Belle Isle is a 1000-acre island located in the Detroit river between the US and Canada. A developer plans to purchase the island for $1 billion and convert it into a sovereign state that the wealthy from all over the world can come and live in, free from those oppressive taxes that are taken from them and given to the moochers and looters. [Read more…]
James Bamford has an detailed article titled The Secret War that look at General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, and what he has been secretly constructing. As the subheading says, “INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS, FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL” [Read more…]
As we all knew would happen, there has been a concerted effort to discredit Edward Snowden the person, which is the usual means adopted by the ruling class. When they cannot defend their actions, they go after the messenger. The latest charge is that he is a double-agent, likely working for the Chinese. It is a story spun out of purely circumstantial evidence. [Read more…]
No system of detection is perfect, whether it be in medicine or police work. There is always the chance of false positives and the wider you make your dragnet, the larger the number of false positives that you are going to get. While the massive secret databases of the NSA are touted as an efficient means of detecting patterns to thwart terrorist attacks, it is simply a statistical fact that any pattern matching software will throw up false positives. [Read more…]
Three companies in the Czech Republic have created a flying bicycle. They have a prototype that is controlled remotely at present, rather than having a human rider.
Pretty cool, I thought.
(Via Machines Like Us.)
Yesterday I posted about the absurd plans of people who want to create separate armed enclaves where they hope to live free lives without the government imposing its will on them. As readers were quick to point out, while the military fortifications and weaponry envisaged may have been barely adequate in medieval times, it would take a modern army less than five minutes to overpower them. [Read more…]
Some time yesterday, this blog passed the two million pageviews mark since I started blogging at FtB on January 10, 2012. Before that I was blogging at my previous home since January 2005, so a lot of words (I estimate about 3,000,000) have emerged from my keyboard since the very beginning.
Thanks to all who read and those who comment. My goal has been to create a community of people who are interested and want to engage in important issues thoughtfully and respectfully, and I think that has been largely achieved.
In the process I feel like I have got to know many of you quite well, even though the interactions haste been entirely online.
Although by now most everyone knows what LGBT stands for (and many even know the expanded LGBTQQIA), it is clear that the transgender community has not reached anywhere near the levels of acceptance that the gay and lesbian (or even bisexual) community has. They still face all manner of serious discrimination, apart from the other complications of living in a society that is not being prepared to deal with this issue. [Read more…]
I have written before that I find the practice of tipping to be distasteful, since it seems to encourage servile behavior and has overtones of the master-servant relationship. Of course, I still tip 20% because the people doing those jobs are almost never paid a decent salary and need the tips to survive. But I wish that they were paid decent wages and benefits so that they were not dependent on tips to make a living. [Read more…]
Despite the massive efforts by the administration and leading members of Congress and elements of the servile establishment media to downplay the NSA spying revelations and attack those who brought them to light, opposition and anger about the programs is starting to build. [Read more…]