Category Archives: Of Interest

The End of NSA Spying? Really?

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NSA

Has everybody gone stupid? The NSA has not stopped spying on Americans… and it never will, either

Tuesday, June 02, 2015

(NaturalNews) There are days I just shake my head in bewilderment at the astonishing, almost incomprehensible gullibility of mainstream Americans and the media that claims to be practicing intelligent journalism. When I see the Associated Press report things like, “The NSA had stopped gathering the records from phone companies hours before the deadline,” I’m almost paralyzed with disbelief.

That’s their story, though. And they apparently believe it. See Either way, no more NSA collection of US phone records. Read the story yourself if you need a really good laugh at an example of extreme gullibility in the media.

What’s so funny about that story? For starters, given that the NSA is a super secret organization with ZERO oversight and a history of repeatedly lying about what it’s really doing, how on Earth are we supposed to believe the NSA when it says it suddenly stopped spying on Americans’ phone calls because it “lost the authority” it never recognized in the first place?

Is the mainstream media really just taking the NSA’s word that it has stopped spying on everybody because it no longer has the “legal authority” to do so? There isn’t a single shred of evidence that the NSA has stopped any spying activities at all. Even more, the Associated Press has no way to verify whether anything has been halted. Trusting the NSA’s statement claiming it has halted its spying activities is about as gullible as trusting Iran’s statements on how it has halted its nuclear fuel enrichment program. Geesh… how hard is it for people to understand that governments lie by default?

Grow up, America. The NSA was spying on us all long before it ever had any legal authority to do so, and when the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was asked under oath, at a United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, about whether the NSA was spying on Americans, he outright lied over and over again, claiming no such spying was taking place.

So now, suddenly, we’re supposed to believe the NSA isn’t spying on us all merely because it says so? Should we pull out our pinkies and do a pinky swear on it, too? Maybe we can be BFF as well?

The NSA recognizes no legal authority, period

It’s just incredible that anyone would think the NSA’s activities are bound by anything even resembling “legal authority.” The NSA does whatever the hell it wants. And why does it do that? Because it can. Because they’ve already gathered up all the records of U.S. Supreme Court judges and they have enough emails, phone calls, web surfing history and search engine history to blackmail practically everyone in Washington D.C. (and everywhere else, for that matter).

“However Congress resolves its impasse over government surveillance, this much is clear: The National Security Agency will ultimately be out of the business of collecting and storing Americans’ calling records,” says the Associated Press. Yeah, right. In your crack-induced fairytale, maybe. But in the real world of hardball politics and blackmail, any organization that has the power to keep collecting all these records will absolutely keep doing so unless and until it is physically forced to stop (i.e. shut off the power, confiscate the servers and close the buildings).

And that’s never gonna happen, folks. Not by a long shot. The spy apparatus is far too valuable to ever be shut down. At best, it will pretend to shut down long enough to shut up the public. But behind the scenes, every single spy server dedicated to this task will continue as normal, without interruption.

Sorry to have to say this so bluntly, but anyone who believes the government is going to voluntarily stop spying on the American people is a complete fool. The way these games are really played is far beyond any recognition of “legal authority.” For example, the NSA can simply take its entire spy operation, transfer the assets to an NSA shell company in the Cayman Islands (without actually moving the servers anywhere), rename it “NSB” and continue operations as normal… all while testifying before Congress that, “The NSA has halted all domestic surveillance operations.” Yep, it has! But NSB has resumed those operations, ha ha.

And if NSB is ever unveiled, they can move it all to “NSC” and so on. The spying never stops, folks. The only thing that changes is the name of the spy organizations conducting it. Does any intelligent person honestly think they’re going to voluntarily shut off all those billions of dollars in servers and storage facilities they built for this purpose? Ain’t gonna happen.

And the way you know this to be true is to ask yourself this question: If you were the director of the world’s most amazing intelligence gathering spy tool that operated utterly without any boundaries or limitations whatsoever, would YOU shut it down? Of course not. No one would. You’d use it precisely because it’s powerful. It’s the Ring of Power from the Lord of the Rings. Almost no human being has the moral integrity to voluntarily part with it. It’s so PRECIOUSSSSS…

True American heroes: Edward Snowden and Rand Paul

Despite the ongoing spy activities of the NSA, it’s worth mentioning something hugely important in all this.

There is only ONE Presidential candidate who has the courage to stand up against the surveillance state and demand an end to these illegal violations of Americans’ privacy. His name is Rand Paul.

As far as I can tell, Rand Paul is the only candidate who has a spine. While Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are both total spy state insiders, Rand Paul is risking not just his political career but even his own neck to take a stand against the surveillance state. That’s historic. It’s truly remarkable, and it may uniquely qualify Rand Paul to be the kind of serious reformer who can take on Washington and knock some heads around.

Edward Snowden is also, of course, the key hero in all this, and I strongly recommend you watch the documentary called Citizen Four to gain a better understanding of Snowden’s contributions to privacy and freedom in America. Edward Snowden has quite literally risked his life — and forfeited his own personal freedom — to blow the whistle on the illegal spying being conducted by the U.S. government on the citizens of America.

