The Real Cost Of College
Posted in school on November 27th, 2011
Was Aleister Crowley King Tut’s Curse
Posted in secret societies on November 24th, 2011
Source: disinfo.com
In post-WWI London, the public’s attention was gripped by a string of mysterious deaths of people linked in one way or another to the unsealing of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Was the “pharaoh’s curse” in fact carried out by Aleister Crowley?
Six mysterious London deaths famously attributed to the ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’ were actually murders by notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley, a historian claims in a new book. Incredible parallels between Crowley and Jack the Ripper have also been discovered during research by historian Mark Beynon.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, London was gripped by the mythical curse of Tutankhamun, the Egyptian boy-king, whose tomb was uncovered by British archaeologist Howard Carter. More than 20 people linked to the opening of the pharaoh’s burial chamber in Luxor in 1923 bizarrely died over the following years – six of them in the capital.
Victims included Carter’s personal secretary Captain Richard Bethell, who was found dead in his bed from suspected smothering at an exclusive Mayfair club. Bethell’s father Lord Westbury then plunged seven floors to his death from his St James’s apartment, where he reportedly kept tomb artefacts gifted by his son. And Aubrey Herbert, half-brother of Carter’s financial backer Lord Carnarvon, also died suspiciously in a Park Lane hospital shortly after visiting Luxor.
At the time, a frenzied Press blamed the ‘Curse of Tutankhamun’ for the deaths and speculated on the supernatural powers of the ancient Egyptians. But Mr Beynon has now drawn on previously unpublished evidence to conclude the deaths were all ritualistic killings masterminded by Crowley, an occultist dubbed “the wickedest man in the world”.
The gods and goddesses of Crowley’s own religious philosophy, Thelema, were mainly drawn from ancient Egyptian religion. He believed himself to be a prophet of a new age of personal liberty, controlled by the ancient Egyptian god Horus. It is likely that he would have found Carter’s excavation sacrilegious and wanted revenge, according to Mr Beynon.
After unique analysis of Crowley’s diaries, essays and books and inquest reports, the armchair detective argues that he was a Jack the Ripper-obsessed copycat killer.
Crowley wrote in his diaries that he believed the locations of five of the Ripper’s murders in Whitechapel in 1888 formed a pentagram – an important star-shaped symbol in Satanism. Mr Beynon claims that the locations of five of Crowley’s ‘murders’ form a copycat pentagram.
London’s Curse: Murder, Black Magic and Tutankhamun in the 1920s West End by Mark Beynon
(hardcover available in February) (Kindle version out now)
Facial Recognition Software Thwarted By ‘CV Dazzle’ Makeup
Posted in big brother on November 24th, 2011
Not interested in having yourself automatically identified in photos across the internet? Then you might want to take a cue from Adam Ant (or Blade Runner’s Pris, if you prefer), as Adam Harvey, a student in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program, has discovered that some over the top face makeup applied in just the right way can thwart most facial recognition software. Dubbed CV Dazzle (after the Dazzle camouflage used in World War I), the makeup works simply by enhancing areas of the face that you otherwise wouldn’t ordinarily enhance — so instead of applying the makeup around your eyes, you’d apply some on your cheeks and effectively “invert” that area. According to Harvey, that method is effective at blocking the face recognition used by Facebook, Picasa and Flickr — and it doesn’t simply cause some mild confusion, it actually prevents the software from detecting any face at all.
See video here.
Source: engadget.com
Did Adolf Hitler Escape Germany in 1945?
Posted in security breach on November 23rd, 2011
On April 27, 1945, Adolf Hitler spoke briefly with one of the SS soldiers standing guard outside the Führerbunker, the last refuge of the inner circle of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. “Germany,” he said, “can hope for the future only if the whole world thinks I am dead.”
It seems impossible to believe that Adolf Hitler could not only have escaped Germany but, in fact, survived in relative comfort in Argentina until his death of natural causes in 1962. Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams’ new book Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, which was released in October, presents a remarkable, linear account of a sequence of shadowy events occurring in the final days of World War II that is neatly timelined and meticulously sourced.
Recalling the early realization – in 1943 – by Party Reichsleiter Martin Bormann of the necessity of planning a route of final retreat, the book navigates the various stages of creation and execution of what may have been one of the most daring and enigmatic escapes in history. It examines the early preparations of a secret German base in the Canary Islands as well as mid-level contacts between Germany and the United States, when the latter was presented with an opportunity to turn a blind-eye to Hitler’s escape with the choice of “a carrot or a stick.” (The U.S. could, on the one hand, accept a secret exile for a dozen members of the Nazi hierarchy, in which case Germany would dutifully capitulate and peacefully transfer her gold, art and scientific patents to a victorious, U.S.-led allied coalition. Alternatively, they could refuse such an offer, in which event said treasures would be destroyed and the great, unscathed cities of the U.S. east coast would find themselves under sudden and punishing attack from submarine-launched, nerve gas equipped, V-1 rockets.)
