Round-Up of Random Crap

Outrageous and disturbing--
Massachusetts SWAT teams claim they’re private corporations, immune from open records laws. 
Like we really need heavily militarized privatized police who are even more unaccountable than regular police...


How much fucking money is wasted on people coming up with these nonsense code names? Jesus.

The latest round of documents from Edward Snowden reveal how the British spy agency GCHQ has developed a range of secret tools to manipulate the Internet by disseminating propaganda, rigging online polls, inflating page views, conducting mass delivery of emails, and monitoring Skype users in real time. The news website The Intercept published the document, which reads like a menu of covert tools with code names like "ANGRY PIRATE," "CONCRETE DONKEY," "STEALTH MOOSE" and "IMPERIAL BARGE," a term that refers to the ability to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call. The revelations come as the British Parliament is set to begin debate on a fast-tracked bill to expand government spying powers.

More crazy NSA/GCHQ code names here. Other obnoxious disruptions of internet activity by the NSA/GCHQ here.

Oy:

One week after revelations of how over the span of 35 years, a County Galway home for unwed mothers cavalierly disposed of the bodies of nearly 800 babies and toddlers on a site that held a septic tank, new reports are leveling a whole different set of charges about what happened to the children of those Irish homes.In harrowing new information revealed this weekend, the Daily Mail has uncovered medical records that suggest 2,051 children across several Irish care homes were given a diphtheria vaccine from pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome in a suspected illegal drug trial that ran from 1930 to 1936.

The FBI heavily harass and monitor environmental activists, treat them often as terrorists.

Was the 1989 Tianamen Square massacre mostly western propaganda?

A last random bit of info-- 1950-1960s' modern art was funded by the CIA as a pro-American scheme to show off freedom, but also to turn Americans away from art? Complex psyop, for sure.  Not unlike the idea of the US intel agencies funding the 60s music scene, notably the Laurel Canyon hippies.