Category Archives: Technology

China To Build “Big Bang” Telescopes Near Indian Border

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From the Times of India, more interesting news about Chinese doings near the Indian border:

BEIJING: China is setting up the world’s highest altitude gravitational wave telescopes in Tibet, close to Line of Actual Control with India, with a budget of USD 18.8 million to detect faintest echoes resonating from universe which may reveal more about the Big Bang theory.

Construction has started for the first telescope, code-named Ngari No 1, 30 km south of Shiquanhe Town in Ngari Prefecture, said Yao Yongqiang chief researcher with the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Parts of Nagri is last Tibetan prefecture at China’s border with India.

The telescope, located 5,250 meters above sea level, will detect and gather precise data on primordial gravitational waves in the Northern Hemisphere.”

As far as I can understand this new technology, which isn’t very far,  it allows us to understand the sound-track of the universe, where once we only had the pictures.

What does this have to do with anything political. Well, a powerful telescope at high altitude practically on the border of Tibet and India must always be of deep significance – both from the point of view of science and technology, as well as of defense and security.

Then again, there are all those conspiracy theories (?) about a so-called Project Bluebeam developed by NASA, which come to mind.

What are the potential spin-offs from this gravitational wave technology in weaponry, surveillance, or covert operations?

I have no idea.

But reports like this one from 2015 don’t make me rest easy:

RESIDENTS of two Chinese cities have witnessed the gateway to a parallel universe after a ‘floating city’ appeared in their sky.

Well, that’s one possible explanation offered by conspiracy theorists for the strange event, which occurred above the Jiangxi and Foshan regions of China.

The event was captured on film and showed what appeared to be a large cityscape of dark skyscrapers floating in the clouds.

After appearing on Chinese news channels and being uploaded to YouTube, the bizarre footage has attracted a number of other conspiracy theorists offering an explanation.

One of the more common themes occurring is the belief the illusion was the result of ‘Project Blue Beam’ — a secret NASA project in which the space agency will try to start a New World Order by simulating the second coming of Christ through holograms.

“This is the Project Blue Beam by NASA preparing their mind control over the sheep people. Wake up and smell the roses,” wrote one user.

“Clearly this was an offshoot of project Bluebeam by the Chinese Government in conjunction with the US air force,” wrote another.

Another theory suggests the event was not designed here on Earth; rather it was the work of aliens from another dimension.

“I believe it’s the work of the Grays [aliens]. They probably teleported a giant city or maybe reflected it from their own dimension,” wrote one user.

While these supernatural explanations are enticing, scientists have been quick to dismiss the occurrence as a Fata Morgana — a mirage caused when light passes through at different temperatures.

What buzz kills.

India Top Five Target Of US Spying

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A 2013 article at Esamkriti.com describes why the US spies on India:

Clues to a changing world

In March 2013 the NSA picked up 9.6 billion pieces of information from India’s computer networks, making it the fifth tracked country in the world after Iran, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt. The top four are all Muslim countries, with Jordan also a close ally, so it’s a no-brainer why the NSA is targeting them. But has the world shifted so much on its geopolitical axis that India is now a bigger target than Russia and China?

There are two possibilities. One, the Americans are making sure India remains on its side of the fence. Secondly, if the NSA has been able to steal more data from India than from Russia and China, it only shows how powerless developing countries are against well-equipped spy agencies.

Why India is a top 5 target

In March 2013 the NSA picked up 9.6 billion pieces of information from India’s computer networks, making India the fifth tracked country in the world after Iran, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt. If India is now a bigger target than Russia in American eyes, it only shows how the world has shifted on its geopolitical axis.

Unlike China and Russia where the United States can pinch industrial (http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/06/tianhe/) secrets, India offers nothing equivalent. In almost every technological area, the Americans are ahead of India.

[Lila: This is actually inaccurate. There are plenty of areas in which the US is very eager to pinch or adopt Indian technical breakthroughs and medical innovations and the eagerness the US shows in joint ventures with Indian research institutions is proof of this. Moreover, one of the great objectives of the digitilization of India is to make Indian trade secrets and scientific research even more open to theft than it already is.]

