BIG BROTHER

How Spy Chips Are Quietly Reshaping Privacy

You may not realize it, but that pack of disposable razors you just bought can enable you to be tracked wherever you go. Same with that discount card you used to buy the razors in the first place.
Somewhere, a computer is collating and tabulating all of your information from the moment you step into the store, and using it to generate a "profile" of you for unknown purposes.
Not only that, but soon you could have a little microchip implanted in your body to be electronically "tagged" and identified in order to build a record of your medical information, accessible anywhere in the world -- and for other purposes you may not know about.

[Radio frequency identifiers (RFID chips) are a reality in everything from retail business to medical records.]

BIG BROTHER

Rumsfeld Spies on Quakers and Grannies

The Pentagon has a file on an anti-war group that was gathering at the Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida, to plan a counter-recruiting effort at local high schools.
That group of Quakers constitutes a “threat,” according to a 400-page Pentagon document.

ENDLESS WAR

The Other Army

Transporting firearms from the United States required legal documents that the company couldn't wait for; instead, in Iraq, it got Department of Defense permission to visit the dumping grounds of captured enemy munitions. The company took mounds of AK-47's and culled all that were operable.
So Triple Canopy had vehicles and it had assault rifles, and when it needed cash in Iraq, to pay employees or buy equipment or build camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago, the company's home, with a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. ''All the people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,''' Mann said. ''Or, 'We need two backpacks.''' Each pack held half a million dollars.
And in this way, one of the largest private security companies in Iraq was born. In this way, Triple Canopy went off to war. Plenty of other companies have done the same, some that were more established before the American invasion, some less.

EARTH CHANGES

Global warming 'past the point of no return'

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.
They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

Steve Connor: Vicious cycle will affect climate of northern hemisphere

Since the first satellites began monitoring the frozen ocean of the Arctic 27 years ago they have given us a bird's eye view of the relentless loss of the northern hemisphere's floating sea ice.
There is an annual cycle of sea ice growth and retreat each polar winter and summer, but the monthly averages collected since 1978 show an unambiguous, long-term decline. Satellite data shows the sea ice in September - the month when it melts to its minimum extent each year - has declined by about 8 per cent each decade.

[Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost about 20 per cent of its September sea ice.]

EARTH CHANGES

2005 hottest year ever in Australia

By the end of December 2005, it is expected to have been the second warmest year globally and there is no natural phenomenon like an El Nino effect to explain the heat.
At a conference in Sydney, experts will discuss the evidence.
The Bureau of Meteorology's Dr Michael Coughlan says there is no longer any debate about whether the world is getting warmer.
"Where the debate lies now is in the attribution issues and the general consensus of climate scientists is that there's a large component of human activities in that," he said.

[Catastrophic storms like Hurricanes Katrina and Stan took weather extremes across the globe to new levels in 2005, with flooding and heatwaves touching almost every continent, the United Nations Geneva-based World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says.]

NEWSPEAK

Euphemisms the rule. Plain english a casualty

Iraq's Fort Suse, the newest Theater Internment Facility capable of housing more than 1700 security detainees, recently began operations

[Theater Internment Facility = Jail. Security detainees = prisoners of war.]

BULLSHIT BAFFLES

Alibi Network helps people keep their secrets for a small fee

"We provide excuses.  For instance, doctor's call from the doctor's office, with the actual doctor's office on the caller ID.
If they choose to call to verify, we could make the number appear to be a doctor's office when it's actually going to our call center.
"Our main concern here is basically helping people get away with extramarital affairs, relationships.  We also help people with their image.  If they want to be pursued as somebody more important than they are, to impress somebody, we handle that.
"We provide phone numbers from anyplace in the world.  Again, the Caller I.D. will state whatever the client wants it to state, and we do it quite well.
"We believe here at Alibi Network, that if we're doing this, we are saving marriages.  The divorce rate -- even if the divorce rate could go just a percentage lower than it is, then our job was well done because of the fact that people are not finding out.  They move on with their life, and their family life remains the same, untouched."

[From the boardroom to the bedroom -- and including government mendacity -- lies, untruths and 'faulty intelligence' are now the widely accepted way of conducting human affairs.]

BAH HUMBUG

Christian soldiers battle the 'War on Christmas'

People now say 'we're celebrating the season,' or 'we're celebrating the holiday'," said Baptist Church pastor Corkish. "It's almost like people have been asked not to say, 'Merry Christmas.' I've been a pastor for 50 years and I've never seen anything like it."
Corkish joins an emerging chorus of religious conservatives and commentators who, bothered by what they see as a secular watering down of a Christian holiday, want to put the Christ back in Christmas. These groups contend that a fear of offending non-Christians has led retailers, schools and government agencies to ignore Christmas' biblical roots in favor of folk symbols like Santa Claus or generic phrases such as "Happy Holidays."

