Category Archives: Big Brother

Tattoo will advertise your genetic flaws

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Tattoos tell a lot about you. Photo: Laura Brechtbert/Flickr CC

MIT materials experts suggest that an ink made from carbon nanotubes can be injected into diabetics, to monitor their blood glucose levels. Patients can then check their tats for any changes.

Diabetics say this beats pricking their fingers throughout the day. But the tat — which might be partially covered by wristwatch with a UV scanner on the back of it — will also mean wearing your condition on, or near, your shirtsleeve.

The technology behind the MIT sensor, described in a December 2009 issue of ACS Nano, is fundamentally different from existing sensors, says Strano. The sensor is based on carbon nanotubes wrapped in a polymer that is sensitive to glucose concentrations. When this sensor encounters glucose, the nanotubes fluoresce, which can be detected by shining near-infrared light on them. Measuring the amount of fluorescence reveals the concentration of glucose.

The researchers plan to create an “ink” of these nanoparticles suspended in a saline solution that could be injected under the skin like a tattoo. The “tattoo” would last for a specified length of time, probably six months, before needing to be refreshed.

via ‘Tattoo’ may help diabetics track their blood sugar.

Smart appliances will tell Google when you rise, and hit the shower

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Now that we know Google — the search engine giant and revolving door operation for CIA analysts — has been spying on Wi-Fi laptop users, we can expect corporations and governments to next target so-called smart appliances: toasters, clock radios (such as this prototype, left) and dishwashers connected directly to the Internet.

Add these gadgets to the smart meters being promoted by the likes of the Boston-based “consumer group,” ConsumerUnited.com (actually, the organization lists utility companies as its “partners”), and you will find it impossible to flip a switch in your house without someone knowing about it.

Here’s a bit from my column this week, below the fold, about a Wi-Fi (and therefore, apparently, vulnerable) alarm clock that factors-in your commute time, and the time it takes you to shave and shower before work, to calculate when you wake up:

“The Dynamically Programmable Alarm Clock will not make getting out of bed easier. But it will do a better job than your current bedside gadget to make sure you’re on time for that meeting.

The DPAC (egaertner.com/dpac), as its developers at Northeastern University call it, connects to Google Calendar via Wi-Fi. It then grabs your first task of the day as a starting point for its calculations.”

Note: Special thanks to Alan Watt (and his Cutting Through the Matrix listeners) for sharing your thoughts about my research, here.

via Power up, with juice from the yard – The Boston Globe.

Bombshell NY governor hopeful: Legalize pot, liberate courts

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As a native New Yorker, I can’t tell you who disappoints me more: the NYPD, for chasing dopers around town, because they’re easy marks, or the “46,000 New Yorkers” too indiscreet to avoid getting busted with a bit of weed.

What’s happened to the Big Apple’s cosmopolitanism?

“Spitzer madam” and libertarian gubernatorial candidate Kristin Davis (right) is using her notoriety, and her cleavage, to draw attention to New York’s pot problem, as she sees it, as well as gay marriage, which she supports.

Here’s Davis’ take on government waste:

“High Times recently reported that New York City recorded, in 2009, the second highest number of marijuana arrests on record. The police arrested over 46,000 people – that’s right, 46,000 – for public possession of marijuana. That’s 46,000 people bogging down the judicial system, trudging through city precincts, and otherwise diverting the police from more pressing duties. I find this ludicrous and asinine.”

Davis also wants to legalize prostitution in New York, and reform the state’s penal system, in which she did a four-month turn, after providing hookers to some of New York’s most powerful men.

via NY Gov. candidate Kristin Davis: ‘I can think of few acts as harmless as smoking a joint, even in a public park’ | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

Intel aircraft over NYC tapped cell phone calls

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SIGINT (Signal Intelligence) aircraft such as this one, bristling with antennae, swirled above New York after this week's failed bombing attempt. Photo: US Navy

That’s how officials caught up with the stumblebum Times Square terrorist:

“In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.”

via Army Intelligence Planes Led To Suspect’s Arrest – wcbstv.com.

Ronald Reagan: Occultist

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Photo: Blatant News/Flickr CC

I wonder if it means you’ve drunk the conspiracist’s Kool-Aid when you say to someone, abruptly, and for no apparent reason, “I’m not a Freemason.”

That’s what I said to a colleague at Emmanuel College, Friday, when I was blabbing about how, when working with someone, “I need to know if he’s on the level.”

Perhaps my self-consciousness was provoked by this bit about “the Great Communicator,” excerpted below (via Christopher Knowles). The piece, by occult historian Mitch Horowitz got me thinking about how our use of the language reveals our beliefs, and programming.

“At a 1957 commencement address at his alma mater Eureka College, Reagan, then a corporate spokesman for GE, sought to inspire students with this leaf from occult history. ‘This is a land of destiny,’ Reagan said, ‘and our forefathers found their way here by some Divine system of selective service gathered here to fulfill a mission to advance man a further step in his climb from the swamps.’”

You can listen to a wonderful interview with Horowitz, by Occult of Personality host, Greg Kaminsky, here.

And for Christopher Knowles’ analysis, click here.

via Political Bookworm – Reagan and the occult.

What happens at a Rainbow gathering?

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Nine bucks to Flux will buy you some answers. — MB

Previous gathering. Photo: Alexander Konovalenko/Flickr CC

Journalist and videographer Flux Rostrum, whose work has appeared on Democracy Now and at other prominent outlets, operates the NOmadjik Media Bus — the green grease-burning rig that’s brought us stories from coal country and NOLA, to just about everywhere else that real news is happening.