But India is far more important. As their economies surge, India and China are reverting to their ancient duopoly. Research conducted by Angus Maddison and his colleagues at the University of Groningen shows India had 25 per cent of global income from the year 1500 CE through 1700 CE. China accounted for 35 per cent. In the year 1 CE, India’s share was 33 per cent, China’s 26 per cent and the Roman Empire’s 21 per cent.

Historically India and China were the engines of global trade. Roman emperor Tiberius and the historian Pliny complained about the drain of wealth (http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-10-21/ahmedabad/28239734_1_bharuch-port-book) to India.

An India-China duopoly is a deep-rooted Western fear, and under the BRICS umbrella it might well happen. (Before the British created the border problems, the India-China border was as free as the United States-Canada frontier. Venetian traveller Marco Polo wrote in his memoirs that the Chinese emperor sent him on a fleet which carried a princess who was to marry an Indian prince.) In the 21st century as India and China are once again poised to be the two largest economies, both will be intensely targeted by Western spy agencies.

Weapon worries

Ironically, India’s improvement in ties with the United States is likely to lead to even more American spying. The Americans have always been paranoid about Russia acquiring their weapons technologies via India. Earlier, it simply banned arms sales to India; now with the decline of the American economy, India is a valued – though not trusted – customer. If only to feel assured that its high-tech armaments and aircraft are not being taken apart in Moscow, American spies will be keeping a close watch.

They have plenty of experience in that area. One of the earliest instances of American meddling in India was back in the 1950s when the CIA secretly provided cash to the Catholic Syrian Christian church to destabilise the democratically elected government of Kerala. On another occasion the CIA provided funds to discredit communists in West Bengal.

According to former US ambassador to India, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Both times the money was given to the Congress Party which had asked for it. Once it was given to Mrs Indira Gandhi herself, who was then a party official.”

Islamic angle

The increasing radicalisation of Indian Muslims and the big uptick in Islamic terrorist activity in India is a worry not just for India but also for the West, as India’s Muslim terrorists are now linking up on a multinational scale. It won’t be long before some of them are seen in Chechnya or other troublespots.

It is, therefore, understandable why the top four in the NSA list are Muslim countries. American espionage on India and Indian Muslims is, therefore, as inevitable as American spying on Saudi Arabia and Iran. In fact, American paranoia is justified as the Indian government – with an eye on Muslim votes – is victimizing its own agents who have played a key role in eliminating Muslim terrorists.

India and US: Trust deficit

The United States doesn’t implicitly trust India in a way it trusts Britain, Canada or Poland. After 9/11 the Americans encouraged the Indian government to send RAW and IB agents to enroll in counter-terrorism courses in the United States. This had two major consequences. One, it helped the United States identify hundreds of Indian agents who now cannot undertake undercover operations. Two, it has helped the CIA recruit Indian secret service agents. The most well-known case was that of RAW agent Rabindra Singh, who became an American double agent on one his many trips to the United States.

The Hindu’s Pravin Swami argues that India’s establishment is more vulnerable now than at any point in the past. “The large number of politicians, bureaucrats and military officers whose children study or work in the US provide an easy source of influence. Efforts to recruit from this pool are not new. In the early 1980s, the son of then RAW chief N. Narasimhan left the US after efforts were made to approach the spy chief through him. Narasimhan’s son had been denied a visa extension, and was offered its renewal in return for his cooperation with the US’ intelligence services. According to a senior RAW officer, not all would respond with such probity.”

Global backlash

The good money is on an international backlash against the United States and Britain. The Germans are already calling for the “United Stasi of America” to put a leash on the NSA. According to John Villasenor, professor of electrical engineering and public policy at UCLA, (http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml) “The NSA leaks will put wind in the sails of non-US intelligence services aiming to ramp up espionage targeting American businesses. Budgets for spying on American businesses will grow, and people to do the work will be easier to hire.”

Also, the Defence Science Board says the United States is not prepared to counter a full-scale cyber conflict. China’s ability to penetrate the world’s most secure communication system indicates the Board is spot on.

