Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
January 10th, 2013Via: Rolling Stone:
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
Owner of Company That Makes Top Quality Firearms Posted Message on Facebook About Mass Shooters Who Had Taken Psychiatric Drugs — Killed in Car Accident Days Later
January 10th, 2013Via: Natural News:
John Noveske is one of the most celebrated battle rifle manufacturers in America. His rifles, found at www.NoveskeRifleworks.com are widely recognized as some of the finest pieces of American-made hardware ever created… Sadly, John Noveske was killed in a mysterious car crash just a few days ago, on January 4, 2013.
According to the Outdoor Wire, his car “traveled across the oncoming lane onto the dirt highway shoulder until it struck two large boulders. The vehicle rolled and Mr. Noveske was ejected.”
But barely a week before this incident, John Noveske posted a lengthy, detailed post on Facebook that listed all the school shootings tied to psychiatric drugs. At the end of the post, he asked, “What drugs was Adam Peter Lanza on?”
That was the last post he ever made.
OBAMA REGIME CONSIDERING USE OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS FOR GUN CONTROL
January 10th, 2013To all of you who stacked it deep while it was cheap: Well done.
Via: New York Times:
President Obama is planning a comprehensive effort to pass legislation and use executive orders to prevent gun violence, representatives of about a dozen gun control organizations were told Wednesday at a White House meeting.
…
Mr. Feinblatt said the general consensus among the representatives of advocacy organizations at the meeting was to seek broad changes to law that could include an assault weapons ban, limits on high-capacity magazines for ammunition, better enforcement measures, a gun-trafficking statute and improved data for background checks.
He said the advocates also pushed for executive actions that would not require Congressional approval, including new efforts by the Justice Department to prosecute people who lie on their background checks.
Iowa Legislator Wants Semi Auto Weapons Confiscated
January 9th, 2013Via: Daily Times Herald:
State Rep. Dan Muhlbauer, D-Manilla, says Iowa lawmakers should ban semi-automatic guns and “start taking them” from owners who refuse to surrender any illegal firearms through a buy-back program.
In an interview, a fiery Muhlbauer said it is time to act with “radical changes” on gun laws and other issues to protect schoolchildren from shooting sprees like the one last week in Newtown, Conn.
“We cannot have big guns out here as far as the big guns that are out here, the semi-automatics and all of them,” Muhlbauer said. “We can’t have those running around out here. Those are not hunting weapons.”
He added, “We should ban those in Iowa.”
Muhlbauer, who did not list the specific weapons he wants outlawed in The Daily Times Herald interview, said he would like to see the ban implemented in a retroactive fashion.
“Even if you have them, I think we need to start taking them,” Muhlbauer said. “We can’t have those out there. Because if they’re out there they’re just going to get circulated around to the wrong people. Those guns should not be in the public’s hands. There are just too many guns.”
Disney World to Track Visitors with Wireless Wristbands
January 9th, 2013Via: NBC:
New wireless-tracking wristbands designed to make the “Most Magical Place on Earth” even more hassle-free will hit Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., over the next few months.
The “MagicBands” will be linked to customers’ credit-card information and function as room keys and park entry passes, thanks to radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, which are most commonly used in wireless toll collection and public-transit turnstiles.
The MagicBands are part of a bigger system called “MyMagic+,” which also allows the theme park to collect sensitive personal information, including names of guests both young and old, their purchasing and riding patterns and real-time location data.
Secret Government Documents Reveal Vaccines to be a Total Hoax
January 9th, 2013Via: Natural News:
Through several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Dr. Tomljenovic was able to obtain transcripts of private meetings that were held between the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI), a so-called “independent expert advisory committee” that makes recommendations to the government about vaccine policy, and various British health ministers over the years. And after poring through this plethora of information, which had previously been veiled from public view, Dr. Tomljenovic made some disturbing discoveries.
“[T]he JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization) made continuous efforts to withhold critical data on severe adverse reactions and contraindications to vaccinations to both parents and health practitioners in order to reach overall vaccination rates which they deemed were necessary for ‘herd immunity,’ a concept which … does not rest on solid scientific evidence,” explains Dr. Tomljenovic in the introduction to her paper.
