[conspire] CIA chief Brennan hints new gov't initiative against crypto

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> Increasingly it is obvious that these attacks on Frances were a
> political blunder and no amount of surveillance would have prevented them.
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/25/world/europe/its-capital-frozen-belgium-surveys-past-failures-and-squabbles.html

I read that article; it was quite interesting.

Most of the piece is about the inherent, structural reasons why Belgium 
is a deliberately decentralised country, and why Belgians in the main
greatly prefer it that way. 

Unlike, say, Monty Python, I've always had a soft spot for Belgium, an
appealing little country.  Belgium held against the entire might of
Imperial Germany's invasion in 1914[1], the government retreating until 
it held the last 10% of Belgium next to France (the 'Yser Front'), dug
in, and wouldn't surrender.  My dad spent time during his WWII military
service in the U.S. Army Air Corps in company with Belgian officers,
which is why Dad learned French with a Belgian accent.

Anyhow, Belgium as a nation-state has excellent reasons to distrust
strong central authority, so they don't have much of that, or want it.
And this created a lack of sufficiently focussed, sufficiently funded,
and politically empowered police attention in Brussels.

All of language and culture is politicised in Belgium, even down to the 
names of the two main languages:  Don't say the Flemish are speaking
Dutch, even though they are.  They prefer to call it Flemish.  Don't say
the Walloons are speaking French.  They'd say they're speaking Walloon
or Picard or Gaumais.  The language divisions reflect deep ethnic
divisions that go with them, and nobody wants any of the other guys in
charge.


[1] One of the reasons the famous Schlieffen-Moltke Plan failed on
account of missed timetables, and bogged down into four years of brutal
trench warfare is that the Belgians failed to roll over as planned.
Despite being massively outgunned and outnumbered, the Belgians managed
to delay seizing of its key railroad junctions for almost 20 days, where
the plan required they be seized in five -- and never were fully
defeated at all.  This was fatal to the invasion timetable.

-- 
Cheers,                                  "If you see a snake, just kill it. 
Rick Moen                                Don't appoint a committee on snakes."
rick at linuxmafia.com                                         -- H. Ross Perot
McQ! (4x80)