About 300 people have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated in the U.S. thanks to DNA evidence. But overlooked in those stories are the accounts of jurors who unwittingly played a role in the injustice.
One of those stories is playing out in Washington, D.C., where two jurors who helped convict a teenager of murder in 1981 are now persuaded that they were wrong. They’re dealing with their sense of responsibility by leading the fight to declare him legally innocent.
Santae Tribble, now 51, is already out of prison, but he’s asking a judge to sign a certificate of actual innocence that would help him get compensation for more than 25 years he spent behind bars.
Bad Evidence And Faulty Facts
In January 1981, a jury took only a few hours to convict Tribble for shooting a cabbie dead in a botched robbery. There was only one witness, the cabbie’s wife, who couldn’t make a positive identification. The key evidence was a woman’s stocking, which the murderer wore over his face. That stocking contained hair the FBI said it had matched to Tribble.
“They admitted that they didn’t know with certainty, but the numbers they threw out were so steep as to make it virtually certain that it was his hair,” juror Susan Dankoff said.
In fact, prosecutors told the jury in the closing argument there was only a 1 in 10 million chance it could be someone else’s hair.
EnlargeCarrie Johnson/NPRJuror Anita Woodruff is haunted by her decision to help convict Santae Tribble of murder.
But Tribble, his family members and his girlfriend all testified that he was home, sleeping at his mother’s apartment in Maryland at the time of the murder.
Dankoff remembers she considered the alibi — and rejected it.
“Then you start to think, OK, maybe they’re covering for him. And I think that that was really what it came down to,” she said.
So the jury voted to convict — except that the hair analysis that proved so persuasive has been completely discredited. Even the Justice Department says Santae Tribble didn’t do it. Dankoff said she got a call from Tribble’s lawyer not too long ago letting her know.
“And that really, really left a mark,” she said. “I was just devastated. I think I walked around feeling numb for a week after hearing that.”
Anita Woodruff also served on that jury. She said she went home and cried after voting to convict. The case never really left her. So when Tribble’s lawyer Sandra Levick, of the Public Defender Service, called to say new DNA tests on that hair did not match, Woodruff recalled, “I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘He spent all that time in jail, for nothing.’ ”
Starting Over After Decades In Prison
Woodruff was only 20 years old at the time of the trial, close in age and experience to Tribble. She said she started thinking about how their lives diverged.
“You know, and I’m thinking about all the things that … I did,” Woodruff said. “I got married, you know, got a divorce, but I had kids, you get to raise your kids, and I did see them get their license and go to proms and high school graduations.”
Santae Tribble had none of that.
“I did have a son that was born soon after I was incarcerated,” Tribble said. “I missed his entire life growing up.”
Tribble said he understands the jury and the justice system made a mistake. But now, he said, is the time to make amends.
“Like, they went the extra mile to, when the pieces didn’t fit, to make them fit,” Tribble said. “Now that it’s clear that the pieces don’t fit, make it right.”
Under the law, Tribble can collect as much as $50,000 a year for each year he was wrongfully incarcerated, if a judge signs off and formally declares him innocent.
The two jurors from his trial so long ago have written to urge the court to support that idea. They say they’re haunted by Tribble’s circumstances. He has no job, no money and no real home. He’s living with his older brother. No big dreams, but maybe a landscaping business, he says, since he spent too many years indoors.
“Well, in landscaping they call it beautification,” Tribble said. “You know, to make it pretty, the flowers and arranging the grass and stuff like that.”
He says he only wants a chance, another chance, at a normal life.
United Nations report calls for Internet surveillance, saying lack of “internationally agreed framework for retention of data” is a problem, as are open Wi-Fi networks in airports, cafes, and libraries.
The United Nations is calling for more surveillance of Internet users, saying it would help to investigate and prosecute terrorists.
A 148-page report (PDF) released today titled “The Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes” warns that terrorists are using social networks and other sharing sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Dropbox, to spread “propaganda.”
“Potential terrorists use advanced communications technology often involving the Internet to reach a worldwide audience with relative anonymity and at a low cost,” said Yury Fedotov, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
The report, released at a conference in Vienna convened by UNODC, concludes that “one of the major problems confronting all law enforcement agencies is the lack of an internationally agreed framework for retention of data held by ISPs.” Europe, but not the U.S. or most other nations, has enacted a mandatory data-retention law.
That echoes the U.S. Department of Justice’s lobbying efforts aimed at convincing Congress to require Internet service providers to keep track of their customers — in case police want to review those logs in the future. Privacy groups mounted a campaign earlier this year against the legislation, which has already been approved by a House committee.
The report, however, indicates it would be desirable for certain Web sites — such as instant-messaging services and VoIP providers like Skype — to keep records of “communication over the Internet such as chat room postings.” That goes beyond what the proposed U.S. legislation, which targets only broadband and wireless providers, would cover.
Other excerpts from the UN report address:
Open Wi-Fi networks: “Requiring registration for the use of Wi-Fi networks or cybercafes could provide an important data source for criminal investigations… There is some doubt about the utility of targeting such measures at Internet cafes only when other forms of public Internet access (e.g. airports, libraries and public Wi-Fi hotspots) offer criminals (including terrorists) the same access opportunities and are unregulated.”
Cell phone tracking: “Location data is also important when used by law enforcement to exclude suspects from crime scenes and to verify alibis.”
Terror video games: “Video footage of violent acts of terrorism or video games developed by terrorist organizations that simulate acts of terrorism and encourage the user to engage in role-play, by acting the part of a virtual terrorist.”
Paying companies for surveillance: “It is therefore desirable that Governments provide a clear legal basis for the obligations placed on private sector parties, including… how the cost of providing such capabilities is to be met.”
Today’s U.N. report was produced in collaboration with the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force, which counts the World Bank, Interpol, the World Health Organization, and the International Monetary Fund as members.
While everyone in Washington is talking about the upcoming presidential debate today, one of the U.S. Air Force’s newest high-tech toys was taking big step — er, flight — forward.
The Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project (CHAMP) is an effort to build a missile that flies over — not into — a target, be it an entire military base, neighborhood, or a even a lone tank and shuts down all the electronics inside without harming a soul. (Think of it almost as a mini-EMP in a rocket.) On Oct. 16, a CHAMP missile flew an hour-long preprogrammed route low over the Utah desert, “degrading and defeating”the electronics inside seven different targets. In a building along the route packed with computers, the screens all went dark as CHAMP sailed by, emitting a blast of high-power microwaves, according to CHAMP-maker Boeing’s Oct. 22 press release announcing the test flight. (The weapon even took out the remotely controlled TV cameras that were monitoring the tests, claimed Boeing.)
As the Chicago-based defense giant says in its press release, “CHAMP, which renders electronic targets useless, is a non-kinetic alternative to traditional explosive weapons that use the energy of motion to defeat a target.” (Side note: “energy of motion” is a nice way of saying that missiles, bombs, and bullets slam into things and explode.)
So, how does CHAMP fit into the Pentagon’s post Iraq and Afghan war plans? As everyone knows, the Defense Department is focusing on how to defeat new generations of air defense radars, surface to air missiles, anti ship missiles, and a host of other technologies that are specifically meant to keep American weapons systems at bay.
This means coming up with a fleet of new stealth bombers, fighters, and drone jets that can penetrate these defenses. It also means creating a bevy of long-range — or standoff weapons — capable of being launched by unstealthy jets far away from heavily defended targets. Where does something like CHAMP come in? As a door kicker. Launched from a stealth aircraft and designed to take out enemy air defense networks and command and control centers, CHAMP would pave the way for less stealthy jets and help to “blind” the enemy.
“In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive,” said Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager at Boeing’s Phantom Works division, in a press release.
Still, don’t expect to see CHAMP fielded soon. It’s simply meant to demonstrate that such a weapon is feasible. In the meantime, the Pentagon is buying EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets for the Navy while the Air Force and Marine Corps hope to use something called the Next Generation Jammer along with powerful Active Electronically Scanned Array radars (AESA radars can be used to jam other radars, in addition to many other things) on their F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to defeat enemy sensors. And don’t be surprised if the Navy decides to equip its planned fleet of stealthy combat drones, known as UCLASS, with some sort of electronic warfare gear aimed at jamming enemy electronics.
Representatives of the Libertarian, Green, Constitution, and Justice parties have held a presidential debate in Chicago.
Four third-party candidates, who were not invited to the presidential debates between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, have faced eachother in Chicago.
Tuesday’s debate was hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, a group promoting a more open electoral process, and moderated by talk show host Larry King.
“It’s a two-party system, but not a two-party system by law,” King said. Obama and Romney were also invited, but declined to attend.
The participants included former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, former Virginia congressman Virgil Goode, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who ran against Romney in Massachusetts in 2002.
When asked about the Pentagon’s budget, during the debate, all four candidates agreed that military spending should be cut. Goode was perhaps the most circumspect; the other candidates called for big cuts.
For instance, Johnson said military spending should be cut by 43 per cent.
Goode, who voted to authorise the war in Iraq in 2003, said: “If I’m elected president … part of the cuts have to be in the Deparmtent of Defence. We cannot do as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan suggest. I support a strong defence but we need to retrench rather than being the policeman of the world.”
In response, Johnson said: “The biggest threat to our national security is the fact that we’re bankrupt.” He supports a 43 per cent reduction in military spending – 2003 spending levels, he pointed out.
Stein, the Green Party nominee, said: “A foreign policy based on militarism … is making us less secure, not more secure. We need to cut the budget and bring the troops home.”
Since 1988, candidates have only been invited by the Commission on Presidential Debates to participate if polls find they have more than 15 per cent support.
So far, only one candidate has met that criterion, the billionaire Ross Perot, who debated Bill Clinton and George H W Bush in 1992.
Alternative presidential debates for third-party candidates have been held since 1996, but George Farah, author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates, says he “[doesn’t] remember one getting this much attention, having Larry King moderate it.”
A second third-party match-up will be held on October 30.
High threshold
Farah describes the 15 per cent threshold as “just substantially too high”.
He notes that in order to receive federal matching funds, parties only have to have received five per cent of the vote in the previous election. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s an arbitrary figure,” he told Al Jazeera.
Farah says third-party or independent candidates face “Herculean structural barriers”, arguing they face a fundraising disadvantage compared to Republican and Democratic candidates, and have to collect huge numbers of signatures in some states to get their names printed on the ballot.
Another hurdle is the structure of the US winner-take-all electoral system. Research shows third-party candidates perform better in countries that have proportional representation or instant runoff voting systems.
Although most public opinion polls of the presidential race do not ask whether voters support third-party candidates, one Gallup survey released in September found that three per cent nationally say they will vote for either Stein, Johnson, or Goode.
In many states, citizens will not be able to vote for third-party candidates even if they want to.
“It’s a two-party system, but not a two-party system by law.“
– Larry King
The US has a highly complex patchwork of ballot access laws, and all 50 states have somewhat different requirements for candidates’ names to be printed on the ballot.
Candidates not affiliated with either major party must collect a certain number of signatures from voters in order for their names to be automatically printed on ballots.
If they fail to meet this threshold, some states allow third-party candidates’ names to be manually written in by voters instead.
Certain states, like North Carolina and Oklahoma, are notoriously difficult for third-party candidates to gain access; others, like Louisiana, are much easier.
Only Obama and Romney are on the ballot in all 50 states and Washington, although Johnson is close, with 48 state ballots listing his name.
Records broken
Richard Winger, who runs the website Ballot Access News, thinks third-party candidates are likely to receive a higher share of the vote this year than in 2008.
He attributes this partly to the high enthusiasm for Barack Obama in 2008.
“There was so much optimism and happiness” about Obama and about electing the country’s first black president, he told Al Jazeera. As a result, less than 1.5 per cent of the vote went to minor parties.
Winger said the state which will deliver the highest share of its vote to third-party candidates “may very well be Alaska”.
Because it is four time zones behind the East Coast, many voters already know who will win, explains Winger.
