There are a handful of stories that a parapolitics researcher never forgets, regardless of the efforts to do so. The deaths of Jane Greenhow, Stefan Bateman and Ruth Fleming---ten years ago this month---was the point of no return for me.

I'd been reading about JFK, Vietnam, Gehlen, MKULTRA, CIA cocaine, etc. for years. Even ECHELON was old news back then. It was all old news, if you went looking for it, that is. You had to make a point of seeking it out. You don't read about sh*t like this in the Los Angeles Times on your lunch break... Right?

I knew it was rare to catch a glimpse of an operation being rolled up. But there it was in front of my eyes. I held the page of the newspaper in one hand and a chicken burito in the other.

There it was.

I mumbled it back then as I mumble it now, "What the f*ck was this?"

The story still haunts me. I pick over the bones on the Internet every few years; which results, thankfully, in nothing. I contacted the LA Times reporter; nothing, case closed, trail isn't cold, there's no trail. That's about it, really. What else can one do? Start driving around the backwoods of Red Neck America asking about a few dead British Nazis?

Something tells me that such an investigation wouldn't have gone so well, if you know what I mean.

If you like, you may read more about this in a book called Sh*t Magnet: One Man's Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World's Guilt by Jim Goad. Goad was in contact with Greenhow before the trio ventilated themselves. Do a, "Search inside this book" and enter Greenhow as the query. You can't read it all at once, so when Amazon stops giving you free pages, make the stupid thing search for a semi unique word on the last page you have access to, click that page in the search results and you'll get a few more pages.

It's not much for a ten year anniversary, but when you set out to turn over the bones, you've got to take what you can get:

Just before Jane Greenhow died, she drove up a lonely road in remote Shasta County and wrote a note to the one she loved: her Glock 10-millimeter pistol.

"I am so sorry I have to leave you now, the only one I am reluctant to leave behind," the tattooed, 23-year-old neo-Nazi sympathizer wrote to her gun. "I guess you just functioned more reliably--I jammed."

Then Greenhow, clad in black fatigues and combat boots, put the pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger, culminating a bizarre trio of suicides of neo-Nazi cult followers last week in California and Arizona.

....

Stefan Bateman and Ruth Fleming, both 22, were wearing the same style of black garb when they rented pistols at the range and took a few dozen practice shots Wednesday afternoon.

Then they turned the pistols on themselves--apparently counting down together so the guns would go off at the same instant, Arizona authorities said.

"Witnesses said they both fell at the same time," said Mesa Police Sgt. Earle Lloyd. "It was ruled a double suicide."
posted by Kevin at 1:48 AM

I couldn't, for the life of me, make it up:

Every football... will be marked with a drop of synthetic DNA to thwart potential counterfeiters who might be tempted to sell phony "game-used" Super Bowl footballs, which can be worth thousands of dollars. Exposed to a specific laser frequency, the DNA glows to a bright green.
posted by Kevin at 11:23 PM

I posted this message to a private list that is frequented by some of the big deal names in the Peak Oil machine. I got a total of two responses. The moderator wished me, "good luck." The second was from a New Zealander who pretty much wanted me to shut up about New Zealand. HA. I kinda wanted to hear that someone on that list was doing something other than bloviating about doing something. No such luck.

The point is: prepare, while you have options. Whether you say you can or you can't, you're right:

My name is Kevin, I'm the editor of cryptogon.com. I've been lurking here for about a year.

I just wanted to say that I hope all of you have made preparations... and are getting to where you need or want to be.

In general, I'm shocked at the level of inaction of people who are supposedly, "In the know." A lot of people are talking about making changes but aren't actually doing anything. This is the 1% who actually "get it." Of that 1% who get it, it's probably 1% of them who are taking drastic action. "Maybe I'll by a hybrid the next time I'm in the market for a car," isn't going to cut it. HAHA

Don't fall into this trap.

Run like hell, while you can. Run your ass off. You don't want to wait until the idiots figure it out, or until you're placed on the no-fly list, or worse. If you're staying in the U.S., and are aware of what's happening, you must know what's in store and my hat is off to you.

I'm moving to New Zealand. My wife is already there. I miss her, but I feel very good knowing she's out of here. We bought five good acres, and have other farmers as neighbors. Things will be hard in NZ, but paradise compared to the U.S. I'm just winding things down here, selling everything I can (including my gold, silver and anything else that isn't bolted down).

