Stranger than fiction

Americas super rich are getting poorer. For only the fifth time since 1982, the collective net worth of The Forbes 400, our annual tally of the nations richest people, has…

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Ken Lewis, the beleaguered CEO of Bank of America, announced Wednesday that he will retire at years end. There was no successor named. Lewis, who was…

The British Royal Air Force dropped a box of propaganda leaflets — from a Hercules aircraft flying I don’t know how many thousands of feet in the air — and it “failed to open”.

Why, you may ask, are the British resorting to World War 2 methods for deploying propaganda behind enemy lines?

According to the CIA, Afghanistan has “limited” landline telephone service. There are an estimated 5.4 million cell phones in Afghanistan and they only work in the major cities (we don’t know how many of those phones are actually just sitting in a shop waiting to get sold).

How many TVs do they have? I couldn’t find that data. But. They use 1.4 billion kWh of electricity a year. For a population of 28.3 million. Venezuela has 28.5 million people and they use 83.8 billion kWh of electricity annually.

So that’s why the Brits are dropping leaflets. Except only 28% of the population can read.

Summary By microdot

Caught on dash cam, this officer blatanty threatens to trump up charges as he badgers this guy. When the video went viral, the officer was reprimanded by unpaid leave. During a T.V….

Enemies lists do exist, and Alex Jones is probably on a lot of them

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The existence of an “Obama hit list” which includes Alex Jones amongst the biggest political enemies of the Obama administration is believable not because it was reported by tabloid magazine The Globe, but because such lists are known to have been kept by the Clintons and others very close to the President.

The Globe cites sources close to the Obama administration in compiling a list of 25 names, people who the Obamas intend to “take down one by one,” that includes Glenn Beck, Rep. Joe Wilson, the Congressman who called Obama a liar on national television, as well as country singer Toby Keith.

Alex Jones is listed as enemy number 24 on the list due to his Obama Deception DVD and his upcoming film Fall Of The Republic, both of which slam Obama as a front man for the global elite.

“Obama is getting strategic guidance from Bill Clinton,” the report states. “Bill has met several times with Obama to discuss how he can counterattack his enemies, the source says. The most recent powwow was a 90-minute session at New York’s trendy Il Mulino restaurant on Sept. 14. As police and secret service surrounded the eatery, Bill sat with Obama plotting various ways to get even with his fiercest critics.” Clinton allegedly urged Obama to draw up an enemies list and “then take them down one by one.” According to the article, Obama intends to engage in “all-out mortal combat.”

Alex Jones indicates that if the Obama administration indeed has an official enemies list and his name is included, he will consider taking legal action.

Political hit lists are by no means an invention of supermarket tabloid magazines. A March 2009 CBS News story described how Speaker of the House and close Obama ally Nancy Pelosi has kept such a list throughout her political career, “a roster of those whom she believes have screwed up, betrayed her, challenged her or merely annoyed her.”

According to the article, Pelosi has sought to strip power from her adversaries and “has a propensity for remembering slights and grievances for years.”

The story goes on to list eight people who are on Pelosi’s political enemies list, including Rush Limbaugh, who also appears on the Obama hit list published by The Globe.

Only the stupidly naive would deny the fact that politicians are a back-stabbing and vindictive breed, therefore it’s common sense that they would attempt to discredit and disenfranchise those who have opposed and exposed their behavior. Or as one blog puts it, “Michelle Obama does come across as a really vindictive shrew, so it is easy to imagine her having an enemies list.”

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The fact that Bill Clinton was purported to have advised Obama who to put on his enemies list fits with the long held view that both Bill and Hillary kept hit lists during the Clinton’s presidency as well as during and after the 2008 Democratic primaries, a topic explored by MSNBC in June 2008.

“While Hillary Clinton has a short list of people who disappointed her, Bill Clinton, who reportedly has an encyclopedic memory of all the people he has helped, employed or appointed over the years, apparently has a far longer one,” reported the New York Times In November last year.

