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7/26/2002



Shoot the Messenger: Whitehats Beware :.

Hey netstumblers, you're not going to believe this one:

A Houston computer security analyst has been charged with hacking after demonstrating the insecurity of a county courts wireless LAN.

Stefan Puffer, 33, was indicted by a Grand Jury on Wednesday with two counts of fraud for allegedly breaking into Harris County district clerk's wireless computer system. It's believed to be the first case of its kind in the US.

Puffer, who was employed briefly by the county's technology department in 1999, could get five years in jail and faces a $250,000 fine on each count if convicted, the Houston Chronicle reports.





Bizzarro: Four Fort Bragg Soldiers Kill Wives :.

I don't have any idea what to make of this one:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The killings of four military wives in the past six weeks -- allegedly by their husbands who are based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina -- have led commanders to take a new look at whether combat deployments may be causing undue stress.

Sources at Fort Bragg, home to the Army Special Operations Command, say there's no common thread among the cases, and suggest it may simply be an "anomaly" that so many incidents have occurred so close together.

Benjamin Abel, an Army Special Operations Command spokesmen, gave these details on the four incidents:

On June 11, Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, 32, and his wife, Teresa, were found shot to death at their residence in a suspected murder-suicide. Nieves was assigned to the 3rd Special Forces Group. He was deployed to Afghanistan in early January and returned in mid-March.

On June 29, Jennifer Wright, the wife of Master Sgt. William Wright, 36, was found strangled. Wright was charged with first degree murder. He was assigned to the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion. He was deployed to Afghanistan in mid-March and returned in mid-May.

On July 9, Marilyn Griffin, wife of Sgt. Cedric Griffin, 28, was stabbed to death. Griffin is charged with first degree murder. He was assigned to the 37th Engineer Battalion, 20th Engineer Brigade. He had not been deployed to Afghanistan and no such deployment was planned.

On July 19, Sgt. 1st Class Brandon S. Floyd, 30, and his wife, Andrea, were shot at their home in an apparent murder-suicide. Floyd was assigned to Headquarters Company, U.S. Army Special Operations Command. He was deployed to Afghanistan in November and returned in January.





Congress Calls for Independent 9/11 Investigation :.

The "blue ribbon" commission can start by trying to get explanations for some of these items, if it ever actually comes into existence.

July 25, 2002, 8 PM, PDT � (FTW) In a session lasting until 2 A.M., the House of Representatives today passed an amendment to the 2002 Intelligence Authorization Bill (HR 2883) that would require the establishment of a �blue ribbon� independent commission to investigate the attacks of last September 11th. The amendment, introduced by Indiana Democrat Tim Roemer, passed by a vote of 219 to 188. 25 of those voting in favor were Republicans.


7/25/2002



Homeland Security Youth Camps :.

All fascist regimes seek to indoctrinate children with, "the truth." It helps when those children come from broken and impoverished family settings. Indeed, this camp focuses on recruiting poor and even mentally challenged kids, i.e. the easiest to dupe and control. Before September 11, corporations needed armies of professionally educated imbeciles to keep the wheels of commerce turning. Now that we have the War to Save the Homeland, etc. we're going to need armies of destitute non-thinkers to make the trains run on time:

The entire program is designed for teens who may be teenage parents, juvenile delinquents, low income, or coping with a learning or other disability. Eighty percent are male, and 30 percent live in group foster homes.

"These aren't the kids whose parents are going to give them $20 to sit by the pool all day," said camp director Danielle Bursk, who oversees activities at several sites from a tiny office at Bucks County Community College.

The job training they receive, Bursk says, can start a career in the homeland security business, which is booming.


Check out the words of another big believer in youth camps:

"My program for educating youth is hard. Weakness must be hammered away. In my castles of the Teutonic Order a youth will grow up before which the world will tremble. I want a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes...That is how I will eradicate thousands of years of human domestication...That is how I will create the New Order." -- Adolf Hitler, 1933.

