China: Birth Defects Soar Due to Pollution
November 1st, 2007These are just the numbers released by the diabolical Chinese regime. What are the real numbers!?
Via: Guardian / Reuters:
Birth defects in Chinese infants have soared nearly 40 percent since 2001, a government report said, and officials linked the rise to China’s worsening environmental degradation.
The rate of defects had risen from 104.9 per 10,000 births in 2001, to 145.5 in 2006, affecting nearly one in 10 families, China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission said in a report on its Web site (www.chinapop.gov.cn).
Infants with birth defects now accounted for “about 4 to 6 percent of total births every year”, the family planning agency said. Of these, 30 percent would die and 40 percent would be “disabled”.
The World Health Organisation estimates about 3 to 5 percent of children worldwide are born with birth defects.
Research Credit: Alison
AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance
October 31st, 2007Please indulge me by re-reading this extended passage from Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation:
Remember Russell Tice, the NSA SIGINT officer who had knowledge of a special access NSA operation that was so disturbing that he tried to tell the U.S. Congress about it?
What was Tice talking about here:
Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said.
An angle that we haven’t heard about. Since everyone and his dog knows about the mass surveillance, what could that angle be?
More recently, Tice said that the NSA intercepts of civilian traffic is “the tip of the iceberg” and says, again, that there is something else, something we still don’t know about. Here’s part of the interview between Tice and Reason:
REASON: What prompted you to step forward now?
Tice: Well, I’ve known this for a long time and I’ve kept my mouth shut…
REASON: You’re referring to what James Risen calls “The Program,” the NSA wiretaps that have been reported on?
Tice: No, I’m referring to what I need to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now.
Ok, so the outrage that Tice was willing to ruin his life over is only “tertiarily connected” to the operation we already new about.
Tice continues:
In my case, there’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it; no one at the Times should ever learn about these things.
The surveillance side of this is the chickenfeed. There’s something far more sinister than the simple surveillance… an angle we haven’t heard about yet.
Tice never did tell his story to Congress about this different aspect of the program.
Well, my guess is that it has something to do with providing surveillance data for this SEAS World Sim thing, and that individual Americans are being watched and potentially targeted with it. Tice’s background seems to involve a lot of traditional electronic warfare, radar and ELINT stuff. Maybe Tice’s deal involved the collection of the mobile phone GPS and/or triangulation data which would provide realtime spacial/geographic data to the SEAS system. In other words, SEAS sees you. They could bring up a map of a city and plot your path based on the information that your phone is exchanging with the mobile network.
— End Excerpt —
In summary, my thesis was that the NSA operation that Tice was involved with was related to tracking individual Americans, on the ground, in real time, using the mobile phone networks.
Ok, now, Wired’s Threat Level just published a story about Hancock, an AT&T programming language that was designed for parsing large blocks of data for surveillance purposes. Within the context of my theory above—about the operation Tice was involved with—look at this:
Programs written in Hancock work by analyzing data as it flows into a data warehouse. That differentiates the language from traditional data-mining applications which tend to look for patterns in static databases. A 2004 paper published in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems shows how Hancock code can sift calling card records, long distance calls, IP addresses and internet traffic dumps, and even track the physical movements of mobile phone customers as their signal moves from cell site to cell site.
All of these tidbits… It’s all the same operation. They have an unthinkable surveillance capability that includes all of your email, web, purchasing and telephone activity. And, if I’m right, they’re keeping track of where you are and where you’ve been. Oh yeah, wave at the birdy.
I know. It’s too incredible. Impossible, you might think.
What’s impossible is trying to grasp what the intelligence agencies did with $43.5 billion just in 2007. Yeah. Yeah. Incompetence. Inefficiency. Ripoffs. The usual $4000 toilet seat refrain. Fine. But if that’s your perspective, what’s your theory about the operation Tice was involved with?
They got something for the billions of dollars spent on this crap over the last several years and I’m pretty sure that it knows more about all of us than we can imagine.
There’s no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it…
Via: Wired:
From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company’s telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes.
An AT&T research paper published in 2001 and unearthed today by Andrew Appel at Freedom to Tinker shows how the phone company uses Hancock-coded software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls “communities of interest” — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom.
