Crapaganda.com

Source: Cryptogon.com

During his recent TED talk, Bill Gates said that the world population is headed to 9 billion people. Then he said, “Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services—we could lower that perhaps ten or fifteen percent.”

I’m not sure what the nothing-to-see-here explanation is for Bill Gates’ theory that “new vaccines” can help lower the population of the world, but I thought about the incidents from the 1990s where the World Health Organization was providing a “tetanus vaccine” to poor girls and women (and just poor girls and women) that contained human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG). For those who don’t want to delve into that, in short, it was a World Health Organization experiment; a test of a vaccine against pregnancy.

Bill Gates on population control vaccines (mp3)

Watch the vid at: TED

United States military intelligence spied on Planned Parenthood and other domestic groups as part of US security preparations for the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, according to a recently declassified military document obtained by a civil liberties group Thursday.

The document, drafted by a Pentagon Deputy Inspector General whose name is redacted, was included in more than 800 pages released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of a Freedom of Information Act Request. They include reports from the Pentagon’s Intelligence Oversight Board that were submitted to the Defense Secretary from 2001 to 2007.

Referring to an incident where military intelligence personnel distributed information about FBI spying on the 2002 Olympics, the inspector general’s office tersely remarked that an “intelligence oversight violation occurred.”

“The document… contained US Persons data in referring to an reporting on organizations (Planned Parenthood, the white supremacist group National Alliance) and their involvement in protests and literature distribution,” the inspector’s office wrote. “Also noted was the report contained a large section labeled “GENERAL CRIMINAL ACTIVITY.” Collection and dissemination of US Persons information by military intelligence assets is not allowed unless this information constitutes “Foreign Intelligence.”

“The inclusion of these two sections in this intelligence product is clearly outside the purview of military intelligence assets and should be handled through law enforcement or Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection channels,” the inspector’s office added. “An inquiry into the circumstances of this violation was conducted and the result will be forwarded via separate correspondence.”

More at: US military spied on Planned Parenthood, civilian phone calls (Raw Story)

The United States would lose a cyberwar if it fought one today, a former US intelligence chief has warned.

Michael McConnell, a retired US Navy vice admiral who served as ex-president George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence, also compared the danger of cyberwar to the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

“If we went to war today in a cyberwar, we would lose,” McConnell told a hearing Tuesday on cybersecurity held by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

“We’re the most vulnerable, we’re the most connected, we have the most to lose.

“We will not mitigate this risk,” added McConnell, now an executive vice president for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton’s national security business. “And as a consequence of not mitigating this risk, we are going to have a catastrophic event.”

Tuesday’s hearing came a little over a month after Internet giant Google revealed that it and other US companies had been the target of a series of sophisticated cyberattacks originating in China.

“National security and our economic security are at stake,” said Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, the panel’s chairman and a co-sponsor of a bill seeking to bolster public and private sector cybersecurity cooperation.

“A major cyberattack could shut down our nation’s most critical infrastructure — our power grid, telecommunications, financial services.”

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that government intervention would probably be needed to crack down on the “Wild West” the Internet has become.

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In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace. But our weaponization of classical music—where Mozart, Beethoven, and other greats have been turned into tools of state repression—marks a new low.

We’re already the kings of CCTV. An estimated 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK, a remarkable achievement for an island that occupies only 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass.

A few years ago some local authorities introduced the Mosquito, a gadget that emits a noise that sounds like a faint buzz to people over the age of 20 but which is so high-pitched, so piercing, and so unbearable to the delicate ear drums of anyone under 20 that they cannot remain in earshot. It’s designed to drive away unruly youth from public spaces, yet is so brutally indiscriminate that it also drives away good kids, terrifies toddlers, and wakes sleeping babes.

Police in the West of England recently started using super-bright halogen lights to temporarily blindmisbehaving youngsters. From helicopters, the cops beam the spotlights at youths drinking or loitering in parks, in the hope that they will become so bamboozled that (when they recover their eyesight) they will stagger home.

And recently police in Liverpool boasted about making Britain’s first-ever arrest by unmanned flying drone. Inspired, it seems, by Britain and America’s robot planes in Afghanistan, the Liverpool cops used a remote-control helicopter fitted with CCTV (of course) to catch a car thief.

