Colin Gustafson
NY Sun
March 4, 2008

A number of scientists and members of think tanks are rejecting the popular consensus that humans are causing global warming and that carbon gas emissions pose a mounting threat to environmental stability.

Today, climatologists, economists, and free market advocates will gather in Time Square’s Marriott Marquis Hotel for the final session of a three-day conference challenging what its sponsor, the Heartland Institute, calls the “public hysteria and alarmism about man-made” global warming.

“We have no power to affect global climate change, which will take us in whatever direction it may take us,” a former business consultant, Christopher Monckton, said yesterday at the International Conference on Climate Change.

His remarks came shortly after a consortium of scientists released a report rebutting a U.N. panel’s recent assertions that carbon gas emissions are contributing to the earth’s current warming trend.

Far from being a product of human activity, this warming pattern is part of the climate’s natural ebb and flow, the report’s authors contend.

In their report, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,” a group of American university professors also argues that computer modeling technology cannot accurately predict changes in the climate system.

They also write that popular anti-global-warming campaigns have become “unnecessary, costly, and disruptive for energy security,” as, in their opinion, carbon gas emissions pose a minimal threat to the climate.

Such assertions conflict with those of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has concluded that so-called greenhouse emissions are causing a rise in global temperatures and sea levels.

The panel’s conclusions became popularized in Vice President Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was cited in the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s 2007 decision to award him the Peace Prize.

At yesterday’s conference, scientists derided Mr. Gore’s film as a misleading work of fear-mongering “propaganda.”

“What is being exploited in these doomsday scenarios” about climate change “is the ignorance of science in the general public,” a former University of Winnipeg professor, Timothy Ball, said.

“It’s very appropriate that it got an Oscar from the land of make-believe.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, Kalee Kreider, dismissed those arguments as unfounded. “These groups try to obscure the scientific consensus that global warming is real,” she said in a statement yesterday.

“There will always be deniers — there are still people who don’t believe that we landed on the moon — but they really are on the fringe.”

The president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, will be the keynote speaker this morning at the Heartland Institute’s conference.

ruggish bone bone thugs ringtone thuggish

For ringtones free mp3 mp4 mainland, it was reported that both of its two operators will adopt the caller-pays approach as early as January 2007.

Tom Kelly
dailymail.co.uk
March 4, 2008

Hitler: Said to have had no interest in astrology

In the battle against Hitler, he was one of the more unlikely figures - a German astrologer who claimed he could predict the Fuhrer’s war plans.

Astonishingly, Louis de Wohl was hired by British intelligence after convincing spymasters that Hitler was obsessed with horoscopes and had tried to recruit him to provide readings.

Secret documents released yesterday show that de Wohl, who arrived in Britain in 1935, persuaded MI6’s forerunner the Special Operations Executive to employ him so he could tell them what German stargazers would be telling the tyrant.

After the outbreak of war he was hurriedly made a captain in the British Army and put in charge of the new Psychological Research Bureau, effectively a department for astrological warfare.

Between 1941 and 1943 he submitted hundreds of would-be horoscopes for Hitler to British intelligence chiefs and outlined what impact he believed these would have on Nazi plans.

In wartime papers released by the National Archives in Kew, officials concluded that he made some “useful predictions”, although it is unclear how much information was acted on.

De Wohl claimed that Hitler had been advised by astrologers since 1923 and that “it is entirely irrelevant whether we ourselves regard astrological advice as valuable and scientific, or as useless nonsense. All that matters is that Hitler follows its rules”.

Louis de Wohl: Horoscopes

In fact, some historians now believe that de Wohl’s claims were a spectacular ruse and that Hitler had no interest in astrology.

But the papers reveal that de Wohl had also influenced “high-placed British intelligence officers” for whom he also began to write horoscopes.

He claimed to have inspired the Royal Navy’s victory in the crucial Battle of Matapan by predicting that Admiral Andrew Cunningham was likely to have a great success between March 27 and April 5, 1941.

Cunningham duly attacked on March 28, sinking five Italian cruisers and destroyers and in a single stroke neutralising Mussolini’s Mediterranean naval threat.

De Wohl was also used for propaganda, outlining bad horoscopes for Hitler while on a tour of the U.S.

But the files reveal that de Wohl was regarded by some senior British agents as a “complete scoundrel” and a “dangerous charlatan and confidence-trick merchant”.

