A Texas woman who said she was forced to remove a nipple ring with pliers in order to board an airplane called Thursday for an apology by federal security agents and a civil rights investigation.
— Greg Risling AP
If this wasn’t so disturbing then it might be funny. I am still trying to figure out how one would take down an entire commercial airliner with two nipple rings? Just one more example of the man keeping us down. How dare we want to travel and keep our privates… umm well private.I guess that this could be just a couple idiots that work in Lubbock (God knows they have their share), but then that begs the question, are these the kinda of people who could even recognize a terrorist if they saw one? As long as they weren’t wearing nipple piercings they should be ok.
I watched No End In Sight last night, and I have to say I was blown away by how potent this movie was. There is an obvious bias that the movie take, but in reality it might be the same bias that the facts take (thank you Rob Courdry via The Daily Show). After seeing this movie I am left with two thoughts. Either the planners of this war are retardedly incompetent or they wanted the reconstruction of Iraq to be a complete failure. It is hard to find sources that you can take seriously and/or honestly about the Iraq war and I think this documentary is has achieved both.
One side note, the proponents of this war in Iraq have always hammed up the idea that if you are against the war then you somehow are against the troops. I think one of the most successful parts of No End In Sight is its ability to show empathy for so many involved and yet still be able to ask the tough questions. In thinking about the troops and the Iraqi citizens I will leave you with the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game.”
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.
“A former technician who worked for Hart InterCivic — a voting machine company based in Texas — has alleged that his company lied to election officials about the accuracy, testing, reliability and security of its voting machines. The whistleblower says the company did so because it was eager to obtain some of the approximately $4 billion in federal funds that Congress allocated to states in 2002 to purchase new voting equipment under the Help America Vote Act (aka HAVA).”
— Kim Zetter @ Wired
So, here is just one (or two) more reasons to use paper ballots for all elections. Read the whole article though, if the whistle-blower is telling the truth this just adds more fuel to the fire.
More from Wired today, don’t worry they didn’t tap your phone lines everything is ok. The Telecom companies just love Congress so much they wanted to tip them.
“Political action committees for telecoms being sued for privacy violations gave more than $10,000 on average to each Congress member who voted to give amnesty to telecoms being sued for illegally helping the government spy on Americans, according to an analysis done by MapLight.org, an organization devoted to using new technology to show the influence of money on government.”
Wired has a nice article on a group called called Direct Action to Stop the War, a San Francisco anti-war protesters, marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq are using the micro-blogging service Twitter to coordinate their movements throughout the day. Join the fight to stop the war by checking out their site and their Twitter feed.
Alright, I got a couple of articles to check out relating to American Society of Civil Engineers and the possibility they covered up knowledge about 9/11 and hurricane Katrina.
Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a structural engineer and forensics expert, contends his computer simulations disprove the society’s findings that skyscrapers could not be designed to withstand the impact of a jetliner.
“We looked at every possible thing we could think of that could happen to the buildings, even to the extent of an airplane hitting the side,” said Skilling.
“Our analysis indicated the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be a horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed,” he said. “The building structure would still be there.”
In a telling afterthought, Skilling said that the only way the building could be brought down was by means of well-placed explosives rigged by top experts.
And why not, here is a video featuring WTC Construction Manager Frank A. DeMartini, who was killed in the 9/11/01 attack, describes in January of 2001, how the towers could, “probably sustain multiple impacts of jet-liners”.
“You can take off that ninja mask now. A new facial-recognition algorithm created by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is able to recognize faces with 90-95 percent accuracy, even if the eyes, nose and mouth are obscured.”
“If you have some tinfoil handy, now might be a good time to fashion a hat. At the Digital Living Room conference today, Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior VP of user experience, told me the cable company is experimenting with different camera technologies built into devices so it can know who’s in your living room.”