What should have happened immediately after Snowden’s shocking revelations was a nationwide movement of pissed off people marching in the streets against Orwellian government. But what really happened instead was a nationwide movement of apathetic sheeple turning on Oprah and munching down some Twinkies before injecting themselves with insulin. In other words, nobody gave a damn because they were too busy cowering in blind obedience and practicing cowardice and conformity.

And so they all are getting the government they deserve: an Orwellian spy state that enslaves them all. This is what they are begging for, after all, when they are so gullible that they’ll believe anything the government tells them. The same people who believe the NSA magically stopped spying on them must also believe the FDA protects the people, the DEA wants to eliminate the drug trade, and the CDC is trying to eradicate infectious disease.

Wake up and smell reality, folks. None of these entities give a damn about the People. They all exist for only one purpose: to expand and assert their own power by any means necessary. That’s the fundamental nature of organizational existence, and it’s precisely why Big Government keeps getting bigger, badder and more dangerous unless its power is somehow limited or halted by the People.

Hence the origins of the Bill of Rights in the first place, over two centuries ago.

We’ve been down this road before, of course. This isn’t the first rise of police state tyranny in the history of our world. And it certainly won’t be the last…

Sun-Drying Foods At Home

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fruit

How to preserve foods using sun-drying techniques

Sunday, May 31, 2015 by: Daniel Barker

(NaturalNews) Sun-drying is not only the oldest and simplest method of preserving food, it’s also the cheapest and most environmentally-friendly choice. Humans have been using solar power to dry fruit, vegetables and meat for thousand of years, and the technique works just as well today, especially if you live in a climate with high temperatures and low humidity, such as the southwestern and midwestern United States.

These days, many people use dehydrators or oven-drying methods of preserving food, but sun-drying can preserve more of the natural flavors, making the extra time and care worth the effort. Moreover, learning how to sun-dry foods is a very useful survival skill to have if the power grid goes down.

Almost any type of food can be sun-dried, but it’s best to start learning the techniques by first choosing foods that are relatively easy to dry, such as tomatoes.

Making your own sun-dried tomatoes

There’s nothing more flavorful than sun-dried tomatoes, and making your own couldn’t be simpler. Plum or paste tomatoes, such as Roma or Pomodoro, are generally considered the best choices for sun-drying, but any variety will work. The main thing to consider is thickness – slice paste tomatoes in halves or thirds, while plum tomatoes can be cut in half. Make your slices consistent in thickness so they will dry at the same rate.

Wash and cut the tomatoes to the desired thickness, then arrange them leaving space in between them on a frame that has stainless steel screens on the bottom and top. You can make the frame any size you want; the screen’s purpose is to provide airflow and to keep insects from getting in. You can season them with herbs or sea salt if you like.

Make sure you’re in for some hot, dry weather because it will take several days for the tomatoes to dry thoroughly. Place your racks in direct sunlight in a location that gets as much breeze as possible.

The tomatoes are ready when they no longer feel “tacky” to the touch.

Sun-dried tomatoes can stored in sterile canning jars with olive oil or in vacuum-sealed plastic bags.

Sun-drying fruit

Because they are high in sugar and acid, fruits are easy to sun-dry; the sugars and acid help to retard spoilage while drying. You’ll need to do a little preparation with most fruits before drying them.

Apricots and peaches should be cut in half and pitted before drying. Fruits such as apples, apricots and pears should be soaked in lemon juice or an ascorbic acid solution for around five minutes before being placed on the rack to begin drying. This will keep them from browning.

Cut the fruit into slices of uniform thickness and choose a hot, dry spell (85 degrees Fahrenheit or higher) for the drying period.

Bring the racks inside at night or cover them with cloth to prevent moisture from being reabsorbed.

Once the fruits are thoroughly dried, you should condition and pasteurize them for safe long-term storage.

To condition the dried fruits after they have cooled, place them in sealed glass jars for one week to ten days, shaking the jars daily to distribute the remaining moisture.

Once the fruits are conditioned, remove them from the jars and either pasteurize them in the oven on trays in single layers at 160 degrees Fahrenheit for half an hour or in plastic freezer bags in a zero-degree Fahrenheit freezer for 48 hours.

Sun-drying vegetables calls for basically the same method as fruits, but they should be cut in smaller pieces due to their lower acid content.

Why not give sun-drying a try this summer, especially if you have a surplus of garden fruits and vegetables?

Sources
http://offgridsurvival.com/sun-drying-fruits-foods/
http://whiteonricecouple.com/recipes/sun-dried-tomatoes/
http://www.motherearthnews.com

Black Knight Satellite – What is it?

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20 Facts about the Black Knight Satellite

Ancient Code

The Black Knight Satellite, close-up image.
 

20 facts about the Black Knight Satellite

20 Facts about the Black Knight Satellite. The Black Knight wiki.

This “Artificial Satellite” has caused mayor media interest since the late 50′s, and it has become one of the most talked about objects in space. First thought to be an Russian spy satellite, the Black Knight satellite has gripped the interest of millions worldwide.