He notes that Ralph Nader, who ran in every presidential election from 1992 to 2008, received a greater share of the vote there in 2004 than in any other state.
Farah also predicts a higher share of voters in New Mexico than in other states will choose third-party candidates as Johnson used to govern the state and “remains quite popular” there.
Third-party candidates have already broken one record this year: Winger says that there are 27 individuals this year whose names are on the ballot in at least one state. The previous record was 23, set in the 1992 election.
The debate was broadcast by Al Jazeera and Russia Today but on no major US cable news networks
Andrew Sullivan says he’ll use it less scrupulously than the president. But based on what evidence? Current policy is plenty unscrupulous already.
Asked about drone strikes during Monday’s foreign policy debate, Mitt Romney basically said that President Obama is right to use them. Expect more drone warfare in 2013 regardless of who wins the election. Does that mean that the two candidates are indistinguishable on the issue? My friend and former boss Andrew Sullivan doesn’t think so. “Memo to Conor Friedersdorf,” he wrote while live-blogging at The Dish. “You think Romney would be as scrupulous in drone warfare as Obama?” Implicit is the judgment that Obama has been “scrupulous.”
But it isn’t so.
Sullivan and I agree that Obama won last night’s debate, and that he’d be likely to preside over a more prudent, reality-based foreign policy than Romney, based on the respective campaigns that they’ve run. On drones, however, Romney appears to have the exact same position as Obama. And Obama has been egregiously unscrupulous. I don’t want to hear the dodge about how drone strikes are necessary. It’s beside the point. This is about the specific ways Obama has waged the drone war. Even if you agree in theory with drone strikes, Obama’s actions ought to bother you.
Let me be specific:
As Jane Mayer noted when describing the CIA’s drone strikes, “The program is classified as covert, and the intelligence agency declines to provide any information to the public about where it operates, how it selects targets, who is in charge, or how many people have been killed.”
The Obama Administration avoids judicial accountability by arguing that the drone program is secret, even as it acknowledges the existence of the program when bragging about killing terrorists.
As the Mayer article goes on to state, “because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war. Should something go wrong in the C.I.A.’s program — last month, the Air Force lost control of a drone and had to shoot it down over Afghanistan — it’s unclear what the consequences would be.”
According to The New York Times, “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
The Obama Administration permits the CIA to carry out “signature strikes” even though they don’t know the identity of the people they’re trying to kill!
As Glenn Greenwald explained, “In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals.”
As a report published by the law clinics at NYU and Standford document, innocent people in Waziristan are being terrorized and traumatized daily by Obama’s drone war. And the policy has killed, at minimum, hundreds of innocent people, a judgment that is supported even by data from the New America Foundation, whose methods almost certainly under-count dead innocents.
So to sum up, Obama has implemented a global killing program with zero checks and balances; he’s operated it out of the CIA rather than the Department of Defense; he invokes the state-secrets privilege to avoid defending it in court, even as he brags about its efficacy; it includes killing people whose identities we don’t even know; all military-aged males we kill are presumed to be “militants”; the Pakistani government reportedly gets to pick some of the targets; at minimum, hundreds of innocents have been killed, including rescuers and funeral-goers; a 16-year-old American citizen was among those killed; and Sullivan, having been exposed many times to all the information I’ve just included, thinks its accurate to call Obama’s drone program “scrupulous,” though it could easily be made more transparent, accountable, and lawful.
What really gets me is that, in addition to arguing that Obama has run this program scrupulously (something implied in Sullivan’s question, and explicitly argued in threads like this one), Sullivan has also himself articulated almost all of the reasons why the program has been unscrupulous — that is to say, why Obama’s drone policy “disregards, or has contempt for, laws of right or justice with which he is perfectly well acquainted, and which should restrain his actions.”
“One thing I’ve learned this past decade is that the CIA is pretty much its own judge, jury and executioner,” Sullivan wrote. “It is much less accountable to the public, more likely to break the laws of war and destroy the evidence, more likely to do things that could escalate rather than ameliorate a conflict.” Is it scrupulous to pick an organization like that to run your drone program?
Says Sullivan’s post from June of 2011 (emphasis added):
Obama is now engaged in two illegal wars — in Libya and in Yemen. There was no Congressional debate or vote on these wars — and one is being waged by the CIA with unmanned drones. I think we have learned a little about what happens when you give the CIA carte blanche to run a war with no accountability except to a president who has a vested interest in covering up errors.
Said Sullivan on another occasion, “Put drones in the hands of an executive who is empowered to do anything without any input from the other branches of government … and we have a problem indeed.” He is also on record stating that “counting every military-age man in the vicinity of a Jihadist as a terrorist is a total cop-out,” and he even wrote that “if the CIA, based on its own intelligence, can launch a war or wars with weapons that can incur no US fatalities, the propensity to be permanently at war, permanently making America enemies, permanently requiring more wars to put out the flames previous wars started, then the Founders’ vision is essentially over. I think it’s a duty to make sure their vision survives this twenty-first century test.”
So let’s get back to Sullivan’s debate night question. “You think Romney would be as scrupulous in drone warfare as Obama?” My best guess is that, on drone warfare, their policies would be about the same — that is to say, alarmingly unscrupulous, with unpredictable consequences. That’s what happens when you give someone the power to kill without checks in secret.
I have no reason to think one or the other would predictably kill more innocent people with drones. Does Sullivan? If Romney wins, what odds would Sullivan give on the proposition that Romney ultimately kills more civilians with drones than Obama has? Based on what evidence? Obama has already killed an American citizen without trial and conducted drone strikes in a country where no war has been declared, so I don’t see how Romney would set any precedents that are even more alarming. (What precedent would that be?) Overall, I have no idea whose drone war would be more damaging. Having watched Sullivan strongly denounce and other times defend Obama’s drone war in posts that cannot be reconciled with one another, I don’t think he knows either.
So what if Romney is elected and turns out to be much worse on drones? It could totally happen. I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll be opposing his unaccountable killing policy from day one regardless, just as I’ve opposed Obama’s policy due to its manifold flaws. And if Romney’s drone policy turns out to have all sorts of catastrophic consequences? I hope Sullivan remembers that Obama established the bipartisan consensus behind a worldwide drone-strike strategy and set all the necessary precedents without losing the support of backers like Sullivan. (He didn’t even lose support for continuing his current drone policy itself.) A Romney drone fleet, operating in numerous countries with zero oversight from the judiciary or Congress, with American citizens in the crosshairs? Obama and his supporters built that. It would be ready for President Romney on day one.
A gathering of experts on artificial intelligence becomes a search for deeper meaning
Hundreds of the world’s brightest minds — engineers from Google and IBM, hedge funds quants, and Defense Department contractors building artificial intelligence — were gathered in rapt attention inside the auditorium of the San Francisco Masonic Temple atop Nob Hill. It was the first day of the seventh annual Singularity Summit, and Julia Galef, the President of the Center for Applied Rationality, was speaking onstage. On the screen behind her, Galef projected a giant image from the film Blade Runner: the replicant Roy, naked, his face stained with blood, cradling a white dove in his arms.
At this point in the movie, Roy is reaching the end of his short, pre-programmed life, “The poignancy of his death scene comes from the contrast between that bitter truth and the fact that he still feels his life has meaning, and for lack of a better word, he has a soul,” said Galef. “To me this is the situation we as humans have found ourselves in over the last century. Turns out we are survival machines created by ancient replicators, DNA, to produce as many copies of them as possible. This is the bitter pill that science has offered us in response to our questions about where we came from and what it all means.”
The Singularity Summit bills itself as the world’s premier event on robotics, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies. The attendees, who shelled out $795 for a two-day pass, are people whose careers depend on data, on empirical proof. Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, discussed advances in probabilistic first-order logic. The Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman lectured on the finer points of heuristics and biases in human psychology. The Power Point presentations were full of math equations and complex charts. Yet time and again the conversation drifted towards the existential: the larger, unanswerable questions of life.
Rapture of the nerds
Inside the Masonic Temple the morning light shone through a glorious set of stained glass windows. The work, completed in 1957 by Emile Norman, charts the progress of industry, from covered wagons to high speed trains, from sailing ships to cruise liners. It’s a celebration of civilization, interwoven with the beauty of the natural world, and above it, the all seeing eye of God.
That same year Norman completed his masterpiece, the mathematician John von Neumann passed away. It was von Neumann who first spoke of a technological singularity. He imagined the pace of scientific progress would grow faster and faster, until it becomes impossible for humans to keep up with the change. By singularity, von Neumann was referring to a spacial anomaly, like a black hole, where the traditional rules of physics do not apply.
While there are numerous versions of what the future will become in the wake of the Singularity, the unifying principle is that, beyond this moment, the universe as we know it will be dramatically altered. And so the Summit is a sort of nirvana for hyper-intelligent dreamers: sci-fi fans with PhDs, big bank accounts, and boring day jobs, who love to debate radical visions of the future. Making a religion of rationality, it turns out, can lead some very smart people to embrace some insane-sounding ideas.
Laura Deming, who began attending MIT at the precocious age of 14, was one of four Thiel Fellows to speak onstage. Peter Thiel, the billionaire hedge fund manager, tech investor and founder of PayPal, is one of the biggest donors to the Singularity Institute. His fellowship offers the world’s brightest minds $100,000 each to drop out of school and pursue their bold ideas. Deming, who at 18 has already finished college, electrified the crowd with her short talk.
“There is one fact that never fails to infuriate me. Every day 150,000 die of a disease that we ignore. I remember when I was eight, I decided that I wanted to work on curing aging,” Deming began. “It was watching my grandma try to play with my brother and I when arthritic joints made just walking painful.” Deming’s voice grew husky, and her eyes watered with tears. “I remember clearly the death of three grandparents, three amazing people, from this awful, inexorable process that we have somehow come to view as something normal, natural, and beautiful… to be celebrated.” She paused to collect herself. “At least outside this room, that seems to be the consensus.”
“Just think how far we’ve come in a century,” said Deming, her cheeks flushed with excitement. “Only a century ago, the nature of genetic code was still a mystery. Now we’re creating pocket-sized DNA calculators and swapping biological circuitry like it’s Lego blocks.” Like many at the conference, her faith in a brighter future was grounded in the continuing acceleration of scientific progress. “If we succeed, we will have turned the most awful paradigm that we know on its head. The inevitability of death.”
The crowd burst into rapturous applause.
I wondered if The Singularity might serve as a sort of substitute for faith among the Silicon Valley set who felt uncomfortable with some of religion’s mystical beliefs. “The Singularity resolves a lot of the problems that religion irons out for humans,” said R.U. Sirius, a longtime attendee I chatted with. “The contradictions, the pains and suffering of living: these are deeply troubling for people who pride themselves on their rational minds. Here you can find a vision of absolute transcendence, but one that uses as its foundation long-term projections that are at least somewhat grounded in science.”
Making a religion of rationality, it turns out, can lead some very smart people to embrace some insane-sounding ideas
Laura Deming
The prophet of progress
When the conference broke for lunch, I wandered outside to California Avenue. The area was clean, bright, and quiet. Across the street the high steeple of Grace Cathedral caught the afternoon light. At the corner, the road descended at a frightening angle, sloping off like the inverse of one of the many charts projected on the screen that morning to display the astounding rate of our technological gains.
The audience at the conference was a pleasant polyglot: unassuming geeks in t-shirts adorned with coding jokes, bankers in Oxford shirts, freaks with gelled mohawks, crossdressers in leather boots, and one man in Victorian breeches and top hat. Grabbing a seat at an outdoor table, I caught the tail end of a discussion between several programmers and a pair of quants from a hedge fund. They were talking about the amount of trading in today’s stock markets that is governed entirely by computer algorithms, moving at light speed, with little or no human involvement. “You want to see a world where computer intelligence is leaving humans in the dust,” the hedgie boasted. “It’s already here.”
