Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
Israel Firing Experimental Weapons at Gaza’s Civilians, Say Doctors
July 16th, 2014Via: Common Dreams: Doctors treating patients in Gaza have accused Israel of using experimental weapons on Palestinian civilians. Addressing reporters at a press conference on Sunday, Youssef Abul Resh, undersecretary of the health ministry in Gaza said, “Medical teams have registered injuries consistent with those caused by DIME [dense inert metal explosives] and other banned […]
Israel Can’t Win This or Any Future Conflicts by Bombing Gaza
July 15th, 2014In other news: Hamas Was Founded by Mossad. Via: Los Angeles Times: The heavy bombardment of Gaza only deepens the Israelis’ problem rather than solving it. Over the last 47 years, Israel has systematically created one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world in the Gaza Strip. The more targets Israel destroys, the more […]
“An FBI Counterterrorism Agent Tracked Me Down Because I Took a Picture of This”
July 15th, 2014Via: ACLU: So, consider this: A professional photographer taking a photo of a well-known Boston landmark is now considered to be engaged in suspicious terrorist activity? I lived through the McCarthy era, so I know how false accusations, surveillance, and keeping files on innocent people can destroy their careers and lives. I am deeply troubled […]
GCHQ Has Developed Covert Tools to Seed the Internet with False Information
July 15th, 2014The headline is a huge understatement. Go through the document for a laundry list of stuff they’re up to. Via: First Look: The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web […]
From 2004: “Army Test in 1950 May Have Changed Microbial Ecology”
July 14th, 2014Via: San Francisco Chronicle: Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years. In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious […]
Have We Gone From a Post-War to a Pre-War World?
July 13th, 2014Via: Huffington Post: On June 28, 1914, a chauffeur panicked after a failed bomb attack on his boss, took a wrong turn and came to a complete stop in front of a café in Sarajevo where Gavrilo Princip was sitting. Princip, discouraged at the apparent failure of the planned murder, seized the unexpected opportunity and […]
Banks Dreading Computer Hacks Call for Cyber War Council
July 13th, 2014Via: Bloomberg: Wall Street’s biggest trade group has proposed a government-industry cyber war council to stave off terrorist attacks that could trigger financial panic by temporarily wiping out account balances, according to an internal document. The proposal by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, known as Sifma, calls for a committee of executives and […]
CIA Employee’s Quest to Release Information Destroyed Career
July 6th, 2014Via: Washington Post: His CIA career included assignments in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the most perilous posting for Jeffrey Scudder turned out to be a two-year stint in a sleepy office that looks after the agency’s historical files. It was there that Scudder discovered a stack of articles, hundreds of histories of long-dormant conflicts […]
The Military Is Already Using Facebook to Track Your Mood
July 2nd, 2014Via: Defense One: Critics have targeted a recent study on how emotions spread on the popular social network site Facebook, complaining that some 600,000 Facebook users did not know that they were taking part in an experiment. Somewhat more disturbing, the researchers deliberately manipulated users’ feelings to measure an effect called emotional contagion. Though Cornell […]
Billionaire: When The Pitchforks Come Out, There Won’t Be Time to Board Our Gulfstream Jets for New Zealand
June 27th, 2014There’s another take on this over at Daily Ticker. In short: Wealthy People Should “Chill Out” Because Docile, Bewildered Americans Will Just Keep Watching TV: The rich ought to chill out. While the masses may envy their wealth, there’s no evidence of a revolution brewing, or even a well-behaved civil disturbance. Americans are clearly dismayed […]
