As we said in the movie THRIVE, “Every phone call and email we send is collected and archived, and can be inspected at any time.”
Some viewers were skeptical… “they wouldn’t do that even if they could, which they can’t”. Fast forward to the days of Edward Snowden style wake-up calls, and it’s actually being admitted. Proven liar-to-Congress, James “No…Not wittingly” Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, has finally admitted that the NSA surveils this country’s entire domestic population.
The movement to end the Surveillance State is finally getting serious. With the failure by Congress to rein in the NSA — although the heroic Rep. Justin Amash nearly succeeded in doing so — activists on the state level are mounting a campaign that promises to hit Big Brother where it really hurts — by cutting off the NSA's water supply at its Bluffdale, Utah, Data Center.
A bill introduced in the Utah legislature by state representative Marc Roberts (R-Santaquin) would cut off the water supply to the NSA's massive facility which will gobble up 1.7 million gallons of water per day — in a state already hit hard by a region-wide drought.
The city of Amsterdam has approved a new set of rules that allows residents to rent out their homes on Airbnb with less red tape. Previously, Amsterdam required renters to secure permits in order to list on Airbnb, a move that wasn’t exactly a ban, but did serve as an obstacle to would-be hosts.
Under the new policy, citizens can classify their houses as “Private Rentals.” They’ll still have to pay taxes on the income, and renters that cross the line into running a business may be subject to investigation.
Airbnb’s Head of Global Public Policy David Hantman celebrated the rules as “great news” for the startup’s customers.
The spread of machine gambling offers a portent of other economic developments
Tim Harford, Undercover Economist
What if the future of capitalism is not to be found in Shenzhen, Abu Dhabi or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab – but in the Nevada desert? Natasha Dow Schüll, an anthropologist, has spent 15 years conducting field research in Las Vegas, culminating in a disturbing book, Addiction by Design. We are used to thinking of Vegas as a city of gaudy spectacle and the green baize of poker, blackjack and roulette tables. It is now a city of slot machines, which have grown like weeds because they are fantastically profitable. And the spread of machine gambling offers a worrisome portent of developments elsewhere in the economy.
Three slot-machine innovations stand out: first, confusion by design; second, addictiveness by design; third, the use of play money. All have been made possible by the digital automation of the machine itself, which in Las Vegas as elsewhere eliminates the skilled service jobs of croupiers and replaces them with highly paid jobs in interface design and low-paid work as a security guard or waitress.
Further dimensions of the growing surveillance state that is placing the world under scrutiny. If you think this is just about terrorism you haven't been paying attention. This is a growing information matrix whose purpose is to allow a small virtual corporate state elite that, in turn, controls the U.S. and other governments, to control the world. It sounds like some loony conspiracy tale — but it i! s true. Its very size makes in seem implausible. Once again we owe a vote of thanks to Edward Snowden. Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm
JAMES RISEN and LAURA POITRAS – The New York Times
BREAKING NEWS: We have found a resolution that validates and integrates three apparently inconsistent positions (on the use of big nukes, small nukes and nanothermite) from respected experts on 9/11.
The contentious debate over how the Twin Towers were destroyed has pitted those favoring large (“basement”) nukes against those identifying small nukes distributed in the elevator shafts throughout the buildings against those promoting thermite (or “nanothermite”).
The Anonymous Physicist has drawn a parallel between the efforts that have been made to obfuscate and confound the public about the death of JFK, which has been comparable to what has been done in relation to 9/11. As he observes,
We learn two things: that USAF and USN were out-fought by North Vietnamese fighters over North Viet-Nam, and that SIGINT made a huge difference when it focused on supporting tactical air combat in near real time.
