klintron
Blackwater Accused of Bribing Iraqi Officials
The New York Times reports:
Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.
Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and…
Google Unveils Protocol For An Interplanetary Internet
From Wired UK:
Vint Cerf, Google’s internet evangelist, has unveiled a new protocol intended to power an interplanetary internet.
The Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol emerged from work first started in 1998 in partnership with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The initial goal was to modify the ubiquitous Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to facilitate robust communications between celestial bodies and satellites. [...]
The core issue is that TCP assumes a continuous (and fairly reliable) connection. DTN makes no such assumptions, requiring each node to buffer all of its packets until a stable connection can be established. Whereas TCP will repeatedly attempt to send packets until they are successfully acknowledged, DTN will automatically find a destination node with a reliable connection, and then send its payload just once. Given the latency of space communications and the…
Goldman Sachs Official Says Jesus Embraced Greed
Matt Taibbi writes:
I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses.
Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets…
Fascism Watch: Police and Military Lining Up Against Obama
Klint Finley writes for Mutate:
To their credit, the “Oath Keepers” acknowledge the Patriot Act’s erosion of civil liberties as well. But where were they during the 8 years that Bush was president? Obama gets 400% more death threats than Bush but still lets people carry assault rifles around him, and the Oathers think that they’re being persecuted? Bush had people hauled away for wearing the wrong t-shirts.
I have little good to say about Obama, but I can’t say that his administration is less tolerant of dissent than Bush’s.
From the Oather’s Declaration of Orders We Will NOT Obey: “We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects — such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons.”
I take this…
Pay Your Bills on Time? There’s a Fee for That.
In an attempt to squeeze more revenue out of consumers who don’t rack up much debt, Citigroup, Bank of America, and other credit card companies are adding new fees. According to USA Today credit card users are being hit with new “inactivity fees” and fees for not putting enough debt on your credit cards. Consumers thinking about canceling their cards face taking a hit to their credit scores for closing an account.
Other consumers may have no choice – Citibank has been closing some credit card accounts without reason or warning, damaging their customers credit ratings.
I cut-up my credit cards last night.
EsoZone – Free, This Weekend
This is it! EsoZone is upon us. The weekly PDX0 meetup is tonight at Watershed, and then EsoZone kicks off tomorrow night, starting a weekend of mutated conversation and participatory detensing, art, and rituals.
If you want to support us, it’s not too late to donate or buy a t-shirt. Or, show up and spend money with our sponsors!
And don’t forget, after EsoZone on Saturday the one and Ivan Stang will perform along with a variety of other SubGenius at the Cyclone of Slack.
Can’t make it to Esozone? Astral Project!
Fascism by the Numbers
Klint Finley, Mutate:
As a follow-up to my recent post Is It Too Late to Stop Fascism in the US?, I worked from the definition of fascism proposed by Robert Paxton.
There are several other definitions of fascism, many of which are listed on the Wikipedia entry Definitions of Fascism. I’ve decided to go through the definitions that include specific lists of criteria and see which of them the United States fits.
I’ve made the case before that when Ronald Reagan signed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Officials Act, he was quietly declaring martial law and creating a police state (and that the US has never really lived up to its liberal democratic ideals). I’m sure those with more knowledge of the right-wing populist movement of the 70s that culminated in Reagan’s election…
LSD Research Resurgence
Erin Halliday, SF Gate:
Nearly 40 years after widespread fear over recreational abuse of LSD and other hallucinogens forced dozens of scientists to abandon their work, researchers at a handful of major institutions – including UCSF and Harvard University – are reigniting studies. Scientists started looking at less controversial drugs, like ecstasy and magic mushrooms, in the late 1990s, but LSD studies only began about a year ago and are still rare.
The study at UCSF, which is being run by a UC Berkeley graduate student, is looking into the mechanisms of LSD and how it works in the brain. The hope is that such research might support further studies into medical applications of LSD – for chronic headaches, for example — or psychiatric uses. [...]
In 1966, the federal government made LSD…
Is It Too Late to Stop Fascism in the U.S.?
Klint Finley writes on Mutate!:
Sara Robinson outlines the definition of fascism and the stages all fascist nations have gone through in arriving at fascism and concludes that the US is on the brink of fascism. Robinson gives some suggestions on how to fight back and prevent fascism in the future, but I think it may be too late:
Depression’s Evolutionary Roots
Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. write in Scientific American (via Theoretick):
Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression? [...]
In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits. [...]
So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely…
Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxian Car Being Restored – Find Out How You Can Help!
The Dymaxion Car of R. Buckminster Fuller is being restored by the company Crosthwaite and Gardiner. [...]
Trevor Blake of synchronofile.com has been providing essential research material on the Dymaxion Car to Crosthwaite and Gardiner since February 2009. C&G researcher Phil King wrote: “More and more details are slowly coming out from the archives and from people like yourself, but I must say your information has been the most informative and the most prolific so far. [...] I know I keep saying it but your help has been fantastic and you have made a difference.”
synchronofile.com has been granted the great honor of announcing the restoration of the Dymaxion Car – because our readers are now invited to help in the project. Can you identify the manufacturer for this component?
Justice Dept.: Blackwater Contractor Saw Killing Iraqis as 9/11 Payback
For sport, they rolled through the streets of Baghdad hurling frozen oranges and water bottles at civilians and nearby vehicles, trying to smash windshields and injure bystanders. Convoying through the city in armored vehicles, the contractors fired their weapons indiscriminately. One member of the Blackwater security team known as Raven 23 regularly bragged about his body count and viewed killing Iraqis as “payback for 9/11.”
These allegations are contained in court records [PDF] filed on Monday by Justice Department lawyers prosecuting five Blackwater contractors for the September 2007 shooting frenzy in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that killed 14 Iraqis and wounded 20 others. Anticipating that lawyers representing the contractors will argue that they were acting in self defense, the prosecution is seeking to introduce evidence that “several of the defendants had harbored…
Did You Know: Alejandro Jodorowsky Was Going to Direct Dune?
Alejandro Jodorowsky was going to direct the film adaptation of Dune.
Moebius and HR Giger were tapped for design work, Pink Floyd was to do the soundtrack, and Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles were all to appear in the film.
To make matters weirder, David Lynch may have ended up directing Return of the Jedi had Jodorowsky pulled off Dune.
