Al Qaeda Commander of NATO’s Bloody Reign of Terror in Tripoli is the Monster Abdel Hakim Belhadj, aka Abdel Hakim al-Hasadi, Friend of Osama Bin Laden, former US POW, and Infamous Killer of US Soldiers in Afghanistan
September 1st, 2011Via: Tarpley:
According to the London Daily Telegraph of March 26, Darna (also transliterated as Derna or Darnah), a key city in the rebel heartland between Benghazi in Tobruk, is commanded by al-Hasidi, an al Qaeda terrorist controller who trained and hobnobbed with Osama bin Laden at the Khost terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. Hasidi boasts of having sent 25 fighters to fight US and NATO forces in Afghanistan; one wonders how many they managed to kill. Hasidi was a US prisoner of war after being captured by the Pakistanis, but tells the Wall Street Journal of April 2 that he now hates the US only “less than 50%” hinting that Americans can redeem themselves by appeasing Al Qaeda with arms, money, political power, and diplomatic support. At his side in the city leadership is Sufian bin Kumu, Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur, another terrorist who was an inmate at Guantánamo Bay for six years. Also among the Darna city fathers is al-Barrani, a devoted member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which merged with Al Qaeda in 2007.
This gaggle of fanatics, psychotics, and criminals is billed by the CIA media as an effective ruling elite for the future democratic governance of Libya. In reality, the Benghazi rebel council, heavily larded with al Qaeda terrorists, could only preside over the descent of the country into a chaos of tribalism, warlords, and criminal syndicates which would spell the end of civilization itself in the area. Precisely this appears to be the goal of US policy, and not just in Libya.
Research Credit: getdusted
Billing Dispute Reveals Details of Secret CIA Rendition Flights
September 1st, 2011Via: Washington Post:
On Aug. 12, 2003, a Gulfstream IV aircraft carrying six passengers took off from Dulles International Airport and flew to Bangkok with fueling stops in Cold Bay, Alaska, and Osaka, Japan.
Before it returned four days later, the plane also touched down in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates and Ireland. As these unusual flights happened, U.S. officials took custody of an Indonesian terrorist, Riduan Isamuddin, who had been captured in Thailand and would spend the next three years being shuttled among secret prisons operated by the CIA.
The Gulfstream IV’s itinerary, as well as the $339,228.05 price tag for the journey, are among the details of shadowy CIA flights that have emerged in a small Upstate New York courthouse in a billing dispute between contractors. The court documents offer a rare glimpse of the costs and operations of the controversial rendition program.
For all the secrecy that once surrounded the CIA’s program, a significant part of its operation was entrusted to very small aviation companies whose previous experience involved flying sports teams across the country.
The August 2003 flights — and dozens of others to locations such as Bucharest, Romania; Baku, Azerbaijan; Cairo; Djibouti; Islamabad, Pakistan; and Tripoli, Libya — were organized by Sportsflight, a one-man aircraft brokerage business on Long Island. It secured a plane from Richmor Aviation, based near the Columbia County Airport in Hudson, N.Y. Richmor eventually sued Sportsflight for breach of contract. In the process, the costs and itineraries of numerous CIA flights became part of the court record.
In other cases, the government has invoked the “state secrets” privilege to shut down litigation over the CIA program, but the case in Columbia County proceeded uninterrupted in an almost empty courtroom. There were only two witnesses at the bench trial: Richmor President Mahlon Richards and the owner of Sportsflight, Donald Moss.
In a 2009 judgment, largely upheld on appeal this year, Judge Paul Czajka awarded Richmor more than $1 million.
Lasers Could Be Used to Start or Stop Rainfall
September 1st, 2011Via: Guardian:
Ever since ancient farmers called on the gods to send rain to save their harvests, humans have longed to have the weather at their command.
That dream has now received a boost after researchers used a powerful laser to produce water droplets in the air, a step that could ultimately help trigger rainfall.
While nothing can produce a downpour from dry air, the technique, called laser-assisted water condensation, might allow some control over where and when rain falls if the atmosphere is sufficiently humid.
