DEA Can’t Enter 150 Pounds of Pot Into Evidence, Because It Illegally GPS-Tracked This Dude
Guess the system works at times. Reports the AP Via ABC News:
When Kentucky State Troopers stopped 49-year-old Robert Dale Lee on Interstate 75 in September 2011, they knew he would be coming their way and what to look for in his truck.
The Drug Enforcement Administration had been following Lee’s truck from Chicago using a GPS — a tracking device placed on the vehicle as part of a multi-state drug probe — and troopers found 150 pounds of marijuana in the vehicle.
Now, a federal judge has ruled the stash inadmissible in the case against Lee because the DEA and troopers didn’t have a warrant to place the device on the truck.
“In this case, the DEA agents had their fishing poles out to catch Lee,” Thapar wrote. “Admittedly, the agents did not intend to break the law. But, they installed a GPS device on Lee’s car without a warrant in the hope…
Dante’s Inferno In ‘The Graphic Canon’
[Disinfo ed.'s note: This week I had the distinct pleasure of meeting up with Russ Kick for the launch of his epic series of classic literature anthologized in graphic form, The Graphic Canon. Although it's not published by disinformation, I'd encourage all disinfonauts to check it out; the quality is self-evident through and through. Russ and his publisher, Dan Simon, kindly agreed to let us give you another taste (also check out The Book of Revelation if you missed it previously).]
The Inferno is far and away the most well known, influential part of The Divine Comedy. No one can resist the inventiveness and appropriateness of the punishments suffered by sinners. Hypocrites wear outwardly beautiful cloaks that are lined with lead. Fortune-tellers have their heads on backward. Gluttons lie in putrid mud like pigs. Those who were violent against others boil in a river of blood. Flatterers, meanwhile, spend eternity submerged in shit.
Such…
The ‘Lesbians Are Everywhere’ Campaign And Conspiracy Theories
Photo: Marco Gomes
Padraig Reidy comes up with an unusual parallel between a gay tolerance campaign in Ireland and the appeal of conspiracy theories, in a commentary for the Guardian:
In 1990s Ireland, a poster campaign was launched to encourage more enlightened attitudes to homosexuality. Alongside various pictures of happy, smiling, safe-looking women ran the caption: “Lesbians are Everywhere”. It’s clear what they were getting at, but you couldn’t escape the notion that it sounded vaguely like a threat. Or possibly a warning: “Watch out! They’re behind you, plotting in their dark way.”
People could very easily have become obsessed with spotting lesbians, indeed harboured the suspicion that every woman they met was gay. After all, if lesbians are everywhere, then it seems pretty likely this woman before me is a lesbian, doesn’t it? Roughly the same logic applies to conspiracism. Once you have bought the idea that conspiracies run the world, it…
Penn Jillette Skewers President Obama on Hypocrisy and His Drug Use (Video)
Via Penn’s Sunday School:
On a recent episode of his podcast, Penn Jillette unleashed his thoughts on the Obama administration’s handling of the War on Drugs, calling President Obama’s actions “beyond hypocrisy” regarding his own admitted drug use.
Penn said: “He would have done hard fucking time! And if he had done hard fucking time, he would NOT be President of the United States of America, and he would NOT have gone to his fancy ass college, and he would NOT have sold books that sold millions and millions of copies and made millions and millions of fucking dollars, he would NOT have a beautiful, smart wife, he would NOT have a great job. He would have been in fucking prison, and it’s not a goddamn joke!”
Priest Claims Schoolgirl Was Kidnapped for Vatican Sex Parties
The priest making the claim and is a very busy exorcist. Reports the Belfast Telegraph:
A Catholic priest has claimed a missing schoolgirl was kidnapped for Vatican sex parties and has implicated diplomatic staff and members of the Holy See.
Italian priest Gabriel Amorth, 85, said girls were recruited for parties at the Vatican and said the death of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, last seen alive in 1983, “was a crime with a sexual motive”.
The priest spoke out last week as investigators broke into the grave of a known gang boss in Rome following an anonymous tip that the key to Emanuala’s disappearance would be “found there”. But so far bones which do not belong to mobster Enrico De Pedis, have not be positively identified as the girl’s…
‘Cursing Stone’ Found On Isle Of Canna
Would you test the powers of the cursing stone? The first ever uncovered in Scotland, it supposedly can cast a spell when it is rotated while the proper prayer is spoken. BBC reports:
A stone discovered by chance in an old graveyard on the Isle of Canna is Scotland’s first known example of a bullaun “cursing stone”, experts have revealed. Dating from about 800 AD, the stones are associated with early Christian crosses – of which there is one on the isle.
