The vulnerability, which affects Linux kernel versions 5.14 through 6.6, resides in the NF_tables, a kernel component enabling the Netfilter, which in turn facilitates a variety of network operations, including packet filtering, network address [and port] translation (NA[P]T), packet logging, userspace packet queueing, and other packet mangling. It was patched in January, but as the CISA advisory indicates, some production systems have yet to install it. At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation.

In the early days of Russia's war on Ukraine, President Joe Biden boldly declared he was ready to seize "ill-begotten gains" of the region's oligarchs.

But in the years before Moscow twice invaded Ukraine, Democrats enriched themselves politically and personally from such oligarchs and businesses in the region while empowering Vladimir Putin with energy and technology deals that still haunt America today.

The answer to inflation, say the authors, is discarding long-held misperceptions that helped bring on the current crisis. They include the notion that central banks can create prosperity by producing money “out of thin air,” and that economic “stability” requires “a little inflation.” For decades these ideas have been Holy Writ in Washington. Inflation shows why they’re misguided, and also why the heedless money-printing being pushed today by left-wing advocates of “Modern Monetary Theory” would lead us down the road to disaster.

There’s a new peer-reviewed study from economist and gun expert John Lott, Jr. that is going to have a lot of folks talking again about the 2020 election.

Lott found there were at least 255,000 excess votes and maybe as many as 368,000 excess votes for Biden in key battleground states.

GALTean
5 months ago
russians threaten with nukes??? Must be a day ending in Y...seriously how many of their nukes would even launch and go bang WHEN they are supposed to and not immediately or not at all? After seeing Ivantech in action in Ukraine and my time in the cold war going up against the soviet crap...I would say that most may be painted telephone poles.

streiff GALTean
5 months ago
the last Russian nuke test was 1990. So there's 30 years of Russian maintenance and quality control at work on those warheads.

Dieter Schultz streiff
5 months ago
I've noted this before...

There's been some discussion here and elsewhere that Russia's nuclear arsenal and delivery vehicles are largely past their useful designed lifespan. One news site suggested that Russia ended the inspection of their nuclear arsenal four or five years ago, in large part, because they didn't want western countries to discover the sorry state of their arsenal.

Laocoön of Troy streiff
5 months ago edited
You know...it just occurs to me that Russia could put to rest any doubts about their nukes by doing an above-the-ground public nuke test at their Semipalatinsk Test Site. Of course, suitably observed and recorded by their usual Western media allies. It would exponentially increase their leverage in terms of their threats. But so far Putin hasn't gone there. Why?

streiff Laocoön of Troy
5 months ago
for the same reason the USSR didn't invade Western Europe, they know how f***ed they are and we have too many centers of influence with a financial/power stake in making the threat larger than it is.

In an internal American Airlines Jetwire for employees, the company shared what happened to a group of school children visiting Washington, D.C. from Bermuda on June 15th.

Seventy one students and their chaperones had flown non-stop to Washington’s National airport on American. They were ticketed on a connecting flight back through Miami, and their DC to Miami segment was delayed by weather. They were going to miss their connection home. //

So American Airlines decided to add a dedicated flight just for this school trip. //
Since National airport is an American Airlines hub, and crew base, they were able to pick up crew that were on reserve to work the trip. They used a 128-seat Airbus A319 dedicated to the group. //

This was an even more expensive move that American made for these passengers than it seems at first glance. That’s because they didn’t just have to fly an extra plane to Bermuda – they had to get it back, too. They didn’t need to operate an extra Bermuda departure that day. So American paid to ferry the plane back to National airport, too.

I said Trump would outperform his 2016 numbers in Florida, not because I felt that way or because my ideology stated I had to say so, but rather because voter registration and polling data said it was going to happen. You can’t add 150k more voters in a state than the Democrats, pick up huge swings of minority voters and lose. Mathematically, it doesn’t add up.

Which is going to lead me to doing something I have been doing way too often lately: Calling BS. In every bit of math coming out of these states. In all of the polling data (*when adjusted), it told us Trump was going to win by larger margins among minority voters. The numbers literally don’t lie. In North Carolina, Democrats lost 161,000 voters since 2016 while Republicans gained 72,000 voters. You want us to believe that Republicans, who have registered as such since the Trump era, walked into the voting booth on Election day and pulled the trigger for Biden? In that state, Trump currently leads by 77,000 votes, in a state Trump won by 173,000 votes in 2016, and that Republicans picked up a 230k voter margin since? I call BS.

In Pennsylvania, Trump has won every county he won in 2016 except for one, while he picked up another county that Clinton won in 2016. Enthusiasm levels for Biden were lower than they were for Clinton in PA. Since 2016, in the state where Trump won by 45,000 votes, Democrats have lost 48,000 voters while Republicans have added 150,000 voters, outperformed amongst minorities and had record party support and Democrat cross-over vote and yet, Trump only leads by 110,000 voters? BS.

