When President George W. Bush was pretending to want to avoid a war on Iraq while constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going, we had a feeling he was lying. After all, he was a Republican. But it was after the war was raging away that we came upon things like the Downing Street Minutes and the White House Memo.
Now President Barack Obama is pretending to want to avoid a war on Iran and to want Israel not to start one, while constantly pushing laughably bad propaganda to get that war going. We might suspect a lack of sincerity, given the insistence that Iran put an end to a program that the U.S. government simultaneously says there is no evidence exists, given the increase in free weapons for Israel to $3.1 billion next year, given the ongoing protection of Israel at the U.N. from any accountability for crimes, given the embrace of sanctions highly unlikely to lead to anything other than greater prospects of war, and given Obama's refusal to take openly illegal war “off the table.” We might suspect that peace was not the ultimate goal, except of course that Obama is a Democrat.
(PhysOrg.com) — University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, also offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale.
“This is a clean way to generate clean fuel,” said Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Electronic microscopic image of a nanoforest, or “3D branched nanowire array.” Green tint added for contrast. Image Credit: Wang Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
The trees’ vertical structure and branches are keys to capturing the maximum amount of solar energy, according to Wang. That’s because the vertical structure of trees grabs and adsorbs light while flat surfaces simply reflect it, Wang said, adding that it is also similar to retinal photoreceptor cells in the human eye. In images of Earth from space, light reflects off of flat surfaces such as the ocean or deserts, while forests appear darker.
Wang’s team has mimicked this structure in their “3D branched nanowire array” which uses a process called photoelectrochemical water-splitting to produce hydrogen gas. Water splitting refers to the process of separating water into oxygen and hydrogen in order to extract hydrogen gas to be used as fuel. This process uses clean energy with no green-house gas byproduct. By comparison, the current conventional way of producing hydrogen relies on electricity from fossil fuels.
By harvesting more sun light using the vertical nanotree structure, Wang’s team has developed a way to produce more hydrogen fuel efficiently compared to planar counterparts where light is simply reflected off the surface. Image Credit: Wang Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Cyber criminals are not the only ones buying software flaws, say sources.
The Australian government is buying computer security weaknesses found by hackers before they are sold on the black market, as part of its defence strategy, claim those at the coal face of cyber security.
“The Australian government has developed these capabilities as part of ASIO, DSD [Defence Signals Directorate], CSOC [Cyber Security Operations Centre] and possibly others. But they are purely for research and defence,” says an Australian security consultant who wishes to remain anonymous.
He says while the government won't admit it, buying vulnerabilities is an obvious part of “gathering intelligence”.
. . . . . . .
“There is a trade in weaponised exploits being provided by hackers to the security vendors,” confirms another source, a hacker, who spoke to Fairfax's IT Proon the condition of anonymity.
Phi Beta Iota: Were Western governments responsible (China-Russia seems to be doing better), there would be an international Center of Computational Mathematics and Security, we would all be using open source software, and bugs would not exist past beta. It is clear that cyber-bugs, like the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, both fraudulent, are desired by governments as justification for spending on irresponsible government.
Thomas Drake on life inside the National Security Agency and the price of truth telling
Matthew Harwood
Salon, 7 March 2012
Thomas Drake, the whistle-blower whom the Obama administration tried and failed to prosecute for leaking information about waste, fraud and abuse at the National Security Agency, now works at an Apple store in Maryland. In an interview with Salon, Drake laughed about the time he confronted Attorney General Eric Holder at his store while Holder perused the gadgetry on display with his security detail around him. When Drake started asking Holder questions about his case, America’s chief law enforcement officer turned and fled the store.
But the humor drained away quickly from Drake’s thin and tired face as he recounted his ordeal since 2010 when federal prosecutors charged him with violating the Espionage Act for retaining classified information they believed he would pass on to then Baltimore Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman. While Drake never disclosed classified information, he did pass on unclassified information to Gorman revealing that the NSA had wasted billions of taxpayers’ dollars on Trailblazer, a contractor-heavy intelligence software program that failed to find terrorist threats in the tsunami of digital data the agency was sucking up globally — and sometimes unconstitutionally. While Trailblazer [SAIC] burned through cash, in the process enriching many NSA employees turned contractors, Drake found that another software program named ThinThread had already met the core requirements of a federal acquisition regulation that governed the proposed system at a sliver of the cost, all while protecting American civil liberties at the code level. The NSA leadership, however, had already bet their careers on Trailblazer. So Drake blew the whistle, first to Congress, then to the Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office, and finally, and fatefully, to Gorman.
Syria: Deputy Oil Minister Abdo Hussameddin announced his resignation and departure from the Ba'ath Party to side with the opposition against President Al-Asad's regime. If confirmed, he would be the highest-ranking official to defect, and the third member of the administration to do so. A video of his declaration was posted on YouTube and repeated around the world.
Comment: Most news outlets reported this man as the highest-level official to defect, which means very little. A lengthy search showed the man was a Baath Party member for a long time, but failed to discover whether the defector was a Christian, Druze, Sunni, Alawite or member of another group. The implications of the defection hinge largely on details not available in the public domain.
Syria celebrated the 49th anniversary of the Syrian coup by Hafez al-Asad on 8 March 1963. Revolution Day is 8 March.