No business like the spy business

In “Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archive” author Nigel West shows the extent to which countries will go to steal secrets. One summer day during the 1950s in Moscow, KGB agents were tailing the wife of the British ambassador. The woman had been obtaining classified documents from a Russian, while on her daily ‘walks’ through Moscow’s streets. Realising she was being followed the ambassador’s wife tucked the documents in her underpants and tried to run towards the embassy.

She was caught, the documents were retrieved, and the British envoy quickly quit his job.

Thanks to advances in communication, spies no longer have to steal documents in such comical fashion. It is precisely because of the vulnerability of spies on the ground that the NSA has taken electronic eavesdropping to a new level.

Back Links and No Follow tags

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I happened to look at my back links at a website that monitors these things and found I had over 16,000.

A much larger website with 25% fewer links had a rate of no-follow tags to links of 1.5%.

13.5% of my links had no-follow tags.

A link to my site at Zerohedge (a govt. endorsed conspiracy site) has a no-follow tag behind it.

So also at the popular site, Business Pundit.

And at Christ4ro.com.

In other words, dozens of sites that have links to this blog placed by readers and sometimes by me (I voted for Business Pundit, that’s why there was a link there) have no-follow tags after the links, so I don’t get traffic from them.

Did they take the trouble to do it themselves or is it some kind of web censorship?

When I’m a bit less sleepy (it’s past midnight), I’ll find out more about the other sites that are blocking traffic for me.

Meanwhile, a reader posts and asks me not to publish.

I published, but removed the name.

I need your comments and I need links.

I know people don’t like “getting involved,” but if you don’t, who will?

 

USG Monitors Poop, Feeds Citizens Cocaine

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Here’s the scoop on the fate of  poop in the Electronic Gulag from the American Chemical Society:

The war on drugs could get a boost with a new method that analyzes sewage to track levels of illicit drug use in local communities in real time. The new study, a first-of-its-kind in the U.S., was published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology and could help law enforcement identify new drug hot spots and monitor whether anti-drug measures are working.

Kurunthachalam Kannan and Bikram Subedi note that to date, most methods to estimate drug use in the U.S. are based on surveys, crime statistics and drug seizures by law enforcement. But much illegal drug use happens off the radar. To better approximate usage, scientists have been turning to wastewater. Like a lot of other compounds from pharmaceuticals and personal care products to pesticides, illegal drugs and their metabolic byproducts also persist in sewage. In Europe, a number of studies have been done to see how well wastewater treatment plants are removing illicit drugs from sludge before treated water is released into the environment. But until now, no study in the U.S. had looked at this, likely leading to underestimates of abuse. Kannan and Subedi wanted to form a more complete picture of drug use, so they studied levels of illicit drugs at two wastewater treatment plants in Albany, New York.”

Notice that the scientists in this program are of Indian origin.  I wonder why these two didn’t put their expertise in sewage to better use by figuring out inexpensive ways to treat sewage which is a major need in India, as it is in the US.

As Mike Adams points out, it will only be a matter of time before toilets are microchipped to analyze your excreta in real time.

As he notes, if cocaine is finding its way into sewage and via the treatment procedure back into our drinking water, traces of it must be in the blood of all citizens, making the government guilty of forcing a class-A felony on its citizens.

Anyone drinking tap water is, therefore, consuming class-A felony controlled substances which can then be detected in their bodies in parts per billion concentrations. This is how the police state can arrest and imprison absolutely anyone by claiming they’re a drug user since there’s cocaine in their blood and it’s all over their twenty dollar bills, too!

There probably isn’t a single person living in America today who doesn’t have traces of cocaine on their person or in their blood. Notably, federal laws on cocaine possession make no exceptions for “inadvertent possession” or possession of trace amounts. Even one molecule of cocaine qualifies you to be charged with felony possession.

 

Quake Experts Visited Nepal Days Before Quake

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Here’s an interesting tidbit:

50 earthquake and social scientists were in Nepal the week before  the earthquake that devastated Kathmandu.

They were anticipating a quake but didn’t expect it so soon.

ABC News reports:

Nepal’s devastating earthquake was the disaster experts knew was coming.

