Archive for December, 2009
Not So Intelligent Intelligence: Four CIA Flops
Funny yet historically intriguing essay from Molly Mann on divine caroline. I really thought the Acoustic Kitty was BS, guess not:
Most of us don’t know much about what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) actually does. Without some degree of mystery, after all, it can’t carry out its purpose to covertly collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals for American policymakers. So when we do learn anything about a specific CIA program, it’s usually after the fact, and usually because it was a big enough failure to garner media attention. With the understanding that all details about the agency’s dealings are sketchy, unconfirmed, and, well, secret, here are four of the twentieth century’s biggest CIA flops.
1. Operation Acoustic Kitty: The Cold War era of the 1960s was the CIA’s heyday. Americans were so worried about what the Communists were doing and whether they had nuclear weapons that we would have done just about anything to find out.
And the secret agents, glorified in spy novels and movies, who did get the dirt on the Reds were our heroes. The CIA’s carte blanche in chasing Communists led to rumors of some pretty bizarre ideas, like Operation Acoustic Kitty, which supposedly ran from 1961 to 1967, and involved the CIA’s surgically implanting cats with audio equipment to use them as bugging devices.
Doctor Admits Israeli Pathologists Harvested Organs Without Consent
Ian Black, The Guardian:
Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s – it emerged at the weekend.
The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs — a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.
The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.
Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.
The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel…
Cruise Missile Attacks in Yemen
From Salon:
Given what a prominent role “Terrorism” plays in our political discourse, it’s striking how little attention is paid to American actions which have the most significant impact on that problem. In addition to our occupation of Iraq, war escalation in Afghanistan, and secret bombings in Pakistan, President Obama late last week ordered cruise missile attacks on two locations in Yemen, which “U.S. officials” say were “suspected Al Qaeda hideouts.” The main target of the attacks, Al Qaeda member Qasim al Rim, was not among those killed, but: “a local Yemeni official said on Sunday that 49 civilians, among them 23 children and 17 women, were killed in air strikes against Al-Qaeda, which he said were carried out ‘indiscriminately’.” Media reports across the Muslim world — though, not of course, within the U.S. — are highlighting the dead civilians from the U.S. strike (one account from an official Iranian outlet began: ”U.S. Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama has signed…
10 Ways to Screw Over the Corporate Jackals Who’ve Been Screwing You
From Alternet:
The New Year is nearly here, and so much has happened. Wait, what’s that? Nothing major at all has happened, you say? Oh right, we’ve been stuck in neutral since dumping the toxic trash of the Republican Bush administration and embracing Democratic promises of hope and change, neither of which have blossomed.
A year of our collective life has flown by and our global culture is still rife with schemers, screw jobs and sorry excuses for solutions. And we just sit back and take it, year after year. But no more. When you make that hefty list of New Year’s resolutions, drop some of these bombs. Then duck. You’ll get your change faster than you can say, “Teabag this!”
1. Mortgage underwater? Just walk away from it. Even academia says it’s OK. Move to the city and rent.
“Homeowners should be walking away in droves,” University of Arizona law school professor Brent T.…
Jesse Ventura’s Latest Conspiracy Theory – Global Warming
In the third episode of his new TV series, Jesse Ventura is following the money trail, out to expose the most frightening, inconvenient Conspiracy Theory yet: That Global Warming may be a scam.
The movement claims the planet is heading to disaster because factories and cars are heating up the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. The green industry feeds off our fears and urges us to spend billions on products that purport to be good for the environment.
This week, Jesse and his investigators are traveling around the world to expose the power-brokers who pull the strings and rake in fortunes. The Conspiracy Theory team aims to get to the bottom of claims that global warming is a powerful plot meant to extort, tax and control all of us…
D.C. Detective Brings a Gun … To A Snowball Fight?!?
Matt Zapotosky writes in the Washington Post:
The call went out on a Web site and over Twitter, and hundreds of 20- and 30-somethings, tired of being cooped up, gathered at 14th and U streets NW on Saturday for a little restless indulgence.
People squealed as they hurled balls of snow across the largely deserted road. Then, a snowball or two slammed into a Hummer. The driver, a plainclothes detective whom D.C. police refused to identify, got out, drew his gun and exchanged angry words with revelers, according to video footage and witnesses.
Police said initially that the detective had not flashed his weapon. On Sunday, the officer was placed on desk duty after Twitter, blogs and YouTube appeared to show otherwise.
Google Pays No Taxes on Its £1.6bn Ad Revenues in Britain
Robert Watts writes in the Times:
Google, the internet giant whose informal corporate motto is “don’t be evil”, did not pay any tax on its £1.6 billion advertising revenues in Britain last year.
