Archive for August, 2010
And Now… A Vaccine Against Stress
August 4th, 2010Oh sure. Via: CBS News: Stressed out? There’s no app for that, but soon enough there might be a vaccine. Dr Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscience professor at Stanford, says after 30 years of studying stress, his team might be on the verge of a novel cure. “To be honest, I’m still amazed that it works,” […]
Web Attack Uses Google Geolocation Database to Identify Address of Routers
August 4th, 2010First of all, as usual with stories like this, I have to refer back to my old essay that deals with the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity. Second, this hack isn’t new. See the Skyhook Wireless antics, circa 2008. Third, the article below doesn’t make it clear, but this will only reveal your exact location […]
China: Garbage Islands Threaten Three Gorges Dam
August 3rd, 2010Via: Reuters: Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said on Monday. Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China […]
Rockefeller Foundation: Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development
August 3rd, 2010This Rockefeller Foundation report lays out four possible scenarios for the near future. I’ll just clip a few passages from each of the four. You’ll love this. Via: Rockefeller Foundation: LOCK STEP – A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback In 2012, the pandemic […]
The Aftermath of the Global Housing Bubble Chokes the World Banking System
August 3rd, 2010The U.S. housing bubble was tame compared with several other ones around the world over the same period. Via: Housing Story: What our leaders are doing is correcting a severe cyclical recession. What our reporters are doing is covering a severe cyclical recession. What sublime kabuki theater. Back in the real world, the destruction of […]
Six Month Backlog of Americans Wanting to Renounce Citizenship in Britain
August 3rd, 2010Via: Financial Times: At the US Embassy in London, there is a waiting list that none of the officials likes to discuss. On the list are Americans hoping to give up their citizenship, as they seek shelter from the Internal Revenue Service. … The backlog at the US Embassy, where no appointments are available until […]
Six Cities Training Mail Carriers to Dispense “Anti-Terror Drugs”
August 2nd, 2010Via: USA Today: The Postal Service is ready to deliver lifesaving drugs to about a quarter of the residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the only metropolitan area in the nation where letter carriers have been trained to dispense medication after a large-scale terrorist attack involving biological weapons. Six years after the government began exploring the idea […]
Adrian Lamo Is a “Volunteer” for Project Vigilant, a Private Internet Surveillance Company Closely Linked to U.S. Intelligence
August 2nd, 2010Via: Forbes: A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers”, researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal […]
Erica Goldson: Coxsackie-Athens Valedictorian Speech 2010
August 2nd, 2010It’s definitely worth clicking through to read the whole thing. Via: America Via Erica: And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. […]
Schwarzenegger to Speak at Bohemian Grove
August 1st, 2010Will he be wearing his Death’s Head belt buckle? Via: Press Democrat: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is scheduled to address a throng of rich and powerful men on Friday under the towering redwoods at the Bohemian Grove as the annual encampment along the Russian River in Monte Rio enters its final weekend. No one other than […]
