U.S. Savings Bonds Go Paperless
January 5th, 2012*chortle*
Via: CBS News:
U.S. savings bonds enclosed in birthday cards have been an American tradition for more than 70 years.
But from now on, purchasers will have to be computer savvy.
As of January 1, the U.S. Treasury declared that all bonds must be purchased online through the website www.treasurydirect.gov.
The buyer can download a “gift certificate” indicating the amount of the bond, and for what occasion.
“It’s not quite the same thing as having the embossed savings bond being given to the young person,” says Bob Fragasso, CEO of the Fragasso Financial Group, downtown.
UK Police Treating Remains Discovered at Queen’s Estate as Murder
January 5th, 2012Via: AP:
It’s a case that Sherlock Holmes would have loved to unravel: British police say a woman’s body has been found at the vast rural estate in Norfolk where Queen Elizabeth II and her family celebrated New Year’s.
Police are treating the case as a murder, and an autopsy was conducted Tuesday to learn more about the cause of death and the identity of the victim.
The body was found on New Year’s Day three miles from the elegant country home of Sandringham in eastern England where the royals held a New Year’s Day celebration in rural splendor.
Part of the nearly 20,000-acre royal estate is open to the public, and the body was found in a forest at Anmer, a hamlet of several dozen people on the estate 115 miles northeast of London.
…
So far, there are more questions than answers about the strange discovery, which has shaken the normally quiet region where the queen and her family typically enjoy riding horses and shooting parties.
Buckingham Palace officials are keeping mum about the murder case, referring callers to the police, and police have released few details. It is not yet clear how old the victim was, how long her body had been in the woods, if she was murdered on the grounds or if her remains were put there after the slaying.
“We are at the very early stages of the investigation and it could be a complex inquiry,” Detective Chief Inspector Jes Fry said Tuesday. “The body had been there for some time.”
Fry said authorities were examining missing person reports and unsolved cases around the country to see if there were any possible links.
Research Credit: EB
New York Governor Wants State to Take DNA Samples from More People Convicted of Crimes
January 5th, 2012Via: AFP:
New York’s governor on Wednesday proposed making the state the first in the country to take mandatory DNA samples from anyone convicted of a crime, including relatively lesser offenses.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, in an annual “State of the State” speech to the New York legislature, said currently DNA was collected in less than half of crimes on the books.
“I will propose a bill requiring the collection of a DNA sample from any person convicted of a felony or Penal Law misdemeanor,” said Cuomo, a former federal prosecutor and New York state attorney general.
Cuomo said that applying DNA collection to all criminals would both help law-enforcement bodies fight serious crime and protect against wrongful convictions.
Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives
January 5th, 2012Be warned: If you are having difficulties with maintaining appearances at work, this book won’t make it any easier.
For understanding the professional, the concept of “ideology” will emerge as much more useful than that of “skill.” But what is ideology, exactly? Ideology is thought that justifies action, including routine day-to-day activity. It is your ideology that determines your gut reaction to something done, say, by the president (you feel it is right or wrong), by protesters (you feel it is justified or unjustified), by your boss (you feel it is fair or unfair), by a coworker (you feel it is reasonable or unreasonable) and so on. More importantly, your ideology justifies your own actions to yourself. Economics may bring you back to your employer day after day, but it is ideology that makes that activity feel like a reasonable or unreasonable way to spend your life.
Work in general is becoming more and more ideological, and so is the workforce that does it. As technology has made production easier, employment has shifted from factories to offices, where work revolves around inherently ideological activities, such as design, analysis, writing, accounting, marketing and other creative tasks. Of course, ideology has been a workplace issue all along: Employers have always scrutinized the attitudes and values of the people they hire, to protect themselves from unionists, radicals and others whose “bad attitude” would undermine workplace discipline. Today, however, for a relatively small but rapidly growing fraction of jobs, employers will carefully assess your attitude for an additional reason: its crucial role in the work itself. On these jobs, which are in every field, from journalism and architecture to education and commercial art, your view of the world threatens to affect not only the quantity and quality of what you produce, but also the very nature of the product. These jobs require strict adherence to an assigned point of view; and so a prerequisite for employment is the willingness and ability to exercise what I call ideological discipline.
