Jihad Report Oct 15, 2016 -Oct 21, 2016Attacks 49Killed 576Injured 891Suicide Blasts 11Countries 12Total since 9/11: 203,785

Including: Two-hundred and eighty-four civilians, including some children, are rounded up and executed by the Islamic State at the College of Agriculture

Has Anybody Seen Matt Lauer?

Who is the real Hillary Clinton? When she said that she has a different temperament and a different policy in her private interactions than she does in her public interactions, what did she really mean? WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT THE NBC COMMANDER IN CHIEF (COC) PRESIDENTIAL FORUM WITH MATT LAUER?

 DEMOCRAT HILLARY CLINTON’S BEHIND THE SCENES TIRADE AFTER NBC’s MATT LAUER ASKED CLINTON THE ONE QUESTION SHE HAD NOT PRE-APPROVED 

 VETERAN NBC CAMERAMAN: ‘YOU REALLY HAD TO SEE THIS TO BELIEVE IT...SHE CAME APART – LITERALLY UNGLUED; SHE IS THE MOST FOUL MOUTHED WOMAN I’VE EVER HEARD...AND THAT VOICE AT SCREECH LEVEL...AWFUL’ 

 SHE LOOKED SO ENRAGED THAT WE ALL THOUGHT HER HEAD WOULD EXPLODE...IT WAS A FULL-ON MELT-DOWN AND THEN SHE SCREAMED, SHE’D GET THAT F - - - ING LAUER FIRED FOR THIS. IT WENT ON FOR AT LEAST A HALF HOUR; WE ALL THOUGHT THE EMS WOULD BE THE NEXT CALL” NBC Associate Producer of Forum:

 Behind the scenes, NBC technicians and cameramen at the Wednesday night, Commander-in-Chief Forum (Sept 7) report that Hillary Clinton was so angry and incensed that she had been  ‘blind-sided’ by one question she was not prepared for and had not approved.

 When her time in front of the cameras ended, Clinton shook the hand Lauer extended to her and smiled once more for the wide camera shot and then Hillary proceeded to pick up a full glass of water and threw it at the face of her assistant and the screaming started. She was in a full meltdown and no one on her staff dared speak with her – she went kind of manic and didn’t have any control over herself at that point. How these people work with this woman is amazing to me. Most of the small military audience were cordoned off, their seating not close to Mrs. Clinton, but certainly they heard her screaming because it was loud...and she really didn’t seem to care who heard any of  it.”

 Republican Donald Trump also appeared, in a separate telecast from Hillary Clinton’s and arrived with his two sons but no entourage or assistants in tow. The NBC cameramen involved in his segment said he was a ‘true gentleman’ and Trump and his sons spoke to everyone and thanked them  for inviting him to speak: “It was a pleasure to answer your questions, Matt."

 Hillary Clinton’s segment was much different.  According to people working on the sidelines, “When Matt posed the one legitimate question about the FBI investigation concerning her homemade server and the unsecured emails, we could see she was beginning to boil and her eyes looked to pop.” 

 “It was toward the end of her interview so she was becoming unglued by the time Lauer finished with questioning.  Afterwards, Hillary went ballistic, throwing a huge tantrum and screaming at her staff, “you f - - - ing idiots, you were supposed to have this thing set up for me and you’ve screwed it up! If that f - - - ing bastard wins we all hang from nooses!  Lauer’s finished...and if I lose it’s all on you ass - - - - s for screwing this up.”  

Clinton finally stormed off the military ‘set’ and the assistant producer said she was screaming that she wanted to talk to, “the idiot who set this mess up...you do not blindside me!  Ever!" Clinton continued to demand to speak with executives at Comcast, parent company to NBC Universal.

Her dozen or more aides were visibly disturbed and tried to calm her down when she started shaking uncontrollably.  That did not stop her from demanding an executive, “on the phone, now!”

She was told the executive-in-charge of the forum was ready to talk with her and she was led away by two rather large aides who appeared to help her walk.  The TV executives got the message with all of the censuring headlines that followed over the next couple of days when it seemed the entire media turned on Matt Lauer for behaving in a “partisan” manner and “being grossly unfair and critical of the former secretary of state.”  Matt Lauer was heavily criticized on air by the Clinton campaign the rest of the week with most of the mainstream media joining in. The media appeared to frame Matt’s one serious question as the Clinton campaign was doing...”an unfair and partisan attack on Mrs. Clinton.” 

Matt Lauer is still facing major backlash following his 23 minutes with Hillary Clinton.  Privately, many reporters said Matt handed the Democrat nominee the expected softball questions, but made the decision to ask about the emails because, “the American people deserve an answer from the former secretary of state."  Calls were made to New York Times, Washington Post and Huffington Post and Twitter executives with orders to “Crush Matt Lauer”.  As you can easily see with all the headlines from these MSM sources, they did as they were told by the Clinton campaign.  

 Hillary also screamed that she would be “treated with respect at the debates or heads will roll.” Staffers at the Clinton campaign report that they fear her wrath and uncontrollable outbursts, and one described Hillary as “an egotistical psychopath”.  

 Since Hillary does not allow any staff to have cell phones when she is in their presence, no footage is available, but Hillary will never let this rest.  She has made it clear that she wants Matt Lauer to be “persona non grata - for putting her on the spot.”

 Interim DNC chairman Donna Brazile, the first black woman to hold the position, was singled out by Hillary during the rant. She screamed at Donna, “I’m so sick of your face. You stare at the wall like a brain dead buffalo, while letting that    f - - - ing Lauer get away with this. What are you good for, really? Get the f - - - to work janitoring this mess.  Do I make myself clear?”  A female NBC executive said that Donna Brazile looked at Mrs. Clinton and never flinched, which seemed to enrage Hillary all the more. The executive continued, “It was the most awful and terrible...and racist display – such a profane meltdown I have ever witnessed from anyone, and I will never forget it.  That woman should never see the inside of the oval office I can tell you that. She was unhinged and just continued to verbally abuse everyone; she was out of control.”

1. Purge the rolls of dead people.2. Purge the rolls of dual registrations.3. Repair Absentee ballot review.4. Picture ID to be able to vote.5. Purple finger if you have voted.6. Land owners only vote7. Repeal the 19th Amendment8. Demand paper ballot audit trail9. Make precincts financially liable for fraudulent results10. Put cheaters in jail and assess fines.11. Prosecute voter fraud by national committees.

Obama 3rd Term Gets Support from Senate

Conservative commentator Jamie Dech sent fear into the hearts of patriots everywhere recently when he predicted that Barack Hussein Obama would try to leverage his “political and media infrastructure” to bypass the current presidential election and try to either enter the race as a candidate or to utilize martial law in order to make himself president for another four years.

“I believe, depending on Republican race results and possible agitation in the aftermath, it’s possible Obama could try for a ‘third term,’” Dech wrote last week for Eagle Rising. “I don’t think he wants to give up the White House next January, if he can help it.”

A disturbing video has just surfaced from earlier this year that proves Dech may be on to something. In the video, Obama is seen claiming that if voters had the choice, they would vote him in for a third term.

“I think if I ran, I could win,” Obama claimed while delivering a speech in Ethiopia. “But I can’t.”

Obama went on to discuss the many riots and protests occurring in this country, most notably from the Black Lives Matter group and George Soros funded groups as he pointed out that martial law could eventually be instated.

“So, if there is massive unrest by groups like ‘Black Lives Matter’ — enough to cause a need for martial law, with National Guard action and all – then, if he declares himself king of the White House, how would he be stopped?” he asked.

The prospect of Obama being in office for a third term is terrifying, yet if you look at the many times he has bypassed congress during his presidency, we wouldn’t put it past him…

Clinton Bus Dumping its Crap Again on the Public

t looks like properly disposing of No. 2 is not Hillary Clinton’s No. 1 priority.

A Clinton campaign “Forward Together” bus has been caught dumping foul-smelling human waste into the street and down a storm drain in Lawrenceville, Georgia, according to several reports.

“Police say when they arrived on the scene, toilet paper was scattered everywhere and there was a foul smell,” reported Atlanta’s WGCL-TV 46.

Local businessman Mike Robins snapped several photos of the bus dumping the stinky waste into the street.

Robins told Lawrenceville Police he saw someone get out of the bus bearing images of Mrs. Clinton and her running mate Tim Kaine and dump “its sewage into the storm drain,” according to an incident report.

In close-up images, what is likely a mixture of liquid feces, urine and toilet paper can be seen oozing from the bottom of the bus. The “Forward Together” bus went through Lawrenceville, Georgia, and appeared to be illegally dumping human waste (Credit: Mike Robins)

A HAZMAT crew reportedly had to be called in to clean up the mess.

A DNC spokeswoman called the fecal matter “an honest mistake”:

This was an honest mistake and we apologize to the Lawrenceville community for any harm we may have caused. We were unaware of any possible violations and have already taken corrective action with the charter bus company to prevent this from happening again. Furthermore, the DNC will work with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, as well as local and state officials to determine the best course of corrective action.

WGCL noted that the State Environment Protection Department and Gwinnett County Storm Water are now involved in the investigation into the dumping.

Hundreds of WND readers weighed in on the news, with comments including:

How symbolic of what she is doing to AMERICA! TRUMP 2016 Clinton always thought her s—t didn’t stink. Now it’s undeniable. Go Trump! Low turnout in that town? Leaving a message, were they? This is a symbol of what she thinks of We the People. Can it get any more obvious? Stand back! That poop has the “pneumonia” virus in it! I think I’m going to throw up.

