Christian Cult Leader Worked Tampa “BLACK ICE” Operation
March 8th, 2014Via: Mad Cow Productions:
Moreover, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, McClain was one of the leaders of a bizarre Christian cult which grew to more than 10,000 members living on farms and ranches in wilderness areas on three separate continents, including remote corners of Colombia, Peru, and Guatemala.
According to an account in the New York Times, the cult—in which McClain was active for a decade and maintained cordial relations afterwards— also owned its own fleet of planes.
Research Credit: alvinroast
Department of Homeland Security Reads Woman’s Email, Questions Her About Relationship with Man at Airport
March 8th, 2014Via: Indy Star:
Christine Von Der Haar has heard President Barack Obama and national security officials insist the U.S. government isn’t spying on ordinary citizens.
The Indiana University faculty member doesn’t believe them. Not after what happened to her at the Indianapolis airport.
Von Der Haar says in a federal lawsuit that she was illegally detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in 2012 at Indianapolis International Airport. The lawsuit says the detention occurred after government agents intercepted and read emails she had exchanged with a friend from Greece before he came to visit her in Indiana.
Commercial Drone Operations in U.S. Airspace Are Legal, Rules Federal Judge
March 7th, 2014Via: Drone Hire:
The long stand-off between commercial drone operators and the FAA has just taken an extraordinary twist: A federal judge has rejected the FAA’s ban as unenforceable, ruling that commercial use of drones in the United States is unequivocally legal.
College Grads Taking Low-Wage Jobs Displace Less Educated
March 7th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
Jeanina Jenkins, a 20-year-old high-school graduate from St. Louis, is stuck in a $7.82-an-hour part-time job at McDonald’s Corp. that she calls a “last resort” because nobody would offer her anything better.
Stephen O’Malley, 26, a West Virginia University graduate, wants to put his history degree to use teaching high school. What he’s found instead is a bartender’s job in his home town of Manasquan, New Jersey.
Jenkins and O’Malley are at opposite ends of a dynamic that is pushing those with college degrees down into competition with high-school graduates for low-wage jobs that don’t require college.
MIT’s Liquid Metal Batteries Could Compensate for Intermittent Nature of Renewable Energy
March 7th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
A 40-foot trailer loaded with 25 tons of liquid metals may be the solution to the renewable-energy industry’s biggest challenge: making sure electricity is available whenever it’s needed.
A Boston-area startup founded by MIT researchers is working to turn this new concept into a commercially viable product, liquid-metal batteries that will store power for less than $500 a kilowatt-hour. That’s less than a third the cost of some current battery technologies.
The technology promises an alternative to the massive pumped-water systems that make up 95 percent of U.S. energy-storage capacity. At that price, developers will be able to build wind and solar projects that can deliver power to the grid anytime, making renewable energy as reliable as natural gas and coal without the greenhouse-gas emissions.
“If we can get liquid-metal batteries down to $500 a kilowatt-hour, we’ll change the world,” Donald Sadoway, chief scientific adviser at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Ambri Inc., said in an interview.
Power storage will compensate for the intermittent nature of renewable energy. Batteries can store energy when the wind blows at night, and then send electricity to the grid the next day when it’s needed.
Moscow Signals It Will Embrace Crimean Move for Secession
March 7th, 2014Via: New York Times:
Leaders of both houses of Russia’s Parliament said on Friday that they would support a vote by Crimea to break away from Ukraine and become a new region of the Russian Federation, the first public signal that the Kremlin was backing the secessionist move that Ukraine, the United States and other countries have denounced as a violation of international law.
The E-Waste Disaster in Ghana
March 7th, 2014Via: Kevin McElvaney:
Satoshi Nakamoto, Creator of Bitcoin, Has “Done Classified Work for Major Corporations and the U.S. Military”
March 6th, 2014Update: Nakamoto Now Claims, “I Never Was Involved”
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The day started with a possible answer to one of the digital era’s greatest mysteries: Who created the bitcoin virtual currency that has become a multibillion-dollar global phenomenon?
From there, with the unlikely revelation by Newsweek magazine that it might be Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese American living in Temple City, the day only got wilder and weirder.
It featured a media frenzy on his front lawn and a semi-comical car chase through multiple cities as Nakamoto rode in a Prius driven by an Associated Press reporter trying to elude other reporters. And then, a denial from Nakamoto — as he climbed into an elevator at the downtown AP offices — that he was the creator of bitcoin.
“I never was involved,” he said to a Times reporter, saying there was only one reason he had agreed to even talk to a reporter. “It was all for a free lunch.”
Really?
—
The picture that’s painted here is pretty strange. Nakamoto apparently worked on black world projects, but, according to the story, he’s a libertarian and is ambivalent about the government. According to his daughter, “He was very wary of the government, taxes and people in charge.”
I don’t know what to make of this, but it’s definitely an interesting read.