More essential skills for children.


7/24/2002



3 Former Adelphia Execs Arrested :.

Why is there something intrinsically beautiful about corporate executives being led away in hand cuffs?

NEW YORK (AP) - The founder of bankrupt Adelphia Communications Corp. and two of his sons were charged Wednesday with conspiracy for allegedly looting the cable TV provider and using it as their "personal piggy bank" as they hid more than $2 billion in debt from investors.

Related: Dick Cheney Hides During Corporate Crime Investigation :.

Sources told the Daily News yesterday that with the urging of his lawyers, Cheney has scaled back his crucial public cheerleading role until a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Halliburton's accounting practices while Cheney was chairman and CEO has been resolved.

Also: SEC Investigating AOL :.


7/23/2002



The Incredible Corn Con :. (NY Times, requires free registration)

Sometimes, the biggest frauds occur in open view. I strongly encourage you to take a few minutes to read about a swindle so vast that it touches just about everyone in the U.S. And if you ever wanted more of an incentive to support your local organic food growers and retailers, I don't know if you will ever find it. This is truly incredible:

Our entire food supply has undergone a process of "cornification" in recent years, without our even noticing it. That's because, unlike in Mexico, where a corn-based diet has been the norm for centuries, in the United States most of the corn we consume is invisible, having been heavily processed or passed through food animals before it reaches us. Most of the animals we eat (chickens, pigs and cows) today subsist on a diet of corn, regardless of whether it is good for them. In the case of beef cattle, which evolved to eat grass, a corn diet wreaks havoc on their digestive system, making it necessary to feed them antibiotics to stave off illness and infection. Even farm-raised salmon are being bred to tolerate corn � not a food their evolution has prepared them for. Why feed fish corn? Because it's the cheapest thing you can feed any animal, thanks to federal subsidies. But even with more than half of the 10 billion bushels of corn produced annually being fed to animals, there is plenty left over. So companies like A.D.M., Cargill and ConAgra have figured ingenious new ways to dispose of it, turning it into everything from ethanol to Vitamin C and biodegradable plastics.

. . .

Modern corn hybrids are the greediest of plants, demanding more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop. Corn requires more pesticide than any other food crop. Runoff from these chemicals finds its way into the groundwater and, in the Midwestern corn belt, into the Mississippi River, which carries it to the Gulf of Mexico, where it has already killed off marine life in a 12,000 square mile area.

To produce the chemicals we apply to our cornfields takes vast amounts of oil and natural gas. (Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, pesticides from oil.) America's corn crop might look like a sustainable, solar-powered system for producing food, but it is actually a huge, inefficient, polluting machine that guzzles fossil fuel � a half a gallon of it for every bushel.


Research credit: JH





Widening Financial Crisis :.

Yes, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan did Enron type scams for several other corporations, none of which have been named as of yet. But instead of harping on the details of these latest revelations, I thought I'd share with all of you a letter I recently sent to my own sister. She has watched the value of her mutual fund investments drop over the past two years, along with a lot of other people. Not knowing much about investing, she just had faith in the "buy and hold" BS that is marketed to retail investors. Last Friday's Dow collapse finally got her attention. She went to her investment advisor and said she wanted to make changes; something between getting out and getting much more conservative. What does the criminal advisor suggest she do with her money? Read on:

(Sister's name deleted),

Honestly, I have to wonder if the person assisting you with your money has been smoking crack.

These funds are MUCH more aggressive and risky than your current allocation. One is 95% in stocks. The other is 90% in stocks. If you had been in these funds over the past two years, you would have lost A LOT of money.

Forget what anyone says about these funds and look at the charts.

First, (fund name 1 deleted). This piece of sh*t would cost you 5.75% of your money JUST to buy in. THAT IS INSANE! The funds core holding (Verisign) has lost 82% this year!