“An honest mistake,” my a–. EVERYBODY knows you don’t put sewer-type waste into a storm drain. The Dems think they are above the law, and the Hillary Clinton email case has reinforced that belief.

What type of person dumps raw sewage directly on a public street and into the storm drains?

Intentionally dumping waste into storm water runoff is a massive state and federal EPA violation. Fines can be tens of thousands and/or imprisonment. Watch what happens to a business if it pollutes storm water runoff, intentionally or unintentionally. Not just the individual, but the business is liable. So the individual and the Clinton campaign should be in serious legal trouble. Oh, I know, the Hillary defense.

As a former charter bus driver, I know that the least experienced driver knows better than to do that. There are plenty of dump locations. It is inexcusable and criminal.

Of course it was a mistake. Nothing to see here. Hillary is such a fine, lovely person. Move along. (Eyes roll with sarcasm.)

If Trump did that, it would be national news for a week. When you exit the bus and see the problem, then do nothing about it, it’s not a “mistake.” A spokeswoman called the fecal matter an “honest mistake”? And so was Benghazi, and

the video tape, and Hillary’s email. It seems like Hillary and her campaign s— on America, quite literally. I hope that big, blue, rolling turd doesn’t come to my town. They’re gonna need a lot of BleachBit. I guess she really does give a you-know-what. Another way to create more jobs Americans won’t do. She is a job creator after all. Policeman: “Clean it up.” Hillary: “You mean like with a cloth or something?” Well, that would explain the flies. The poor bus couldn’t contain any more of Hillary’s B.S. To the good people of Lawrenceville, GA … Be thankful she wasn’t traveling by air.

When the Election is Over

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump didn't say outright during Wednesday night's debate that he plans to reject the outcome of the upcoming election if he loses to Hillary Clinton, but that he won't concede the election "until the results are actually known, certified and verified," his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway argued on several morning news programs Thursday.

"I imagine if you asked Al Gore in 2000 if he was going to respect the election results, he would have said yes," Conway told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos on the "Good Morning America" program.

"He actually called to concede the election to Gov. George W. Bush and retracted it and as you know, we had six weeks until the Supreme Court of the United States decided who the next president would be."

At the same time, Trump is "also putting people on notice that if there are irregularities or voter fraud or large-scale malfeasance that's committed, he's not just going to want to investigate that, but we'll have to see what happens."

Conway, also appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, said it would be "ridiculous" for Trump to "go through every hypothetical possible in the world" with his comments, but "why would he disclose the possibility until we know what the results are, and they're certified and they're verified?"

On Wednesday, Conway told MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle that she does not believe there will be widespread voter fraud, "absent overwhelming evidence that there is, it would not be for me to say there is."

On Thursday, she told the network's early show that she presumes Trump is saying "he's got to take a look at it and see if there is any voter fraud. You even have James Carville saying, of course there will be some voter fraud.

"We know there are dead people still registered . . . I think the whole conversation about American principals and democracy must include the other person on the stage, who has used the State Department as a concierge for foreign donations.

"She takes money from countries that don't respect women, let alone don't respect democracy. So I think it's a two-way conversation on that."

Trump has specifically mentioned Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis in his comments about rigged elections, a panelist on the "Morning Joe" program pointed out, and Conway said she does know he's been looking at past reports.

"He's been actually scouring a lot of data about where irregularities have taken place, where dead people are still on the roles, and he's looking at past as possibly coupled with his broader message about a corrupt system," she said.

On CNN's "New Day," Conway sparred with anchor Chris Cuomo, after he said Trump's comment sounded like a "disavowal of democracy."

"If anybody has added to American democracy in the last year-and-a-half, it's Donald Trump," she said. "He has gotten people who are not quite interested in participating out to his rallies and out to the polls in the primaries and energized to vote for him this time. You can't call Hillary Clinton a change-maker. She's been there for decades."

Cuomo argued, though, that Gore waited until the election happened before saying he'd contest it, and that happened after there was a recount triggered in Florida.

"It was George W. Bush who wound up having to appeal to the Supreme Court to decide the matter, and when they did, that's when Al Gore took the step of conceding the race," Cuomo said.

"This is not an analogy to that . . . It sounds not just like whining, but disavowing the democratic process if it doesn't suit Donald Trump's personal preference," he added.

"Two people [were] on the stage last night and only one was whining and it wasn't Donald Trump," Conway retorted. "If you had Al Gore in this seat 16 years ago and you asked him the

same question: 'Vice President Gore, if you win the popular vote and you're losing Florida by less than 600 votes, decisive of the election, will you concede the election?'"

Conway also pointed out that "96 percent of the donations from journalists went to Hillary Clinton," but Cuomo responded that he doesn't know what journalists are allowed to donate, as at CNN, "we're not allowed to give."

"If you just turn on a TV or read the print every day, you know the guy can't get a fair shake," Conway said of her client, and insisted that if he wanted to talk about someone undermining American democracy, "let's ask the lady who was secretary of state."

Meanwhile, she argued that the debate showed Clinton's true form.

"She was on her heels, her position on abortion," she told Cuomo. "Every pro-choicer right now doesn't support abortion in late term the way that she does. She was on her heels in the Second Amendment. She was held to account for her position with the hot spots all over the globe."

On Fox News' "Fox & Friends," Conway said the topic of Trump holding back on saying he'd accept the election is being heavily covered because the mainstream media doesn't want to cover Trump challenging Clinton and the Clinton Foundation to return money to countries that violate civil rights, but "she never responded, of course."

"I also think they are deflecting from, I thought it was a pretty tough debate for Hillary Clinton and a debate that Donald Trump clearly won," said Conway.

Something Blue This Way ComesThere are an estimated 270 million firearms in the United States right now. That does

not take into account weapons bought before interstate records were available. There is actually no Federal database, and there is no list of people who own guns that is even close to being accurate. Most news services agree that about 1 in 3 adult Americans own at least one firearm. That means America potentially has the largest armed populace in history with more than 110 million armed individuals. There are also an additional 21 million teenagers who are probably highly advanced shooters that don’t show up on the records as adults.

Even more to consider is the fact that when gun ownership is perceived to be under threat in any way, Americans respond within minutes by spending billions of dollars to buy more guns and more ammunition. Barack Obama has a legacy that will last in the history books beyond every other self-aggrandizing theme. He is the undisputed world heavyweight champion gun salesman. He has been directly responsible for the biggest boom in gun sales in world history.

The 21st century gun customer is no ordinary gun buyer. They buy high quality hand guns, rifles, shotguns, holsters, scopes, and other accessories. Federal Firearms License holding guns stores are selling so many guns, they have to add online sales to keep up with the demand. They also have added thousands of indoor and outdoor gun ranges. Every Saturday and Sunday, those gun ranges have a two-hour waiting list for gun owners who pay an hourly fee to use the range for practicing. Any given weekend, it is not uncommon to see 70 thousand people a day honing their skills at drawing and firing their weapon. Women are getting just as good as men. Teenagers are getting just as good as adults.

But what does that mean; getting good? It means the ultimate form of gun control; being able to hit your target. Let’s talk about the target for a moment. After visiting numerous ranges

and interviewing hundreds of shooters of all ages and sexes—yeah, more than two—I was amazed at what I discovered. Hardly anyone was using round paper targets. They almost exclusively used paper body silhouettes. When asked why they were using that style of target, they virtually all had the same answer. They were practicing for home defense or self-defense. Defense against what? Almost universally, the answer was government.

These people were afraid. They were excited that they have the freedom to defend themselves, but they were scared. They watch the news. They see hundreds of thousands of citizen soldiers in jogging suits and blue jeans fighting street by street against professional troops to defend their neighborhoods. City after city is turned to rubble and dust and broken glass, and yet they fight on. Not even American forces hold a city against ragtag fighters who can scarcely read and have no decent firearms and ride around on 30-year old small motorcycles and fight armored vehicles and billion-dollar aircraft. In more than 25 years in the Middle East, America has been sent on their way without a single square yard of secure territory, week after week. What hope could any invading force on earth have against the armed American? None.

But there is a new force that is coming of age. It is funded by the American government. It has the finest intelligence ever known. It has unlimited armaments. Up until now, it has lacked a trained and motivated force of men who were willing to fire on civilians. The United Nations now has such a force, and it is made of many nations, none of whom have an ounce of respect for the armed American. They are currently marketing their mission to the main stream media and preparing us for the day when their signature blue helmets will march into our towns.

The recent publication of international speeches by Miss Step-and-Fetch, now heading the Department of Justice, inspired me to put some pieces together. First, she expressed endorsement for the Strong Cities Network, which is a multi-national police force empowered to disarm the global community. Second, the new Federal standing army led by Jeh Johnson’s Department of Homeland Security is boarded inside the United States and recently purchased a billion rounds of 40-caliber hollow point bullets—non-Geneva Convention—and publicly announced it is aimed directly at Constitutional Americans. This led me to have a conversation with a former FBI agent, who was a Special Forces commander, on this subject, and we are at odds.

