Mythbusters Banned From Discussing RFID By Visa And Mastercard
Host Adam Savage of Mythbusters tells how Visa, Mastercard, and Discover had the Discovery Channel put the kibosh on an episode that would have revealed just how “trackable and hackable” the RFID chips found in many credit cards are. It’s a telling example of how corporate advertisers serve as the gatekeepers of mainstream media/entertainment:
Anonymous Attacks Monsanto (Video)
Via the Earth First! Newswire:
Anonymous, which briefly knocked the FBI and Justice Department websites offline as well as Music Industry websites in retaliation for the US shutdown of file-sharing site Megaupload, is a shadowy group of amazing international hackers.
MSNBC, Please Fire Meghan McCain (Video)
She was hired because her father ran for president. What a mistake … NBC as a failed corporation, why not hire any commenter on this post?
Bank Of America ATMs Altered To Become ‘Truth Machines’
San Francisco’s Rainforest Action Network altered 85 Bank of America ATMs around the city last week using sticker overlays, so that the machines would notify users of what their money is being used for. Bankrupting America has a handy map of the affected/improved ATMs.
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Bed Bath & Beyond’s Radioactive Tissue Boxes
Well, at least that colds of yours won’t stand a chance with irradiated tissues. Mike Adams reports at Natural News:
The Dual Ridge Metal Boutique tissue boxes sold at Bed, Bath & Beyond stores have been discovered to be radioactive. Made with the extremely dangerous material used to blast cancer tumors with radiation — cobalt-60 — they emit gamma rays that are known to cause both cancer and infertility. They were manufactured in India, shipped on a commercial container to New Jersey, and then distributed to Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in 20 states.
How much radiation do these tissue holders emit, exactly? Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman David McIntyre said, on the record, that standing near one of these tissue holders for 30 minutes a day would expose you to the equivalent of “a couple of chest X-Rays” each year. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency went even further, issuing a release stating…
Mountain Dew Will Dissolve Rats On Contact
If you like soft drinks the way I do, that is, looking like my conception of nuclear waste, this is really good news. From the Smoking Gun:
Defending itself from a lawsuit claiming that an Illinois man found a dead mouse inside a can of Mountain Dew, PepsiCo contends that a rodent would have disintegrated and been transformed into a “jelly-like” substance between the time of the soft drink’s bottling and the day the plaintiff reportedly purchased the soda from a vending machine at his office.
In a court response to a motion filed by Ronald Ball–who claims to have found the dead mouse in a Mountain Dew can about three years ago–PepsiCo filed a fascinating/revolting affidavit from Lawrence McGill, a veterinarian who noted that he was “familiar with the effects an acidic fluid, such as common soda drinks including Mountain Dew, will have on mice and other animals.”
According to McGill, if…
Marvel Comics Lawyers Argue That Mutants Are Not Human
Bullpen Bulletin! A “real world” conflict based on the bottom line has infringed on the civil liberties of our uncanny “fictional” heroes, who have lately made a ton of dough for their corporate creator. Grant Morrison has tread this ground in Animal Man to explore the dynamic between the creator and the creation, but sans the grand mega-corporate, economic drama. (Probably need to see Seaguy for that: I wonder if Mickey Eye is behind the actions of Marvel’s Law Defense Team!)
The folks at io9.com do a great job of explaining how the map is not the territory in this collision of “realities.” As Meredith Woerner explains (and check out the Radiolab Podcast):
Mark this up as one more blow to human-mutant equality. Marvel lawyers are putting up a fight to prove the mutants aren’t the same as humans after all. Unleash the Sentinels!
This strange piece of news comes via the Radiolab Podcast, which uncovered a weird saga of…
Breaking Apart An iPhone’s Cost
It’s still shocking to see just how little of the profits from an item go towards those who made it. From a piece on the power of transnational corporations, via Reports from the Economic Front:
The production of the iPhone offers one of the best examples of the logic and operation of these transnational corporate controlled cross border production networks.
Not surprisingly, the division of profits, as shown below, reflects the overall hierarchy that structures this and other cross border production networks.
Mystery Kidney Disease Epidemic in Central America
Kate Sheehy reports for PRI’s The World:
In the western lowlands of Nicaragua, in a region of vast sugarcane fields, sits the tiny community of La Isla.The small houses are a patchwork of concrete and wood. Pieces of cloth serve as doors.