This summer, Flux will be working with the Petrol-Free Gypsy Carnival Tour, and reporting from the anarchic Rainbow Gathering — a be-in with roots in the 1960′s, which is now threatened by police activity in US national parks.

Reporters such as those from Flux’s Mobile Broadcast News protect our freedom to congregate in our publicly-owned lands.

I’ve just added my $9 to the pool. Please join me!

“Donations will be used to subsidize the NOmadjik Media Bus which will be providing media assistance this summer to the Petrol Free Gypsy Tour in May and vital off grid media distribution infrastructure on the ground at the National Rainbow Gathering in June & July.”

via Mobile Broadcast News | Flux Rostrum’s Fundraiser on Crowdrise.

Singularity watch: US Airmen to serve in parallel universe

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Now in Second Life. Photo: US National Guard

The US Air Force, which already owns 12 regions in the virtual world, Second Life, now plans to give each new recruit a duplicate copy of himself to manage for the rest of his career.

The Airman in the first run of a proposed, permanent shift by the US military into virtual reality, will be assigned to a base that matches the one he has outside of Linden Lab’s servers, almost exactly.

The Airman’s avatar, meanwhile, will have a face that crinkles with age. His avatar will also rack up kills, and receive medals, in parallel with his real world rewards.

From a story about the proposal:

“This would take place in simulated worlds that mirror the service’s actual facilities. ‘Everyone who comes into the Air Force will be given an avatar, and that avatar travels with them, grows with them, changes appearance with them,’ said Larry Clemons, of the Air Education and Training Command. ‘It will provide them a history of where they’ve been and a notion of where they’re going.’”

The experiment also reiterates the US military’s commitment to mastering virtual reality — after most people are unable to distinguish between their first and second lives.

That’s what will happen in the Singularity, a forthcoming period of advanced technological development, in which genetics, nanotechnology and robotics converge, and humans achieve immortality.

The Singularity has been explored and described by Ray Kurzweil and others in the transhuman movement.

And only two years ago, the US Army attempted to define what it might mean to be a leader in the Singularity.

via Airmen to Live Out Their Careers In Cyberspace.

Popular Science makes pitch for "Mark of the Beast"

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Microsoft proposes tattooing patients. PopSci appears to like the idea. — MB

Photo: Yuichiro C. Katsumoto/Flickr CC

You might take this PopSci bit about an “invisible,” ultraviolet tattoo ID system, for another inconsequential workup of an industry press release.

But what bothers me about this webby, is that it uncritically pushes the RFID industry’s latest, dubious storyline: that the only way to be “truly safe” (from phantom villains, hacking into pacemakers) is with “permanent,” implanted devices and IDs.

This graf, for example, exemplifies the imprecise prose George Orwell describes, in Politics and the English Language. Rather than encouraging critical thinking, it conceals and prevents it:

“More and more implantable devices, like pacemakers or defibrillators, are turning to wireless signals as a means to communicate with external devices, but in doing so they open themselves to security breaches. Several solutions are in the works that tackle this problem by upping device defenses, but by piling on security measures, yet another risk emerges: that at a critical time an authorized physician might not be able to access the device.”

The graf — as does the rest of the piece — tosses up unspecified threats, against which it proposes tattooing patients (i.e., everyone). In all that vagueness, the vulnerabilities posed by implanted devices become infinitely vast and dark.

Without those threats, the RFID industry will have a tough time tattooing serial numbers on people for whom the tagging, tracking, and tracing of humans remains a bitter, and fresh, memory, and Christian end-timers, for whom the Mark of the Beast is a very real fear.

via Tattooing Patients With UV Ink Could Protect Pacemakers From Hackers | Popular Science.

The PopSci piece uses this Microsoft paper, proposing the tattoos, as its primary source.

US Government to Scrutinize Patriot Radio

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Alan Watt makes the MSM, again, this time for hosting his show on RBN. Also, a prediction: By 2011, the federal government will confirm that it is directly investigating RBN, or another underground radio network. — MB

Photo: Kyle May/Flickr CC

John Stadtmiller’s Republic Broadcasting Network is taking heat in the Christian Science Monitor, for broadcasting a show hosted by the head of the Guardians of the Free Republics.

Stadtmiller, a competent broadcaster, appears to be getting out in front of this week’s story, about the Guardians’ apparently clumsy attempt to get dozens of US governors to step-down. (The word “investigation” alone is enough to make a broadcaster’s heart skip a beat.)

RBN also broadcasts Alan Watt’s Cutting Through the Matrix. The weeknight show features excellent insights — often on science and technology news stories — from Watt, one of the underground’s best-known conspiracy historians. (Watt’s commentary has informed my MSM reporting on RFID technologies, for example.)

But the network also airs a show by one, rabid anti-Semite, along with other voices that might not otherwise find a significant audience. And it runs ads from Holocaust-denying publishers:

“Republican Broadcasting Network is a satellite, shortwave, and Internet radio station that features 31 shows with names like ‘Cutting Through the Matrix, ‘Govern America,’ and ‘Road Warrior Radio.’ It has loose ties to the American Free Press newspaper, which Michael calls “the most important newspaper of the radical right.’”

Watt receives no money from RBN for his show, which is supported by direct book sales and donations to his website.

via Guardians of the free Republics tied to Texas radio station / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com.