If you find our article about the Black Knight satellite too long, here are some interesting facts about this mysterious object:

  1. According to monitoring agencies around the world, The Black knight satellite has been transmitting radio signals for over 50 years now
  2. The USA and Soviet Union have shown particular interest in this “unidentified space object”
  3. Rumors are that it was Nikola Tesla the first man to “intercept” a signal from the black knight satellite in 1899 after building a high-voltage radio device in Colorado Springs.
  4. Since the 1930′s Astronomers worldwide have been reporting strange radio signals which allegedly come from the “Black Knight”.
  5. In 1957, Dr. Luis Corralos of the Communications Ministry in Venezuela photographed it while taking pictures of Sputnik II as it passed over Caracas.
  6. The story of the Black Knight made its media debut in the 1940′s when the St. Louis Dispatch and The San Francisco Examiner wrote about the “Satellite” on May 14th 1954.
  7. The Time Magazine wrote about the Black Knight Satellite on the seventh of March, 1960.
  8. In 1957, an unknown “object” was seen “shadowing”  the Sputnik 1 Spacecraft. According to reports, the “unidentified object” was in Polar orbit.
  9. in 1957. The United Stated nor the Russians possessed the technology to maintain a spacecraft in Polar Orbit.
  10. The first Polar orbiting satellite was launched in 1960.
  11. Polar orbits are often used for earth-mapping, earth observation, capturing the earth as time passes from one point and reconnaissance satellites. This would put the Black Knight in the category of a observational Satellite.
  12. In the 1960′s the Black Knight satellite was located once again in Polar Orbit. Astronomers and Scientists calculated the objects weight to be over 10 tons which would be at that time the Heaviest Artificial Satellite to orbit our Planet.
  13. The Black Knight’s orbit was unlike any other object orbiting Earth.
  14. The Grumman Aircraft Corporation gave much importance to this mysterious “Satellite”, On September 3, 1960, seven months after the satellite was first detected by radar, a tracking camera at Grumman Aircraft Corporation’s Long Island factory took a photograph of the Black Knight satellite.
  15. The Grumman Aircraft Corporation formed a committee to study the data received from the observations made but nothing was made public.
  16. In 1963, Gordon Cooper was launched into space. On his final orbit, he reported seeing a glowing green object in front of his capsule in the distance moving towards his Spacecraft. The Muchea tracking station, in Australia, which Cooper reported the object to, picked up this Unidentified object on Radar travelling East to West.
  17. It was the Ham Radio operator who apparently  decoded a series of signals received from the UFO Satellite and interpreted it as a star-chart centered on the Epsilon Bootes Star System
  18. According to the decoded message, the Black Knight satellite originated from the Epsilon Bootes Star System 13.000 years ago.
  19. On August 23, 1954 the technology magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology released a story about the Black Knight Satellite that angered the Pentagon who were trying to keep the information secret.
  20. NASA has released official images which apparently show the Black Knight Satellite.

from:    http://www.ancient-code.com/20-facts-black-knight-satellite/

Jade Helm, PsyOps, & The Media

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As ALWAYS — DO YOUR RESEARCH!

Jade Helm as Itself a Psy Op

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Art by David Dees.

By: Jay Dyer

For most consumers of alternative news and media, the lineup of the players constitutes the tyrants and their systemic control, and the enlightened underground, with both sides fighting the great battle of winning the hearts and minds of the rest of the public.  For the alternative news and information community, the possibility of large-scale psychological operations within alternative media itself are generally outside the spectrum of the possible.  Indeed, crowds today are sill cheering on Assange and his Vaudeville Whistleblower Roadshow with Bradley-Chelsea Manning, and more recently finding themselves intellectually snowed in by our last hero, Snowden.

Jade Helm 15

In 2015, the focal point has become the Jade Helm 15 training operation across at least 7 states, with SOCOM running the training exercise for realistic military training. The brief document lists role-playing involving Texas and Utah as “hostile” areas, with insurgents in Southern California and other states like Colorado, California and Nevada as “friendly.”  On the surface, the exercise gives credence to the ultimate fears and paranoia of tea party and militia groups – clearly the U.S. government is prepping for everything from “martial law,” to “economic collapse,” and everything else under the sun that can be gleaned from a Google search and baseless YouTube speculation.

Fending off the mainstream media’s dishonest portrayal of the patriot and alternative media’s fears, Alex Newman of The New American concludes:

“Of course, critics of Jade Helm and the Obama administration should stick to facts that can be proven, rather than speculation. Most have done that, including many of those being dishonestly smeared by the deceitful media. However, the establishment press has an even more serious responsibility and duty to do the same — stick to the facts, do not deceive readers, question those in power, and adhere to basic journalistic ethics. Instead of sticking to the facts and being honest, though, establishment propagandists masquerading as journalists have once again shown the world why they cannot be trusted. As such, it is no surprise that so few Americans trust the “mainstream” press and are flocking to the alternative media by the millions.”