I say that millions more Americans are now armed, and they are training for war. He says, if an American raises his weapon to law enforcement, they will be locked up. I say that enforcement actions will not be tolerated very long against law abiding citizens. He says that law is what the DOJ decides it is, and that we are a nation of laws, and that without the rule of law there will be anarchy. I say that there is a difference between rule of law, and the rule by law. Americans are a governed people, not a ruled people.

The former FBI agent asked me what I thought the armed American would do if United Nations troops marched into town to collect firearms. I said that the people would surrender for a while, and then something terrible would go wrong. One of those blue helmets is going to rape someone or beat someone. Retaliation will be swift and terrible. There will be nowhere to run, and there may be no prisoners.

I told the former FBI agent that if any nation, including our own, comes after the law abiding, peaceful American, they will face certain destruction. I told him it is not a threat, but that the prospect of that threat was written into the Constitution, because the founding fathers knew it would keep us free. That is why the second amendment is second, right after the right to free speech; the very right under which I write this article. The second amendment is there so that government cannot take away the other rights that come after it.

A word to the unwise at the United Nations; do not tread on the armed American. Your blue helmets will end up in trophy cases on the American mantle. We the People allow our government to exist. When the order comes to march into America to collect weapons, United

Nations soldiers should lay their arms down and go home to their families. This standoff has kept Americans free for 375 years, and so it shall forever.

The Annual Al Smith Celebrity Roast: Burn the place down.

The annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a white-tie gala in New York that is often the last time the two presidential nominees share a stage before Election Day, is traditionally a time when campaign hostilities are set aside.

Not this year. You see this campaign, the truth came out before the election was over. This time the Democrat headquarters was raided, and the secrets were let out to the public. The Clinton Obama machine paid thugs to beat police, burn cars, throw rocks, start fights, and even claim that they were groped by Donald Trump in a sleazy personal and relentless attack for months. They published nude photos of his wife. They slandered his carpenter father, his religion, and even accused him of consorting with the Russians to win the election. They even published his private tax returns in a national paper to disgrace him with his darkest business hour.

So, this year, Donald Trump took the podium first and turned the heat up to where it became to melt Hillary’s plastic face. Trump earned big laughs early in the speech. As the jokes went on, they began to swell with the truth. “Hillary went to confession recently, but the priest could do nothing for her when she could not recall her sins 39 times. Maybe she would email them to him later.” And then he appeared to lose the room as he repeatedly dug in with caustic swipes at Clinton, drawing rare boos at a charity event meant to raise money for impoverished children throughout New York.

 "Hillary is so corrupt she got kicked off the Watergate Commission. How corrupt do you have to be to get kicked off the Watergate Commission? Pretty corrupt," he said to loud boos and at least one call demanding he get off the stage.

"Hillary believes that it's vital to deceive the people by having one public policy and a totally different policy in private," he said to growing jeers. "Here she is tonight, in public, pretending not to hate Catholics."

“Michelle Obama gave a speech recently. They think she's absolutely great. My wife Melania gives the exact same speech, and people get on her case.”

Trump joked that she had bumped into him earlier in the night "and she very simply said 'Pardon me’” to which he responded, “I don’t know. When I become president, I’ll have to see about that.”

“Hillary has often said it takes a village. She ought to know; she took several in Haiti.”

Cardinal Dolan later called his seat "the iciest place on the planet."

The press is angry at him for drawing his sword at such a gala event. But here’s the thing. Trump was true to himself. He wore a white tie, but underneath it was a deep wound made with a blade of lies and deceit. People were hurt. Police were injured. Reputations were

permanently damaged. And Trump is not a politician. He will not simply go to a neutral corner and only fight you between the bells. He is the kind of champion that retains his honor and will fight evil where it falls to rest for w while. This is the leader who will never give up, until the last brick is laid. He is my president, and pray for his victory every day against the darkest, most sinister gangster to ever run for the office of president. Long live President Trump.

The dinner is named after the former New York governor, who was the first Catholic to receive a major party nomination for president when he unsuccessfully ran in 1928. And fittingly for an event named after a man nicknamed "The Happy Warrior," the occasion has produced dozens of memorable presidential jokes — and sincere moments of goodwill that have remained largely absent from the 2016 campaign.

Janet Yellen Signals Bank Civil War

Fed Chair Janet Yellen's interest in running a "high-pressure economy" threatens to add to an increasingly divisive climate at the U.S. central bank.

In remarks last week that jarred the market, Yellen ruminated about the benefits of letting inflation run a little hotter than normal while allowing the unemployment rate to drop below the point that historically would trigger Fed tightening action.

To many observers, the comments were a clearly dovish signal that she favors a lower-for-longer approach when it comes to interest rates.

But that kind of attitude could exacerbate tensions among Federal Open Market Committee members, in particular those who have been clamoring for rate hikes.

"Despite the fact that rates were not raised at the September FOMC meeting as we predicted, the truce at Federal Reserve has never been more tenuous and appears to be on the verge of an outright civil war," Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at Channel Capital Research, said in a note. "The truce between hawks and doves is now being renegotiated."

Right now there are just three hawkish members of the 10 FOMC voters. They are Esther George, who often breaks from the dovish pack, along with Loretta Mester and Eric Rosengren, a recent addition to those pushing for higher rates. The dissenters worry that keeping interest rates too low could hasten a recession if the Fed is forced to act quickly on rates after inflation picks up, according to minutes from the September meeting

In addition to the three "no" voters, Vice Chair Stanley Fischer earlier this week spoke on the dangers of low rates.

"The limitation on monetary policy imposed by low trend interest rates could therefore lead to longer and deeper recessions when the economy is hit by negative shocks," Fischer said, according to the text of his remarks. Fischer did say the Fed needs to keep rates low and would be helped by stronger fiscal policy.

Yellen has only seen this level of dissent in her tenure once before, in December 2014. Should it continue or accelerate, the reverberations will be felt through the market.

"At this point there is a civil war, and the consensus is, the hawks are saying 'We'll allow you to raise rates very slowly, we just want you to start raising rates,'" Roberts added in a phone interview. "What the new (consensus) will look like is being renegotiated. ... That, to me, is going to act as an overhang for the market."

Traders currently assign about a 70 percent chance of a rate increase at the December meeting, but then no additional moves through at least September 2017.

Election could play a role

Though the Fed professes independence, Roberts thinks the upcoming presidential election will sway policy.

President Barack Obama has appointed consistently dovish Fed members. He reappointed Yellen's predecessor, Ben Bernanke, then named her in 2013 to chair the central bank.

Democrat Hillary Clinton has spoken comparatively little about the Fed during her campaign, but Republican Donald Trump has been critical of Yellen in particular. That could be a signal he would appoint more hawkish members, though he also has spoken in favor of low interest rates.

Wall Street itself is divided on the rates issue. Some worry that the current low-rate environment has generated capital misallocation and boosted asset values — stocks in particular — while penalizing savers and pensions and holding back economic growth.

In an analysis released Friday, Goldman Sachs economists see only limited benefits to following the "high-pressure economy" strategy, particularly when it comes to the primary malady, low productivity.

"[I]t is hard to have great confidence in the productivity benefits of a high-pressure economy," David Mericle and Avisha Thakkar said in the report. The greatest benefits, they said, would come to low-wage workers who could see pay increases in a tighter labor market.

However, they did note the effects the debate could have on Fed unity.

"Fed officials who believe that there is a clear trade-off between running a high-pressure economy and the expected duration of the expansion are unlikely to be persuaded by these benefits," Mericle and Thakkar wrote. "But for those who do not see as strong a link, the policy might look more like a trade-off between low-probability risks and low-probability benefits.

"We take last week's comments as a sign that this is a live debate on the FOMC, one that could have important implications for the pace of tightening next year and beyond."

Trump First 100 Days

Donald Trump planted a flag on hallowed ground Saturday morning by laying out near the Gettysburg National Battlefield what he would do in his first 100 days as President of the United States.

Touting 'the kind of change that only arrives once in a lifetime,' Trump told an audience of about 300 invited guests that he will 'drain the swamp' in Washington, replacing the current government 'with a new government of, by and for the people.'

The symbolism factor was high, with a campaign aide telling reporters Friday night that the Civil War battle in Gettysburg memorialized by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 'was the moment when the war turned.'

Trump's own war – a two-front clash against both Hillary Clinton and the mass media – will come to a climax on November 8 when most Americans will choose a leader for the next four years.

He summed up the substance of his campaign in a 'Contract With The American Voter' – a point-by-point set of initiatives that track with the themes he has focused on for 16 months.

Included are six anti-corruption pledges, seven actions related to jobs and trade and five on immigration and the 'rule of law.' He ended his contract with a list of 10 bills he said he would try to quickly shepherd through Congress.

Aides promised the Republican nominee would put more meat on the bare bones of some of his mainstay pledges, but little in the speech was new.

TRUMP'S ANTI-CORRUPTION TO-DO LIST 

1. Constitutional Amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress 

2. Hiring freeze on federal employees to reduce the workforce through attrition 

3. Requirement to eliminate two federal regulations for every new one 

4. Five-year-ban on White House and Congressional officials becoming lobbyists 

5. Lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for foreign governments 

6. Complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections 

Instead, Trump formalized his signature pledges by announcing a legislative package that he said he would help shepherd through Congress.

He also reiterated a laundry list of executive actions that he has sketched out in speeches stretching back more than a year. 

The small crowd gathered in a hotel ballroom was a far cry from the 10,000 rowdy fans he typically draws, but they brought moments of enthusiasm.

