Ever closer. Vortex, lower right, is the slick, about to make landfall. For the live viewer at NASA, click the link, below.
via NASA.
NASA sat tracks impending Gulf oil devastation
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Category Archives: homeland security
What happens at a Rainbow gathering?
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.
Popular Science makes pitch for "Mark of the Beast"
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
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.
Shotgun shell found outside Milton High School
Photo: Evil Erin/Flickr CC
In case you all missed it, here’s the email I received from the Milton Pubic Schools Dept. within the hour:
“Subject: 3/15/10 – Message Regarding Milton High School
Date: Monday, March 15, 2010 3:27 PM
From: ALERTNOW Message from Milton Public Schools <mgormley@miltonps.org>
To: <mark@baard.com>
Conversation: 3/15/10 – Message Regarding Milton High SchoolMilton High School was placed in a “Stay In Place/Lock Down” this morning at approximately 11:30am.
The Milton Police were immediately contacted when a shotgun shell was found outside the main entrance of the school building.
As a precautionary measure and in consultation with the Milton Police Dept, Milton High School went into “Stay In Place/Lockdown” Mode.
The Milton Police then conducted a canine search of the school building – at no time did the dogs come in contact with the students.
In addition, school bags were checked by Milton High School Administrators and police for a possible weapon. No weapon was found.
At no time were students in jeopardy.
We would like to thank the Milton Police, the Milton High School staff and students for their patience and flexibility during this process.
If you have any questions, please contact the Milton High School main office or the Superintendent’s office.”
Cannabis, computers, conspiracies: latest MSM recipe for disaster
The takeaway, from this week's Pentagon shooting: Pot will make you crazy. Photo: nimbin mardi grass 2009/Flickr CC
The Washington Post today describes John Patrick Bedell as “a troubled 36-year-old Californian who loved marijuana, computers, and conspiracy theories.”
If those interests form some kind of explosive mix, as the WaPo story indicates, then we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.
Suspicions that 9/11 was an inside job are widespread, as are pot use and technophilia — the latter two, at least, are directly supported by the government.
Bedell pulled a gun at an entrance to the Pentagon this week not because of his interests, or his character, but — as Bedell’s parents rightly put it — his mental illness.
I’d be interested, then, to know which psychiatric and psychological treatments Bedell did get, if any. That will go further to answering the “why” of this story, than a list of hobbies.
Here’s a bit of the sensational stuff, though, from WaPo:
Bedell left an electronic trail thick with written, video, and audio manifestos. In an audio address posted on the Internet, he suggested that after the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy the United States had been infiltrated by a cabal of gangsters he called the “coup regime.’’ Bedell believed that the group has continued manipulating the country “up to the present day’’ and was probably responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war.
via Gunman troubled, friends say – The Boston Globe.
Pentagon shooter aimed to create synthetic life
Photo: Zoe/Flickr CC
Mad scientist proposed creating self-assembling nanobots and “smart dust” with DNA.
This week’s anti-government, lone gunman, John Patrick Bedell, is another perfect poster boy for the government’s crackdown on the pro-pot and 9/11 truth movements.
Bedell, who was killed at a subway entrance to the Pentagon, was bent on according to the LA Times,
“revealing the truth behind the 9/11 “demolitions.”
Bedell also bore a grudge against the authorities, who busted him with weed at his California home some time ago.
But the mad scientist’s greatest passion may have been bringing about the Singularity — that future point in human evolution, predicted by Ray Kurzweil and others, when genetics, nanotechnology and robotics become a single science, reality and virtual reality become indistinguishable, and people become immortal.
Bedell, in 2006, proposed blending DNA with standard, integrated circuits, to create self-propagating “smart dust,” tiny, self-propagating — indeed, living — sensors and robots that could provide governments will blanket surveillance capabilities.
And in this way, Bedell shares something with another gun-wielding nerd in the news: UAH shooter, Amy Bishop, designer of a cyborg mechanism, the Neuristor.
Here’s Bedell’s proposal for the DNA-integrated circuit hybrids:
via Pentagon shooter apparently doubted 9/11 facts in Web posting – latimes.com.
Click here for a primer on synthetic biology.
Interested in tech from the Hub? Check out this week’s User Friendly
Latin America to UN drug warriors: Put this in your pipe, and smoke it
Photo: Esparta Palma/Flickr CC
Mexico, Argentina and Brazil are winding-down their roles in the no-win-scenario, war on drugs being waged (purportedly on Latin America’s behalf) by the United States.
And the UN is frustrated:
“The Vienna-based International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), in its annual report released today, stated its concern over Latin America’s “growing movement to decriminalize the possession of controlled drugs, in particular cannabis.”
Homeland Security loses track of its guns
While one was recovered — with a gang’s logo etched on the barrel — an internal report (below), finds that the US Department of Homeland Security lost a bunch of guns last year.
From the report:
The Department of Homeland Security, through its components, did not adequately safeguard and control its firearms. Components reported 289 firearms as lost during FYs 2006 through 2008.
Coke's face-match trickery makes suckers of Facebookers
Barr. DavidAll06/Flickr CC
I sure hate what Bob Barr put us through, back when he was leading the effort to impeach Bill Clinton.
But the man makes perfect sense when he’s talking about the privacy threats posed by intrusive, government spy technologies.
Here, Barr reveals the problem with the ungodly mashup of facial recognition software and social media, in Coca Cola “Facial Profiler” campaign:
Coca Cola is a multi-national corporation which means it operates in conjunction with and under the watchful eye of our and other national governments around the globe. Posting a picture on Coke’s website or Facebook may on the surface appear to be a harmless act; but giving a multinational corporation access to a digitized photo of one’s self contributes to the building of a globally accessible database that can be used for facial-recognition cameras and systems. The privacy implications associated with having potentially hundreds of millions of digital pictures from people throughout the world in a database or databases is astounding.
The CIA-backed technology that searches your face for signs of “bad intents” already exists, of course.
Poppa Baard. Photo: Chris Taggart
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This bit reminds me, by the way, of my own observation last October that Bob Barr looks like a Baard.