While the concept of the Singularity has been around since the 1950s, it failed to catch on with the mainstream until 2005, when the prolific inventor and polymath Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity is Near. It was an update to his 1999 work, The Age of Spiritual Machines, which became a bestseller in Amazon’s science section. But The Singularity is Near broke through to become a New York Times bestseller, largely by mixing Kurzweil’s earlier notions of sentient machines with new predictions about the possibilities for eliminating diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s and, eventually, overcoming death itself.
Kurzweil is the Singularity’s optimistic prophet. As a young inventor, he set out to help the blind to see and the mute to speak. Incredibly, he accomplished these lofty goals, creating technologies that touched many lives, and making himself a millionaire many times over the process. So perhaps it’s not surprising that he truly believes he can solve the vexing problem of mortality, and even, as he explains in the documentary Transcendent Man, bring his dead father back to boot. In Kurzweil’s vision of the future, we can merge our brains with computers, giving us a near godlike intelligence and the ability to back up our memories and thus live forever. This new species of man-machine will spread out across the universe, a super race on an infinite quest for knowledge.
This new species of man-machine will spread out across the universe, a super race on an infinite quest for knowledgeThe excitement in the crowd was palpable when Kurzweil stepped onstage, the last speaker on the first day. Despite the advances made in computer processing, brain imaging, and even artificial intelligence, it’s not clear to Kurzweil, or anyone else, exactly when this change will occur. “The Singularity’s not here, but it’s near,” Kurzweil said, by way of an opening line. He currently swallows over 200 pills each day in the hopes of lasting till that momentous event. His talk pointed out the promising signs: IBM’s Watson outsmarting humans at Jeopardy and improvements in brain scans allow computers to recreate more and more of how our minds work.
Kurzweil’s most important and controversial belief is that sciences like biology and medicine are increasingly becoming “information technologies.” This would mean the same principles of accelerating returns which have played out in the world of computers would now hold true for you and me: Moore’s law will apply equally mitochondria and microchips. As soon as Kurzweil finished, a hand shot up in the front row. John Linnemeier, a frail man with thinning white hair, grasping a ski pole for a cane, called for the microphone.
“I just want to ask, you and I are both pretty old, what if we don’t make it to the Singularity? Do you have any plans for that?”
Kurzweil gets this question a lot. While his three health books have been a “wake up call” for baby boomers, he explains, the generation won’t necessarily make it. “But before 2030 we will be adding more than a year every year to our life expectancy. Of course you could be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow, but we are doing something about that too, with Google’s work on self-driving cars.” He didn’t mention it onstage, but Kurzweil also sells his own line of supplements. “You don’t want to be the first person in line not to make it into the theater,” he joked, to laughter and cheers from the crowd.
After Kurzweil’s talk the conference broke up, and we made our way downhill to The Cellar for a Saturday evening after-party. Descending from Nob Hill into downtown San Francisco, the city grew dirtier, louder, and more crowded. A cluster of tourists had gathered around a game of Three-card Monte. The smell of weed drifted out of a window.
Inside the bar the mood was festive. A “conscious” mixologist specializing in “essential oil wizardry” poured pungent elixirs. Downstairs in a basement club, someone had stacked a large pile of cardboard cubes. Attendees donned special virtual reality glasses that turned the blocks into a real life game of Tetris.
Kurzweil made his way through the bar, mobbed by fans eager to chat him up or take a photo with their idol. “When he came on stage, it was definitely a Jesus moment,” said Tom Rausch, a first time attendee, sipping a beer, noting the way people hung on Kurzweil’s every word.
The bar was too small for the growing crowd of Singularitarians. They spilled out onto the street. I chatted for a while with Ioven Fables, a philosophy major from Boston College who now works as an executive assistant at the Singularity Institute. “Our big problem is, we can attract all these smart people to come together, to chat and to network. But how do we get the world’s best mathematicians and programmers to actually work for us? If you are serious about the Singularity, like I am, then it’s not about the money.” He took a deep swallow from his drink. “We’re not all as optimistic as Ray about how things are going to turn out.”
continues below
Through a glass, darkly
“Fasten your seatbelts, because this could be very bad.”
Jann Tallinn
Like most of the dominant modern religions, the Singularity presents a dramatic duality in its visions for what will follow — a heaven and hell. In Kurzweil’s vision, mankind escapes death and gains godlike intelligence. But for many in attendance, including the senior staff of the Singularity Institute, something far more cataclysmic seemed the likely outcome, a superhuman form of artificial intelligence that gives rise to a race of sentient machines which wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.
Jaan Tallinn, an Estonian programmer known for his work helping to create the peer-to-peer architecture behind Kazaa and Skype, has become one of the most vocal advocates and biggest financial donors to the Singularity Institute. “It will be the biggest change the universe has seen,” he explained to me during a Q&A session in the sweaty press room underneath the stage. “Fasten your seatbelts, because this could be very bad.”
Tallinn has wispy hair, slightly ridiculous bangs, and the first flecks of grey creeping in. His talk was a playful affair, touching on topics like the multiverse and time travel with comic, hand drawn illustrations. But in private, his passion was alarming. “People always ask me after my talks, ‘What can we do?’ One thing is just spread the idea that, although this sounds like science fiction, it is deadly serious. We definitely need way more resources to work on the safety aspects of developing artificial intelligence and possibly superhuman intelligence. Right now we are spending vastly more on lipstick research than planning for changes of galactic scale.”
I didn’t come away from this weekend thinking the Singularity Institute was some kind of apocalyptic cult. As charming as the comparison seemed at first, Singularitarians are not to the tech world what Scientologist are for Hollywood. Rational thought and healthy skepticism are core values in this community. Many of the folks I met were more interested in networking with their industry peers than discussing the implications of a neural network. Melanie Mitchell, a Professor of Computer Science at Portland State, directly contradicted Kurzweil during her talk. IBM’s Watson, she pointed out, had beaten the best human players at Jeopardy. And yet the program had no chance of explaining, as a precocious ten year old could, why the audience laughed every time Watson’s robot voice intoned, “I’ll take ‘Chicks Dig Me’ for $400, Alex.”
Google’s Peter Norvig, a venerable figure in the world of Artificial Intelligence, was similarly dismissive. Despite the prodigious minds and mountainous resources at his disposal, the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough of this year wouldn’t exactly pass the Turing test. 1000 computers using 10 million YouTube stills learned how to identify a cat… 15.8 percent of the time. “I think our progress is best summed up by a cartoon from Abstruse Goose,” Norvig said, projecting the strip onto the auditorium screen.
Throughout the Summit, the Singularity Institute’s staff implored the audience for donations of time and money. The world’s best minds, they insisted, were needed to work on planning for the disastrous possibilities of the Singularity, and that kind of brain power doesn’t come cheap. “The Singularity Institute actually knows some brilliant mathematicians who can work on these problems and want to work on them, and we can’t afford to hire them, that is the state of funding for the world’s most important problem,” warned Luke Muehlhauser, the Institute’s Executive Director. While intellectual curiosity was the dominant trait among attendees, fear was the emotion the Institute leveraged in trying to solicit support. “If superhuman AIs are steering the future, they might take it somewhere we don’t want to go,” Muehlhauser emphasized.
As reporters filed out of the press room for the next talk, a small group gathered around Tallinn to ask some follow-up questions. In a confidential tone, he made it clear that creating a sense of urgency around the Singularity was his current mission in life. “How valuable are the mistakes, that can be warnings?” Tallinn asked. “The only dramatic thing I have found, which wasn’t good enough… a decade ago an aircraft cannon in South Africa went berserk and started killing people.” I ask him about the computer algorithms that caused flash crashes in the stock market. “I don’t think that’s dramatic enough,” he said, shaking his head. Speaking in a near whisper, he looked me square in the face. “From a long term perspective, it might be good to have a major AI disaster. A real wake-up call.”
A wild Washington Poststory reports that the Obama administration has been developing plans to “institutionalize” its extrajudicial assassination program. The lede is bonkers:
Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”
It gets crazier:
The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.
Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.
Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.
You should really take the time to read the entire piece yourself; the information contained therein is truly alarming.
Many observers of related matters will have a lot to say about these revelations over the coming weeks, months and probably even years — and I’m one of them. But I quickly want to point out something that immediately struck me as particularly disturbing, and that many people likely won’t notice.
The “evolving database” — the “disposition matrix”
was developed by the NCTC, under former director Michael Leiter, to augment those organizations’ separate but overlapping kill lists, officials said.
The NCTC stands for the National Counterterrorism Center. What’s the big deal, right? The NCTC sounds like a terrorism related thing, so why wouldn’t it have developed the Kill List replacement, the Disposition Matrix?
Not that long ago the ACLU’s Chris Calabrese warned us about what really goes on at the NCTC: massive, secretive data collection and mining of trillions of points of data about most people in the United States. These points of data can include “records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records. Literally anything the government collects would be fair game, and the original agency in charge of protecting the privacy of those records would have little say over whether this happened, or what the spy agency did with the information afterward. What if that spy agency could add commercial information, anything it – or any other federal agency – could buy from the huge data aggregators that are monitoring our every move?”
Calabrese wasn’t describing a “what if” scenario. He was describing the NCTC.
The rules governing that data collection and retention used to say that “non-terrorism related” data about US persons had to be purged within 180 days of collection — and it wasn’t supposed to be collected in the first place. But this year President Obama oversaw a troubling change in that policy; non-terrorism related data about US citizens can now be retained for five years — or forever if the government feels like it.
Once information is acquired, the new guidelines authorize broad new search powers. As long NCTC says its search is aimed at identifying terrorism information, it may conduct queries that involve non-terrorism data points and pattern-based searches and analysis (data mining). The breadth and wrongheadedness of these changes are particularly noteworthy. Not only do they mean that anytime you interact with any government agency you essentially enter a lineup as a potential terrorist, they also rely on a technique, datamining, which has been thoroughly discredited as a useful tool for identifying terrorists. As far back as 2008 the National Academy of Sciences found that data mining for terrorism was scientifically “not feasible” as a methodology, and likely to have significant negative impacts on privacy and civil liberties.
Perhaps most disturbing, once information is gathered (not necessarily connected to terrorism), in many cases it can be shared with “a federal, state, local, tribal, or foreign or international entity, or to an individual or entity not part of a government” – literally anyone. That sharing can happen in relation to national security and safety, drug investigations, if it’s evidence of a crime or to evaluate sources or contacts. This boundless sharing is broad enough to encompass disclosures to an employer or landlord about someone who NCTC may think is potentially a criminal, or at the request of local law enforcement for vetting an informant.
All of this is happening with very little oversight.
As they say in the intelligence world: let’s connect the dots.
The NCTC collects impossibly enormous reams of data about all of us, routinely, stores it for a long time (maybe forever), and “data mines” it to look for “suspicious patterns” or whatever else the government wants to look for. Now we know that the NCTC is also the government outfit in charge of crafting a “disposition matrix” to oversee the management and institutionalization of the US government’s extrajudicial assassinations — a power the Obama administration asserts it can (without due process) apply to US citizens as well as foreigners.
We need to know a whole lot more about how these two operations intertwine. For some reason, I am not holding my breath for forthright government disclosures to that effect.
New documentary We Are Legion puts an actual human face on Anonymous, the hacktivist group whose members usually are seen wearing Guy Fawkes masks — if they are seen at all.
Considering Anonymous’ retaliatory acts against websites run by the Department of Justice and the entertainment industry just last week in response to the government takedown of file-sharing site Megaupload, We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists could almost be mistaken for a 93-minute news segment.
But unlike most news segments about the group, the documentary contains genuine moments with actual Anons (some maintain their anonymity in the doc, but others don’t).
“The last two or three days we’ve seen a lot of what Anonymous does,” We Are Legion director Brian Knappenberger said in an interview with Wired.com here Saturday, the morning after the documentary’s premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival. “You know, there was a film about the Weather Underground that came out a few years ago, and that was made 30 years after they were blowing up buildings, and I love that film. But picture making a film like that while they were still blowing up buildings — that’s what I’m talking about.”
