Caption Contest: Bill Gates Promotes Vaccinations
May 18th, 2011Via: Reuters:
Research Credit: Noble
NATO in Libya: Besides the Oil, Is It Also a Gold Robbery?
May 17th, 2011Pookie let me know about issue #5 of The Gold Standard (.pdf), which includes an interesting comment from this Wall Street Journal piece about Gaddafi’s vast gold holdings. The comment is no longer posted at the Wall Street Journal:
PvC from Belgium comments on Wall Street Journal Blog: “It seems to me that the war in Libya is not only an oil grab anymore, but a gold grab as well. It is reported that Libya’s central banks are hoarding 140+ tons of gold. The central banks are in three locations. Two of them were attacked. Too many coincidences piling up here…”
Here’s some more info on the gold via BBC:
The IMF data show Libya’s reserves to be 4.6 million ounces, a figure of nearly 144 tons. At current market prices the value is over $6bn.
Related: Libya’s Sea of Fresh Water Beneath the Desert, But Wait, There’s More
Coast Guard Closes Mississippi River Near Natchez
May 17th, 2011Update: Re-Opened, With Restrictions
Via: CBS News:
Shipping already curtailed because of flooding that is plaguing the Mississippi River was halted for much of Tuesday when officials closed the waterway north of New Orleans in the latest tough decision to try to reduce pressure on levees protecting cities and towns.
By late in the day, barges that haul coal, timber, iron, steel and more than half of America’s grain exports were allowed to pass, but at the slowest possible speed. Such interruptions could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of millions of dollars for each day the barges are idled, as the toll from the weeks-long flooding from Arkansas to Louisiana continues to mount.
—End Update—
Via: Reuters:
The key waterway for U.S. grain exports was cut off on Monday when the U.S. Coast Guard closed the Mississippi River near Natchez, Mississippi.
The Coast Guard said 15 miles of the Mississippi was closed to all traffic to protect ships and flood control structures because flooding has raised the river to record levels.
Two vessels were waiting to move northbound on the river by the closure and one ship was waiting to move southbound, the Coast Guard said.
About 60 percent of U.S. grain exports go out through the Mississippi.
Eight Louisiana refineries dependent on the river to bring crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico and to move refined products into the Gulf, are not affected by Monday’s closure.
The Coast Guard gave no estimate for when the River would re-open.
The Secret Sharer
May 17th, 2011Yet again, we learn that there was a desire to generate dossiers on people that, besides the Internet, financial transactions and telephone surveillance data, included physical tracking information.
Bill Binney, the NSA employee who led the team that created the ThinThread system (described below), also alleges that all email “transmitted in America” is archived and keyword searchable.
Via: The New Yorker:
As Binney imagined it, ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says, “The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep expanding.”
…
When Binney heard the rumors, he was convinced that the new domestic-surveillance program employed components of ThinThread: a bastardized version, stripped of privacy controls. “It was my brainchild,” he said. “But they removed the protections, the anonymization process. When you remove that, you can target anyone.” He said that although he was not “read in” to the new secret surveillance program, “my people were brought in, and they told me, ‘Can you believe they’re doing this? They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers’ ”—logs of dialled phone numbers—“ ‘on everyone in the country!’ ”
Drake recalled that, after the October 4th directive, “strange things were happening. Equipment was being moved. People were coming to me and saying, ‘We’re now targeting our own country!’ ” Drake says that N.S.A. officials who helped the agency obtain FISA warrants were suddenly reassigned, a tipoff that the conventional process was being circumvented. He added, “I was concerned that it was illegal, and none of it was necessary.” In his view, domestic data mining “could have been done legally” if the N.S.A. had maintained privacy protections. “But they didn’t want an accountable system.”
Aid, the author of the N.S.A. history, suggests that ThinThread’s privacy protections interfered with top officials’ secret objective—to pick American targets by name. “They wanted selection, not just collection,” he says.
…
Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Research Credit: coxsone
Police Can Now Knock On Your Door, Listen for Sounds Suggesting Evidence Is Being Destroyed (Whatever That Means), and Then Break In—No Warrant Necessary
May 17th, 2011Game over.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision in a Kentucky case, says police officers who loudly knock on a door in search of illegal drugs and then hear sounds suggesting evidence is being destroyed may break down the door and enter without a search warrant.