My family thinks I'm insane. Obviously. "Why would you want to leave the best country in the world?"

Before, I used to start rattling off the "facts and figures." Arguing. Trying to make them see it. Listing my sources. All to no avail. They have opinions about their emotions, debt and large TVs. You want to talk about composting toilets and chickens with these people? By the time they "get it"... well, I don't want to be around.

Here's the conclusion I came to: There is no point in trying to explain things to so-called 'normal' people anymore.

I used to think that They (the powers that be, the Elite, whatever) were the problem. Then, I thought that ignorant sheeple were the problem, and that I could help them see "it." Now, as the curtain is coming down on this show, I see that for all these years, I've been wasting time and that---yes---I am the problem. Talking about solutions is great, but while we have been talking They have been DOING. Live your life in a way that makes ecological sense. <- That's it, in a nutshell. Spend less time talking about it. Make actions the priority, not words. When you and your neighbors are eating well as a result of your hard work, take some time to tell others about it. Until then, the time for jibber jabber is over.

posted by Kevin at 4:57 PM

Beware of the militant debunkers who place any alternative analysis of the building collapses in the realm of pods and holograms:

How did a fire fed by jet fuel, which at most burns at 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit, cause the collapse of the Twin Towers, built of steel that melts at 2,800 degrees? (Most experts agree that the impact of airliners, made mostly of lightweight aluminum, should not have been enough alone to cause structural failure.) How could a single planeload of burning jet fuel -- most of which flared off in the initial fireball -- cause the South World Trade Center tower to collapse in just 56 minutes?

Related: Scholars for 9/11 Truth
posted by Kevin at 12:21 PM

The contract, which is effective immediately, provides for establishing temporary detention and processing capabilities to augment existing ICE Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) Program facilities in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs. The contingency support contract provides for planning and, if required, initiation of specific engineering, construction and logistics support tasks to establish, operate and maintain one or more expansion facilities.

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.
posted by Kevin at 11:10 PM

Astonishing:

President Bush next week will request a $439.3 billion Defense Department budget for 2007, a nearly 5 percent increase over this year, according to senior Pentagon officials and documents obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

The spending plan would include $84.2 billion for weapons programs, a nearly 8 percent increase, including billions of dollars for fighter jets, Navy ships, helicopters and unmanned aircraft. The total includes a substantial increase in weapons spending for the Army, which will get $16.8 billion in the 2007 budget, compared with $11 billion this year.

Senior defense officials provided the totals on condition of anonymity because the defense budget will not be publicly released until Monday. The figures did not include about $50 billion that Bush administration officials said Thursday they would request as a down payment for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. The administration said war costs for 2006 would total $120 billion.
posted by Kevin at 10:58 PM

Fascism continues to unfurl in Australia:

POLICE directives about what could and could not be photographed were an abuse of power and should be ignored, Liberty Victoria has said.

The civil liberties body made the statement after a report in a Melbourne newspaper said a member of the Geelong Camera Club received a visit from police after he photographed gas storage cylinders at the city's Shell oil refinery.

Club member Hans Kawitski was told not to photograph industrial installations and was ordered to inform members of the camera club to follow his lead.

Liberty Victoria said its advice to photographers would be to ignore the directive.

"The police have got no place making such warnings," president Brian Walters SC said.

"Merely to threaten is exceeding police powers and is an abuse of power.

"If you were a serious terrorist you wouldn't be openly taking photographs. Taking photos of public objects is a normal and quite understandable part of a modern society."

Mr Walters said police had been spooked by politicians and had acquired "an inflated fear of terrorism".

"We currently have thousands of cameras set up to watch citizens, but if citizens themselves take photos, the authorities take that as some sort of risk," he said.
posted by Kevin at 2:18 AM

Collapsitalism:

Welcome to the homeland security industrial complex, a world where doomsday scenarios double as marketing pitches, patriotism mingles with capitalism, and the spoils go to whoever can placate a skittish society. "The best thing that will happen is that we will never have a nuclear event in the United States, never have a sarin gas event," Weiss says. "But do you know how much money is going to be spent" preparing for such events? "It's only a matter of time before someone finds something bad in a container coming through the port of Baltimore, Charleston, or Long Beach."
posted by Kevin at 12:17 PM

Not really new...

I was actually in Little Rock, Arkansas for the past several days. As the aircraft approached the Little Rock airport, I looked out the window at the mostly empty landscape.