We Are Legion might be the first to portray the group’s members as true revolutionaries, and it could serve as a time capsule if the kind of online sit-ins and retaliatory strikes that Anonymous has helped create become the new model for civil disobedience across the globe.
For those who didn’t hear of Anonymous until Occupy Wall Street started up, We Are Legion effectively puts the group’s current incarnation in historical perspective. The documentary traces the roots of early hacker-activist groups like the Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater before jumping into Anonymous’ roots in 4chan.
The documentary goes deep. Speaking with current and former Anonymous participants — as well as Wired writers Ryan Singel and Steven Levy — Knappenberger gives a thorough chronological account of Anonymous’ exploits, up to the group’s current place at the forefront of online disobedience.
Starting with Mercedes Renee Haefer, who was arrested in conjunction with the denial-of-service attacks against online payment service PayPal last July, the documentary talks to Anons and experts about Anonymous’ vendetta against Scientology, defense of WikiLeaks, and support of the actions in Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab Spring.
Slamdance, the underground alternative movie fest that runs during the Sundance Film Festival here each year, seems like the perfect place for We Are Legion’s primer on Anonymous. The film might have seemed out of place at a glitzy Hollywood-in-the-hills screening.
“It feels right,” Knappenberger said of the premiere. “Slamdance has a kind of undercurrent of revolutionary, counterculture, slightly anarchic vibe that just seemed to fit [the film] right away.”
Knappenberger is looking for distribution for his film so it can be seen by a wider audience. It seems possible that Hollywood backers will shy away from a film about Anonymous after the group’s actions against the Motion Picture Association of America and other entertainment industry power players. But Knappenberger said he isn’t worried.
“I just want to tell the story,” he said, adding that considering Anonymous’ various targets over the years, “Who aren’t I offending?”
He could also take advice from his subject Haefer, who in the film says that what Anonymous ultimately hopes to protect is freedom of speech, regardless of a person’s opinions or background.
Former CIA agent John Kiriakou pleaded guilty Tuesday morning to crimes related to blowing the whistle on the US government’s torture of suspected terrorists and was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Kiriakou, 48, agreed to admit to one count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent early Tuesday, just hours after his attorney entered a change of plea in an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom outside of Washington, DC.
Kiriakou was originally charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 after he went public with the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of waterboarding on captured insurgents in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. On Monday morning, though, legal counsel for the accused former CIA agent informed the court that Kiriakou was willing to plead guilty to a lesser crime.
Initially, Kiriakou pleaded not guilty to the charge that he had outted two intelligence agents directly tied to the drowning-simulation method by going to the press with their identities.
As RT reported last week, defense attorneys had hoped that the government would be tasked with having to prove that Kiriakou had intent to harm America when he went to the media. Instead, however, prosecutors were told they’d only need to prove that the former government employee was aware that his consequences had the potential to put the country in danger.
Had Kiriakou been convicted under the initial charges filed in court, he could have been sentenced to upwards of five decades behind bars.
“Let’s be clear, there is one reason, and one reason only, that John Kiriakou is taking this plea: for the certainty that he’ll be out of jail in 2 1/2 years to see his five children grow up,” Jesselyn Raddack, a former Justice Department official who blew the whistle on Bush administration’s mishandling in the case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, wrote Tuesday.
Kiriakou, Raddack wrote, was all but certain to enter the Alexandria courthouse on Tuesday and plead guilty to the lesser charge of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA), explaining, “there are no reported cases interpreting it because it’s nearly impossible to prove–for “outing” a torturer.”
“’Outing’ is in quotes because the charge is not that Kiriakou’s actions resulted in a public disclosure of the name, but that through a Kevin Bacon-style chain of causation, GITMO torture victims learned the name of one of their possible torturers,” Raddack wrote. “Regardless, how does outing a torturer hurt the national security of the U.S.? It’s like arguing that outing a Nazi guarding a concentration camp would hurt the national security of Germany.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former government official told Firedoglake recently that the CIA was “totally ticked at Kiriakou for acknowledging the use of torture as state policy” and allegedly outing the identity of a covert CIA official “responsible for ensuring the execution” of the water-boarding program.
Kiriakou “outted” to the reporters the identities of the CIA’s “prime torturer” under its Bush-era interrogations, Firedoglake wrote. “For that, the CIA is counting on the Justice Department to, at minimum, convict Kiriakou on the charge of leaking an agent’s identity to not only send a message to other agents but also to continue to protect one of their own.”
Former National Security Agency staffer Thomas Drake suffered a similar fate in recent years after the government went after him for blowing the whistle on the NSA’s poorly handled collection of public intelligence. A grand jury indicted Drake on five counts tied to 1917’s Espionage Act as well as other crimes, but prosecutors eventually agreed to let him off with a misdemeanor computer violation that warranted zero jail time.
Together, Drake and Kirakou are two of six persons charged under the Espionage Act during the administration of US President Barack Obama. The current White House has indicted more people under the antiquated World War 1-era legislation than all previous presidents combined.
Your iPhone, I’m sad to say, is not like Las Vegas: What happens there often does not stay there.
Much of your iPhone activity — including your web browsing, app store downloads and more — is transmitted to advertisers through various channels so that they can serve up relevant advertisements and offers for you. Although these services have mechanisms in place to ensure that you can’t be identified, you still might be a little uneasy about all of that information getting sent off to unclear dimensions (regardless of whether you’re doing anything — ahem — naughty on your iPhone).
Luckily for you and your privacy concerns, Apple has provided users with several ways, especially on iOS 6, to limit the amount of information that gets transmitted to third parties. Unluckily, they are buried deep within the bowels of the iPhone, opaquely worded, and not located where you might think they are.
Consider this, then, to be your privacy itinerary. Here are three settings you should tweak if you want to limit the activity tracking that occurs by default on your iPhone. While the settings won’t completely eliminate the transmission of your iPhone data to often-mysterious parties, they will greatly reduce it.
1. Limit Ad Tracking
The subject of a brief controversy stirred up by Business Insider, Apple recently changed the way it identifies your device, starting with iOS 6, for advertisers that serve you well-aimed ads. To which you might reasonably reply: “Wait a minute — Apple is identifying my advice for advertisers so that they can serve me well-aimed ads?!?!”
Welcome to 2012, where pretty much everything with a battery is tracking you, and every site that prompts you to enter a login and password is trying to provide you with relevant ads.
Though Apple insists the Advertising Identifier is non-permanent and cannot be used to determine your identity — and by all indications, the new system is far better than the old one, which really did identify you to an odd extent — it still allows you to opt out of the program. To do so, go into Settings, then General, then About, then Advertising. You want to turn Limit Ad Tracking to the “On” position.
(Which is a little confusing, by the way: In order to turn ad tracking off, you have to flick the switch to “On”? How about, next time, if you want to shut something off, you select “Off”? If I want to mute my phone, I don’t have to switch “Turn Volume Off” to the “On” position, do I? Who’s on first?)
No matter: Turn “Limit Ad Tracking” on. You will still see ads on your phone, but they won’t be “targeted” to you based on your activity.
2. Opt Out Of Targeted iAds
To more thoroughly block targeted ads, you can specifically prevent Apple’s own iAd system from tracking your behavior and presenting ads based on that activity.
To do so, open Safari on your iPhone and visit http://oo.apple.com. There you’ll see a screen asking if you want to opt out of Interest Based iAds. If you flip the switch to “Off,” the ads you see will not be based on your history. Instead, they will be general, non-targeted advertisements. (See? Flip the switch to “Off” when you want to turn something off. How hard was that?)
And, as our friends at TUAW helpfully point out, this is not a final decision: If you find yourself yearning for targeted ads, you can bring them back any time you please, by clicking to the site above and turning them back on. Thomas Wolfe was wrong: You can go home again! (If by “home” you mean “digital advertisements conjured by an automated analysis of your smartphone activity.”)
While you’re tweaking your iAds, you might also shut off location-based iAds, or advertisements based on your current location. Go into Settings, then Privacy, then Location Services, then System Settings (at the bottom), then switch “Location-Based iAds” to the “Off” position.
3. Do Not Track
With the Safari browser in iOS 6, Apple also introduces a “Do Not Track” feature, which denies websites you visit the ability to track you both on their page and on other websites you visit when you leave.
I know, I know, it’s a radical concept: Once you leave a website, that website no longer tracks your behavior. It’s like, when I leave my friend’s apartment, do I expect him to secretly embed a spy camera on my backpack so that he can keep an eye on my every movement outside of his home?
Well, maybe. There’s no “Off” switch for my creepy friend William.
Unlike William’s creepiness, however, there is an “Off” switch for website tracking! To enable Do Not Track on your iPhone, you need to turn on “Private Browsing.” Open up Settings, and then go into the Settings for Safari. Switch Private Browsing to “On” and your phone will start sending a Do Not Track message to any website you visit.
You can learn more about the Do Not Track movement by visiting the official website (which will also tell you whether you have Do Not Track enabled on your browser).
These three tips should put your mind at ease about the extent to which your iPhone behavior is being tracked. Again, it’s not a wholesale solution to your iPhone-tracking concerns, but it will greatly reduce the more suspect, easily-preventable data-collecting activity.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go check my backpack for spy cameras.
The hallucinogen in magic mushrooms may no longer just be for hippies seeking a trippy high.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have been studying the effects of psilocybin, a chemical found in some psychedelic mushrooms, that’s credited with inducing transcendental states. Now, they say, they’ve zeroed in on the perfect dosage level to produce transformative mystical and spiritual experiences that offer long-lasting life-changing benefits, while carrying little risk of negative reactions.
The breakthrough could speed the day when doctors use psilocybin–long viewed skeptically for its association with 1960s countercultural thrill-seekers–for a range of valuable clinical functions, like easing the anxiety of terminally ill patients, treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and helping smokers quit. Already, studies in which depressed cancer patients were given the drug have reported positive results. “I’m not afraid to die anymore” one participant told The Lookout.
The Johns Hopkins study–whose results will be published this week in the journal Psychopharmacology–involved giving healthy volunteers varying doses of psilocybin in a controlled and supportive setting, over four separate sessions. Looking back more than a year later, 94 percent of participants rated it as one of the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lifetimes.
More important, 89 percent reported lasting, positive changes in their behavior–better relationships with others, for instance, or increased care for their own mental and physical well-being. Those assessments were corroborated by family members and others.
“I think my heart is more open to all interactions with other people,” one volunteer reported in a questionnaire given to participants 14-months after their session.
“I feel that I relate better in my marriage,” wrote another. “There is more empathy — a greater understanding of people, and understanding their difficulties, and less judgment.”
Identifying the exact right dosage for hallucinogenic drugs is crucial, Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins who led the study, explained to The Lookout. That’s because a “bad trip” can trigger hazardous, self-destructive behavior, but low doses don’t produce the kind of transformative experiences that can offer long-term benefits. By trying a range of doses, Griffiths said, researchers were able to find the sweet spot, “where a high or intermediate dose can produce, fairly reliably, these mystical experiences, with very low probability of a significant fear reaction.”
In the 1950s and ’60s, scientists became interested in the potential effects of hallucinogens like psilocybin, mescaline, and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on both healthy and terminally ill people. Mexican Indians had, since ancient times, used psychedelic mushrooms with similar chemical structures to achieve intense spiritual experiences. But by the mid ’60s, counterculture gurus like Dr. Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley were talking up mind-altering drugs as a way of expanding one’s consciousness and rejecting mainstream society. Stories, perhaps apocryphal, circulated about people jumping out of windows while on LSD, and some heavy users were said to have suffered permanent psychological damage. By the early ’70s, the US government had essentially banned all hallucinogenic drugs.
But recent years have seen the beginning of a revival of mainstream scientific interest in mind-altering drugs, and particularly in the possibility of using them in a clinical setting to alleviate depression and anxiety. A 2004 study by the government of Holland (pdf) found psilocybin to have no significant negative effects.