This book is about the people who get these jobs and become members of the ideological workforce—that is, professionals. My thesis is that the criteria by which individuals are deemed qualified or unqualified to become professionals involve not just technical knowledge as is generally assumed, but also attitude—in particular, attitude toward working within an assigned political and ideological framework. I contend, for example, that all tests of technical knowledge, such as the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) or the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), are at the same time tests of attitude and that the examinations used to assess professional qualification are no exception. I consider in detail how the neutral-looking technical questions on such examinations probe the candidate’s attitude. The qualifying attitude, I find, is an uncritical, subordinate one, which allows professionals to take their ideological lead from their employers and appropriately fine-tune the outlook that they bring to their work. The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology. The political and intellectual timidity of today’s most highly educated employees is no accident.
As attitudes and values have come to play an increasingly important role in the production of goods and services, employers have faced a choice: either hire huge numbers of managers to direct every move of the large number of employees who now do politically sensitive work, or hire employees who can be trusted politically and merely check the results of their work. Employers have pursued both strategies simultaneously. But the first one is limited by its cost, and so today every country in the world, from the United States to China, has a growing cadre of people trusted to do work that requires making decisions based not on detailed instructions but on an assigned ideology.
Related: They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer
U.S. to Send Troops to Israel
January 5th, 2012Watch that CNN clip with the soldier talking about voting for Ron Paul before you read the story below:
Via: Global Research:
In one of the most blacked-out stories in America right now, the US military is preparing to send thousands of US troops, along with US Naval anti-missile ships and accompanying support personnel, to Israel.
It took forever to find a second source for confirmation of this story and both relatively mainstream media outlets are in Israel. With one source saying the military deployment and corresponding exercises are to occur in January, the source providing most of the details suggests it will occur later this spring. Calling it not just an “exercise”, but a “deployment”, the Jerusalem Post quotes US Lt.-Gen Frank Gorenc, Commander of the US Third Air Force based in Germany. The US Commander visited Israel two weeks ago to confirm details for “the deployment of several thousand American soldiers to Israel.” In an effort to respond to recent Iranian threats and counter-threats, Israel announced the largest ever missile defense exercise in its history. Now, it’s reported that the US military, including the US Navy, will be stationed throughout Israel, also taking part.
While American troops will be stationed in Israel for an unspecified amount of time, Israeli military personnel will be added to EUCOM in Germany. EUCOM stands for United States European Command.
In preparation for anticipated Iranian missile attacks upon Israel, the US is reportedly bringing its THAAD, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, and ship-based Aegis ballistic missile systems to Israel. The US forces will join Israeli missile defense systems like the Patriot and Arrow. The deployment comes with “the ultimate goal of establishing joint task forces in the event of a large-scale conflict in the Middle East”.
A Brief History of Plutocracy
January 5th, 2012Via: Robin Upton at Chaos Computer Club:
This whistlestop re-telling of world economic history squeezes 12,000 years of history into 18 slides. Its focus is the changing nature of money and the rise of the monied class in US and Europe.
It outlines how the modern system of banking was instituted, how international organising allowed the power of the rich to gradually eclipse that of national governments, how war was managed for profit, and how the super-rich set about using the organs of the state in an effort to secure their position of control.
CNN Pulls the Plug on Live Feed of Soldier Talking About Voting for Ron Paul
January 4th, 2012Update: Soldier in Trouble for Praising Ron Paul on National TV
Noguru sent this in.
Via: ABC:
Rep. Ron Paul likes to silence the GOP rivals who criticize his foreign policy as “dangerous” by reminding them that he receives more financial support from military personal than all the other candidates combined.