Common Sense Show host Dave Hodges has argued the end goal of Jade Helm is the imminent roundup, gulag confinement and gun confiscation of all Americans who have been marked as rebellious, with bank account confiscations, martial law and false flags just around the corner.  Infowars reporters Joe Biggs and David Knight have argued similarly that the threats are rather constant, slow build ups to condition the American public into the acceptance of moving towards a third world, banana republic scenario.  However, what all these portrayals have not delved into is the possibility that Jade Helm 15’s “leak” to the alternative news and patriot community itself might be a psychological warfare operation.  In order to understand this possibility, it is necessary to understand the purpose and goal of PsyOps.

Psychological Warfare Operations

Psychological warfare operations are at once mysterious, yet fairly well-known.  Most educated readers are familiar with World War II propaganda or the notion of “black operations,” but more precise and technical ideas of PsyOps are not as well known.   Retired Maj. Ed Rouse explains of the goals of PsyOps:

BAM!

“Psychological Operations (PSYOP) or Psychological Warfare (PSYWAR) is simply learning everything about your target enemy, their beliefs, likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Once you know what motivates your target, you are ready to begin psychological operations.

Psychological operations may be defined broadly as the planned use of communications to influence human attitudes and behavior … to create in target groups behavior, emotions, and attitudes that support the attainment of national objectives. The form of communication can be as simple as spreading information covertly by word of mouth or through any means of multimedia.

A psychological warfare campaign is a war of the mind. Your primary weapons are sight and sound. PSYOP can be disseminated by face-to-face communication, audio-visual means (television), audio media (radio or loudspeaker), visual media, (leaflet newspapers, books, magazines and/or posters). The weapon is not how its sent, but the message it carries and how that message affects the recipient.”

With that basic definition in mind, we can consider the possibility of Jade Helm 15 itself as having multiple potential uses.  Rather than the simple, binary dialectic of tyrannical fascist system versus liberty-loving, God-fearing patriot, the effect of Jade Helm 15’s “leak” upon the public and their reaction are far more interesting and relevant than the operation itself.   In fact, if we think back to recent years, alternative media outlets were in a tizzy over National Level Exercise 09, and then over NLE 11, etc.  In neither case did imminent apocalyptic doom manifest, but what did occur was a labyrinth of fractal speculation and orgiastic frenzy of bloggers, YouTubers and eschatological doomsayers, as these “leaked” exercises took on a life of their own.

From the perspective of PsyOps, the potential of Jade Helm to “learn everything about your target enemy, their beliefs, their likes, dislikes, strengths, weaknesses,” etc., would thus have numerous applications here.  On one level, the inter-contextual dialectic of tyrannical military versus veterans and patriots is the out playing of the intended war gaming scenario.

Multi-level Game Theory and Algorithmic Tracking

On a higher, meta level, the intention is to gather game theory-style data on the target audience, which in this case is not merely the alternative media and tea party niche, but also the mainstream media and its response to the tea party response, and back and forth.  Like a game of Pong, the game theorist can sit back and watch mass trends, movements and reactions between these two sides with social media and search engine algorithmic tracking.

Titan Supercomputer.

For example, a Raleigh-based firm boasts of its ability to track “suicide bombing” with its collection of Pakistani bombing information.  WNCN reports:

“In analyzing the information, they realized that they have the blast signatures for the terrorist organizations. “I can tell you who did the attack with 93 percent accuracy, based on the way they make the bombs,” Usamani said.  They looked at what they call geo-political indicators, which includes things like political events, weather patterns, even the date on the calendar.  Burns said there are more than 150 such indicators. “You have to combine all of those,” he said. “You have to determine which combination is going to develop the risks for a particular area.”

Despite limitations in this type of software, numerous companies have arisen with the technological capability to offer some form of predictive algorithm programs to service law enforcement and intelligence agencies in “pre-crime.”  One of the many goals of Jade Helm style operations that are consistent, ongoing military praxis would be the overcoming of these limitations and moving closer to the unachievable accuracy of 100%.

In other words, perfection, or the nearest thing to, requires a lot of practice.  Jade Helm is therefore an exercise that is far more relevant for data collection in terms of risk management and game theory for intelligence agencies and front tech companies, than anything to do with martial law, imminent gun confiscation or the blood moon asteroid crashing into the Wal-Mart turned FEMA camp guillotine gulag.

In the wake of ongoing exposure of mainstream media’s consistent usage of staged, faked, and computer-generated “news,”  alternative media outlets and consumers should be reminded of the possibility of alternative media falling into this same pattern of sensationalizing and disregarding facts for ever increasingly clickbait, tabloid-style online media gimmickry in both alternative and mainstream sources.