Just a week ago, about 50 earthquake and social scientists from around the world came to Kathmandu, Nepal, to figure out how to get this poor, congested, overdeveloped, shoddily built area to prepare better for the big one, a repeat of the 1934 temblor that leveled this city. They knew they were racing the clock, but they didn’t know when what they feared would strike.

“It was sort of a nightmare waiting to happen,” said seismologist James Jackson, head of the earth sciences department at the University of Cambridge in England. “Physically and geologically what happened is exactly what we thought would happen.”

This should ring alarm bells for anyone with an interest in weather modification by the government or in geo-engineering.

And sure enough, digging around we find that the disastrous Haiti earthquake of January 12, 2010, which killed over a quarter of a million people, had also been anticipated…and prepared for….just the day before it happened.

Global Research has this:

On the day prior to the earthquake, “on Monday [January 11, 2010], Jean Demay, DISA’s technical manager for the agency’s Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project, happened to be at the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami preparing for a test of the system in a scenario that involved providing relief to Haiti in the wake of a hurricane.” (Bob Brewin, op cit, emphasis added)

The Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project (TISC) is a communications-information tool which  “links non-government organizations with the United States [government and military] and other nations for tracking, coordinating and organizing relief efforts”.(Government IT Scrambles To Help Haiti, TECHWEB January 15, 2010).

The TISC is an essential component of the militarization of emergency relief. The US military through DISA oversees the information – communications system used by participating aid agencies. Essentially, it is a communications sharing system controlled by the US military, which is made available to approved non-governmental partner organizations. The Defense Information Systems Agency also “provides bandwidth to aid organizations involved in Haiti relief efforts.”

[Lila: underlining is mine.]

Unknown devices…..

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Unknown devices keep showing up under network adapters in my device manager. I keep disabling them and they keep showing up.

They have no signature, no device ID or function, no location or vendor information. They just have the word root and then a number.

Then there’s the comment link on which I accidentally clicked that took me to an empty website. Was someone tying to download something or find my IP address?

My computer got very buggy and slow yesterday. Then my security software keeps turning off.

Worse, there are the unknown devices of my fellow man.

Someone sent me an email at which to contact them. The handle was something like city-slicker@usa.com (not the actual handle, of course).

Now do high-profile people usually have emails with such handles,  and, even if they do, do they give it out to strangers on the web?  Do they insist on contacting you and then insist that you respond only on personal email and private cell numbers?

And then do they comment on this blog using a fake handle?

One with a link on which I accidentally click that takes me to an empty website set up a long while ago?

Methinks I smell a set-up.  Especially when the high-profile one claims to have intelligence contacts/experience.

I could be wrong, of course. In which case, my profound apologies.

But that is why I do not respond except in ways I choose.

And that is why I like to keep it strictly about politics, except for people who have actually intersected with me.

Even then, I tend to be wary.

Anything a stranger needs to tell me can be posted at this blog.

If it’s confidential and has some public importance, disguise the information and post pseudonymously.

If it’s private information, please find a personal friend in whom to confide.

It does you, the reader, and me, the blogger,  no good to confuse web-reality with real-reality.

Google: Cyberbullying for profit

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An anonymous Australian web-site reveals how Google has a financial incentive to cyber-bully people by elevating smear-and-extort sites like The Ripoff Report.

(I will not link to it, but here is Wikipedia’s entry on the Ripoff Report):

[Side-note: One of my attackers on the web seems to have been affiliated with this site,  which essentially runs an extortion racket by smearing people via hired proxies and then asking for money from the victims to remove the smears.]

UPDATE September 20th 2013: Victory

A large number of major companies have removed their advertisements from Ripoff Report.

This webpage contains an overview of the project.

The updated full report can be downloaded from this url:

https://www.adrive.com/public/9u3aau/Cyberbullying for Profit September 2013.zip

A list of examples URLs from Ripoff Report containing offensive material about children, public figures and individuals is contained in an attachment to the report but an also be found here:

This video explains how Google priorities links from Ripoff Report in its search results.

This video shows that Google considers Ripoff Report has unacceptable  business practices. So why does it advertise on its webpages? The answer is…..advertising revenue for  Google (see above).