“Official documents obtained from the U.K. Department of Health (DH) and the JCVI reveal that the British health authorities have been engaging in such practice for the last 30 years, apparently for the sole purpose of protecting the national vaccination program.”
These are some strong accusations, but the information Dr. Tomljenovic gathered speaks for itself. Not only did the JCVI routinely ignore questions of safety as they came up with regards to the ever-expanding vaccination schedule, but the group actively censored unfavorable data that shed a “negative” light on vaccines in order to maintain the illusion that vaccines are safe and effective. Beyond this, the JCVI regularly lied to both the public and government authorities about vaccine safety in order to ensure that people continued to vaccinate their kids.
More: The Health Hazards of Disease Prevention by Lucija Tomljenovic, PhD
Research Credit: windhorse
Stephen Hawking ‘More Machine Now Than Man’
January 9th, 2013This article is great for those considering enrolling in Ph.D. programs. While the example of Hawking twitching his eyebrow to set swarms of minions aflutter with activity might seem extreme, this is actually the essence of the graduate school experience for many. Your adviser probably won’t be a cyborg, but my guess is that this piece is going to hit home in more ways than one.
Via: Wired:
Click-click-click: This is what you hear when having a conversation with Stephen Hawking. No voice, no other sounds, no facial expressions. For those who know him, Hawking may be able to communicate through his eyes; but for the rest of us, his sole means of communicating is through infrared connection to his computer.
Today, January 8, is Hawking’s birthday, yet on this day it’s worth examining just who and what we are really celebrating: the man, the mind or … the machines?
Hawking has become a kind of a “brain in a vat.” Since being afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease) almost 50 years ago, his muscles have stopped working, though his mind and senses remain unaffected. In some ways Hawking is, to borrow from Obi-Wan referring to Darth Vader, “more machine now than man.”
In one version of Hawking’s eulogistic story, we praise the smartest person in the world, the brilliant physicist, one of the greatest cosmologists of our time. He fits perfectly well with our conception of how science and its heroes work: To be a genius all one needs is a powerful – a “beautiful” – mind. And indeed, because of his disability, Hawking embodies the mythical figure capable of grasping the ultimate laws of the universe with nothing but the sheer strength of his reasoning: He can’t move his body, so everything must be in his mind. What else would a theoretical physicist need?
But in another version of Hawking’s story, we notice that he is more “incorporated” than any other scientist, let alone human being. He is delegated across numerous other bodies: technicians, students, assistants, and of course, machines. Hawking’s “genius,” far from being the product of his mind alone, is in fact profoundly located, material, and collective in nature.
Related: Stephen Hawking Joins Anti-Robot Apocalypse Think Tank
Linguistics Identifies Anonymous Users
January 9th, 2013See also:
How Unique – and Trackable – Is Your Browser?
Software Can Identify You from Your Browsing Habits
The Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity
Via: SC Magazine:
Up to 80 percent of certain anonymous underground forum users can be identified using linguistics, researchers say.
The techniques compare user posts to track them across forums and could even unveil authors of thesis papers or blogs who had taken to underground networks.
“If our dataset contains 100 users we can at least identify 80 of them,” researcher Sadia Afroz told an audience at the 29C3 Chaos Communication Congress in Germany.
“Function words are very specific to the writer. Even if you are writing a thesis, you’ll probably use the same function words in chat messages.
“Even if your text is not clean, your writing style can give you away.”
The analysis techniques could also reveal botnet owners, malware tool authors and provide insight into the size and scope of underground markets, making the research appealing to law enforcement.
To achieve their results the researchers used techniques including stylometric analysis, the authorship attribution framework Jstylo, and Latent Dirichlet allocation which can distinguish a conversation on stolen credit cards from one on exploit-writing, and similarly help identify interesting people.
…
While successful, the work faces a series of challenges. Analysis could only be performed using a minimum of 5000 words (this research used the “gold standard” of 6500 words) which culled the list of potential targets from tens of thousands to mere hundreds.