[There is a term for the supposed anti-Christmas bias: the War on Christmas, named for a new book by Fox News Channel anchor John Gibson, whose subtitle is, How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday is Worse Than You Thought.]

CLIMATE OF CHANGE

Changing the face of 'old' New York

Winter, the weather folk decree, begins on a particular date in late December and spring is due to blossom on 20 March.
But when I step outside our apartment onto Riverside Drive, with the Hudson rolling grandly past Manhattan's Upper Westside, it is hard to stand up, let alone advance in a freezing 30mph wind. And the second snowstorm of the week serves notice that the winter furies have ignored the script and arrived early.

EARTH CHANGES

Earth's Magnetic Pole Drifting Quickly

Earth's north magnetic pole is drifting away from North America and toward Siberia at such a clip that Alaska might lose its spectacular Northern Lights in the next 50 years, scientists said.

[The rate of the magnetic pole's movement has increased in the last century compared to fairly steady movement in the previous four centuries, the Oregon researchers said. At the present rate, the north magnetic pole could swing out of northern Canada into Siberia.]

MATH IS MURDER

Calls grow for withdrawal of Nobel prize

A group of Israeli intellectuals and activists has demanded that the Nobel prize committee withdraw the award for economics to be made today to an Israeli mathematician and his American colleague on the grounds that they are "warmongers".
The economics prize is to be presented to Robert Aumann of Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Thomas Schelling of Maryland University in recognition of their "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis", a mathematical study of how individuals and governments react to other people's actions including in war.

RIGHTS TRASHED

ACLU: Protesters placed in terror files

The names and licenseplate numbers of about 30 people who protested three years ago in Colorado Springs were put into FBI domestic-terrorism files, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Colorado said Thursday.
The Denver-based ACLU obtained federal documents on a 2002 Colorado Springs protest and a 2003 anti-war rally under the Freedom of Information Act.
ACLU legal director Mark Silverstein said “These documents confirm that the names and license plate numbers of several dozen peaceful protesters who committed no crime are now in a JTTF file marked ‘counterterrorism,’” he said.
“This kind of surveillance of First Amendment activities has serious consequences. Law-abiding Americans may be reluctant to speak out when doing so means that their names will wind up in an FBI file.”

[The FBI files are available here.]

ENDLESS WAR

Miami airplane shooting: Washington’s 'war on terrorism' comes home

The most chilling aspect of the brutal state killing of Rigoberto Alpizar, the 44-year-old Costa Rican immigrant gunned down while fleeing an American Airlines Boeing 757 in Miami Wednesday, is the utter absence of any statement of remorse by government officials.
Rather than publicly acknowledge that a horror and a tragedy had resulted from the use of lethal force against an unarmed and innocent man, spokesmen for the Bush administration and various state agencies praised those who killed him and virtually celebrated the spilling of blood on American soil in the so-called “global war on terrorism.”

Eyewitnesses refute official story

The central assertion that Alpizar posed a terrorist threat is based on the claim he said he had a bomb.
However, no witnesses -- including from among the more than 100 passengers and crew members on board the flight -- have come forward publicly to back up this allegation.
Instead, numerous passengers have directly contradicted it, even after hours of interrogation and prodding by police authorities in the wake of the shooting.

[The treatment of the plane’s passengers following the shooting was of a piece with the violence meted out to Alpizar. Armed federal marshals and police agents stormed the aircraft and ordered them to put their hands on their heads. Terrified passengers were told to remain motionless for more than an hour, and some reported having guns put to the backs of their heads.]

PAPER TRAIL

Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.
“I don’t give a goddamn,” Bush retorted. “I’m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.”
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”

[The Constitution isn't just a piece of paper or parchment. It's a contract; the original contract with America. It's the contract you yourself swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend against all enemies both foreign and domestic. You attached your name to that promise. You swore that oath before a judge of the United States Supreme Court, with your hand on a bible. That isn't just scenery for the cameras. Swearing an oath before a judge carries legal obligations with that oath, and legal penalties for breaking that oath.]

ASSEMBLY LINE

Nanotech discovery could have radical implications

Torquato and colleagues have published a paper in the Nov. 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, the leading physics journal, outlining a mathematical approach that would enable them to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another.
Instead of employing the traditional trial-and-error method of self-assembly that is used by nanotechnologists and which is found in nature, scientists propose starting with an exact blueprint of the nanostructure they want to build.