On September 27, former president Clinton said the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that attacked him during his presidency has been weakened, but continues to operate against Obama.

“I mean, they’re saying things about him [Obama] — you know, it’s like when they accused me of murder and all that stuff they did,” Clinton told David Gregory of NBC’s Meet the Press.

According to anonymous insiders, Bill and Hillary Clinton kept detailed lists of enemies. Others even suggest that a list of people who died in suspicious circumstances were the victims of a “Clinton death list” which included journalists, political adversaries like Vince Foster, and others who had witnessed the Clinton’s corruption at close quarters.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Obama operatives had compiled an enemies list of people spreading “disinformation” about Obama’s proposed national health care plan. In response to the effort, U.S. senator John Cornyn of Texas wrote a letter to Obama that “expressed serious concern about the White House’s new program requesting Americans to forward email chains and other communications opposing the President’s health care policies. Sen. Cornyn is seeking assurances that the program is being carried out in a manner consistent with the First Amendment and America’s tradition of free speech and public discourse,” Cornyn’s website noted on August 5.

During the election, Obama’s campaign asked Missouri law enforcement to target Obama’s critics. Two high-profile Missouri officials — Jennifer Joyce, St. Louis Circuit Attorney, and Robert P. McCullouch, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney — went on local television and said they would prosecute “anyone who lies or runs a misleading television ad during the presidential campaign.” Gov. Matt Blunt subsequently declared the court officers had “attached the stench of police state tactics to the Obama-Biden campaign.”

The term “enemies list” came into prominence during the Nixon administration. Charles Colson and his assistant George T. Bell had compiled a list of official enemies in 1971. The official purpose, as described by the White House Counsel’s Office, was to “screw” Nixon’s political enemies, by means of tax audits from the IRS, and by manipulating “grant availability, federal contracts, litigation, prosecution, etc.” Nixon’s list contained the names of newspaper editors and journalists, actors, supporters of Democrat Eugene McCarthy and others.

See the scans from The Globe article below.

The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it

Tim Teeman
London Times
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

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Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Full story here.

One of biggest land and property owners in the world attacks middle class second home-owners

AFP
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The 88-year-old husband of Queen Elizabeth II — who has official residences in London, Windsor and Scotland as well as a vast portfolio of property — lamented the demise of the quintessential English village.

“Villages used to have to be more or less self sufficient: they had a butcher, a baker, a shoemaker,” he said. “Now that has all gone because of the way retailing is concentrated in big centres and multi-stores.”

He complained that the huge increase in holiday home ownership, fuelled by a decade-long property and economic boom, at least until last year’s global financial crisis, had changed the make-up of communities around the country.

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Wading into the highly contentious issue of climate change, he stressed the impact of population increase on the production of greenhouse gases.

“People go on about this carbon footprint, but they fail to realise that the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere is entirely dependent on the number of people living on the earth,” he said.

“There are now 60 million people living in this country and we are about the same land size as New Zealand — this country had three million people in Elizabeth I’s day” back in the 16th century, he added.

Full story here.

Nate Clark
We Are Change Minnesota
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Fox News Channel’s chief political correspondent Carl Cameron shared his thoughts on a variety of issues including the attacks of 9/11/2001 with We Are Change Minnesota on September 14th, 2009 in the U.S. Senate office building. Citing warnings by numerous foreign intelligence agencies, pre-9/11 warnings from Arizona FBI agent Kenneth Williams and stating quite plainly that, “It’s really hard to make the case that the buildings just imploded without some sort of an accelerant,” Cameron said we’re, “right to bang the drum because we don’t know,” what really transpired on 9/11 and that, “The unanswered questions are reasons to be skeptical.“

Sharing thoughts on how his reporting on the Israeli art student spy ring and executive assassination squads (subsequently revealed by Sy Hersh) have gone nowhere, he explained, “There are bad guys in the government. Black Ops and stuff does happen.“ He went on to share some insight into the inner workings of the news industry. Despite repeated acknowledgment of the unanswered questions concerning the events of September 11th, 2001, he declined to go on the record in support of a new investigation of 9/11 with the excuse that, “every single thing I say has to go though media relations”—referring to media relations as a, “meat grinder.” An astute observer might wonder if media relations was involved or if he personally felt it appropriate as debate moderator to outright insult Ron Paul’s electability—asking, “Do you have any, sir?“ during the 2008 Republican presidential debates.

