Friday, May 31, 2019

Something wicked this way comes ...


Toadies, a BRT blurb about Assange, the press and the 1st Amendment, describes how Trump now has the minions needed to gut the 1st Amendment using the 1917 Espionage Act to make it happen. As followup,  Taibbi extends this questionable approach to freedom of the press big time in his piece titled:

Julian Assange Must Never Be Extradited

The United States filed charges against Assange early last month. The case seemed to have been designed to assuage fears that speech freedoms or the press were being targeted.

That specific offense was “computer hacking conspiracy” from back in 2010. The “crime” was absurdly thin, a claim that Assange agreed (but failed, apparently) to try to help Chelsea Manning develop an administrative password that could have helped her conceal identity as she downloaded secrets. One typewritten phrase, “No luck so far,” was the damning piece of evidence.

The troubling parts of that case lurked in the rest of the indictment, which seemed to sell normal journalistic activity as part of the offense. The government complained that Assange “took measures to conceal Manning as the source of the disclosure.” Prosecutors likewise said, “Assange encouraged Manning to provide information and records from departments and agencies of the United States.”

The indictment stressed Assange/Manning were seeking “national defense information” that could be “used to the injury of the United States.” The indictment likewise noted that the pair had been guilty of transmitting such information to “any person not entitled to receive it.”

It was these passages that made me nervous a month and a half ago, because they seemed to speak to a larger ambition. Use of phrases like “national defense information” given to persons “not entitled to receive it” gave off a strong whiff of Britain’s Official Secrets Acts, America’s Defense Secrets Act of 1911 (which prohibited “national defense” information going to “those not entitled to receive it”) and our Espionage Act of 1917, which retained many of the same concepts.

All of these laws were written in a way that plainly contradicted basic free speech protections. The Espionage Act was revised in 1950 by the McCarran Internal Security Act, sponsored by Nevada Senator Pat McCarran (who incidentally was said to be the inspiration for the corrupt “Senator Pat Geary” character in The Godfather). The change potentially removed a requirement that the person obtaining classified information had to have intent to harm the country.

Something wicked this way comes - Ray Bradbury

It's On!



Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Into the valley of Death rode the 600 ...


To ignore science is folly, to actively stifle it is something else all together, especially when the science in question is climate change and the impact it's having on the world, an action bordering on criminality as this research is vitally needed, in part, to inform the nation on how to intelligently adapt to the enormous changes coming to planet earth as we move further into the 21st century. 



Undue process.





The Charge of the Light Brigade was a failed military action involving the British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. British commander Lord Raglan had intended to send the Light Brigade to prevent the Russians from removing captured guns from overrun Turkish positions, a task for which the light cavalry were well-suited. However, there was miscommunication in the chain of command, and the Light Brigade was instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire. The Light Brigade reached the battery under withering direct fire and scattered some of the gunners, but they were forced to retreat immediately, and the assault ended with very high British casualties and no decisive gains.

I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

II
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
   Someone had blundered.
   Theirs not to make reply,
   Theirs not to reason why,
   Theirs but to do and die.
   Into the valley of Death
   Rode the six hundred.

III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
   Rode the six hundred.

IV
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
   All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
   Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
   Not the six hundred.

V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
   Left of six hundred.

VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
   All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
   Noble six hundred! 

Alford Lord Tennyson

Criminality indeed ...

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

War is a Racket/Rev II



Think about this. I know I have.






Click here for the PDF of Butler's powerful work.

Julian Assange is a dick


Julian Assange's acid personality not withstanding, the impact this guy has had on the world's governments and significant others has been huge because revealing sensitive secrets is a total no no to entities like the US, Russia and China and to "religions" like Scientology. 




Secret No 1.




Read the rest of Lee Camp's take on Assange to see why this guy matters.

The Truth is Out There



The Truth is Out There ...

WASHINGTON — The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Not our tech by any stretch of the imagination ...

What was strange, the pilots said, was that the video showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.

“Speed doesn’t kill you,” Lieutenant Graves said. “Stopping does. Or acceleration.”

Oberth forcefield or why UFOs can fly the way they do.



Videos filmed by Navy pilots show two encounters with flying objects. One was captured by a plane’s camera off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 20, 2015. That footage, published previously but with little context, shows an object tilting like a spinning top moving against the wind. A pilot refers to a fleet of objects, but no imagery of a fleet was released. The second video was taken a few weeks later. CreditU.S. Department of Defense

Why ...


