in Perugia, Italy, to hear the verdict in her murder trial. - WKTV.com/AP

I really haven’t kept up with the Kercher murder case that much, but getting the message that Knox was convicted disturbed me. The few details I remember from the case were that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito supposed had some type of sick and twisted sex murder thing, killing Meredith Kercher then trying to make it look like it had been an attempted robbery. Another guy, Rudy Guede, was also convicted of her murder. He was a known drifter from the Ivory Cost.

What concerns me is where most of the evidence came from. There’s strong evidence to show that Police botched up the sample collection, whether by not wearing gloves or hairnets, allowing evidence to sit for months in the open, even in one case smashing a window. This is obviously not America, since the prosecution’s response to that was that is wasn’t their job to prove the crime scene work was good enough. (Find out more info from CNN)

Since most of the evidence in this case is linked from the botched crime scene work, there isn’t any evidence really to show she did it. It’s all very suspect, and I surprised at how poorly the Italian justice system has handled it thus far, given the amount of international coverage this has received.

Is Knox guilty? I have no freaking clue. Her family has continued to stand by her (unlike my favorite murdering whore, Casey Anthony), and the evidence presented is unreliable, so at its current status, I’d have to say she is not-guilty (note: not-guilty and innocent are two COMPLETELY different things). There is not enough solid evidence to say she was there. The only bits of evidence that appear to be authentic, and they prove absolutely nothing. DNA evidence is harder to use in this case, given the mishandling of the crime scene and body, along with the fact that Knox lived in the same apartment.

At least Italy does have an appeal process, and her attorney has already stated they will be appealing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like murderers, but I also don’t like people being convicted of murder when dipsh!ts from the police screw up the crime scene and make the evidence unreliable. They also used a old trick of defaming her character. Reminds me of the media sensation Cattle Kate from the Wyoming Ranch Wars. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out

A reminder of the recent revolts against the current regime - Photo: AFP/GETTY

My favorite country in the whole wide world, Iran, is back at it, AGAIN! Favorite being the relative term, given that I if I were given control of the little red button, Iran would become the deepest geological pit on the planet. Yes, they are always at it, but of course, they made front page CNN.com again. It’s not enough that they are refining nuclear material for “peaceful energy purposes.” Peaceful energy being another relative term, since their 3/4 of a year supply incidicates that their idea of peaceful energy is harnessing a nuclear bomb to eliminate Israel off the map. Nor is it enough that Ahmadinejad and his cronies (including the “Supreme” Leader Khamenie, a position which sounds more like a member of Star War’s galactic empire than the ruler of a fundamental Islamic republic) rigged the recent election, and brought so much hell against the people that it suppressed their views. Never fear, that’s a pot that will probably boil over sooner than later. Its not enough to consider the treatment of the people who were arrested during those protests, including a journalist who was tortured and forced to give an old confession, and who was only recently released on a large sum of bail. He had a great quote too, “I knew I was in trouble, because the people who were in charge of my life were idiots.” Great stuff.

But nope, they done gone and done something else again. Now they are conducting military exercises, designed to protect their “peaceful energy” deposits. Read: Iran wants to try and make sure neither the Israelis nor the Westerners are able to destroy their weapons grade stash. According to CNN,

Iran’s regular military and its elite Revolutionary Guards were to participate in the exercise against aerial attacks, especially against Iran’s nuclear plants, according to Press TV.

The Iranians are also still up to their “honest truth” campaign. Iran has stated,” it intends to produce nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes, including civilian electricity and medical research.” Scouts honor dude, these Iranians would never lie to us. I think we should believe them. That’s why they only have 3/4 of a year’s worth of material, capability to enrich to weapon’s grade, and that used nuclear reactor fuel makes a good base stock for weapon’s grade enrichment, according to my sources.

The sooner we realize that we’ve just let a bunch of fundamentalists have control over a country, control over its military, and now has access to some of the most dangerous weapons material in existence, the sooner we can figure out a plan of action. They have absolutely no track record of truly caring for its citizenry. Iran has never demonstrated its interested in doing medical research and the like. Modern science slaps their form of Islam right in the face. They have presented their agenda, we know it clearly. They refuse to accept that Israel is even in existence. They have denied that the holocaust has even occurred. They refuse to embrace the rights of their citizenry, evident by the rigged election and the mistreatment and murder of many of its own people. They have continually accepted and embraced the evils of the world that keeps us at war.

We need to wake up and smell the bacon. Iran does not get solved by diplomacy. A crook will not relinquish his power because we ask him too. If Bernie Madoff had been caught before the recession, and the authorities asked him nicely to stop, do you think he would’ve? No! The only way to handle a crook is to take him down, whether by force or by pulling the rug right out from under him. The world and so many Persians know the truth about this regime, but knowing and doing are two completely different things. Are we just going to sit on the sidelines and wait until Ahmadinejad brings about WW3/Armageddon/etc., or are we going to stop him before he has a chance to make Adolf Hitler look like a sweet Annie Orphan?

