Taking Liberties
June 2nd, 2007Via: noliberties:
The shocking truth about the erosion of our fundamental civil liberties by Tony Blair’s government will be exposed this summer in TAKING LIBERTIES, released in UK cinemas by Revolver Entertainment June 8th 2007.
Right to Protest, Right to Freedom of Speech. Right to Privacy. Right not to be detained without charge, Innocent Until Proven Guilty. Prohibition from Torture. TAKING LIBERTIES will reveal how these six central pillars of liberty have been systematically destroyed by New Labour, and the freedoms of the British people stolen from under their noses amidst a climate of fear created by the media and government itself.
Dutch Try to Grow Enviro-Friendly Meat in Lab
June 2nd, 2007Coming to a domed city near you.
Via: Reuters:
Dutch researchers are trying to grow pork meat in a laboratory with the goal of feeding millions without the need to raise and slaughter animals.
“We’re trying to make meat without having to kill animals,” Bernard Roelen, a veterinary science professor at Utrecht University, said in an interview.
Although it is in its early stages, the idea is to replace harvesting meat from livestock with a process that eliminates the need for animal feed, transport, land use and the methane expelled by animals, which all hurt the environment, he said.
“Keeping animals just to eat them is in fact not so good for the environment,” said Roelen. “Animals need to grow, and animals produce many things that you do not eat.”
Forced to Eat Higher Food Prices
June 1st, 2007Via: Kitco:
What I am in a panic about is that from the Financial Times we read the terrible news that “Retail food prices are heading for their biggest annual increase in as much as 30 years, raising fears that the world faces an unprecedented period of food price inflation. Few countries have not felt the impact of food price rises. In the US, prices have risen by 6.7 per cent, seasonally adjusted, since the beginning of this year, compared to 2.1 per cent for all of 2006, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
As much as I am horrified by this news, the silver lining in this dark, dark cloud is that now I can be not only sarcastic and cruel, but I can also prove my bellicose point with a mathematic precision out to three decimal places, just like the U.S. government does now!
So, prepare yourselves to be absolutely chilled – yet thrilled! – at the resonant-yet-piercingly-shrill tonal quality OF my voice combined with the utter conviction and hostility IN my voice as I indignantly bellow, “In one lousy year, inflation in food went from an annual rate of 2.1 percent to 6.7 percent? Is that what you are telling me? Huh? Is it? Because if that is what you are telling me, then that means that inflation in food prices is up more than 300.000% from a year ago! We’re freaking doomed! And now I laugh the tragic laugh of the damned! ‘Hahahaha!'”
The Financial Times did not officially respond to my chilling (but mathematically precise) outburst, but with famed British stiff-upper-lip stoicism merely continued, “If prices keep rising at these levels for the rest of the year, it would be the biggest annual increase since 1980.”
Research Credit: Survival Acres
State Department Orders Site to Take Down Photos of $592 Million U.S. Embassy In Iraq
June 1st, 2007Winning hearts and minds, now with obscene embassy/palace.
Via: ThinkProgress:
On Tuesday, ThinkProgress highlighted photos of the U.S. embassy in Iraq, which is set to open in September. Projected to cost $592 million, the embassy will have a staff of 1,000 people and operating costs will total $1.2 billion a year. The complex will be 104 acres, which is the size of approximately 80 football fields.
The architectural firm designing the embassy, Berger Define Yaeger, recently posted the designs for the colossus on its website (which is currently down). Today, the State Department ordered Berger to remove the images. AP reports:
Detailed plans for the new U.S. Embassy under construction in Baghdad appeared online Thursday in a breach of the tight security surrounding the sensitive project. […]
The images were removed by Berger Devine Yaeger Inc. shortly after the company was contacted by the State Department.
People May Be Arbitrarily Stopped and Searched by Police in All of London
June 1st, 2007Via: BBC:
Under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, police officers may randomly stop someone without reasonable suspicion, providing the area has been designated a likely target for an attack.
The power is currently in force across the whole of London.
Raising Questions About 9/11 Gets an Army Sergeant Demoted for “Disloyalty”
June 1st, 2007Via: Fort Worth Weekly:
These days, Donald Buswell’s job is not as exciting or dangerous as it once was. For the past few months, his working hours have been spent taking care of some 40-plus wounded soldiers at San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston medical center. The work is sometimes menial, even janitorial, but he doesn’t mind. After all, Buswell has been where these men are — three years ago, he too was recovering from wounds received in a battle zone in Iraq.
“I truly consider this an honor,†Buswell told his dad not long ago.
Still, it’s not exactly where Buswell expected to be after 20 years of well-respected service in the Army.
Since joining the Army in 1987, he had risen to the rank of sergeant first class, serving in both Gulf Wars, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Korea. He ended up with shrapnel scars and a Purple Heart and, back in the U.S. after his last tour in Iraq, a job as intelligence analyst at Fort Sam Houston.
