Archive for November, 2010
WikiLeaks’ Plan To Take Down A Major Bank
Julian Assange, perhaps THE man of the media moment, says that early in 2011 WikiLeaks will disclose documents so damning that their release could “take down a bank or two.” Finally perhaps, some retribution for the Plunder of America by the banksters? From Andy Greenberg’s interview with Assange for Forbes:
Julian Assange
Forbes: Is it a U.S. bank?
Assange: Yes, it’s a U.S. bank.
One that still exists?
Yes, a big U.S. bank.
The biggest U.S. bank?
No comment.
When will it happen?
Early next year. I won’t say more.
What do you want to be the result of this release?
[Pauses] I’m not sure.
It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.
Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were…
How a Burnt Lady Gaga CD Helped Leak 250,000 U.S. Embassy Cables to WikiLeaks
I find this to be a good reminder for conspiracy theorists how seriously incompetent governments can be. From a fake Lady Gaga CD to a thumb drive that is a pocket-sized bombshell — the biggest intelligence leak in history… David Leigh writes in the Guardian:
The US military believes it knows where the leak originated. A soldier, Bradley Manning, 22, has been held in solitary confinement for the last seven months and is facing a court martial in the new year. The former intelligence analyst is charged with unauthorised downloads of classified material while serving on an army base outside Baghdad. He is suspected of taking copies not only of the state department archive, but also of video of an Apache helicopter crew gunning down civilians in Baghdad, and hundreds of thousands of daily war logs from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It was childishly easy, according to the published chatlog of…
Amtrak To Allow Guns On Most Trains
Want to travel through the country with your firearms, but can’t get through airport security? No worries, take the train! Amtrak will soon allow passengers to transport their firearms, unloaded and stored away. The Sacramento Bee reports:
Reversing a near decadelong ban, Amtrak will allow passengers to bring guns on most trains starting next month, including several that stop in Sacramento.
The change, pushed by gun rights advocates and ordered by Congress, aligns Amtrak’s firearms policy with air travel rules that allow unloaded guns to be stored in locked baggage holds.
Federal Homeland Security officials on Monday said they are OK with guns being on trains as long as security protocols are enforced.
“It’s deemed safe and appropriate,” federal Transportation Security Administration spokesman Nico Melendez said. “If people follow the rules, it’s pretty simple.”
[Continues at The Sacramento Bee]
Brooklyn’s Bees Are Addicted To Junk Food
The Dell's Maraschino Cherries building in Red Hook
Well what do expect from bunch of Brooklyn Bees, living in the borough of Junior’s Cheesecake, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs and other not so healthy culinary delights? The New York Times relates the tale of the bright red bees:
Cerise Mayo expected better of her bees. She had raised them right, given them all the best opportunities — acres of urban farmland strewn with fruits and vegetables, a bounty of natural nectar and pollen. Blinded by devotion, she assumed they shared her values: a fidelity to the land, to food sources free of high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food coloring.
And then this. Her bees, the ones she had been raising in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and on Governors Island since May, started coming home to their hives looking suspicious. Of course, it was the foragers — the adventurers, the wild waggle dancers, the social networkers incessantly…
Is NASA About to Announce the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life?
Please let this have something to do with the discovery of a monolith. Fingers crossed on Thursday. Alasdair Wilkins asks on io9.com:
NASA is bringing together a geologist, an oceanographer, a biologist, and an ecologist for a press conference on Thursday to talk about an astrobiology discovery that “will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” Yeah, this could be major.
Blogger Jason Kottke did some inspired sleuthing regarding what Thursday’s press conference might be about. He discovered the expertises of the various people involved include the interaction of geology and life on alien planets (specifically Mars), photosynthesis using arsenic, Saturn’s moon Titan as an early Earth environment, and the chemistry of life, including in places without carbon, water, or oxygen.
Taking that all together and combined with the current blitz of news from NASA’s Cassini probe around Saturn, Kottke guesses the announcement might have something to do with the discovery of…
Upper-Class People Have Trouble Recognizing Others’ Emotions
A window into the behavior of CEOs and politicians? Science Daily writes:
Upper-class people have more educational opportunities, greater financial security, and better job prospects than people from lower social classes, but that doesn’t mean they’re more skilled at everything. A new study published in Psychological Science finds surprisingly, that lower-class people are better at reading the emotions of others.
The researchers were inspired by observing that, for lower-class people, success depends more on how much they can rely on other individuals. For example, if you can’t afford to buy support services, such as daycare service for your children, you have to rely on your neighbors or relatives to watch the kids while you attend classes or run errands.
One experiment used volunteers who worked at a university. Some had graduated from college and others had not; researchers used educational level as a proxy for social class. The volunteers did a test of emotion perception,…
Foxs’ Report On ‘War On Christmas’ Never Actually Happened
Via Media Matters:
Fox & Friends reported that a school in central Florida had banned the “traditional Christmas colors” red and green from classrooms. In a statement to Media Matters, the school’s district spokesperson, Regina Klares, has denied this, stating, “There is not a ban on the colors red and green at Heathrow Elementary.”
[Continues at Media Matters]
The Sweeping Shift Of The Two-Party Vote
The line between “red” states and “blue” states is far more fluid than one might think…and ultimately are labels that don’t really mean all that much. Here’s how drastically and frequently political-party-allegiance across the country has shifted over the last ninety years, via David B. Sparks:
Jon Stewart on the Questionable U.S.–Saudi Arabia Relationship (Video)
All due to WikiLeaks, at around 2:15 in this Daily Show clip. Finally, some more goddamn truth on television:
Thawing Siberian Permafrost Leaking More Methane Than Ever
Siberia
We can endlessly dispute whether the changes are man-made or natural, but change isn’t a question, it’s a reality. From Arthur Max via AP:
CHERSKY, Russia – The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame.
