Anonymizer, the company that brings you free anonymous email facilities, called nyms, as well as similar secure services used by activists all over the world, is actually owned by Cubic Corporations, the parent company that owns Abraxis, which in turn owns Trapwire. So, it’s possible, if not probable that all those activists around the world who believe their emails are safe may well be sending messages that go straight into Trapwire, the surveillance system that monitors activists. This could be lifted straight out of a political conspiracy movie – but it isn’t. Furthermore, Cubic Corporation runs transport smart cards around the world, including USA, Australia and London (Oyster card): a link with Trapwire too?
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Hidden History: America’s Secret Drone War in Africa by David Axe
More secret bases. More and better unmanned warplanes. More frequent and deadly robotic attacks. Some five years after a U.S. Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle flew the type’s first mission over lawless Somalia, the shadowy American-led drone campaign in the Horn of Africa is targeting Islamic militants more ruthlessly than ever.
Thanks to media accounts, indirect official statements, fragmentary crash reports and one complaint by a U.N. monitoring group, we can finally begin to define — however vaguely — the scope and scale of the secret African drone war.
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8 More Unusual or Underated Crops for the Homestead – The Survival Podcast
Sometimes you just get a bit tired of all the negative things going on out there. Mid summer seems like some of the worst of those days, hot long days filled with news of encroachment on liberty, economic doom and more.
For me gardening and planting along with planning for future planting and homesteading activities offers me solace. It doesn’t fix the problems, as I said yesterday when I quoted Steven Covey, “While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.” Sadly we have many consequences to face but as Mr. Covey put it we do control our actions, NOW, today and tomorrow.
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NBC’s war for fun and profit by Glenn Greenwald
A new military-themed reality show from NBC, entitled “Stars Earn Stripes,” debuts tonight. The show “enthusiastically melds warfare and fame,” as a Washington Post review today put it. It features eight celebrities (using the loosest definition of that term) — such as husband-of-Sarah Todd Palin, former Superman Dean Cain, and former boy band member Nick Lachey — paired up with “military and law enforcement veterans, including a Green Beret, a SWAT officer, two Marine sergeants, a retired member of the Delta Force and two Navy SEALs”, whom NBC hails as the “Bad Ass Operatives.” They’re all under the “command” of Gen. Wesley Clark, who once actually thought he should be President, as he co-hosts this reality show with former Dancing with the Stars host Samantha Harris (subjecting oneself to the two preview videos below, one wonders how much NBC had to pay to purchase Gen. Clark’s dignity in full: probably more than the Terror group MEK paid him to become its loyal shill).
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Getting Away With Murder by William Blum
For more than half a century members of the United States foreign policy and military establishments have compiled a record of war crimes and crimes against humanity that the infamous beasts and butchers of history could only envy.
Not a single one of these American officials has come any closer to a proper judgment than going to see the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg”.
A man who destroyed a fleet of police cars by running them over with a tractor has become an internet folk hero.
Roger Pion destroyed six of the vehicles in a ‘monster-truck’-sized farm tractor, reportedly in a rage at his recent arrest for resisting arrest and marijuana possession.
Surrounded by Free State supporters, Adam “Ademo” Meuller, 30, was found guilty of illegal wiretapping Monday and sentenced to three months in prison.
The Hillsborough County Superior Court jury deliberated 50 minutes before returning verdicts on the three charges. Mueller, of Jackson, Wis., has maintained that he did nothing wrong and remained defiant as Assistant Hillsborough County Attorney Michael Valentine said his intentions were “to disrupt, to be disobedient, to slow down the court system and clog it.”
These days every news cycle brings us more thoroughly disturbing reasons to be concerned about pervasive digital monitoring in the United States. This week things got extra interesting with the revelation of an enormous, shadowy surveillance company with deep ties to the CIA: Trapwire exploded on the surveillance scene like a bat out of hell. And people are justifiably freaked out about it.
But people are also publishing a lot of information that seems to have appeared out of the ether, grounded in no documentation whatsoever. There is no need to speculate or conjure surveillance bogeymen where they do not exist. The documented facts speak loudly enough.
The following sworn declaration of William Binney, a former employee of the NSA and specialist in traffic analysis, was filed July 2, 2012 in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s case against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) regarding their illegal domestic surveillance programs which, according to Binney “are consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications” inside the U.S. Thanks to Jacob Appelbaum for originally drawing attention to the declaration.