Overview

The website Ripoff Report and other websites that emulate the business model of ‘cyberbullying for profit’  publish false and offensive information about minors, teenager, adults and businesses and these are often accompanied by photographs and identifying details.   Ripoff Report also publishes extremely racist and homophobic material, offensive material about religious groups, public figures and ‘celebrities’. While the material about public figures appears to be given a low Google page rank, the names of children, teenagers, ordinary people and small business owners ‘reported’ on these websites is contained in snippets displayed at or near the top of the Google search results (SERPs). These snippets contain names and location details couched in terms such as ‘ripoff’, ‘fraud, ‘pedophile’, ‘scam’, ‘whore’, ‘slut, ‘prostitute’, ‘skank’, ‘murderer’, ‘bitch’ ‘faggot’ ‘liar’ ‘drug abuser’, ‘cunt’, ‘stalker’, ‘HIV’ and/or ‘AIDS’ and other accusatory and derogatory terms.  

Ripoff Report earns revenue from two sources – advertising and payments from victims to the website to ‘rehabilitate’ their reputation in the Google search results or remove the false material. Despite the fact that the claims are false, if a person cannot pay their life is ruined because, as stated by Google, their search engine is often ‘the first place people look for information that’s published’ about a person.

Even if the allegations can be proven to be false Ripoff Report will not remove the material unless they are paid a substantial ‘corporate advocacy’, or ‘arbitration’ fee. In response to removal requests, Google provides a number of excuses and victims must find an ‘ex-gratia’ payment in order to ensure the material is removed from the Google index and ameliorate the danger towards their children and/0r save their livelihoods and businesses. Furthermore, Ripoff Report publishes registered trade names and copyrighted photographs without permission. It claims a copyright over the webpages. This business model is enabled by both a high Google page rank  and advertising revenue. The companies and business that advertise on Ripoff Report supply this revenue and support the endangerment and cyberbullying of children, teenagers and adults and the destruction of careers and livelihoods. This project arose out of my own experience with the publication of false and defamatory material on these websites.

Despite the fact that it takes only a couple of minutes to remove links from the Google index, after four years of notifications, pleading with the website and Google, and litigation against Google it has not been removed. ……I sued Google for defamation in February 2011 with the hope that it would simply remove the links and I could then move on with my life. My hope was misplaced. …….

…Despite the fact that Google refuse most removal requests, they have quietly removed links for other victims of Ripoff Report.

[Lila: I have seen Google actively suppress information that exposes the financial mafia,which is to the left, politically.]

“For obvious reasons I cannot and will not publish the names of these people because they likely paid a substantial amount to either the websites or Google to save their families and livelihoods.

However, Google can and does remove websites and links without much effort.

For example, since December 2011 Google has removed almost 90,000 links from its index at the request of Ripoff Report. Many of those links contained registered trademarks and copyrighted photographs but it appears that Ripoff Report is  not questioned about these DMCA issues by Google. My blog, was also removed from the Google index soon after it went online.  If this appears difficult to believe consider that the removal occurred  after I drew attention to the blog by applying for AdSense advertising as an experiment.

In fact, I clearly stated on my blog that I was suing Google. Apparently’ freedom of speech’ only applies unless one says something negative about Google.

My blog was magically re-indexed in the Google index within hours of my public complaint in a blog conversation in which Matt Cutts was participating. The documents showing the removal and reinstatement of my blog in the Google SERPs can be downloaded from this link.“

[Lila : Here is a previous blog post of mine, from 2009, where I reference Ripoff  Report and its owner, in the context of describing the nexus of organized crime and short-sellers.]

Worst cyber-crime is in US, Russia

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As I blogged yesterday, the IP addresses attacking me trace back to a Netherland hosting company called Ecatel Network.

ECATEL NETWORK

Ecatel has become notorious for hosting bad actors, from the Russian spammers to pedophile networks.  It also has a reputation for brushing off requests for help from the victims.

Trying to figure out what was going on, I did a bit of research into the world of cyber-crime.

AKAMAI REPORT – CHINA LEADS CYBER-CRIME?

