“There will be no peace in this area, as long as everyone is not living among his own people,” says the Serb mayor. And Bato Princip, the assassin's descendant, warns the rest of Europe against the illusion that everyone has learned his lesson in the place where World War I began, “because in this country, there are always, unfortunately, three different truths: one for Serbs, one for Croats and one for Muslims.”
A couple months ago there was a TRIAL in DC involving an active duty officer in Afghanistan who passed a threat warning via NIPRNET – and was thrown under the bus even though the threat was valid and an attack of the site occurred.
Remember a researcher named Gilles-Eric Seralini, his 2012 GMO study, and the controversy that swirled around it?
He fed rats GMOs, in the form of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn, and they developed tumors. Some died. The study was published in the journal, Food and Chemical Toxicology. Pictures of the rats were published.
A wave of biotech-industry criticism ensued. Pressure built. “Experts” said the study was grossly unscientific, its methods were unprofessional, and Seralini was biased against GMOs from the get-go. Monsanto didn’t like Seralini at all.
The journal which published the Seralini study caved in and retracted it.
Why? Not because Seralini did anything unethical, not because he plagiarized material, not because he was dishonest in any way, but because:
He used rats which (supposedly) had an inherent tendency to develop tumors (the Sprague-Dawley strain), and because he used too few rats (10). That’s it. Those were Seralini’s errors.
Well, guess what? Eight years prior to Seralini, Monsanto also did a rat-tumor-GMO study and published it in the very same journal. Monsanto’s study showed there were no tumor problems in the rats. But here’s the explosive kicker. Monsanto used the same strain of rats that Seralini did and same number of rats (10). And nobody complained about it.
Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumer’s Union, explains in an interview with Steve Curwood at loe.org:
According to Vice contributor Kelly Carlin, the term “sharing economy” has become a misnomer. By attaching the word “sharing” to a service it gives clients a warm fuzzy feeling, like attaching “green” or “all natural.” Carlin calls it ‘sharewashing.’ “Peel back the wrapper and you find that beneath its promised efficiencies and innovations, the sharing economy moniker can sometimes whitewash operations that are tax-shifting, labour-regulation-skirting and tip-stealing,” she writes.
1. After 9/11, the military and intelligence community went to war while America went to the mall. Score a failure for the Bush Administration.
2. While I certainly neither present nor involved and at the risk of both speaking ill of the dead taking issue what Leon Panetta said at the time, the Chief of Base at Camp Chapman (Khost), Afghanistan was unqualified for the position held.. She may have been a credible analyst but she wasn't an operator by either experience or training and based on everything I've read and watching the move “Zero Dark Thirty,” I think she was personally responsible for not preventing the deaths at Khost Base, including Jeremy Wise, on that day in December, 2009.
Writer Corry Doctorow may be just suffering from deep winter blues, but if not, and he's correct, his brief musings on the near future of the net are ominous:
“Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and f*ck you in every possible way.”