He couldn’t have foreseen that one e-mail could derail his career and put him on his way out of the Army. One e-mail, speculating about events that millions of people have questioned for the last six years, was all it took.
Sgt. Buswell wants to know: What really happened on 9/11? And he said so in his e-mail. In the few paragraphs of that August 2006 message — a reply not to someone outside the service, but to other soldiers — Buswell wrote that he thought the official report of what happened that day at the Pentagon, and in the Pennsylvania crash of United Airlines Flight 93, was full of errors and unanswered questions.
“Who really benefited from what happened that day?†he asked rhetorically. Not “Arabs,†but “the Military Industrial Complex,†Buswell concluded. “We must demand a new, independent investigation.â€
For voicing those opinions in an e-mail to 38 people on the San Antonio Army base, Buswell was stripped of his security clearance, fired from his job, demoted, and ordered to undergo a mental health exam.
(He was also ordered not to speak with the press. Information for this story came from documents, conversations with Buswell’s family members and friends, and sources within Fifth Army who asked not to be named.)
As if all that weren’t enough, Fort Sam Houston’s chief of staff penned a letter accusing Buswell of “making statements disloyal to the United States.â€
His father, Winthrop Buswell, said that his son “is one of the most patriotic people I know.â€
“Donald saw something that his conscience led him to dispute,†he said. “That’s just the type of man he is.â€
For his dissent, Donald has paid a heavy price.
Research Credit: M
DARPA to Create Brain-Chipped Cyborg Moths
June 1st, 2007Via: The Register UK:
Famed US military mad-scientist bureau DARPA (the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) is engaged in an effort to grow/build cyborg moths for use as spies. No, really.
The program is called Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, or HI-MEMS. In it, the arguably over-caffeined DARPA boffins aim to construct a tiny lepidopterine infiltration borg by growing a living moth around a “micro-mechanical system”.
“Animal world has provided mankind with locomotion over millennia,”* says Dr Amit Lal, DARPA HI-MEMS program manager.
“For example we have used horses and elephants…olfactory training of bees has been used to locate mines and weapons of mass destruction. The HI-MEMS program is aimed to develop technology that provides more control over insect locomotion, just as saddles and horseshoes are needed for horse locomotion control.”
Except that, rather than saddling up a moth and riding off, DARPA wants to implant a metallic core which will wear their bodies like a living cloak. Sound familiar? It does to us. If Dr Lal was using vast Austrian bodybuilders rather than moths, we’d be talking Terminator yet again (this happens rather a lot when one starts looking at the US defence establishment).
In a Times article today, Rod Brooks of MIT’s computer science and artifical intelligence lab (CSAIL), was quoted on the insectoid cyber-infiltrator project.
“This is going to happen,” said Mr Brooks. “It’s not science like developing the nuclear bomb, which costs billions of dollars. It can be done relatively cheaply.”
“A bunch of experiments have been done over the past couple of years where simple animals, such as rats and cockroaches, have been operated on and driven by joysticks, but this is the first time where the chip has been injected in the pupa stage and ‘grown’ inside it.
“Once the moth hatches, machine learning is used to control it.”
Research Credit: PD
TB Guy’s Father-In-Law Is a CDC TB Expert
June 1st, 2007Imagine my shock.
Obviously, this entire thing is a bunch of bullshit intended to frighten you, at some point, into the arms of some crook with a needle. Since I can’t even bring myself to quote much from this claptrap nonsense, I’ll just include the part about the guy’s father-in-law, who happens to be a CDC microbiologist who works on, yes, TB.
Via: CNN:
Speaker’s father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a microbiologist who studies tuberculosis at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Research Credit: KH I’ve seen this “coincidence” referenced in so many places that if you told me about it and I didn’t credit you, I apologize.
Remember My Warnings About Closed Source Computer Security Products and Services?
June 1st, 2007Read the Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity and then try to guess who’s an affiliate for Armorware, a proprietary computer security software suite?
This is Mike Ruppert’s Armorware page.
That’s right. That Mike Ruppert.
I stopped paying attention to Ruppert after his weird statements in the wake of the Gary Webb murder, which came after his association with Pinnacle Quest International. As Ruppert went on to self destruct, I didn’t know what the hell to make of the guy.
I recently started to wonder where he wound up and what he was doing, after all that drama with his office and going off half cocked to Venezuela. I found that link to Ruppert’s Armorware affiliate page on mikeruppert.blogspot.com. When I checked further, his association with Armorware is old news.
I looked over that Armorware thing and I find it absolutely shocking that Ruppert would be involved with selling such a product, especially since so many people in activist and dissident circles listen to him. Users of that software have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what it’s actually doing. It’s proprietary. Trust us.