Officials described de Wohl’s prewar history as “murky” but said he was born in Berlin in 1903 to Hungarian parents.

He worked as a banker and then novelist in Germany while all the time studying astrology.

After the war de Wohl left England. He is believed to have died in Switzerland in the 1960s.

Cambridge University historian Paul Winter said: “After the defeat of Hitler British agents interviewed his secretary and she confirmed that he had no interest in horoscopes whatsoever.

“He even joked at a Nazi dinner in 1942 that it would be funny if the British thought he believed in astrology.”

• Nazi plans to recruit British prisoners of war to fight the Russians flopped after the would-be volunteers proved more interested in chasing German women than going to the Eastern Front, the secret files reveal.

In 1943, the Nazis planned to recruit an 800-strong “British Free Corps” to join the German army in the battle against the Russians.

They set up special prison camps where potential recruits enjoyed better food and coach tours around the capital, Berlin.

But MI5 files suggest that no more than around 20 ever joined up.

And the SS officer-in-charge, Hauptsturmfuhrer Hans Werner Roepke, later confessed to MI5 that he had been inundated with complaints from local residents who were “shocked by the appearance of Englishmen in their towns, flirting with German girls while the RAF carries out nightly terror raids over their towns”.

Substance is harmless, assures newspaper, but terror paranoia fearmongering is contagious

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
March 3, 2008

The Pentagon has assured residents of Crystal City, Virginia, that the gases they will release downtown on Thursday are completely harmless, while on the other hand secretly hoping that the fearmongering about imminent biological terror attacks the tests are set to generate is contagious.

“The Pentagon is scheduled to release an odorless, invisible, and yes, harmless, gases into the city Thursday to test how quickly they spread through buildings, officials said.”

“The test is part of the military’s national security preparation for the capital area,” reports The Examiner.

The Pentagon will release perfluorocarbon tracers as well as sulfur hexafluoride amongst the general public without their consent, a practice that would otherwise be illegal in a free society.

Urban Shield: Crystal City Urban Transport Study will be another opportunity for the media to show armed men barking orders at citizens while trusted officials in hazmat suits deal with the deadly outbreak that’s “inevitably” going to happen for real somewhere down the line, we are constantly reminded.

Which country or terror group has the capability to release weaponized biological agents other than the government isn’t made clear but I presume it’s some offshoot of Saddam Hussein’s fabled UAV drone armies.

Since the only biological agents released in the U.S. came directly from Uncle Sam,
, citizens of Crystal City might have pause for thought.

Residents should probably be thankful that the Pentagon at least told them in advance of the tests, unlike the New Yorkers exposed to Bacillus globigii in 1966.

The fact that U.S. veterans were used as guinea pigs for 50 years during tests under the banner of Project SHAD and other programs involving deadly substances, including sarin nerve gas, without their knowledge or consent , reminds us that some were not so lucky.

RAW STORY
March 3, 2008

A protester has been charged with disorderly conduct after yelling at former President Bill Clinton during a campaign stop.

The Corpus Christi Caller-Times says that the man was holding a sign saying the Sept. 11 attacks were an inside job as Clinton spoke. The man yelled at Clinton later as the former president shook hands with the crowd.

Police were approaching the man when someone in the crowd grabbed his sign and tore it in half. The paper says the unidentified man screamed at officers to protect his First Amendment rights. Police handcuffed the man and took him to a patrol car and said he would be charged with disorderly conduct.

Campaigning for his former first lady, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, he spoke Monday to fewer than 1,000 people in a gym at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, touching on his wife’s plans to reinvigorate the economy, provide health insurance and make college affordable.

In his 17-minute speech, Clinton did not mention his wife’s rival, Barack Obama. Obama spoke to more than 5,000 on the campus two weeks ago.

Last month, the former president had an angry response to another 9/11 protester, as RAW STORY reported.

“9/11 was not an inside job, it was an Osama Bin Laden job,” Clinton said at a campaign event in Denver.

“We look like idiots, folks, denying that the people who murdered our fellow citizens didn’t when they are continuing to murder people all around the world,” he added. “So we heard from you, you go away.”

