CIA Operating In Libya, In Consultation With Opposition
Via CNN:
CIA operatives are providing intelligence from Libya, where opposition forces are on the run and the defiant government suffered the embarrassing defection of its foreign minister Wednesday.
The NATO-led coalition, which is enforcing a no-fly zone and protecting civilians from the intense fighting, got no help from the weather in its ongoing efforts to protect the fragile opposition movement.
“The weather conditions did not allow close combat support by aircraft in the last couple of days,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Moammar Gadhafi’s government, for its part, kept up the war of words. State-run Libyan TV late Wednesday quoted a military source as saying a “civilian location was shelled tonight in the city of Tripoli by the colonizing crusader aggression.”
Amid debate on whether the allies will arm the retreating and undertrained rebels, a U.S. intelligence source told CNN the CIA is in…
CNN Attributes ‘Mainstreaming Of Conspiracy Theories’ To Rise In U.S. Hate Groups
While “hate groups” undoubtedly can be a problem for a civil society, I believe this article is awfully biased against those who are rationally weary of Big Gov.
CNN reports:
The number of radical right groups in America — including hate groups, “Patriot” groups and nativist groups — increased in 2010 for the second year in a row, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The organization’s quarterly publication, Intelligence Report, said the growth was “driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities.”
The SPLC documented 1,002 hate groups operating in the United States in 2010, a 7.5% increase from the year before. It was the first time that more than 1,000 hate groups were recorded since the organization started tracking them in the 1980s.
But the biggest…
How a Slap Sparked Tunisia’s Revolution … And Perhaps For the Entire Middle East (Video)
While Libya now, and Egypt not too long ago, are/were dominating the news cycle, 60 Minutes had a recent piece on what happened in Tunisia before these events. The most amazing part of this video to me, is in Tunisia, some young people who were part of the protest movement are now part of the new government. Bob Simon of 60 Minutes reports:
The wave of revolutions sweeping the Arab world started in a forgotten town in the flatlands of Tunisia. It was an unlikely place for history to be made. But so was Tunisia itself, the smallest country in North Africa, strategically irrelevant, with no oil and not much of an army.
It has been an oasis of tranquility in this tumultuous part of the world, famous for its beaches, its couscous and its wonderful weather. But there was a dark side to paradise: for 23 years, Tunisia was ruled by a corrupt and ruthless dictator named Zine Ben Ali, who filled his prisons with anyone who spoke out against him.
Day Of Rage: Americans Finally Reacting To Economic Rape?
Undoubtedly, many are wondering if the unrest in Africa and the Middle East would spark any movements in the United States. What comparisons can be drawn from the protests in Wisconsin to the other protests seen around the world?
Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars offers his perspective:
Last month we speculated how long it would take for the scenes on the streets of Cairo to be repeated in America. After all, Americans are facing similar levels of economic rape to those that prompted Egyptians to rise up and overthrow 30 year dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Now Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan (R) is making similar comparisons after protesters massed in the hallways of the Wisconsin state Capitol this morning as part of what Matt Drudge dubbed a “day of rage”…
Seven Arrested Over Plot to Sell Drugs to Arm Taliban
Taliban flag
Selling drugs to finance arms purchases — why does that sound so familiar? The New York Times reports:
A group of men agreed to assist the Taliban in a conspiracy to ship narcotics through West Africa to the United States and with the proceeds buy weapons for use against American forces in Afghanistan, federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced on Monday.
The charges stemmed from a sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration, in which paid informants posed as representatives of the Taliban and discussed arrangements for the proposed drugs and weapons deals with the accused conspirators in meetings in West Africa and Eastern Europe.
One conspirator told the confidential informants that they could obtain heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, antitank missiles, grenade launchers, night vision equipment, sniper rifles and AK-47 assault rifles, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The defendants included two Americans, who were both accused of conspiring…
Could A U.S. Government Crackdown Take America Off The Internet?
I’m sure this has been on the minds of many following the ongoing events in Egypt. An io9 article discusses the possibility:
With the threat of today’s protests looming in Egypt, on Thursday Egyptian authorities cut the nation off the internet. No online communication could pass in or out of the country. We investigated whether a similar lockdown could happen in America.
How the Egyptian government erased its citizens from the internet
No one is completely certain what happened to the Egyptian internet, but it appears that the shutdown started off early in the week with the country blocking Twitter and Facebook access for those within its borders. Then, shortly after Thursday midnight local time, the country simply disappeared from the internet. With a few exceptions like the stock exchange, Egyptian websites and services were unreachable; the network traffic over Egyptian borders dropped by an astonishing 90 percent. Cell phone networks were also down. Today…
FBI Issues Warrants Over “Anonymous” Cyber Attacks
Will “I did it for the lulz” hold up in court? Fox News reports:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation refused to elaborate Friday on the status of more than 40 search warrants the agency issued throughout the United States on Thursday, as part of an ongoing investigation into recent coordinated cyber attacks against major companies and organizations.
An FBI spokesman refused to tell FoxNews.com whether arrests had been made or were expected, instead referring all questions back to a press release the agency issued late Thursday announcing the warrants.
The FBI also said that the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service had executed search warrants that had resulted in five arrests. The suspects in custody are identified as young men from the central and souther England area, and range in age from 15 to 26.
Targeted suspects are members of a group called “Anonymous,” which coordinated cyber attacks against companies like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard after…
Iranian Book Celebrating Suicide Bombers Found in Arizona Desert
U.S. Border Patrol dune buggy in Arizona. Look who's riding shotgun!
