cryptogon.com
   HOME
1/14/2006

Cryptogon Reader Contributes $30

AB wished Cryptogon a Happy New Year and sent along a donation of $30. Thanks, AB, and I hope your plans are working out well!


1/13/2006

'Doomsday' Seed Bank to Be Built :.

Yaah sure, you betcha:
Norway is planning to build a "doomsday vault" inside a mountain on an Arctic island to hold a seed bank of all known varieties of the world's crops.

The Norwegian government will hollow out a cave on the ice-bound island of Spitsbergen to hold the seed bank.

It will be designed to withstand global catastrophes like nuclear war or natural disasters that would destroy the planet's sources of food.
I didn't have the energy to compose useful commentary on this story. Hereticfig, on the other hand, nailed it to the wall.



The Windows MetaFile Backdoor? :.

More: WMF Flaw not a Backdoor

Leo and I carefully examine the operation of the recently patched Windows MetaFile vulnerability. I describe exactly how it works in an effort to explain why it doesn't have the feeling of another Microsoft "coding error." It has the feeling of something that Microsoft deliberately designed into Windows. Given the nature of what it is, this would make it a remote code execution "backdoor." We will likely never know if this was the case, but the forensic evidence appears to be quite compelling.

Research Credit: MT



Was Rosenbaum Murder Suspect Altered? :.

Asking if a suspect---in what amounts to a political assassination---has been altered is as natural of a question to me as wondering what the weather will be like tomorrow. In the early 1990s, I bought photocopy of a book called Operation Mind Control by Walter Bowart. And that was just the beginning down the path into this dark area of inquiry. So, I've had a long time to let all of this stuff sink in.

If you're a MK newbie, read up on alters over at Rigorous Intuition. Of the thousands of places on the Internet to read about mind control, Jeff's site is probably my favorite.

I'm not saying that the Rosenbaum murder is a MK situation. I'm not saying that it isn't, either:

A man was arrested Thursday night in the fatal assault on David E. Rosenbaum, a retired reporter for The New York Times, and was charged with felony murder, the police said.

District of Columbia detectives said the man, Michael Hamlin, 23, a maintenance worker from southeast Washington, had seen himself on an evening news report that broadcast surveillance photographs of him the police released in late afternoon. The photographs showed a man using Mr. Rosenbaum's credit cards at a gas station and an auto parts store.

Detective Anthony Paci, the lead detective in the case, said Mr. Hamlin had walked into the Seventh District Police station in southeast and said he "wanted to know why my face is in the news."

Detectives drove to the station house, picked up Mr. Hamlin and brought him to their offices for questioning.

"After about an hour, he confessed," Detective Paci said.


1/12/2006

Alito Memo in '84 Favored Immunity for Top Officials :.

This was the last article written by New York Times reporter and editor, David E. Rosenbaum. He was murdered on January 8th.

One of Alito's harshest critics (with any kind of audience), beaten to death during a robbery.

This sends a concise message to critics of the regime. F*ck with us too much, and you're dead. You know, like Barb advocates:

The attorney general should be immune from lawsuits for ordering wiretaps of Americans without permission from a court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote in a memorandum in 1984 as a government lawyer in the Reagan administration.



Climate-Change Fungus is Wiping Out Frogs :.

An infectious fungus aggravated by global warming has killed entire populations of frogs in Central and South America and driven some species to extinction, scientists said on Wednesday.

In research that showed the effects of rising temperatures on delicate ecosystems, a team of researchers found that a warming atmosphere encouraged the spread of a fungus that has wiped out species of harlequin frogs and golden toads.

"This is the first clear evidence that widespread extinction is taking place because of global warming," Dr Alan Pounds, an ecologist of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, said in an interview.


1/9/2006

N.Y. Times Editor-Reporter Murdered :.

Like I said, "Random acts of violence, car crashes, suicides and heart attacks are quite common."

David E. Rosenbaum, a longtime editor and reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, died yesterday after being beaten and robbed Friday night near his home in upper Northwest Washington.


1/8/2006

Homeland Security Opening Private Mail :.

U.S. Intelligence services have always been opening mail. They just don't feel the need to cover it up anymore. Rather, it's overt, in your face, jackbooted fascism. They're not making any effort to hide it. This isn't "clumsiness," as Mr. Goodman asserts. It's by design. The same logic will eventually lead to people being taken away and placed in concentration camps, and worse. Oh, woops, that's already happening.