The firm, which has a substantial presence in London, diverted all its advertising earnings from customers in Britain to its Irish subsidiary. The arrangement allowed Google legally to avoid paying more than £450m in corporation tax to HM Revenue & Customs in 2008, The Sunday Times has established.
The disclosure prompted politicians to criticise Google, widely lauded as a pioneer of the internet age, for “ducking its social responsibility” and for “tax avoiding”. Accounts filed with Companies House in the past week show Google’s 2008 UK corporation tax bill amounted to just £141,519 — and that was tax on the interest generated by its cash pile in UK bank deposits.
Vince Cable, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, urged the…
California Activists Propose Legalizing (And Taxing) Marijuana To Bail Out State
Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman write on Reuters:
With California teetering perpetually on the edge of financial ruin, marijuana activists have seized the moment, claiming that legalizing and taxing pot could help bail out the cash-strapped Golden State.
But critics are slamming the proposal, saying the social costs of a free-smoking state far outweigh the money it would bring in, and that a promised windfall from taxing marijuana sales couldn’t possibly plug California’s massive budget gap.
Voters are likely to confront the issue next year. Marijuana advocates say they have collected more than enough signatures, over 680,000, to qualify for November’s ballot with a proposal to make California the first U.S. state to legalize possession and cultivation of pot for recreational use.
Passage remains far from certain, even in socially permissive California.
Fifteen years after Californians led the nation in approving the use of cannabis for medical purposes, fierce political debate is raging over a…
Sarah Palin Blasts ‘Arrogance Of Man’ (Meaning Obama?)
Via The Hill:
The now-finished climate change summit in Copenhagen marks the “arrogance of man,” former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said this weekend.
Palin, who had urged President Barack Obama not to attend the conference in Denmark, blasted the agreement world leaders made late on Friday to begin stemming emissions that contribute to climate change.
Palin tweeted early Saturday morning:
Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature’s ways.MUST b good stewards of God’s earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature
Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng
Those tweets and previous skepticism the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee has expressed toward global warming science has led some to label her a climate change “denier.”
But Palin has maintained that she does not deny that climate change exists, and that she only questions the extent of the change and what sort of policies should be put in place to address it…
[continues…
Chase Bank Rigs Online Fundraising Contest?
More shenanigans from our beloved mega-banks, concerning this Facebook contest :
via the NY Times
JPMorgan Chase & Company is coming under fire for the way it conducted an online contest to award millions of dollars to 100 charities.
At least three nonprofit groups — Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Marijuana Policy Project and an anti-abortion group, Justice for All— say they believe that Chase disqualified them over concerns about associating its name with their missions.
The groups say that until Chase made changes to the contest, they appeared to be among the top 100 vote-getters.
“They never gave us any indication that there was any problem with our organization qualifying,” said Micah Daigle, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. “Now they’re completely stonewalling me.”
Three days before the contest ended, Chase stopped giving participants access to voting information, and it has not made public the vote tallies of the winners.
“This is a problem of accountability,” said David Lee, executive director of Justice for All. “Simply publish the votes and let us see that the 100 organizations named as winners won.”
Hackers Face Off At The U.S. Cyber Challenge
Jeanne Meserve and Mike M. Ahlers cover the U.S. Cyber Challenge for CNN:
With the coolness of a card shark at the final table of the World Series of Poker, Matt Bergin pulls the hood of his brown sweatshirt over his head and concentrates on the task at hand.
The task: hacking into as many target computers as he can and then defending those computers from attacks by other skilled hackers.
Other skilled hackers like Michael Coppola, 17, a high school senior who, at this very moment, is hunched over a keyboard in his Connecticut home.
Or like Chris Benedict, 21, from the tiny town of Nauvoo, Illinois. Chris is sitting silently nearby, one of 15 “All Star” hackers who have taken over this spacious hotel conference room.
At days end, the moderator of this unusual computer challenge declares the best of the best: Benedict is the winner, king of the hacker hill, followed by…
Winter Solstice: Standing With Stones
Rupert Soskin is the writer and presenter of the documentary travelogue Standing With Stones: A Journey Through Megalithic Britain. He lectures and leads groups to ancient sites and natural wonders in Britain and abroad. He is also a much-published nature and travel photographer.
Once again the winter solstice has come around. That magical time when the sun begins to rise again, giving us longer days and taking us into warmer days of plenty. People flock to sites such as Stonehenge and Newgrange to witness the rising or the setting of the sun. Modern-day druids hold ceremonies at these and other ancient monuments, continuing ancient traditions which began so long ago in human history for their origins to be lost in the mists of time.