The audience rose to their feet and chanted 'Trump! Trump! Trump!' as he entered. One man shouted: 'We love you!'

And in a sign of how deeply the GOP's most negative campaign slogan has taken root, half the crowd chanted 'Lock her up!' at the first mention of Hillary Clinton's name.

The two loudest applause lines were Trump's pledge to repeal and replace the Obamacare medical insurance law and to end federal funding for 'sanctuary cities' – Democrat-run municipalities that offer safe harbor to illegal immigrants. 

Saturday marked the second time Trump has engaged in the customary 'first 100 days' routine: In June he tacked a laundry list on to a speech castigating the Clintons for profiting from a 'special interest monopoly' in Washington.

That set of promises was predictably vague, including pledges to 'appoint judges who will uphold the Constitution,' 'stand up to countries that cheat on trade' and 'pass massive tax reform to create millions of new jobs.'

TRUMP'S PLAN FOR JOBS AND TRADE 

1. Renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement or withdraw from it 

2. Withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

3. Order the secretary of the treasury to label China a 'currency manipulator' 

4. Use U.S. and international laws to end foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers

5. Lift restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of U.S. energy reserves including shale, oil, natural gas and coal

6. Approve the Keystone XL pipeline project and other 'vital energy infrastructure projects' 

7. Cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to improve U.S. water and environmental infrastructure

Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg delivered the first pre-speech warmup, a somber seven-minute note of reverence on what Trump hopes will be remembered as the day his battle with America's establishment had a rebirth.

TRUMP'S PLEDGES ON IMMIGRATION AND 'RULE OF LAW'

1. Cancel Obama's 'unconstitutional' executive actions, memoranda and orders

2. Pick a conservative replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia 

3. Cancel all federal funding to 'sanctuary cities' that harbor illegal immigrants

4. Begin removing the 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the U.S., and cancel visas to countries that won’t repatriate them 

5. Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where incoming people can't be properly vetted.

'I can't think of a more historic place,' Kellogg said.

'It's really a historic time in our life,' he added as he drew parallels that stretch backward 153 years to a similar 'time when the future of our nation was in doubt.'

'We are waging another battle – a political one,' he said.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani framed the day in more practical terms, quoting Lincoln's famous three-minute speech.

'I don't know if I could call government, right now, "of the people, by the people and for the people",' Giuliani said.

'I think it's government of the lobbyists, permanent politicians ... the big gigantic multinational corporations, and the unions that can donate massive amounts of money.'

'People are somewhere down there – somewhere,' he lamented.

The policy agenda Trump described on Saturday, a senior campaign aide said Friday night, was far beyond what Democrat Hillary Clinton could put on the table.

She can't articulate her policy goals, the aide said, because her donors haven't yet told her what to think.

'Secretary Clinton has no core,' the aide charged, quoting a Democratic aide in a hacked email recently released by WikiLeaks.

'Her policies are determined by the checks that are given to her, and nothing else. And of course no one actually disagrees with that. Everyone understands that she's a special-interest-driven candidate.'

The aide described Saturday's event, added to the calendar on Friday afternoon, as 'our chance to lay out a positive vision for the country, from Mr. Trump, about what he's going to do in his first 100 days in office, and how he's going to go about doing it.' 

Clinton won't follow suit – 'she can't even go there' – the aide predicted, 'because she doesn't even know what checks she's going to get between now and when she would hypothetically be elected.'

But it's not clear where 'there' is, or why it's taken so long to read the map.

The aide promised 'new material' on Saturday but quickly played it coy, saying: 'I don't want to say what it will be.'

'What you're seeing tomorrow, is Mr. Trump identifying the 10 most important principles for the first 100 days, and then offering policy solutions to go with those.'

Trump's Gettysburg address comes with just 17 days to go before the Nov. 8 election. He and Clinton have debated three times. And, most worrisome for Republicans, an estimated 4 million Americans have already cast ballots through early voting programs.

As the call was going on, Trump himself appeared on the Fox News Channel with host Sean Hannity to preview Saturday's speech in an equally vague fashion.

We're going to be lowering taxes. We're going to be strengthening our borders,' he said, remixing buzzword bromides that have been speech staples for months.

'We're going to be getting rid of regulations,' Trump continued. 'The regulations are going to be gone ... we need them for security or we need them for certain things like the environment, but our regulations are just taking over our companies. We can't compete anymore.'

'We're going to be terminating, repealing and replacing Obamacare. We're going to be saving our Second Amendment, There are a lot of things, Sean. It's gonna be - I think it's gonna be very special.'

At about the same time, his campaign blasted out a fundraising email signed by his middle son Eric.

'Here is what my father is determined to do in his first 100 days in office,' the email read. 'This is what we're fighting for.'

The only missing was the original “Accountability Clause,” in the Contract with America. "If we fail to bring these to a vote in the first 100 days, you can kick us out".'

Acknowledging that 'it's a little bit different when you're the president,' the second aide said that 'the sentiment will be the same, which is that changes need to come very rapidly. And progress needs to come very rapidly.'

The policy proposals Trump will unveil Saturday, the aide said, 'are not going to wait until deep into his term, or in his second term.'

The comparison with the Contract with America could be fraught with trouble, even though its architect Newt Gingrich is advising Trump's campaign.

When Gingrich became Speaker of the House, his rank-and-file pledged to enact eight budget reforms and bring 10 specific bills to a vote.

The bills met with varying levels of success: Some became law while others died in the U.S. Senate or met the business end of President Bill Clinton's veto pen. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled one was unconstitutional.

Comment: Where's the part about arresting George Soros, charging him with treason, seizing all of his US assets and stripping him of his US citizenship ???

Trump will be suing all of the women who publicly stated he inappropriately touched them. Each of these women will be financially destroyed. The Democrat operatives that coerced these women to tell their stories will abandon them.

Further, Whatever you think of Donald Trump not promising to immediately accept the election result, don’t believe anyone who says challenging the result would be unprecedented. Donald Trump is not the first candidate to say a presidential election was “rigged.”

People were up in even more of a lather in previous elections. Four times in the history of the United States, it wasn’t the voters, or even presidential electors, that chose the president. Rather, it was a separate branch of government. I write about these in my book, “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.”

In the nation’s history, four candidates who lost the popular vote became president, but there was by no means anything illegal about it. The Electoral College decides the presidency, not the popular vote. Until the Constitution is amended, it will remain that way. There is an effort among some states to undermine the Electoral College by agreeing to have their electors vote for whoever won the national popular vote. While this might not honor the wishes of the voters in their own state, state legislatures have the right to apportion electors however they wish. Other states have debated proportional awarding of electoral votes—as Maine and Nebraska already have. But again, it’s up to the states.

It should be noted that of the four presidents to emerge from these odd situations—Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes and George W. Bush—there were no claims that Jefferson was selected rather than elected.

For most, 2000 is the frame of reference. But a majority was able to accept the Supreme Court’s verdict in Bush v. Gore, even though many Democrats take it as an article of faith they were robbed in Florida. But other examples are more profound. Two elections could have led to war.

Democrats, such as newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and Henry Watterson, talked about leading 100,000 armed men into Washington if their nominee Samuel Tilden didn’t win the presidency. It was actually talk, but Democrats and their media allies did spend the next four years calling President Rutherford B. Hayes, Rutherfraud. In reality, 1876 was a presidential election the Democrats stole, the Republicans stole back and like 2000, Florida was in dispute.

The election controversy came at a very touchy time for the country, just 11 years after the end of the Civil War. America could have been pushed to war again had some of the rowdier voices prevailed.

Similarly, after the 1800 Electoral College tie with Thomas Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr, the lame duck Federalist Congress considered installing Burr as president. Jefferson supporters were threatening armed rebellion. But, in the end, the country went through the first peaceful transfer of power, and Burr, of course, became disgraced on multiple other fronts. The infant country was at a delicate stage at this time, and there were legitimate fears about a French Revolution-style ideology spreading.

For all the wailing about how divided the country is along partisan and ideological lines today, we should ask: compared to when? Compared to the 1960s? Compared to the 1860s? Compared to when a sitting vice president would gun down a former treasury secretary in a duel? The story of the campaigns that went down to the wire also tells us that America is more than able to survive internal political tensions and unite.

The other elections, 1824 and 2000, didn’t come close to armed conflict. But after the 1824, John Quincy Adams had a stillborn presidency, dogged by the alleged “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay. Further, 1824 most closely resembles 2016. It was the ultimate political insider, Adams, verses the in-your-face, sometimes foul-mouthed, politically incorrect outsider, Andrew Jackson. Jackson won a plurality but not a majority of both the popular and electoral votes, but lost the presidency.

And there were elections with suspicious results but were never strongly challenged.

Shortly after John F. Kennedy was inaugurated president, Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen—certain that election fraud in his home state of Illinois cost Richard Nixon the election, called FBI Assistant Director Cartha DeLoach to ask why there wasn’t an FBI investigation into the chicanery and voter fraud emanating from Chicago’s Daley machine.

“I told him that the Department of Justice was investigating this,” DeLoach recalled to the Washington Post. “I referred him to the attorney general.”

The exasperated Dirksen sarcastically asked, “Who’s the attorney general?”

DeLoach answered, “Bobby Kennedy.”

So, what about 2016? There’s a few scenarios.