The Supreme Court on Monday gave police more leeway to break into residences in search of illegal drugs.
The justices in an 8-1 decision said officers who loudly knock on a door and then hear sounds suggesting evidence is being destroyed may break down the door and enter without a search warrant.
Residents who “attempt to destroy evidence have only themselves to blame” when police burst in, said Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
In a lone dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she feared the ruling in a Kentucky case will give police an easy way to ignore the 4th Amendment. “Police officers may not knock, listen and then break the door down,” she said, without violating the 4th Amendment.
Was Fukushima a China Syndrome?
May 16th, 2011Via: Time:
The China Syndrome refers to a scenario in which a molten nuclear reactor core could could fission its way through its containment vessel, melt through the basement of the power plant and down into the earth. While a molten reactor core wouldn’t burn “all the way through to China” it could enter the soil and water table and cause huge contamination in the crops and drinking water around the power plant. It’s a nightmare scenario,the stuff of movies. And it might just have happened at Fukushima.
‘We are 100% certain that governments will start banning bitcoins in the next 12 to 18 months.’
May 16th, 2011Well, they can’t stop people from transferring bitcoins to each other. As long as the Internet exists, bitcoins can be sent and received around the world. The governments, however, can shut down exchanges that handle national fiat currencies in and out of bitcoins.
I wonder if people will continue to be use bitcoin after the governments shut down the fiat exchanges? They just might. Like any medium of exchange, it’s fungible as long as people are willing to use it.
Via: Launch:
A month ago I heard folks talking online about a virtual currency called bitcoin that is untraceable and un-hackable. Folks were using it to buy and sell drugs online, support content they liked and worst of all — gasp! — play poker.
Bitcoin is a P2P currency that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband.
U.S. Debt Limit Reached, Government Halts Pension Investments
May 16th, 2011Via: AP:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Monday that he will immediately halt investments in two big government pension plans so the government can continue to borrow money.
Geithner informed Congress of his decision in a letter stating that the government had officially reached its $14.3 trillion borrowing limit. He repeated a warning that if lawmakers do not increase the borrowing limit by August 2, the government is at risk of an unprecedented default on its debt.
The debt limit is the amount of money the government can borrow to help finance its operations. The nation has reached its debt limit because the federal government has grown accustomed to borrowing massive amounts of money. The latest estimate is that it borrows 40 cents for every dollar it spends.
Arcimoto Electric Vehicles: Made in Eugene, Oregon
May 16th, 2011The U.S.: Where Europe Comes to Slum
May 16th, 2011Via: Los Angeles Times:
The newest slumlord in Los Angeles is a pillar of German capitalism. Earlier this month, the city attorney’s office filed suit against Deutsche Bank, the world’s fourth-largest bank, for letting many of the more than 2,000 L.A. homes it has foreclosed on descend into squalor and decay.
A yearlong city investigation of the properties on which Deutsche Bank foreclosed turned up tenants compelled to live in crumbling apartments the bank would not fix, houses taken over by gangs, faucets from which water either wouldn’t flow or wouldn’t stop, and the occasional unidentified dead body. Nothing, in other words, that would be allowed to happen to bank holdings in Frankfurt, the neat-as-a-pin German city that is home to Deutsche Bank and much of the rest of German finance.
Deutsche Bank responded to the suit by blaming the loan servicers that were supposed to have maintained the bank’s properties. But City Atty. Carmen Trutanich insisted the blame belonged with the owner. “We are not going to allow them to play the shell and nut game,” he said.
But slumming in America is fast becoming a business model for some of Europe’s leading companies, and they often do things here they would never think of doing at home. These companies — not banks, primarily, but such gold-plated European manufacturers as BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Siemens, and retailers such as IKEA — increasingly come to America (the South particularly) because labor is cheap and workers have no rights. In their eyes, we’re becoming the new China. Our labor costs may be a little higher, but we offer stronger intellectual property protections and far fewer strikes than our unruly Chinese comrades.
Don’t take my word for it. Check out the study released this month by the Boston Consulting Group, which concludes that when you compare China’s soaring wages and still-low levels of productivity with our stagnating wages and rising levels of productivity, the price advantage of manufacturing in China instead of the U.S. will shrink to insignificance by 2015. Investment in the U.S., says the group, “will accelerate as it becomes one of the cheapest locations for manufacturing in the developed world.”
Related: minerva
