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I wonder how soon this will be a topic in the election?
Wikileaks has published five million emails from Stratfor, an intelligence company based in Texas that, looking at their practices, appears to be America’s very own privately run CIA. According to Wikileaks, their deals would also include the use of privileged information to make money in financial markets.
Stratfor’s clients are the US Government, other countries and military organizations, as well as private companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman or Raytheon. They have a global network of spies in governments and media companies, including “secret deals with dozens of media organizations and journalists, from Reuters to the Kiev Post.” According to the emails, these spies get paid in Swiss bank accounts and pre-paid credit cards.
Wikileaks says that the emails also reveal the creation of a parallel organization called StratCap. Apparently, this organization would use Stratfor network of informants to make money in financial markets. Wikileaks claims that the emails show how then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman put StratCap in motion in 2009.
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WASHINGTON — Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb. Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.
In Senate testimony on Jan. 31, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, stated explicitly that American officials believe that Iran is preserving its options for a nuclear weapon, but said there was no evidence that it had made a decision on making a concerted push to build a weapon. David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director, concurred with that view at the same hearing. Other senior United States officials, including Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have made similar statements in recent television appearances.
“They are certainly moving on that path, but we don’t believe they have actually made the decision to go ahead with a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Clapper told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Virginia’s controversial transvaginal ultrasound bill hit one Republican lawmaker close to home. In the bedroom, to be precise. He said a fellow lawmaker’s television discussion of the bill cost him sex with his wife. State Del. David Albo (R-Fairfax Station) was addressing the House of Delegates Friday when he described his failed seduction of his wife Tuesday night. Albo had driven home from Richmond following debate on the bill, which would have required women to have a transvaginal ultrasound procedure before receiving an abortion.
Here is how we are supposed to sleep, and did, before the modern job existed.
Segmented sleep, also known as divided sleep, bimodal sleep pattern, or interrupted sleep, is a polyphasic or biphasic sleep pattern where two or more periods of sleep are punctuated by a period of wakefulness. Along with a nap (siesta) in the day, it appears to be the natural pattern of human sleep. Maintaining such a sleep pattern may be important in regulating stress.
In Western civilization before the Industrial Revolution, segmented sleep was the dominant form of human slumber since time immemorial, according to A. Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech. […] Typically, individuals slept in two discrete phases, bridged by an intervening period of wakefulness of up to an hour or more.
[…]
The modern assumption that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and correct way for human adults to sleep may lead many people to approach their doctors with complaints of maintenance insomnia or other sleep disorders. Their concerns might best be addressed by assurance that their sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.
Here’s another article on Ekirch’s research.
With this natural sleep considered aberrant now, drug companies to the rescue!
Bed is a medicine,” instructs an Italian proverb. Increasingly, Americans are inverting that counsel by ingesting sleeping pills to speed their slumber.
With complaints of insomnia mounting, and marketing by drug companies becoming ever more ubiquitous, we are turning in increasing numbers to drugs like Ambien and Lunesta. According to a recent report from the research company IMS Health, pharmacists in the United States filled some 42 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year, a rise of nearly 60 percent since 2000.
Your employer wants you awake to make them money, drug companies want to sell you products to keep you sleeping or awake, and all you need is a little nap….zzzzzz
Found by Brother Uncle Don
When AT&T started slowing down the data service for his iPhone, Matt Spaccarelli, an unemployed truck driver and student, took the country’s largest telecommunications company to small claims court. And won.
His award: $850.
We have better access than ever before to still photos and video from war zones. There is another tradition – that of the battlefield artist – still practiced. And one of the best is Matthew Cook. His reputation may extend further around the world than it does in the UK.
Thanks, Nikolay Kotev
The liberal news media is making a big deal out of Mitt Romney saying his wife has two Cadillacs, like she’s so rich or something. Perhaps Mitts wife is just like the rest of us. Maybe she just has one Cadillac for parts so she can keep the other Cadillac running? Bet you won’t see that possibility in the liberal news!
Alaska State Representative Sharon Cissna has introduced a bill to criminalize TSA pat-downs and naked-body scans, adding The Last Frontier to a growing list of states battling the intrusive screening procedures of the Transportation Security Administration.
[…]
Cissna’s bill, HB 262, states:A person commits the offense of interference with access to public buildings or transportation facilities if the person, as a condition for access to a public building or transportation facility, requires another person to consent or otherwise submit to
(1) physical contact by any person touching directly or through clothing the genitals, buttocks, or female breast of the person seeking access; or
(2) any electronic process that produces an electronic image of the genitals, anus, or female breast or otherwise creates an electronic image of the person seeking access that exposes or reveals a physical characteristic that is normally hidden by clothing and is not normally visible to the public.
Last year, the Transportation Security Administration reneged on a promise to conduct further studies into the safety of radiation-firing body scanners used at airports nationwide. However, following reports of cancer clusters among TSA screeners at Boston-Logan Airport, the TSA is now obligated to test the operators of the naked-body scanners for radiation exposure. But the TSA still refuses to test the actual machines.
Speaking of the TSA, how much money do you think is being made selling TSA-confiscated items?
And, of course, there’s this article.
In an age when Apple has become the top music retailer without selling a single physical disc, audio engineers are increasingly creating specially mastered versions of songs and albums designed to counteract the audio degradation caused by compression. Though audiophiles typically scoff at paying for compressed audio, preferring vinyl or high-end digital formats such as DVD-A, mastering engineers are doing their best to create digital masters that can pass through Apple’s iTunes algorithms with minimal sonic corruption.
Great article. Hate that iTunes wont provide loss-less formats and Amazon music downloads, which do provide loss-less, are not available down under.
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On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.
If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.
So, Russia and China are now countries other countries want to emulate instead of us?
There’s an agenda behind those cookies the Girl Scouts sell, one bent on promoting communism, lesbianism and subverting “traditional American family values,” according to an Indiana lawmaker. That’s the reason Rep. Bob Morris, a Republican representing Fort Wayne, insists he won’t go along with a resolution meant to honor the Girls Scouts on the organization’s 100th anniversary…
Here is the latest conversation I had with money manager Andrew Horowitz…. new insights for anyone who invests in anything. We discuss the bullcrap that is Greece.
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