I wonder if the raw COMINT traffic between my wife---who isn't American, and also happens to be outside of the U.S. at the moment---and I rates the attention of a human analyst, or if parsing by machine is sufficient... You know, do They keep a file on how many chickens we plan to fatten, vs. how many we'll keep for eggs? Maybe the more juicy intel involves the location of where Becky wants to plant some green vegetables... I make jokes about what the NSA machine must think about our own personal lingo. HAHA! I'm not in denial about what's happening, I just have to laugh about it, even though it's not funny.

From, They Thought They Were Free, by Miltion Mayer:
Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, "regretted," that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle... one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
And now, from the MSNBC piece on Homeland Security opening private mail:
In the 50 years that Grant Goodman has known and corresponded with a colleague in the Philippines he never had any reason to suspect that their friendship was anything but spectacularly ordinary.

But now he believes that the relationship has somehow sparked the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and led the agency to place him under surveillance.

Last month Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words "by Border Protection" and carrying the official Homeland Security seal.

"I had no idea (Homeland Security) would open personal letters," Goodman told MSNBC.com in a phone interview. "That's why I alerted the media. I thought it should be known publicly that this is going on," he said. Goodman originally showed the letter to his own local newspaper, the Kansas-based Lawrence Journal-World.

"I was shocked and there was a certain degree of disbelief in the beginning," Goodman said when he noticed the letter had been tampered with, adding that he felt his privacy had been invaded. "I think I must be under some kind of surveillance."

Goodman is no stranger to mail snooping; as an officer during World War II he was responsible for reading all outgoing mail of the men in his command and censoring any passages that might provide clues as to his unit's position. "But we didn't do it as clumsily as they've done it, I can tell you that," Goodman noted, with no small amount of irony in his voice. "Isn't it funny that this doesn't appear to be any kind of surreptitious effort here," he said.
One day it is over his head...



The Ballad of Finis Shelnutt :.

The rioters are shooting at police, and other weird antics of one of Uncle's lackey contractors.



9/11 Haiku :.

Do you have friends and family members with short attention spans? Even they might be able to get it after reading these.



Al-Qaeda's AIDS Bombers :.

I. Have. Heard. It. All.

The old AQ will be responsible for disease outbreaks in Iraq...

Hmm.

I wonder how many people are being given vaccinations in Iraq now, both Iraqi and American?

Hmm.

What is the recommended daily allowance of feces in drinking water?

Hmm.

Nevermind all that. The Al-Queda suicide bombers are biological weapons now, don't ya know?

AL-QAEDA is recruiting suicide bombers who are infected with the AIDS virus, according to documents revealed to the Sunday Mirror.

Terror chiefs are also targeting fanatics who suffer other lethal blood diseases such as hepatitis and dengue fever in order to increase their "kill rate" from an explosion. The chilling new threat is revealed in papers distributed to British military camps in Iraq and across Europe.

Under the heading "HIV/Hepatitis" the document states: "There is evidence that terrorists might be deliberately recruiting volunteers with diseases that are spread by blood transference."

Experts have found that bones and other blood-spattered fragments from a suicide bomber could penetrate the skin of a victim 50 metres away and infect them.

In the papers (part of which is summarised above) soldiers are warned to wear special protective clothing when on guard duty or if they have to deal with casualties in the event of an attack.



New Device Will Sense Through Concrete Walls :.

Remember the alien in Predator? I wonder if U.S. troops will also start collecting the skulls of their victims?

Troops conducting urban operations soon will have the capabilities of superheroes, being able to sense through 12 inches of concrete to determine if someone is inside a building.

The new "Radar Scope" will give warfighters searching a building the ability to tell within seconds if someone is in the next room, Edward Baranoski from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Special Projects Office, told the American Forces Press Service.

By simply holding the portable, handheld device up to a wall, users will be able to detect movements as small as breathing, he said.

The Radar Scope, developed by DARPA, is expected to be fielded to troops in Iraq as soon as this spring, Baranoski said. The device is likely to be fielded to the squad level, for use by troops going door to door in search of terrorists.

The Radar Scope will give warfighters the capability to sense through a foot of concrete and 50 feet beyond that into a room, Baranoski explained.




Google


cryptogon.com
www

:. 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.