The system was built in the late 1990s to develop marketing leads, and as a security tool to see if new customers called the same numbers as previously cut-off fraudsters — something the paper refers to as “guilt by association.”
But it’s of interest to THREAT LEVEL because of recent revelations that the FBI has been requesting “communities of interest” records from phone companies under the USA PATRIOT Act without a warrant. Where the bureau got the idea that phone companies collect such data has, until now, been a mystery.
According to a letter from Verizon to a congressional committee earlier this month, the FBI has been asking Verizon for “community of interest” records on some of its customers out to two generations — i.e., not just the people that communicated with an FBI target, but also those who talked to people who talked to an FBI target. Verizon, though, doesn’t create those records and couldn’t comply. Now it appears that AT&T invented the concept and the technology. It even owns a patent on some of its data mining methods, issued to two of Hancock’s creators in 2002.
Programs written in Hancock work by analyzing data as it flows into a data warehouse. That differentiates the language from traditional data-mining applications which tend to look for patterns in static databases. A 2004 paper published in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems shows how Hancock code can sift calling card records, long distance calls, IP addresses and internet traffic dumps, and even track the physical movements of mobile phone customers as their signal moves from cell site to cell site.
With Hancock, “analysts could store sufficiently precise information to enable new applications previously thought to be infeasible,” the program authors wrote.
Lockheed Martin Co-Developing System to Predict Stability of Nations
October 31st, 2007Sounds like a plugin level task for the SEAS system.
Via: Washington Business Journal:
Lockheed Martin Corp. said Wednesday that a team lead by its Cherry Hill, N.J.-based Advanced Technology Laboratories has won a $1.3 million contract to develop a system for predicting crises and the stability of countries.
The contract is for the first phase of development, which covers 15 months. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency doled out the award to the Bethesda-based contractor.
The system is called the Predicting Stability through Analyzing Germane Events system and will be part of DARPA’s Integrated Crises Early Warning System.
Other team members working with Lockheed (NYSE:LMT) include the universities of Pennsylvania, Kansas, Washington and Georgia; Innovative Decisions Inc. and Evidence Based Research Inc. of Vienna; Interactive Data Visualization Inc. of Lexington, S.C.; and Argonne National Laboratory.
Over 1000 Imbeciles Volunteer to be Poisoned by Quacks
October 31st, 2007While the JBTs look on. Did they hand out any freedom fries?
By the way, in a comment on the story below, there was a link to Daily Dose of Terror. You’ll like that one.
Via: AZ Central:
Chandler Regional Medical Center’s flu shot drill Saturday was a hit with residents and considered a success by officials testing the hospital’s ability to respond to a bioterror or other mass medical emergency.
Cars began lining up for the free drive-though vaccinations as early as 6 a.m. even though the start time wasn’t scheduled until 7:30 a.m., said hospital spokeswoman Kimberly Day.
The clinic included 100 hospital personnel and 60 city employees, including police in full tactical gear who, in a real emergency, likely would be required to maintain order.
“They treated this like it was a real scenario so they dressed up in their gear,” Day said.
The hospital administered 1,266 flu vaccine doses through 11 a.m., going beyond the scheduled 1,000 shots planned because of strong demand.
Day said lessons learned were to add more screeners farther back in the line and have hospital staff show up earlier to deal with early birds.
“Otherwise the whole drill went extremely smoothly,” she said.
Gilbert Mercy Medical Center will have a similar free drive-though clinic from 8-11 a.m. Nov. 10 but it won’t include a police drill.
Research Credit: PD
Raising a Brand-Free Kid
October 31st, 2007Brands are everywhere, eh? Let me look around the farmlet… Cows: yes. Goats: yes. Gardens: yes. Trees: yes. Stream: yes. Brands? Nope.
Becky and I have been discussing this issue and we’re taking it very seriously. (Our child hasn’t even been born yet.) We’re already wondering if we will be able to find other homeschooling-no-tv parents around here. It’s probably not going to be easy. But then again, nobody said it was going to be easy.
Via: The Tyee:
Parents, be warned: It takes only a single visit to McDonald’s for your child to get hooked on the greasy stuff for life.