When considering the possibility of large-scale psychological operations in relation to purported “leaks” and “whistleblowers” who become the darlings of mainstream media and begin negotiating book and movie deals, John Young of Cryptome.org gave an analysis concurrent with the above to RT in 2011:

If the military wanted to keep Jade Helm secret, it could have been kept secret.  The decision to run a mass drill in several states was intentionally done and purposefully allowed to “leak.”  The consequences of such a public revelation are much more useful for war gaming and future predictive responses than any imminent threat of martial law.  Just like Assange and Snowden, Jade Helm is the establishment’s middle finger in the face of the ridiculous naiveté of the Tea Party crowd.

from:    http://jaysanalysis.com/2015/05/28/jade-helm-as-itself-a-psy-op/

Satellite Imagery Reveals Hidden Structures in Sahara

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Mysterious Ancient Structures Hidden
Under The Sand In The Sahara Desert
Could Re-Write History Of Ancient Egypt
MessageToEagle.comMessageToEagle.com
Satellite images reveal intriguing and mysterious structures in the Sahara desert. The constructions are either damaged pyramids or antediluvian remains.
Something is very large is hidden under the sand and we don’t know what it is.

The Great Flood is a controversial topic among scientists but there are those who are convinced once in the distant past our planet was submerged and the waters wiped out entire civilizations. Some would say it was the day when Earth nearly died.

Many people associate the story of the Great Flood with the Bible. However, the story of Noah’s ark is not just a Biblical story. Noah was known under a different name in India, among ancient Egyptians and Native Americans, just to mention a few cultures.

Some of the details of the Noah story seem mythical, so many biblical scholars believe the story of Noah and the Ark was inspired by the legendary flood stories of nearby Mesopotamia, in particular “The Epic of Gilgamesh.”

According to a controversial theory once in the distant past there really was a mother of all floods. Fascinated by the idea that the story of the great Flood might be true, Robert Ballard, one of the world’s best-known underwater archaeologists decided to look for traces of an ancient lost civilization that could reveal more information about the Deluge.

Artists concept of the pyramids written about by the Greek historian Herodotus.

Hopefully one day scientists will be able to provide solid evidence supporting the ancient story of the Great Flood and provide more information about a period in our history when the Earth nearly died.

Meanwhile, we can admire and puzzling ancient structures like those discovered by Angela Micol, founder of The Satellite Archaeology Foundation, Inc.

Based on the satellite imagery, Micol suggests that the mounds might represent eroded pyramids.The up-close pictures make the formations look more like piles of rocky rubble.

The largest one appears to have the ruins of a square building or walls on its summit, but it’ll take a full-blown excavation to unravel the mystery.

“We have found some incredible evidence at the Abu Sidhum site and it could be much older than many in Egypt.

There is a distinct water line on all four mounds at around 50 feet in height.

If this site is proven to be an artificial pyramid/mound site it could date back to the Predynastic or the Prehistoric period of ancient Egypt, making this one of the oldest known pyramid/mound complexes in Egypt.

The implications that this site, if proven artificial may be an amazingly old site and could even rewrite the history of ancient Egypt,” Angela Micol says.

Satellite images reveal strange structures in the Sahara Desert.
Image credit: Angela Micol

There is no evidence that these remarkable structures are from times before the Great Flood but one cannot dismiss the possibility their destruction was caused by the devastating waters.

Abu Sidhum Site, Egypt- View from Google Earth.
Image credit: Angela Micol

Image credit: Angela Micol


Angela Micol was contacted by an expedition team in Egypt who visited the Abu Sidhum site.

They sent detailed video of the mounds, showing how they resembled pyramids, along with video of pottery shards which covered the area extensively and helped confirm something is buried under the sand near the site of Abu Sidhum.

The team used a metal and cavity detector that gave positive results for tunnels and cavities inside all four mounds/possible pyramids!

See also:

Ancient Egyptian Capital Tell El-Amarna Mapped Through Satellite Imagery System

‘The White Walls’ Of The Ancient Egyptian Capital Memphis – Discovered

Mysterious Enormous Underground Labyrinth Of Egypt Holds Secrets Kept From The Outside World

The team and and Angela Micol believe to have identified a temple or habitation site near the Abu Sidhum site and a row of what may be mastaba tombs adjacent to the mounds!

The remnants are located in an area around the present-day town of Dimai in Egypt’s Fayoum Desert. The locale used to be a desert settlement during Egypt’s Ptolemaic era, back when Greek and Roman influence were on the rise.

A while back scientists unerthed 20 Stone Age skeletons in the Sahara Desert. The burials spanned thousands of years, suggesting the place was a persistent cemetery for the local people. What is more hidden under the sand? Credit: Mary Anne Tafuri

According to Italian archaeologist Paola Davoli, the structures may have been watchtowers – but she hasn’t ruled out the possibility that they might also be tombs or well sites. What’s needed is an excavation to unlock the secrets hidden within.

So for the moment, these remarkable ancient structures remain shrouded in mystery but with proper investigation scientists may learn more about the remains.

© MessageToEagle.com

Information Control, Google, & Alternatives

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Who’s Afraid Of The Internet? Elites Panic As Information Control Flounders

Who’s Afraid Of The Internet Elites Panic As Information Control Flounders

1st June 2015

By James Corbett

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

Do you want the good news first or the bad news?

Alright, here’s the bad news: Google is about to start ranking sites according to their conformity with mainstream opinion. Or at least that’s what the headlines would have you believe.