The mainstream media likes to portray cyber-crime as essentially a foreign threat. China, especially, is fingered as the bad guy.

For instance, in January,  US-based Akamai Technologies issued a report  placing China at the head of global hacking, responsible for 35% of cyber-attacks world-wide.

More recently,  the US government pressed cyber-warfare charges against five of China’s army officers.

Nigerians scamsters are rumored to run a close second.

There are two things wrong with this picture. The first is the source of the information.

Akamai Technologies is a “content-delivery network” head-quartered in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

It was founded by an MIT applied math professor, Tom Leighton, and a graduate student at MIT, Daniel Lewin, later killed on AA flight 11, which crashed during the September 11, 2001 attack.

According to his MIT bio, Leighton is a specialist in cryptography,  digital rights, and algorithms for network applications. He also chaired a Presidential committee on Cyber-Security.

Akamai’s co-founder,  COO, and President was the founder of the Road-Runner cable service. Its CEO was a senior VP from IBM.

Akamai’s privacy policy states that it collects IP addresses and effectively tracks clients.

Its partners include Microsoft and Apple and its clients include the BBC, the White House,  Facebook, Twitter, Adobe Systems, Netflix, Yahoo, ESPN Star (India),  China Central Television and Al Jazeera, among many others.

How likely is it that reports from Akamai on cyber-crime are untouched by political pressure?

WORLD HOSTS REPORT –  US, RUSSIA LEAD CYBER-CRIME

Point two. The statistics don’t support Akamai’s pious propaganda.

The Chinese do indeed have a very high number of IP addresses attached to their malicious activity. If sheer volume were the only criterion, China would dominate.

However,  as far as the number of malicious sites and the level of threat involved, the world’s leading cyber-criminals aren’t Chinese.  Not even close.

They are in the US and in Russia, closely followed by smaller countries like the Netherlands, the Ukraine, and Romania.

In Host Exploit’s authoritative World Hosts Report of March 2013, five of the top twenty  malware hosts were based in the US; four were in Russia, two each in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Ukraine.

Chinanet Backbone was the only host from China that made the top twenty.

What was especially interesting to me was to find the originator of the attacks on my computer, Ecatel network, at the top of the list of the world’s leading hosts for malware.

Host Exploit also breaks down cyber-crime by country, with Russia leading the pack.

This is its list of the world’ top ten cyber-crime havens in 2013:

1. The Russian Federation (RU)

2. Belarus (BY)

3. Ukraine (UA)

4. The British Virgin Islands (VG)

5. The United States (US)

6. Romania (RO)

7. Netherlands (NL)

8. Poland (PL)

9. Turkey (TR)

10. Bulgaria  (BG)

 

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: Mt. Gox goes poof!

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Mt Gox has gone bust.

Ahem.

We’ll take a quick bow (along with Gary North, Robert Wenzel, Bionic Mosquito, and several others).

We Bitcoin-deniers stood our ground in the face of relentless and shameless]pumping, supported by rent-a-libertarians, like the former chief editor of the Daily Reckoning, Joel Bowman and shameless other opportunists

[On rereading this, I think I want  soften my tone, since the anti-BTC’s have been proved by events.[

See the two MBP posts below:

BTC: My Comments at EPJ

Bitcoin: My Comment at EPJ and Block’s Reversal

See also the following anonymous comments at EPJ in December and November 2013:

My comments are anonymous, because I was worried that the elites might attack people who criticized BTC, just as they trashed Assange critics all over the net:

Comments at EPJ on December 3

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila )

  3. Stick with Gary North, Wenzel.

    Better the known devil than the unknown.

    And talking about unknown devils, who is this Paul Rosenberg from Cryptohippie?

    Who owns Cryptohippie?

    Might they have connections to TOR, Wikileaks, Assange, and/or the Internet billionaires (Zuckerberg, Brin, Thiel, Omidyar)? If so, can DARPA be far behind?

    How would we know since Bitcoin is so mysterious……

    In fact, how would we know if Bernanke himself wasn’t moonlighting as an “anti-Fed” bit-coiner?

    Answer is we wouldn’t.