Is this a simple case of total ignorance on Ruppert’s part? Or is there something else to it?
The software seems to be popular with computer amateurs who think that they’re conducting offshore banking transactions in a private manner.
Since the software requires VPN connections to Armorware servers in Canada, for U.S. users, all of these sessions will explicitly be targeted by NSA. That’s not tinfoil. Foreign communications surveillance is the stated purpose of the NSA. The fact that Armorware’s servers could be acting as a massive honeypot is a different matter entirely, but consider that, for a mere $485, a private Canadian company is going to protect you from the NSA? I couldn’t make it up, but Mike Ruppert is trying to sell you on that one.
On this Armorware page, Mike is quoted:
“Government officials, attorneys and high-ranking officials don’t want to be caught sharing information or sensitive documents, which is why journalists need to protect their sources,” says Ruppert. “It’s a matter of safety and is vital to civil liberties and freedom of the press.
My sources also have a concern for privacy because my writings are largely critical of the US government. They have a strong interest in communicating information securely in order to protect themselves and their families from harassment or retribution.”
At best, this thing shouldn’t be used because there’s no way to know what Armorware’s servers are doing with the data associated with your sessions. At worst, this thing could be some kind of intelligence agency cutout that is harvesting EVERYTHING that people are doing when they THINK that their sessions are secure.
How do we know? We don’t. It’s proprietary.
Just how bad COULD this be?
I’m not saying that their software is doing this, but how would I know that they’re not running keylogging routines that capture my passphrases and a few lines of code that transmits my keystrokes and private crypto keys to their servers? Since they are the man-in-the-middle on the “secure” sessions, they would be in a position to capture my encrypted email as well as my surfing history and everything that I do online. Recover my private keys, and, well, this is the worst nightmare scenario I’ve had to think about in a long time.
In other words, since I don’t know what their closed source binaries are doing, they could potentially be doing things that make decrypting what I think are totally private communications a simple, point-and-click matter.
How would I know that this isn’t the case? Because they tell me it’s a “sterile” and “secure” environment?!
Of course, skilled security analysts could conduct packet analysis on what exactly was passing between the client and Armorware’s servers. Even if that turned out to be clean and legit, how would we determine exactly what was happening on Armorware’s servers? The man in the middle has great powers. How well do you trust him?
Users of Armorware are trusting that thing with their lives. That is absolutely frightening.
Major red flag.
Remote New Zealand Tidal Power Project
May 31st, 2007By 2013, power companies will have the option of cutting off power distribution to “unprofitable” parts of New Zealand.
Will the lights go out in the Hokianga?
No.
You see, the simple and sane solutions become possible once a place isn’t profitable anymore.
I N C R E D I B L E !
Power crisis.
Tell me another one.
Via: stuff.co.nz / Northnern News:
Tidal turbines in the Hokianga Harbour could power up to 1000 homes, saving residents money and securing power supplies to remote areas facing an uncertain energy future.
A working party exploring renewable energy options in the Far North says marine currents at The Narrows, Te Karaka Point, Rangi Point and North Head may be swift enough to generate up to 2.5 megawatts of electricity.
The tidal power scheme is one of several generation schemes that could be embedded in the district’s electricity network, says working party member Dr Zuben Weeds.
Similar schemes, using wind and hydro power, could be modelled on the Hokianga project if it proves viable, says Mr Weeds, a Waikato University energy researcher.
“An objective of this project is to develop a model community- distributed generation scheme that could supply up to 1000 houses in the Far North through Top Energy’s network,” he says.
There are two good reasons for developing the schemes in Northland, he says.
Domestic electricity prices in the region have risen by 65 percent since 1999, adding $725 to household power bills, while prices nationally have gone up by an average of 39 percent.
“For many Far North households, the increase in power costs is significant because incomes in these areas are lower than the national median income,” says Mr Weeds.
Generating power locally would reduce loads on the national grid at Auckland, which Transpower predicts will exceed capacity by 2013, he says.
It would also secure electricity supplies in isolated areas where it is not economic for Top Energy to maintain power lines.
Under present law, the line company won’t have to maintain uneconomic power lines after 2013.
“In effect, the distribution line to a remote area may potentially deteriorate to the point where it cannot carry electricity.”
The Hokianga project could take at least five years to complete if it goes ahead, Mr Weeds says.
Partners in the project would likely be the Far North District Council, Te Runanga O Te Rarawa, Scottish firm Gentec Venturi, Waikato University and Kerikeri firms Small Hydro Enterprises and IES Construction.
Capital funds could come from an $8 million government fund for marine power schemes.
“As we are one of the only groups looking at small-scale generation for remote communities, we have a good chance of being successful once the grant applications open,” Mr Weeds says.