Cameron, a notorious John “Skull and Bones“ Kerry basher, seemed to revel in sharing an account of Nancy Pelosi calling Kerry a “liar” for having supported the trumped up claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Considering how Cameron was also the source of the allegation that Sarah Palin thought that Africa is a country rather than a continent, it seems that character assassination may be the name of the game.

Ironically, the conversation concluded with a reference to his encounter with We Are Change New York last year when he listened to their concerns at length but offered little to none of his own thoughts on the matter. He did, however, tip off the group to the nearby Phil Gramm. “Come on guys, that’s Phil Gramm… why aren’t you busting his ass?” He offered the following advice on confrontation:

Yeah, and I mean seriously, simply you guys help your own cause, and I’m not saying you need to be rude to the people who are on your team, but if they tamp it down a little bit, I mean… I got jumped in downtown New York by a bunch of 9/11 truthers and I talked with them for an hour and it’s still out there on the web and the thing is if we’d had a quiet conversation, they might’ve actually gotten something out of me that would’ve been better than me just telling them, “I’m not going to talk to you.”

Let’s hope more workers in the news industry do what they can to help expose the unanswered questions about 9/11—if even to tip off the real reporters to opportunities to report on the “real questions.”

Transcript

[Emphasis added]

Cameron: The thing is, you guys get painted as conspiracy nuts because some of the people don’t actually spend the time to read the facts, and you can give a number of facts to realize that it’s really hard to make the case that the buildings just imploded without some sort of an accelerant. So, in the emphasis of [inaudible] the accellerant, it’s a culprit. The unanswered questions are reasons to be skeptical.

What the office holders can’t do lead to the conclusions… because they’re office holders. I mean there’s politics [inaudible] and so raising… You guys shouldn’t get painted as nutjobs because you’re raising questions. But some of the guys who are on 9/11 truth squads and stuff like that, they’ll say shit that’s so far out there that it undermines the questions.

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Anthony: We just had one guy out… We were just up there in New York and we had one of the guys—one of those same guys—comes in and disrupted William Rodriguez, you’ve heard of him right?

Cameron: Yeah.

Anthony: …Just comes in and totally interrupts the speech…

Adam: …goes on about aliens and reptiles and stuff—makes us all look like we’re out of our minds, you know?

Cameron: The guys that I got my four part Israelis series on are serious, non-partisan government people, you know? They went out and whacked people on the other side of the presidents, Republican and Democrat, they do their job and then..

Anthony: Whacked?

Cameron: Yeah. They do shit. There are bad guys in the government. Black Ops and stuff does happen. I mean, you know, Jack Bauer is a fuckin’ movie but it… Twenty Four is a TV show but it’s… but there are, it’s based in some stuff that’s not just imagination and it has to be that way. I mean, it just has to be. So, it was just recently revealed that Bush had authorized an executive order that essentially would’ve taken Brown and Root guys and, the Black-uh, the Blackwell paid contractors overseas and turned them into hit men to go after Bin Laden.

Anthony: Do you mean Blackwater?