[The paper appearing in Physical Review Letters is a condensed version of a more detailed paper that has been accepted for publication in Physical Review E and which will probably appear sometime before the end of the year.]

COACCIDENTS HAPPEN

Brothers die in crashes just minutes apart

Two brothers died within minutes of each other in separate traffic crashes in a rural county where their father is a sheriff's deputy.
Rory McDowell, 23, and Cory McDowell, 21, were pronounced dead a couple of miles and 20 minutes apart.

Father, Andy McDowell, was not on duty at the time but was taken to Rory's crash. He later was driven past Cory's fiery crash, not knowing his younger son was involved in it.

["You take the most unimaginable hell that a parent could be told and double that," Warren County Deputy Coroner Dwayne Lawrence said.]

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT

Quantum Entanglement Between Remote Ensembles of Atoms Achieved

Reporting in the December 8 issue of the journal Nature, California Institute of Technology physicist H. Jeff Kimble and his colleagues announce the first realization of entanglement for one "spin excitation" stored jointly between two samples of atoms. In the Caltech experiment, the atomic ensembles are located in a pair of apparatuses 2.8 meters apart, with each ensemble composed of about 100,000 individual atoms.
According to Kimble, who is the Valentine Professor and professor of physics at Caltech, this research significantly extends laboratory capabilities for entanglement generation, with now-entangled "quantum bits" of matter stored with separation several thousand times greater than was heretofore possible.

[In the Caltech experiment, the entanglement involves "collective atomic spin excitations." To generate such excitations, an ensemble of cold atoms initially all in level "a" of two possible ground levels is addressed with a suitable "writing" laser pulse. For weak excitation with the write laser, one atom in the sample is sometimes transferred to ground level "b," thereby emitting a photon.]

POWER AND PASSION

Bush and Blair slated by Pinter

Most politicians "are interested not in truth but in power and the maintenance of that power", the 75-year-old writer Harold Pinter said in his lecture as winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.
His lecture, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, studied the importance of truth in art before decrying its perceived absence in politics.
He said politicians feel it is "essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives".
"You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good."

[Pinter, whose plays include The Birthday Party and Betrayal, was announced the winner of the $1.3m (£740,000) cash prize in October.]

EARTH CHANGES

Greenland glacier races to ocean

Scientists have been monitoring what they say may be the fastest moving glacier on the planet.
Kangerdlugssuaq Glacier on the east coast of Greenland has been clocked using GPS equipment and satellites to be flowing at a rate of 14km per year.
It is also losing mass extremely fast, with its front end retreating 5km back up its fjord this year alone.
The glacier "drains" about 4 per cent of the ice sheet, dumping tens of cubic kilometres of fresh water in the North Atlantic.
This gives it significant influence not just on global sea level rise but on the system of ocean circulation which drives through the Arctic.

[]

SEDITION BITES

Australian bloggers muzzled

Australian blogs will never be as hard-hitting as their overseas counterparts because of our restrictive laws.
Many local bloggers are unaware that they may be liable for everything they write on their sites, not to mention all of the colourful comments made by contributors.
Our new sedition laws will make this worse.
Blogs fall under the same defamation and other laws that regulate all media organisations in the country.
While US bloggers are protected by a freedom of speech clause in the US Bill of Rights, new sedition laws passed by Australian authorities may make life even tougher for bloggers.

[Hey evil pundit, don't complain when a Labor Government locks you up because it doesn't like the way you look at them.]

WATER WARS

Choking on Chemicals in China

Most of the country's air and waterways are hopelessly polluted and the government has done little to address the problem. Instead, officials prefer to lie.

In the northeast Chinese city of Harbin, hundreds of people wait for a water truck. They have been waiting in the bitter cold since early morning -- though the water delivery isn't scheduled until 11 am.
"We are now frugal with water," says a woman in a red woolen cap. "First we use it to clean vegetables, then to wash our hands and finally to flush the toilet."
The emergency came about when 100 tons of toxic chemicals from Chemical Factory 101 floated down the Songhua River afer an explosion 400 kilometers upstream which released highly toxic benzene compounds.

[The slick, slowly traveling down river toward Russia, threatens the drinking water supply for more than 10 million people between the northeast Chinese city of Harbin and Khabarovsk in Siberia.]

POWER POINT

Bullet Points over Baghdad

The National Security Council document released under the grandiose title "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" is neither an analytical report nor a policy statement. It's simply the same old talking points repackaged in the style of a slide presentation for a business meeting.
Refuting some of the upbeat assertions about Iraq requires specialized knowledge, but many of them can be quickly debunked by anyone with an Internet connection.
The point isn't just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It's the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt - contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media.
And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

[NY Times original]