Polish Prosecutor Shoots Himself After News Conference
January 9th, 2012[???]
Update: Comments from Przybyl
Via: Reuters:
Speaking to state news agency PAP from his hospital bed on Tuesday, Przybyl said he had wanted to protect the honour and the future of military prosecutors.
He said he had faced many threats related to past investigations aimed at intimidating him, and was finally driven to attempt suicide by accusations of wrongdoing. He did not specify who he thought was behind the threats.
“I could accept that they destroyed my car, loosened my wheels so I would kill myself. There was a million zloty (185,158 pound) bounty on my head. They killed my dog,” Przybyl said.
“I could not deal with the attacks related with accusations of illegal actions.”
—End Update—
Via: BBC:
A Polish military prosecutor has shot himself in the head after cutting short a news conference in his office, officials and media reports say.
Col Mikolaj Przybyl was defending a military investigation into media leaks related to the air crash that killed the Polish president in 2010.
He asked reporters to leave so that he could take “a break”.
Upon hearing a loud thud, the reporters returned to find him on the floor with a pool of blood around his head.
Mr Przybyl, who was in his office in Poznan, western Poland, is now in hospital in stable condition. His life is not in danger, according to hospital officials.
One of the reporters present told Polish television: “We heard a loud thud and we went back into the room thinking one of the cameras had fallen over. Then we saw the prosecutor motionless on the ground in a pool of blood, his military gun beside him.”
In television pictures of the news conference, Col Przybyl is seen reading out a statement to reporters: “During my entire service as a civilian and later military prosecutor, I have never brought shame to the Republic of Poland and I will protect the honour of an officer of the Polish armed forces and prosecution. Thank you, please give me a five-minute break, I need to rest.”
He then walks out of shot and the sound of a gun being cocked can be heard followed by a loud bang.
U.S. Soldiers Confined to Base Over Missing Equipment
January 9th, 2012Via: Reuters:
About 100 U.S. soldiers have been confined to their barracks at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, as Army officials investigate the apparent theft of sensitive military equipment, base spokesmen said on Sunday.
The infantry unit was placed on “lockdown” on Wednesday after the weapons accessories were reported missing from a supply area, said Major Chris Ophardt, a spokesman for the U.S. Army’s I Corps at the base.
The missing equipment included laser-targeting gun sights, night-vision goggles, and weapons scopes with a “high-dollar value” in the “six-figure range,” said Lieutenant Colonel Gary Dangerfield, another base spokesman.
He said the items in question were deemed “sensitive” but were not considered dangerous by themselves.
The Army did not say how many individual pieces of equipment were missing, but Ophardt said missing gear was “definitely stolen.” He added that no actual weapons were missing, and there was no danger to the public.
Lewis-McChord, located about 9 miles south of Tacoma, also is the home base of a group of soldiers convicted of assaulting and murdering unarmed Afghan civilians while on patrol as part of a combat unit formerly known as the 5th Stryker Brigade.
West Readies Oil Plan in Case of Iran Crisis
January 9th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Western powers this week readied a contingency plan to tap a record volume from emergency stockpiles to replace nearly all the Gulf oil that would be lost if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, industry sources and diplomats told Reuters.
They said senior executives of the International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises 28 oil consuming countries, discussed on Thursday an existing plan to release up to 14 million barrels per day (bpd) of government-owned oil stored in the United States, Europe, Japan and other importers.
Action on this scale would be more than five times the size of the biggest release in the agency’s history — made in response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The maximum release, some 10 million bpd of crude and about 4 million bpd of refined products, could be sustained during the first month of any coordinated action, the plan says.
“This would form a necessary and sensible response to a closure of the strait,” a European diplomat told Reuters. “It wouldn’t take long to put in place if it was required … and would be unlikely to prove controversial amongst the (IEA) membership.”
A spokesman for the IEA confirmed that the Paris-based agency has an existing contingency plan that outlines a maximum stock release capability of 14 million bpd for a month. “We’re watching the situation carefully,” he said of Iran.
Tehran announced plans on Friday for new military exercises in the world’s most important oil shipping lane, through which some 16 million barrels of crude pass each day.
Iranian officials have threatened to block the strait if new sanctions, aimed to discourage Iran’s nuclear programme, harm Tehran’s oil exports.
Many oil experts believe the threats are rhetoric aimed at pushing up oil prices in a bid to avert sanctions.
Google Backing Original Shows for YouTube — Lots of Them
January 8th, 2012Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.
This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.
The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.
—Joe Bageant, Lost on the Fearless Plain
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
…
The bayonet will still be relevant; however, informational superiority incisively employed should both sharpen that bayonet and permit us to defeat some–but never all–of our enemies outside of bayonet range. Our informational advantage over every other country and culture will be so enormous that our greatest battlefield challenge will be harnessing its power. Our potential national weakness will be the failure to maintain the moral and raw physical strength to thrust that bayonet into an enemy’s heart.
