Great articles

Two from WRSA.

On the Open Source Revolution.

And on lessons from a deep-web drug dealer.

Both are worth a read and your consideration.

I know Dylan said it in the 60's but it's as true now as then.

Porcupine Terrorist Vermin

Gotta love Actively Disengaged.

Maybe I can make Porc-Fest next year.

http://activelydisengaged.com/

Upcycling

"Sustainability, biomimicry, biology, futurism, ecology, ecosystems: these terms have recently begun to have more weight in public discourse signaling a change in questions being asked and thinking about how humans should live on and interact with the Earth.

Crises abound around the world, many related to farming, food and water. For example, untreated human waste is reportedly used by 200 million farmers to irrigate and fertilize farm land to produce vegetables and grains for human consumption. The primary reason farmers resort to these methods is the shortage of fresh water and high fertilizer costs. Unfortunately this process involves health risks reportedly leading to 2.2 million deaths worldwide a year from intestinal illnesses; allowing people to starve to death is not an alternative either."

http://www.industrytap.com/wasting-150-billion-annually-in-top-soil-how-will-upcycling-change-that/4104

I can't believe I read that article and didn't see the word "permaculture" anywhere.  "Upcycling" and permaculture are very convergent ways of thinking. So much so that I would be surprised if the authors, William McDonough and Michael Braungart, had not had some exposure to it. The principles and ethics of these two systems so are strongly aligned that they are basically the same thing.

Their book just made my Amazon shopping list.

Bitcoin inspired art work

Hit the link to see some really awesome and innovative pieces inspired by Bitcoin.

This one is my favorite. What's yours?

http://www.coindesk.com/10-impressive-bitcoin-inspired-art-pieces/

Justin Townes Earle - Lone Pine Hill (Live in Sydney)

Really funny stuff

Aesop's list of things not to do.

Or "is your refrigerator running?" for pissed off grownups.

When was the last time you had some fun?

H/t- WRSA

Word to the wise

Encrypt your sexts and compromising selfies.

"In an extensive new interview with The Guardian, National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden emphasized the need for "lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests," and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to ditch unencrypted communication. He also confirmed what many people have joked about since the NSA's surveillance was first revealed: Yes, agents are totally looking at and passing around your "sexually compromising" photos."

http://reason.com/blog/2014/07/18/sexy-time-at-the-nsa

 

This poor girl just got the news....a little bit too late though.

Protect yourself. Use crypto.

 

Recipe for disaster

"From our fields to our forks, huge corporations have an overwhelming amount of power over our food supply every step of the way.  Right now there are more than 313 million people living in the United States, and the job of feeding all of those people is almost entirely in the hands of just a few dozen monolithic companies.  If you do not like how our food is produced or you don't believe that it is healthy enough, it isn't very hard to figure out who is to blame.  These mammoth corporations are not in business to look out for the best interests of the American people.  Rather, the purpose of these corporations is to maximize wealth for their shareholders.  So the American people end up eating billions of pounds of extremely unhealthy food that is loaded with chemicals and additives each year, and we just keep getting sicker and sicker as a society.  But these big corporations are raking in big profits, so they don't really care."

More at Zerohedge.

There is so much wrong with this situation that it needs to change and soon maybe too late.

Depending on such a small segment of society to meet a fundamental need is the largest amongst a number of concerns with this situation. Ask the Ukrainians about the dangers of centralized food systems.

The issues with profits over quality and the resulting effects on health and wellness of society is a large concern also.  We tend to be an over-fed and yet, under-nourished society.

I doubt these guys care, but maybe you, me, and the rest of us should.

 

 

St. Vincent - Digital Witness

Breaking News

Millennials think both political parties suck.

"Millennials don’t have much confidence in either of the two major political parties. When asked who they trust most to handle a series of issues, neither Democrats nor Republicans receive a majority of support on any of the 15 issues surveyed. Instead pluralities say they trust “neither” party to handle 12 of the 15 issues."

To read the full article and see the results of the Reason-Rupe poll follow the link to the Hit and Run blog post.