Maudiel Martinez emerges from his house to greet me. He’s pale, and his cheekbones protrude from his face. He hunches over like an old man — but he is only 19-years-old.
“The way this sickness is — you see me now, but in a month I could be gone. It can take you down all of a sudden,” he says. Maudiel’s kidneys are failing. They do not perform the essential function of filtering waste from his body. He’s being poisoned from the inside. When he got ill two years ago, he was already familiar with this disease and how it might end. “I thought about my father and grandfather,” he says.…
How Private Warmongers and the U.S. Military Infiltrated American Universities
Steve Horn and Allen Ruff recently 
reported in Truthout:
A matrix of closely tied university-based strategic studies ventures, the so-called Grand Strategy Programs (GSP), have cropped up on a number of elite campuses around the country, where they function to serve the national security warfare state.
In tandem with allied institutes and think tanks across the country, these programs, centered at Yale University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University, Temple University and, until recently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, illustrate the increasingly influential role of a new breed of warrior academics in the post-9/11 United States. The network marks the ascent and influence of what might be called the “Long War University.”
Ostensibly created to train an up-and-coming elite to see a global “big picture,” this grand strategy network has brought together scores of foreign policy wonks heavily invested — literally and figuratively — in an unending quest to maintain US global…
eBook Readers Live in a Different Universe of Books
Amazon’s released their list of 2011’s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books!
The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. “It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,” notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only “Singles,” including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s “Reamde” was Amazon’s #99 best-selling…
Bernie Sanders’ Saving American Democracy Amendment
Warning that “American democracy in endangered,” Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday, December 8, 2011 proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn a Supreme Court ruling that allowed unrestricted and secret campaign spending by corporations on U.S. elections. The first constitutional amendment ever proposed by Sanders during his two decades in Congress would reverse the narrow 5-to-4 ruling in Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission.
Show your support – sign the petition. Thanks Miles Jaffe for sending us the link.
WikiLeaks Releases Spyware Firm Videos That Show How to Hack Email, Skype, WiFi
Kim Zetter writes on WIRED’s Threat Level:
What better way to sell your wares than to produce a marketing video showing exactly how your product works? Even if that product is spyware, marketed to oppressive regimes.
WikiLeaks, as part of its Spy Files trove of documents, released on Thursday a series of videos from Gamma International, a UK-based firm that markets the Finfisher spyware.
The video shows how the company’s product can be used to sniff WiFi networks from a hotel lobby, hack computers and cell phones, or intercept Skype communications and siphon encryption passwords.
BP Accuses Halliburton of Destroying Evidence in Gulf Oil Spill Case
Laurel Brubaker Calkins reports in the Washington Post:
BP Plc accused a unit of Halliburton Co. of intentionally destroying evidence that could be used to prove the oilfield services firm shares blame for the blowout that caused the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Halliburton Energy Services Inc. destroyed test results that showed samples of the cement used to seal London-based BP’s Macondo well, which exploded off the Louisiana coast last year, were unstable, BP said in a filing in federal court in New Orleans.
The oilfield services provider also suppressed computer models that might prove Halliburton was at fault “because it wanted to eliminate any risk that this evidence would be used against it at trial,” BP said in the filing. BP asked the court to find that Halliburton destroyed evidence on purpose and to compel the company to turn over for third-party examination the computer used for the modeling.
“Halliburton is reviewing…
Pro And Anti-Christmas Retailers List
Keepers of morality the American Family Association have released their annual list of companies that are “Christmas friendly” or “anti-Christmas” (the latter using the term “Christmas” sparingly and instead referring to “the holidays”). Lesson learned: Jesus loves Wal-Mart, and when you shop at Staples, you’re shopping with Satan.
Malls Track Shoppers’ Cell Phones on Black Friday
Annayln Censky reports for CNN:
Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.
Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year’s Day, two U.S. malls — Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. — will track guests’ movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.
While the data that’s collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers’ paths from store to store.
The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria’s Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren’t being visited?
While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they’ve used cell phones.
Yet One More Way That Money Corrupts Politics…
For some reason, insider trading laws do not apply to members of Congress, whose back-rooms dealings give them special knowledge of how upcoming votes will effect the market. Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes reports:
How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich
An incisive new article by Tim Dickinson of Rolling Stone looks back to the ’80s, and describes how Republican Party came to abandon fiscal responsibility in favor of endless tax subsidies for the rich:
The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary — and that’s crazy.”
Preacherlike, the president…