Cameron: Blackwater… Now here’s the thing. I reported that at the same time I reported the 9/11 stuff—that the president had signed an executive order that essentially would’ve permitted the possibility of hit squads. And, I put it out there. Ah, it went absolutely nowhere. Two years later a guy named Sy Hersch of the New Yorker wrote a very famous article about, “Hey, you know what? Bush may have authorized hit squads.” No shit! Told ya that after the attacks! And everybody was like, “Whoa, it must be true.” Now what happened was he signed an order that said, worse comes to worse, you walk into a bar and you see Bin Laden there at the corner of the table playing black jack, knife his ass in the back. That’s what they fuckin’ tell them. Now, that’s a lot different than… Dude walks into the cafe for a cup of tea in Morocco. He’s got a beard and he’s six foot three, so they zero in a satellite and they say, wow, he’s a lot taller than everybody and they nuke the village. It doesn’t happen that way. You know? I mean I have to explain this to people every day that how do they keep missing that. You know? It’s a good question. You guys should be wondering, “Why the fuck do you keep doing that?” Well, there’s a reason. We see him in real time, thirty… from six miles up in a satellite. By the time they launch the satellite from the gulf of Aden twelve hundred miles away, it takes a fuckin’ half an hour to get there. He’s long gone, and you kill a village worth of kids! So, you know, you understand that. But if you don’t explain that to the average person who is just, you know, happy to keep listening, when I can see on TV that we know where he is…

Adam: It’s called moral hazard. I mean, of course, the reasons on the surface are going to be justifiable and common sense, but it leads to this gray for them to exploit.

Cameron: In addition to what I reported, we knew the day after 9/11 that the Russians had warned us. The Russians had warned us of the attacks in September. The French and the British had warned us of hijacking planes. The Israelis and the Germans hadn’t, had warned us of a plane attack on the World Trade Center—all in the preceding eleven months. Now, you know, ninety nine times out of a hundred these warnings mean absolutely nothing. But these were like six, specific, generalized things, and they didn’t check.

Now, I mean, I know you guys have done the research. You know, you have the FBI agent down in Arizona who let out the whole freakin’ warning before it happened.

Adam: Is that O’Neil?

Cameron: Yeah.

They’re learning how to fly, they’re coming down to flight schools in Florida and they’re comin’ out here in their crop dusters and everything else. I mean, it was all there, but we’re a big fuckin’ country—we’re a whole god-damn hemisphere! You know? I mean, it got lost between the cracks. And whether or not that was a deliberate conspiracy, or benign neglect or just rank government incompetence, you know, my feeling is you guys are right to bang the drum because we don’t know. And just as a journalist, I talked to George Bush personally after 9/11. I talked to Harry Reid and John Kerry personally after 9/11. All three of them said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Anthony: You personally did?

Cameron: Yeah, all three of them. Now, unbelievably enough, only two people in the entire Congress adamantly refused… said that that’s not true. Bob Graham, the former Democratic chairman from Florida of the intelligence committee who said there was no evidence, and Nancy Pelosi. Nanci Pelosi at a dinner one night told me that John Kerry was a fucking liar because he never saw the evidence in the report because she had looked at it. She was actually one of the ranking Democrats on the intelligence committee. Now who could believe Nancy freakin’ Pelosi? She’s from San Francisco, you know, she’s a pacifist. But those other two who said adamantly I’ve looked at every page, all the information and it’s just not there, and she outed Kerry who was running for president at the time. So…

Adam: We’ve actually got a DVD a buddy of mine made—a film called Core of Corruption, a five part film, they’ve released the first part so far. He could write a book on Bob Graham alone but it features Bob Graham in there and the dirt we’ve got on him. But ah, also with regards to whether or not the intelligence muck-up, and you know, incompetence, or whether there might be direct, uh, involvement, something that really bothers us is the Able Danger program and I was wondering you have any thoughts on that.

Cameron: No. I mean, there’s always the concern that you’re going to run into people who are not following real questions. There are questions that have yet to be answered. It doesn’t make sense, that the President of the United States or the Congress of the United States will willfully lie to hurt Americans for the purposes of reelection or economic downturn—that’s a bridge too far. I can understand how people who are informed might be able to make that leap, but it undermines a valid pursuit of facts when you go too far to prove a point. It’s like, I don’t know if you guys have kids or anything, but you see a little kid throw a fucking tantrum in the grocery store because they want a box of milk. They’re not going to get it—they’re going to get locked in the back of the car and slapped. You know, it’s, it’s…

Adam: Well, just like the town hall meetings. We’re always given grief because, you know, they think that we’re the ones that are shouting people down with the health care and we have nothing to do with it.