—Ralph Peters, Constant Conflict
Via: New Yorker:
Therefore YouTube, the home of grainy cell-phone videos and skateboarding dogs, is going pro. Kyncl has recruited producers, publishers, programmers, and performers from traditional media to create more than a hundred channels, most of which will début in the next six months—a sort of YouTV. Streaming video, delivered over the Internet, is about to engage traditional TV in a skirmish in the looming war for screen time.
Paypal Founder Backs Blueseed, ‘Googleplex of the Sea’
January 7th, 2012Will there be… Plasmids?
BioShock is set during 1960, in Rapture, a fictional underwater dystopian city; its history is revealed to the player through in-game audio recordings scattered throughout the game.
Rapture was envisioned by the Objectivist business magnate, Andrew Ryan, as a laissez-faire utopia for society’s cultural and scientific elite to avoid the oppression of government and religion. He secretly funded its construction on the mid-Atlantic, utilizing submarine volcanoes to provide geothermal power, and was completed by 1946. Despite Ryan’s attempts, a seedier side of Rapture formed, led by businessman and gangster Frank Fontaine, who secretly managed to maintain a black market for goods to and from the surface. Scientific progress flourished within Rapture after the discovery of a new form of sea slug by Dr. Bridgette Tenenbaum; stem cells from the slugs could be used to create “ADAM”, a plasmid that altered its user’s DNA and grant them super-human powers like telekinesis and pyrokinesis. An industry for plasmids was created by Tenenbaum and Fontaine. To meet the growing demand, Tenenbaum devised a means for the sea slugs to be embedded in the stomachs of young girls from Fontaine’s orphanages, named Little Sisters, producing large quantities of ADAM.
Via: Wired:
Blueseed says U.S. immigration law is choking the flow of “bold and creative” entrepreneurs into Silicon Valley. So it’s building a floating IT fortress where entrepreneurs can be bold and creative right next to Silicon Valley without actually setting foot on U.S. soil.
To get around the government’s immigration choke-hold, the much-discussed startup plans to sail foreign innovators 12 miles off the Northern California shore, into international waters. Once there, governed only by loosely enforced maritime treaties, these entrepreneurs can ply their trade without worrying about worker visas or various other immigration regulations. And they can live in San Francisco. Ferries will shuttle them back and forth.
This is more than just an idea. Big-name venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel just sunk some cash into the Blueseed crusade, and on Tuesday, the company released detailed mockups of its floating incubator (see the above image gallery, given exclusively to Wired).
Gabriel Jack, an immigration attorney at law firm MJ Law in Silicon Valley, tells Wired the notion is legally sound — though he points out that workers on the floating incubator will need valid visitor visas, which can be good for up to 10 years. “There’s nothing in the [visa] law that says how often you can visit the United States. If they make it clear that they work in international waters and are using a visitor visa to stay on land,” he says. “I don’t see how the immigration department can do anything about it legally.”
But there’s more to deal with here than just the law. Last week, Wired sat down with the Blueseed’s three founders to get the low-down on its plan to take the TechCrunch set on an eternal boat ride.
Japan ‘Dream Project’: 600 Acre Farm with Autonomous Robot Workers
January 7th, 2012Does anyone understand how LEDs are supposed to replace pesticides?
Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes.
Anyway, this sounds like it could have been lifted right out of some 1980s era anime film.
Via: AFP:
Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami, the government said Thursday.
Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes.
Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare (600 acre) site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers, the Nikkei newspaper said.
The agricultural ministry will begin on-site research later this year with a plan to spend around four billion yen ($52 million) over the next six years, a ministry official said.
Land in Miyagi prefecture, some 300 kilometres (200 miles) north of Tokyo, which was flooded by seawater on March 11, has been earmarked for the so-called “Dream Project”.
Microsoft Gets Patent for ‘Avoid Ghetto’ Technology
January 7th, 2012Via: CBS:
Microsoft has been granted a patent for its “avoid ghetto” feature for GPS devices.
A GPS device is used to find shortcuts and avoid traffic, but Microsoft’s patent states that a route can be plotted for pedestrians to avoid an “unsafe neighborhood or being in an open area that is subject to harsh temperatures.”
Created for mobile phones, the technology uses the latest crime statistics and weather data and includes them when calculating a route.
‘Gamers Are Now in Full Battle Rattle with Official U.S. Army Rifle Controllers, Backpacks and Headsets’
January 6th, 2012Start ’em young.
