Internet Babel

http://wordpress.org/news/2012/01/help-stop-sopa-pipa/

You may have heard people talking/blogging/twittering about SOPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act. The recent SOPA-related boycott of GoDaddy was all over the news, with many people expressing their outrage over the possibilities of SOPA, but when I ask people about SOPA and its sister bill in the Senate, PIPA (Protect IP Act), many don’t really know what the bills propose, or what we stand to lose. If you are not freaked out by SOPA/PIPA, please: for the next four minutes, instead of checking Facebook statuses, seeing who mentioned you on Twitter, or watching the latest episode of Sherlock*, watch this video (by Fight for the Future).

Some thoughts:

• In the U.S. our legal system maintains that the burden of proof is on the accuser, and that people are innocent until proven guilty. This tenet seems to be on the chopping block when it comes to the web if these bills pass, as companies could shut down sites based on accusation alone.
• Laws are not like lines of PHP; they are not easily reverted if someone wakes up and realizes there is a better way to do things. We should not be so quick to codify something this far-reaching.
• The people writing these laws are not the people writing the independent web, and they are not out to protect it. We have to stand up for it ourselves.

 

Here’s where you can currently find the list of Wikileaks mirror sites:

http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html

support wikileaks.

The Australian and Swedish governments show themselves to be poodles of the American establishment, Australia by besmerching a citizen who hasn’t yet been charged with any related crime, and Sweden by resurrecting a once-dropped legal case surrounding unprotected consensual sex. 

Wikileaks acted as a distributor of information they have been supplied with, and following true journalistic principles, have protected their source. If there is a crime, it has not been carried out by wikileaks. You can argue about whether they should be more discriminating about what they have released but that is not illegal.

The released cables have been created, stored and inadequately protected by the American government. The fault lies with them for allowing them to be accessed and released. Indeed it may yet prove to  be an ‘inside job’.

The australian government’s behaviour so far in this shameful episode has been grubby and cowardly – sucking up to American popular opinion. Grow some balls, Australia, and defend a citizen who has done nothing but reveal the shabby truth about what is actually going on in global politics.

This time Max Keiser and co-host Stacy Herbert talk about the walking zombies of the world’s largest economies.

Afghanistan now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is being converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in huts and houses but in factories. The chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads (improved by international aid) with NATO forces.

The principal sources of these precursor chemicals are believed to be Mexico, China, Europe, Central Asia and India. Traffickers hide the sources of their chemicals by repackaging or false labelling. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, markets and processing facilities are clustered in border areas of Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan.

Acetic anhydride (AA) is the most commonly used chemical agent in heroin processing. According to the DEA, Mexico is the major source of AA and authorities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan routinely seize ton-quantity shipments of acetic anhydride.

A July 2008 report, carried by the Boston Globe, quotes Christina Oguz, country representative for the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, saying that just 1% of these precursor chemicals are ever seized – even though these chemicals are all imported by the tanker-load, and have no ‘dual-use’ justification

It follows that there are many players with a much larger financial stake in the Afghan drug traffic than local Afghan drug lords, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Sibel Edmonds has charged that Pakistani and Turkish intelligence, working together, utilise the resources of the international networks trafficking Afghan heroin.

Others have written about the ties between U.S. intelligence and the Turkish narco-intelligence connection. A former top-level DEA agent in the Middle East, has corroborated the CIA interest in that region’s drug connection, apparently stating that ”In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA”.

The UNODC Executive Director, Antonio Maria Costa, has reported that “money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.”

This video, and many others like it can be used as a starting point to explore these allegations.

A report on Bloomberg indicates that the housing and debt crisis in the U.S. is far from over, as instances of so-called ‘Buy and Bail’ are on the increase.

Buy and Bail consists of  acquiring a new house before the buyer’s credit rating is ruined by walking away an existing mortgage loan because it is “underwater” – i.e. worth less than the mortgage. It’s an attempt to escape payments on a home whose value may never recover while securing a new property, often at a lower price with a more affordable loan (and almost always with a different lender).

After falls in house values since 2006, something like 20% of home loans in the U.S. are “underwater”, meaning the house is worth less than the loan. As a result, more people are looking at ways to walk away from loans and approx. 12% of mortgage defaults are ‘strategic’ (deliberate), according to the report.

There is still a long way down yet, it would seem.

Read the full article here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-10/-buy-and-bail-homeowners-get-past-mortgage-hurdles-from-fannie-freddie.html

This piece from ‘Today Tonight’ highlights some of the medical opinion against the increasing flouridisation of water supplies and also notes growing use of floruide in many other products.

Various institutions have identified fluoride as a possible developmental toxin. The Lancet, in 2006, listed fluoride as an “emerging neurotoxic substance”. In 2000, Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility discussed fluoride as a “known or suspected developmental neurotoxicant”.

In fact, neurological effects were known as early as the 1930′s and 40′s, by scientists working for the Manhattan Project and in Nazi Germany.

The University of Western Ontario says, “Though apparently vague and non-specific, most of the symptoms of Fluoride toxicity point towards some kind of profound metabolic dysfunction, and are strikingly similar to the symptoms of Hypothyroidism.”

Learning Disorders/Difficulty Concentrating/Incoherence/Memory Loss/Confusion, Body Temperature Disturbances/Cold Shivers, Chest Pains, Heart Palpitations, Depression, dizziness/Vertigo, Dyspepsia, Excessive Sleepiness/Fatigue, Headaches/Migraines, Joint Pains, Nausea, Restlessness, Shortness of Breath, Difficulties Swallowing, Thirst, Tinnitus, Visual Disturbances.

Maybe use it as a basis for further investigation of your own.

The Opium machine continues to thrive in Afghanistan. The Russians were often accused of sanctioning and assisting in the production and distribution of Opium whist in Afghanisatn. Has anything changed?

Drug production in Afghanistan has increased dramatically since the US-led invasion and a recent report by the United Nations states that Afghan opium is having a devastating impact on the world, killing thousands in consumer countries.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported that Ahmad Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, is involved in the opium trade, meets with Taliban leaders, and is also a CIA operative.

The opium trade is the major source of Taliban financing.

Google and an investment arm of the CIA are jointly backing a company working on real-time web monitoring and prediction.

Recorded Future uses real-time analysis of tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to identify relationships between people, organisations and events — both present and still-to-come.

The company says its temporal analytics engine looks at  ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same (or related) entities and events. The idea is to derive, for each event, who was involved and where/when it happened or might happen.  Recorded Future plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.

“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.

This seems to be the first time that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA, but this is bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government.

Full story: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/

US defence company Raytheon has been demonstrating a new solid-State, powerful laser that can shoot down aircraft and projectiles as well as sinking ships, with the capability of being hooked up with existing anti-aircraft weaponry. They are also working on land-based and more mobile versions with increased power.