I mumbled to myself, "I wonder how many bodies are out there..."

You see, Bill Clinton's relationship with George Bush goes back at least to the mid 1980s. Clinton's Arkansas was---according to the heaviest narcotics trafficker ever and CIA contractor, Barry Seal---a, "Banana republic." Anything and everything was for sale, and "tithings" could be paid to stay one step ahead of the curve. So, when Bush needed to move guns and drugs by the ton, he didn't go down to Georgia.

He went to Arkansas.

The Contra-related cocaine and weapons operations, which were run out of the Mena airport, were ordered by Bush and facilitated by none other than Governor Bill Clinton. I guess those antics made for some strong bonds. At the minimum, Clinton got to play president for a couple of terms: A) as a reward; or, B) because he was in a position to take the Bush dynasty down with what he knew.

See:

Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA

and

The Boys on the Tracks

In any event, it's all hugs and kisses now.

Make sure you send this story to all the dumbsh*t Democrats and limousine liberals you know:

President George W. Bush says Bill Clinton has become so close to his father that the Democratic former president is like a member of the family.

Former President George Bush has worked with Clinton to raise money for victims of the Asian tsunami and the hurricane disaster along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Asked about his father and Clinton, Bush quipped, "Yes, he and my new brother."

"That's a good relationship. It's a fun relationship to watch," Bush said in an interview with CBS News broadcast on Sunday.

While attending Pope John Paul's funeral, Bush said, "It was fun to see the interplay between dad and Clinton. One of these days, I'll be a member of the ex-president's club. ... I'll be looking for something to do."

He said ex-presidents share rare experiences that others cannot understand. "And so I can understand why ex-presidents are able to put aside old differences," he said.

Bush said he checked in with Clinton occasionally.

"And you know, he says things that makes it obvious -- that makes it obvious to me that we're kind of, you know, on the same wavelength about the job of the presidency. Makes sense, after all, there's this kind of commonality," he said.

Bush jokingly referred to speculation that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former president's wife, will seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency. He had earlier referred to the former first lady as "formidable."

"Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton," he said, referring to how Bill Clinton had followed his father, and Hillary Clinton could follow him.

HAHA. Get it? HAHA.
posted by Kevin at 6:21 PM

Note to Non-Nerds: Don't bother reading this.

Hosts from all over the place are crawling every page on Cryptogon in an automated manner, at semi regular intervals. Did the NSA user from earlier today order his zombie army to lock and load after he meandered around Cryptogon?

Who knows...

The client running on each of the hosts shows up in the log only as Java 1.4.1 or Java 1.5.0. There is no way this activity is due to run-of-the-mill webpage archiving robots. You might see one of those, every once in a while. But over and over again, from different hosts in quick succession, all reporting Java?

I don't think so.

This smells like a DDOS hit to me.

Here are some of the culprits. The fields are hostname, ip, number of pages accessed, client name:

24-207-169-81.dhcp.stls.mo.charter.com 24.207.169.81 185 Java 1.4.1

OL5-42.fibertel.com.ar 24.232.42.5 185 Java 1.5.0

adsl-065-081-092-212.sip.gsp.bellsouth.net 65.81.92.212 185 Java 1.5.0

beckham.socceramerica.com 69.228.251.169 185 Java 1.5.0

I'll be adding these and others to Cryptogon's IP sh*tlist. I doubt anything will happen, but if Cryptogon goes down, it means someone launched a DDOS attack on my server.

Update: Cut Off In Mid Slurp

This thing just returned to have another go:

65.81.92.212

It was cut off in the act by the IP ban list.

This could get interesting. I wonder how many zombies They have? Put on your best Carl Sagan voice and say it with me, "Billllyons and billllyons..."

