Saw this at the beginning of this week’s Frame Rate show on TWIT. It’s from Tom Scott.

It’s all about the FUD.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling “very pressured” by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: “We’re in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don’t cut it,” he said. “And it’s actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that.” Though when Cleveland’s NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it “Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence.”

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.
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Instead, [the FBI is] arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

This is hilarious.

In the ruling issued Friday, the [DC Circuit] court decided that the National Security Agency doesn’t need to either confirm or deny its relationship with Google in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, ruling that a FOIA exemption covers any documents whose exposure might hinder the NSA’s national security mission.
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After all, the NSA has two roles, both as the government’s top cybersecurity defenders and, more troublingly for its relationship with a Silicon Valley firm that has enormous troves of users’ personal information, as its most powerful surveillance arm.
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The ruling comes as controversy has been growing around the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), a bill that passed the House last month in a form that would allow private firms like Google to share a wide range of information with government agencies like the NSA for cybersecurity reasons, as well as other vague purposes like computer “crime” and even “the protection of individuals from the danger of death or serious bodily harm.”

Google, unlike practically every other major tech firm, has yet to take a stance on that bill or the similar cybersecurity legislation now being considered in the Senate.

So a few towns in Northern Washington are talking about becoming “Transition Towns.” This seems to be despite the fact that nobody knows what this means. It’s part of Agenda 21, the scheme to produce one world government run by the Elites. So I find this video supposedly explaining it in 5 minutes. This is worse than the Werner Erhard EST crap. It is pure blather that says nothing. What am I missing? Why do I see this as pure nonsense.

Catholic priest molesters, Muslims stoning women who are raped plus forced circumcision, and now this from Orthodox Jews. More reasons your Uncle Dave is glad he’s an atheist.

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.
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Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses.
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“There is no nice way of saying it,” Mrs. Engelman said. “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”
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In a case late last year that did not get to the police, a 30-year-old molested a 14-year-old boy in a Jewish ritual bath in Brooklyn, and a rabbi “made the boy apologize to the molester for seducing him,” he said.

And now on the lighter side from the you-just-can’t-make-this-shit-up department…

Nadya Suleman was more than a little nervous when she arrived on the set of her first adult-film shoot last week. But after chatting with a seasoned porn star and getting comfortable with the location and crew, Octomom performed like a pro.
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The video, directed by adult film star Brad Armstrong, is scheduled to be released in mid-June by a major online adult entertainment company. At the shoot, Nadya also posed for a set of photographs in which she’s seated at the head of a long table, her body covered with SpaghettiOs.

“For the pictures, we had her topless with a thick sparkly red choker with a big red heart in front and red and white polka dot panties … like 1950s style,” an insider tells me. “SpaghettiOs were all over her body and she’s even throwing the SpaghettiOs toward the camera. The label on the can was changed from SpaghettiOs to say ‘Saucy Octos.’”

If you’ve ever wondered what your dog thinks of you, a new study may just give the answers. Researchers at Emory University developed a new methodology that lets them scan the brains of alert dogs and figure out what really goes on up there.

They use the same functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) that people sometimes go through, but they take this a step further by using different stimuli (hand signals, food, can openers, etc.) to try to find out what means what on the charts.
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The studies are still early on, so nothing groundbreaking has been found yet. After showing the dog different hand signals, which trainers often use to teach dogs tricks and then follow up with a treat, they found “these signals may have a direct line to the dog’s reward system,” as stated by Berns.

I disagree. It’s the very definition of groundbreaking! Dogs respond to treats? Who could POSSIBLY have imagined that finding?!?