Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
Castoff NRO Satellites Have Better Telescopes Than Hubble; If Pointed at Earth ‘Can See a Dime Sitting on Top of the Washington Monument’
June 4th, 2012The way it was told to me back in the 1980s, by a guy I thought was nuts, was that, “A dime on the sidewalk was no problem,” for NRO. Well, that’s pretty similar to what was just printed in the Washington Post today: NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class […]
Australia: Blaming Price Increases on Carbon Tax Could Result in Million Dollar Fine for Businesses
June 4th, 2012Via: The Telegraph: SHOPS and restaurants could face fines up to $1.1 million if waiters or sales staff wrongly blame the carbon tax for price rises or exaggerate the impact. … ACCC deputy chairman Dr Michael Schaper told the Herald Sun companies were entitled to increase their prices and did not have to justify or […]
School Districts Taking More Corporate Advertising
June 4th, 2012This USA Today piece contains easily the most ridiculous lie I’ve read in a long time. “The public isn’t paying for public education anymore.” Oh really? This infographic is from USC: U.S. Education Spending and Performance vs. The World: Via: MAT@USC | Master’s of Arts in Teaching Americans are paying more money for public education […]
Increasing Use of Robots in China’s Factories
June 4th, 2012Via: Reuters: The giant orange robotic arms that swiftly weld together car frames at the Great Wall Motors factory in Baoding might seem like the perfect answer to China’s fast-rising labor costs – they don’t ask for a raise, get injured or go on strike. For Great Wall, a private sector Chinese car maker that […]
Israel Fitting Nuclear Arms on German-Supplied Submarines
June 4th, 2012Via: AFP: Israel is arming submarines supplied and largely financed by Germany with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, influential German news weekly Der Spiegel reports in its issue to be published on Monday. The magazine said in a cover story that Berlin had until now denied any knowledge that German submarines were being used as part of […]
White House Website Petition to Obama: Please Create ‘Do Not Kill’ List
June 3rd, 2012Via: Daily Caller: When President Barack Obama‘s online gurus created an interactive Web forum for receiving and evaluating citizen petitions, this is probably not what they had in mind. “We the People,” the Obama White House’s answer to the office suggestion box, got a bit more interesting on Wednesday with the launch of a petition […]
Flame ‘Could only have been written by a large team of highly skilled software engineers’
June 2nd, 2012Via: Ars Technica: At least 20 modules available for the malware bring a menu of highly advanced spying capabilities to the unknown people who control it. One plugin turns on the internal microphone of infected machines so Skype conversations can be secretly monitored in real time. A separate module scans nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices for names […]
Banks Pressured to Buy Government Debt
June 1st, 2012Remember this? In 2011, the Federal Reserve Purchased a Stunning 61% of U.S. Debt: The recently released Federal Reserve Flow of Funds report for all of 2011 reveals that Federal Reserve purchases of Treasury debt mask reduced demand for U.S. sovereign obligations. Last year the Fed purchased a stunning 61% of the total net Treasury […]
50,000 Pages of JFK Assassination–Related Documents Still Classified
June 1st, 2012Via: Salon: Next year will be a half-century since the death of JFK. And the Obama Administration thinks we need to keep secret the records on the matter … a little longer yet. Believe it or not, more than 50,000 pages of JFK assassination–related documents are being withheld in full. And an untold number of […]
Torture: The Memo Bush Tried to Destroy
May 31st, 2012Via: Salon: In February of 2006, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, authored a memo opposing the Bush administration’s torture practices (though he employed the infamous obfuscation of “enhanced interrogation techniques”). The White House tried to collect and destroy all copies of the memo, but one survived in the State Department’s bowels […]
