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8/19/2006

CIA Executing 'Friendly' Intelligence Operatives? :.

Top Italian telecom security official involved in Abu Omar rendition case commits suicide in Naples.

Research Credit: What Really Happaned



FDA APPROVES VIRUSES AS FOOD ADDITIVE :.

Years from now, the survivors of this horror show will be sitting around crackling fires, telling stories about the dark days before the collapse.

The young ones will find these stories impossible to believe:

A mix of bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on cold cuts, hot dogs and sausages to combat common microbes that kill hundreds of people a year, federal health officials said Friday in granting the first-ever approval of viruses as a food additive.

The combination of six viruses is designed to be sprayed on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products, including sliced ham and turkey, said John Vazzana, president and chief executive officer of manufacturer Intralytix Inc.

The special viruses, called bacteriophages, are meant to kill strains of the Listeria monocytogenes bacterium, the Food and Drug Administration said in declaring it safe to use on ready-to-eat meats prior to their packaging.

The viruses are the first to win FDA approval for use as a food additive, said Andrew Zajac, of the regulatory agency's office of food additive safety.



USDA: Rice Supply Contaminated with FrankenpHood :.

Based on the information I have seen, these corporations should be outlawed:

Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns announced late Friday that U.S. commercial supplies of long-grain rice had become inadvertently contaminated with a genetically engineered variety not approved for human consumption.

Johanns said the company that made the experimental rice, Bayer CropScience of Monheim, Germany, had provided information to the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration indicating that the rice poses no threats to human health or the environment.

"Based upon the information we have seen, this product is safe," he said in a telephone news conference.


8/18/2006

Your Contributions to Cryptogon Are Growing... Literally

Dear Cryptogon Contributors:

Look at all the organic, heirloom seeds that Becky and I have purchased! And seedlings are coming up! We just thought that you would like a glimpse at how we're transforming your financial support into growing, living, nourishing goodness.

We're happy to be doing this work. You should be proud for helping to make it possible.

Best,
Kevin and Rebecca

Related: FDA APPROVES VIRUSES AS FOOD ADDITIVE



Introducing iDungeon: Inside Apple's iPod Hell Holes :.

The techno-liberals from Northern California are some of the most frightening lunatics around. They are so far out that absolutely anything can somehow be spun as clean, green and politically correct.

Even dungeons???

Watch Apple's PR megamachine kick into high gear over this. (iPSYOP?) It'll be smiling, happy workers and maybe even free iPods:

'We have to work too hard and I am always tired. It's like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours. If we move we are punished by being made to stand still for longer.

The boys are made to do push-ups.' Every morning the workers, in beige jackets to denote their junior status, are taken up to the factory roof for a military-style drill.

'We have to work overtime if we are told to and can only go back to the dormitories when our boss gives us permission,' says Zang Lan. 'If they ask for overtime we must do it.'


Related: No Military Use for Open Source Software: Sure Stupid



Single Pervert Theory :.

Anytime the ghoulish PSYOP/sex/murder/cult stories are being hammered and bleeding on front pages everywhere, I block it all out and just wait for Jeff to sort through the bones, entrails, detritus, black hooded corporate/government power brokers and mind controlled intelligence assets:

As much as the media love a good blood feast, it's beginning to slowly back away from the bizarre John Karr. The seeming Manchurian Paedophile is right to say he's not innocent, but he doesn't contain the mystery of the Ramsey case, which America is likely never to admit to itself.



Bush Pardons Moonshining 'Deliverance' Actor :.

Sometimes I need to take a close look at the domain names when I read news stories. You know, because you think, "This can't be real."

This story, for example, was from CNN. It looked like the CNN page. It didn't seem like the URL had been linkjacked somehow. I verified the story anyway...

It's real:

By granting absolution to a convicted moonshiner, George W. Bush also earned the unique distinction of becoming the first president to pardon a cast member of the 1972 Academy Award-nominated movie "Deliverance."

Randall Leece Deal of Clayton, Georgia, had a small role in the film about four Atlanta businessmen who have unpleasant encounters with locals during a north Georgia canoe trip.

...

Deal never served any jail time for the convictions, but the black mark on his record rankled him enough to seek a presidential pardon more than 40 years later. "I just got to thinking about it, you know. Just to get her wiped out if possible," he said.

Deal hired a local attorney and "just filled out the papers and sent it in to the White House, or wherever you send them to, a good long time ago."