I think this is good news in the sense that perhaps this generation will begin the process of seeking solutions to problems outside of politics, because these institutions are obviously failing to deliver.

FAMILIAR TASTE OF BLOOD by Rachel Kann + end.user

Real life video game

"When I told my claustrophobic father I was going to be locked into a windowless room, forced to solve puzzles to escape, his immediate reaction was mild anxiety. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, repeatedly. “If anything goes wrong, call me, I’ll come help you.”

I get that. I have issues with heights, and my guts coil when I see people climb rock-faces. But I had to emphasize to him that there was zero threat of danger in Real Escape Game, a new Toronto-based version of a growing and popular niche activity, based on “escape the room” sub-genre video games, particularly The Room and 999.

But this version is live action."

Read more at Motherboard.

Ron Paul's Ad on our Wars

A classic, and still relevant.

Tedeschi Trucks Band - Angel From Montgomery/Sugaree

Is there Love in Space?--Joe Satriani

Could Cody Wilson and Amir Taaki's Dark Wallet help fulfill Second Realm Strategy?

If you are not familiar with these characters and their project, Dark Wallet, read this excellent Wired article.

"Wilson and Taaki intend Dark Wallet to be the most user-friendly method yet to spend bitcoins under the cover of anonymity’s shadow—without switching to a niche alternative coin or trusting any shady middleman.
Every coin spent through the program, an add-on to Google’s Chrome browser, gets matched up and merged with another transaction in a process called CoinJoin. The trick is a bit like Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, who agree to murder each other’s victims: When Dark Wallet combines two transactions on behalf of two users, their coins are spent simultaneously. The blockchain only records one movement of money, and since the CoinJoin negotiation is encrypted, there’s no way to tell whose coins end up where. As Dark Wallet’s user base grows—today it’s already in the low thousands despite still being in development—those CoinJoins will grow to combine three or even more transactions. Add enough users and the system becomes “a magnificent layer of uncertainty” over “a massive confusion of addresses,” as one early tester describes it.
Dark Wallet also offers what it calls “stealth addresses” that allow a user to receive bitcoins at an encrypted address, where only he or she can retrieve them using a private key. When a coin passes through either a CoinJoin transaction or a stealth address, it becomes vastly more difficult to track, making taxation, regulation, and prosecution virtually impossible. “We want a bitcoin that laughs at the regulatory pageantry,” Wilson says. “We’re going to permanently problematize bitcoin’s reputation.”"

Seriously, though, read the whole thing because it is excellent. With this article and the implications of Dark Wallet in mind, read(or re-read) the Second Realm Strategy paper.

Wilson and Taaki may have developed the tool to bring about crypto-anarchists' greatest wish.

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot: Radiohead Remix

Patriotic

Tips for staying cool and saving money in the summer

See Paul's tips to save some bucks here.

Whaddya gonna do bout it?

"Just days after a report published by researchers at Facebook revealed that users of the social media site had been manipulated for science, The Guardian reports that DARPA - the Pentagon-run Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - has in one way or another funded several studies recently that set out to explore that social networking site, as well as users of Twitter, Pinterest, Kickstarter and others. DARPA told the Guardian that the studies it has funded are essential to US defense interests."

It seems that what was discussed in my previous post on social engineering and Facebook has been admitted to by the DOD.

Also, the implications that I supposed are validated by Edward Snowden, 

"papers leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that US and British intelligence agencies have been deeply engaged in planning ways to covertly use social media for purposes of propaganda and deception."

Read more at Zerohedge.

Lazaretto

Encryption for dummies

This is something I've been hoping to see for some time.

"Encryption is hard. When NSA leaker Edward Snowden wanted to communicate with journalist Glenn Greenwald via encrypted email, Greenwald couldn’t figure out the venerable crypto program PGP even after Snowden made a 12-minute tutorial video.

Nadim Kobeissi wants to bulldoze that steep learning curve. At the HOPE hacker conference in New York later this month he’ll release a beta version of an all-purpose file encryption program called miniLock, a free and open-source browser plugin designed to let even Luddites encrypt and decrypt files with practically uncrackable cryptographic protection in seconds."

