All Wars Are Well Planned Banker Wars, Including WWIII
May 28th, 2014Via: Towards a Better Understanding:
Banks have always profited from war because the debt created by banks results in ongoing war profit for big finance; and because wars have been used to open countries to U.S. corporate and banking interests. Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan wrote: “the large banking interests were deeply interested in the world war because of the wide opportunities for large profits.”
Autonomous Mode Only: Google Unveils Self Driving Car Prototype without Steering Wheel or Pedals
May 28th, 2014Via: Google:
Ever since we started the Google self-driving car project, we’ve been working toward the goal of vehicles that can shoulder the entire burden of driving. Just imagine: You can take a trip downtown at lunchtime without a 20-minute buffer to find parking. Seniors can keep their freedom even if they can’t keep their car keys. And drunk and distracted driving? History.
We’re now exploring what fully self-driving vehicles would look like by building some prototypes; they’ll be designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention. They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don’t need them. Our software and sensors do all the work. The vehicles will be very basic—we want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible—but they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And that’s an important step toward improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people.
Wal-Mart: “Major Holes Are Starting to Form In Its Business”
May 28th, 2014Via: SHTF Plan:
Wal-Mart has begun to lose its cache with consumers and major holes are starting to form in its business.
Interestingly, Wal-Mart has hidden its financial problems from the headlines because challenges are different around the world, masking themselves in the overall picture.
But when you dig between the headlines you can see a company in serious trouble and could be the latest in a long line of leading retailers to go from boom to bust in the blink of an eye.
Obama Announces Plan to Keep 9,800 U.S. Troops in Afghanistan After 2014
May 28th, 2014Are there not enough mercs to protect all of those opium poppies?
Via: Guardian:
President Obama announced Tuesday that he will leave 9,800 US troops in Afghanistan through much of next year and backed away from ending America’s longest war until at least his final year in office.
Related: CIA Ghost Money
Military Plans to Test Brain Implants to Fight Mental Disorders
May 28th, 2014Via: NPR:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is launching a $70 million program to help military personnel with psychiatric disorders using electronic devices implanted in the brain.
The goal of the five-year program is to develop new ways of treating problems including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are common among service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“We’ve seen far too many times where military personnel have neuropsychiatric disorders and there’s very few options,” says , a program manager at DARPA.
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The new program will fund development of high-tech implanted devices able to both monitor and electrically stimulate specific brain circuits. The effort will be led by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and Massachusetts General Hospital.
More: Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings
Research Credit: DS
‘Mind Pilots’ Steer Plane Simulator with Thoughts Alone
May 28th, 2014I like the one from a decade ago about the chunk of rat brain that flew the F22 simulator:
Scientists have grown a living “brain” that sits inside a petri dish and can fly a simulated F-22 fighter aircraft.
The brainchild of Thomas DeMarse, a biomedical engineer at the University of Florida in Gainesville, the “brain in a dish” is a collection of 25,000 neurons taken from the brain of a rat that are connected to a computer via 60 electrodes.
Via: CNET:
New research out of the Technische Universität München (TUM) in Germany is hinting that mind control might soon reach entirely new heights — even by us non-mutants. They’ve demonstrated that pilots might be able to fly planes through the sky using their thoughts alone.
The researchers hooked study participants to a cap containing dozens of electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes, sat them down in a flight simulator, and told them to steer the plane through the sim using their thoughts alone. The cap read the electrical signals from their brains and an algorithm then translated those signals into computer commands.
Seven people underwent the experiment and, according to the researchers, all were able to pilot the plane using their thoughts to such a degree that their performance could have satisfied some of the criteria for getting a pilot’s license.
What’s more, the study participants weren’t all pilots and had varying levels of flight experience. One had no cockpit experience at all.
Brokers Use ‘Billions’ of Data Points to Profile Americans
May 27th, 2014Via: Washington Post:
Data brokers that quietly gather billions of pieces of data on Americans should be required to operate more openly, so that those categorized as “financially challenged” or possibly suffering from serious medical conditions have the ability to check and challenge those characterizations, a federal report said Tuesday.