Researchers demonstrated the technique in field tests after hauling a mobile laser laboratory the size of a small garage to the banks of the Rhône near lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Records from 133 hours of firings revealed that intense pulses of laser light created nitric acid particles in the air that behaved like atmospheric glue, binding water molecules together into droplets and preventing them from re-evaporating.
Within seconds, these grew into stable drops a few thousandths of a millimetre in diameter: too small to fall as rain, but large enough to encourage the scientists to press on with the work.
“We have not yet generated raindrops – they are too small and too light to fall as rain. To get rain, we will need particles a hundred times the size, so they are heavy enough to fall,” said Jérôme Kasparian, a physicist at the University of Geneva. A report on the tests appears in the journal Nature Communications.
With improvements, shooting lasers into the sky could either help trigger or prevent showers. One possibility might be to create water droplets in air masses drifting towards mountains. The air would cool as it rose over these, causing the water droplets to grow and eventually fall.
An alternative might be to stave off an immediate downpour by creating so many tiny droplets in the air that none grew large enough to fall. “Maybe one day this could be a way to attenuate the monsoon or reduce flooding in certain areas,” Kasparian said.
Efforts to bring the weather under control have become a matter of national pride in China, where the Beijing meterological bureau has an office devoted to weather modification. In 2009, the department claimed success after 18 jets and 432 explosive rockets laden with chemicals were sent into the skies to “seed” clouds. The chemicals, usually dry ice or silver iodide, provide a surface for water vapour to condense on, and supposedly trigger downpours from pregnant skies.
Chinese Want to Place an Asteroid in Earth Orbit and Mine It – “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
August 31st, 2011Fantastic plan, comrade!
In other news: Chinese Bullet Train Crash Kills 40.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Most of the discussion about near Earth asteroids focuses on whether they represent a threat to Earth and what to do take if they turn out to be heading our way.
But today, Hexi Baoyin and pals at Tsinghua University in Beijing offer a different take. The question they ask is how to place an asteroid in orbit around the Earth.
Their conclusion is a little surprising. They say it’s relatively straightforward to nudge a small asteroid in our direction. They’ve even discovered a number of candidates nearby that we might want to bring as little closer.
…
A particularly good candidate is a 10-meter object called 2008EA9 which will pass within a million kilometres or so of Earth in 2049. 2008EA9 has a very similar orbital velocity as Earth’s. Baoyin and co calculate that it could be fired into Earth orbit by changing its velocity by 410 metres per second. That’s tiny.
This nudge should place the asteroid in an orbit at about twice the distance of the Moon. From there it can be studied and mined, they say.
Scott Air Force Base: “Normal Suspicious Package” Sends Three People to Hospital
August 31st, 2011Via: Washington Post:
Three people from Scott Air Force Base in southwestern Illinois were hospitalized with rashes Wednesday and parts of the facility were evacuated after a suspicious package arrived at the base’s mail center.
Capt. Kathleen Ferrero said 14 people were decontaminated on site and the three others were treated at a hospital in Belleville, Ill., then released. All were near the area of the base’s mail center and may have been exposed, she said.
Air Force Lt. Benjamin Garland said the hospitalized people showed no symptoms other than the rashes.
Ferrero said she did not know what the package contained and would not address media reports that it smelled like sulphur.
With the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks less than two weeks away, Scott spokesman Thomas Kistler said no extra precautions were in place on the base. He said officials are not treating this as a potential terrorist incident.
“I think they’re treating it as a normal suspicious package right now,” he said.
The package discovered Wednesday morning prompted precautionary evacuations of the base’s education center, bowling alley and other services near the mail center. Kistler said officials were confident there was no reason for anyone else to leave.
“We have evacuated an area around the package but we haven’t enlarged the evacuation area,” he said. “We don’t anticipate there’s any danger to the rest of the base or to the community as a whole.”
AI vs. AI. Two Chatbots Talking to Each Other
August 31st, 2011HAHA. Isn’t it reassuring to know that these types of systems are trading stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives millions of times per second?
Never mind the killer robot applications…
Have a nice day!
Via: Cornell University / YouTube:
Research Credit: jakdmsy
‘Smart’ CCTV Could Track Rioters
August 31st, 2011Yeah, in other words, ‘smart’ CCTV could track anyone.
