Thousands of Illegal Immigrants Being Housed in FEMA Facilities and Military Bases; Hundreds of Unaccompanied Children Arriving in U.S. Daily
June 20th, 2014Is the U.S. on the way to becoming a failed state?
Losing control of borders is one of the primary characteristics of failed states.
See the Wikipedia page for failed states and compare the following criteria to what’s happening in the U.S. right now:
Mounting Demographic Pressures [Yes]
Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons [Yes]
Vengeance Seeking Group Grievance
Chronic and Sustained Human Flight
Uneven Economic Development [Yes]
Poverty, Sharp or Severe Economic Decline [Yes]
Legitimacy of the State
Progressive Deterioration of Public Services [Yes]
Violation of Human Rights and Rule of Law [Yes]
Security Apparatus [Yes]
Rise of Factionalized Elites [Yes]
Intervention of External Actors
Of course, the U.S. isn’t considered a failed state. Yet. I’d suggest that you will want to be far away if it actually gets to that point.
If you click through on the link below and watch the video, it’s actually a playlist of videos. They play one after another. I watched about five clips before I’d seen enough. I’d encourage you to watch some of that. What are we being set up for?
Any portrayal of a flood of refugees over a porous border as being anything other than a dire emergency is ridiculous. This is not a Left Right thing. You can sit in a university classroom and hear bow-tie wearing professors give lectures about things like this happening in Africa, Central America and the Middle East. (Been there, done that, got the t-shirt). This is definitely proto-failed state stuff.
That said, is the state with the most powerful military in the world really not capable of closing its borders to illegal immigration?
Come on.
So what you have here is some sort of scam designed to get Americans to accept a “solution” that wouldn’t be accepted under anything like normal circumstances. The poor immigrants are being used as props.
I have no idea what the “solution” will be, however.
Via: Arizona Republic:
They are part of an unprecedented tsunami of families and children traveling on their own from Central America trying to reach the United States through the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, where the Border Patrol has been overwhelmed by the surge.
On Thursday, about 50 immigrants were living here. Every bed was full.
Many of the migrants were women who had traveled from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala with young children. All of them had run out of money. Now they were stuck at the shelter, within eyesight of the United States.
Hundreds of migrants from Central America are crossing the river daily. They are turning themselves over to the Border Patrol once they reach U.S. soil. At Anzalduas Park in the U.S. border city of Mission, deputies from the Hidalgo County Constable Department Precinct 3 encountered 103 migrants on Wednesday night alone, according to Sgt. Dan Broyles, a spokesman for the agency.
Utopia Series 2 Trailer
June 20th, 2014Via: Channel4:
Elon Musk on Artificial Intelligence: “I Think There Is Potentially a Dangerous Outcome There”
June 20th, 2014Via: Guardian:
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk worries about a “Terminator” scenario arising from research into artificial intelligence.
Musk was an early investor in AI firm DeepMind, which was later acquired by Google, and in March made an investment San Francisco-based Vicarious, another company working to improve machine intelligence.
Speaking to US news channel CNBC, Musk explained that his investments were, “not from the standpoint of actually trying to make any investment return… I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence. I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there.”
“There have been movies about this, you know, like Terminator,” Musk continued. “There are some scary outcomes. And we should try to make sure the outcomes are good, not bad.”
A Mysterious Sound Is Driving People Insane — And Nobody Knows What’s Causing It
June 20th, 2014This is probably the most mainstream treatment of the various “hums” phenomena that I’ve read.
I have never personally heard any of these hums, but this is a classic topic in alternative info circles that goes back a couple of decades.
Have you guys heard anything like what’s described? What do you think is causing it?
Via: Mic Network:
“The Hum” refers to a mysterious sound heard in places around the world by a small fraction of a local population. It’s characterized by a persistent and invasive low-frequency rumbling or droning noise often accompanied by vibrations. While reports of “unidentified humming sounds” pop up in scientific literature dating back to the 1830s, modern manifestations of the contemporary hum have been widely reported by national media in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia since the early 1970s.
Regional experiences of the phenomenon vary, and the Hum is often prefixed with the region where the problem centers, like the “Windsor Hum” in Ontario, Canada, the “Taos Hum” in New Mexico, or the “Auckland Hum” for Auckland, New Zealand. Somewhere between 2 and 10% of people can hear the Hum, and inside isolation is no escape. Most sufferers find the noise to be more disturbing indoors and at night. Much to their dismay, the source of the mysterious humming is virtually untraceable.
While the uneven experience of the Hum in local populations has led some researchers to dismiss it as a “mass delusion,” the nuisance and pain associated with the phenomenon make delusion a dissatisfying hypothesis. Intrigued by the mysterious noise, MacPherson launched The World Hum Map and Database in December 2012 to collect testimonies of other Hum sufferers and track its global impact (he now also moderates a decade-old Yahoo forum along with Deming).