But the Army is now investigating whether a 28-year old reservist breached military protocol when he praised Paul’s foreign policy positions on national television during a Paul rally Tuesday night.
The soldier, Cpl. Jesse Thorsen, walked on stage and lobbed praise on the Texas congressman, calling his foreign policy “better than any candidate out there.”
At one point, Thorsen stopped, reached out his hand out to Paul and exclaimed, “I’m flabbergasted right now. This is an incredible moment for me. It’s like meeting a rock star.”
The Department of Defense policy does not prevent soldiers from advocating for a political candidate, but active duty troops wearing a uniform are expected to avoid activities that “imply official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement.” Thorsen is not active duty.
—End Update—
Flashback/Classic: CNN and PSYOPS:
Military personnel from the Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, have until recently been working in CNN’s hq in Atlanta.
CNN is up in arms about our report in the last issue of CounterPunch concerning the findings of the Dutch journalist, Abe de Vries about the presence of US Army personnel at CNN, owned by Time-Warner. We cited an article by de Vries which appeared on February 21 in the reputable Dutch daily newspaper Trouw, originally translated into English and placed on the web by Emperor’s Clothes. De Vries reported that a handful of military personnel from the Third Psychological Operations Battalion, part of the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group based at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, had worked in CNN’s hq in Atlanta.
De Vries quoted Major Thomas Collins of the US Army Information Service as having confirmed the presence of these Army psy-ops experts at CNN, saying, “Psy-ops personnel, soldiers and officers, have been working in CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta through our program, ‘Training with Industry’. They worked as regular employees of CNN. Conceivably, they would have worked on stories during the Kosovo war. They helped in the production of news.”
Via: YouTube:
H.R. 3166: Enemy Expatriation Act
January 4th, 2012My guess is that, “supporting hostilities” will mean anything the maniac state makes up at its whim about your behavior, reading choices, purchases, etc.
Via: GovTrack:
112th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 3166
To add engaging in or supporting hostilities against the United States to the list of acts for which United States nationals would lose their nationality.
Recommended Links for WordPress
January 4th, 2012Nathaniel Taintor, of Golden Apples Design, is now actively developing Recommended Links for WordPress. This plugin will allow WordPress administrators to offer Reddit-like social news functionality to their existing users.
For years, I have struggled to offer Cryptogon readers a good way of sharing links with me and each other. Reddit is an open air nut house, and there are currently no—that’s right, NO—good social news software offerings available for free, or at any price. Year in and year out, this discrepancy persists.
Some work has been done to allow WordPress to be used for social news, but what is needed is a way for the existing blog content to continue to appear as usual while reader generated story submissions exist in their own ecosystem. The site’s readers need to be able to vote links up or down, sort the links by various criteria and leave comments on the submissions. While a number of people like to write on various threads that such a system would be trivial to create… talk is cheap. Nobody has actually done it.
Recommended Links is going to be the solution.
If you run a WordPress blog that values story submissions from readers, Nathaniel wants your input right now. Consider installing Recommended Links and let him know what you think it needs.
Scientists Grow Sperm in Laboratory
January 3rd, 2012Via: Telegraph:
The development opens up the possibility of infertile men being able to father their own children rather than using donor sperm.
Researchers in Germany and Israel were able to grow mouse sperm from a few cells in a laboratory dish.
In a world first a team headed by Professor Stefan Schlatt, at Muenster University in Germany, were able to grow sperm by using germ cells. These are the cells in testicles that are responsible for sperm production.
Scientists grew the sperm by surrounding the germ cells in a special compound called agar jelly to create an environment similar to that found in testicles.
Prof. Mahmoud Huleihel, who also grew the sperm at Israel’s Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, said: “I believe it will eventually be possible to routinely grow human male sperm to order by extracting tissue containing germ cells from a man’s testicle and stimulating sperm production in the laboratory.”
