Deep Thought of the Day
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Dedicated to fighting authoritarianism, bigotry, greed, corruption, climate change denial, white supremacy, racism, stupidity and general evil, as well as the exploration of interesting ideas and conspiracy theories including 9/11, UFOs, ET's, the paranormal and the general unknown.
Watcher of the skies watcher of allSeems like this is from the perspective of the quarantiners, sung to the quarantined, with some allusions to quarantine escape and failing to escape at the end. The lizard shedding its tail seems particularly noteworthy, as the lizard is symbolic for the ultimate PTB, the evil cosmic criminals.
His is a world alone no world is his own,
He whom life can no longer surprise,
Raising his eyes beholds a planet unknown.
Creatures shaped this planets soil,
Now their reign has come to an end,
Has life again destroyed life,
Do they play elsewhere, do they know
More than their childhood games?
Maybe the lizards shed its tail,
This is the end of mans long union with earth.
Judge not this race by empty remains
Do you judge God by his creatures when they are dead?
For now, the lizards shed its tail
This is the end of mans long union with earth.
From life alone to life as one,
Think not now your journeys done
For though your ship be sturdy, no
Mercy has the sea,
Will you survive on the ocean of being?
Come ancient children hear what I say
This is my parting council for you on your way.
Sadly now your thoughts turn to the stars
Where we have gone you know you never can go.
Watcher of the skies watcher of all
This is your fate alone, this fate is your own.
HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.Raw Story has a similar story.
But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.
According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.
Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
And all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.
This is an excerpt from one of the Word Documents, which was sent as an attachment by Aaron Barr, CEO of HB Gary's Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients:
To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile (satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.
Today, Democrats offered a motion to recommit on legislation to extend expiring provisions of the PATRIOT Act to ensure that PATRIOT Act powers are not used to violate the Constitutional freedoms and protections guaranteed to all Americans. The motion included two parts:Sadly, it's only House Dems that are decent, as the Obama administration happily supports this shit, as well as outrageous unconstitutional actions like what was done to Jose Padilla.
No Constitutional shortcuts. When investigating American citizens, the government must comply with the Constitution, even in national security investigations
Challenging unconstitutional action. If a citizen challenges the government's use of PATRIOT Act power in a court of law, the case must be expedited to ensure the individual's rights are upheld.
A total of two House Republicans -- Texas' Ron Paul and North Carolina's Walter Jones -- voted for this, while 234 did not.
Dear low-income American,America is so awesome.
I know times are tough. I know many of you saw your savings and home values hurt by Wall Street recklessness. I also know that, with official unemployment above 9 percent, it is tough to find a job, and many have been forced to choose part-time employment that lacks benefits. But as a result of extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires, the budget deficit has grown.
So, despite your problems, you are going to be “asked” to sacrifice. Your president is planning to cut $2.6 billion from Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps people afford keeping their homes warm during the winter, despite the fact that due to the economic downturn the number of poor people needing help has increased significantly.
As a result of your going without heat next winter, we will be able to afford almost one whole week of fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost about $468 million a day. Although when you add in the many hidden costs like increased long-term veteran’s health care due to the conflicts, your sacrifice is probably only really going to cover maybe half a week.
I hope you understand that when we had to choose between providing basic necessities to our citizens or fighting about five more days in Iraq and Afghanistan because of [insert newest justification here], we clearly just had to choose the wars over you.
Sincerely,
Democrats in Washington
400 women and children were incinerated or boiled to death at 4:30 a.m. on Feb. 13, 1991, when two F-117 stealth fighter-bombers each dropped a 2,000-pound laser-guided “smart bomb” on the civilian shelter at Amiriyah.Sadly, this is not a particularly novel story.
It was one of those highly accurate “surgical strikes.” The first bomb sliced through 10 feet of reinforced concrete before a time-delayed fuse exploded, destroying propane and water tanks for heating water and food.
Minutes later the second bomb flew precisely through the opening that had been cut by the first and exploded deeper in the shelter creating an inferno.
Fire rose from the lower level to the area where the women and children were seeking shelter – and so did the boiling water. Those who did not burn to death immediately or die from the bombs’ impact were boiled or steamed to death in the intense heat.
Otto Rene Rodriguez said that he was given C-4 explosives and $2,000 by (CIA operative) Luis Posada Carriles to enable the bombing at Havana's Melia Cohiba hotel on Aug. 3, 1997. He was later captured in Cuba with 3.3 pounds of C-4 that he said was given to him by Posada.
REP. GRAYSON: Well I’m in favor of a four-letter foreign policy — MYOB, mind your own business. I think that covers just about any interaction that we need to have with other countries. This idea that we can micromanage our foreign relations, and micromanage the lives of other independent people, I thought that went out with colonialism.Clearly, this man was unfit to be in Congress.