MacPherson quickly discovered that what to him was a strange rumbling was actually having pernicious effects on hundreds of people, from headaches to irritability to sleep deprivation. There are reports that weeks of insomnia caused by the Bristol Hum drove at least three U.K. residents to suicide. “It completely drains energy, causing stress and loss of sleep,” a sufferer told a British newspaper in 1992. “I have been on tranquilizers and have lost count of the number of nights I have spent holding my head in my hands, crying and crying.” Thousands of people around the world have shared similar experiences of the Hum; some, like MacPherson, are devoting their time to finally uncovering its source.
Florida: Cops Hid Use of Phone Tracking Tech in Court Documents at Feds’ Request
June 20th, 2014Via: Ars Technica:
On Thursday evening, the ACLU published a 2009 e-mail exchange (PDF) between police departments in Sarasota, FL and North Port, FL indicating that local law enforcement had concealed the use of cell phone-tracking Stingray devices in court documents. Stingray is a trademark, but it has come to generally mean devices that can be used to track phones or even intercept calls and text messages.
Although the Sarasota Police Department and the North Point Police Department did not own Stingray devices, the two departments had borrowed the cell phone trackers from the US Marshals Service (USMS), which requested that they hide the use of the Stingrays from judges and defendants. The issue was discussed in the e-mails when the Sarasota Police Department realized that a North Point detective had been too explicit in a probable cause affadavit (PCA), specifically detailing “the investigative means used to locate the suspect.” The Sarasota Police asked that the North Point Police seal the old affadavit and submit a new, more vague one.
The e-mail continues:
In the past, and at the request of the U.S. Marshalls [sic], the investigative means utilized to locate the suspect have not been revealed so that we may continue to utilize this technology without the knowledge of the criminal element. In reports or depositions we simply refer to the assistance as ‘received information from a confidential source regarding the location of the suspect.’ To date this has not been challenged…
The e-mail is significant because the ACLU had been pushing to get the city of Sarasota to hand over its records on Stingray use, only to have those efforts thwarted by the USMS, which physically removed stacks of paper records from the city. A state circuit court then found that it could not compel a federal agency to hand those records over. The ACLU has found that cops in at least 15 states use cell phone-tracking devices.
D-Wave’s “Quantum Computer” Isn’t Any Faster Than a Normal PC
June 19th, 2014There have been skeptics on this thing from the start. They were right.
Via: Christian Science Monitor:
A team of researchers compared the performance of a D-Wave Two device to that of a classical computer on a specific set of problems, and failed to find evidence that the quantum computer was faster.
“We do not see any evidence of quantum speedup in the D-Wave device,” said Matthias Troyer, a theoretical physicist at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, and co-author of the study, detailed today (June 19) in the journal Science.
“Got Fiber?” Countries Outside of Five Eyes Network Working with NSA
June 19th, 2014Via: First Look:
Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The classified files, revealed today by the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information in a reporting collaboration with The Intercept, shed light on how the NSA’s surveillance of global communications has expanded under a clandestine program, known as RAMPART-A, that depends on the participation of a growing network of intelligence agencies.
It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as “third-party partners,” are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables.
The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners “provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment.” This allows the agency to covertly tap into “congestion points around the world” where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.
The program, which the secret files show cost U.S. taxpayers about $170 million between 2011 and 2013, sweeps up a vast amount of communications at lightning speed. According to the intelligence community’s classified “Black Budget” for 2013, RAMPART-A enables the NSA to tap into three terabits of data every second as the data flows across the compromised cables – the equivalent of being able to download about 5,400 uncompressed high-definition movies every minute.
California to Investigate Illegal Sterilization of Female Inmates
June 19th, 2014Via: Time:
An investigation of the California prison system revealed troubling numbers of female inmates who had been sterilized without their consent, in addition to many other breaches of protocol.
A report released on Thursday by the California State Auditor examined 144 cases of tubal ligations (more commonly referred to as having one’s “tubes tied”) performed on imprisoned women over the course of eight years.
U.S. Special Forces Deploying to Iraq
June 19th, 2014Arm al-Qaeda. Train al-Qaeda. Fight al-Qaeda.
Arm ISIS. Train ISIS. Fight ISIS. Bonus points for multiple countries (Syria and Iraq) descending into chaos and potentially touching off a regional conflict.
Via: Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama said he’s sending as many as 300 U.S. military advisers to assist the Iraqi army battle an insurgency and is prepared to take additional “targeted” action if necessary.
The advisers will work with the Iraqi army to set up joint operations centers to coordinate intelligence and planning with the Iraqis without engaging in the fighting, he said.
“American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq,” Obama said after meeting with his national security team at the White House.
Laying the Groundwork: Iraq Militants Seize Old Chemical Weapons Facility and “I’ll See You Guys in New York”
Harley-Davidson Refining Electric Motorcycle Design
June 19th, 2014Via: AP:
Harley-Davidson will unveil its first electric motorcycle next week, and President Matt Levatich said he expects the company known for its big touring bikes and iconic brand to become a leader in developing technology and standards for electric vehicles.
Harley will show handmade demonstration models Monday at an invitation-only event in New York. The company will then take several dozen riders on a 30-city tour to test drive the bikes and provide feedback. Harley will use the information it gathers to refine the bike, which might not hit the market for several more years.
Related: The LAPD Just Got a Military-Grade Electric Bike for Stealth Missions