Read more at Wired.

On cash and black markets

"The fact that cash enables black market transactions is one of its greatest benefits to the poor and undercapitalized. The poor cannot afford to navigate regulatory thickets installed by bored bureaucrats on behalf of the powerful. The choice, then, is to set up an informal, cash-based business, or none at all. Recent debates over Uber’s taxi-services or Mom-and-Pop hair braiding remind us of the never-ending roadblocks placed in the way of entrepreneurs, and especially small entrepreneurs, by government. Indeed, without government who would harass small business? Government definitely built that."

Read more at Mises.org.

3-D printed 10/22

"Published at LiveLeak by Buck O'Fama (just possibly a pseudonym) is this video demonstration of a 3D-printed pistol version of a Ruger 10/22—a popular semiautomatic .22 rifle. The receiver is 3D printed and glued together, with metal parts added, including what appears to be the bolt (and, I assume, a synthetic after-market stock*).

The text reads: The pistol version of the popular Ruger 10/22 rifle, the Ruger Charger comes standard with 10-round flush magazines and can accept high-capacity mags holding 30 rounds or more. As demonstrated, making one with a cheap small-format 3D printer and some parts purchased on the internet (with no paperwork) is trivially easy."

Read more and check out the embedded video at Reason.com.

Badfish

New app tracks congressional corruption

"thanks to 16-year-old Nick Rubin, keeping track of just how much politicians have sold out has become a lot easier. He created Greenhouse, a new browser plug-in that operates under the motto "Some are red. Some are blue. All are green." The plugin aims "to shine light on a social and industrial disease of today: the undue influence of money in our Congress."

Read more at Vice.

This thing sounds pretty awesome if it works as reported.

You might want to look this over

http://borepatch.blogspot.com/2014/07/is-there-second-nsa-leaker.html?m=1

Goliath

Did you see me?

Good video on the NDAA

Kenny`s 4th of July Post

The Fourth has always been a special day for me. Anybody that knows me knows I’m not big on holidays. Christmas and Thanksgiving are a pain as far as preparations go and having to deal with family that doesn’t want anything to do with me the rest of the year, Easter – I’m surprised they still celebrate Easter seeing as it’s offensive to muslims and liberals, Veteran’s and Memorial day always rubbed me wrong because those are days for memories that should be thought of everyday, Labor Day is just an excuse for a barbecue, but the Fourth to me was always special because of the anniversary it represents.

Not anymore. The Fourth is nothing but a reminder of what a mess our Nation has become. Our Founding Fathers and the Citizens of that period sacrificed everything to ensure Freedom for their descendants and immigrants coming here to seek a better life for themselves and their families. There were provisions in the Constitution to prevent the new government from becoming what they were trying to get out from under. The Bill of Rights came later naming our basic human rights so that future generations wouldn’t pervert the Yellowed Paper in order to grant them powers that weren’t theirs to begin with.