The indicators of an escape are presented in chillingly irrefutable detail. There is the case of Luftwaffe pilot Peter Baumgart who declared, in court testimony, he had personally flown Hitler and his entourage to an intermediate destination in Denmark. Baumgart’s testimony would be corroborated by notes from the U.S. Army interrogation of an SS officer who claimed to have witnessed the escape, though – according to Dunstan and Williams – at least one of the men would mysteriously disappear shortly after levying the charges.
Or consider the series of declassified FBI telegrams from August 1945 reporting of local police activity investigating the presence of Hitler in Villa Gessel, Argentina – a German colony in a country whose political power class had become agents of influence of Berlin.
Or, perhaps, claims of former sailors of the Admiral Graf Spee – a German cruiser scuttled off the Argentine coast whose crew had been stranded in that nation – that they had assisted in securing the scene of Hitler’s coastal landing from a Kriegsmarine U-Boat and had personally interacted with the Führer.
While some gaps of time and evidence are accounted for by deductive assumption, these are mostly excusable given the uniqueness of the subject matter and the obvious dearth of primary sources from which the authors had to draw. Grey Wolf is not a court case ready for presentation. It’s a musing on the probability of a What If scenario and, when taken in that sense, will withstand many of the most pointed examinations of the book’s conclusive accuracy. If there is one flaw in Grey Wolf it is the several chapters of filler text that occupies the first third of the book in which Dunstan and Williams fete the reader with a parade of horribles perpetrated by the National Socialist government to establish, apparently, the villainous nature of the title character; what we assume the authors believe to be an obligatory gesture to avoid being dismissed as revisionists. Despite this minor annoyance we’re able to give Grey Wolf an enthusiastic five stars.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler is available now.
Source: Parapolitical.com
Judge – Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Unconstitutional
Posted in big brother on November 22nd, 2011
In a succinct one-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Lynn N. Hughes of the Southern District of Texas declared that the law authorizing the government to obtain cellphone records without a search warrant was unconstitutional.
“The records would show the date, time, called number, and location of the telephone when the call was made,” Judge Hughes wrote in the decision, dated Nov. 11. “These data are constitutionally protected from this intrusion.”
Judge Hughes’ decision comes as the U.S. government is facing increasing judicial challenges to its practice of obtaining information about the location of individuals without a search warrant. Last week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case where the government placed a GPS tracking device under a vehicle and monitored the driver’s movements for a month without a search warrant.
During the argument, Chief Justice John Roberts said to Michael Dreeben, deputy solicitor general of the Justice Department: “If you win this case then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States.” The Justice Department argues that people have no expectation of privacy on public roads.
Cellphone records are governed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that permits law enforcement officers to obtain certain digital records – such as some e-mail and cellphone records – without a search warrant. A coalition of technology companies—including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AT&T Corp.—is lobbying Congress to update the law to require search warrants in more digital investigations.
At the same time, judges in lower courts have been questioning the constitutionality of the law, which only requires officers to show “specific and articulable facts” the electronic records sought are “relevant and material” to an ongoing investigation. For physical searches of a person’s home, the government is required to show probable cause that a crime was committed and obtain a search warrant.
Since 2005, more than a dozen magistrate judges have written opinions denying applications for court orders to track cellphones without search warrants. The nation’s roughly 500 magistrate judges handle applications for search warrants and other types of electronic surveillance in federal courts.
Of course, some have upheld warrantless searches. Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Liam O’Grady ruled that the government could obtain data from the Twitter accounts of three WikiLeaks without a search warrant.
Last year, Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith of U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Texas issued an opinion denying the government access to 60 days worth of information about a cellphone subscriber’s location and phone calls, without a search warrant.
Magistrate Judge Smith wrote that although cellphone tracking wasn’t envisioned by the writers of the Constitution, it had become so precise and pervasive that “for a cellphone user born in 1984, however, it is now conceivable that every movement of his adult life can be imperceptibly captured, compiled, and retrieved from a digital dossier somewhere in a computer cloud. Now as then, the Fourth Amendment remains our polestar.”
The government appealed, saying that the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, does not apply because “a customer has no privacy interest in business records held by a cell phone provider, as they are not the customer’s private papers.” The government also challenged Judge Smith’s description of the accuracy of location tracking as “inaccurate or misleading,” and submitted an affidavit from cellular provider MetroPCS Wireless Inc. stating that the average coverage radius of its cellular towers was about “one or two miles.”
The district court ruling was short, but declarative. It affirmed Magistrate Judge Smith’s decision on constitutional grounds. “When the government requests records from cellular services, data disclosing the location of the telephone at the time of particular calls may be acquired only by a warrant issued on probable cause,” Judge Hughes wrote. “The standard under the [existing law] is below that required by the Constitution.”
Source: Wall Street Journal