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Listener Calls for 8-3-12 – The Survival Podcast
What is the best way to pay off a mortgage early
What to grow instead of grass for a useful “lawn”
Healthy but unproductive garden plants and getting them producing
Building community and homesteading with BBQs and garden tours
Choosing a gold vs silver ratio for your precious metal holdings
A lesson from the NH system of government and the Free State Project + more
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Australian Trapwire Articles Removed by Barrett Brown
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Virginia Farmer Holds Party for Little Girls, Sells Tomatoes and Yarn, Gets Slammed With $15,000 in Fines by Katherine Mangu-Ward
Martha Boneta owns a small farm in Fauquier County, Virginia, where she recently hosted a birthday party for eight 10-year-old girls. They wore hats, picked veggies, and made goat’s milk soap. The county says she should have obtain a license before hosting such an event and hit her with a $5,000 fine.
Boneta also got slammed with two more fines for $5,000 each, one for advertising a pumpkin carving and another for violations in the small shop on her property. Boneta sells produce from her farm, as well as eggs, yarn, birdhouses, and local crafts. She sought and received a license for the shop in 2011, but the county now says she can’t sell handiwork or produce from her neighbors under that license.
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How to Defeat the US Imperial Police State by Keith Preston
A scene from the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film “A Clockwork Orange”, based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess, features a telephone conversation between a dissident writer and an unseen cohort. Noting the efforts of the government under which the film’s characters reside, a crime-ridden welfare state, to legitimize the experimental torture of prisoners, the writer remarks: “We have seen this before in other countries…Soon we will have the full apparatus of totalitarianism upon us.” This is precisely what is happening to America today. Present efforts by the regime to legitimize torture and eliminate habeus corpus will, if successful, be the final phase in the transformation of the old American republic into an executive dictatorship and imperial police state. Those who are aware of this precarious situation and stand in opposition to this downward spiral to absolute tyranny are certainly few in number but span the entire spectrum of political and cultural identities. They have many disagreements among themselves. Indeed, the only area where there is commonality concerns the need to oppose the police state. How can this be done?
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Secrecy Creep by Glenn Greenwald
That the Obama administration has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers is by now well-known and well-documented, as is its general fixation on not just maintaining but increasing even the most extreme and absurd levels of secrecy. Unsurprisingly, this ethos — that the real criminals are those who expose government wrongdoing, not those who engage in that wrongdoing — now pervades lower levels of the Executive Branch as well.
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Rethinking Fortification by Zenpundit
Fortification is something of a lost art, but it was up until recent history, a critical military capability. After castles went into a temporary decline with the advent of cannons blasting apart their high walls, post-renaissance architects redesigned European fortifications to endure the new bronze siege guns and defense again triumphed over offense. Military engineers like Vauban were more valuable than field marshals and kings staked their strategies on the strength of chains of fortifications and arsenals. Obsolete by the time of the Napoleonic wars, massive fortresses nonetheless enjoyed a long twilight march to military irrelevance, ending in WWII with the ignominious capture of Belgium’s mighty Eben-Emael fortress by 75 lightly armed Germans and the utter uselessness of the extremely expensive Maginot Line during the Battle of France.
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Bitcoin, the Darknet Economy, and the Low Over-Head Revolution by Kevin Carson
Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age” was set some years after encrypted currencies and e-commerce removed most economic transactions into darknets beyond the government’s capability of monitoring and regulating, and thus caused tax bases around the world to implode. This was followed, in short order, by the collapse of most nation-states. In the ensuing Interregnum, the defunct nation-states were replaced by city-states and by networked global civil societies called “phyles.” The major phyles leased enclaves in most major city-states around the world, much as the Venetian merchant guilds leased “Venetian quarters” in the major port cities of the Mediterranean.
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Matt Reed on Natural Beekeeping – The Survival Podcast
Matt’s philosophy is simple. The chief end of beekeeping should be to provide the bees with the ideal environment in which to thrive. To do this, the beekeeper must engross his or her mind with a wide range of bee-related information detailing the bee life cycle, history, hive design, management and innumerable other topics of importance. Without this knowledge, it is unlikely that the bees or the keeper will have success in their endeavors.
“Downstate families are tired of Chicago dictating its views to the rest of us,” said state Rep. Bill Mitchell as he and fellow Republican state Rep. Adam Brown announced their proposal with straight faces at a news conference. “The old adage is true: Just outside Chicago there’s a place called Illinois.”
Secessionist movements, some more serious than others, have a long history in the U.S. But from the South’s attempt to leave the Union to more recent proposals to carve new states out of California and Arizona and make Vermont its own country, these movements involve groups who want to break away.
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[ Episode #47 // Power Transition ] – The Extraenvironmentalist
After years of stagnant growth in conventional oil extraction rates, ignorance of Hubbert’s Curve has peaked. Now that the mainstream can’t dismiss the issue, public conversations proclaim an exuberant belief in marginal reserves as our savior. Claims of American energy independence have fueled a dialogue that threatens to drive the US economy towards a fiscal and energy cliff. Can we look toward renewables to meet our energy needs for the future? Is it possible to start telling a new story about our energy future?
