The Noble Lie

Thomas Malthus - Public Domain

• Salon - Discovery Channel gunman James J. Lee's manifesto
• Salon - How Malthus drove the Discovery Channel gunman crazy (He requested the network, "develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race." )
• ACLU - Don't Let Schools Chip Your Kids (Are we going to condition our children to grow up in an intrusive surveillence society which tracks their every movement? If they get it from preschool on, as adults they will think it is the most normal thing in the world. "On Tuesday, preschoolers in Richmond, California showed up for school and were handed jerseys embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags are tiny computer chips that are frequently used to track everything from cattle to commercial products moving through warehouses. Now the school district is apparently hoping to use these chips to replace manual attendance records, track the children’s movements at school and during field trips, and collect other data like whether the child has eaten or not.")
• ACLU - Targeted Killing: Death Without Due Process
• Technofascism Blog - U.S. drones to watch entire Mexico border from September 1 (Call this, "How to condition Americans to accept drones flying American skies 101")
• Ron Paul - A Tea Party Foreign Policy ("As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world.")
• New York Times - The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
• LA Times - CIA drones have broader list of targets ("The CIA received secret permission to attack a wider range of targets, including suspected militants whose names are not known, as part of a dramatic expansion of its campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan's border region, according to current and former counter-terrorism officials. The expanded authority, approved two years ago by the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, permits the agency to rely on what officials describe as "pattern of life" analysis, using evidence collected by surveillance cameras on the unmanned aircraft and from other sources about individuals and locations.")
• Florida Oil Spill Law - Tests find sickened family has 50.3 ppm of Corexit’s 2-butoxyethanol in swimming pool one hour north of Tampa
• Wikipedia - Pullman Strike (Happy labor day, since there's no guarantee I'll post before then)
• UK Independent - Why Sarkozy went to war on the Roma
• Aftermath News - Homeland Security Secretary hails Chicago’s massive Big Brother surveillance system
• AP - Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club (Castro plugs Daniel Estulin's "The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club," which aren't so secret anymore as the mainstream news reports on Bilderberg like any other important conference now.)

There's always bound to be a bit of tension between established print journalists and the bloggers who critique them. Bearing that in mind, I still can't believe what I've been seeing on The PLAZOID as of late. It appears a coalition of local journalists (who may very well be imposters) have taken to trolling the comments of this blog with a vengeance, filling up the comments with sleights, non-sequiters, and passive-aggressive insults. One of them has used some very questionable tactics, setting up an imposter blog which appears to be deleted now.

Seriously guys, don't you have anything better to do?

Having moderated over my share of internet forums in my day, the only advice I can give Tad is, "Don't feed the trolls." A troll is a troll, regardless of fancy job titles, degrees, published works, or ability to use spelling/grammar checkers.

It would be a tragedy to see Tad's uniquie voice end online, especially due to a pack of mainstream local journalists and their cronies. He's a refreshing break from the cynicism and apathy that have become the norm, even too often in myself.

And to Hank "Town Dandy" Sims, who apparently is having trouble with the audio in Ubuntu, I recommend a copy of the Unix Haters Handbook (which comes with a barf bag) to spew into, rather than Tad's blog.

Witness killings and flagrant lies by police in New Orleans after Katrina.

Watch the full episode. See more FRONTLINE.

• CNN - Court allows agents to secretly put GPS trackers on cars
• CNN - Children abused, killed as witches in Nigeria
• MIT unveils swimming, oil-cleaning robots ("The robots are designed to work in a swarm, he said, meaning thousands could be deployed on the same spill at once. They coordinate with each other by using GPS location data. That lets them plot out the most efficient way to tackle a clean-up project.")
• The Billion Dollar Gram (Excellent treemap visualization of all the billions of dollars being thrown around)
• Salon - "Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?": America's misguided culture of overwork
• The Week - Top 7 insane homeowners association rules (And you thought you owned your home. Found, like many good articles are, on Cryptogon. "The Constitution does not guarantee Americans the right to smoke in their homes...." However, it is supposed to guarantee Americans the right to privacy in their homes.)
• The Onion - Smart, Qualified People Behind the Scenes Keeping America Safe: 'We Don't Exist' (You got that right)
• New York Times - Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence (About time. "Today, a clearer picture is emerging, and it is an equally ugly one, including white vigilante violence, police killings, official cover-ups and a suffering population far more brutalized than many were willing to believe. Several police officers and a white civilian accused of racially motivated violence have recently been indicted in various cases, and more incidents are coming to light as the Justice Department has started several investigations into civil rights violations after the storm.")
• CNN - Parents, do you know what theses texts mean? (Newspeak for drug and sex-saturated kids)
• Aftermath News - Pain ray gun in LA county jail “tantamount to torture” (And they just had to make it look like a mini-ED209. Sadists. "But the sheriff was creating a dangerous environment with “a weapon that can cause serious injury that is being put into a place where there is a long history of abuse of prisoners,” ACLU attorney Peter Eliasberg said. “That is a toxic combination.”")
• San Jose Mercury News - Calif. inmate care lags despite billions invested (Found by Polly)
• CNN - Guards open fire after 'major riot' at California prison (Folsom)
• HighBoldtage - Mega Marijuana Grow Proposed for Chico (The race is on to out-Oakland Oakland)
• Al-Jazeera - France deports hundreds of Roma ("Earlier in the day officers raided and dismantled a camp set up under a railway line near the northern city of Lille, taking residents in police vans.")
• 10 Practical Steps That You Can Take To Insulate Yourself (At Least Somewhat) From The Coming Economic Collapse (All good advice in any economic climate)
• Dead wrestler's father blasts Linda McMahon, WWE (Conneticut Republican Senate candidate avoids the ugly facts of the industry she helped popularize)