Now I get up in the morning and read what the government wants me to read. If the press isn’t in lockstep with the president then they aren’t allowed in his press corp. If you file for something under the Freedom of Information Act, you see only what the government wants you to see, everything else is blacked out.
My weapons of self defense are government approved but they say if I don’t have a permit for them then they must stay at home, but at the same time the government says the police have no obligation or duty to protect me or mine.
My food has to be approved by the government. I can no longer drink raw milk or eat cheese that hasn’t been homogenized or pasteurized because evidently I don’t know what’s good for me. Even homeopathic medicines have to be government approved if I want to buy them instead of growing and harvesting them myself.
Our children are wards of the State. If they attend a public school, they learn what the government wants them to learn. The government has changed history to suit their views, not what really happened. You are not allowed to discipline your children with your own hand under threat of law. The government determines if your children are eating healthy lunches or not – not lunches from school but what Mom has packed for them.
We’re under constant surveillance. Every time I walk out of my house I have to assume I’m on somebody’s camera. Traffic cams, security cams, dash cams, you name it. My emails are being monitored by the government. My website is being monitored by the government. Every piece of mail – every piece – passing through the post office is photographed and recorded. Every phone call we make, every text we send is monitored by the NSA. Boxes on the side of the roads log in bluetooth information from passing cars to determine who’s in what car traveling down the road, where you got on the road and where you left it. Radar is monitoring our speed.
Our public lands are no longer public. The Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service determine what we can and cannot do on our own public lands and reserve the right to charge us fees for their use. If you resist you will be arrested, fined and possibly imprisoned.
Everything has to be registered. Our vehicles are registered, our animals are registered, our firearms are registered, our watercraft is registered. By the way, you can read that as taxed.
Our police have gone from being peace officers to law enforcement officers. They have the right by decree of government to search you simply by stating they believe you may have committed a crime. In some cities they can search you just because they want to. They burst into our homes, kill our dogs and search our personal belongings with only the simplest of causes. SWAT teams – a concept that was designed for hostage situations – conduct an average of 124 raids every day. Now they raid barber shops for unlicensed (read that untaxed) barbers, they’re raiding dairies suspected of selling raw milk and they’re raiding mom and pop marijuana growers.
With the NDAA and “Patriot” Act, we no longer have a right to an attorney or a Right to a speedy trial in front of a jury of our peers, in fact we no longer have a Right to a trial at all. Indefinite detention is the Plan of the Day at the pleasure of the government.
The tax man takes between 30 and 50% of our paychecks, most of it outright theft. We support, out of our paychecks and from the sweat of our brow, cash and food for those that won’t work, medical and child care for those same deadbeats, organizations through federal and state grants that we don’t morally support or agree with, wars that we may not agree with, and anything else that the government feels is necessary.
Any mention of God has been removed from our schools and government buildings even though this once-great Nation was founded on Christian principles. We can no longer pray before meetings nor can our children while at school. Our churches are regulated as far as mentioning politics. The entire “Separation of Church and State” has been twisted from not allowing the State to force a religion on us to not wanting to offend anybody by asserting our personal beliefs.
Our Nation is presently being overrun with illegal immigrants and our government who swore an oath to obey the Constitution and the Law of the Land is ignoring the law by not defending our borders. In fact, they’re encouraging these illegals to come by rewarding them with promises of a better life and citizenship. If you think this bothers you, think about the immigrants that came here legally and got pushed to the back of the line because of promises that our politicians have made to the illegals.
Our politicians truly believe they are above us, forgetting that they serve us and not the other way around. We have politicians that carry firearms and surround themselves with bodyguards, yet they deny us the very basic human Right to defend ourselves by outlawing us commoners to own and carry firearms and other weapons. They break laws with impunity, yet imprison us for doing the same. They refuse to listen to the People’s desires and instead enact laws they want. We have a president that says we must conserve energy and cut down on pollutants, yet he and his family fly on Air Force One for their many vacations every year. Our fuel prices have been above $3 a gallon for a record breaking 1200 days because our president refuses to cut our dependency on foreign oil and use our own natural resources which would also provide much needed jobs for us. Our president bows to foreign Heads of State, showing them that he believes we are subservient to them. Our government has done everything it can to make sure that we, as a Nation, serves it instead of the other way around.

This is not the Nation our Founding Fathers wanted for us. I know that if they could see what we’ve turned into, they would be appalled. I know I am, and that’s the reason the Fourth holds no special place in my heart anymore.
-Kenny Lane (Wirecutter)
www.knuckledraggin.com
Ceres, CA.

Social engineering and the continued emergence of Fascism in the USA

In case you missed the recent news that Facebook has been conducting an experiment by altering the feeds of their users to see how positive or negative information affects the moods and content created by the recipients of the altered feeds, new information has come out that the U.S. military may have been funding and supporting the effort. 

"There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior.

Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world."

--From SCGnews.

Here's a bit on the Cornell researcher who leads the study and some sketchy-looking track covering.

"Initially, the press release from Cornell highlighting the study said at the bottom: “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.” Once people started asking questions about this, Cornell claimed it had made a mistake, and that there was no outside funding. Jay Rosen, Journalism Professor at NYU, seems to find this highly questionable. He wrote on his Facebook page that:

Strange little turn in the story of the Facebook “emotional contagion” study. Last month’s press release from Cornell highlighting the study had said at the bottom: “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.”