The data broker industry, which is lightly regulated, develops profiles of hundreds of millions of people using online and offline sources, such as magazine subscriptions, visits to Web sites, posting on social networking services and purchase histories, the Federal Trade Commission reported. The information sold to marketers can include race, income and homeownership.
Categories used to label consumers include “Bible Lifestyle,” “Smoker in Household” and “New Age/Organic Lifestyle,” the report said. One category, called “Rural Everlasting,” describes people of retirement age who have “low educational attainment and low net worths.”
FTC officials, who based their report on documents gathered by issuing subpoenas to nine data brokers in December 2012, expressed concern about how the data is collected, how it’s used and the potential for making errors that are kept secret from the consumers themselves.
A Human Experimenter Was Vice-President Of The American Cancer Society
May 27th, 2014Via: io9:
A doctor who was once vice president of the The American Cancer Society turns out to have had a dark history. He twice experimented on human beings, injecting them with cancer cells. Learn about the human experimentation of Chester Southam.
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Amazingly, the loss of the license, even for a brief time, was a step forward. In 1952, Southam worked for a medical organization that injected over 300 women with cancer cells, with relatively few repercussions. Still the quick step from injecting people with cancer cells without their knowledge to heading an organization that treats people with cancer is dramatic, and disconcerting.
Suspended-Animation Trials to Begin on Humans
May 26th, 2014Via: CNET:
This month, the world’s first attempts at placing humans in suspended animation using a new technique will take place at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — not for space travel, but to save lives.
The technique will initially be used on 10 patients whose wounds would otherwise be lethal in an attempt to buy the surgeons some time. It works, as suggested by science fiction, by cooling the body — but not by applying an external temperature change.
Instead, a team of surgeons will remove all of the patient’s blood, replacing it with a cold saline solution. This will cool the body, slowing its functions to a halt and reducing the need for oxygen. Effects similar to this have been seen in accidents: Swedish Anna Bågenholm survived trapped under a layer of ice in freezing water for 80 minutes in a skiing accident; Japanese Mitsutaka Uchikoshi survived 24 days without food or water by entering a state of hypothermic hibernation.
“We are suspending life, but we don’t like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction,” Doctor Samuel Tisherman, the surgeon who will lead the trial, told New Scientist. “So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.”
The technique was developed by Doctor Peter Rhee, who successfully managed to test it on pigs in the year 2000. In 2006, Dr Rhee and his colleagues published the results of their subsequent research. After inducing fatal wounds in the pigs by cutting their arteries with scalpels, the team replaced the pigs’ blood with saline, which lowered their body temperature to 10 degrees Celsius.
All of the control pigs, whose body temperature was left alone, died. The pigs who were resuscitated at a medium speed demonstrated a 90 percent survival rate, although some of their hearts had to be given a jump start. Afterwards, the pigs demonstrated no physical or cognitive impairment.
The technique, therefore, will only be used as an emergency measure on patients who have suffered cardiac arrest after severe traumatic injury, with their chest cavity open and having lost at least half their blood already — injuries that see only a seven percent survival rate. The survival rate of these patients will then be measured against a control group that has not received the treatment before further testing can begin.
White House Mistakenly Identifies CIA Chief in Afghanistan
May 26th, 2014Via: Washington Post:
The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.
The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.
The disclosure marked a rare instance in which a CIA officer working overseas had his cover — the secrecy meant to protect his actual identity — pierced by his own government. The only other recent case came under significantly different circumstances, when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was exposed as officials of the George W. Bush administration sought to discredit her husband, a former ambassador and fierce critic of the decision to invade Iraq.
The Post is withholding the name of the CIA officer at the request of Obama administration officials who warned that the officer and his family could be at risk if the name were published. The CIA and the White House declined to comment.
