Technofascism blog

Good look at what life could be like in some parts of the US in a few years.

I’m heading out of town again for awhile.  I should be back on Sept 13th to post more wonderful tidings of sweetness and light.  In the meantime, check out Cryptogon, Latoc and BlacklistedNews for your daily dose of joyousness.

I’m heading out of town for awhile and won’t have a reliable internet connection again until Aug 16th.  Unfortunately, I’ve had to disable the comments since I won’t have time to delete the several hundred spam comments I would normally get.  I’m thinking when I get back I’m going to go to an account-based commenting system.  The fully open comment system I use now is just too accessible to spambots.  As usual, while I’m gone, you can get info on the latest mayhem and insanity at cryptogon.com.

A special thanks to GW for donating $100 despite the best efforts of PayPal to prevent this.  We finally resorted to good old-fashioned snail mail for the donation. I’m still looking for alternatives to PayPal but I might just continue with snail mail since I think all credit card processing organizations are essentially scammers anyway.

I’ll be away working on some projects on my farm where there is no electricity or internet so posting will be light until I get back. In the meantime, please visit the excellent websites listed on my Blogroll for plenty of good cheer and news.

via cbs5.com.

California drivers may soon come bumper to bumper with the latest product of the digital age: ad-blaring license plates.

State lawmakers are considering a bill allowing the state to begin researching the use of electronic license plates for vehicles.

The device would mimic a standard license plate when the vehicle is moving but would switch to digital messages when it is stopped for more than four seconds in traffic or at a red light.

In emergencies, the plates could be used to broadcast Amber Alerts or traffic information.

The author of SB1453 says California would be the first state to implement such technology if it decides to adopt the plates on a large scale.

Supporters say license-plate advertising could generate much-needed revenue in a state facing a $19 billion deficit.

This is a very long article so I’m only posting some tasty morsels here, get the full meal at The New Yorker. Absolutely amazing look into the life and thoughts of Julian Assange, creator of WikiLeaks.  Highly recommended.

Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Assange had obtained internal Army records of the operation, which stated that everyone killed, except for the Reuters journalists, was an insurgent. And the day after the incident an Army spokesperson said, “There is no question that Coalition Forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.” Assange was hoping that Project B would undermine the Army’s official narrative. “This video shows what modern warfare has become, and, I think, after seeing it, whenever people hear about a certain number of casualties that resulted during fighting with close air support, they will understand what is going on,” he said in the Bunker. “The video also makes clear that civilians are listed as insurgents automatically, unless they are children, and that bystanders who are killed are not even mentioned.”

The edited film, which was eighteen minutes long, began with a quote from George Orwell that Assange and M had selected: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It then presented information about the journalists who had been killed, and about the official response to the attack.

…

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors.

…

Well, it didn’t take long.  My old site was up for 3 weeks on wordpress.com and then I got the following message:

Warning: We have a concern about some of the content on your blog. Please click here to contact us as soon as possible to resolve the issue and re-enable posting.

No previous emails… nothing.  Just disabled posting and when I tried contacting them I got no reply.  Great service, huh?  Anyway, I wound up getting this new domain space at BlueHost upon recommendation from Kevin at Cryptogon.com.  I finally moved my whole site over here and am still in the process of setting things up, so please forgive any untidiness.

Update: Wordpress.com  finally got back to me 7 hours later.  It turns out that it was a frequency of post issue that triggered their automated spam detector to kick in.  It would have been nice to get that clarified from the  beginning instead of having a bot automatically disable my account.   Unfortunately, in the machine-oriented world we now live in, this is becoming par for the course.  Our activity is constantly being scrutinized by robotic watchers.  And, if they don’t like what they see, they terminate it.

More implantable devices, but these are at the nano level and are able to detect micro changes in body chemistry. I wonder what the Gods on Mount Olympus will do with this one?

Tiny chemical probes implanted into patients could identify proteins in trace quantities.

Gold nanoparticles designed to detect proteins within cells, using just laser light, could enable simple and highly sensitive monitoring tools for blood clots and other disorders. Researchers in Scotland have shown that the novel particles can accurately detect thrombin, a biomarker for blood clots, in blood samples. They ultimately envision tests in which the gold nanosensors are injected directly into the patient, enabling measurement of protein concentrations by shining laser light through the skin. In the nearer term, the technology will allow scientists to directly examine how proteins, such as those involved in viral infections, interact within a cell.

via Technology Review