Crapaganda.com

Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the ”routine” monitoring of antisocial motorists, ­protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.

The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.

Documents from the South Coast Partnership, a Home Office-backed project in which Kent police and others are developing a national drone plan with BAE, have been obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.

They reveal the partnership intends to begin using the drones in time for the 2012 Olympics. They also indicate that police claims that the technology will be used for maritime surveillance fall well short of their intended use – which could span a range of police activity – and that officers have talked about selling the surveillance data to private companies. A prototype drone equipped with high-powered cameras and sensors is set to take to the skies for test flights later this year.

BAE System’s new Herti unmanned aerial vehicle has been on reconnaissance and surveillance boat in Afghanistan.

CCTV in the sky: police plan to use military-style spy drones (Guardian UK)

Because homeopathic treatments are sold along side aspirin and Tylenol at the druggist, people assume these “remedies” are tested and effective.  A simple look at the mathematics of homeopathy should do a lot to set one straight.

In his recent article, Homeopathy by the (mind-boggling) numbers (Times Online), Matt Parker does a great job breaking down the astronomical numbers involved in processing homeopathic treatments.

The arnica is diluted so much that there is only one molecule of it per 7 million billion billion billion billion pills.

It’s hard to comprehend numbers that large. If you were to buy that many pills from Boots, it would cost more than the gross domestic product of the UK. It’s more than the gross domestic product of the entire world. Since the dawn of civilisation. If every human being since the beginning of time had saved every last penny, denarius and sea-shell, we would still have not saved-up enough to purchase a single arnica molecule from Boots.

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A & E

During his campaign for election, Barack Obama promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He said, on many occasions, that he would close Camp X-ray within the first year of his presidency.

His year is up!

After a year of “closing” the prison, 200 prisoners remain in the facility. Many of those, still in detention, have been there for eight years. 800 prisoners have been released so far. Of those let go, only one has been found guilty of any crime. He was convicted by a dubious military commission, a verdict that is likely to be overturned.

How does one survive in a detention facility for years? Ask Omar Deghayes.

“For nearly six years, British resident Omar Deghayes was imprisoned in Guantánamo and subjected to such brutal torture that he lost the sight in one eye. But far from being broken, he fought back to retain his dignity and his sanity.

Deghayes developed a personal policy of resistance. Guards would ­typically arrive at a prisoner’s cell and spray pepper and other chemicals through the “bean-hole”, the hatch in the door. While most prisoners cowered at the back of their cell, Deghayes says he would grab the guards’ hands and attack them. He fought back, as viciously as he could, trying to take the fights with guards out of the privacy of his cell and into the corridors.

“It was chaos; they would fall on top of each other and it was embarrassing [for them]. They were wearing all this heavy stuff [body armour] which didn’t help either,” he says. Some guards became afraid of going into his cell. Most, he says, were Puerto Rican and were not driven by the patriotism of the “war on terror”. They did not want to get hurt for their meagre wages.”

How I fought to survive Guantánamo (Guardian UK)

It has been one year since Barack Obama signed the executive order essentially outlawing torture, but the debate about interrogation methods continue.  Although the situation has improved, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think. Elements of the US interrogation policy remain inhumane and counterproductive.

Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the McCain amendment), US law, international law, or President Obama’s executive order.

If one were to visit one of the war zones today, as an a member of an Air Force interrogation team, they would still be allowed to abuse prisoners.

This is true even though in my experience, torture or even harsh but legal treatment never got us useful information. Instead, such tactics invariably did just the opposite, convincing detainees to clam up.

Matthew Alexander – Author of “How to Break a Terrorist.”

Read Matthew Alexander’s Op-Ed – Torture’s Loopholes (NY Times)

Afghan Boys Allegedly Abused At Bagram “Black Prison”

How many spies have CIA polygraph tests exposed?

According to a CBS News account of the suicide bombing at a CIA base in Afghanistan, “The double agent was brought onto the base without first being given a polygraph test, one of the basic tools in establishing a spy’s trustworthiness.”