Why would the military be interested? I wanted to know. So I asked Adam D.I. Kramer, the Facebook researcher, that question on his Facebook page, where he has posted what he called a public explanation. (He didn’t reply to my or anyone else’s questions.) See:https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796

Now it turns out Cornell was wrong! Or it says it was wrong. The press release now reads: “Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.”

Why do I call this strange? Any time my work has been featured in an NYU press release, the PR officers involved show me drafts and coordinate closely with me, for the simple reason that they don’t want to mischaracterize scholarly work. So now we have to believe that Cornell’s Professor of Communication and Information Science, Jeffrey Hancock, wasn’t shown or didn’t read the press release in which he is quoted about the study’s results (weird) or he did read it but somehow failed to notice that it said his study was funded by the Army when it actually wasn’t (weirder).

I think I would notice if my university was falsely telling the world that my research was partially funded by the Pentagon… but, hey, maybe there’s an innocent and boring explanation that I am overlooking.

It gets even more interesting from here. The Professor of Communication and Information Science, Jeffrey Hancock, who Mr. Rosen mentions above, has a history of working with the U.S. military, specifically the Minerva Institute. In case you forgot what this is, the Guardian reported on it earlier this year. It explained:

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research program is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar program is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”

-- From Zerohedge.

Interesting stuff, eh? And remember the Minerva project? I linked to another ZeroHedge article that describes it in detail in "Well, I'm screwed".

What about this story from a few months back? The State Department created a social media platform aimed solely at undermining another sovereign nation. In case you missed it, "Cuban Twitter":

"The U.S. government masterminded the creation of a "Cuban Twitter" — a communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba, built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks, The Associated Press has learned.
The Obama administration project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform. First, the network would build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent."--- From the AP.

So it seems that the Military/Industrial/Information complex (that sure is a mouthful for plain old fascism) is joining together to do social engineering experiments on an unsuspecting populace with the aims of creating or stopping Arab Spring style unrest depending on where and when it is useful to their aims. In Cuba, Ukraine, and numerous Middle Eastern countries it would seem to be useful to create social unrest. But here at home, with a stagnant economy, wealth inequality, and little confidence in government or financial institutions to meet our needs, a stealth campaign of pacification is more the order of the day.

So, what to do about it? I would advise against abstaining from social media altogether. It is a useful tool to liberate minds and people, but it is obviously being weaponized against us. I think simply being aware that some parties are trying to manipulate you will go a long way toward avoiding the consequences they may desire. Be mindful, use this technology as a tool for good, and beware of the risks. You gotta fight for your mind.

New windmill technology

From Silicon Graybeard's place:

"German physicist Albert Betz long ago (1909) calculated the maximum efficiency that a wind turbine could achieve, today called the Betz limit.  According to Betz's law, no turbine can capture more than 16/27 (59.3%) of the kinetic energy in wind.  Those monstrous infrastructure-sized turbines that we've all seen achieve about 80% of the Betz limit, or about 47% of the energy in the wind.  But what about other shapes?  The Dutch firm Archimedes tried the shape they named themselves after, the expanding spiral Archimedes' screw that has been used for pumping water since Archimedes' time.  They claim an efficiency of 80% - not 80% of 59% - a true 80% of the energy in the wind.  But it's better than even that:
Marinus Mieremet, cofounder of Archimedes, puts it this way: "Generally speaking, there is a difference in pressure in front and behind of the rotor blades of a windmill. However, this is not the case with the Liam F1. The difference in pressure is created by the spatial figure in the spiral blade. This results in a much better performance. Even when the wind is blowing at an angle of 60 degrees into the rotor, it will start to spin. We do not require expensive software: Because of its conical shape, the wind turbine yaws itself automatically into the optimal wind direction. Just like a wind vane. And because the wind turbine encounters minimal resistance, it is virtually silent."

The Clock

Awesome tables

Yep, sending you over to Colossal again. If you've been there, well, no explanation necessary. Right?

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/07/table-topography-greg-klassen/