The fund has gone from about $16 to $5.50.

(Fund name 2 deleted) is another loser which also costs you 5.75% of your money just to buy into it!!!

That fund's largest holding is Citigroup. Look at the headline from today's New York Times:

"Senior credit officers of Citigroup misrepresented the full nature of a 1999 transaction with Enron in the records of the deal so that the energy company could ignore accounting requirements and hide its true financial condition, according to internal bank documents and government investigators.

The records and interviews with investigators demonstrate for the first time that bankers intentionally manipulated the written record of their dealings with Enron to allow the company to improperly avoid the requirements of accounting rules and the law, thus keeping $125 million in debt off its books."

I seriously think you should pull your money from this institution immediately. These people are obviously criminals and don't have your best interests in mind. Even if they believe we're at a bottom, why place you in such ridiculously high front loaded funds? To get a fat sales commission, that's why. I suspect they have some kind of deal with (fund company deleted) to share some of the load fees. The fact that these funds were recommended to you stood my arm hairs on end.

(My recommendations deleted.)

Anyway, based on what they recommended, I would not even discuss anything further with those criminals, and I would get your money out ASAP.

-Kevin


The point of me posting this is simply to demonstrate to people that they shouldn't blindly believe the recommendations of Certified Financial Planners and/or *gasp* brokers. Investors need to get more hands on, learn more and trust less. This post is neither a solicitation nor recommendation to buy, sell or use any financial instruments, services or companies.





Google Refuses to Run Paid Ads for Cryptogon.com Due to Content

This is to be expected, I suppose. It means I'm doing something right. I could use any assistance from readers, however, in helping me to get the google bot to crawl my site. I've submitted cryptogon.com to be added to the google crawl list, but the site still hasn't been indexed. I doubt I've been put on some permanent sh*t list, but nothing would surprise me. You can help out by adding a link to my site on any web pages under your control that are being crawled by google.

Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 11:45:16 -0700
From: adwords-support@google.com
Subject: Changes to your Google Adwords campaign

Hello Kevin,

We need your help optimizing your AdWords Select campaign. To make sure every AdWords Select ad we run is successful for the advertiser and relevant for our users, our AdWords Specialists review each ad submitted and check that they comply with the Editorial Guidelines and that they are designed for optimal performance.

When we find an ad that falls outside the Editorial Guidelines, we request that you change that ad in order to meet those criteria and enable your ad to run. If you meet the guidelines but we have a suggestion designed to enhance your ad's performance, we will specify that this is a recommended change. Toward the end of this message, you'll find a more detailed description of the issues involved.

The report below explains what changes are needed for your ad to be fully optimized.

Once you've made these changes, please save your ads. This will automatically resubmit them to us for review. To log in to your account, please go to:

https://adwords.google.com/select/

Our goal is to make your advertising on Google more successful, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thanks for your help and your understanding.

----------------------------------------------
Campaign: 'Campaign #1,' Ad Group: 'Ad Group #1'
----------------------------------------------

AD TEXT:

The Cryptogon
Unreported News, Conspiracies,
Alternative Research
www.cryptogon.com