    Also, what reason could there be for the inventor of an invention of this magnitude (purportedly) to coyly refrain from taking any credit or recognition?

    Another question, why does Julian Assange tout it?
    These are the things which must be investigated before anyone other than fools and gamblers will go near this scheme.

    Anonymous (Lila Rajiva)

  4. Maybe they gain something personally from promoting Bitcoins? Credibility with the hacker-anarchist world, for instance. Maybe even money. How do you know?

    It takes a big person to stick to his guns, even when peer pressure might suggest otherwise.

 


 

Comments at EPJ on December 12:

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila)

  2. @anonymous

    I don’t have time to refute step by step.
    Just the obvious points.

    You claim bitcoin allows you to transfer any amount of wealth anywhere in the world almost instantly and almost free.

    Actually, you can already do that with an ACH transfer (upto 10K), wire transfer ($25 for any sum) cash (as much as you can stuff undetected into your suitcase or cash cards. You can also do hawala.

    The limits in all these cases don’t arise from the medium, but from government restriction, which could be enforced much more thoroughly through BTC than by other means.

    Second. Bitcoins aren’t “free.” They require not only a very good computer, but an excellent internet connection, encryption of a very high order not only for the connection but for the hard drive.. and considerable technical knowledge to thwart the net-savvy people who swarm around bitcoin users.

    None of that is free or widely prevalent.

    In most countries, you don’t even have good enough internet.

    Plus, all of it can be snooped on and shut down.
    That is just one objection out of dozens I could raise.

    Reply

 

1.  Nov. 25, 2013 comments at EPJ

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila)

  2. Shame on anyone who is so credulous to believe this is the “free market” at work.
    Shame on anyone who supports this kind of elaborate con played by the very cartels that anarchists are supposedly fighting.

    Bitcoin is a Rothschild-backed intelligence-funded pump-and-dump. The purpose is to destabilize the dollar and provoke demand for a global single currency.

    It is the global elite-backed “controlled opposition,” using spokesmen from the CIA-infiltrated/ hard-money or “libertarian” community. The ones pitching it will make money as the proles rush in.

    It is easily tracked, easily gamed.
    More so than the dollar or gold.

    This massive swell of interest and pumping by all and sundry is a sure sign of intel involvement.

  3. People promoting this might as well have INTEL stamped on their forehead.

  4. Or FRAUD.

 

Anonymous (Lila)

 


 

November 25, 2013 at 5:21 PM

 

@Philip, Anonymous, edward.

 

Intelligence and government are multi-layered, not unitary.

 

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Sometimes even the left hand doesn’t know. Just a finger or a nail knows.

 

Intelligence might take a while to understand the potential in something their scientists come up with. So it might take a year or two or more. Then they embrace it.

 

The MSM media is brain-washed one way – the obvious mainstream, Keynesian brainwashing.

 

The alternative media, including hard money people, are past the mainstream brainwashing, but they fall for the second-level brainwashing – they fall for Snowden, Assange, Hacktivism, Crypto-currency, Wikileaks, and all such black operations, meant to appeal to gullible, egoistic anti-govt types.

 

There are legions of agencies involved who profile dissent and come up with the red herrings that will be swallowed by the maximum number of fools and opportunists.

 

The economic dissenters trust their hard-money gurus, but that crowd is filled with two-bit cons who will fit their agenda to whatever the intelligence agencies tell them.

 

Please go back and look at when Bitcoin mania started and look at who has promoted it.

 

Be wise as serpents, my friends. Wenzel’s instincts are right. I hope he will not be dazzled by Mayer’s “expertise” and misled into supporting this con game.

 

As for sources. Do some research directly yourself and see what you find.

 

Reply

 

their ‘endgame’ …. .

 

 

Anonymous (Lila)

 

November 26, 2013 at 1:34 PM

 

@Phil McKreviss, EndtheFed,

 

There are a few libertarian (rightist and leftist) blogs where Assange and Snowden have been deconstructed thoroughly. No need to reinvent the wheel here. Let your fingers take a walk and you will see that they are both mouthpieces for the global elites.

 

Some reliable sources you could read: Cottrell, Rappaport, Creighton, Rajiva, Madison…off the top of my head.