We’re always the ones coming out patiently trying at a level volume voice, right, asking questions about these issues and you get these morons out there screaming and crying exactly like that—like a child, and we get pushed into that category.

Cameron: Yep. My whole point of view is to point out that there are unanswered questions, and some of it has been answered, but a lot of it hasn’t been.

Anthony: One thing that really scares me about that is say that this happened on purpose, or something like that, that it would be slowly [inaudible] and things like that and not just…

Cameron: Right, I mean, and here’s the other thing that you gotta remember too. Israel has been known as the country that spies on the United States more than any other. Now it’s not, it’s not national security spying, it’s mostly economic. They want to know what to do to make money and how things are going.

[Carl agrees to a photo with a fan…]

Cameron: Frankly, I’ve been disengaged with a handful of time of you guys who sort of come and try to bust me on street corners and stuff like that. The truth is I have not been involved in the national security stuff since, like, after the beginning of the war in 2002.

Adam: Sure. You’ve got a job to do and they’re going to assign you to different things, and… My question is, you know, I don’t want to get you in trouble or anything like that. I you’re willing we’d like to get you just on the record for our web site, would you support a new investigation?

Cameron: Oh, I can’t. There’s no way. I can’t, I mean that’s the kind of thing where if I were to do that, it’s not going to get… it’s such a hassle for not having gone through media relations. It’s not a question of content, um, but every single thing I say has to go though media relations and that’s simply not… I can’t do interviews without… I can’t, I can’t do interviews with like mainstream political magazines until it’s gone through that meat grinder. So…

Anthony: Mainly we saw you and we just wanted to say thanks. You did a good job even though you…

Cameron: Thanks very much—I appreciate it.

Yeah, and I mean seriously, simply you guys help your own cause, and I’m not saying you need to be rude to the people who are on your team, but if they tamp it down a little bit, I mean… I got jumped in downtown New York by a bunch of 9/11 truthers and I talked with them for an hour and it’s still out there on the web and the thing is if we’d had a quiet conversation, they might’ve actually gotten something out of me that would’ve been better than me just telling them, “I’m not going to talk to you.”

PR Inside
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Andy Martin says emergency measures are needed to stem the tide of violence in Chicago.

U. S. Senate candidate Andy Martin calls for the imposition of martial law in Chicago.

Martin says Mayor Daley and Barack Obama look stupid campaigning for the Olympics when they lack the resources to protect the city’s existing residents.

In response to the senseless slaying of another Chicago child, Andy Martin asks: Where is Mayor Daley? Where is Governor Quinn? Where is President Barack Obama?

Martin questions, “If the City cannot protect minority residents, how are we going to protect millions of Olympic visitors?

Martin says the headquarters of the Chicago Police Department should temporarily be moved to ground zero in the war against crime

(CHICAGO)(September 30, 2009) Republican U. S. Senate candidate and insurgent “Internet Powerhouse” Andy Martin will hold a Chicago news conference Wednesday, September 30th to call for the imposition of martial law on the city of Chicago.

“The latest slaying of an innocent African-America child should be a wake-up call to the Chicago Mayor and Illinois Governor. If the city and state cannot provide African-Americans with basic personal safety—the ultimate human right—why are these officials in power?

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“If necessary, President Barack Obama should send federal troops to protect the right to life of every Chicago child. There cannot be two standards of life, one for minority neighborhoods and another for non-minority neighborhoods.

“I find it incongruous that on a day when Illinois National Guard soldiers were returning from Afghanistan, we needed our Guard personnel in Chicago to restore order here at home.

“With due respect to Superintendent Jody Weis, he has to ratchet up the war on crime and wage relentless war on the gangs and predators who are preying on Chicago’s African-American children. Weis has to take personal ownership of this war, and start leading from the streets, not the safety of his office.

