Katy Perry Appears in U.S. Marine Corps Propaganda Video
April 23rd, 2012According to Wikipedia, this was filmed at, “USMC’s Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California.”
Did she get a DoD paycheck for this?
Related:
U.S. Marines: Infantry Now Open to Women
Research Credit: RP
Huge Water Resource Exists Under Africa
April 22nd, 2012Via: BBC:
Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater.
They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface.
The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource.
Silicon Valley Firms in Alleged Salary Fixing Scheme
April 22nd, 2012Via: MacWorld:
Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe are accused of agreeing not to poach each others staff, therefore holding back career development and suppressing compensation. A federal court in California has ordered seven technology companies in the state including Apple, Intel, Adobe and Google to face a private antitrust suit from five former employees, who alleged that the companies conspired to eliminate competition between them for skilled labor to suppress compensation and mobility of employees.
Many Portuguese Returning to the Land
April 22nd, 2012Via: RTE:
Disillusioned by the unfulfilled promise of the cities and feeling stifled by tough austerity measures aimed at coping with an economic downturn, some Portuguese are opting out and returning to the land.
Jose Diogo, who spent two years in Lisbon working as a technical advisor at a meat company, was one who fled at the beginning of Portugal’s debt crisis in 2009, and has no regrets.
“I lived in Lisbon and decided to go back home to the interior to grab the opportunity of exploring the land my father owned,” Mr Diogo said on the porch at his stone farm house, looking out over apple orchards and grazing fields for his 30 cows.
Far from discouraging people like Mr Diogo, the government is trying to get others to follow in his footsteps.
In February it launched an initiative to map the country’s unused land and terrain that does not have a known owner, with the aim of making it available to be rented to those who want to work it.
The government has also approved a land exchange scheme by which private owners of unused land will win tax benefits if they make their properties available to be rented by farmers.
Around 1.5 million hectares are expected to be made available through the scheme.
Research Credit: Timbooch
Another Weird Incident Involving Possibly Bogus Securities in Italy
April 22nd, 2012Via: Bloomberg:
Italy’s financial police seized U.S. government securities with a nominal value of $1.5 billion from an unidentified man in his 70s, they said in an e-mailed statement.
The police said they also took certificates of deposit for about 1,000 tons of gold, which together with the U.S. bonds are worth more than 3 billion euros ($4 billion). The assets were found in a briefcase in the man’s car in Viterbo near Rome because of their “doubtful origin,” according to the statement.
The man has previous convictions for robbery, extortion, drug trafficking and money laundering, according to the police statement.
The probe, dubbed “Million Dollar,” is being carried out in and around the capital in cooperation with officials from the U.S. Embassy. Police said they’re evaluating “the authenticity, the nature and the origin” of the securities, some of which may date from the 1930s.
Scientific Fraud: ‘Nobody Had Noticed the Whole Thing Was Rotten’
April 21st, 2012Nobody noticed, eh?
Well, my archives go back to 2002, for example, but I don’t count, and thousands of others like me don’t count.
The professionally educated ignoramus class heaps scorn on “conspiracy theorists” for outing their crackpot grant swindling and corporate profit cult for what it is, but then, when the rot has gotten too deep to be able to maintain appearances, “Nobody had noticed.”
Via: New York Times:
“Nobody had noticed the whole thing was rotten,” said Dr. Fang, who is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.
Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.
“This is a tremendous threat,” he said.
Related: American Society for Microbiology: ‘Has Modern Science Become Dysfunctional?’
Misinformation Campaign Targets USA TODAY Reporter, Editor
April 21st, 2012Via: USA Today:
A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.
Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.
The timeline of the activity tracks USA TODAY’s reporting on the military’s “information operations” program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan — campaigns that have been criticized even within the Pentagon as ineffective and poorly monitored.
For example, Internet domain registries show the website TomVandenBrook.com was created Jan. 7 — just days after Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook first contacted Pentagon contractors involved in the program. Two weeks after his editor Ray Locker’s byline appeared on a story, someone created a similar site, RayLocker.com, through the same company.
If the websites were created using federal funds, it could violate federal law prohibiting the production of propaganda for domestic consumption.
“We’re not aware of any participation in such activities, nor would it be acceptable,” said Lt. Col. James Gregory, a Pentagon spokesman.
A Pentagon official confirmed that the military had made inquiries to information operations contractors to ask them about the Internet activity. All denied it, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiries were informal and did not amount to an official investigation.
The websites were taken down following those inquiries. Various other sites and accounts were removed for violating their providers’ terms of service.
Google Billionaires Eric Schmidt and Larry Page Have Teamed Up with James Cameron for Space Mining Venture
April 21st, 2012Resources Development Administration
Weyland-Yutani Corp.
Lunar Industries
Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles
Federal Colonies
Via: Reuters:
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and billionaire co-founder Larry Page have teamed up with “Avatar” director James Cameron and other investors to back an ambitious space exploration and natural resources venture, details of which will be unveiled next week.
The fledgling company, called Planetary Resources, will be unveiled at a Tuesday news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, according to a press release issued this week.
Aside from naming some of the company’s high-profile backers, the press release disclosed tantalizingly few details, saying only that the company will combine the sectors of “space exploration and natural resources” in a venture that could add “trillions of dollars to the global GDP.” The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Planetary Resources will explore the feasibility of mining natural resources from asteroids, a decades-old concept.
“This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources,'” according to the press release.
National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance
April 20th, 2012As of 2001, “Twenty terabytes a minute.”
“You can build up knowledge about everyone in the country. And having that knowledge then allows them the ability to concoct all kinds of charges if they want to target you.”
“The data that’s being assembled is about everybody. From that data then they can target anyone they want.”
Via: Democracy Now:
In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA’s massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after he became a whistleblower. Binney was a key source for investigative journalist James Bamford’s recent exposé in Wired Magazine about how the NSA is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah. The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency, including private emails, cell phone calls, Google searches and other personal data.
Binney served in the NSA for over 30 years, including a time as technical director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. Since retiring from the NSA in 2001, he has warned that the NSA’s data-mining program has become so vast that it could “create an Orwellian state.” Today marks the first time Binney has spoken on national television about NSA surveillance.
Related: Coming Soon: Retroactive Surveillance on Anyone
European Parliament Agrees to Send Airline Passenger Data to U.S.
April 20th, 2012Via: Computerworld UK:
The European Parliament has approved the controversial data transfer agreement, the bilateral PNR (passenger name register), with the US which requires European airlines to pass on passenger information, including name, contact details, payment data, itinerary, email and phone numbers to the Department of Homeland Security.
Under the new agreement, PNR data will be “depersonalised” after six months and would be moved into a “dormant database” after five years. However the information would still be held for a further 15 years before being fully “anonymised”.