DYLAN: How then do you get there? In other words if you look at American foreign policy right now as defined by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld in the hours and weeks following 9/11 and everything really having been derived from that grand architecture, how do we even begin a path toward a new foreign policy whether it is your version or anything else?
REP. GRAYSON: Well we begin that task by bringing our troops home. We don’t need to occupy two other countries 8000 miles from our shores, and it has cost an amazing tremendous amount of harm both in dollars and in blood. There was a study that was done a couple of years ago of troops returning to the United States from Iraq. The study found that 15% of all the troops come back from Iraq with permanent brain damage. I am not talking about headaches, I am talking about things that you can see on a CAT scan — and it is permanent. Now we’ve had almost two million Americans serve in Afghanistan, in Iraq. It means, if you do the math, that we’ve heard about a quarter of a million young Americans permanently scared for life for brain damage — and for what? And why do we need to spend four trillion dollars pursuing the war in Iraq? How is that necessary? We are a country now with a net worth about 50 trillion dollars. We spend 8% of all the wealth accumulated over the course of two centuries. And we dropped into the sands of Mesopotamia. It just doesn’t make any sense. We have to bring the troops home — and we have to mind our own business.
DYLAN: What do you see as the greatest political barrier to moving in that direction?
REP. GRAYSON: I think the greatest political barrier is the fact that the right wing keeps throwing up “leaders,” so called “leaders” to prove, I think they have to prove their manhood by invading and lording it those foreign people. And that was basically what was happening with George W Bush. He know that he was AWOL from service for over a year, and he felt that he could somehow cover that up and make up for it by invading two other countries.
“A quarter of U.S. homes are underwater.”Aww, fuck that. What we really need is more tax cuts for the rich!!!!
The number of U.S. homes worth less than their outstanding mortgage jumped in the fourth quarter as prices fell and lenders seized fewer properties from delinquent borrowers, Zillow Inc. said in a report today.
About 15.7 million homeowners had negative equity, also known as being underwater, at the end of the year, up from 13.9 million in the previous three months, the Seattle-based real estate information company said. The total represented 27 percent of mortgaged single-family homes, the highest in Zillow data dating to the first quarter of 2009.
The intelligence chief tapped by Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak as his vice president and potential successor aided the U.S. with its rendition program, intelligence experts told ABC News, and oversaw the torture of an Al Qaeda suspect whose information helped justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (snip) Ron Suskind, author of the book The One Percent Doctrine, called Suleiman the "hit man" for the Mubarak regime. He told ABC News that when the CIA asked Suleiman for a DNA sample from a relative of Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Suleiman offered the man's whole arm instead. (snip) Suskind said Suleiman "was our point man in Egypt for many years. Everything went through Omar. We never had to talk to anyone else. When we wanted someone to be tortured, we'd send him to Egypt to have them tortured. We wanted to get intelligence and we didn't need it to be stuff that could be doublechecked."So much for true reform and "democracy". Disgusting.
"As chief of the Mukhabarat, or General Intelligence Directorate," said John Sifton, who authored the 2007 Human Rights Watch report on torture conducted by Egypt's other intelligence agency, SSI, Suleiman oversaw joint intelligence operations with the CIA and other Arab countries "which featured illegal renditions and tortures of dozens of detainees."
Fort Smith Little Theatre members are opening their 2011 season with a murder that's "light and easy," said one official.
The theater group will perform a two-hour version of Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" at 8 p.m. Feb. 10-12 and Feb. 16-19, and at 2:30 p.m. Feb. 13 at the theater, 401 N. Sixth St., and the popular whodunit will be light in nature and tone, said Paula Sharum, director of the play.
"We are playing this story with a very light hand," she said. "Agatha Christie likes a lot of things tongue-in-cheek - she walks right next door to the comedic side - and so we are playing this light. It's not dark, if a murder can ever be light and easy."
The story centers around Monkswell Manor, a recently converted guest house where Mollie (Melissa Vitale) and Giles Ralston (Matt Hutchinson) scurry about to prepare for visitors. Once a regal estate, Monkswell Manor is the setting where a murderer runs rampant.
The Ralstons' fear that a fierce blizzard will prevent the arrival of some of the house guests are eased temporarily when Christopher Wren (Zach Callahan) arrives. However, something odd about Wren, as well as the arrival of Major Metcalf (Ron Watson) and Mrs. Boyle (Carmen Taylor), runs the risk of changing the mood and possible safety inside the manor.
The audience learns just before she is murdered that Mrs. Boyle was the magistrate who sent three children to live with foster parents. The children were all abused and the youngest killed, but she disavows any responsibility for the tragedy.