Why we have to change our ways ... NOW. 

Friday, May 24, 2019

Man



Steve Cutts is a treasure.

RussiaGate


As my loyal readers know, yours truly detests Trump and wants him gone in 2020 in ways that truly boggle the mind. With that being said, the real 2016 RussiaGate follies are about to begin and what a show it will be starting with fact No. 1, It was a leak and not a hack.

To whit:

Facts 2 & 3: Mueller never talked to Assange about the emails nor did he talk to William Binney about the leak. 

So ...


And this ...





And this ...



With a touch of blowback and 1st Amendment issues as well ...



But the real cost of RussiaGate is this ...


Lastly ...


Frogmarch anyone?



Toadies

toad·y 
/ˈtōdē/
noun
plural noun: toadies
1.
a person who behaves obsequiously to someone important.
synonyms: sycophant, obsequious person, creep, crawler, fawner, flatterer, flunkey, lackey, truckler, groveller, doormat, lickspittle, kowtower, minion, hanger-on, leech, puppet, stooge, spaniel, Uriah Heep; More

Trump has got the crew needed to gut the 1st Amendment. With these minions in place regarding the press (Wikileaks) and Israel achieving success with the senate via the Orwellian phrased BDS bill, S.1 - Strengthening America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 making it illegal to criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the gutting of our civil rights, starting with W (Homeland Security) and Obama (12333/Patriot Act), is in full swing as seen by the charging of Assange by the 1917 Espionage Act.

In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. ... Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a federal offense to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts.


The question to ask here is ... what does this mean for the press and the 1st Amendment?







For What's It's Worth is yet again, prescient to a fault.


There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop, children, 
hey what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind

It's time we stop, 
hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

It's s time we stop, 
hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, 
hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Remember, dictatorships happen when people are passive, uneducated and deceived. Something to think about don't you think?

Thursday, May 23, 2019

3 times longer :)


EKCD yet again. :)

Going Digital


Going digital in terms of managing data has been around for years, going digital in terms of managing power was not considered possible, until now, a technology destined to change how man handles power ... forever.


What this means ...


I want this without question, especially when manipulating power like one manipulates data over the net. Stellar to the nth degree without a doubt.

The Forever War


The Forever War, you know, the one we are currently in, began around Vietnam in the late 60s, a long running body of work consisting of firefights, skirmishes and protracted campaigns yielding not one victory, save for Grenada, as all the rest either consists of stalemates or defeats depending on the specific action in question as we move ever further into 2019. In connecting this set of fubars to Nam, another "skirmish" based on a lie and ending in defeat, one readily learns the tragic fact these brave men and women died not for freedom but for a misbegotten foreign policy driven by profit for the companies supplying the weapons for a war that never ends.





Thursday, May 16, 2019

The "other" great Earthrise ...



This is the "other" great Earthrise picture proving that there is no up or down in space, only space itself.  :)






Something to think about, right?

Monday, May 13, 2019

The Idea of "Goose" :)


DC strikes yet again. :)

It's all about the money/Rev LX


It's all about the money/Rev LX.




Boggles the mind doesn't it.

415 & counting


As my loyal readers know, climate change is a pretty big deal with BRT as it's a rather serious issue regarding the survivability of us as we mover further into the 21st century. With this in mind, consider the "achievement" of us rubes on reaching 415 parts per million of C02 in the atmosphere thanks to fossil fuel production and what it portends for an overcrowded planet complete with environmental degradation and resource depletion. Comforting is it not?









Just think, we haven't even discussed the accelerating release of methane in Russia and Canada, a CO2 variant  84 times more efficient in trapping heat than CO2 or the conversion of the Arctic from heat reflector to heat sink thanks to the loss of Albedo,  a key component of ice that has kept this planet cool for millennia prior to the arrival of us humans. 

Tuesday, May 07, 2019

Universality indeed ... :)



Nature is economical. Recursion, feedback loops and endless variations on a digital construct like DNA rule, based, in part, on the three laws of thermodynamics.

1. Energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed.
2. The entropy of any isolated system always increases.
3. The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero.

Life temporarily violates the 2nd law as it extracts and transforms energy from the environment to reduce entropy inside its given form factor in the process of staying alive in a reality one will never fully understand in any way, shape or fashion. With this in mind, the notion of universality in all ways linked to conductivity becomes yet another way of why  nature is an economic mistress to the max.







Universality indeed ... :)