Really?

Aldrich Ames, the master Soviet spy who was a high-ranking CIA analyst, routinely passed polygraph exams, even as he passed information to the Soviets.

Nor did the polygraph expose Larry Wu- Tai Chin a Chinese language translator working for the CIA who sold information to China, or Robert Hanssen of the FBI.

Read more »

“At 10:23am on January 30th, more than three hundred homeopathy sceptics nationwide will be taking part in a mass homeopathic ‘overdose’ in protest at Boots’ continued endorsement and sale of homeopathic remedies, and to raise public awareness about the fact that homeopathic remedies have nothing in them.

Homeopathy is an unscientific and absurd pseudoscience, yet it persists today as an accepted complementary medicine.

Ask many people what they think homeopathy is, and you’ll be told “it’s herbal medicine” or “it’s all-natural”. Few realise that it’s been proven not to work; even fewer know it involves substances so dilute that there’s nothing left in them. Homeopathy takes advantage of this uncertainty to sit alongside real, proven medicines on the shelves of our major pharmacies.

Sceptics and consumer rights activists will publicly swallow an entire bottle of homeopathic ‘pillules’ to demonstrate that these ‘remedies’, prepared according to a long-discredited 18th century ritual, are nothing but sugar pills.

The protest will raise public awareness about the reality of homeopathy, and put further pressure on Boots to live up to its responsibilites as the ’scientist on the high street’ and stop selling treatments which do not work.”

Read more at 1023.org.uk

From 2002 until 2006 the FBI called on phone companies to provide customer records by faking terrorism emergencies.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post indicate that officials inside FBI didn’t follow their own protocol to protect civil liberties.

A Justice Department inspector general’s report due out this month is expected to reveal that the FBI often broke the law with its emergency requests, bureau officials confirmed.

FBI broke law for years in phone record searches (Washington Post)

The FBI used faked terrorism emergencies to illegally obtain Americans’ phone records: Report (NY Daily News)

We all know that the  Catholic church has done a miserable job when it comes to policing themselves. Decades of sexual abuse of children by priests attests to that. In the US, children in parish after parish were assaulted by priests and nuns while their superiors covered it up.  We now find out that the orders for the cover-up came from the highest levels of the Vatican.

A secret document has been uncovered. The Crimen Sollicitationis, as it is titled in Latin, lays out church policy that calls for silence on the issue of sexual abuse by priests.

The policy, written in 1962 by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and stored in the secret Vatican archives, focuses on crimes initiated as part of the confessional relationship and what it calls the “worst crime”: sexual assault committed by a priest” or “attempted by him with youths of either sex or with brute animals.”

Bishops are instructed to pursue these cases

“in the most secretive way…restrained by a perpetual silence…and everyone (including the alleged victim) …is to observe the strictest secret, which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office…under the penalty of excommunication.”

View an English translation of Crimen Sollicitationis (pdf)

Watch Sex crimes and the Vatican (BBC)

The ancient Chinese system of aesthetics known as feng shui is believed to use the laws of both Heaven and Earth to help one improve life by receiving positive qi.

The term feng shui literally translates as “wind-water” in English.

Qi rides the wind and scatters, but is retained when encountering water.

Traditional feng shui practice requires the use of a Chinese compass, called a luo pan, to determine the directions in finding any auspicious sector in a desired location.

In Feng shui, furniture is not to be placed randomly in a room. One must consult the luo pan to determine the most auspicious location.

Today, feng shui is widely considered a pseudoscience. It has been criticised by many organisations devoted to investigating paranormal claims.

Modern criticism differentiates between feng shui as a traditional proto-religion and the modern practice:

“A naturalistic belief, it was originally used to find an auspicious dwelling place for a shrine or a tomb. However, over the centuries it… has become distorted and degraded into a gross superstition.”

There has been little systematic scientific research into feng shui, since the general scientific consensus is that it is superstition.

Feng Shui – Penn and Teller Style