Here in the United States, too, the climate may be shifting. In a statement accompanying the announcement of the Johns Hopkins findings, Jerome Jaffe, a former White House drug czar now at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said the results raise the question of whether psilocybin could prove useful “in dealing with the psychological distress experienced by some terminal patients?”
The hope is that the long-lasting spiritual and transcendental experiences associated with psilocybin could–if conducted in a controlled and supportive setting, and with appropriate dosage levels–help ease patients’ fear and anxiety, allowing them to approach death with a greater sense of calm. (You can see one terminally ill cancer patient speak movingly about the positive effects of psilocybin here.)
Griffiths thinks the drug may have the potential to alleviate the suffering of terminal patients. He’s currently leading a separate Johns Hopkins psilocybin study, using volunteers who are depressed after being diagnosed with cancer. “So far we’ve had–anecdotally only–very positive results,” comparable to the study with healthy volunteers, he said. A study from the University of California, Los Angeles last year reported similar positive results.
But Griffiths said his study, under way for three years, has only recruited 20 patients, in part because oncologists are more interested in curing cancer than helping patients cope with its effects, so they don’t refer provide many referrals. “Most oncologists just don’t get it,” he said. “It’s not the focus of their research, and they’re busy people.”
But the experience of one volunteer in Griffiths’s study offers a glimpse of the potential benefits. Lauri Reamer, 47, told The Lookout that she participated in two Johns Hopkins psilocybin sessions last September, not long after ending intensive chemotherapy and radiation to treat a rare form of leukemia that, several times in the preceding few years, had almost taken her life.
Reamer, an anesthesiologist from Ruxton, Md., with three young daughters, said that although her disease was in remission by that time, she was still suffering psychologically from the trauma of the illness and the treatment. She had walled herself off emotionally, she said, and was unable to show empathy for others or even for herself.
The psilocybin had an immediate impact. “At the end of the session, I was just in this joyous, happy, relaxed state,” she said. “The drug was gone–what was left was just this peaceful calm.”
That calm had lasting benefits. Reamer said the experience–what she called “an epiphany”–gave her the impetus to get out of a failing marriage. Since doing so, she said, both she and her daughters have been much happier.
“I don’t think it was the drug that did it,” she said. “It was the drug that helped me find the clarity.”
That’s not the only improvement. “My sleeping has gotten better. My relationships have gotten better with people,” she said. “The fog has lifted.”
“The best thing it did for me was heal me psychologically and emotionally and allow me to be back in my kids’ lives, be back to being a mother,” Reamer concluded. As she spoke, she was taking her daughters–two 15-year old twins, and a 6-year-old–on a trip to Hershey Park.
And although doctors tell her that, thanks to the effect of the illness and the treatment, she likely has only 10 or 15 years to live, she’s able to approach that challenge with equanimity.
“My fear of death kind of disappeared,” she said. “I’m not afraid to die anymore.”
Griffiths, of Johns Hopkins, said Reamer’s experience isn’t an outlier among the volunteers, both sick and healthy, who have tried psilocybin. “People feel uplifted, and very often have a sense that everything is O.K. at one level,” he said. “That there’s sense to be made out of the chaos.”
“When you see people undergoing that kind of transformation,” he added, “it’s really quite moving.”
(Magic mushrooms at a farm in Hazerswoude, Netherlands, August, 2007: AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
You’ve probably seen the news all over the ‘net: If Romney wins the election on November 6, many Obama supporters plan to riot in the streets. A surprising number have announced their plans to “kill Romney.” Simultaneously, FEMA has announced it is preparing for an event involving “mass casualties.”
Regardless of who you support in the coming election, the possibility of post-election riots is a reality. Here are 12 things you need to realize right now if you hope to stay safe should such an outcome unfold.
#1) The riots will likely occur in the inner cities. If at all possible, get out of the inner cities. In fact, you might want to think about moving out of the city altogether. Middle-class and upper-class suburbs will be safe, by the way. It’s mostly the inner cities that are likely to riot.
#2) The police will be almost instantly overwhelmed. Local peace officers are ridiculously short-staffed in cities all across the country, largely due to budget cuts. They have very little capacity to deal with any real outbreak of riots, so don’t expect calling 911 to have any impact at all.
#3) One of the greatest risks from riots is FIRES. Rioters love to set things on fire, as if burning down your own neighborhood is somehow an act of defiance against “The Man.” Even worse, rioters tend to shoot firearms at firemen who are trying to put out the fires. This causes firemen to evacuate the scene, after which fires burn out of control and do a lot more damage than they would have otherwise caused. The risk of fires spreading out of control in the inner city is surprisingly high.
#4) Innocent bystanders may be targeted with violence. Don’t be a “bystander” and you won’t be targeted (because you’re not around). The primary strategy is to simply not be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
#5) Don’t join in the riots. Even if you’re angry at the election outcome, taking part in any sort of violent protest or riot is only asking for trouble. Even if you don’t bring weapons to the riot, somebody from the other side very well might. You could easily find yourself arrested, beaten, pepper sprayed or even shot. STAY HOME and find other outlets for expressing your frustration (such as tweeting all your friends to say how much the winner “sucks bad!” which is always a sign of astounding intelligence).
#6) Think long and hard about the possible ramifications of having an Obama sign (or a Romney sign) in your yard or on your property. If your candidate wins, the haters on the other side of the aisle may take revenge on you and your property. You may wish to pull the signs on election day, before the results are publicized, in order to avoid being vandalized. Everybody has already made up their mind by that time anyway. Only a tiny percentage of the U.S. population is undecided even right now.
#7) Stock up on at least a 72-hour supply of extra necessities such as water, food, medicine and so on. Because if there are riots, there may be fires. And if there are fires, there may be infrastructure damage which could cause a 3-day outage of power, water, food supplies and so on. Election day in the inner city is not the time to be running out of food in the pantry and needing to head to the grocery store.
#8) If you’re in an at-risk area, stock up on pepper spray and bear spray. Pepper spray devices are not my favorite self defense item, but they can be surprisingly effective in crowd control. In fact, you can even buy “pepper spray grenades” online, which are really just canisters of pepper spray that you activate and then lob into, say, your apartment’s entryway if it’s under attack from a crowd of rioters. It will clear out the crazies in just a few seconds, giving you time to call 911.
Oh wait, 911 will be flooded with calls and police won’t be responding, so you’d better have a revolver or some other self defense weapon at the ready just in case you’re threatened with violence. This is the moment you’ll wish you had something more powerful than pepper spray…
#9) On election day, stay tuned in to not just the mainstream media but also the alternative media like Natural News and Info Wars. While the mainstream media may censor stories for political reasons, alternative news websites will be providing uncensored reporting throughout the day.
#10) Don’t be stupid enough to actually make threats against anybody on your Twitter feed or your Facebook page. The act of threatening a Presidential candidate is, of course, a felony crime, and those who make such threats on their own accounts should expect a visit from the U.S. Secret Service. Making such threats online only makes you look like a complete moron, providing yet more evidence to the other side that “supporters of candidate X are all complete morons” and thus furthering the divide.
As you may have noticed, neither Obama nor Romney has a monopoly on moronic supporters, although from what I can see so far, Obama supporters seem to be making a lot more violent threats online so far.
For the record, I’m not voting for either one. What you wish to do on election day is up to you, but I’ve decided to stop participating in the two-party fraud which operates much like a gang. Neither the DemoCRIPS nor the ReBLOODlicans gets my vote.
Additional predictions
If OBAMA wins:
• Expect gun sales to immediately surge to all-time highs.
• Watch for a revolt by small business owners who are fed up with healthcare mandates that are putting them out of business.
• Watch for a surge in gold prices and a sharp drop in the stock market.
• Get ready for mass arrests of government whistleblowers, journalists and critics who will be rounded up under the NDAA and sent to secret military prisons.
• Watch out for a massive increase in the signing of executive orders, where Obama will bypass Congress on everything from gun control to immigration.
If ROMNEY wins:
• Expect to see inner city riots in cities like L.A., Detroit and possibly even Houston.
• Watch for a joint U.S.-Israeli military attack on Iran to happen before February.
• Watch for a temporary DROP in gold prices to occur as the business sector experiences a (short-lived) surge in confidence.
• Expect a temporary stock market surge, reflecting optimism in business and finance sectors.
No matter who wins…
… expect MORE banker bailouts, MORE expansion of big government, MORE prosecutions against farmers and home gardeners, MORE fiat currency creation by the Fed, MORE welfare handouts to the masses, MORE TSA roadside checkpoints, MORE abuses of civil liberties by the government and MORE erosion of the Bill of Rights, which is already largely ignored by the government.
“The restructuring of media in the United States is creating forms of censorship that are as potentially damaging as overt censorship.”
“Media corporations have been undergoing a massive merging process that is realigning our sources of information in America,”
The 11 largest or most influential media corporations in the United States – General Electric Company (NBC), Viacom Inc. (cable), The Walt Disney Company (ABC), Time Warner Inc.(CNN), Westinghouse Electric Corporation (CBS), The News Corporation Ltd. (Fox), Gannett Co. Inc., Knight-Ridder Inc., New York Times Co., Washington Post Co. and the Times Mirror Co. – represent the interests of corporate America, and that the media elite are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the parameters of news and information content and the general use of media resources. Your Mainstream Media is manipulating the news you are allowed to see.
Project Censored has been documenting inadequate media coverage of crucial stories since it began in 1967 at Sonoma State University.
Each year, the group considers hundreds of news stories submitted by readers, evaluating their merits. Students search Lexis Nexis and other databases to see if the stories were underreported, and if so, the stories are fact-checked by professors and experts in relevant fields.
.” Project Censored Director Mickey Huff told us the idea was to show how various undercovered stories fit together into an alternative narrative, not to say that one story was more censored than another.
Here’s Project Censored’s Top 10 list for 2013:
1. Signs of an emerging police state
President George W. Bush is remembered largely for his role in curbing civil liberties in the name of his “war on terror.” But it’s President Obama who signed the 2012 NDAA, including its clause allowing for indefinite detention without trial for terrorism suspects.
Obama promised that “my administration will interpret them to avoid the constitutional conflict” — leaving us adrift if and when the next administration chooses to interpret them otherwise.
Another law of concern is the National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order that Obama issued in March 2012. That order authorizes the president, “in the event of a potential threat to the security of the United States, to take actions necessary to ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability, including services and critical technology, for national defense requirements.”
The president is to be advised on this course of action by “the National Security Council and Homeland Security Council, in conjunction with the National Economic Council.” Journalist Chris Hedges, along with co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, won a case challenging the NDAA’s indefinite detention clause on Sept. 1, when a federal judge blocked its enforcement, but her ruling was overturned on Oct. 3, so the clause is back.
People who get their information exclusively from Mainstream Media sources may be surprised at the lack of enthusiasm on the left for President Barack Obama in this crucial election.
But that’s probably because they weren’t exposed to the full online furor sparked by Obama’s continuation of his predecessor’s (George Bush)overreaching approach to national security, such as Obama signing the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows the indefinite detention of those accused of supporting terrorism, even U.S. citizens.
2. Oceans in peril
Big banks aren’t the only entities that our country has deemed “too big to fail.” But our oceans won’t be getting a bailout anytime soon, and their collapse could compromise life itself. In a haunting article highlighted by Project Censored, Mother Jones reporter Julia Whitty paints a tenuous seascape — overfished, acidified, warming — and describes how the destruction of the ocean’s complex ecosystems jeopardizes the entire planet, not just the 70 percent that is water.
Whitty compares ocean acidification, caused by global warming, to acidification that was one of the causes of the “Great Dying,” a mass extinction 252 million years ago.
Life on Earth took 30 million years to recover. In a more hopeful story, a study of 14 protected and 18 non-protected ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea showed dangerous levels of biomass depletion.
But it also showed that the marine reserves were well-enforced, with five to 10 times larger fish populations than in unprotected areas. This encourages establishment and maintenance of more reserves.
3. U.S. deaths from Fukushima
A plume of toxic fallout floated to the U.S. after Japan’s tragic Fukushima nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found radiation levels in air, water and milk that were hundreds of times higher than normal across the United States.