Update: Additional Hosts Showing Up; Doing the Same Thing

Now blocking:

71.225.253.21
207.104.94.249
68.122.151.90
72.51.34.157
posted by Kevin at 6:20 PM

The U.S. National Security Agency user (host: moses.radium.ncsc.mil, ip: 144.51.73.129) conducted the following Google search: "192.31.19.50"

The NSA user visited the following Cryptogon pages:

http://cryptogon.com/2005_01_02_blogarchive.html

http://cryptogon.com/about.html

http://cryptogon.com/blogarchive.html

Session initiated: 30/Jan/2006:08:43:40 -0700
Session ended: 30/Jan/2006:09:04:02 -0700

Related Story: U.S. Central Command Hits Cryptogon... Again

I went back through recent logs and found that the same NSA system directly accessed this Cryptogon page back on January 5:

http://cryptogon.com/2005_09_25_blogarchive.html

They may have been following up on people who were following this story: NSA Applies for Patent to ID Physical Address of Web Surfers
posted by Kevin at 6:03 PM

The Internet could also be used offensively as an additional medium in psychological operations campaigns and to help achieve unconventional warfare objectives. Used creatively as an integral asset, the Internet can facilitate many DoD operations and activities.

Strategic Assessment: The Internet
Prepared by Mr. Charles Swett
Assistant for Strategic Assessment
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict
July 1995

So, while this is nothing new, it's worth noting:

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.

"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.

Related: Phreaking Hacktivists :.

STOD was set up during the Cold War and is the highest-level military focal point for all matters relating to what is called offensive information warfare. STOD is a covert action broker for the Joint Staff. Unlike other offices in the Pentagon that merely push a lot of paper, it also is charged with providing direct military support to operational missions of the CIA and NSA, and of responding to requests for assistance from the National Security Council. Each U.S. regional command... has its own STOD.

J-33's operations branch controls the Special Technical Operations Center within the Pentagon. The center is the most secure facility within the U.S. military. Dozens of special access (or "black") programs are monitored at the center. These include the United States's own hacking activities; strategic psychological, concealment and deception operations; and "directed energy warfare." The latter includes special weapons and capabilities, such as high-powered microwave weapons, that could be used to disable enemy communications, computing, and the production and distribution of electricity.

Related Goodle Search: Special Technical Operations Division
posted by Kevin at 12:28 PM

The Matrix has you:

The numbers are almost incomprehensible. ExxonMobil reported today that it made profits of more than $36 billion for the year, $10.7 billion of that in the final 92 days of 2005.

That means that during the waning three months of 2005 Exxon was raking in more than $115 million in profits a day. It's a pace that has never been realized by an American company at any time in history.

This astronomical daily take was due, in large part, to the high price of oil. A barrel of crude averaged more than $60 during the fourth quarter, 115 percent higher than the average price of a barrel during the past decade.
posted by Kevin at 12:25 PM

And somehow, the band plays on:

In a shocking development, the Treasury Department website is openly stating that as of January 24, 2006 our national debt stood at $8,185.3 billion and on January 26th at $8,190.5 billion.

http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm

Yet the US national debt 'ceiling', the maximum amount of debt the US government may hold at any one time, stands at $8,184 billion - a full $5.5 billion less. Although called upon by John Snow, Congress has not yet passed an expansion of the debt ceiling and so the US government is now operating in technical default.

You may recall that when last the debt ceiling was approached in the months surrounding the 2004 elections, the Treasury department furiously employed every accounting trick in the book (and then some) to avoid breaching the limit. They even went so far as to take the unprecedented step of borrowing $14 billion from the Federal Financing Bank to cover up the shortfall.

But they never breached the ceiling.

On January 24th they breached it brazenly and openly and with nary an accompanying explanation. Neither have any lawmakers have broached this indelicate subject.

I suppose we could write this off as merely an unsurprising development from a government that no longer bothers to even appear to be adhering to rules, laws and procedures, let alone actually doing so.

But the silence is all the more troubling because there is an unprecedented level of government borrowing on the books for 1Q06 with next 2 weeks (Feb 1st to Feb 9th) an especially busy period of time. An ambitious ~$70-$80b in Treasury paper will hit the market.

The federal government does not have the legal authority to borrow above the statutory debt limit, which raises the prospect of emergency congressional action to avoid a full-fledged default.
posted by Kevin at 10:46 AM

The April contract for gold futures climbed to a more than one-week high near $570 an ounce Monday, with political tension in the Middle East providing support a day ahead of a widely expected hike in U.S. interest rates.

Gold for April delivery was last up $5.80 at $569.50 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange after trading as high as $569.80.

Prices for the contract rose to a high of $573.70 on Jan. 20. The lead-month contract that day was February gold, which climbed to $568.50, the highest front-month futures level since January 1981.

The metal is expected to continue to trade off political uncertainty, although volumes are lighter than normal with much of Asia closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.
posted by Kevin at 10:23 AM