The usual sources in the controlled corporate media are telling you that this is a good thing and that only “Anti-science advocates are freaking out about Google truth rankings”. But if that already seems like a remarkably blasé attitude to take when facing the prospect of a 1984-like reality where the modern-age Ministry of Truth (Google) is going to determine the “truth” of controversial subjects and rank search results accordingly, then keep in mind that such articles are written by the likes of Joanna Rothkopf, daughter of mini-Kissinger, and David Rothkopf, author of “Superclass”.

New Scientist – the website that broke the story with their article “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links” – also framed the story, predictably enough, as “science” versus “anti-science”, starting their article by lamenting the fact that “Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free ‘news’ stories spread like wildfire.” The article rejoices in the fact that the good chaps at Google have come up with a bulletproof answer to this mess: “rank websites according to their truthfulness.”

The slightly good news is that, ironically enough, the New Scientist article seems to be a perfect example of a fact-free story spreading around the internet like wildfire. While the story does link to a research paper from a Google research team that outlines a “novel multi-layer probabilistic model” for assigning a “trustworthiness score” to web pages, it neglects to mention that the idea is still very much a theoretical work-in-progress at the moment and is nowhere near ready to be launched. If you have a fetish for multivariate equations, dynamically selected granularity, and line graphs comparing calibration curves for various data analysis methods, have at it!

Who’s Afraid Of The Internet - Elites Panic As Information Control Flounders - Search Engine Algorithm

For the rest of us who are not fluent in boffin-speak, the gist of it is this:

First, a page is harvested for its “knowledge triples.” These are connected triplets of information consisting of a subject, predicate and object. The paper itself helpfully provides the example: Obama – Nationality – USA. A “false value” (again according to the paper itself) would be Obama – Nationality – Kenya. These knowledge triples are assessed for their (Google-determined) accuracy and the page is assigned a KBT (Knowledge-Based Trust) score, which Google could use in place of (or perhaps in some combination with) the traditional PageRank score to determine how high in the search results the web page should place.

The paper uses a list of 15 gossip websites to demonstrate that using this method, sites with disputed and often incorrect information (gossip sites) might rank high in traditional search results, which are weighted toward popularity, but low in the KBT results. But even the paper itself admits there’s a long way to go before this KBT method would be usable by Google to rank billions of web pages.

This is good news for those alt media websites (and their readers) who realize that they are the ones directly in the crosshairs of this technology. Given that Google is nothing other than an American intelligence adjunct (and has been since its inception), would we expect anything resembling a fair assessment of the “truthfulness” surrounding the most politically controversial subjects of our time?

Who’s Afraid Of The Internet - Elites Panic As Information Control Flounders - Google BouncersThe Federal Reserve is a private cartel created by the banksters for the express purpose of manipulating the money supply and controlling the economy? CONSPIRACY THEORY! No Google for you!

Always and throughout history, Governments have used false flag terrorism in order to justify their wars of aggression? SLANDER! Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to the bottom of the search results!

Google and every other major Silicon Valley firm is in bed with the DOD and/or the CIA and/or the NSA? BLASPHEMY! You have been excommunicated from the church of Google.

You get the idea.

But here’s the really good news: even if Google does launch such a system, it is doomed to failure. The internet is one of the last, best bastions of the free market in action that we have in our stultified, regulated, controlled, manipulated economy. Google’s popularity did not come about because government goons pointed a gun at everyone’s head and forced them to use it. They didn’t even create a licensing system for operating search engines, a favorite government trick for keeping genuine competition out of the market. It became popular because it was a million times more useful than AskJeeves or Yahoo! or any of the other outdated, clunky, dysfunctional search “portals” that dominated the web in the late 1990s. Granted, the power of Google’s PageRank may have come directly from the NSA’s own engineers, as some have speculated, but the fact remains: people use it because they can find what they want quickly and easily with minimal fuss.

At that point at which Google stops being useful for its intended purpose (helping people to look for information), people will start to look for alternatives. And alternatives do exist.

Ixquick.com is a privacy-protecting search engine that returns results drawn from a wide range of other search engines.

DuckDuckGo is another popular alternative search engine focusing on privacy protection that uses a number of innovative tools to make searching quicker and easier.

SigTruth is an “Alternative Media Search Engine for Liberty Minded People” that uses Google’s own custom search abilities against itself by returning only alt media website results on various topics.

And even the news that Google might at some point start using its “truthiness” score to downgrade the alt media has spurred others in the alt media (like Natural News founder Mike Adams) to announce the creation of their own search engines.

This is how the free market of ideas is meant to work, and if and when Google starts returning sanitized propaganda, those who are uninterested in sanitized propaganda will vote with their feet/fingertips.

Who’s Afraid Of The Internet - Elites Panic As Information Control Flounders - New World Order - House Of CardsBut here’s the best news of all: what this urge to categorize sites by “truthfulness” (and all of the back-slapping, high-fiving articles about this news from the dying establishment mouthpiece media) really shows is just how desperate the would-be gatekeepers are becoming in their fight to put the alt media genie back in the bottle. And even better yet, this is by no means the first sign that the gatekeepers are losing their war to keep the people in the dark on the topics that matter.