One month later, the EPA announced that radiation levels had declined, and they would cease testing. But after making a Freedom of Information Act request, journalist Lucas Hixson published emails revealing that on March 24, 2011, the task of collecting nuclear data had been handed off from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a nuclear industry lobbying group.
And in one study that got little attention, scientists Joseph Mangano and Jeanette Sherman found that in the period following the Fukushima meltdowns, 14,000 more deaths than average were reported in the U.S., mostly among infants. Later, Mangono and Sherman updated the number to 22,000.
4. FBI agents responsible for terrorist plots
We know that FBI agents go into communities such as mosques, both undercover and in the guise of building relationships, quietly gathering information about individuals.
This is part of an approach to finding what the FBI now considers the most likely kind of terrorists, “lone wolves.” Its strategy: “seeking to identify those disgruntled few who might participate in a plot given the means and the opportunity. And then, in case after case, the government provides the plot, the means, and the opportunity,” writes Mother Jones journalist Trevor Aaronsen.
The publication, along with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley, examined the results of this strategy, 508 cases classified as terrorism-related that have come before the U.S. Department of Justice since the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001. In 243 of these cases, an informant was involved; in 49 cases, an informant actually led the plot.
And “with three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings.” facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.
5. Federal Reserve loaned trillions to major banks
The Federal Reserve, the U.S.’s quasi-private central bank, was audited for the first time in its history this year. The audit report states, “From late 2007 through mid-2010, Reserve Banks provided more than a trillion dollars … in emergency loans to the financial sector to address strains in credit markets and to avert failures of individual institutions believed to be a threat to the stability of the financial system.” These loans had significantly less interest and fewer conditions than the high-profile TARP bailouts, and were rife with conflicts of interest. Some examples: the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served as a board member of the New York Federal Reserve at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. William Dudley, who is now the New York Federal Reserve president, was granted a conflict of interest waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time the companies were given bailout funds. The audit was restricted to Federal Reserve lending during the financial crisis. On July 25, 2012, a bill to audit the Fed again, with fewer limitations, authored by Rep. Ron Paul, passed the House of Representatives. H.R. 459 was expected to die in the Senate, but the movement behind Paul and his calls to hold the Fed accountable, or abolish it altogether, seem to be growing.
6. Small network of corporations run the global economy
Reporting on a study by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich didn’t make the rounds nearly enough, according to Censored 2013. They found that, of 43,060 transnational companies, 147 control 40 percent of total global wealth. The researchers also built a model visually demonstrating how the connections between companies — what it calls the “super entity” — works. Some have criticized the study, saying control of assets doesn’t equate to ownership. True, but as we clearly saw in the 2008 financial collapse, corporations are capable of mismanaging assets in their control to the detriment of their actual owners. And a largely unregulated super entity like this is vulnerable to global collapse.
7. The International Year of Cooperative
Can something really be censored when it’s straight from the United Nations? According to Project Censored evaluators, the corporate media underreported the U.N. declaring 2012 to be the International Year of the Cooperative, based on the co-op business model’s stunning growth. The U.N. found that, in 2012, 1 billion people worldwide are co-op member-owners, or one in five adults over age 15. The largest is Spain’s Mondragon Corporation, with more than 80,000 member-owners. The U.N. predicts that by 2025, worker-owned co-ops will be the world’s fastest growing business model. Worker-owned cooperatives provide for equitable distribution of wealth, genuine connection to the workplace, and, just maybe, a brighter future for our planet.
8. NATO war crimes in Libya
In January 2012, the BBC “revealed” how British Special Forces agents joined and “blended in” with rebels in Libya to help topple dictator Muammar Gadaffi, a story that alternative media sources had reported a year earlier. NATO admits to bombing a pipe factory in the Libyan city of Brega that was key to the water supply system that brought tap water to 70 percent of Libyans, saying that Gadaffi was storing weapons in the factory. In Censored 2013, writer James F. Tracy makes the point that historical relations between the U.S. and Libya were left out of mainstream news coverage of the NATO campaign; “background knowledge and historical context confirming Al-Qaeda and Western involvement in the destabilization of the Gadaffi regime are also essential for making sense of corporate news narratives depicting the Libyan operation as a popular ‘uprising.’”
9. Prison slavery in the U.S.
On its website, the UNICOR manufacturing corporation proudly proclaims that its products are “made in America.” That’s true, but they’re made in places in the U.S. where labor laws don’t apply, with workers often paid just 23 cents an hour to be exposed to toxic materials with no legal recourse. These places are U.S. prisons. Slavery conditions in prisons aren’t exactly news.
It’s literally written into the Constitution; the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, outlaws “slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” But the articles highlighted by Project Censored this year reveal the current state of prison slavery industries, and its ties to war.
The majority of products manufactured by inmates are contracted to the Department of Defense. Inmates make complex parts for missile systems, battleship anti-aircraft guns and landmine sweepers, as well as night-vision goggles, body army and camouflage uniforms.
Of course, this is happening in the context of record high imprisonment in the U.S., where grossly disproportionate numbers of African Americans and Latinos are imprisoned, and can’t vote even after they’re freed. As psychologist Elliot D. Cohen puts it in this year’s book: “This system of slavery, like that which existed in this country before the Civil War, is also racist, as more than 60 percent of U.S. prisoners are people of color.”
10. H.R. 347 criminalizes protest
H.R. 347, sometimes called the “criminalizing protest” or “anti-Occupy” bill, made some headlines. But concerned lawyers and other citizens worry that it could have disastrous effects for the First Amendment right to protest. Officially called the Federal Restricted Grounds Improvement Act, the law makes it a felony to “knowingly” enter a zone restricted under the law, or engage in “disorderly or disruptive” conduct in or near the zones.
The restricted zones include anywhere the Secret Service may be — places such as the White House, areas hosting events deemed “National Special Security Events,” or anywhere visited by the president, vice president and their immediate families; former presidents, vice presidents and certain family members; certain foreign dignitaries; major presidential and vice presidential candidates (within 120 days of an election); and other individuals as designated by a presidential executive order.
These people could be anywhere, and NSSEs have notoriously included the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, Super Bowls and the Academy Awards. So far, it seems the only time H.R. 347 has kicked in is with George Clooney’s high-profile arrest outside the Sudanese embassy.
Clooney ultimately was not detained without trial — information that would be almost impossible to censor — but what about the rest of us who exist outside of the mainstream media’s spotlight?
Whonix is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Ubuntu GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user’s real IP/location.
Whonix consists of two machines, which are connected through an isolated network. One machine acts as the client or Whonix-Workstation, the other as a proxy or Whonix-Gateway, which will route all of the Whonix-Workstation’s traffic through Tor. This setup can be implemented either through virtualization and/or Physical Isolation.
Whonix advantages:
All applications, including those, which do not support proxy settings, will automatically be routed through Tor.
Installation of any software package possible.
Safe hosting of Hidden services possible.
Protection against side channel attacks, no IP or DNS leaks possible^3^ To test for leaks, see LeakTests.
Advantage over Live CD’s: Tor’s data directory is still available after reboot, due to persistent storage. Tor requires persistent storage to save it’s Entry Guards.
Java / JavaScript / flash / Browser Plugins / misconfigured applications cannot leak your real external IP.
Whonix does even protect against root exploits (Malware with root rights) on the Workstation.
Uses only Free Software.
Building Whonix from source is easy.
Tor+Vidalia and Tor Browser are not running inside the same machine. That means that for example an exploit in the browser can’t affect the integrity of the Tor process.
It is possible to use Whonix setup in conjunction with VPNs, ssh and other proxies. But see Tor plus VPN/proxies Warning. Everything possible, as first chain or last chain, or both.
Loads of Optional Configurations (additional features / Add-Ons) available.
Best possible Protocol-Leak-Protection and Fingerprinting-Protection.
Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull off such a feat. And indeed, a philosophical claim is one thing, actually proving it is quite another. But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it’s a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix. And they think they know what it is.
According to Silas Beane and his team at the University of Bonn in Germany, a simulation of the universe should still have constraints, no matter how powerful. These limitations, they argue, would be observed by the people within the simulation as a kind of constraint on physical processes.
So, how could we ever hope to identify these constraints? Easy: We just need build our own simulation of the universe and find out. And in fact, this is fairly close to what the physicists are actually trying to do. To that end, they’ve created an ultra-small version of the universe that’s down to the femto-scale (which is even smaller than the nano-scale).
And to help isolate the sought-after signature, the physicists are simulating quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is the fundamental force in nature that gives rise to the strong nuclear force among protons and neutrons, and to nuclei and their interactions. To replace the space-time continuum, they are computing tiny, tightly spaced cubic “lattices.” They call this “lattice gauge theory” and it is subsequently providing new insights into the nature of matter itself.
Interestingly, the researchers consider their simulation to be a forerunner to more powerful versions in which molecules, cells, and even humans themselves might someday be generated. But for now, they’re interested in creating accurate models of cosmological processes — and finding out which ones might represent hard limits for simulations.
To that end, they have investigated the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit (or GZK cut-off) as a candidate — a cut-off in the spectrum of high energy particles. The GZK cut-off is particularly promising because it behaves quite interestingly within the QCD model.
According to the Physics arXiv blog, this cut-off is well known and comes about when high energy particles interact with the cosmic microwave background, thus losing energy as they travel long distances. The researchers have calculated that the lattice spacing imposes some additional features on the spectrum, namely that the angular distribution of the highest energy components should exhibit cubic symmetry in the rest of the lattice (causing it to deviate significantly from isotropy).
“In other words,” write the arXiv bloggers, “the cosmic rays would travel preferentially along the axes of the lattice, so we wouldn’t see them equally in all directions.”
And that would be the kind of reveal the physicists are looking for — an indication that there is indeed a man hiding behind the curtain.
And what’s particularly fascinating about this is that we can make this measurement now with our current level of technology. As the researchers point out, finding this effect would be the same as ‘seeing’ the orientation of the lattice on which our own universe is simulated.
That said, the researchers caution that future computer models may utilize completely different paradigms, ones that are outside of our comprehension. Moreover, this will only work if the lattice cut-off remains consistent with what we see in nature.
At any rate, it’s a remarkable suggestion — one that could serve as an important forerunner to further research and insights into this fasinating possibility.
A BBC documentary film crew has been held at gunpoint for over three hours while trying to sneak into the world’s most famous secret base – Area 51, otherwise known as Groom Lake / Dreamland.
The BBC film crew just before they were arrested
The Groom Lake facility has no perimeter fence to keep out intruders, but instead uses a network of hidden sensors and cameras that can detect when anyone crosses onto the base. Private security guards also patrol in unmarked jeeps.
Documentary maker Darren Perks and his film crew were arrested at gunpoint while filming ”UFO: Conspiracy Road Trip’ documentary, which airs next Monday; the footage will show the incident where they are arrested at gunpoint.
They were forced to lie on the ground for three hours as guards surrounded them armed with M16 assault rifles.
‘At this point I managed to talk to the guards a bit and one told me how they could ‘make you disappear and your body will never be found’. – Darren Perks
Some of the buildings at the Area 51 gate that the team managed to film before their arrest.
UFO enthusiast and documentary film maker Darren perks said: ‘At this point I managed to talk to the guards a bit and one told me how they could ‘make you disappear and your body will never be found’.
Apache Helicopter
‘He also pointed out that an Apache attack helicopter had been scrambled and had been monitoring us from two miles away and that over 20 military guards had driven up from the actual base to deal with the incident. There were quite a few of them there with guns!
UFO enthusiast: Darren Perks
“One guard I quizzed let slip that there are sensors in the ground that can detect approaching vehicles and walkers up in the nearby mountains, so they know if people are getting too close as they cannot put fences up because the area is so big.”
“Then at about 11:30pm we were allowed to leave on the bus and we went back to our hotel at the nearby town of Alamo Nevada.”