In Wisconsin, they have lost voters since 2016, to the tune of 145,000 voters. In just three counties, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, and Dane, they lost 63,000 of those. All of those counties went to Clinton by large margins since 2016. That is just considering counties as Wisconsin does not register by party. Overall, Counties won by Clinton lost 97,000 voters since 2016, while Trump counties lost just 47,000 voters, or less than half. Additionally, turnout in 2016, as a percentage of registered voters, was just 79.80%. This year, the state jumped to a statistically impossible 92.26%, a 12.46% increase over their 2016 numbers. In a state when Democrats statistically lost more voters than Republicans, we are supposed to believe that a 12% increase (largest ever) swung majority to Dems, by a factor that not only overcame the margin by which Trump won the state in 2016 but also erased any gains Republicans had in registration (by losing less) and gave Biden a 20,000 vote lead? Again, BS.

In Michigan, the trend continues.

Many of us were alarmed on Election Night 2020 when, while the results were looking good for Donald Trump, multiple states suddenly stopped counting votes. As the night wore on and went into the next day, it seemed that every update was favorable for Biden until he was ultimately named President-Elect. //

While Hounsell wasn’t able at that time to determine what had happened, it seems that Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote have some evidence, in the form of cell phone location data, ballot drop box surveillance video, and more, to suggest that there was a coordinated effort in key states (those in which a small number of votes could swing the state and, therefore, the Electoral College) to illegally “harvest” ballots by paying “mules” to deposit them into drop boxes throughout the given metropolitan area in the month before the election, in numbers that were small enough to fly under the radar on daily counts yet large enough to change the state’s outcome on Election Night. Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza took this data and interviewed witnesses to create the documentary “2000 Mules,” in collaboration with Salem Media Group, to explain what True the Vote found.

Don’t expect answers from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 Committee weaponized to operate as a political witch hunt. //

1. Why Did Nancy Pelosi Delay Deploying the National Guard?

Why Did the Sergeant at Arms Refuse to Cooperate With the Senate?

Why Were The Capitol Police Half-Staffed?

Why Were the Few Capitol Police Who Were On Duty So Unprepared?

Were FBI Informants Present On Jan. 6? If So, How Many, and What Did They Do?

Sixty-four scholars and theologians have signed on to a “Wesleyan witness,” a six-part, 62-page document they hope will shape the future of Methodism, define orthodox Wesleyanism, and ground more Christians in the story of sanctification and restoration through grace. //

“The Faith Once Delivered” was first drafted in January at a summit for “The Next Methodism.” Scholars allied with the evangelical wing of the United Methodist Church, as well as holiness and Pentecostal denominations, came together, formed five working groups, and co-wrote statements on five theological topics: the nature of God, Creation, revelation, salvation, and the church. A sixth section on eschatology or “the fullness of time” was added later.

What Does it Mean to be Human? Part 3--Free Will
Imago Dei, meaning of life, What am I?, What is human? //

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga defines an agent who has free will as one who is free to perform a morally right action and free to refrain; “no causal laws and antecedent conditions determine either that he will perform the action, or that he will not”.(1) In the literature, it is generally defined as follows,

Free will:

The ability to make a decision that satisfies two criteria:

a. the decision was not determined by any antecedent conditions and,

b. the person could have decided otherwise,

where ‘determined’ means it was caused to happen such that no other result was possible. The conditions leading up to the outcome were such that the result was “carved in stone”. This is in stark contrast to bringing some influence to bear on a decision or putting pressure on a person to make a particular decision. Influence is compatible with free will; it can be considered and overridden by the person making the free decision. So even if we have a proclivity, propensity, or an almost overwhelming desire to say “yes” to something that we know is not good for us, we can override those powerful influences and say “no”.

Heroes. They encourage us to hope, to trust, to believe, and to achieve. For 50 years, Moody Bible Institute’s Stories of Great Christians informed and inspired listeners with biographies of real people . . . average men and women . . . who were called and equipped by God to show His love to the world. These dramatized, 15-minute stories bring to life 600 years of heroes of the faith. Listeners hear the voices, music, and sound effects of classic radio. They’ll be reintroduced to historic men and women they admired since childhood and meet new heroes whose stories will expand their world and deepen their Christian faith.

There’s an important update on the lawsuit that Missouri and Louisiana filed back in May against members of the Biden Administration, including Joe Biden, to expose the collusion between them and social media companies to censor speech on a variety of subjects–including things like the Hunter Biden laptop and COVID.

Afederal judge on Monday granted former President Donald Trump’s request for the appointment of a special master to review the documents seized by the FBI during a raid on his Mar-a-Lago home last month. Presiding Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, further held that the Department of Justice cannot review or use for criminal investigative purposes any material seized pending the review process.