In 2008, arch-globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski started lamenting how, for the first time in human history “all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive.” This, as he stressed in speeches and articles at the time, means that it is no longer possible to dominate people in the same ways that they have been dominated for centuries.

In 2011, Hillary Clinton admitted that the US was losing the information war to alternative media outlets of all stripes.

In 2013, PopularScience.com had to turn off comments on all of their articles because, they said, a “decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics” like catastrophic man-made climate change.

And poll after poll after poll in year after year after year continues to chart the decline of the dinosaur print/radio/tv media and the rise of the internet as a source of daily news and information for the majority of the public.

Yes, there are dark skies and reasons to be concerned about what’s coming in the inevitable digital clampdown. But there are bright spots as well, and these deserve to be noted, highlighted and celebrated. After all, the people have had a taste for real information and now more people than ever before see through the increasingly clumsy propaganda of the establishment. And that makes the propaganda increasingly useless for setting the political agenda.

The internet revolution toothpaste is out of the tube, and it’s going to be one heck of a job getting it back in. And that’s good news.

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2015/06/01/whos-afraid-of-the-internet-elites-panic-as-information-control-flounders/

Skeptics & Wikipedia

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Wikipedia Graphic

Wikipedia: Captured by Skeptics

 

The Wikipedia Problem

 

by the Editors

 

Wikipedia currently is the area in which dogmatic skeptics are most successful and influential. One of these activist groups is called Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, founded by Susan Gerbic. Another leader of the online skeptical movement is Tim Farley, who runs the website Skeptical Software Tools.The situation is particularly bad in any areas to do with parapsychology, alternative and complementary medicine, and on the biography pages of scientists involved in investigating these areas.

The Wikipedia skeptics work in teams (contrary to Wikipedia rules) and most are well trained. They generally operate under pseudonyms. It is not necessary to have any particular skill or expertise to become an editor. Anyone can edit. But it is necessary to understand the complex rules of Wikipedia. The skeptical activists are well versed in the rules, and are able to bully and outwit editors who are trying to ensure that articles are balanced and fair. When fair-minded editors oppose the skeptic teams, they are accused of defying the skeptical consensus, and warned that they will be banned from editing. If they persist they are indeed banned. Many such editors have been driven away, to the detriment of Wikipedia and its users. For a detailed case study, see Wikipedia, We Have a Problem.

Although Wikipedia’s official policy is that articles should represent a neutral point of view, skeptics have infiltrated the administration of Wikipedia and have managed to get parapsychology defined as a pseudoscience, along with many aspects of alternative and complementary medicine. The skeptic teams then claim that any editor opposing them is contravening the neutral point of view policy, because these subjects are defined as pseudoscience. These teams are committed to a kind of scientific fundamentalism, and take an extremely narrow view of science, even narrower than that of more mainstream skeptical organizations. Even the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry does not dismiss all parapsychology as pseudoscience: indeed some leading skeptics, like Professor Chris French, have explicitly stated that they regard it as a real science (French, C. C., & Stone, A. Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

Unfortunately, the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is a supporter of the skeptical extremists. In response to the systematic distortion to Wikipedia entries on holistic medicine, the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) organized on online petition to Jimmy Wales through change.org asking for a balanced and scientific approach to these subjects. There were 7,000 signatures. In response, Wales called practitioners of alternative medicine “lunatic charlatans.” He resisted calls for change by saying that Wikipedia’s policies are “exactly spot-on and correct.”

So beware! Until Wikipedia can be reformed or replaced, it is essential to treat its skeptic-infested pages with extreme skepticism.

from:    http://www.skepticalaboutskeptics.org/examining-skeptics/wikipedia-captured-by-skeptics/

To De-Google or Not?

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Google

How to avoid Google surveillance and protect your personal data

Friday, May 29, 2015 by: Daniel Barker

(NaturalNews) It all seemed rather innocent in the beginning. It certainly seemed convenient, and still is – maybe more so than ever, to be truthful. But if you haven’t noticed, slowly and gradually, during the past 17 years since its inception, Google has evolved from being a company which once merely provided Internet users with a free search engine and email to becoming an all-encompassing entity that monitors nearly everything you do.

And not only does Google snoop on you, it takes the personal information it has collected and sells it to corporations. Google also provides that information to intelligence agencies, such as the NSA.

A recent article penned by Derek Scally of The Irish Times explores the extent of Google’s tentacles into our private lives and offers some very useful advice on how to “de-Google” your life.

And why should you de-Google your life if you have “nothing to hide”?

From Scally’s article, which is titled “De-Google your life: it’s worth the hassle if you value your privacy”:

“For privacy campaigner Glenn Greenwald, the man who revealed Snowden’s mass surveillance claims against the National Security Agency, the most common response he hears on the road is what he calls the ‘I have nothing to hide’ argument. To this he has a simple answer.