Fined
The crew were all facing a potential 6 month jail sentence for crossing onto the restricted area, but after a series of phone calls between Washington and London and the payment of an equivalent £375 fine each they were allowed to go free.
Followed
It didn’t end there for the crew as they had obvioulsy attracted a lot of rather unwanted attention. Perks went on – ‘Because the film equipment had been taken by the FBI we had to wait to get new kit from Vegas so we had a day of rest but we were followed everywhere by unmarked Government vehicles.”
‘They stuck out like a sore thumb to me. It was myself that pointed this out to the others otherwise they would not have been aware of being followed.”
Ex-Marine who threw back his medals, Jon Michael Turner, speaks the raw hard truth about merciless & indiscriminate killing PROMOTED by Staff Sgts and other Top Military Brass during modern war and middle eastern conflict.
A Bloomberg investigation shows that the federal government is paying a military contractor facing allegations of torture to manage some public records work.
The Freedom of Information Act allows ordinary people to learn about behind the scenes functions of our government. There are a number of limited, discrete exemptions to the law, which allow agencies to redact or withhold documents in whole or in part. But generally speaking, the law grants us broad access into the workings of our government — and it is therefore one of the key mechanisms whereby we learn of illegal or inappropriate government activities. FOIA is a necessary transparency mechanism in our democracy.
That’s why it’s shocking to learn, as Bloomberg news reports today, that increasingly the process of managing and responding to our FOIA requests is being handled by private corporations. The investigation shows that at least 25 federal agencies are farming out their FOIA work to private companies, at a cost both to taxpayers and to the integrity of the open records system. As director of the Sunlight Foundation John Wonderlich told Bloomberg:
If I was in charge of an agency and wanted to create an unaccountable FOIA process, the first thing I would do is put an outside contractor in charge of it because fewer of our accountability laws apply to them…It would just be another layer between me and the public.
It gets worse. Not only does the contracting out of FOIA work shield the government from precisely the transparency the law is meant to institute. There could be very serious conflicts of interest involved when private companies are tasked with managing the processes whereby sensitive (and likely embarrassing or damning) government secrets are disclosed to the public.
Case in point is CACI International, a military and intelligence contractor that is facing a lawsuit alleging its employees participated in the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. CACI is one of the companies the federal government has outsourced FOIA work to over the past ten years.
Should a company accused of serious human rights violations in a war zone have any involvement with open government processes designed to disclose precisely such abuses?
Did you know that Aspartame has been proven to cause brain damage by leaving traces of Methanol in the blood? It makes you wonder why Aspartame has been approved as “safe” and is found in thousands of food products. Currently more than 90 countries have given the artificial sweetener the “OK” to be used in foods.
“Multiple Sclerosis is often misdiagnosed, and that it could be aspartame poisoning” – Montel Williams
Given that Aspartame is 200 times sweeter than sugar, manufacturers are able to produce their sweet foods and market them as “low calorie” so they can market and appeal to millions of people on “diets.” There is no doubt that the less sugar you have in your diet, the better. But replacing sugar with aspartame is not the solution, and in fact is likely to be even worse for your health.
In my personal experience, Aspartame has always made my head feel very odd when I consumed it. Headaches, light headedness and overall nausea, are all symptoms I personally feel from consuming Aspartame. But that isn’t even the bad part when you look at what all of the research is suggesting. So I question, and everyone should be asking the same: With all of the research about Aspartame and its dangerous effects, even in small quantities, why is it still approved by the FDA and other health agencies as being safe for human consumption?
Let’s take a look at some research.
What is this lovely substance (Aspartame) made of?
An Aspartame molecule is essentially made up of 3 different substances. 90% of it is made of two natural amino acids, 1 being aspartic acid and the other being phenylalanine. The other 10% of the molecule is made up of a methyl ester bond (includes Methanol). The methanol is released from the aspartame within hours of consumption and begins traveling through the body via the blood. Once the methyl ester bond is broken, is separtes into methyl alcohol and methanol (wood alcohol). The big problem with methanol is that it easily passes into your blood-brain barrier and once there, is converted into formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is what is causing the brain damage. While animals are able to detoxify methanol in the body, humans do not have this capability. It doesn’t really take a rocket scientist to realize that accumulating formaldehyde in the brain is not a good thing.
What’s the deal with Methanol?
As mentioned above, Methanol is the key issue here as it is what converts into formaldehyde. While it is often believed that formic acid is the issue with Aspartame, it is actually formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a serious neurotoxin and carcinogen. According to the EPA, Methanol is considered a cumulative poison which means is accumulates in the body and very little is excreted each time it is consumed.
Methanol is a toxin that destroys the myelin tissue in your body, which is the insulating material around your nerves that allows nerve signals to travel properly. Once injured, one can have what are called demyelinating symptoms that are commonly seen in diseases like MS and also migraines that can include bizarre and inconsistent visual field disruptions.
But it must be safe in small doses!
While having NO methanol in the body makes most sense, the EPA has accepted that a limit of consumption of 7.8 mg/day is still OK. Why we accept even small amounts of toxic stuff in our body is beyond me, but some feel we can still consume this stuff in small doses. According to Woodrow Monte, Ph.D, R.D., director of the Food Science and Nutrition Laboratory at Arizona State University:
“When diet sodas and soft drinks, sweetened with aspartame, are used to replace fluid loss during exercise and physical exertion in hot climates, the intake of methanol can exceed 250 mg/day or 32 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended limit of consumption for this cumulative toxin.”
Further, he states that due to the lack of a couple of key enzymes, humans are many times more sensitive to the toxic effects of methanol than animals. Therefore, tests of aspartame or methanol on animals do not accurately reflect the danger for humans.
“There are no human or mammalian studies to evaluate the possible mutagenic, teratogenic, or carcinogenic effects of chronic administration of methyl alcohol,” he said.
How can you know you are getting too much Methanol? You may experience headaches, ear buzzing, dizziness, nausea, gastrointestinal disturbances, weakness, vertigo, chills, memory lapses, numbness and shooting pains in the extremities, behavioral disturbances, and neuritis. Another very well known sign of methanol poisoning is vision problems.
Adding to the problem, one of the amino acids in aspartame, aspartic acid is capable of crossing your blood-brain barrier. There it attacks your brain cells, creating a form of cellular overstimulation called excitotoxicity, which can lead to cell death.
Your blood-brain barrier, which normally protects your brain from excess aspartate, as well as toxins, is not able to adequately protect you against the effects of aspartame consumption because it:
Is not fully developed during childhood
Does not fully protect all areas of the brain
Is damaged by numerous chronic and acute conditions
Allows seepage of excess aspartate into the brain even when intact
That excess aspartate slowly begins to destroy neurons, and the large majority (75 percent or more) of neural cells in a particular area of the brain are killed before any clinical symptoms of a chronic illness are noticed. Then, when they do occur, they may or may not be associated with aspartame consumption, even though examples of chronic illnesses that are made worse by long-term exposure to excitatory amino acid damage include: Multiple sclerosis (MS), ALS, hormonal problems, memory loss, epilepsy, hearing loss, Alzheimers, dementia, brain lesions, and Neuroendocrine disorders.
It can be easy for us to make the argument that this stuff is OK in small doses, and it hasn’t killed us yet so it can’t be that bad. But it almost seems there is something more to it why we use this reasoning. Are we just addicted to these substances? Afraid to admit we have been poisoning ourselves? Unable to accept that the FDA and health agencies have lied to us? Like to brush these truths off as conspiracies? No matter what the reason is, there comes a point where we must see what is staring us in the face and start looking at how we can begin making new choices. Returning to something that is healthier and more in line with our bodies. We are really damaging ourselves here and becoming quite numb to life. It is susbstances like Aspartame and Fluoridethat are causing these issues and the difference it makes to avoid these substances is monumental for our quality of life and consciousness.
Update: One thing I really wanted to add to this article is geared towards really looking at ourselves when it comes to not just aspartame but food, beverage, cosmetics, etc. We all at some point consumed or used products that are not all that great for our bodies. Most of the everyday products we use contain very toxic chemicals, it’s just that we spend a lot of time seeing ad’s about them, using them and looking at the nice labels that look all happy so we don’t realize how bad this stuff really is for us. You may want to check THIS ARTICLE out for more info. The question I want to raise here is, why is it that when information is presented about chemicals and toxic products do we get in a rage about the information and want to justify the continuation of its use in our bodies, on our bodies and on the planet? Even if something like Aspartame was only half as bad as it really is, why would we even want that? Why is the connection we have to our bodies so lost that we want to subject it to toxins, carcinogens, chemicals and other products that 1. are not remotely natural and 2. are not something that should be near our bodies to begin with. It just seems as though the bigger issue here is that we have become very disconnected from not only our bodies but the planet as well. It has become about convenience, money, temporary happiness, filling emotional voids and staying stagnant. When this info is presented all of those buttons get pushed at once and next thing we know we are defending the use of something that should have never been brought into existence in the first place. To look at it further, even the amount of sugar and type of sugar we use in the products we use aspartame in as an alternative, is terrible as well. Any product that currently contains aspartame shouldn’t be consumed by humans to begin with. What is wrong with fruit? Vegetables? Nuts? Seeds? Why do we always need these artificially flavored and chemically enhanced products that are terrible for our health? Aspartame or no aspartame, the real thing to observe here is our disconnection from our bodies, life and the planet.
Information about tactics can be derived from accounts of battles, but the very military manuals known to have existed and to have been used extensively by commanders, have not survived. Perhaps the greatest loss is the book of Sextus Julius Frontinus. But parts of his work were incorporated in the records of the historian Vegetius.
The importance of the choice of ground is pointed out.
There is an advantage of height over the enemy and if you are pitting infantry against cavalry, the rougher the ground the better. The sun should be behind you to dazzle the enemy. If there is strong wind it should blow away from you, giving advantage to your missiles and blinding the enemy with dust.
In the battle line, each man should have three feet of space, while the distance between the ranks is given as six feet.
Thus 10’000 men can be placed in a rectangle about 1’500 yards by twelve yards, and it was advised not to extend the line beyond that.
The normal arrangement was to place the infantry in the centre and the cavalry on the wings. The function of the latter was to prevent the centre from being outflanked and once the battle turned and the enemy started to retreat the cavalry moved forward and cut them down. – Horsemen were always a secondary force in ancient warfare, the main fighting being done by the infantry.
It was recommended that if your cavalry was weak it was to be stiffened with lightly armed foot soldiers.
Vegetius also stresses the need for adequate reserves. These could prevent an enemy from trying to envelope one’s own forces, or could fend off enemy cavalry attacking the rear of the infantry.
Alternatively, they could themselves move to the sides and perform an enveloping manoeuver against an opponent.
The position to be taken up by the commander was normally on the right wing.
The tortoise was a essentially defensive formation by which the legionaries would hold their shields overhead, except for the front rows, thereby creating a kind of shell-like armour shielding them against missiles from the front or above.
Powerful Steven Segal speech from movie ‘On Deady Ground’. Exposes the corruption and suppression of advanced renewable ‘free-energy’ technologies that have been withheld from the public, and weaponized by the Military Industrial Complex. Theft of Native American Lands, and the Agenda of Enslavement by Corporate Greed.
The powerful and hard-hitting documentary, American Holocaust, is quite possibly the only film that reveals the link between the Nazi holocaust, which claimed at least 6 million Jews, and the American Holocaust which claimed, according to conservative estimates, 19 million Indigenous People.
It is seldom noted anywhere in fact, be it in textbooks or on the internet, that Hitler studied Americas Indian policy, and used it as a model for what he termed the final solution.
He wasnt the only one either. Its not explicitly mentioned in the film, but its well known that members of the National Party government in South Africa studied the American approach before they introduced the system of racial apartheid, which lasted from 1948 to 1994. Other fascist regimes, for instance, in South and Central America, studied the same policy.