Via: Newsweek:
Satoshi Nakamoto stands at the end of his sunbaked driveway looking timorous. And annoyed.
He’s wearing a rumpled T-shirt, old blue jeans and white gym socks, without shoes, like he has left the house in a hurry. His hair is unkempt, and he has the thousand-mile stare of someone who has gone weeks without sleep.
He stands not with defiance, but with the slackness of a person who has waged battle for a long time and now faces a grave loss.
Two police officers from the Temple City, Calif., sheriff’s department flank him, looking puzzled. “So, what is it you want to ask this man about?” one of them asks me. “He thinks if he talks to you he’s going to get into trouble.”
“I don’t think he’s in any trouble,” I say. “I would like to ask him about Bitcoin. This man is Satoshi Nakamoto.”
“What?” The police officer balks. “This is the guy who created Bitcoin? It looks like he’s living a pretty humble life.”
I’d come here to try to find out more about Nakamoto and his humble life. It seemed ludicrous that the man credited with inventing Bitcoin – the world’s most wildly successful digital currency, with transactions of nearly $500 million a day at its peak – would retreat to Los Angeles’s San Bernardino foothills, hole up in the family home and leave his estimated $400 million of Bitcoin riches untouched. It seemed similarly implausible that Nakamoto’s first response to my knocking at his door would be to call the cops. Now face to face, with two police officers as witnesses, Nakamoto’s responses to my questions about Bitcoin were careful but revealing.
Tacitly acknowledging his role in the Bitcoin project, he looks down, staring at the pavement and categorically refuses to answer questions.
“I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it,” he says, dismissing all further queries with a swat of his left hand. “It’s been turned over to other people. They are in charge of it now. I no longer have any connection.”
Nakamoto refused to say any more, and the police made it clear our conversation was over.
…
Far from leading to a Tokyo-based whiz kid using the name “Satoshi Nakamoto” as a cipher or pseudonym (a story repeated by everyone from Bitcoin’s rabid fans to The New Yorker), the trail followed by Newsweek led to a 64-year-old Japanese-American man whose name really is Satoshi Nakamoto. He is someone with a penchant for collecting model trains and a career shrouded in secrecy, having done classified work for major corporations and the U.S. military.
Standing before me, eyes downcast, appeared to be the father of Bitcoin.
Not even his family knew.
…
“My brother is an asshole. What you don’t know about him is that he’s worked on classified stuff. His life was a complete blank for a while. You’re not going to be able to get to him. He’ll deny everything. He’ll never admit to starting Bitcoin.”
And with that, Nakamoto’s brother hung up.
…
“He is very wary of government interference in general,” she says. “When I was little, there was a game we used to play. He would say, ‘Pretend the government agencies are coming after you.’ And I would hide in the closet.”
Los Angeles Worst City In U.S. For Gridlock
March 6th, 2014I left Southern California just over eight years ago and even after all of this time living in rural New Zealand, driving on empty roads at 5 or 6 PM still feels incredibly strange to me.
Empty or nearly empty beaches in summer is another very weird and wonderful thing. Wow.
You have to make your own Mexican food, though. Those carne asada or chicken burritos with guacamole that are sold pretty much everywhere in SoCal… You can’t buy one of those for any price here.
If I ever go back, I’d almost certainly wreck myself on Mexican food.
Via: CBS:
A recent study has confirmed what many Angelenos already know: Los Angeles has the worst traffic in the nation.
Los Angeles topped the charts for the most gridlocked city in 2013, according to the annual Traffic Scorecard, which is complied by traffic information provider INRIX.
Drivers in LA wasted an average of 64 additional hours behind the wheel due to traffic.
Motorists also experienced longer backups than drivers in dense cities in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, the study found.
New H5N8 Avian Influenza Penetrated Biosecurity Defenses at Korea’s Premier Poultry Research Center
March 5th, 2014Via: Science:
A new, deadly H5N8 strain of avian influenza penetrated the biosecurity defenses of a National Institute of Animal Science (NIAS) campus near Seoul, prompting authorities to cull all of the facility’s 11,000 hens and 5000 ducks.
The devastating loss could set back poultry experiments at the NIAS lab for 2 years. “It will likely to take up to 95 weeks to fully rebuild [the flocks] and resume normal research,” says Kim Sung-Il, head of the contingency team at the Rural Development Administration, which oversees NIAS. Kim adds that the institute, which studies breed improvement and animal husbandry techniques, will reconstitute its flocks from birds kept at other facilities.
A wild goose that died of the virus was found 10 kilometers from NIAS’s Suwon campus, near Seoul, on 1 February. The entire NIAS staff went to work disinfecting and shoeing away wild birds. Despite those efforts, 30 ducks were found dead on 2 March. The next day, authorities confirmed the cause of death as H5N8 avian influenza. NIAS immediately initiated culling, which was completed on 4 March.