I’d be shocked if it turned out to be the case that this wasn’t already operational for the British equivalent of MAIN CORE, assuming there is one (which I do).
Via: BBC:
CCTV that can automatically monitor criminal behaviour and track suspects is being developed by UK scientists.
Researchers at Kingston University have created a system that uses artificial intelligence to recognise specific types of behaviour, such as someone holding a gun.
The technology is capable of following a person across multiple cameras.
Privacy campaigners warned that it might be used to target groups such as political protesters.
However, the developers insisted that their invention would allow police to focus on law breakers and erase images of innocent civilians.
The technology works by teaching a computer to recognise specific types of public behaviour, known as “trigger events”.
Research Credit: noncompliant
Obama DOJ: John Yoo Memos on Spying Must Stay Secret
August 31st, 2011Via: The Atlantic:
What was Bush Administration lawyer John Yoo thinking when he wrote various legal memos declaring that the president has the power to spy on American citizens without getting a warrant or telling anyone about it?
The Obama Administration isn’t telling:
The Obama administration has refused to declassify a secret memo from the George W. Bush presidency that justified the warrantless spying conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Matthew Aid, a writer who’s covered the NSA and surveillance policy, requested a copy of a 2001 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion by John Yoo that discussed the legal grounds for electronic spying without permission from a special federal court. The Department of Justice mostly denied Aid’s Freedom of Information Act request, saying the redacted information in the OLC opinion was “classified, covered by non-disclosure provisions contained in other federal statutes, and is protected by the deliberative process privilege.”
They did release 8 sentences from a 21 page memo.
Said John Yoo: “Intelligence gathering in direct support of military operations does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures.”
Related: Appeals Court to Weigh NSA Dragnet Surveillance
Research Credit: noncompliant
Seasonic Fanless Power Supplies
August 31st, 2011I’m doing more book length reading at my computer and the power supply fan noise just had to go. I’d estimate that the power supply was making about 75% of the total system noise. Maybe 15% was CPU fan noise, with the rest of the noise split among the video card fan, case fan and hard drive.
I wasn’t going to go full freak and build a liquid cooled rig. Since I just wanted a large reduction in noise, I focused on the power supply, which was the core of the problem. After a bit of research, I found a totally silent power supply: The Seasonic 460 Watt X-Series Fanless Power Supply. This thing is not quiet. It’s silent. 0 dBA.
Seasonic X-Series 460 Watt Power Supply - Look Ma, no fans!
I bought and installed this unit and WOW, although it costs much more than commodity-class power supplies, the drastic reduction in overall system noise is very worth the added expense (in my opinion). I just wanted it so that I could concentrate more effectively, but maybe some of you could use this for your home theater computers or studio sound recording rigs, etc.
I’m going to try the cheap and allegedly good Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus as an alternative to my stock Intel Core 2 Quad heatsink and fan. Apparently, this Cooler Master unit is very quiet at the lowest (600 RPM) speed, which is how it would run on my system most of the time.
That’s all I have planned for now. My case and junky Radeon 3650 GPU fans hardly make any noise at all, so I’ll just be leaving them alone. And I’m not ready to shell out for a solid state drive just yet.
But…
If you want to take this a bit further, without going to liquid cooling, you could use a solid state drive and a passively cooled video card, which are both completely silent.
Just a quick note on passively cooled video cards: There are plenty of low performance / silent video cards out there. But I got curious about how far gaming cards went with passive cooling. As of right now, the king daddy of silent gaming video cards is the PowerColor SCS3, which is a Radeon HD6850. You have to see the heatsink on this card:
Powercolor SCS3 - Radeon 6850
HAHA. Good luck fitting that thing in your case. Anyway, that’s all the quiet computing trivia I have for you this morning.
Disclosure: I have no relationship with any of the companies who’s products are mentioned in this post. I am an Amazon affiliate.
Cryptogon Readers Sign Up for Hosting with BlueHost
August 31st, 2011Thanks to the owners of three different domains who signed up for hosting with BlueHost. I received $270 as a result.
None of the sites are active yet. If you signed up for hosting and want me to mention your site here, just send me an email from the domain that you used to set up your BlueHost account and I’ll post it. Thanks again for your support.