Consider how close the race is in key states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida and the high unfavorable ratings for both candidates. There could be a split with the popular and Electoral College vote.

Further, a Libertarian Party ticket of two former Republican governors, Gary Johnson and William Weld, polled within striking distance in one New Mexico poll. Independent Evan McMullin has a somewhat reasonable chance of winning Utah. Both long shots. But, this could deprive Trump and Hillary an electoral majority. That would mean the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would decide.

None of this could happen, right? It’s too rare, almost unheard of.. Sort of like everything else in the 2016 election.

Remember with Lincoln won the election and united the nation? Well, except for the half that left?

Voter Fraud: It’s been real for 200 years. How do we stop it?

Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus slammed a debate question asking Donald Trump if he'd accept the outcome of the election, calling it a premature and unprecedented request for a "concession speech."

In an interview on CBS News' "Face The Nation" on Sunday, the RNC chairman was incensed about persistent demands that the GOP nominee give up his right to question voter fraud.

"To ask a candidate three weeks before the election if they lose are they going to concede, asking for a concession speech, no one does that," Priebus said.

"I'm trying to put you in the mind of a person running for president and [he] sees this unbelievable world around him, and then you … hear about fraud at the ballot box, and you say, 'you know what, I'm going to reserve all options.' …I know where he's at on this."

Priebus vigorously defended Trump's call for monitoring against fraud on Nov. 8. Al Franken lost, but was close enough to demand a recount. After three recouts, he finally got enough votes to win, and he stopped the demand for a recount. He has been there ever since.

"We know that this is not millions of people," he said. "But what we're talking about are things like … the Milwaukee police report that came out about six years ago… a 70-page report on election fraud in Milwaukee. This wasn't the Republican Party," he said.

"I'm saying this is real. So let's not go down this road where we're acting like it's a figment of people's imagination." Never in American history, has there been an election recalled because of voter fraud.

How do we stop it?

Planet X: The NASA Perspective

The putative "Planet Nine" may have tilted the entire solar system, researchers say. 

In January, astronomers revealed evidence for the potential existence of another planet in the solar system. Researchers suggest that if this world — dubbed Planet Nine — exists, it could be about 10 times Earth's mass and orbit the sun at a distance about 500 times the distance from the Earth to the sun.

Researchers claim that a huge planet almost ten times the size of Neptune probably exists in the frozen Kuiper Belt region of our solar system. The plant has not yet been located or photographed. Planet X would be about the same size as the most commonly found exoplanets orbiting other stars. The evidence for the claim is that six of the most distant known Kuiper Belt objects have orbits that line up in a way that would only happen if the gravity of a massive, unknown planet were pulling on them. The researchers predicted that Planet X’s gravity would cuase another set of Kuipe Belt objects to be forced into orbits Perpendicular to Planet X’s orbit.Five objects have already been discovered that fit this description precisely. The six-degree obliquity of the sun suggests that either an asymmetry was present in the solar system's formation environment, or an external torque has misaligned the angular momentum vectors of the sun and the planets. However, the exact origin of this obliquity remains an open question. Batygin & Brown (2016) have recently shown that the physical alignment of distant Kuiper Belt orbits can be explained by a 5-20 Earth-mass planet on a distant, eccentric, and inclined orbit, with an approximate perihelion distance of ~250 AU. Using an analytic model for secular interactions between Planet Nine and the remaining giant planets, here we show that a planet with similar parameters can naturally generate the observed obliquity as well as the specific pole position of the sun's spin axis, from a nearly aligned initial state. Thus, Planet Nine offers a testable explanation for the otherwise mysterious spin-orbit misalignment of the solar system.

Previous research suggested that Planet Nine would possess a highly tilted orbit compared with the relatively thin, flat zone in which the eight official planets circle the sun. This led scientists to investigate whether Planet Nine's slant might help explain other tilting seen elsewhere in the solar system. [The Evidence for 'Planet Nine' in Images (Gallery)]

Now, researchers suggest that Planet Nine's influence might have tilted the entire solar system except the sun.

"Planet Nine may have tilted the other planets over the lifetime of the solar system," said study lead author Elizabeth Bailey, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. 

Prior work found that the zone in which the eight major planets orbit the sun is tilted by about 6 degrees compared to the sun's equator. This discrepancy has long been a mystery in astronomy.

Bailey and her colleagues ran computer simulations that suggest that the tilt of the eight official planets can be explained by the gravitational influence of Planet Nine "over the 4.5-billion-years-ish lifetime of the solar system," Bailey told Space.com.

Bailey did note that there are other potential explanations for the tilt of the solar system. One alternative is that electrically charged particles influenced by the young sun's magnetic field could have interacted with the disk of gas and dust that gave rise to the planets in ways that tilted the solar system. Another possibility is that there might have been an imbalance in the mass of the nascent sun's core.

"However, all these other ways to explain why the solar system is tilted are really hard to test — they all invoke processes that were possibly present really early in the solar system," Bailey said. "Planet Nine is the first thing that has been proposed to tilt the solar system that doesn't depend on early conditions, so if we find Planet Nine, we will be able to see if it's the only thing responsible for the tilt, or if anything else may have played a role."

The scientists detailed their findings yesterday (Oct. 18) at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences and European Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, California.

SETI

The hunt for radio signals from intelligent extraterrestrials just received an international boost.

Breakthrough Initiatives, a privately funded series of long-term astronomical programs, is teaming up with the National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) to scour the skies with some of the world's most powerful telescopes, in search of signs of intelligent life.

"'Are we alone?' is a question that unites us as a planet," Yuri Milner, Russian billionaire investor and founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives program, said in a statement. Working together, the two organizations will use telescopes in the United States, Australia and China to hunt for signals from alien civilizations.

"And the quest to answer it should take place at a planetary level, too," Milner added. "With this agreement, we are now searching for cosmic companions with three of the world's biggest telescopes across three continents."

The world's largest telescope

Whether life exists beyond Earth has been a long-standing question in both science and literature, but it wasn't until the past 50 years or so that humans began to pursue the answer vigorously. Because some radio signals can only be generated artificially, radio telescopes are some of the most used instruments in the hunt.

In July 2015, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation launched the most comprehensive astronomical search for intelligent life ever undertaken, committing to spend $100 million over the next decade on this effort. The project, known as Breakthrough Listen, partnered with the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia and the Lick Observatory in California. The instruments at Parkes and Green Bank will perform dedicated searches for radio signals, whereas the Lick Observatory will hunt along optical wavelengths.

Although it's not part of Breakthrough Listen, the Arecibo Observatory, located in Puerto Rico, has spent a significant amount of time over the past half century looking for extraterrestrial life. Rather than using dedicated time to search for signals, the search frequently piggybacks on other scientific searches, scanning whatever part of the sky has been allotted to other researchers.

Now, the world's largest single-dish radio telescope has joined the hunt. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), located in China's Guizhou province, has teamed up with Breakthrough Listen to hunt for signals from space, sealing the deal at a signing ceremony in Beijing. The enormous instrument saw first light only a few weeks ago, on Sept. 25, 2016. Together, the organizations will exchange observing plans, search methods, and data, as well as host a series of meetings and conferences to improve their methods.

Jun Yan, director general of NAOC, said that, as the world's largest single instrument, FAST "will be one of the most powerful instruments to search for the potential intelligent life beyond Earth."

According to an online report comparing the two by Robert Williams, a mechanical engineer at Ohio University, the enormous instrument is more sensitive than the smaller Arecibo dish.The iconic dish, once the largest single instrument, is dwarfed by the Chinese telescope, which Williams says is almost twice its diameter.

Made up of 4,450 panels, FAST is the size of 30 football fields, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported earlier this year. Although arrays of multiple telescopes can grow larger, the new instrument is the largest single-aperture telescope in the world, and should be able to detect signals from farther out than Arecibo can, Williams said.

"The FAST telescope is a remarkable instrument with unprecedented power," said Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives program. "We are delighted to be collaborating with NAOC."

The Search Does Reveal Great Discoveries

A group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers, including Carnegie's Jonathan Gagné, joined forces to discover an unusual hunting ground for exoplanets. They found a star surrounded by the oldest known circumstellar disk—a primordial ring of gas and dust that orbits around a young star and from which planets can form as the material collides and aggregates.

Led by Steven Silverberg of University of Oklahoma, the team described a newly identified red dwarf star with a warm circumstellar disk, of the kind associated with young planetary systems. Circumstellar disks around red dwarfs like this one are rare to begin with, but this star, called AWI0005x3s, appears to have sustained its disk for an exceptionally long time. The findings are published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"Most disks of this kind fade away in less than 30 million years," said Silverberg. "This particular red dwarf is a candidate member of the Carina stellar association, which would make it around 45 million years old [like the rest of the stars in that group]. It's the oldest red dwarf system with a disk we've seen in one of these associations."

The discovery relied on citizen scientists from Disk Detective, a project led by NASA/GSFC's Dr. Marc Kuchner that's designed to find new circumstellar disks. At the project's website, DiskDetective.org, users make classifications by viewing ten-second videos of data from NASA surveys, including the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE) and Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) projects. Since the launch of the website in January 2014, roughly 30,000 citizen scientists have participated in this process, performing roughly 2 million classifications of celestial objects.

"Without the help of the citizen scientists examining these objects and finding the good ones, we might never have spotted this object," Kuchner said. "The WISE mission alone found 747 million [warm infrared] objects, of which we expect a few thousand to be circumstellar disks."