“If newspaper reporter Mark Brown can see where the gangs are lurking, why are police not attacking these encampments and arresting these gangsters?

www.suntimes.com/news/brown/1795973,CST-NWS-brown29.article

“If the City cannot protect existing citizens, how are we going to guarantee the safety and security of millions of Olympic visitors?

“I propose that the mayor, governor and president adopt a five-point program to return safety to Chicago’s streets:

“First, I want Superintend Weis out on the streets, personally supervising field operations. He needs to lead from the front, not his headquarters office.

“Second, I want the CPD to put every sworn officer on the streets, and replace desk officers with temps if necessary. Any officer who is authorized to carry a gun should be working outside, on the streets. We need to regain control of this city.

“Third, Cook County needs to hire an emergency allotment of prosecutors and prison guards, and create space for thousands of new prisoners, as well courtrooms for prosecution of these predators. We need to disrupt, disable and destroy the gang elements and criminal elements in minority neighborhoods.

“Fifty years of anti-gang efforts have failed. Failure is no longer an acceptable option.

“Maybe Tod Stronger should fire some of his relatives, and well as other Daley Machine payrollers, and replace them with prosecutors and jail guards. State Attorney Alvarez needs to become more proactive; she has been much too passive.

“Fourth, Governor Quinn should mobilize the Illinois State Police and the Illinois National Guard, and have these forces start patrolling the streets of any neighborhood with excessive crime.

“Fifth, President Obama should order the deployment of part of our ready reserve forces to duty in Chicago. It was a Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, who sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce the constitutional rights of African-American students. Republicans were in the forefront of protecting African-Americans then. Republicans should lead again.

“The Daley Machine’s failure to protect minority children is a disgrace to humanity. If the City refuses to do its job, federal troops should be used to protect Chicago’s minority neighborhoods. Republicans need to start raising hell about the hellish conditions in minority neighborhoods. Children living in these areas have a right to life and a right to live. Their lives should not be snuffed out by gangsters operating in plain sight of a Sun-Times reporter.

“As for Barack Obama, the latest tragedy took place in the Altgeld Gardens area, where he was a so-called ‘community organizer’ 25 years ago. Obviously, Obama’s efforts left no lasting impression in the neighborhood. It is time for America’s first African-American president to start taking the protection of Chicago’s African-American children seriously Martin will state. “Daley and Obama should be flying to Chicago, not Copenhagen.

”The bottom line: we need martial law in Chicago until the safety and security of every schoolchild is ensured. I realize that these endless, random killings are an emergency situation; they are intolerable. Why can’t Chicago’s and Illinois’s leaders do the same and respond to this unacceptable reality

Cryptogon
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The surveillance side of this is the chickenfeed. There’s something far more sinister than the simple surveillance… an angle we haven’t heard about yet.

Tice never did tell his story to Congress about this different aspect of the program.

Well, my guess is that it has something to do with providing surveillance data for this SEAS World Sim thing, and that individual Americans are being watched and potentially targeted with it. Tice’s background seems to involve a lot of traditional electronic warfare, radar and ELINT stuff. Maybe Tice’s deal involved the collection of the mobile phone GPS and/or triangulation data which would provide realtime spacial/geographic data to the SEAS system. In other words, SEAS sees you. They could bring up a map of a city and plot your path based on the information that your phone is exchanging with the mobile network.

—Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation

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Via: Popular Science:

Researchers from Georgia Tech have devised methods to take real-time, real-world information and layer it onto Google Earth, adding dynamic information to the previously sterile Googlescape.

They use live video feeds (sometimes from many angles) to find the position and motion of various objects, which they then combine with behavioral simulations to produce real-time animations for Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

They use motion capture data to help their animated humans move realistically, and were able to extrapolate cars’ motion throughout an entire stretch of road from just a few spotty camera angles.

From their video of an augmented virtual Earth, you can see if the pickup soccer game in the park is short a player, how traffic is on the highway, and how fast the wind is blowing the clouds across the sky.

Up next, they say they want to add weather, birds, and motion in rivers.

They will present their paper at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality next month, but you can read a draft PDF here.