Jacob Sullum
Reason Magazine
March 3, 2008

This month the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is scheduled to rehear a case involving a Tucson eighth-grader who was strip-searched by school administrators enforcing a “zero tolerance” drug policy. The ACLU, which today filed a brief on the student’s behalf, describes the search:

Savana Redding, an eighth grade honor roll student at Safford Middle School in Tucson, Arizona, was pulled from class on October 8, 2003 by the school’s vice principal, Kerry Wilson.  Earlier that day, Wilson had discovered [drugs] in the possession of Redding’s classmate….Under questioning and faced with punishment, the classmate claimed that Redding, who had no history of disciplinary problems or substance abuse, had given her the [drugs].

After escorting Redding to his office, Wilson presented Redding with the [drugs] and informed her of her classmate’s accusations. Redding said she had never seen the [drugs] before and agreed to a search of her possessions, wanting to prove she had nothing to hide. Joined by a female school administrative assistant, Wilson searched Redding’s backpack and found nothing. Instructed by Wilson, the administrative assistant then took Redding to the school nurse’s office in order to perform a strip search. 

In the school nurse’s office, Redding was ordered to strip to her underwear. She was then commanded to pull her bra out and to the side, exposing her breasts, and to pull her underwear out at the crotch, exposing her pelvic area. The strip search failed to uncover any [drugs].

“I was embarrassed and scared, but felt I would be in more trouble if I did not do what they asked,” said Redding in a sworn affidavit following the incident.  “The strip search was the most humiliating experience I have ever had.”

The punchline: The drugs in question were ibuoprofen pills—prescription-strength, 400-milligram pills (equivalent to a couple over-the-counter Advil caplets), but nothing anyone would or could use to get high. Then again, it’s much easier to overdose on ibuprofen than on marijuana, so maybe the administrators have their priorities right.

A three-judge 9th Circuit panel did not go quite that far, but last year it did say Redding’s Fourth Amendment rights were not violated by the search. The judges ruled that the principal had “reasonable grounds” to believe the search would discover evidence that Redding had violated the school’s ban on possession of prescription drugs. They also concluded that the search was not excessively intrusive. On March 24 the full court will hear arguments urging it to reconsider.

Brandon Keim
Wired
March 4, 2008

Outlaw News
March 4, 2008

This is a psychopath.

A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.

Physorg
March 4, 2008

Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth-generation fuel” project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California.

“We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy,” Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.

“We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock.”

Simple organisms can be genetically re-engineered to produce vaccines or octane-based fuels as waste, according to Venter.

Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step is life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste, according to Venter.

“We have 20 million genes which I call the design components of the future,” Venter said. “We are limited here only by our imagination.”

His team is using synthetic chromosomes to modify organisms that already exist, not making new life, he said. Organisms already exist that produce octane, but not in amounts needed to be a fuel supply.

“If they could produce things on the scale we need, this would be a methane planet,” Venter said. “The scale is what is critical; which is why we need to genetically design them.”

The genetics of octane-producing organisms can be tinkered with to increase the amount of CO2 they eat and octane they excrete, according to Venter.

The limiting part of the equation isn’t designing an organism, it’s the difficulty of extracting high concentrations of CO2 from the air to feed the organisms, the scientist said in answer to a question from Page.

Scientists put “suicide genes” into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves.

Venter said he is also working on organisms that make vaccines for the flu and other illnesses.

“We will see an exponential change in the pace of the sophistication of organisms and what they can do,” Venter said.

“We are a ways away from designing people. Our goal is just to make sure they survive long enough to do that.”

Isabelle Groc
PC Magazine
March 4, 2008

Terrorists don’t use the Internet solely to recruit members, spread their ideology, and raise funds for their activities. They also use it to conduct their own internal debates, creating a rich pool of information for analysis by counterterrorist groups. Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communication at the University of Haifa, Israel, and author of the book Terror on the Internet monitored just 12 Web sites operated by terrorist groups in 1998. Today he monitors 5,800.

Intelligence agencies are having trouble keeping up with the volume. That’s why researchers from the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have developed a set of automated tools to collect and analyze terrorist content on the Internet in a systematic way. The project, named the Dark Web, uses Web -spidering to find and catalog millions of Web pages, postings to terrorist forums, videos, and other multimedia content. The Dark Web has identified seven jihadist Web sites that host 90 percent of the information related to improvised explosive devices, such as instruction manuals and videos, says project director Hsin-chun Chen. The findings are passed on to military intelligence agencies.