"Unraveling the mysteries of our universe, while contributing to the advancement of astronomy, is without a doubt a dream come true," says Hugo Durantini Luca from Argentina, one of eight citizen scientist co-authors.

Determining the age of a star can be tricky or impossible. But the Carina association, where this red dwarf was found, is a group of stars whose motions through the Galaxy indicate that they were all born at roughly the same time in the same stellar nursery.

Carnegie's Gagné devised a test that showed this newly found red dwarf and its disk are likely part of the Carina association, which was key to revealing its surprising age.

"It is surprising to see a circumstellar disk around a star that may be 45 million years old, because we normally expect these disks to dissipate within a few million years," Gagné explained. "More observations will be needed to determine whether the star is really as old as we suspect, and if it turns out to be, it will certainly become a benchmark system to understand the lifetime of disks."

Knowing that this star and its disk are so old may help scientists understand why M dwarf disks appear to be so rare.

This star and its disk are interesting for another reason: the possibility that it could host extrasolar planets. Most of the extrasolar planets that have been found by telescopes have been located in disks similar to the one around this unusual red dwarf. Moreover, this particular star is the same spectral type as Proxima Centauri, the Sun's nearest neighbor, which was shown to host at least one exoplanet, the famous Proxima b, in research published earlier this year.

The Map of the Galaxy

Scientists have used two of the world's largest telescopes to produce a new, super-detailed map of our galaxy.

Astronomers in Germany and Australia charted hydrogen -- the most abundant element in space and the main component of stars and galaxies -- to give an unprecedented view of the Milky Way. The map shows the concentration of stars and dwarf galaxies across the skies. "We've been able to produce a whole-sky image that in many ways is greater than the sum of its parts," Lister Staveley-Smith of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) told CNN. "The new map gives us a much more coherent view of the sky and enables a better understanding of the Milky Way."Naomi McClure-Griffiths from the Australian National University (ANU) said the study revealed for the first time the fine details of structures between stars in the Milky Way."Very small gas clouds appear to have helped form stars in the Milky Way over billions of years," she said in a statement.She said the map would be used to answer the big questions about the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies."How does the Milky Way get the new gas it requires to continue forming stars? And where are all of the small dwarf galaxies that must surround our Milky Way? The next steps will be exciting," she said.

Staveley-Smith said the project took thousands of hours of telescope time over several years, involving around ten billion individual data points. The team used the Parkes Observatory in Australia and the Effelsberg 100m Radio Telescope in Germany, carefully matching results in overlapping scans of the sky.

"The data processing was an even greater task as we had to write our own software packages to carefully calibrate the data and subtract out spurious signals at each point in the sky," Staveley-Smith said.

"Tiny clouds become visible that appear to have fueled star formation in the Milky Way for billions of years," he added in a statement.

"These objects are too dim and too small to be detected even in the other galaxies closest to us."

Containing up to 400 billion individual stars and with a diameter up to 180,000 light years across, the Milky Way is our galactic home, but we're far from the center of the action. Our solar system is located around 27,000 light years from the Galactic Center, where a supermassive black hole is believed to sit. Our detached location gives us a fantastic view of the galaxy, and the neighboring Andromeda and Magellanic Cloud galaxies, all of which can be seen in the new map. Light pollution makes the view difficult to see from much of Earth however: 80% of Americans can't see the Milky Way at all. The new map is the latest example of huge advances made in astronomy in recent years, thanks to new telescopes and data processing techniques.

In July, a South African telescope revealed hundreds of of galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe where only 70 had been seen before, while this month the Hubble Space Telescope upped the total number of observable galaxies to 2 trillion . Earlier this year, a team working with the APEX telescope in Chile produced a stunning new image of the Southern Hemisphere of the Galactic Plane, where a majority of the Milky Way's mass lies.

The War in Kosovo

The Kosovo War was an armed conflict in Kosovo that lasted from 28 February 1998[citation needed] until 11 June 1999. It was fought by the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (by this time, consisting of the Republics of Montenegro and Serbia), which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian rebel group known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with air support from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) from 24 March 1999, and ground support from the Albanian army.

Support for the Kosovan War and, in particular, the legitimacy of NATO's bombing campaign came from a variety of sources. In a 2009 article, David Clark claimed "Every member of NATO, every EU country, and most of Yugoslavia's neighbours, supported military action."[159] Statements from the leaders of United States, Czech Republic and United Kingdom, respectively, described the war as one "upholding our values, protecting our interests, and advancing the cause of peace",[160] "the first war for values"[159] and one "to avert what would otherwise be a humanitarian disaster in Kosovo."[161] Others included the then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan who was reported by some sources as acknowledging that the NATO action was legitimate[162] who emphasised that there were times when the use of force was legitimate in the pursuit of peace[163] though Annan stressed that the "[UN Security] Council should have been involved in any decision to use force."[163] The distinction between the legality and legitimacy of the intervention was further highlighted in two separate reports. One was conducted by the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, entitled The Kosovo Report,[164] which found that:

[Yugoslav] forces were engaged in a well-planned campaign of terror and expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians. This campaign is most frequently described as one of "ethnic cleansing," intended to drive many, if not all, Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo, destroy the foundations of their society, and prevent them from returning.

It concluded that "the NATO military intervention was illegal but legitimate". It was based almost completely upon a picture that was published correctly, but used deceptively by Hillary Clinton and Madelaine Albright and financed by George Soros and Henri Levy, the same as the violence during this campaign.

The fact is that the above pictured Bosnian Muslims were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished.

The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims; it is around the cameraman and the journalists. It formed part of a broken-down barbed wire fence encircling a small compound that was next to Trnopolje camp. The British news team filmed from inside this compound, shooting pictures of the refugees and the camp through the compound fence. In the eyes of many who saw them, the resulting pictures left the false impression that the Bosnian Muslims were caged behind barbed wire.

Whatever the British news team's intentions may have been, their pictures were seen around the world as the first hard evidence of concentration camps in Bosnia. 'The Proof: behind the barbed wire, the brutal truth about the suffering in Bosnia', announced the Daily Mail alongside a front-page reproduction of the picture from Trnopolje: 'They are the sort of scenes that flicker in black and white images from 50-year-old films of Nazi concentration camps.' (7 August 1992) On the first anniversary of the pictures being taken, an article in the Independent could still use the barbed wire to make the Nazi link: 'The camera slowly pans up the bony torso of the prisoner. It is the picture of famine, but then we see the barbed wire against his chest and it is the picture of the Holocaust and concentration camps.' (5 August 1993)

Penny Marshall, Ian Williams and Ed Vulliamy have never called Trnopolje a concentration camp. They have criticised the way that others tried to use their reports and pictures as 'proof' of a Nazi-style Holocaust in Bosnia. Yet over the past four and a half years, none of them has told the full story about that barbed wire fence which made such an impact on world opinion.

Some criticised the NATO intervention as a political diversionary tactic, coming as it did on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, pointing to the fact that coverage of the bombing directly replaced coverage of the scandal in American news cycles.[172] Also, some point out that before the bombing, rather than there being an unusually bloody conflict, the KLA was not engaged in a widespread civil war against Yugoslav forces and the death toll among all concerned (including ethnic Albanians) skyrocketed following NATO intervention.[172]

As First Lady from January 1993, she encouraged her husband Bill and his secretary of state Madeleine Albright to attack Serbian forces in the disintegrating Yugoslavia—in Bosnia in 1994 and Serbia in 1999. She’s stated that in 1999 she phoned her husband from Africa. “I urged him to bomb,” she boasts. These Serbs were (as usual) forces that did not threaten the U.S. in any way. The complex conflicts and tussles over territory between ethnic groups in the Balkans, and the collapse of the Russian economy following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, gave Bill Clinton an excuse to posture as the world’s savior and to use NATO to impose order. Only the United States, he asserted, could restore order in Yugoslavia, which had been a proudly neutral country outside NATO and the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War. President Clinton and Albright also claimed that only NATO—designed in 1949 to counter a supposed Soviet threat to Western Europe, but never yet deployed in battle—should deal with the Balkan crises.

The Bosnian intervention resulted in the imposition of the “Dayton Accord” on the parties involved and the creation of the dysfunctional state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Kosovo intervention five years later (justified by the scaremongering, subsequently disproven reports of a Serbian genocidal campaign against Kosovars) involved the NATO bombing of Belgrade and resulted in the dismemberment of Serbia. Kosovo, now recognized by the U.S. and many of its allies as an independent state, is the center of Europe’s heroin trafficking and the host of the U.S.’s largest army base abroad.

The Kosovo war, lacking UN support and following Albright’s outrageous demand for Serbian acquiescence—designed, as she gleefully conceded, “to set the bar too high” for Belgrade and Moscow’s acceptance—of NATO occupation of all of Serbia, was an extraordinary provocation to Serbia’s traditional ally Russia. “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get,” Albright said at the time, as NATO prepared to bomb a European capital for the first time since 1945.

U.S. President Clinton and his administration were accused of inflating the number of Kosovo Albanians killed by state forces.[173] After the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin said that the US was using its economic and military superiority to aggressively expand its influence and interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. Chinese leaders called the NATO campaign a dangerous precedent of naked aggression, a new form of colonialism, and an aggressive war groundless in morality or law. It was seen as part of a plot by the US to destroy Yugoslavia, expand eastward and control all of Europe.