Action taken: Suspended - Pending Revision
Issue(s): Unacceptable Product
~~~~~~~~~

SUGGESTIONS:
-> Content: At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of "sites that advocate against any individual, group, or organization" on our website. We also do not permit sites that sell these products to advertise on Google. As noted in our advertising terms and conditions, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site.

---------------------
Read below for definitions of the issues we discovered:

Unacceptable Product: Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers broad access to content across the web without censoring search results. Please note that the decisions we make concerning advertising in no way affect the search results we deliver.

---------------------

Please feel free to email us at adwords-support@google.com if you have any further questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
The Google AdWords Team





U.S. Congressman Alludes to ECHELON Surveillance Network

Keep in mind the story I wrote below, where I indicated that part of IAO's role will be to create analytical tools to deal with the flood of data being gathered by NSA collection efforts. U.S. Congressman Mark Kirk had some interesting comments in an NPR interview.

From Cryptome.org:

On National Public Radio a US Senator[sic] basically confirmed the existence of the Echelon communications surveillance network. U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (Republican, member of the House Intelligence Committee, worked for Naval Intel and the CIA, assigned to the Pentagon War Room in the 1990s) said: "I used to stand as a watch officer in the War Room at the Pentagon and I would get about one message every second. An analyst, for example, working on Latin America would get 1400 messages a day. There are huge - what I would call - vacuum cleaners in the sky sucking in information for the foreign intelligence agencies ..." Here's the audio link -- the interesting part is from the 6th minute onwards:

http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/me/20020718.me.06.ram


7/21/2002



U.S. May Debate Giving Military Law Enforcement Power :.

Further down the rabbit hole:

The government should consider reversing more than a century of tradition and law to give the U.S. military a bigger law enforcement role in the event of a terrorist attack, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and some lawmakers said.





Internment Camps for Arab Americans? :.

A member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said in Detroit on Friday he could foresee a scenario in which the public would demand internment camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again in this country.

If there's a future terrorist attack in America "and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights," commission member Peter Kirsanow said.

The reason, he said, is that "the public would be less concerned about any perceived erosion of civil liberties than they are about protecting their own lives."


Research credit: TR




Google


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:. Reading

Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture by Andrew Kimbrell Readers will come to see that industrial food production is indeed a "fatal harvest" - fatal to consumers, as pesticide residues and new disease vectors such as E. coli and "mad cow disease" find their way into our food supply; fatal to our landscapes, as chemical runoff from factory farms poison our rivers and groundwater; fatal to genetic diversity, as farmers rely increasingly on high-yield monocultures and genetically engineered crops; and fatal to our farm communities, which are wiped out by huge corporate farms.

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Myron Gross This is a relatively short but extremely cogent and well-argued treatise on the rise of a form of fascistic thought and social politics in late 20th century America. Author Bertram Gross' thesis is quite straightforward; the power elite that comprises the corporate, governmental and military superstructure of the country is increasingly inclined to employ every element in their formidable arsenal of 'friendly persuasion' to win the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans through what Gross refers to as friendly fascism.

The Good Life
by Scott and Helen Nearing
Helen and Scott Nearing are the great-grandparents of the back-to-the-land movement, having abandoned the city in 1932 for a rural life based on self-reliance, good health, and a minimum of cash...Fascinating, timely, and wholly useful, a mix of the Nearings' challenging philosophy and expert counsel on practical skills.

Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth by David Bollierd In Silent Theft, David Bollier argues that a great untold story of our time is the staggering privatization and abuse of our common wealth. Corporations are engaged in a relentless plunder of dozens of resources that we collectively own—publicly funded medical breakthroughs, software innovation, the airwaves, the public domain of creative works, and even the DNA of plants, animals and humans. Too often, however, our government turns a blind eye—or sometimes helps give away our assets. Amazingly, the silent theft of our shared wealth has gone largely unnoticed because we have lost our ability to see the commons.

The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-To-Basics Guide by John Seymour The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the only book that teaches all the skills needed to live independently in harmony with the land harnessing natural forms of energy, raising crops and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving, and much more.

When Corporations Rule the World by David C. Korten When Corporations Rule the World explains how economic globalization has concentrated the power to govern in global corporations and financial markets and detached them from accountability to the human interest. It documents the devastating human and environmental consequences of the successful efforts of these corporations to reconstruct values and institutions everywhere on the planet to serve their own narrow ends.

The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener This expansion of a now-classic guide originally published in 1989 is intended for the serious gardener or small-scale market farmer. It describes practical and sustainable ways of growing superb organic vegetables, with detailed coverage of scale and capital, marketing, livestock, the winter garden, soil fertility, weeds, and many other topics.