“The first version of our spider could only collect 10 to 15 percent of the content. Now we can get about 85 to 95 percent,” says Chen.

To make spiders more effective at retrieving forum contents, Chen uses proxies and randomized processes so that they don’t get blocked. The group has also developed analysis tools to make sense of the content and prioritize the information. For example, “authorship analysis” captures the writing styles of anonymous senders, and “sentiment analysis” identifies who on the Web is the most violent and radical. “Some forums have a quarter million people posting, so there is no way anyone can eyeball those results,” explains Chen. “[Now] we can analyze millions of postings in a matter of seconds.”

Another independent group participating in the monitoring is the Virginia-based Terrorism Research Center. Its deputy director, Ned Moran, says that tools such as the Dark Web help intelligence analysts do the first pass. “They take this massive entity of the Internet and scale it down into something more manageable.” But Moran retains some skepticism about the ability of such automated tools as spiders to differentiate adequately between relevant data and junk.

Weimann agrees with Moran that human judgment remains an invaluable tool in determining which sites contain potentially harmful content. “What automated search can do is save expenses, manpower, and time. But it is limited in the depth of the analysis. Human eyes and mind see more and deeper than a crawler,” he says.

FINDING TERRORISM ONLINE: HOW IT WORKS

Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona’s Artificial Intelligence Lab lists the methods his team uses (beyond Web spiders) to identify terrorist Web content.

• Searching the Web using the State Department’s list of known terrorism groups.

• Sharing information with other terrorism research groups.

• Searching known keywords of several terrorist groups (for example, many jihadist sites refer to Osama bin Laden as the “Big Chief”).

• Doing link analysis—following links posted on terrorist sites to explore other possibly dangerous sites.

• Employing domain experts skilled in Arabic to analyze and browse domains. Chen emphasizes that the team does not pursue fundamentalist Muslim sites that do not advocate or promote violence.

Glenn Chapman
AFP
February 29, 2008

The very design of Abu Ghraib in Iraq turned good soldiers into evil tormentors that humiliated and brutalized prisoners, a famed social psychologist said Thursday.

Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo described a “Lucifer effect” as he flashed shocking images of Abu Ghraib horrors for those at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California.

“If you give people power without oversight it is a formula for abuse,” Zimbardo said to a stunned audience the included famous actors, entrepreneurs and politicians.

“Abu Ghraib abuses went on for three months … Who was watching the store? Nobody, and it was on purpose.”

Zimbardo, 75, is renowned for the 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students on summer break play roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the university’s campus in Northern California.

The pretend guards grew so sadistic and the prisoners so cowed that the experiment was halted prematurely out of concern for the students.

Zimbardo detailed stark parallels to abuses of suspected terrorists by US soldiers at Abu Graib prison in Iraq, and how environment can turn people into heroes or demons.

“I was shocked when I saw those pictures but I wasn’t surprised,” Zimbardo said of the images he was privy to while a member of a legal defense team for a sergeant charged in connection with prison abuses.

“Because I had seen those cells before at Stanford. The power is in the system. It’s not bad apples, but bad barrel makers.”

Zimbardo, wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a devil flanked by two angels, paced the stage as images of horrors flashed on large screens. He lays out his conclusions in a recently released book titled “The Lucifer Effect.”

“There is an infinite capacity to make us behave kind or cruel, or make some of us heroes,” Zimbardo said, convinced that environment dictates the outcome far more than people’s characters or personalities.

“The Stanford prison experiment shows the power of institutions to change behavior. We took good apples and put them in a bad situation.”

As a witness for a US military police reservist that was a guard at the Abu Ghraib interrogation center when abuses occurred, Zimbardo got access to records and pictures gathered in the case.

The guards were told to “soften” prisoners to make them more cooperative with military intelligence interrogators, according to Zimbardo.

Photos showed naked and hooded prisoners beaten bloody and being made to commit humiliating acts such as human pyramids or simulating homosexual sex. Soldiers posed proudly with battered corpses and nude, injured prisoners.

A picture shows a soldier firing a bullet into a camel’s head at point blank range.

“They took pictures of everything,” Zimbardo said.

A “hero” at Abu Ghraib turned out to be a lowly private that called for abuses there to be stopped, according to the professor.

“Heroism is the antidote to evil,” Zimbardo said. “Let’s focus on justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing.”