Correction: The place names cited by the Red Crescent official and reported in the 7 March edition of NightWatch are governates, not cities and towns. Syria has 14 governates – often translated as provinces – which administer 61 districts.
It is important to enter an instability problem at the right level, meaning at the level of political organization that provides diagnostic and prognostic results. The international press persists in describing unrest in terms of governates. Entering the instability problem at this level results in distorted narratives and exaggerated reports about the strength of the opposition and the weakness of the government.
Readers are justified in wondering why the government in Damascus has not collapsed. The reason is that the government is not now and has never been threatened by a governate-level insurrection. The fight is in local neighborhoods and most are on the political or geographic periphery of the governates, posing little threat to central authority.
Syria is about the size of North Dakota, according to the CIA World Factbook, with a few differences. Syria has 61 districts which more or less correspond to North Dakota's 53 counties. North Dakota's counties, however, are not organized into governates or provinces.
Syria supports more than 22.5 million people in the same space that North Dakota supports just under 700,000, but with a lot less water. North Dakota has no cities as populous as Syria's Homs which contains over a million people. North Dakota has no sea ports or borders with hostile enemy states.
NightWatch has sought to enter the Syrian instability problem at the district or sub-district level so as to guard against bias and get finer ground truth granularity about just what is happening in Syrian neighborhoods.
For example, a careful survey shows that today the Free Syrian Army and its supporting web sites posted situation reports indicating that this force engaged in six operations in five different governates on 7 March. Several were exchanges of gunfire in which no one was injured and one was erection of a roadblock, in a territory the size of North Dakota.
This data supports leaked information attributed to US intelligence persons that there isn't much of a Free Syrian Army. There is unrest in Syria, but there really isn't much of an insurgency. For the purposes of comparison, in Iraq in 2006, more than 300 firefights occurred daily. In Afghanistan last spring, there were around 50 firefights daily and hundreds of incidents involving makeshift explosives.
Syrian security forces were busy. Opposition sources reported dozens of activities in nine of the 14 governates. A closer look showed that the activities were concentrated in about a dozen of the 61 districts.
Nine governates sounds like a big insurrection. Unrest in 12 districts presents a far more manageable security problem than nine governates supposedly out of control, but in fact not. No governates are out of control and apparently neither are any of the 61 districts.
A still finer focus showed that most of the opposition activities were small, brief street demonstrations (which were not further defined), according to the opposition's own postings. There were no clashes except as noted above; no bombings and no terror attacks on 7 March.
Most of the government operations were local neighborhood sweeps that encountered no resistance. Other reported government actions included over flights of aircraft, some vague armor movements and shelling. The opposition sources that posted the reports were not careful to distinguish whether the operations were by law enforcement and police personnel, paramilitary militias or the Syrian armed forces. Most were attributed to “thugs,” which suggests the paramilitary militias.
Unfortunately the sources also were not specific about which sub-districts or neighborhoods were under stress from government operations. Each of the 61 Syrian districts has multiple sub-districts what are called, nawahi. It is not yet possible to track activity at the nawahi level, but it would show a more fine grained definition of the status of the instability problem in Syria.
Phi Beta Iota: CNN and BBC both appear to be taking direction from US covert operations / media influence staffs. Both appear unintelligent and dishonest. We hold NIGHTWATCH and its editor in the highest regard, consistently superior to the larger organizations that lack both intelligence and integrity. We note with interest that the Syrian Diaspora and the crisis mapping communities are relatively silent on this matter.
German lawmakers are to review Bundesbank controls of and management of Germany’s gold reserves. Parliament’s Budget Committee will assess how the central bank manages its inventory of Germany’s gold bullion bars that are believed to be stored not only in Frankfurt, but at locations outside Germany, according to German newspaper Bild.
What's most interesting about all this is that Germany may follow in Hugo Chavez’s footsteps and repatriate their gold to Germany so as to have direct possession of and ownership of their gold reserves. It's really the only way to protect a central bank's gold ownership, since by simply going in and asking the New York Fed to show Germany “their” gold, the Fed can walk them in and show them a pile of gold and tell them that it is theirs. The next day they can walk Chinese officials in and show the Chinese the exact same pile of gold and tell them that the gold is theirs.
Possession is the only sure protection.
Germany’s huge gold reserves – 3,396.3 tonnes of gold are some 73.7% of Germany’s national foreign exchange reserves, and are held not only in Germany but at the New York Fed, in London and in Paris. Dumb.
What kind of pressure will the U.S. put on Germany to prevent them from repatriating their gold? The banksters clearly have German Chancellor Merkel in their pocket, but this is unlikely to be influence that is deep into German political leaders. Thus, a run on gold, started by Germany, is not an impossibility.
In this scenario, the noise you would hear is the spike in gold as Bernanke prints more dollars for open market purchases of gold to fill demand for delivery by various central banks. Yikes.
(ViaJamesMiller)
Phi Beta Iota: Germany is at least a year if not two behind China and Russia. Furthermore, what is really needed, apart from physical repossession and testing of all gold, is a complete audit of the New York Bank and all — without exception — all gold transferred to others after possession by the New York Bank. This should not be a political issue — this should be a stake in the heart of the Federal Reserve and central banking. Community banks and asset-based loans are the near-term solution for all who wish to disconnect from endemic fraud across the US banking system.
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