Besides handing Trump a victory in his battle for some oversight of the Biden administration’s digging into his documents, Cannon highlighted several significant facts over the course of her 24-page order that further call into question the DOJ’s targeting of Trump.

Here are the seven top-line takeaways:

1. President Biden Was Directly Involved

As we witness the mass breakdown of voting machines on the single day of the year they’re supposed to work, cameras going down in vote-counting offices, and the endless drip-drip of ballot dumps — curiously in the most hotly-contested races and most critical precincts for political control in the country — remember that this is all commonplace and normal. And if you think otherwise, you’re not only unhinged, but you might be a domestic terrorist.

This is the gaslighting we have been getting from our political class and the media over the last two federal election cycles. It is purposeful propaganda meant to obscure the truth that our betters have fundamentally transformed voting policies and practices, and then exploited the new rules to the maximum extent.

The reality is that those skeptical about the integrity in our brave new election world are not a “threat to democracy.” They are defenders of the republic. America is in serious danger if the public unquestioningly accepts the fact that authorities made radical changes, sometimes unduly and under cover of crisis, that made less safe, secure, or at minimum trustworthy the processes by which we elect our representatives.

After a series of “Twitter Files” detailed Twitter’s extensive collusion with the FBI and federal agencies to control public discourse before Elon Musk took over the tech giant, the FBI on Wednesday tried to salvage its reputation by spinning the revelations as normal procedure.

Twitter head Elon Musk had some more to say on Tuesday about the reach to which the censorship by the government went.

We saw with the release of the last Twitter files the pressure that the Biden administration was putting on Twitter to de-platform people over things like COVID. https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/12/26/the-one-weve-been-waiting-for-twitter-files-on-covid-19-drops-n679095. //

Elon Musk

@elonmusk
·
Follow
Replying to @ggreenwald and @mtaibbi
Most people don’t appreciate the significance of the point Matt was making:

Every social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government.

Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.
9:19 AM · Dec 27, 2022 //

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
·
Dec 27, 2022
·
Replying to @elonmusk and @mtaibbi
When Dems controlled both houses of Congress and the WH (and Exec Branch), they repeatedly summoned Big Tech CEOs and openly and explicitly threatened them: if you don't censor more, you will be punished. And DHS/FBI/CIA applied immense pressure:
greenwald.substack.com
Congress Escalates Pressure on Tech Giants to Censor More, Threatening the First Amendment

Elon Musk @elonmusk
·
Exactly!
9:33 AM · Dec 27, 2022

The obvious question was, who did it? Four suspects emerged: the United States, Ukraine, an undetermined party probably involving Poland, and Russia. But, as stated in Putin’s PR Machine Throws up Smoke as the Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion Investigation Begins, my personal view is that Russia was the most likely culprit.

1. The pipelines were not producing income; they were costing money to operate.
2. The war forced Nord Stream customers to find other sources, and it was unlikely that Nord Stream would operate again.
3. It made it clear to Germany what the price was for helping Ukraine.
4. It avoided breach of contract financial penalties that would hit Gazprom if Germany desired to re-open the pipeline, and Russia refused.
5. The repair cost of the pipelines was insured.
6. Breaching the pipelines at the deepest part means that the shortest area would be flooded, and the damage would be the cheapest to repair.
   In my view, the bonus was that the explosions took place in Scandinavian fishing grounds, and the first explosion was in the vicinity of a new Norway-Poland pipeline which gave it a “nice pipeline you’ve got there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it” flavor.

Michael Shellenberger, who has been involved in breaking down some of the Twitter files releases, has posted a thread and an article about the World Economic Forum, ahead of its meeting in Davos this week.

Shellenberger says that the World Economic Forum is “fighting back against those who say it and its founder are seeking global domination through a ‘great reset’ aimed at stripping the masses of their private property, de-industrializing the economy, and making everybody eat bugs.” But Shellenberger takes apart that “defense.”

A WEF managing director claimed in August of last year that the “you’ll own nothing and be happy” meme was a conspiracy theory started by an anti-Semitic account on 4Chan. But that wasn’t true, since it was based on an article on the WEF website from 2016. The spokesperson mentions that article but downplays it as a “years old” opinion article.

The managing director also leaves out the subsequent video put out by the WEF in 2018 that makes it seem far less like a “years-old article.” While they deleted the page that had the video on their site, the video is still up on their Twitter and it’s a creepy, prospective look for 2030.

It was significant enough for them to put together this video that repeated the “own nothing” claim, as well as phasing down meat and eliminating fossil fuels. The video is a festival of all kinds of leftist aims in one place.

Shellenberger noted that if the WEF is calling on others to be transparent, why are they deleting their web pages and why aren’t they forthcoming about their own financial information?