The three-judge panel actually ruled in favor of Milosevic’s objections to admitting testimony from chief Kosovo war crimes investigator Kevin Curtis because of the irrelevance of “evidence” composed entirely of “repeating stories he had heard from others,” the AP reported. When the prosecution’s intelligence analyst Stephen Spargo detailed through maps the routes

taken by 800,000 or so deported or fleeing Albanians in 1999, Milosevic asked whether he knew that 100,000 Serbs left Kosovo along with everyone else once NATO started bombing. Spargo answered that he “hadn’t been assigned to document Serb displacements.” Naturally. In Kosovo, Milosevic continued, since there were 10 Albanians to every Serb, proportionally speaking, more Serbs than Albanians fled Kosovo  —  casting doubt on the forced-deportation argument that the Clinton government helped craft for our consumption.

Milosevic scored points early on when he showed the court an Albanian map depicting Greater Albania, which included southeast Montenegro, southern Serbia, western Macedonia and parts of northern Greece in addition to Kosovo  —  a long-harbored dream of many in Albania and Kosovo. It goes without saying that the American people were not shown this map of Greater Albania as they were being sold a story of Milosevic’s push for a “Greater Serbia.”

My guest tonight, among many of her other accomplishments, is a former Marine, an on the ground witness who lived in Montenegro, and a host on the Truth Frequency Radio network with her own program. Elizabeth McCabe is her with us tonight.

1. Americans sometimes feel like high-level politicians can call up Wars-R-Us and order up a war when they need a little distraction. In your opinion, should the US have become involved in this conflict?

2. Was the conflict resolved with the defeat and capture of Milosovic?3. What was the driving force behind the actual violence; national or religious factors.4. Before the US and NATO involvement, was this a war between Muslims and non-Muslims?5. Who was importing the trained Mujahudeen forces into the theater, and in your opinion,

what would have happened if this was somehow prevented from happening?6. Are their similar forces building momentum today in the region? Are the ideologies that

different?7. All of the wars in the 20th century, except those in southeast Asia started in the Balkans.

Why?8. Sometimes we think that bankers are the ones who really arrange the wars and the

conflicts. Is this latest tension created by economics, or is this an ongoing war of propaganda?

9. What is the solution to the centuries old conflict in this region?

It wasn’t all bad. A relatively low-tech army developed very intelligent ways of fighting a high-tech opponent. Kosovo also showed that some low-tech tactics could reduce the impact of a high-tech force such as NATO; the Milošević government coöperated with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, passing on many of the lessons learned.[253] The Yugoslav army had long expected to need to resist a much stronger enemy, either Soviet or NATO, during the Cold War and had developed effective tactics of deception and concealment in response. These would have been unlikely to have resisted a full-scale invasion for long, but were probably used to mislead overflying aircraft and satellites. Among the tactics used were:

U.S. stealth aircraft were tracked with radars operating on long wavelengths. If stealth jets got wet or opened their bomb bay doors, they would become visible on the radar screens. An F-117 Nighthawk downed by a missile was possibly spotted in this way.[254]

Dummy targets such as fake bridges, airfields and decoy planes and tanks were used extensively. Tanks were made using old tires, plastic sheeting and logs, and sand cans and fuel set alight to mimic heat emissions. They fooled NATO pilots into bombing hundreds of such decoys, though General Clark's survey found that in Operation: Allied Force, NATO airmen hit just 25 decoys—an insignificant percentage of the 974 validated hits.[255] However, NATO sources claim that this was due to operating procedures, which oblige troops, in this case aircraft, to engage any and all targets, however unlikely they may be. The targets needed only to look real to be shot at, if detected, of course. NATO claimed that Yugoslav air force had been devastated. "Official data show that the Yugoslav army in Kosovo lost 26 percent of its tanks, 34 percent of its APCs, and 47 percent of the artillery to the air campaign.

Why SCOTUS is so Important

When the U.S. Department of Justice filed criminal contempt charges against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Oct. 17, accusing the well-known lawman of intentionally violating a federal judge’s order not to arrest illegal aliens without evidence they had broken state law, it was beyond even the imagination of George Orwell.

In Stolen Sovereignty, I warned about judges granting citizen rights to those who are in the country without the consent of the people and providing them standing to sue for affirmative benefits. Now, in the latest legal assault on Arizona, law enforcement, and sovereignty, illegal aliens have succeeded in getting a radical judge and the Obama Administration to collude against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and charge him with criminal contempt for enforcing federal immigration and national sovereignty in his jurisdiction, which has been devastated by the effects of illegal immigration. He faces up to six months in jail if convicted of contempt. Meanwhile, the most violent criminal aliens remain at large in the state. This is Orwellian beyond imagination.

In August, Judge G. Murray Snow of the U.S. District Court of Arizona took the unprecedented step of referring Arpaio for misdemeanor criminal contempt charges for allegedly not following a prior court injunction against his police tactics of apprehending those reasonably suspected of being in his jurisdiction illegally. The injunction stems from a 2007 class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) accusing the Maricopa County Sherriff of racial profiling — the golden goose of liberal litigation against law enforcement. After soliciting federal officials to take action against a sitting sheriff protecting one of the most dangerous jurisdictions, the Obama DOJ took up the mantle and brought charges against Arpaio the day before early voting began in his race for reelection. The charges were brought up at a hearing last Tuesday, called for by Judge Susan Bolton who herself is a notorious liberal activist who has sided with illegal aliens over Arizona sovereignty for years.

When the charges were announced, the Arizona Republic observed the unprecedented nature of this case:

Announcement of the charge, which came minutes into the start of the criminal-contempt proceedings, surprised even those closest to the lawsuit.

“Usually a set status conference is a meeting between the court and council to discuss legal issues,” said Mel McDonald, Arpaio’s defense attorney. “We had no clue that they were going to come here today and make the announcements that they made.”

McDonald said Arpaio will plead not guilty.

Legal experts say the judge and attorneys have little historical guidance moving forward with the case.

“As rare as it is to have a federal judge refer the head of a law-enforcement agency for prosecution, it is even rarer that the Department of Justice would pick up that gauntlet and move forward with the charge,” said Paul Charlton, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona. “It’s unheard of.”

As I note in my book, our Founders are rolling over in their graves at the sight of a sheriff being placed on trial for taking common sense steps to protect his state’s sovereignty and applying federal law in cases of reasonable suspicion laws over which Congress, not the judiciary, has plenary authority. While Arpaio admits to mistakenly violating the injunction, the broader question is how a federal court can issue an injunction against sovereignty laws of a nation using … you guessed it … the Fourteenth Amendment. Arpaio was acting according to federal law, which requires the federal government to respond to state inquiries on an individual’s immigration status [8 U. S. C. §1373c]. Yet, he is potentially facing jail time while illegal aliens chanted “Si se puede! Si se puede!” outside the court house. This is an image and a perverse juxtaposition even Orwell could never have imagined.

Immigration insanity: This federal judge just turned six states into sanctuary cities

A number of important observations are in order:

1. While thousands of criminal aliens are being released onto the streets of Arizona, Sheriff Arpaio is the one who is facing the prospect of jail time. There is something fundamentally wrong when a state like Arizona is being destroyed by a foreign invasion and local elected officials are hamstrung from defending the state, even though they are following federal law. At the same time, sanctuary cities that thwart federal immigration law, are being rewarded by the federal judiciary.

2. While illegal aliens get standing in court to sue over the enforcement of federal immigration laws — as we covered last week — Arpaio and other law enforcement officers were never able to get standing to sue Obama for violating federal immigration law when he implemented the DACA amnesty. As Janice Rogers Brown wrote in her concurring opinion in the Arpaio case where she reluctantly accepted the precedent on standing issues, “if an elected Sheriff responsible for the security of a county with a population larger than twenty-

one states cannot bring suit, individual litigants will find it even more difficult to bring similar challenges.” By individual litigants, she meant taxpayers suing on behalf of American sovereignty, not illegal aliens suing to remain in this country against the national will.

3. The legacy of the Supreme Court’s decision in Arizona v. United States — in which the court gutted the state’s ability to protect itself — will make life harder for Arpaio’s defense and any law enforcement agency that wants to protect sovereignty.[1] That decision, which was authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, was shredded by Justice Antonin Scalia who was so irate he read his dissent from the bench. He warned that the court’s injunction against SB 1070 “deprives States of what most would consider the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the power to exclude from the sovereign’s territory people who have no right to be there.” “Neither the Constitution itself nor even any law passed by Congress supports this result,” wrote an indignant Justice Scalia.[2]

Arpaio has a grim road ahead of him — as does the entire state of Arizona — if Congress doesn’t strip the courts of their foray into immigration law. 

4. How ironic that the courts are now using the Fourteenth Amendment to steal the sovereignty of the nation and the states. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James F. Wilson said during the debate over the 14th Amendment in 1866 that the addition to the Constitution established “no new right” and declared no new principle: “[I]t is not the object of this bill to establish new rights, but to protect and enforce those which belong to every citizen.”[3] Tragically, that amendment — which was designed to protect existing rights of American citizens — is being used to disenfranchise the citizenry at the hands of illegal aliens!

