Archive for January, 2014
California: Elevated Radiation Levels in Coastside
January 7th, 2014Via: Half Moon Bay Review: An amateur video of a Geiger counter showing what appear to be high radiation levels at a Coastside beach has drawn the attention of local, state and federal public health officials. Since being posted last week, the short video has galvanized public concerns that radioactive material could be landing on […]
Senate Confirms Yellen as Fed Chair
January 7th, 2014Oh yeah, the swelling ranks of homeless people will be riding the wave of Recovery any minute. Via: CNN: The Senate confirmed Janet Yellen as the next Federal Reserve chairman Monday, ensuring that the central bank’s pro-growth policies since the Great Recession will likely continue.
How Google Cracked House Number Identification in Street View
January 7th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review: Google can identify and transcribe all the views it has of street numbers in France in less than an hour, thanks to a neural network that’s just as good as human operators. … But the task of spotting and identifying these numbers is hugely time-consuming. Google’s street view cameras have recorded […]
From the Pentagon to Life in a Van
January 7th, 2014Alternate headline: How Someone with Retirement Benefits of $40,000 Per Year Winds Up Homeless. Via: The Philadelphia Inquirer: After a 30-year military career in which he earned three graduate degrees, rose to the rank of colonel, and served as an aide to Pentagon brass, Robert Freniere can guess what people might say when they learn […]
FBI Drops Law Enforcement as ‘Primary’ Mission
January 7th, 2014Via: Foreign Policy: The FBI’s creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now […]
Kerry: U.S. Can Fight al Qaeda in Iraq without Troops
January 5th, 2014Mercenaries and drones? Via: Reuters: The United States will support the Iraqi government and tribes fighting al Qaeda-linked Sunni Muslim militants in Anbar province but will not send U.S. troops back to Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday. Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda and tribal fighters have taken control of […]
The Doomer Congressman Who Went Off Grid
January 5th, 2014Via: Politico: Roscoe Bartlett spent 20 years on Capitol Hill. Now he lives in a remote cabin in the woods, prepping for doomsday. When Roscoe Bartlett was in Congress, he latched onto a particularly apocalyptic issue, one almost no one else ever seemed to talk about: America’s dangerously vulnerable power grid. In speech after late-night […]
Beijing Seals Manhole Covers to Prevent People from Living in Sewers
January 5th, 2014Via: Reuters: Zig-zagging left and right through a maze of dark, narrow corridors in a high-rise’s basement, 35-year-old kitchen worker Hu has joined the many thousands of Chinese fleeing fast-rising property prices by heading down – down underground. Hu lives here beneath an affluent downtown apartment building, in a windowless, 4 square-meter (43 square-foot) apartment […]
The Business of War: SOFEX
January 4th, 2014Via: VICE:
Cryptogon Support in Bitcoin
January 4th, 2014I received .501 Bitcoin from a generous Cryptogon reader. This netted me NZ$491.67! Thank you very much.