Noted even less frequently, Canadas Aboriginal policy was also closely examined for its psychological properties. America always took the more wide-open approach, for example, by decimating the Buffalo to get rid of a primary food source, by introducing pox blankets, and by giving $1 rewards to settlers in return for scalps of Indigenous Men, women, and children, among many, many other horrendous acts. Canada, on the other hand, was more bureaucratic about it. They used what I like to call the gentlemans touch, because instead of extinguishment, Canada sought to remove the Indian from the Man and the Women and the Child, through a long-term, and very specific program of internal breakdown and replacement call it assimilation. America had its own assimilation program, but Canada was far more technical about it.
Perhaps these points would have been more closely examined in American Holocaust if the film had been completed. The films director, Joanelle Romero, says shes been turned down from all sources of funding since she began putting it together in 1995.
Perhaps its just not good business to invest in something that tells so much truth? In any event, Romero produced a shortened, 29-minute version of the film in 2001, with the hope of encouraging new funders so she could complete American Holocaust. Eight years on, Romero is still looking for funds.
American Holocaust may never become the 90-minute documentary Romero hoped to create, to help expose the most substantial act of genocide that the world has ever seen one that continues even as you read these words.
watch – Native American Holocaust Exterminate Them! The California Story (FULL)
The Man Who Drank The Universe is a documentary on the amazonien brew AYAHUASCA also know as DAIME. It tell the story of a English man from London who goes to experiment the brew in the Brasilia amazon.
This week, PBS’s “Frontline” published the transcript from a June 27, 2012 interview with Kristen Caldwell, a woman who grew up with President Barack Obama and attended the Punahou School with him in Honolulu, Hawaii. Among other claims, she told PBS that, as a young child, Obama told his classmates that he was Kenyan royalty or an Indonesian prince — fascinating claims that she discussed in great detail.
The former classmate, who referred to Obama as “Barry” throughout the interview (the name she claims his classmates called him), said that she believes Obama was at the prestigious school on scholarship. Like other kids who were attending on reduced admission, he likely worked at the tennis courts on campus — a location where the two frequently hung out.
“I can picture him as this slightly — “chubby” is too strong, but rounded, short little guy, Barry Obama,” Caldwell said. “And he told us that his father was an Indonesian king and that he was a prince, and after he finished school he was going to go back, and he would be a ruler in Indonesia.”
Obama must have been charismatic even then, as his former classmate said the following about his wild claims: “I absolutely believed him.” Caldwell also said she heard that Obama once told his fifth-grade class that he was Kenyan royalty. While she didn’t hear this directly — and it was years later that the story made its way to her — Obama’s claim to be a prince was something she experienced directly.
“My sister and I remember very clearly that he was an Indonesian prince and that he would be going back there,” she continued. “So there was some reference to where he had come from, and the understanding was his family was there.”
Caldwell and Obama were purportedly close, seeing as her father allegedly drove him home from the tennis courts on rainy days. Additionally, she claims that they spent a great deal of time hanging out together both during the school year and throughout the summer each year – however, she didn’t seem to know intimate details about his background.
As far as the embellished stories about his father and stature, PBS asked Caldwell why she believes Obama told such tall tales.
The former classmate said that she believes insecurity was the central underpinning of his stories about being royalty and one-day returning to Indonesia to assume the throne. After living in Hawaii until he was six, moving in Indonesia from six until age 10 and then arriving back in the state, once again, she said she could understand why he felt the need to compensate.
“I would think he would have felt very, very fish-out-of-water, very uncomfortable, and like anybody, he’d have to have a little bit of bravado to mask the insecurities,” Caldwell continued.
In a subsequent question, PBS asked if Caldwell noticed anything special about Obama during the time she spent with him. Considering that he grew up to become the leader of the free world, the outlet was curious to know if he exuded confidence and other such sentiment that pointed to a bright future ahead. While highlighting the fact that Punahou was filled with brilliant and talented children — and that getting into the school required that one fit these categories — she said, “to me he was a normal kid.”
“He didn’t seem outstanding academically or athletically or any other way. To me he seemed normal,” she continued.
While these claims are certainly odd, children often role-play and use their imaginations. It’s entirely possible this is what was at play. Either way, these are some intriguing claims to say the least. Read the transcript from “Frontline’s” entire interview with Kristen Caldwell here.
Vitamin B12, or rather a lack thereof, has been called the “canary in the coalmine” for your future brain health, and recent research has bolstered the importance of this vitamin in keeping your mind sharp as you age.
According to the latest research, people with high levels of markers for vitamin B12 deficiency were more likely to score lower on cognitive tests, as well as have a smaller total brain volume, which suggests a lack of the vitamin may lead to brain shrinkage.
This issue is of paramount importance for many of you reading this for two reasons:
Vitamin B12 deficiency is very widespread
Your blood level of vitamin B12 is not an adequate marker of whether or not you’re deficient, making vitamin B12 deficiency easy to miss
What is Vitamin B12?
Vitamin B12 is a powerhouse micronutrient often known as the “energy vitamin” because it assists in energy production.
Your body relies on the efficient conversion of carbohydrates to glucose — your body’s source of fuel — to run smoothly, and vitamin B12 plays a major role in that conversion. B12 also enables your body to convert fatty acids into energy. Further, your B12 level impacts a number of very important functions in your body, including:
Carbohydrate and fat metabolism
Healthy nervous system function
Promotion of normal nerve growth and development
Help with regulation of the formation of red blood cells
Cell formation and longevity
Proper circulation
Adrenal hormone production
Healthy immune system function
Support of female reproductive health and pregnancy
Feelings of well-being and mood regulation
Mental clarity, concentration, memory function
Physical, emotional and mental energy
Problems with Memory, Brain Function Top Signs of Vitamin B12 Deficiency
Mental fogginess and problems with memory are two of the top warning signs that you have vitamin B12 deficiency, and this is indicative of its importance for your brain health.
In addition to the latest Neurology study, which found more signs of shrinkage of brain tissue among those with low vitamin B12, a Finnish study published in Neurology last year found that people who consume foods rich in B12 may reduce their risk of Alzheimer’s in their later years. For each unit increase in the marker of vitamin B12 (holotranscobalamin) the risk of developing Alzheimer’s was reduced by 2 percent. Research also shows that supplementing with B vitamins, including B12, helps to slow brain atrophy in elderly people with mild cognitive impairment (brain atrophy is a well-established characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease).
What Causes B12 Deficiency?
Vitamin B12 is the largest vitamin that we know of. Because of its large size, it is not easily absorbed passively like most supplements. Because of this, many, if not most oral B12 supplements are worthless and do NOT work. Vitamin B12 requires a complex system in your body involving intrinsic factor to bind to it so it can be actively absorbed in the end of your small intestine (terminal ileum). As you grow older the ability to produce intrinsic factor decreases and cause a deficiency state.
Studies from the U.S. Framingham trial show one in four adults are deficient in vitamin B12, and nearly half the population has suboptimal blood levels. If you eat an all vegetarian or vegan diet, vitamin B12 is one of the nutrients your body is most likely deficient in, as it is naturally present in foods that come from animals, including meat, fish, eggs, milk and milk products. However, there are many other causes of B12 deficiency as well, including:
Food-Cobalamin Malabsorption Syndrome:This condition results when your stomach lining loses its ability to produce intrinsic factor, a protein that binds to vitamin B12 and allows your body to absorb it into your bloodstream at the furthest point of your small intestine.Intrinsic factor is a protein made by your stomach. It grabs onto the B12 molecule and together they move through your stomach to your small intestine. When they reach the end of your small intestine, the intrinsic factor is absorbed first, pulling the B12 with it into the cells of your large intestine, where they are absorbed for use by the rest of your body.
Increasing Age: Intrinsic factor diminishes as you age, and this means it’s virtually impossible to get B12 from your diet. This also means the older you get, the more likely you will need to supplement B12.
Use of the drug metformin for Type 2 diabetes: Use of metformin (brand names include Glucophage, Glucophage XR, Fortamet, Riomet, and Glumetza) may inhibit your B12 absorption, especially at higher doses.
Coffee consumption: Four or more cups of coffee a day can reduce your B vitamin stores by as much as 15 percent.
Use of antacids: The use of antacids or anti-ulcer drugs will lower your stomach acid secretion and decrease your ability to absorb vitamin B12. Stomach acid (hydrochloric acid) is a crucial ingredient in your body’s ability to absorb B12. If you’re taking a medication specifically designed to reduce the amount of stomach acid you produce, your body’s ability to use vitamin B12 from the food you eat or the supplements you take will be significantly compromised.
Gastric bypass surgery
Exposure to nitrous oxide (laughing gas)
Why a Blood Test May Not be Enough to Detect Deficiency
Blood tests for vitamin B12 deficiency aren’t as clear cut or helpful as they are for other nutritional deficiencies. Standard tests to assess vitamin B12 concentrations are limited because the clinical severity of vitamin B12 deficiency is unrelated to vitamin B12 concentrations. As researchers concluded in Neurology:
“Concentrations of all vitamin B12-related markers, but not serum vitamin B12 itself, were associated with global cognitive function and with total brain volume.”
So generally speaking, you can use the following recommendations to screen for vitamin B12 deficiency:
If your vitamin B12 concentration is less than 150 pmol/L, you are considered B12 deficient and you and your health care practitioner should take steps to determine the underlying cause(s) and treatment.
If your B12 concentration is between 150 and 200 pmol/L, your serum MMA (Methylmalonic Acid) level should be determined to identify whether your situation requires more investigation and treatment. Research suggests elevated levels of MMA (a natural compound found in your body) are an indicator for vitamin B12 deficiency.
However, if you suspect or are concerned you are vitamin B12 deficient, a more practical option may be to simply supplement your diet with B12 and see if your symptoms improve.
B12 is available in its natural form only in animal food sources. These include seafood, beef, chicken, pork, milk, eggs. If you don’t consume enough of these animal products (and I don’t recommend consuming seafood unless you know it is from a pure water source) to get an adequate supply of B12, or if your body’s ability to absorb the vitamin from food is compromised, vitamin B12 supplementation is completely non-toxic and inexpensive, especially when compared to the cost of laboratory testing.
In fact, the first treatment most doctors and other health care experts will suggest upon receiving B12 deficiency lab test results is supplementation with vitamin B12. I recommend either an under-the-tongue fine mist spray, as this technology helps you absorb it into the fine capillaries under your tongue. This delivery system bypasses the intrinsic factor problem and is much easier, safer and less painful than having your doctor inject you with a vitamin B12 shot.
Signs and Symptoms to Watch For
Besides the above-mentioned mental fogginess and memory problems, there are actually a wide range of symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency, from mild to severe, which can affect your body, mind and mood. In general, the signs are:
Fatigue, lack of energy, muscle weakness, tingling in your extremities
Mental fogginess or problems with your memory, trouble sleeping
Mood swings, especially feelings of apathy or lack of motivation
Depression
Dementia and Alzheimer’s
Anemia
Neurological and Neuropsychiatric conditions
Female fertility and childbearing problems
Heart disease and cancer
Other symptoms of long-term, chronic B12 deficiency are included in the chart above. Even though vitamin B12 is water-soluble, it doesn’t exit your body quickly like other water-soluble vitamins. B12 is stored in your liver, kidneys and other body tissues, and as a result, a deficiency may not show itself for a number of years until you finally run out of this naturally stored internal source of the vitamin.
This time lag in seeing symptoms of a B12 deficiency is a serious concern, because after about seven years of deficiency, irreversible brain damage can potentially result. So if you are suffering from any of the symptoms above it makes sense to take steps to increase your levels to protect your long-term brain, and overall, health.
IMPORTANT B12 Summary: Please Remember…
If you believe you need a vitamin B12 supplement, don’t hesitate to take one. They are very safe and there are virtually no known side effects. However, avoid oral B12 supplements as they will not be easily absorbed. You can take an injection or do a far easier sublingual (under your tongue) spray that allows the large B12 structure to bypass your intestine and be absorbed directly into your blood stream, allowing you to benefit immediately.
UFO enthusiast: Darren Perks