Britain might not make steel anymore, or cars, or pop music worth listening to, but, boy, are we world-beaters when it comes to tyranny. And now classical music, which was once taught to young people as a way of elevating their minds and tingling their souls, is being mined for its potential as a deterrent against bad behavior.

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)

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Astrology is a system of beliefs which hold that the relative positions of celestial bodies at the time of ones birth can provide information about personality, human affairs, and other terrestrial matters.

Astrologers believe that the movements and locations of stars and planets directly influence life on Earth.  Today’s astrologers define astrology as more of a symbolic language, an art form, or a form of divination.  Despite differences in definitions, a common assumption of astrologers is that celestial placements can aid in the interpretation of past and present events, and in the prediction of the future.

In India, soon to be the most populous country on the earth, 75%  of  marriages are  not based of compatibility of partners but on astrological horoscopes.  Most Indians plan their day based on daily astrological predictions published in newspapers. Most TV channels in India are running a minimum of one hour of astrology programing  every morning.

Astrology is generally considered a pseudoscience by the scientific community which cites a lack of statistically significant astrological predictions, while psychology explains much of the continued faith in astrology as a matter of cognitive biases.

Carl Sagan on Astrology

James Randi takes on Astrology (sorry for the rough sound track in the beginning )

In this day and age it is hard to believe that one of the most technologically advanced nations in history would be using defensive measures that once protected ancient Egyptian fortresses. Sure the moat is a tried and true technology, but is it superior to laser fencing and phalanxes of cameras with computer brains? Originally designed to make access to fortress walls difficult for siege weapons, such as siege towers and battering rams, moats may also be effective at keeping truck bombs from getting too close to the Embassy.

US diplomats add a moat to their expenses at $1bn London embassy (Times Online)

In an attempt to get patriotic Americans to buy War Bonds the US Treasury commissioned a propaganda film.  The film is replete with the racism of 1940s America and contains some pretty vivid shots of the casualties of war.

Watch My Japan

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all.

Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.

The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials.  But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests.  Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked.

Prosecutors “were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device,” said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. “And I started asking the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ‘What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?’ ”

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama’s Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government’s relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket.

How many of the owners of the country’s 277 million cell phones even know that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint can track their devices in real time? Most “don’t have a clue,” says privacy advocate James X. Dempsey.

Read more at: The Snitch in Your Pocket (Newsweek)

The NHS should stop funding homeopathy, MPs say.

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee said using public money on the highly-diluted remedies could not be justified.

The cross-party group said there was no evidence beyond a placebo effect, when a patient gets better because of their belief that the treatment works.

But manufacturers and supporters of homeopathy disputed the report, saying the MPs had ignored important evidence.

It is thought about £4m a year is spent on homeopathy by the NHS, helping to fund four homeopathic hospitals in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow and numerous prescriptions.

Homeopathy is a 200-year-old system of treatment that uses highly diluted substances – sometimes so none of the original product is left – that are given orally in the belief that it will stimulate the body’s self-healing mechanism.

Read More At: NHS money ‘wasted’ on homeopathy (BBC)

Airport security chiefs may have thought they had enough to worry about with shoe bombers, underpants bombers and people who forget to put their toothpaste into those little plastic bags. But, if so, they were reckoning without Benedict XVI.

At a meeting in the Vatican at the weekend, the pope made an authoritative – if entirely unexpected – incursion into the raging debate over the planned use of airport body scanners. He told an audience from the aerospace industry that, notwithstanding the threat from terrorism, “the primary asset to be safeguarded and treasured is the person, in his or her integrity”.

Respect for the principles he enunciated “might seem particularly complex and difficult in the present context”, he told his audience, which included airport managers, airline executives, security workers, pilots, cabin and ground staff.

They had to contend with problems arising “from the economic crisis, which is bringing about problematic effects in the civil aviation sector, and the threat of international terrorism, which is targeting airports and aircraft”. But, he warned: “It is essential never to lose sight of respect for the primacy of the person.”

The pope’s words will delight civil liberties campaigners opposed to a device that strips passengers virtually naked.

But those involved in airport security will no doubt point out that, when he himself travels — on Alitalia – the pope and his entourage are simply waved through security controls.

An exception was in 1984 when a permanently installed detection mechanism in Luxembourg alerted security officials to the fact that John Paul II and his aides were packing significant quantities of metal. It had been activated by their crosses.

Source: Pope enters airport body scanners row (Guardian UK)