It was later found to fit exactly into a large rectangular stone with a worn hole which was located at the base of the Canna cross. Traditionally, the pilgrim would recite a prayer while turning the stone clockwise, wearing a depression or hole in the stone underneath.
Katherine Forsyth, an expert in the history and culture of early Celtic-speaking peoples, based at the University of Glasgow, described it as an “amazing find”.
FBI’s New Secretive Surveillance Unit Can Spy on Skype and Wireless Communications
Reports Declan McCullagh on cNet News:
The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.
The establishment of the Quantico, VA-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.
While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.
DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that…
Solidarity During Wartime in the Streets of Chicago
Photo: Aaron Cynic
Aaron Cynic writes at Shareable.net:
My feet are completely blistered, my bones are sore. I’m dehydrated, bruised and beyond exhausted. I’ve spent four days on the streets of Chicago, running through streets and alleys, cameras strapped to my body, frantically trying to take in as much information about the protests surrounding the NATO summit on Sunday and Monday.
For two days, world leaders gathered in Chicago to discuss what tens of thousands of activists described as the world’s largest game of Risk, where the stakes amount to life and death for citizens around the globe.
Some might accuse me of hyperbole, but considering the massive amount of civilian casualties (including women and children) in countries like Libya and Kosovo, bombed by NATO forces, the silent voices of the dead would probably disagree.
For the average Chicago resident, hosting the NATO summit fell short of what Mayor Rahm Emanuel predicted in nearly every…
Today’s Inequality Weather Report
A vision of a socially-conscious daily evening news? The chiming xylophone tones, at least, are a definite improvement.
Occupy Consciousness: Essays on the Global Insurrection
The Evolver Social Movement presents OCCUPY CONSCIOUSNESS: Essays on the Global Insurrection, a free eBook anthology (edited by me and Reality Sandwich Associate Editor Mitch Mignano) that offers a variety of viewpoints on the nascent rebellion from writers such as Doug Rushkoff, David Graeber, Starhawk, and Russell Brand. Together these pieces provide an essential perspective on the true significance of Occupy—not a protest movement essentially, but a harbinger of a new way of being.
“Is this movement’s implicit goal to re-engage our humanity? To reach beyond the political, the national and other illusory, temporary concepts and into our true, spiritual nature?” —Russell Brand
“Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” —David Graeber
Despite being subject to ridicule from the mainstream and intense suppression from police and government forces in the US and abroad, Occupy has shifted the discourse around critical social, political, and economic issues, breaking…
Land-Sea Ecological Chains of Life Threatened With Extinction Around the World
And it’s not like we humans aren’t part of such chains. Via ScienceDaily:
Douglas McCauley and Paul DeSalles did not set out to discover one of the longest ecological interaction chains ever documented. But that’s exactly what they and a team of researchers — all current or former Stanford students and faculty — did in a new study published in Scientific Reports.
Their findings shed light on how human disturbance of the natural world may lead to widespread, yet largely invisible, disruptions of ecological interaction chains. This, in turn, highlights the need to build non-traditional alliances — among marine biologists and foresters, for example — to address whole ecosystems across political boundaries.
This past fall, McCauley, a graduate student, and DeSalles, an undergraduate, were in remote Palmyra Atoll in the Pacific tracking manta rays’ movements for a predator-prey interaction study. Swimming with the rays and charting their movements with acoustic tags, McCauley and DeSalles…
American Police Forces Plan To Arm Domestic Drones
If American police forces start using unmanned aerial drones to attack citizens, does that by definition make the United States a police state? Report by Hannah Yi for The Daily:
As a Texas sheriff prepares to use an unmanned drone as his force’s eye in the sky, and perhaps even arm it with nonlethal weapons like Tasers and rubber bullets, civil liberties groups are crying foul.
In the coming weeks, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office north of Houston says it will deploy a $300,000 ShadowHawk drone — bought with a federal homeland security grant — to spy on criminals, support SWAT operations and look for missing persons.
The unmanned helicopter is about the size of a large dog, has a range of 25 miles and…
Not Letting The Facts Get In The Way of Attacks on Candidates and Whistleblowers
Increasingly, politics is a game driven by often-invented beliefs and myths that are firmly detached from facts and their interpretation.
The parties and their factions live not only in parallel universes but worlds of information that are driven mostly but what they think will work in pandering to their bases and the public.
Even as progressives complain that Barack Obama has moved right even if he occasionally talks left, the hard-core right-wing see him a black revolutionary shaped by Reverend Wright’s black liberation theology with allusions to Malcolm X and Kenyan communists thrown into the mix to “prove” their case.
