Infopolicy – Christian Engström: The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week’s hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone.
The father of Linus Torvalds, Nils Torvalds, is a Member of the European Parliament for Finland. This week, Nils Torvalds took part in the European Parliament’s hearing on the ongoing mass surveillance, and brought a revelation:
The United States security service NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux.
“France will not give way on nuclear proliferation, so long as we are not certain that Iran has renounced nuclear arms, we will keep in place all our demands and sanctions,” he said afterwards. He didn’t explain why France and Israel have the right to threaten humanity with nuclear weapons and others do not have the right of self-defense.
This wasn’t just diplomatic chit-chat, Israel and France are getting as close as they haven’t been since the 1950s. Hollande had arrived with seven of his government ministers, tens of French businessmen and many journalists. They came to sign many deals publicly and a few secretly.
Here is the latest report on the Fukushima catastrophe that I think is credible. I take it as a given that the Japanese government, TEPCO, and certain branches of the American government are either lying or don't actually know the truth about Fukushima, and put out information whose real purpose is not to inform but to keep people calm. The fact is there has never ! been an event like this, and no one really knows quite what the implications are.
Almost every day it seems there is more and more information about the American Gulag, one of the great shames of the United States. This story is a measure of the abject failure of the Congress and the President to serve the interests of national wellness. The privatization of prisons is just the final step in a long process of creating the new American slavery. Given that the average net worth of a U.S. Congressperson from either chamber is $1,066,000 and the average net worth of an American family is $66,000 is it any wonder they seem to have no sense of national wellness, or what is really going on in the lives of average Americans?
This is the latest in the Superbug trend, and it is very scary. Having experienced what contracting one of these Superbugs did to my late brother Alan, and my late wife, Hayden, I have a direct sense of what this story is about. This problem is human created, arising from the over prescription of antibiotics, dumping unused ones ! into the toilet thus polluting the ground water and, particularly, the over-use of antibiotics in industrial animal husbandry. Yet the governments of the world, led by the U.S., just can't seem to put the welfare of the many ahead of the profits of the few. See also the current issue of the Medical journal The Lancet: http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/antibiotic-resistance-the-need-for-global-solutions.
I don't eat chicken nuggets, but I know many people do. Here's what you're eating. Bon Appétit. What I do object to is the fact that this, or things like it, are all that is available in some neighborhoods or rural areas.
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40th anniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende.
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Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other nations might get ideas about independence, were the very reason for the coup and even the partial moves toward nationalization instituted by Allende could not be tolerated by the US business class.
Henry Kissinger was national security advisor and one of the principle architects – perhaps the principle architect – of the coup in Chile. US-instigated coups were nothing new in 1973, certainly not in Latin America, and Kissinger and his boss Richard Nixon were carrying on a violent tradition that spanned the breadth of the 20th century and continues in the 21st – see, for example, Venezuela in 2002 (failed) and Honduras in 2009 (successful).
Where possible, such as in Guatemala in 1954 and Brazil in 1964, coups were the preferred method for dealing with popular insurgencies. In other instances, direct invasion by US forces such as happened on numerous occasions in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and many other places, was the fallback option.
The coup in Santiago occurred as US aggression in Indochina was finally winding down after more than a decade. From 1969 through 1973, it was Kissinger again, along with Nixon, who oversaw the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
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It is impossible to know with precision how many were killed during those four years; all the victims were considered enemies, including the vast majority who were non-combatants, and the US has never been much interested in calculating the deaths of enemies.
Estimates of Indochinese killed by the US for the war as a whole start at four million and are likely more, perhaps far more. It can thus be reasonably extrapolated that probably more than a million, and certainly hundreds of thousands, were killed while Kissinger and Nixon were in power.
In addition, countless thousands of Indochinese have died in the years since from the affects of the massive doses of Agent Orange and other Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction unleashed by the US. Many of us here know (or, sadly, knew) soldiers who suffered from exposure to such chemicals; multiply their numbers by 1,000 or 10,000 or 50,000 – again, it’s impossible to know with accuracy – and we can begin to understand the impact on those who live in and on the land that was so thoroughly poisoned as a matter of US policy.
Studies by a variety of organizations including the United Nations also indicate that at least 25,000 people have died in Indochina since war’s end from unexploded US bombs that pocket the countryside, with an equivalent number maimed. As with Agent Orange, deaths and ruined lives from such explosions continue to this day. So 40 years on, the war quite literally goes on for the people of Indochina, and it is likely it will go on for decades more.
Near the end of his time in office, Kissinger and his new boss Gerald Ford pre-approved the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s invasion of East Timor in 1975, an illegal act of aggression again carried out with weapons made in and furnished by the US.
This is a book review of the new volume by Peter C. Gøtzsche, Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare (New York: Radcliffe Publishing, 2013). It presents the evidence for an aspect of the pharmaceutical industry that almost never gets discussed, but that you should be aware of.
The book features Forewords by two heavy hitters, Richard Smith, former editor of BMJ, and Drummond Rennie, long-time deputy editor of JAMA. If you read between the lines, the two editors both convey more or less the same message-this guy comes across as a raving lunatic, but it would be a shame if you were put off by that tone, because he actually has something important to say.
By way of the lunacy quotient, I append a representative list of quotes:
‘In the United States and Europe, drugs are the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.”(1)
‘The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs. Blatant lies that-in all the cases I have studied-have continued after the statements were proven wrong.”(2)
‘The book addresses a general system failure caused by widespread crime, corruption and impotent drug regulation in need of radical reforms. Some readers will find my book one-sided and polemic, but there is little point in describing what goes well in a system that is out of control. If a criminologist undertakes a study of muggers, no one expects a ‘balanced’ account mentioning that many muggers are good family men.”(2)
‘I dedicate this book to the many honest people working in the drug industry who are equally appalled as I am about the repetitive criminal actions of their superiors and their harmful consequences for the patients and our national economies. Some of these insiders have told me they would wish their top bosses were sent to jail, as the threat of this is the only thing that might deter them from continuing committing crimes.”(3)
‘[Industry] clinical trials are rarely research in the true sense of the word…it is marketing disguised as research. The trials are often flawed by design, additional flaws are introduced during data analysis, and the misleading results are spun to make sure that whatever an honest trial might have shown, the trial concludes something that is useful for boosting sales.”(87)
Phi Beta Iota: They provide more intelligence at less cost than the clandestine service. They also know almost nothing about holistic analytics or full spectrum human open source intelligence.