For many thousands of years man has celebrated this celestial cycle of ebb and flow, seeking to live in harmony with the constant effects of the heavens upon…
This Christmas, Bring Home A Crucifix Tree
Christian-themed retailer Boss Creations is “putting the ‘Christ’ back into Christmas.”
Putting one of these in the living room is a real conversation-starter…and after the holiday season is over you can hang laundry on it, or something.
The Day The Sun Stood Still
Today is the winter solstice, the solar nadir in the northern hemisphere, a temporal event in Spaceship Earth’s rotations where the sun takes its lowest path through our sky and the daytime is least: the astronomical New Year.
This is an event that many wise have encouraged us to recognise as the origin of our ‘modern’ festive experience. The word solstice in fact derives from the Latin Sol meaning Sun and sistere which means to stand still, because this is exactly what it appears to do.
Our sun, having clambered ever lower over the horizon since midsummer, seems to be disappearing, perhaps eternally, an experience which was no doubt,a source of unquestionable anxiety to early peoples. When the sun was henceforth ‘reborn’ from the horizon, into a fresh cycle of light, there was much rapture and hedonistic release; it is not hard to recognise a common origin for the many religious rebirth mythologies in…
Drug Money Rescued The World’s Banks
Who were the heroes who brought the United States and the rest of the world away from the brink of financial catastrophe this past year? Time person-of-the-year Ben Bernanke and co.? Nope, more like the Mexican Mafia. From the Guardian:
Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, [says] the United Nations’ drugs and crime tzar.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organized crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis.
Was Berlusconi Attack Faked? Conspiracy Theory YouTube Video Becomes Overnight Sensation
Now that the attack on Berlusconi seems to have made him more popular, achieving the opposite of what was assumed to be the assailant’s goal, comes this conspiracy theory, reported in the Daily Mail:
A You Tube video which suggests the attack on Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was faked has become an overnight sensation.
Berlusconi, 73, was hit in the face with a souvenir marble and metal replica of Milan’s famous Gothic cathedral following a political rally and suffered a fractured nose and two broken teeth.
TV footage of the politician showing him bleeding profusely from cuts to his lips and gums went around the world in a matter of seconds and were seen by millions.
However, today a video posted on You Tube suggesting the attack in Milan was faked had received almost 500,000 hits in just a matter of hours…
Google Talks Transparency, But Hides Surveillance Stats
From Wired:
Google likes to trumpet transparency and free expression, especially when it concerns the internet, part of its commitment to the corporate motto, “Don’t Be Evil.”But despite the company’s recent online public policy posts espousing unfettered online expression, we aren’t buying it.
The Mountain View, California, search and advertising giant said Wednesday, for example, that it was a “company that believes deeply in free expression” and that it was “determined to continue to do our part and make new, significant contributions to promote free expression in 2010.”
But juxtapose those and other recent statements on its public policy blog with the real facts — facts that Google won’t cough up.
We asked Google some simple questions about how much user data it turns over to the government. These are questions at the heart of free expression, especially with a company that wants you to use its operating system, its browser, its DNS servers, its…
‘Boat’ Could Explore Saturn Moon
From BBC News:
A daring proposal to try to put a “boat” down on a sea of Saturn’s moon Titan is about to be submitted to Nasa.
The scientific team behind the idea is targeting Ligeia Mare, a vast body of liquid methane sited in the high north of Saturn’s largest moon.
The concept will be suggested to the US space agency for one of its future mission opportunities that will test a novel power system.
It would be the first exploration of a planetary sea beyond Earth.
“It is something that would really capture the imagination,” said Dr Ellen Stofan, from Proxemy Research, who leads the study team.
“The story of human exploration on Earth has been one of navigation and seafaring, and the idea that we could explore for the first time an extraterrestrial sea I think would be mind-blowing for most people,” she told BBC News.
Dr Stofan, who is also an honorary professor…
Child Diabetes Tied to Food Sweetener Fructose
Lois Rogers writes in the Times:
Scientists have proved for the first time that a cheap form of sugar used in thousands of food products and soft drinks can damage human metabolism and is fuelling the obesity crisis.
Fructose, a sweetener derived from corn, can cause dangerous growths of fat cells around vital organs and is able to trigger the early stages of diabetes and heart disease.
It has increasingly been used as a substitute for more expensive types of sugar in yoghurts, cakes, salad dressing and cereals. Even some fruit drinks that sound healthy contain fructose.
Experts believe that the sweetener — which is found naturally in small quantities in fruit — could be a factor in the emergence of diabetes among children. This week, a new report is expected to claim that about one in 10 children in England will be obese by 2015.
Previous studies of the potentially adverse impact of fructose…