Never mind that Obama threw his one time mentor Wright under the bus in 2008, or that his policies rarely speak of the needs of a black community suffering under the burden of high joblessness, foreclosures and growing poverty.
In fact, real black revolutionaries like Cornel West and so many others find the president…
Magnetic Bacteria Create a Biological Hard Drive
Jacob Aron writes in New Scientist:
Computer virus destroyed your hard drive? Don’t worry, some day bacteria might build you a bigger and better one.
Hard drives store data on discs coated with a metallic film divided into tiny magnetic regions, each of which stores a single bit — the more regions you can squeeze on to a disc, the bigger the capacity. Now, a team at the University of Leeds, UK, have borrowed a trick from nature to build a new kind of hard drive.
Certain strains of bacteria absorb iron to make magnetic nanoparticles that let them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field. The team have extracted the protein behind this process and used it to create magnetic patterns that can store data. “We’re using and abusing nature because it’s had billions of years to do all of its experiments through evolution, so there is almost no point in us starting…
Animal Poachers In India Can Be Shot on Sight
Reports Talia Ralph on Global Post:
Animal poachers in India can now be shot on sight, after lawmakers in the western state of Maharashtra passed legislation Wednesday to defend tigers, elephants, and other wildlife from attacks, the Times of India reported.
The state’s forest guards should not be “booked for human rights violations when they have taken action against poachers,” Maharashtra’s Forest Minister Patangrao Kadam said Tuesday, the Associated Press reported.
There have been no cases of tiger poachers being shot or killed in Maharashtra, but guards have been charged in the past for shooting illegal loggers or fishermen, the state’s chief wildlife warden S.W.H. Naqvi told the AP.
The state also announced plans to put more rangers and jeeps on patrol in the forest, and will offer secret payments to those who tip off officials about poachers and animal smugglers, according to the AP.
Don’t Wanna Be An American Idiot (In Congress)
Reports Tamara Keith on NPR:
Members of Congress are often criticized for what they do — or rather, what they don’t do.
But what about what they say and, more specifically, how they say it? It turns out that the sophistication of congressional speech-making is on the decline, according to the open government group the Sunlight Foundation. Since 2005, the average grade level at which members of Congress speak has fallen by almost a full grade.
American Airlines Boots Woman From Flight For “Offensive” Pro-Choice T-Shirt
Reports David Ferguson on RAW Story:
A woman traveling home from an abortion rights seminar was detained and forced off an American Airlines flight Tuesday because the captain and crew found her T-shirt “offensive,” according to the blog RH Reality Check. The woman, who asked not to be named, was wearing a T-shirt with a slogan made famous by Oklahoma state senator Judy McIntyre (D), who marched earlier this year to protest Oklahoma’s “fetal personhood” law, carrying a sign that read, “If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d fuck a senator.”
The woman, who detailed her experience in an email to RHRC blogger Jodi Jacobson, said she was sleeping for most of her first flight with a shawl covering her shirt. ”Right before we were set to land the flight attendant from first class approaches me and asks if I had a connecting flight? We were running a bit behind schedule, so…
Anonymous Online Speech: Soon To Be Banned In New York?
Illustration: Helodrgt (CC)
WTF Albany? Remember the authors of the Federalist Papers? Victoria Bekiempis writes in the Village Voice:
Legislation is pending in Albany that would make illegal anonymous online commenting, City & State tweeted this morning. Looks like Wired was among the first to report on the measure.
The bill’s backers, according to the mag, want to curtail “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”
The legislation would make New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”
The measures would also apply to messages on social networks and message boards or “any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages,” Wired points out, and requires that sites offer “a contact number or e-mail address posted for…
On Romantic Matchmaking By Smell
Possibly superior to online dating? Via Paleofuture, on when the new romance rage was organizing marriage by odor:
Dating sites claim they can find you the perfect match by using algorithms. This idea–wanting to make the frustrating world of romantic love into something quantifiable–is nothing new. The April 1924 issue of Science and Invention magazine ran an article by Hugo Gernsback, the magazine’s publisher, which examined the “scientific” ways to determine if a marriage will succeed or fail.
Gernsback claims that more marriages are probably wrecked by body odors than any other cause. During the body odor test, the couple is made to smell each other (“not a pleasant experience,” Gernsback opines) by one person being placed inside a large capsule with a hose coming out the top. The hose is led to the nose of the other person and if the smells aren’t found too objectionable (again, measured by devices strapped…