Okay, so that’s an exaggeration. But the three-year-old son of Angela Verbrugge still remembers his one and only meal under the golden arches. Which has Verbrugge worried.
And Kyla Epstein swears if her young son Max ever wants to eat there, he’ll be doing it on his own dime.
These parents aren’t raging against the health detriments of fast food. Instead, they are making a conscious effort to limit the amount of branding and advertising their kids are exposed to in all aspects of their lives; what they eat, wear, watch and play with.
It’s not easy. Brands are everywhere — literally.
Chinese Chemicals Flow Unchecked to Market
October 31st, 2007On a good day, the pharmaceutical industry is an institutionalized death racket. And on a bad day…
Via: New York Times:
In January, Honor International Pharmtech was accused of shipping counterfeit drugs into the United States. Even so, the Chinese chemical company — whose motto is “Thinking Much of Honor†— was openly marketing its products in October to thousands of buyers here at the world’s biggest trade show for pharmaceutical ingredients.
Other Chinese chemical companies made the journey to the annual show as well, including one manufacturer recently accused by American authorities of supplying steroids to illegal underground labs and another whose representative was arrested at the 2006 trade show for patent violations. Also attending were two exporters owned by China’s government that had sold poison mislabeled as a drug ingredient, which killed nearly 200 people and injured countless others in Haiti and in Panama.
Yet another chemical company, Orient Pacific International, reserved an exhibition booth in Milan, but its owner, Kevin Xu, could not attend. He was in a Houston jail on charges of selling counterfeit medicine for schizophrenia, prostate cancer, blood clots and Alzheimer’s disease, among other maladies.
While these companies hardly represent all of the nearly 500 Chinese exhibitors, more than from any other country, they do point to a deeper problem: Pharmaceutical ingredients exported from China are often made by chemical companies that are neither certified nor inspected by Chinese drug regulators, The New York Times has found.
Does Gold Know Anything About Upcoming Fed Decisions?
October 31st, 2007WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any financial instrument.
Chock this one up as something interesting to watch, one way or the other:
I was watching spot gold prices continuously before the last Fed announcement. Gold rallied before the announcement was made public. I thought: “They” knew that the rate cut was coming for sure. And then the Fed cut rates.
I’m watching gold prices, just like before, and what is gold doing before the Fed announcement this time?
Selling off.
How many thousands of articles insisted that the Fed would cut rates for sure this time? About the same number as last time. But gold is taking a bit of a dump here.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s almost definitely worthless for trading purposes; BUT if the Fed doesn’t cut, well, that’ll be very interesting, especially for gold longs short term.
The order flow is very orderly and gold has been in a neatly defined downward channel for the last several hours. It’s under 785 now, which served as a pretty good support. However, the longer interval, intraday uptrending channels are intact, despite the recent selloff. I’m drawing a key support at $765. Under $765, she’s breaking down lots of different ways. Overhead resistance is $795.
Get your popcorn ready. It’s make or break time.
Soy: Frankenfood Blood Crop
October 31st, 2007Via: Globe and Mail:
What could be a more eco-righteous symbol of the hippie vegetarian movement than a block of tofu? As it turns out, the gentle bean has become somewhat of a blood crop in South America. A recent article in The Daily Telegraph uncovered that land-rights activists are risking death, while vast swaths of rainforest are being felled to provide land for the booming soy industry in Brazil (now surpassing the United States as the top soy exporter in the world). With the added issues of widespread genetically modified and pesticide-laden crops, along with the documented dangers of eating too much unfermented soy, just how green is the soy bean?
27,200
Amount in square kilometres (an area about the size of Belgium) of Amazon rainforest cleared for monoculture soybean farming between August, 2003, and August, 2004. Three-quarters of this destruction was illegal.
75 to 89
Percentage of soybeans grown
in North America that are genetically modified. Even if you are actively avoiding GM foods, GM soy is present in approximately 60 per cent of processed foods – usually as filler or oil. Neither Canada nor the United States requires any safety testing on GM food products, despite findings of toxicity and cancer-promoting properties.