‘Whenever I hear someone say “I have nothing to hide,” ‘ said Mr Greenwald in Berlin last year, ‘I always ask that person for their email password so I can read their messages. No one has ever taken me up on the offer.’ “

How to de-Google your life

Look for storage alternatives – Scally recommends not putting “all your digital eggs” in one basket. For example, he urges people to explore alternatives for storing emails, photos and cloud content. European-based services are preferable due to EU laws which protect privacy. German-based mailbox.org is one example of an alternative mail service that does not sell or give your data to corporate interests.

Change the way you search – Whenever you can, use an alternative search engine that doesn’t track your searches, such as DuckDuckGo.com or GoodGopher.com (GoodGopher is a new search engine described as “the world’s first privacy-protecting search engine that bans corporate propaganda and government disinfo”).

Block cookies – We’re told that cookies “improve the user experience,” but they also track everything you do online. Install a tracking blocker, such as Ghostery or DoNotTrackMe, into your browser. You can also download the privacyfix.com service from AVG, which helps you click the right privacy settings on your computer and the Internet services you currently use.

Find an alternative to Gmail – Scally admits that it’s “difficult” to give up Gmail and its 15GB of “free” storage, but he points out that even though you theoretically retain intellectual property rights to the content stored on Google, you also give the company a: “worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify . . . communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.” Better to use a service such as the above-mentioned mailbox.org or Posteo. Another alternative is to encrypt your emails using PGP.

Stop using Google and Apple cloud services – Keeping your calendars and contacts synced on multiple devices without using the Google or Apple cloud services can also be difficult because, as Scally notes: The “big players deliberately tinker with file standards for their calendar and address-book offerings to make migration possible and keep you inside their golden cage.” This “devious and effective practice” is perhaps not easy to sidestep, but it’s probably worth the hassle. And as Scally says, “if you clear this hurdle, you’re home free.”

Smartphone alternatives – It’s possible to wipe your Android phone and install CyanogenMod, which uses the same OS, only without Google’s presence. However, installing it requires some technical skills. Another alternative is to invest in a Jolla smartphone. Jolla is a Finnish-made smartphone that uses an OS with “no corporate tentacles.” A team of Nokia designers left the company to introduce this product, which aside from offering privacy also has some very innovative features.

Pigeon Arrested for Spying

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WHAT NEXT!!!

Pakistani pigeon arrested for espionage in India (VIDEO)

Published time: May 30, 2015 23:44
Screenshot from Ruptly video

Screenshot from Ruptly video

While intelligence agencies across the globe are busy boosting their communication interception capabilities, Indian authorities have not forgotten the centuries-old methods adversaries might use, literally intercepting a spy pigeon from Pakistan.

Hard to believe but true. It is one of the few occasions recently that a bird has been deemed a “spy” and arrested by authorities after the discovery of a secret message or a wire-like objects on their bodies.

The white pigeon is believed to have crossed from Pakistan earlier this week, before a 14-year-old boy in the Indian village of Pathankot, Punjab state, captured it some 4km from the border.

The boy rushed to hand the “spy” over to police, who discovered a message in the Urdu language and numbers that authorities believe were part of a landline telephone number in Pakistan’s Narowal district.

Puzzled by the discovery, police sent the bird to get x-rayed for more possible clues. “Nothing adverse has been found, but we have kept the bird in our custody,” Pathankot senior superintendent of police (SSP) Rakesh Kaushal told the Times of India.

“This is a rare instance of a bird from Pakistan being spotted here. We have caught a few spies here. The area is sensitive, given its proximity to Jammu, where infiltration is quite common,” said Kaushal.

Because the messenger was seized as an inter-state security conference was taking place among Punjab police, authorities decided to make a diary entry classifying the bird as a “suspected spy”, and notifying intelligence agencies.

The pigeon discovery also comes two days after the country’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) issued an alert warning of Indian Mujahideen being active in Jammu and Pathankot regions.

This is not the first time birds have been arrested for spying. In 2008, Iranian authorities arrested two pigeons allegedly spying on a nuclear facility. In 2013, a stork was detained in Egypt also on espionage charges.

from:    http://rt.com/news/263553-spy-pigeon-india-pakistan/

Magnetic Filaments on the Sun

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MAGNETIC FILAMENTS ON THE SUN: With no sunspots actively flaring this weekend, solar activity is low. Or is it? There’s more to solar activity than sunspots and flares. “I can’t recall ever seeing as many magnetic filaments on the sun as I have this month,” points out amateur astronomer John W. O’Neal of Amherst, Ohio. “This composite image is my tribute to the filament-ridden sun of May 2015.”

Indeed, the sun has been unusually filamentary. Vast strands of plasma held together by magnetic fields have crept across the face of the sun all month long. Occasionally, these dark filaments become unstable and erupt, hurling parts of themselves into space. Fragments falling back to the stellar surface can explode, producing a type of flare called a Hyder flare–no sunspot required.

There is an extra-large filament on the solar disk today. It stretches more than 700,000 km from end to end–about twice the distance from Earth to the moon. These dimensions make it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes.

from:      spaceweather.com