5. Consider the damage wrought upon Arizona by illegal immigration as the sheriff who is protecting his people faces jail time. Here are some key facts from chapter five of my book:

o As of 2013, it was estimated that there were 630,700 illegal aliens residing in Arizona (including American-born anchor babies).[4] That is a population of foreign invaders larger than the total population of any single colony at the time of our Founding. [5] 

o Over 10% of the state’s public school population is comprised of illegal alien children.[6] When coupled with the fiscal strain of health care and incarceration, the total cost of illegal immigration is $2.4 billion a year.[7]  

o The Arizona Department of Corrections estimates that illegal aliens comprise 17% of its prison population and 22% of all felony defendants in Maricopa County. [8]

o Arizona has become the drug smuggling capital of the country. From 2010-2015, heroin seizures in Arizona have increased by 207%, while Methamphetamine seizures grew by 310%. [9] In FY 2014, there were more pounds of Marijuana seized in the Tucson corridor than every other border sector combined.[10]

Arpaio has a grim road ahead of him — as does the entire state of Arizona — if Congress doesn’t strip the courts of their foray into immigration law. Judge Bolton was the original district judge who placed the injunction on SB 1070, Arizona’s enforcement law. The Ninth Circuit is … well … the Ninth Circuit. And Roberts has already agreed with the five leftists on the court that states must follow the whims of international law and the Obama administration instead of congressional statutes.[11]

Scalia used to lament that states would never have joined the union had they been told they would be crushed by the federal courts. As Scalia concluded in his dissent in Arizona, “if securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State.”[12]

Who ever said crime doesn’t pay and cheaters never prosper?

Federal judge Susan Bolton requested the criminal charges at a hearing the previous week. In August, Judge G. Murray Snow of the U.S. District Court of Arizona had referred Arpaio for misdemeanor criminal contempt charges for not obeying a previous court injunction against his practice of apprehending those he reasonably suspected of being in the country illegally.

The injunction grew out of a 2007 class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund accusing Arpaio of racial profiling.

Horowitz noted the Arizona sheriff is essentially being punished for enforcing federal immigration law within his jurisdiction while violent criminal aliens remain on the run all over Arizona. He called the situation “Orwellian beyond imagination.”

“While thousands of criminal aliens are being released onto the streets of Arizona, Sheriff Arpaio is the one who is facing the prospect of jail time,” Horowitz said. “There is something fundamentally wrong when a state like Arizona is being destroyed by a foreign invasion and local elected officials are hamstrung from defending the state, even though they are following federal law. At the same time, sanctuary cities that thwart federal immigration law are being rewarded by the federal judiciary.”

This is the type of juxtaposition Horowitz writes about in his book “Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges From Transforming America.”

“While Arpaio admits to mistakenly violating the injunction, the broader question is how a federal court can issue an injunction against sovereignty laws of a nation using … you guessed it … the Fourteenth Amendment,” Horowitz said. “Arpaio was acting according to federal law, which requires the federal government to respond to state inquiries on an individual’s immigration status [8 U. S. C. §1373c]. Yet, he is potentially facing jail time while illegal aliens chanted ‘Si se puede! Si se puede!’ outside the court house. This is an image and a perverse

Adding to the “perverse juxtaposition” is the fact that, as Horowitz pointed out, courts have granted illegal aliens standing to sue over the enforcement of federal immigration laws, but Arpaio was never able to get standing to sue President Obama for violating federal immigration law when he implemented DACA.

Horowitz noted Arpaio has been so tough on illegal immigrants because his jurisdiction is among the most dangerous hotbeds of illegal alien crime in the country. The author shared some facts from his book.

“As of 2013, it was estimated that there were 630,700 illegal aliens residing in Arizona (including American-born anchor babies),” Horowitz wrote. “That is a population of foreign invaders larger than the total population of any single colony at the time of our founding.

“Over 10 percent of the state’s public school population is comprised of illegal alien children. When coupled with the fiscal strain of health care and incarceration, the total cost of illegal immigration is $2.4 billion a year.

“The Arizona Department of Corrections estimates that illegal aliens comprise 17 percent of its prison population and 22 percent of all felony defendants in Maricopa County.

“Arizona has become the drug smuggling capital of the country. From 2010 to 2015, heroin seizures in Arizona have increased by 207 percent, while methamphetamine seizures grew by 310 percent. In FY 2014, there were more pounds of marijuana seized in the Tucson corridor than every other border sector combined.”

The 84-year-old sheriff, who faces up to six months in jail if convicted, will find it tough sledding because of the current makeup of the federal courts, according to Horowitz.

“Arpaio has a grim road ahead of him – as does the entire state of Arizona – if Congress doesn’t strip the courts of their foray into immigration law,” he suggested. “Judge Bolton was the original district judge who placed the injunction on SB 1070, Arizona’s enforcement law. The Ninth Circuit is … well … the Ninth Circuit. And [Chief Justice John] Roberts has already agreed with the five leftists on the court that states must follow the whims of international law and the Obama administration instead of congressional statutes.”

Staveley-Smith said the Milky Way map will form the basis of future studies of our galaxy, such as an upcoming project using China's new 1,640 foot wide FAST dish, which began operations in September.

The Great American Hack Attack

Technology experts warned for years that the millions of Internet-connected "smart" devices we use every day are weak, easily hijacked and could be turned against us. We are now, more than ever, a web-based society. In fact, it is becoming an integral part of our neuronetwork. The human brain is capable of the same thing as the web, but there is an additional ability that the web does not have. We are able to related things that exist in separate files, even separate websites, and make a coherent point with that new relation. When we Google something, which is actually a useful verb in our new 21st century language, we are adding to our knowledge base, if we choose to memorize that fact. After all, we may have to defend our point later, and we may need to even remember, we call it mental bookmarking, the bibliography in a street debate. Useless trivia, maybe. More than likely it is helping man become more intelligent. But, our dependence upon this part of our neuronetwork also makes us vulnerable to scoundrels who want to disrupt it for one reason or another. It is perhaps those reasons that I want to explore.

The massive siege on Dyn, a New Hampshire-based company that monitors and routes Internet traffic, shows those ominous predictions are now a reality.

An unknown attacker intermittently knocked many popular websites offline for hours Friday, from Amazon to Twitter and Netflix to Etsy. I warned you that someone was testing the fences to see how prepared we were, and how easy it would be to cause a major disruption. What they needed was a large number of sources capable of putting a large amount of data into the system all at once. How the breach occurred is a cautionary tale of the how the rush to make humdrum devices “smart” while sometimes leaving out crucial security can have major consequences.

Dyn, a provider of Internet management for multiple companies, was hit with a large-scale distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), in which its servers were flooded with millions of fake requests for information, so many that they could no longer respond to real ones and crashed under the weight. Who orchestrated the attack is still unknown. But how they did it — by enslaving ordinary household electronic devices such as DVRs, routers and digital closed-circuit cameras —is established. None of these devices are password protected, for a reason. People want plug-and-play and do not want to go through the same things they did when they set up their modem or their wireless router, or God forbid their multi-function remote.

The attackers created a digital army of co-opted robot networks, a "botnet," that spewed millions of nonsense messages at Dyn's servers. They use your DVR, local or remote, to play back movies or make movie requests all at once. Like a firehose, they could direct it at will, knocking out the servers, turning down the flow and then hitting it full blast once again.

The specific weapon? An easy-to-use botnet-creating software called Mirai that requires little technical expertise. An unknown person released it to the hacker underground earlier this month, and security experts immediately warned it might come into more general use. Mirai insinuates itself into household devices without the owner's knowledge, using them as platforms to send the server-clogging messages even as the device continues to do its day job for its true owner.

The software uses malware from phishing emails to first infect a computer or home network, then spreads to everything on it, taking over DVRs, cable set-top boxes, routers and even Internet-connected cameras used by stores and businesses for surveillance.

That breadth of "attack surface," as security experts call it, is one of the things that makes Mirai so difficult to fight, said Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer.

“The complexity of this attack is because it’s so distributed. It’s coming from tens of millions of source IP addresses that are globally distributed around the world. What they’re doing is moving around the world with each attack," he said.

As long as companies have been gleefully making and selling Internet-connected devices (the so-called Internet of Things or IoT), computer security experts have warned the security included with them was far too weak, or sometimes even nonexistent.

"IoT security has been horribly flawed ever since it first became a thing, largely because of the pace that new products have to go to market, and the fact that designing security is seen by vendors as ‘slowing things down,’" said Casey Ellis, CEO of Bugcrowd, a San Francisco-based computer security service.

This "avalanche" of smart and connected devices has created an environment where software and implementation flaws can be exploited at previously unseen levels, "effectively turning them into widely distributed information weapons," said Mike Ahmadi, director of critical systems security for security company Synopsys.

The danger is two-fold: The devices can be hacked into by one individual and potentially used to enter the owner's home computer network, putting their personal information at risk, or it can be easily taken over and turned into a node on a botnet.

Either way, stronger security would protect both the devices' owners and the larger Internet. However, security is too often left out — and also needs to be continually updated.

While users at least sometimes are willing to install security updates to their phones or computers, the idea of going around and doing software or firmware security updates on thermostats, garage door openers and even refrigerators has yet to catch on.

"The threat research community needs to find a way to prevent the IoT devices from participating in these attacks. They are valuable to the bot army controller because they are usually always on and have high capacity connections that generate huge botnet power," said Jeff Schilling, chief of operations and security at computer security firm Armor.