TRANSPARENT GOVERNMENT

Disclosure Military and Government
"In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwar-ranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military IndustrialComplex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and willpersist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our libertiesor democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert andknowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial andmilitary machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that secu-rity and liberty may prosper together."
- President Eisenhower - January 1961

ADVANCED COMPOSITES

Starlite, the nuclear blast-defying plastic that could change the world

Two decades ago amateur scientist Maurice Ward invented a material that could resist the force of 75 Hiroshimas. So why haven't we all heard about it?

WHAT THE FUCK?

Egypt plans 'farewell intercourse law' so husbands can have sex up to six hours after wife's death

Egyptian husbands could soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives for up to six hours after their death, local media is claiming. The controversial new law is claimed to be part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women's rights of getting education and employment.

 

ONLY WOMEN BLEED

Why Do They Hate Us?

Just as her husband denies her an orgasm, the call to prayer interrupts his, and the man leaves. After washing up, she loses herself in prayer -- so much more satisfying that she can't wait until the next prayer -- and looks out onto the street from her balcony. She interrupts her reverie to make coffee dutifully for her husband to drink after his nap. Taking it to their bedroom to pour it in front of him as he prefers, she notices he is dead. She instructs their son to go and get a doctor. "She returned to the living room and poured out the coffee for herself. She was surprised at how calm she was,"

WATCH OUT

Roxon to face grilling on Assange lawyer

 

London-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson said on Thursday Heathrow airport authorities had informed her she was on an "inhibited travel list" and needed special permission to return to Australia.

She said on Twitter security guards had told her "you must have done something controversial" because we have to phone the embassy.

DRONE SICK

America's drone sickness

There are many evils in the world, but extinguishing people’s lives with targeted, extra-judicial killings, when you don’t even know their names, based on “patterns” of behavior judged from thousands of miles away, definitely ranks high on the list.

Although the Obama White House has not approved of this request from CIA Director David Petraeus, these so-called “signature strikes” that “allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior” are already robustly used in Pakistan — having been started by George Bush in 2008 and aggressively escalated by Barack Obama.

There is much to say on this new report, but in order for me to focus on three discrete points, permit me to highly recommend two superb articles that highlight other vital aspects of this policy: (1) this article from my Salon colleague Jefferson Morley this morning on why this form of drone-targeting is pure American Terrorism, and (2) this essay from Chris Floyd about a recently published Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings on Obama’s love of drones and secret wars and how the military’s slang for drone victims — “bug splat” — reflects the sociopathic mindset that drive them.

NAKED TRUTH

How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses

By Naomi Wolf - Our surveillance state shown considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram – der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of … various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex". There was the stripping of Bradley Manning is solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine – made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff – with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner".

WAR WADIZITGUDFER?

 

U.S. soldiers wait for air deliveries of fuel by a C-17 Globemaster III to Forward Operating Base Waza K'wah in Paktika province, Afghanistan, Jan. 30, 2011. (Photo: The U.S. Army)

Who benefits from the organized violence of war?

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has nothing to gain and all to lose - especially their lives. -Eugene Victor Debs

CASHLESSNESS

Germs in your wallet can make you sick - tests prove it

GERMS on money may be making unwary Aussies sick - some notes are more than six times filthier than a public lavatory.

But don't think swapping it for plastic will magically make the germs disappear. A Public Defender investigation of 10 Melbourne shoppers' wallets found cash and credit cards could be potential hotbeds for bacteria.

ADAM ON MAN

Smith: Theory of Moral Sentiments

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

WORKING SOLUTION

Human user verification helping to digitize old books

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.

Each word of an old scanned book, or rather only the words that cannot be read correctly by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is used as a CAPTCHA. The system uses an aggregated response to determine what the OCR couldn't read

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle?

Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

VAMPIRE SQUID

Goldman Sachs director quits 'morally bankrupt' Wall Street bank

Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs has suffered a severe blow to its reputation after one of its bankers announced his resignation in the New York Times by declaring his employer "morally bankrupt".

The departing employee, Greg Smith, said the firm's superior staff described the firm's clients as "muppets" and he made reference to the Tourre affair of two years ago in which London-based banker, Fabrice Tourre, said Goldman Sachs was creating "Frankenstein" products that showed scant regard for the needs of clients.

Smith's public resignation letter also made reference to the infamous description of Goldman in Rolling Stone magazine as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity".

DISCO TIME

A UFO (bottom of frame) stalks formation of jets at a Chilean air force base

In the video - recorded near El Bosque Air Base in Santiago, Chile - a UFO flies in and out of the frame a number of times as air-force jets in formation fly by the photographer.

The object is difficult to see because it's moving so fast. It was flying at velocities estimated to be at least 5000kmh. Clearly under intelligent control, it zoomed toward each set of jets at about their altitude, circled around and zoomed out of frame.

Close up images show it as a dome-shaped, flat-bottomed object. The rounded top reflects the sun and appears metallic; the bottom is darker and flat. It appears to emit something which is visible in photo analysis. Infrared studies show the entire object is radiating heat.

SECURITY. SAY NO MORE

- The Australian, 11 March 2010.

SLACKTIVISM v AWARENESS

Kat Anderson: The Kony Issue

For those of you living under a social media rock you may not be aware of the latest video conscious-raising video making the rounds. For you here’s the link (It is 30 minutes long, but it is important to see) http://vimeo.com/37119711. For those of you who have seen the video, you’ve also undoubtedly seen the debate around it as well and whether this form of awareness is useful, harmful, neither or both. 

SHOCKING DEVELOPMENT

Australian Government moves to quickly pass laws to sterilize, electroshock and restrain children without parental consent

Another draft mental health bill, this time in Australia is mirroring global efforts in what is now an international and deliberate surge by government officials to remove parental consent. If passed, the shocking new law will allow children who are considered sufficiently mature, to be subjected to horrifying procedures including sterilization and electroshock.

SHOCK HORROR

Amnesty International Urges Stricter Limits on Police Taser Use as U.S. Death Toll Reaches 500

 

Two days after the death of a Georgia man who was shocked with a police Taser -- raising the known death toll from tasers to 500 in the United States -- Amnesty International today repeated its call for tighter limits on police use of the weapons.

 

According to data collected by Amnesty International, at least 500 people in the United States have died since 2001 after being shocked with Tasers either during their arrest or while in jail.

BIG BROTHER

Facebook spies on phone users' text messages, report says

Facebook admitted reading text messages belonging to smartphone users who downloaded the social-networking app and said that it was accessing the data as part of a trial to launch its own messaging service, The (London) Sunday Times reported.

Other well-known companies accessing smartphone users' personal data - such as text messages - include photo-sharing site Flickr, dating site Badoo and Yahoo Messenger, the paper said.

It claimed that some apps even allow companies to intercept phone calls - while others, such as YouTube, are capable of remotely accessing and operating users' smartphone cameras to take photographs or videos at any time.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 

Occupy our food supply

Our food is under threat. It is felt by every family farmer who has lost their land and livelihood, every parent who can't find affordable or healthy ingredients in their neighborhood, every person worried about foodborne illnesses thanks to lobbyist-weakened food safety laws, every farmworker who faces toxic pesticides in the fields as part of a day's work.

When our food is at risk we are all at risk.

Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed a massive consolidation of our food system. Never have so few corporations been responsible for more of our food chain.

MAD SCIENCE

Normal grieving is ‘not depression’

the new DSM-5 suggests that depression could co-occur with grief. Critics see the changes as suggesting the DSM is trying to “medicalize” normal grieving. Anyone who experiences grief after a tragic or significant loss will now be at risk for receiving — heaven forbid — mental health treatment and a diagnosis.