This loaded article is sure to stir some controversy. Fox News reports:
A book celebrating suicide bombers has been found in the Arizona desert just north of the U.S.-Mexican border, authorities tell Fox News.
The book, “In Memory of Our Martyrs,” was spotted Tuesday by a U.S. Border Patrol agent out of the Casa Grande substation who was patrolling a route known for smuggling illegal immigrants and drugs.
Published in Iran, it consists of short biographies of Islamic suicide bombers and other Islamic militants who died carrying out attacks.
According to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents, “The book also includes letters from suicide attackers to their families, as well as some of their last wills and testaments.” Each biographical page contains “the terrorist’s name, date of death, and how they died.”
Agents also say that the book appears to have been exposed to weather in…
‘The Empire Strikes Back’ & Others To Be Preserved By U.S. Library
Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back is to be preserved by the US Library of Congress as part of its National Film Registry:
Each year, 25 “culturally” significant films are added to the registry, which was founded in 1989. Lucas’s Star Wars and American Graffiti are among the 550 titles already selected for preservation.
This year’s raft of entries includes Robert Altman’s 1971 western McCabe and Mrs. Miller starring Warren Beatty, Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther and Elia Kazan’s first feature film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, made in 1945.
Wikileaks And The Secrets That Deceive Us
In the days of Stalin’s Russia, not only would dissidents “disappear” but also even in the pre-digital era, photographs of officials at May Day reviewing stands would be erased from photographs when their political stars fell. Our own “Kremlinologists” would know who was in, and who was out by comparing last year’s pictures with this year’s.
That’s one way of concealing information.
Just last week, Republicans on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission pushed to have certain words removed from the report they were writing because they posed a conflict to their view that only the government was to blame for the financial collapse
Explained economist Paul Krugman:
Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”
When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be…
Newton’s Third Law – The Coming Collision
The Singularity by Ken Vallario.
“To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction: or the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions.”
In watching the coming collision collision between one individual and the world’s mightiest government, we are about to see if these forces are in fact equal, or if these laws will soon be broken.
The Good News
In the light of the latest Wikileaks events I have been thinking very deeply about citizen empowerment and how technology enabled a small group of people to threaten the legitimacy of the most powerful government the world has ever known. And surprisingly that same government has yet to find a legitimately effective response against this very big pie in their very large collective face.
As many of us have done, I have attempted to fill this void with my own speculations about the retaliatory…
Florida Gunman Spraypaints Red ‘V’ On Wall, Opens Fire At School Board Meeting
Another day, another revolution nipped in the bud. MSNBC reports on an agrieved lunatic whose comic-book-esque showdown with a Florida school board ended with his being shot to death by authorities. Tape below:
Introducing Metabolic Chambers
__________________________________________________________________________
“The Moral Underground” Explores How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy
Kathleen Burge at the Boston Globe has this review:
As Newton resident Lisa Dodson, a Boston College sociology professor in the thick of a research project, was interviewing a grocery story manager in the Midwest about the difficulties of the low-income workers he supervised, he asked her a curious question: “Don’t you want to know what this does to me too?’’
She did. And so the manager talked about the sense of unfairness he felt as a supervisor, making enough to live comfortably while overseeing workers who couldn’t feed their families on the money they earned. That inequality, he told her, tainted his job, making him feel complicit in an unfair system that paid hard workers too little to cover basic needs.
The interview changed the way Dodson talked with other supervisors and managers of low-income workers, and she began to find that many of them felt the same discomfort as the grocery store…
Moogfest: Remembering Robert Moog
Moogfest, a celebration of music made with the unique and wonderful Moog synthesizer, just wrapped in Asheville, NC, the place inventor Bob Moog called home for the last 30 years of his life.
The New York Times‘ lead music critic Jon Pareles has written an excellent account of the three-day festival, which you can read here, but I thought fans of Moog music might enjoy the liner notes written in 1999 by Bob for the first (and only) disinformation CD, Best Of Moog: Electronic Pop Hits From The 60’s & 70’s:
We began making electronic music instruments in 1964 and began calling them “synthesizers” in 1967. Back then, most of our customers were experimental composers in universities and conservatories. Their music was “at the fringe”, to say the least. Meanwhile, out in the mainstream of our musical culture, record producers and performing musicians tended to think of the Moog Synthesizer as an instrument that could make…
Keith on Keith (Richards)
Via Joe Nolan’s Insomnia:
Inside the dust jacket of his new book, Keith Richards has left an inscription:
“This is the Life. Believe it or not, I haven’t forgotten any of it. Thanks and praises, Keith Richards.”
Perhaps the most highly-anticipated rock autobiography ever, Life is the most detailed account we have yet of the legendary guitarist/songwriter.
Richards has lived his life in public since his early 20s and he’s always lived it in the full-glare of the media — bad publicity be damned. That said, this book is not a confessional reassessment in which a public figure offers explanations — or excuses — for past sins. Richards greatest music and worst behavior are a matter of public record and Life doesn’t offer a new version of events so much as it delivers his version, and it’s full of crazy wisdom, smirking sarcasm, raspy rambles, heart and soul.
While other volumes — like Victor Bockris’ excellent Keith — have revealed the man through the eyes of friends, family and Rolling Stones insiders, it’s Life’s first-person candor that sets it apart. Not only does Richards give us the straight-dope on Keith, he also illuminates the rise of rock ‘n’ roll and the ’60’s counter-culture from inside the eye of the hurricane. Life is also about the creative life of one of rock’s most important guitarists and songwriters, and the book’s rich detail is at least partly due to a life lived on the look-out for the next song, the next riff.