In Extraenvironmentalist #47 we discuss the global energy picture with Chris Nelder as he describes the energy stories we tell ourselves and explains exactly how many natural gas wells it will take for the United States to gain energy independence. We ask Chris about the complexity of our international energy markets and why we shouldn’t give up on renewable energy even if it doesn’t fit the power grid of today. Then, we speak with Gregor MacDonald about the recent blackout in India that cut electricity to 10% of Earth’s population. Gregor tells us about the process of normal accidents and why the risk we’ve offloaded might be trickling back into our energy infrastructure.
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What If Drug Users Organized Like Unions? by Ben Christopher
The name of the group was only meant to be a placeholder. Until the union’s rank-and-file could settle on a more permanent title, the organizers needed something to write on their grant applications and to give to community center staff when signing up for meeting space around the Tenderloin and the Mission. It was during one of those meetings in late 2009 that someone suggested San Francisco Drug Users’ Union. It wasn’t a name calculated to win the endorsement of a focus group, but then again, neither was the organization.
Three years later, the name has stuck.
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Reclaiming the Forests and the Right to Feel Safe by Karla Zabludovsky
On the morning of April 15, 2011, using rocks and fireworks, a group of women attacked a busload of AK-47-armed illegal loggers as they drove through Cherán, residents said. The loggers, who local residents say are protected by one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal organizations and given a virtual free pass by the country’s authorities, had terrorized the community at will for years.
Cherán’s residents said they had been subjected to multiple episodes of rape, kidnapping, extortion and murder by the paramilitary loggers, who have devastated an estimated 70 percent of the surrounding oak forests that sustained the town’s economy and indigenous culture for centuries.
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Small Is Beautiful, and It Works by Ethan Bishop
Picture it: a self-governing community of little more than 35,000 people, living amongst “dramatic natural scenery”. For over the past two centuries, the people of this same community have been renowned for their independent spirit and love of freedom. Though originally little more than an agrarian community, today they have a modern economy oriented toward tourism and sport. There is a great “pedestrian main drag” where one can find such diversity as “modern art, hotels and slick office parks.” It is often remarked that even though it is a tiny place when compared to the rest of the world, “the views are big, and hiking (and skiing) possibilities go on and on.”
Grassroots “No Drones” campaigns are happening across the country, and soon there will be one in every state. Get active with the people working to stop drone killings and drone surveillance in your area today!
In June, a group of academics from around Latin America plus the US wrote a letter to the State Department railing against the US military presence in Honduras and demanding that aid to the country’s abusive law enforcement apparatus be halted. They exposed the drug war as the farce it is, charging “we are the ones providing all the corpses in your war” and arguing that “combatting drug trafficking is not a legitimate justification for the US to fund and train security forces that usurp democratic governments and violently repress our people.”
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Why I Got Discouraged and Why I’m Back by George Donnelly
Be ready to die at any time. Expect it. Look forward to the opportunity for a great death. This doesn’t mean I want to die. It just means I have to constantly put myself into challenging situations in order to continue growing and avoid rotting. Otherwise I’ll never be up to the challenge of taking a run at my mission.
We have much to learn from each other. Every new topic and area of the prepper lifestyle we may find is usually supported by someone else who has already explored it; we simply have to take the time to learn from them. We can study and practice new techniques, relying on the skills and information others have found before us. Eventually, we include those ideas into our own routines and become experts, able to teach others who come after us.
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Food Storage: 20 Crops That Keep and How to Store Them by Barbara Pleasant
Here in southwest Virginia, my partner and I take pride in growing and storing most of our fruits and vegetables. Knowing where our food comes from gives us confidence in its goodness, plus we save about $5,000 a year through our gardening and food storage efforts. There is another benefit, which is the utter convenience of having a self-provisioned home. In early winter when our stores are full, I feel like I’m living in a well-stocked organic grocery store.
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The Eclipse of US Politics, and its Global Consequences by David Kerans
Since the time of DeTocqueville’s Democracy in America, if not earlier, Americans have been aware of the tendency of their two-party system to restrain ideological polarization through an automatic process. In a two-party system, each of the parties is strongly impelled to adopt positions close to the current popular consensus, wherever that may lie. Should either one depart from the consensus on key issues, the other is likely to reap huge gains at the ballot box. The fact that the mass of Americans has long believed and trusted in the self-moderating mechanism of the two-party system accounts for the wave of lamentations over the last decade concerning a perceived slide into polarization. Common wisdom now sees the two parties as bitterly opposed, with the Republicans on the right and the Democrats on the left. With somewhat less conviction, mainstream political observers maintain that the nation is deeply divided along corresponding lines.
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