 

China – China is a COMMUNIST country, my friends. Goldman Sachs has a big presence there.

 

End-game is control – maximum control over your assets, your money, your movements, your writing, your thoughts – so they can harvest it all for themselves.

 

The elites would be gods…and for that, they need for you to be less than men. They need for you to be little BITS of a machine.

 

Read everything critically, inwardly, not in this trusting fashion.

 

Rest assured, when something shows up on the internet, with this much fanfare, the elites approve.

 

Freedom is hard.

 

It will not come without sacrificing some time, effort and along the way, some favorite delusions and consolations too.

 

Biggest delusion is to believe that there is any quick simple remedy whereby you get to make a ton of money quicker and liberate “the world” too.
All that is Grimms Fairy Tales in a special edition for libertarians.

Natural AC: Five plants that can dehumidify for free

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Tillandsia Royalty Free Stock Images

I’ve been looking around for natural methods to combat humidity for those days when the air-conditioner fails….or in places where it isn’t used.

For instance, AC isn’t as popular in Europe as it is in the United States.

That’s for a variety of reasons – including greater environmental awareness, better built homes, and popular fear of illness from constant exposure to cold air. Many Europeans think  air-conditioning makes you sick.

[Read this American tourist’s AC-induced cultural-shock in France.]

AC is also a lot of maintenance and expense.

So, finding a way to get humidity down without becoming dependent on a complicated mechanical device has got to be attractive to anyone with a survivalist bent.

There are several well-known natural methods to reduce humidity, but they still take quite a bit of effort and not all the ingredients are easy to come by in developing countries.

One of them requires hanging cheese-cloth (or gunny, burlap, or jute) bags of rock-salt from the ceiling, with buckets beneath to catch the water as it drips down.

Rock-salt is a desiccant, which means it extracts the moisture from the air until it is water-logged itself.

If you’ve ever had a salt-shaker that got clogged on humid days, you know how that works.

By the way, the solution to moisture in salt-shakers is simple – throw in a few grains of raw rice. They’ll absorb moisture in the shaker and keep your salt dry.

If rock-salt (salt with large crystals) is unavailable where you live, you can also spread table-salt in pans and leave them on counters or shelves. Table salt will absorb some atmospheric moisture until it’s too wet do absorb any more.  After the salt becomes water-logged, it can still be heated, dried, and reused.

Other dehumidifiers include baking soda , silica, and charcoal briquets. They do well as desiccators, but they’re not cheap in many places and they need to be replenished…or, in the case of silica, heated for reuse.

I’ve never tried salt or silica this way, so I don’t know if it actually has an appreciable effect on the humidity inside a house that’s worth the effort and clutter of pans and bags all over the place.

A simpler and more aesthetic method would be to grow indoor plants that absorb humidity.

At first, this seems counter-intuitive, because most plants add to the moisture content of the air.

If you live in an arid area, humidifying plants can be very useful.

That’s besides all the other proven benefits of house plants – purifying the air, improving mental focus and general health, speeding up healing, and making it easier for you to breathe.

Still,  there are a few plants that reduce humidity or at least balance it.

DoItYourself.com has a list of five “plant dehumidifiers” that are easily grown indoors:

1. The Peace Lily, which needs watering just once a week and sucks in moisture from the air the rest of the time.

2. The Reed Palm, which also purifies the air.

3. English Ivy, which you can hang from the ceiling out of your way, where it will reduce humidity and take care of airborne mold.

4. Boston Fern, which balances the humidity in the air, in addition to reducing it.

5. Tillandsia (also known as air-plant), which doesn’t even need a root system to absorb water an nutrients from the atmosphere.

The catch to this list is that when I researched the names of plants that add to humidity indoors, three names on this list –  the peace lily, the English Ivy, and the Boston fern – showed up on the list of humidifiers as well.

So, if humidity is a severe problem where you live, it might be better to just stick with the Reed plant  (one of the most useful plants in permaculture) and Tillandsia.

Tillandsia, a type of bromeliad, needs no soil and very little watering and can be mounted on cork, wood, wire, twigs, on a shelf or wall cabinet.