115
Celsius temperature to which soy beans are heated in the production of commercial soy milk in an attempt to remove trypsin inhibitors (they interfere with protein digestion and have been linked to pancreatic disorders), but the phytate content remains largely intact. (Phytates block the absorption of essential minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron and especially zinc in the intestinal tract.)
5
The equivalent number of birth-control pills a day that babies fed exclusively on soy formula would be consuming, according to a British toxicologist’s calculations. (Components of soy called isoflavones produce estrogen-like effects in the body, and as a result are sometimes called phytoestrogens.) Thirty to 40 per cent of babies in the United States are fed soy formula.
BOTTOM LINE
From fast food to pet food, soy is wall-to-wall in our edible products. And while organic fermented soy can be good in moderation, eating a tofu burger and washing it down with a glass of soy milk on a daily basis could prove hazardous to your health. Although the lauded Asian diet has incorporated soy for centuries, it has never included the large amounts of unfermented and heavily processed soy products consumed in North America that have toxicologists worried. When seeking out soy, look for products that are labelled “organic soy,” which means they are genetically unaltered and pesticide-free. Fermented soy products, including miso, tempeh and tamari sauce, are healthy choices (the fermentation process removes the phytates, trypsin inhibitors and hemagglutinins, which can cause clots). If only the hippies had known that soy was going to wind up a Frankenfood blood crop – chances are they would’ve just stuck to the wheatgrass.
More: Soy Alert
The $915B Bomb in Consumers’ Wallets
October 31st, 2007Via: CNN:
This past summer’s subprime meltdown involved about $900 billion in now-suspect securitized debt, reckless lending, and consumers who buckled under the weight of loans they couldn’t afford. Now another link in the consumer debt chain – credit cards – is starting to show signs of strain. And the fear that the $915 billion in U.S. credit card debt (an uncannily similar figure) may blow up has major financial institutions like Citigroup, American Express, and Bank of America strapping on their Kevlar vests.
Last month, as banks reported their worst quarterly results since 2001, concerns about rising credit card delinquencies began to make their way onto earnings announcements alongside mentions of subprime woes.
First Citigroup, reporting a 57% decline in earnings, cited higher consumer credit costs and said it would put aside $2.24 billion in loan-loss reserves to cover future defaults.
In describing the situation to analysts, CFO Gary Crittenden said Citi’s credit card holders were beginning to increase the balance on their cards or take cash advances on those cards for the first time – behavior that, in his experience (which includes seven years as CFO of American Express), can translate into future trouble. Citi said the change in loan losses was “inherent in the portfolio but not yet visible in delinquencies.”
Cloned Meat and Dairy Products on the Way
October 30th, 2007Via: Examiner:
Families and friends who share eggnog, lamb curry or beef stew this winter may not know whether the main ingredients came from cloned animals, after the governor vetoed a San Francisco lawmaker’s labeling bill.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is poised to end a voluntary moratorium on the sale of dairy and meat from cloned cattle, goats, pigs and sheep, after it ruled last year that the food is safe for humans. The agency published a health risk assessment in December that noted high death rates among cloned animals and host mothers, partly because of incidents of ‘large animal syndrome’ in cloned cattle and sheep.
A federal bill to require labels on food from cloned animals and their descendants has been stalled in Democratic-controlled congressional committees since February. A similar bill by state Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, passed the Legislature last month, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently refused to sign it.
To clone an animal, scientists move its genetic material into excavated donor embryos, which are planted in host mothers to grow as genetic doppelgängers of the prized beast. A Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology survey last year found that two-thirds of Americans are “uncomfortable†with the technology.
Migden said labels on cloned food would let consumers know and choose what they put on the dinner table, but Schwarzenegger told lawmakers in a veto statement that Migden’s proposed rules “could be unworkable, costly and unenforceable,†and might violate federal law.
About a dozen agricultural and retail groups opposed Migden’s bill. California Farm Bureau lobbyist Noelle Cremers said cloning lets livestock producers “more quickly respond to consumer demand†by replicating valued animals, and that it would be “next to impossible†to segregate food, for labeling purposes, from cloned animals and their descendents.
Labels for cloned food would mislead consumers, which would violate federal law, said Cremers, because there’s “absolutely no difference†between food from cloned and non-cloned animals.