Deal's "Deliverance" performance consisted of a single line: "It ain't nothing but the biggest [expletive] river in the state!" For the record, Deal did not play one of the surly locals involved in an infamous rape scene with actor Ned Beatty.



Sploid: The End :.

Sploid was great. I'll miss it:

Winners write the history books, but anybody can write the blog post. So get right up close to your computer screen and we'll tell you a little story...


8/17/2006

STEORN: FREE ENERGY CLAIM OUT OF IRELAND :.

This one will be interesting to watch:

DUBLIN (Reuters) - An Irish technology firm issued a challenge to the world's scientific community on Friday to give its verdict on technology it says smashes one of the basic laws of physics by producing "free energy."

Dublin-based Steorn said it had placed an advertisement in The Economist magazine seeking 12 top physicists to examine the technology -- based on the interaction of magnetic fields -- and publish their results.

"We fully accept there is going to be cynicism surrounding this but what we're saying to the world of science is come and prove us wrong," said Steorn Chief Executive Sean McCarthy.


Related: Steorn



Cost of Water Shortage: Civil Unrest, Mass Migration and Economic Collapse :.

Cholera may return to London, the mass migration of Africans could cause civil unrest in Europe and China's economy could crash by 2015 as the supply of fresh water becomes critical to the global economy. That was the bleak assessment yesterday by forecasters from some of the world's leading corporate users of fresh water, 200 of the largest food, oil, water and chemical companies.

...

Globally, water usage has increased by six times in the past 100 years and will double again by 2050, driven mainly by irrigation and demands of agriculture. Some countries have already run out of water to produce their own food.



Australian Treasurer to Home Owners and Investors: Brace Yourselves :.

INVESTORS and home owners have received a rare, dire warning from the Treasurer to brace for the economic fallout from "world record oil prices".

And Peter Costello delivered a blunt message to the Reserve Bank: he may provide it with a "wider perspective" by filling the deputy governor's chair with an outsider.

With underlying inflation high and apparently rising, Mr Costello told reporters yesterday that the country faced a "great" risk of repeating the economic mess that followed the 1970s oil shocks.


Research Credit: Life After the Oil Crash



Mike Ruppert Leaves the United States :.

Maybe he has been reading Cryptogon... ;)

My country is dead. Its people have surrendered to tyranny, and in so doing, they have become tyranny's primary support group; its base constituency; its chief defender. Every day they offer their endorsement of tyranny by banking in its banks and spending their borrowed money with the corporations that run it. The great Neocon strategy of George H.W. Bush has triumphed. Convince the American people that they can't live without the "good things", then sit back and watch as they endorse the progressively more outrageous crimes you commit as you throw them bones with ever-less meat on them. All the while, lock them into debt. Destroy the middle class, the only political base that need be feared. Make them accept, because of their own shared guilt, ever-more repressive police state measures. Do whatever you want.

...

I left the United States with one large suitcase, my laptop, and a backpack. I left behind my precious library, most of my clothing, my personal possessions, my guns, and a house full of furniture. I brought with me less than eight thousand dollars in cash and gold to start the final segment of my life.

...

Like all humans I want to hold on to dreams for as long as possible, even long after I know they will never come true. I have tried and sacrificed with every fiber of my being to change my country, but the plain fact is that the United States of America cannot and will never be changed from within.



EUROPE: BIOMETRIC ID FOR ALL AIR TRAVELERS :.

BIOMETRIC testing is set to be introduced at European airports under plans for stringent new security measures revealed yesterday in the wake of last week's alleged terror plot.

Passengers would have their fingerprint or iris scanned under the measures proposed by EU interior ministers, which would also use passenger profiling to try to identify potential terrorists.

The move to beef up relaxed security procedures in Europe came as John Reid, the Home Secretary, warned that human rights would have to be balanced against the threat from terrorism and that the current terror threat was Europe-wide and needed to be tackled on an international level.

The EU minister in charge of justice, Franco Frattini, said ministers were looking at the "positive profiling" of passengers, carried out well in advance of their flights, based on "biometric identifiers" such as iris scans or fingerprints.


Research Credit: Aftermath News



NSA Eavesdropping Program Ruled Unconstitutional :.

That'll show the NSA!

* yawn *

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.



Airline to Fired Employees: Go Dumpster Diving :.

Bankrupt Northwest Airlines Corp. advised workers to fish in the trash for things they like or take their dates for a walk in the woods in a move to help workers facing the ax to save money.