The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the prison closed because it lagged below the required standards - whatever those are in Iran

In an odd move by the Iranian government, the authorities fired and arrested the warden and a security official at the Kahrizak prison facility that was closed late last month. They are purportedly being held for mistreatment of detainees, this coming in the wake of the death of two detainees that were being held for protesting the June 12th election there. The prison was ordered to be shut down by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, amid reports that the prison did not meet the required standards. You can read the full story at CNN.

No offense to the people who were detained there (as Kahrizak may be home to more human rights violations than we’ll ever know about), but I find the matter rather amusing. After the recent display of self-destructive protests in Iran, the government is in a position where it needs to restore some faith from its people. The supreme leader has had a taste of how truly insignificant his position is in Iran. He is supposed to be a direct link to Allah himself, his word being final. Yet those protests of the (rigged) elections, which saw President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being re-elected under “curious” circumstances, were condemned by the Ayatollah, yet continued on with full force. I hate to saw I’ve lost my best for now: I was betting on a civil war.

But this move shows just how fragile the power hold on the Iranians is right now. Most of the time, the regime would’ve swept this under the rug, even if it were students as in this case. Anyone who would have spoken out would have been foolish, like playing Russian roullete with a Colt 1911. Yet had this story had surfaced, and the regime behind the game on it, oh boy what a mess.

I believe that we will see even more divisive cracks like this in the coming months. The Islamic Iranian government had unwittingly provoked the Persian soul of its inhabitants, and has quickly learned to respect a culture that is older than Islam itself.

"Ahem, I would like to speak both to my people, and the infidel nation of the United States. This one's for you!"

So for those Americans (or anyone else for that matter) who are afraid that we are going to pick another fight and go to war with Iraq’s neighbor, I wouldn’t be too concerned. There will probably be a war there at some point, but we’ll probably be on the sidelines. This election may well be the straw that broke the Iranian camels back.

Akula class Russian submarine, like the two that were found off the East U.S. coast

Seems like Russia wants the world to know that it is supposedly back on top of its military game. The U.S. has been tracking two Russian submarines off the east coast of the U.S., hanging around in international waters. That’s comforting to know given that A) I don’t trust Russians and B) I live on the east coast. Of course, I’d be a maniacal conspiracy-theorist to believe that they are out there sitting for me, but it still isn’t comforting. Russia has been showing signs of wanting to reunite its former soviet states, and has been showing that this new “democratic” government – lead by Medvedev, prime minister Putin’s puppet – is still built a lot like it’s former socialist self. I’ll save my evidence for another day though, I’m sure I’ve pissed enough folks off saying I don’t trust Russians.

Aside from Russians, wtf is this about clunkers? If you guessed CARS – Cash for Clunkers – then you’d be absolutely right. This geniously little program, which is about to run about $3 billion once Obama signs the latest bill, has done more to stimulate than the $750 billion+ economic bailout/stimulus. They are estimating 750,000 cars sold. Even if half of the buyers were planning on buying anyways (according to economists), that’s still hundreds of thousands of new car buyers out there.  That’s billions of dollars worth of new loans flowing into the market place, hundreds of millions if not billions being pulled out of savings to pumped back into the economy. That’s salesmen who finally are getting a decent check, sales managers who have work to do. A definitely positive shot to the economy. So for all you naysayers, complain once you kiss your elbow.

So now what does the 1st part, and this last part, hackers, have in common? Is it that they are both listed using an odd number, or that putting the numbers together makes an unlucky American number (13) ? Well, its true and all, but the meaning is much deeper than that. Russians = hackers. Maybe. At least some who manage to stay away from the Vodka water fountains long enough =)

As I said, it could be. If you haven’t heard, someone or a group of someones led a distributed denial-of-service – DDoS – attack against twitter and some other services yesterday. Turns out that this attack was launched specifically at sites by a man named “George”, including his twitter page, livejournal, and facebook. As of this writing, his Livejournal and Facebook page is still down. But why him? To quote CNN:

His recent posts include: “How Russia was preparing military agression (sic) against Georgia, how they were training soldiers and mobilizing military equipment, what kind of provocations were carried out by the separatists prior to the war.”

“Seems somebody did not like such a chronicle of events,” he [ "George" ] told CNN.

So was it Russians? Was it someone in Georgia who is pro-Russian? Hopefully the world may end up finding out. Given that this dipshit(s) didn’t just take out one page, but knocked out Twitter, numerous groups are now involved with this, including the Georgian government. But I would be more concerned with the hackers that use Twitter.

What this all boils down to is more Russians or pro-Russians afraid of the truth. They should’ve just stuck with the vodka.

Oh, and for one last jab. I just noticed that if you look at Medvedev and Putin side by side, Medvedev looks like 007, while Putin fits the bill for one of his Russian enemy masterminds.