It also needs to separate discussion on product information like credit cards, exploits and drugs from conversational text in order to facilitate machine learning to automate the process, according to researcher Aylin Caliskan Islam.
And posts must be translated to English, a process which boosted author identification from 66 to around 80 per cent but was imperfect using freely available tools like Google and Bing.
However both of these tasks were performed successfully, and further development including the use of “exclusive” language translation tools would only serve to boost the identification accuracy.
Leetspeak, an alternative alphabet popular in some forum circles, cannot be translated.
Minimum of 40 Children Paralyzed After New Meningitis Vaccine
January 9th, 2013Via: Vactruth:
On December 20, 2012, a vaccination tragedy hit the small village of Gouro, located in northern Chad, Africa. According to the newspaper La Voix, out of five hundred children who received the new meningitis vaccine MenAfriVac, at least 40 of them between the ages of 7 and 18 have become paralyzed. Those children also suffered hallucinations and convulsions.
Since this report, the true extent of this tragedy is coming to light, as parents of these vaccinated children have reported yet more injuries. The authorities in the area are shaken, as citizens set fire to a sanitary administration vehicle in a demonstration of their frustration and anger at the government’s negligence.
“We wish that our children would get their health back,” shared the parent of a sick child.
THE MENAFRIVAC VACCINE
MenAfriVac is a new vaccine manufactured by Serum Institute of India Limited. According to The Meningitis Vaccine Project (MVP), it is the first vaccine to gain approval to travel outside the cold chain, meaning that the vaccine can be transported without refrigeration or ice packs for up to four days:
“The meningitis A vaccine known as MenAfriVac®, created to meet the needs of Africa’s meningitis belt, can now be kept in a controlled temperature chain (CTC) at temperatures of up to 40°C for up to four days, a decision that could help increase campaign efficiency and coverage and save funds normally spent maintaining the challenging cold chain during the “last mile” of vaccine delivery.”
The data on the MenAfriVac vaccine is further backed by the World Health Organization’s website and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website.
So, why does this information differ vastly from the information given on the manufacturer’s website? Serum Institute of India Ltd. stated under the section marked STORAGE:
“MenAfriVac should be stored and transported between 2-8ºC. Protect from light. The diluent should be stored at 25°C. It is recommended to protect the reconstituted vaccine from direct sunlight. Do not exceed the expiry date stated on the external packaging.”
THE STORY FROM INSIDE AFRICA
Mr. M., the cousin of two of the vaccine-injured children, who currently remain critically ill and hospitalized, explained that many of the children reacted within 24 hours of receiving the vaccine. He said that at first the children vomited and complained of headaches, before falling to the floor with uncontrollable convulsions while bent over with saliva coming from their mouths.
He shared that on December 26, 2012, the Minister of Health and the Minister of Social Security visited Gouro, bringing with them two Members of Parliament. He said that after some discussion, they decided to evacuate approximately 50 paralyzed children to a hospital over three hundred miles away in N’Djamena, the capital city of Chad.
He added that the government responded to the tragedy by paying the parents money in a desperate bid to silence them, further stating that many of the parents are traumatized and confused.
As reported in La Voix, according to a member of the medical staff, as well as a comment from Dr. Daugla Oumagoum Moto, the director of the Center of International Health Support (CSSI), the reactions that these children have suffered are not typical of this type of vaccine against meningitis, which they say are normally fever, vomiting, and headaches, not the adverse reactions experienced by the hospitalized children.
FPSRussia Business Partner Found Dead – Gunshot Wound to Head
January 8th, 2013Via: Guns.com:
Business partner of FPSRussia, the popular Youtuber known for getting his hands on the latest and greatest guns and gear, was found dead Thursday evening in Carnesville, Georgia.
Franklin County Sheriff Stevie Thomas told local media that 32-year-old Keith Ratliff died of a single gunshot wound to the head and that his body had been sitting for some time before it was discovered. Thomas said investigators also found several guns in the area where Ratliff’s body was found and authorities are treating the death as a homicide until the investigation proves otherwise.
Wikipedia: FPSRussia