The No. 5 U.S. carrier, which has slashed most employees' pay and is looking to cut jobs as it prepares to exit bankruptcy, put the tips in a booklet handed out to about 50 workers and posted for a time on its employee Web site.


8/16/2006

FCC Cracks Down on 'Fake News' :.

The Federal Communications Commission has mailed letters to the owners of 77 television stations inquiring about their use of video news releases, a type of programming critics refer to as "fake news."

Video news releases are packaged news stories that usually employ actors to portray reporters who are paid by commercial or government groups.

The letters were sparked by allegations that television stations have been airing the videos as part of their news programs without telling viewers who paid for them.

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said Tuesday the letters ask station managers for information regarding agreements between the stations and the creators of the news releases. The FCC also asked whether there was any "consideration" given to the stations in return for airing the material.

"You can't tell any more the difference between what's propaganda and what's news," Adelstein said.


Research Credit: TR


8/14/2006

U.S., Israel Planned Lebanon Invasion, Before Soldiers Were Kidnapped :.

Imagine my shock:

The US government was closely involved in the planning of Israel's military operations against Islamic militant group Hezbollah even before the July 12 kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, The New Yorker magazine reported in its latest issue.

The kidnapping triggered a month-long Israeli operation in South Lebanon that is expected to come to an end on Monday.

But Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist Seymour Hersh writes that President George W Bush and vice president Dick Cheney were convinced that a successful Israeli bombing campaign against Hezbollah could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential US pre-emptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations.

Citing an unnamed Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of the Israeli and US governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah - and shared it with Bush administration officials - well before the July 12 kidnappings.

The expert added that the White House had several reasons for supporting a bombing campaign, the report said.

If there was to be a military option against Iran, it had to get rid of the weapons Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation against Israel, Hersh writes.

Citing a US government consultant with close ties to Israel, Hersh also reports that earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, several Israeli officials visited Washington "to get a green light" for a bombing operation following a Hezbollah provocation, and "to find out how much the United States would bear".

"The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits," the magazine quotes the consultant as saying. "Why oppose it? We'll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran."

US government officials have denied the charges.



Submit for Biometric Travel Interview :.

Just in case you don't click through, this is from The Wall Street Journal. You guys will love this:

At airport security checkpoints in Knoxville, Tenn. this summer, scores of departing passengers were chosen to step behind a curtain, sit in a metallic oval booth and don headphones.

With one hand inserted into a sensor that monitors physical responses, the travelers used the other hand to answer questions on a touch screen about their plans. A machine measured biometric responses -- blood pressure, pulse and sweat levels -- that then were analyzed by software. The idea was to ferret out U.S. officials who were carrying out carefully constructed but make-believe terrorist missions.

The trial of the Israeli-developed system represents an effort by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration to determine whether technology can spot passengers who have "hostile intent." In effect, the screening system attempts to mechanize Israel's vaunted airport-security process by using algorithms, artificial-intelligence software and polygraph principles.

Neither the TSA nor Suspect Detection Systems Ltd., the Israeli company, will discuss the Knoxville trial, whose primary goal was to uncover the designated bad guys, not to identify threats among real travelers. They won't even say what questions were asked of travelers, though the system is generally designed to measure physical responses to hot-button questions like "Are you planning to immigrate illegally?" or "Are you smuggling drugs."

The test alone signals a push for new ways to combat terrorists using technology. Authorities are convinced that beyond hunting for weapons and dangerous liquids brought on board airliners, the battle for security lies in identifying dangerous passengers.



Open Source Project Adds "No Military Use" Clause to the GPL :.

Sorry, guys: There's no free-love, clean-green, holodeck, techno utopia at the end of the tunnel. It's going to be terminator robots, microchip implants and much worse... Assuming humanity survives for another couple of decades.

But thanks for thinking Happy Thoughts and hoping that the deranged killers who run this horror show pay any attention to your terms and conditions:

GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That's intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it. They call it a "no military use" modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Tiziano Mengotti and Rene Tegel are the lead developers on the GPU project. Mengotti is the driving force behind the license "patch," which says "the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed."

Mengotti says the clause is specifically intended to prevent military use. "We are software developers who dedicate part of our free time to open source development. The fact is that open source is used by the military industry. Open source operating systems can steer warplanes and rockets. [This] patch should make clear to users of the software that this is definitely not allowed by the licenser."




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