Via: Joystiq:
CTA DigitalTM (http://ctadigital.com) today announced a partnership with the U.S. ArmyTM to manufacture U.S. ArmyTM branded video game accessories. Virtual soldiers on the video game battlefield can now take pride in Being Army StrongTM. Rifle controllers, backpacks and headsets with an authentic U.S. ArmyTM design are some of the many items that will soon be available.
“We’re proud and honored that the Army chose to work with us.” said Sol Markowitz, CEO at CTA DigitalTM, “We’re looking forward to a long and mutually beneficial partnership.”
Related: Anybody’s Son Will Do
Feds Want Judge to Force Suspect to Give Up Laptop Password
January 6th, 2012Reader Question: Which Encryption Software Do I Use?
M emailed to ask about the encryption software that I use.
For full disk encryption, I use TrueCrypt. Whether or not you believe that TrueCrypt can protect your data from all attackers, when used properly, it can definitely protect your data from attackers that you are likely to encounter, for example, your children, thieves, your local and national police forces, etc.
For email, I use the outstanding Enigmail frontend to GPG, which is fully integrated with Thunderbird.
I’m not going to get into the of the ifs-ands-and-buts related to this, but let it suffice to say that there are many. In general, though, it’s like I said above: If the attacker is the kid down the street or the pigs, this stuff can make your data relatively secure.
—End Update—
While we hear about these criminal cases, where the government alleges to not have access to the system because of the encryption, we never hear about what happens to the laptops with full disk encryption that are seized from people at airports…
Via: Wired:
Federal prosecutors want a judge to order a Colorado woman to provide the password to decrypt her laptop, which the government seized with a search warrant.
With backup from digital rights groups, the woman is fighting the feds, arguing that being forced to provide her password violates the Fifth Amendment’s protection against forced self-incrimination.
Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn is expected to rule any day on whether to force defendant Ramona Fricosu to decrypt her Toshiba Satellite M305, which authorities seized from her in 2010 with a court warrant while investigating financial fraud.
The case is being closely watched by digital rights groups, as the issue has never been squarely weighed in on by federal courts, and the Supreme Court has never addressed the issue.
Related: New Year’s Resolution: Full Disk Encryption on Every Computer You Own
Research Credit: roaches
Ron Paul: Race, Ritual and the Scottish Rite
January 6th, 2012Disclosure: I sent $20 to Ron Paul’s 2012 Presidential campaign, even though I don’t vote in U.S. Presidential elections, and haven’t since I voted for Ross Perot in 1996. See: Waiting for Clarity on the Brink of Oblivion, for my opinion on national elections in the U.S.
—
While many of you might quickly write off the Secret Sun post below as a descent into apophenia, stick with it.
I didn’t know that Ron Paul’s wife was Eastern Star and his daughters were Rainbow Girls, for example. I also wasn’t aware of the 2008 Ron Paul and Freemasonry magathread over on Aftermath News.
Click through for copious links and images.
Via: Secret Sun:
But is Paul a Freemason? One fact people have pointed out is that Ron Paul’s wife is Eastern Star and his daughters are Rainbow, an arrangement essentially unheard of for a man who is not in fact a Mason himself.
In this handwritten letter (note the reverse of the Great Seal) to a “Charlotte” published on his site Paul denies being a “Freemason.” And here’s where we come to the classic non-denial denial. A “Free” Mason is a member of the Ancient, Free and Accepted Masonic Order. There are other Orders that do not define themselves as “Free.” Several, actually.
And as longtime secret Sun readers know, the Free-masons are the low men on a much bigger Masonic totem pole in which Masonic-inspired and Masonic-created fraternities and secret societies wield the true power. And here’s where we hit paydirt…
Paul is a proud member in good standing of Lambda Chi Alpha, yet another Masonically-created fraternity that is classified as a “secret” fraternity. Lambda Chi traces its origins to Boston (birthplace of American Freemasonry) and Phila(e)delphia, in Paul’s native Pennsylvania. Here’s an obituary of Lambda Chi’s founding father, John E. “Jack” Mason (seriously).
Funeral services were held on Wednesday, June 5, at the Oliver H. Bair funeral parlors in Philadelphia. Cremation and private burial were in Woodland Cemetery. Masonic services were conducted by Lodge 51, of which he was a past master, the preceding evening with his close friend and associate, past Grand High Alpha Fischer, in his station of senior warden.
That Lambda Chi is in fact a Masonic fraternity and not just a drinking club is made clear by its original seal, prominently featuring a Masonic handshake. Lambda Chi also includes an inner body called “The Mason’s Circle,” a classic example of esoteric double-entendre.
It’s current seal also features the handshake, which is overshadowed now by explicit Knights Templar (and Solar) iconography, as well as the cojoining of the cross and the crescent, which is a byword for the Order.
Research Credit: mangrove