Gas locked inside Siberia’s frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.
Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could…
Rep. Peter King Calls WikiLeaks a “Foreign Terrorist Organization”
Dylan Ratigan talks to Ana Marie Cox, Matt Lewis, and Sam Seder:
The Jester, A ‘Hacktivist For Good’, Claims WikiLeaks Takedown
Sounds like a comic book villain. Richard Allen Greene & Nicola Hughes report for CNN:
A computer hacker who calls himself “The Jester” claimed responsibility for the cyber attack which took down the WikiLeaks site Sunday, shortly before it started posting hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables.
The Jester, who describes himself as a “hacktivist for good,” said he took the controversial site down “for attempting to endanger the lives of our troops, ‘other assets’ & foreign relations.”
He normally attacks Islamist websites, announcing “TANGO DOWN” on his Twitter account when claiming to have attacked a site. “Tango Down” is Special Forces jargon for having eliminated a terrorist.
The Jester describes himself as “an ex-soldier with a rather famous unit, country purposely not specified.”
“I was involved with supporting Special Forces, I have served in (and around) Afghanistan amongst other places,” he told the website threatchaos.com early this year.
Survey Says: Over One Third of South African Men Admit to Having Committed Rape
Nastasya Yay reports on the AP via Yahoo News:
JOHANNESBURG— A new survey says more than one in three South African men admit to having committed rape.
A 2010 study led by the government-funded Medical Research Foundation says that in Gauteng province, home to South Africa’s most populous city of Johannesburg, more than 37 percent of men said they had raped a woman. Nearly 7 percent of the 487 men surveyed said they had participated in a gang rape.
More than 51 percent of the 511 women interviewed said they’d experienced violence from men, and 78 percent of men said they’d committed violence against women.
A quarter of the women interviewed said they’d been raped, but the study says only one in 25 rapes are reported to police.
A survey by the same organization in 2008 found that 28 percent of men in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces said they had raped a woman or girl.…
Graham Hancock: The War on Your Consciousness
Mandelbrot Islands of Consciousness. Image: David R. Ingham (CC)
Site editor’s note: This article was originally published as part of the Russ Kick-edited Disinformation anthology, You Are STILL Being Lied To. Hancock’s latest book is a novel dealing with some of the issues presented below titled ENTANGLED: The Eater of Souls.
We are told that the “War on Drugs” is being waged, on our behalf, by our governments and their armed bureaucracies and police forces, to save us from ourselves. “Potential for abuse and harm” are supposed to be the criteria by which the use of drugs is suppressed—the greater a drug’s potential for abuse and harm, the greater and more vigorous the degree of suppression, and the more draconian the penalties applied against its users.
In line with this scheme drugs are typically ranked into a hierarchy: Schedules I, II, and III in the US, Classes A, B, and C in the UK,…
Apple Employee Shuts Down “Crapple Store” Website
A former Apple Store employee announced today that he’s ending a critical blog called The Crapple Store. “No one likes a big fuss or legal battle,” he informed readers, “so I’ve decided, unfortunately, to stop blogging before it gets out of hand…”
There’s still a few quotes from his site on other blogs, including an e-mail he published from another disgruntled the Apple Store employee. (”I have never felt so undervalued as an employee or so constantly undermined by useless management…”) But in today’s announcement, he admitted that “it was never really meant to be read by the whole world… it was a place for fed up employees to read the sufferings of another fed up employee, and laugh about all the little things that begin to tick you off whilst working at Apple.”
It’s not clear whether Apple pressured him over the site, but today’s announcement makes clear that he no…
Surely, Leslie Nielsen Can’t Be Gone! Yes, (Sadly), But Don’t Call Him Shirley (Video)
The comedy classic Airplane! by means of the late, great Leslie Nielsen:
America’s 30 Hackiest Political Pundits
Salon’s War Room has unveiled the Hack Thirty, counting down America’s worst political columnists and television pundits, with representative quotes of their most dismal work. The focus isn’t on obviously-partisan loons such as Glenn Beck; rather it’s on “respectable” and “moderate” writers and cable news commentators who use their enviable positions to spout banalities, unthinkingly regurgitate accepted wisdom, and bow down to those in power. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman comes in at No. 3:
Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from…
Ahmadinejad Accuses WikiLeaks’ Cables Release of Being a False Flag Operation
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Photo: Jose Cruz (CC)
The BBC reports:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the release by the Wikileaks website of thousands of extracts from US diplomatic messages was simply psychological warfare against Iran.
He said the release would not affect Iran’s relations with other countries. The US said the release was “reckless” and put the lives of diplomats at risk.
The Obama administration has been scrambling to make sure similar leaks do not happen again. Government agencies have been ordered to tighten their procedures for handling classified information, ensuring that employees only have access to such documents as they need to do their jobs.
The Pentagon said it was making its computer systems more secure to prevent future leaks. And Attorney General Eric Holder said there was an “active and ongoing criminal investigation” into the release of the documents and anyone found responsible would be prosecuted.
… Among the revelations is a report that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had urged…
Video: Inside North Korea
A group of North Koreans have been risking their lives secretly filming within the regime’s borders. Smuggling tapes across the Chinese border, they hopes to expose the condition of North Korean life to a global audience. From The Telegraph:
