Pretty in Pink Eye?

Merlin debuts latest NSA-themed back-to-school wear for Generation Eye.
Um, pink is apparently the new brown. Or is that salmon?

Da-da Shrugged: Disney's Thunder Mountain Re-opens

Speaking as a former Disney musician, cast member and Dopey Book contributor... well... the above, allegedly refurbished ride looks the same as it did in the '80s and '90s. Sure, there might be a few extra lights and LED fake-dynamite fuses, but otherwise the ride seems identical. Same twists and turns. Pretty disappointing, actually, considering the ride's been out of commission for over a year.

Cave scene from the old pre-Thunder Mine Train ride.

Da-da liked the old Rainbow Ridge Mine Train better. It was soothing and quirky and rather interesting, a cooling change of pace in a hot part of the park.

Probably for sheer moolah/body-count/ride-throughput reasons, Disney has purged their Anaheim park of slow rides like the original, as they did The People Remover and the SkyWay cars through the Matterhorn, which was also a nice shortcut across Fantasyland.

Two defunct rides, no waiting.

Oh, well. Tom Wolfe's been vindicated yet again, Disney-style. Kinda makes you wonder how much money Disney spent on the refurb and what it was spent on... unless the new mine train is to be a fat corporate tax deduction -- or perhaps an NSA surveillance showcase. (Few people realize that the former head of Disneyland Security was the first person chosen for the newly minted and oxymoronic, "Dept. of Homeland Security.") And D-land's new procrustean and highly invasive guest security system should come as a surprise to no one... provided people actually suspend their civil rights and submit themselves -- and their kids -- to it, pictures and thumb prints and all, no doubt shared with the DHS. Da-da, for one, will opt out.
 

People riding in the dark in the old days. The smell of water was nice.

Oh, well. At least Da-da was HOT back then.

Agency Love

Happy Valentine's Day from your pals in Intelligence.
Don’t worry, it’s for freedom!

NSA-Approved Book Covers

Huh. Ok, then. Don’t worry, it’s for freedom!

NSA Unveils Kinder, Gentler Wallpaper

They're here for us, they really are. Don’t worry, it’s for freedom!

Back to School, Big-Brother Style

That's right, citizens: All school buses are bugged. No thoughts of your own.

Only Way to Have a Private Conversation These Days

The Cone of Silence. What? THE CONE OF SILENCE! WHAT?!

The Watcheroos ARE HERE

The Watcheroos! Spy on loved ones! Subvert state and federal laws! Poopoo the Constitution!

Hey, kids! The Watcheroos are here! Available in NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS and White House flack flavors! Collect 'em all and TRY to tell the difference! Spy on loved ones! Subvert state and federal laws! Poopoo the Constitution! Be your own worst enemy! Get 'em while supplies last, or until the Motherships arrive. Just in time for Halloween costume pre-game planning.

Don't Think of it as 24/7 Surveillance...

Don't think of it as 24/7 surveillance. Think of it as your own
Reality TV Show! Just don't do or think anything wrong. Ever.

Bolt Outta the Blue... in Your Toaster?

Aiiiee!

Zeus hurled it. Dr. Frankenstein used it. The monster lived it. Eldritch ZAP of dreams and horror movies, it's even used to describe sudden inspiration -- like the rather hackneyed title of this post.

Lightning strikes the earth approx. 100 times every second, 8.64 million times a day, 259.2 million times a month, 3.1 billion times a year. (Note: Wikipedia has a lower figure.) And besides creating pretty light shows and some fairly complex chemistry, it's pretty much all going to waste.

SHOCK AND AWE

Scary to some, would lightning scare you that much if you could harness and store its cumulative energy? The answer is NO. "Lightning Farms" could be installed places with high lightning potential, like Colorado Springs. Global weather changes should spawn whole orders of magnitude increases in lightning. If this blue-white dragon could be tamed, it could even spawn extra-planetary energy systems for astronauts and future colonists to other planets. We know other planets like Venus, Jupiter and Saturn have lightning -- in fact, Jupiter has epic lightning that must be truly amazing to behold.

Lightning just happens to repeatedly strike those developing parts of the earth that could use the energy the most.

IF YOU BUILD IT...

If we could somehow harness lightning, we'd be getting about 30,000 amps of electricity for an average bolt, enough to make steam on a moderate scale and drive turbines. Bigger strikes have about 120,000 amps. Sure, that's not that much energy when compared to how much people use, but multiply by the total number of lightning strikes and you've got a potential for 93.3 trillion amps, or 1.6 trillion megajoules -- 1.6 x 10^18 joules. That's 1.6 sextillion joules, or... one exajoule.

Global energy usage today is about 550 exajoules per year. Yeah, read that again. We use 10X more energy today than we did a century ago.

Of course, Da-da makes this lightning-grab sound easy. Lightning is devilishly complicated, with both positive and negative charged bolts, cloud-to-cloud, cloud-to-ground, space-to-chicken, etc. Positive lightning, which comes fro the tops of the highest clouds, makes up about only 5% of total lightning strikes -- but yields 300,000 amps and a billion volts, and of course much higher temperatures. Positive lightning can bring down planes, and has done so, which is why pilots work so hard to avoid it.

[Speaking of planes, it's possible that the water vapor (and whatever else a plane might be leaving behind) could make a path-of-least-resistance for lightning... or perhaps other high-energy sources, HAARP for instance, those contrails creating a kind of high-altitude energy grid for whatever purposes that might serve. Bet you could even use it to spy on people.]

ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION

Speaking of spying on people, lasers have been used to do just that as well as create pathways for lightning. If the incoming energy exceeded the outgoing, and it could be reliably sourced and stored, then that could be one method toward lightning as an alternative energy source. Then again, lighting -- for reasons we don't yet understand -- releases X-rays (which are really just localized gamma rays). So, that pretty blue eye-melting glow plus the incredible noise and non-stop lightning flashes might be a bit too much for a nearby population to endure. Unless they like light shows. And non-stop thunder. It's a tourist attraction! It's a power plant! Stop it, you're both right.

Sure, some have argued that there's not that much energy in one lightning bolt, 'cause there isn't, but if you make up that deficit with sheer volume? And supplement between-storm usage with solar panels? AND somehow harness (and shield yourself from) those ambient X-rays? It's intriguing.

ENTER THE FMC (FREAKING METRIC CRAPLOAD)

Ok, NOW let's think about lightning's source.

Lightning is static electricity generated by all those mega-gajillions of air molecules rubbing against each other all over the place, tickled by EM dynamos of both the earth and sun, pummeled by gamma rays and meteors striking it... blah blah blah. Basically, there is a Freaking Metric Crapload (FMC) of energy floating around over our heads 24/7/365.25... and you don't necessarily need a lightning rod to harness it.

Tesla, who gave the word, "amazing" a run for its money, showed how you could place a pole in the ground, say 50 feet tall or taller, and generate electricity from the differences in electrical potential from the top of the pole to the bottom -- with a secure ground. This is like slow lightning, much easier to harness, manage and deploy. (Tesla noted that to make this work, you had to have a very reliable ground, either down to groundwater level, or using a tree with roots touching the water table.) Hm. Maybe that's what this very interesting thing used to be, long ago, a base to a larger electrical structure, though it's probably just an amazing example of ancient metallurgy, one we cannot date and cannot reproduce.

Basically, energy and lost ideas are all around you. Get creative.

You don't want to look like this guy.

DON'T PULL A BEN

NEEDLESS TO SAY, If you choose to experiment, BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL AROUND LIGHTNING and electricity. One amp can kill you. Don't go sticking copper rods in the ground and attaching wires and standing next to the damn things during electrical storms. Ben Franklin was lucky he wasn't killed. (He flew kites with wires instead of string into electrical storms.) Use thought experiments, please. And some common sense. Which is not common anymore. So use uncommon sense. And Vive Muchachos.

Just trying to help the ballclub and all that. Tesla did much more, securing some 300 patents (!) worldwide, but alas, he died penniless. The guy invented radio (not Marconi), A/C motors, A/C current, fluorescent lighting and about a zillion other things that you and your kitty cat use every single freaking day and he died broke, his journals stolen and hoarded by the government after his death. Tesla invented the modern world you live in and you just thought he was a bad '80s band.

Anyway, if any of the above sparks an idea and you somehow make a zillion dollars -- or save a zillion -- please remember to return here and DONATE to Da-da a small fraction, thereof -- a return stroke, if you will. Da-da could use it. Unlike Tesla, Da-da has dependents.

Who's your exajoule da-da?

Main data source: Wikipedia.

Get That Dinosaur Outta There

So long. Don't let the next era hit you in the butt on the way out.

Da-da rarely does this kinda thing, but this must-read bears reposting. It's only a matter of time before someone high-up breaks ranks and spills their guts.

US rulers fear American people

veteransnewsnow.com/2013/06/24/224729-us-rulers-fear-american-people/

What the disclosures of former CIA contractor Edward Snowden show perhaps above all else is just how petrified the leaders of the United States have become – of ordinary citizens both in the US and around the world. When we say “leaders” we mean the ruling elite – the top one percent of the financial-corporate-military-industrial complex and its bought- and paid-for politicians.

by Finian Cunningham


The international manhunt by the US authorities for Snowden, which has accelerated with his flight to Moscow to evade extradition from Hong Kong, is indicative of the desperation in Washington’s elitist establishment to quash him and what he is revealing about their despotic rule.

Today, the US has evolved into a dystopia, not a democracy, where obscene wealth and privilege stand in the face of massive poverty and misery. One indicator of this abysmal inequality is the fact that the 400 richest Americans have more material wealth than 155 million of their fellow citizens combined. Another datum: some 50 million Americans – a sixth of the population – are surviving on food handouts. Unemployment, homelessness, suicide rates, prescription drug addiction, rampant gun crime all speak in different ways of social meltdown.

American society is collapsing from the sheer weight of its decrepit capitalist economy. The social system is unsustainable. It is like a distended rotten sack that is coming apart at the seams from inexorable burgeoning pressure. This is not unique to the US. All around the world, people are rebelling against the inequity of crony capitalism – there is only one form of capitalism – from Europe to the Arab Middle East, from Turkey to Brazil.

But the US is a phenomenal case in point of collapsing capitalist society. It’s hard to believe that not so long ago, within living memory; the US was regarded as the economic paradigm of the world. Now it more and more resembles a giant sprawling ghetto of unremitting poverty that is interspersed with a few gated rich communities, the latter populated by the top one percent of society.

This is the historical context for fully understanding the significance of gargantuan state surveillance by the elite against the citizenry, as revealed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The American ruling class, as with their elite counterparts around the world, are figuratively sitting within their privileged niches and petrified by the mounting discontent “outside”. Through their criminal ransacking and rigging of wealth, the powers-that-be have through their own insatiable greed created a powerful potential enemy -virtually the entire population, both in the US and around the world.

In this highly unstable situation of elites and masses that bankrupt capitalism has furnished, “democracy” can no longer be tolerated by the rulers. That is why the rulers have embarked on massive information gathering, monitoring, spying and surveillance. It is all about maintaining “control” of a precarious and explosive disequilibrium.

One basic duty of any state is to protect its citizens from foreign enemies. Enemies are conventionally understood to be state militaries or non-state terrorist groups. But from Snowden’s revelations of US government surveillance of telecommunications, the vast bulk of America’s spying is on civilians. The phone calls, emails, cyber chats and photos of billions of people all around the world are vacuumed up and stored for analysis. Snowden disclosed in one instance how Chinese hospitals and universities – not military installations – were among the many international civilian targets for American government snooping.

US national security officials defend this global dragnet method as a necessary way to trawl for terrorists. Last week, the chief of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander told the American Senate that more than 50 terrorist plots against the US had been foiled by the NSA’s interception of civilian communications. The evidence for the alleged thwarted terrorist attacks cited by General Alexander was sketchy at best, so we are obliged to accept the NSA’s dubious word on its self-serving claims of success.

Even if we accept this claim on face value, an alleged terror threat numbering 50, gleaned from billions of communication files, is a negligible ratio, akin to a needle in a haystack. That means two things. First, the statistical terror threat against US citizens is likewise negligible to the point of being virtually non-existent. As Snowden himself pointed out, the chances of Americans dying from slipping in their bathtub are far great than from terrorism. The second thing is that the official pretext for global, industrial-scale infringement of privacy – that is, national security of its citizens – is grotesquely disproportionate, and therefore unjustifiable.

In the aftermath of these revelations, US President Barack Obama and his security officials are claiming that the infringements of individual privacy are minor. “No-one is listening to your phone calls,” said Obama. He also added that there must be a trade-off between national security and what he called “minor breaches” of civil liberties.

These assurances from Obama and US National Intelligence Director James Clapper, among others, are rejected by Snowden and other NSA whistleblowers, as well as by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is litigating against the American government over the recent revelations. Official claims of limited surveillance and breaches are also repudiated by various digital privacy advocates, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as by common knowledge of American constitutional rights.

Edward Snowden says that when he was working at the NSA, he had clearance to hack into anyone’s email “including the president’s”. That is far from “minor”.

Another former senior employee of the NSA, Thomas Drake, who was prosecuted under the US Espionage Act for similar whistleblowing in 2011, says that the American government and its secret agencies have systematically “subverted the constitution” by arrogating the power to tap into all and any communications that they desire. In a narrow sense, Obama may be right that “no-one is listening to your phone calls”. Not yet, at least, but the executive powers and technology are in place for this totalitarian system of eavesdropping to be switched on.

Drake writes, “The supposed oversight, combined with enabling legislation – the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court, the congressional committees – is all a kabuki dance, predicated on the national security claim that we need to find a threat. The reality is: they [the US government] just want it all, period.” He added: “They have this extraordinary system: in effect, a 24/7 panopticon on a vast scale that it is gazing at you with an all-seeing eye.” 

It seems an incredible lack of judgment among some alternative commentators who have dismissed Snowden’s revelations as trivial. Worse still, some commentators have even insinuated that the former NSA analyst is a witting or unwitting player in an elaborate CIA hoax aimed at intimidating citizens from using mass communications.

Such views badly underestimate the extent of American government criminality towards its own sacrosanct constitution and the deeply corrupting implications that has for democracy.

Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story earlier this month, has said, “The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or terrorists, but at them.”

Greenwald adds, “And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been ‘harmed’ is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability.”

Since the US Espionage Act was instituted nearly a century ago in 1917, there have been a total of 10 prosecutions against American government employees deemed to have broken the law and compromised national security through whistleblowing. One of those was former State Department staffer Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, revealing the spurious legal grounds for the American genocidal war on Vietnam.

Seven out of the total 10 prosecutions against whistleblowers – 70 percent – have occurred under the Obama administrations. That figure alone tells of a growing anxiety within the American ruling class. That anxiety is related to their increasingly criminal secret powers and the ongoing subversion of democracy. The American rulers are jealously guarding their criminal behaviour and that is why they are hunting down with a vengeance people like Snowden who are seen to be exposing this criminality. It is something of an irony that this week Snowden had to flee to Russia (the former “evil empire” in the words of late American President Ronald Reagan) in order to avoid extradition to the US where he is charged with felonies under the Espionage Act.

Former NSA employee Thomas Drake says that when he was working as an analyst during the Cold War he was assigned to monitor the espionage activities of Stalinist East Germany and its secret Stasi police. Drake says that the Stasi had an obsession to “knowing everything” about its citizens and kept a huge archive of paper files. However, this voluminous archiving is a fraction of what is stored and accessible by American secret services owing to the internet and digital technology. Drake describes the American NSA as “a Stasi on steroids”.

In the 1970s, US Senator Frank Church led a groundbreaking investigation into illicit American government covert operations. Church warned then that if the secret powers of the NSA were to ever become deployed against the American public – as opposed to “foreign enemies” – then that country’s democracy would be finished. That is precisely the present abysmal outcome of secret US state powers.

There are two corollaries of the imploding capitalist system, for which the US still remains the lynchpin for historical reasons. The first is the increasing militarism of the US and its Western allies to compensate for this economic demise. This militarism has evolved over the past decade since the purported 9/11 terror attacks on the US in 2001 to become a condition of “permanent war”. The present US-led covert war in Syria and underway against Iran are part of a continuum of imperialist war-making that connects Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, as well as Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Mali. This state of permanent war is needed by the waning capitalist powers to try to assert control of natural resources, markets, finance and investment against perceived rivals, such as Russia and China.

The other corollary of the historic failure of capitalism, and in particular in the US, is the imperative to assert control over social meltdown and rebellion. That is why the growth in militarism abroad has gone hand-in-glove with the intensification of surveillance powers and repression against citizens at home. American, and Western, democracy is, for all intents and purposes, a dead corpse. Only criminal wars and repression of its citizens are keeping the moribund system on a life-support system.

As Thomas Drake noted, “Since the [US] government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out.”

The rulers of America are despotic elites who are living in fear and trepidation of their own people and of people power around the world rising in rebellion against the misrule of capitalism.

Source : Press Tv

Short URL: http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/?p=224729

One of the pithy commenters (hit the link) seriously hit the nail on the head:

"They are scared sh*tless that Snowden will expose their complicity in 9/11.

They need the secret massive blackmail/enslavement surveillance grid to protect them from the noose."

Childhood's End. 

*1984* is Not an Instruction Manual for the Future