• Science Daily - Do-Gooders Get Voted Off Island First: People Don't Really Like Unselfish Colleagues, Psychologists Find (It's worth clicking through and reading the entire study, which is only a few pages long - but it looks like it's behind a paywall now. This study has so many ramifications I don't know where to start, but it confirms many thoughts and observations that I've made in my life. People hate villians, but we also hate heroes, and we aspire to be "average" or "normal." This is one big reason why hard work alone WON'T win you the American Dream.)
• NBC Los Angeles - New "Laser" Weapon Debuts in LA County Jail (Microwave weapons deployed in US county jails. 44% of readers are "thrilled." You know these things are used as torture devices. The Inquisition has nothing on 21st century tech and the monsters willing to deploy it. "The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish ether in facing or inflicting death.  They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while.  They will have the faith to kill.  If deterrent punishments are used at all in the code of the future the deterrent will be good scientifically-caused pain." -HG Wells)
• EFF - Steve Jobs Is Watching You: Apple Seeking to Patent Spyware ("More specifically, the technology would allow Apple to record the voice of the device's user, take a photo of the device's user's current location or even detect and record the heartbeat of the device's user.")
• Technofascism Blog - Software Predicts Criminal Behavior ("Developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the software is already used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict which individuals on probation or parole are most likely to murder and to be murdered.")
• Technofascism Blog - Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans
• Christian Science Monitor - China traffic jam enters Day 11. A tale of deceit and criminality? (A China-sized traffic jam, apparently caused by the black market in coal. It hurts to watch China deal with super-sized versions of our own problems during our industrialization heyday.)
• Cryptogon - Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System (Money is the best weapon money can buy. It makes people dependent.)
• Humboldt Herald - Raw milk issue mooooves forward
• CBS - After Katrina, N.O. Police Told to Shoot Looters (Not new news, but there you go. Remember how to tell the difference between looters and finders.)
• CNN Money - Credit card interest rates hit a nine-year spike (Gotta make up the profits from the new CARD Act fee-blocking legislation somewhere)
• Reuters - Partner abuse tied to spanking kids (Apparently beating your kids is correlated to beating your husband/wife. Who would have thought?)
• AMA - Reinventing vaccines: New frontiers in prevention (What, no mention of flying syringes? PS, "recombinant" means "genetically modified," like Gardasil. And of course there's talk of "vaccinating" against bad habits like smoking.)
• USA Today - Used-car prices jump by as much as 30% (THANKS, CASH FOR CLUNKERS)
• ABC - Shirley Sherrod Declines Job at USDA After Race Flap
• LA Times - Ruling a blow to stem cell research
• AP - US admits human rights shortcomings in UN report

• NBC Philadelphia - Pay Up or Shut Up: Bloggers Charged $300 for Their Thoughts
• Mashable - Philadelphia Tax Code Sparks Big Controversy with Small Bloggers

This story is showing up everywhere. The city of Philadelphia is demanding bloggers get a “business privilege license” in order to run a weblog. These licenses cost $300, and apparently it doesn't matter if you make money off your blog or not.

There are several things going on here. First, a few suckers will end up paying this, especially if they profit off their blogs. Second, licensing bloggers means what was once a right is now a privilege that can be revoked. Third, I don't claim to know anything about municipal tax collection, but this has to be a good tool for unmasking anonymous bloggers and shutting down sites that are unpopular with the wrong people.

Apparently this tax covers freelance writers, too. Would it cover non-conventional forms of blogging, say, a blog that was solely photos, podcasts, etc? What's the difference between a "blog" and a website, and do all websites require licesnes?

Accounts differ on how enforcable this is, and how much it applies to bloggers who don't make any money off their sites (like me). Does this make my web-hosting fees and time spent deleting spam comments tax-deductible?

I'm short on details but I'm pounding my fists on the table at this story. These taxmongers will never stop coming up with new ways to take our freedom so they can sell crumbs of it back to us.

I'd stop blogging before I paid $300. I'd go back to handing out educational material to the small handful of people I interact with.

• Reuters - As troops leave, U.S. to double contractors in Iraq
• Army Times - Combat brigades in Iraq under different name
• UK Telegraph - Tea Party versus K Street: the real Republican faultline
• Dayton Daily News - WSU tries for CIA contract with skeletal identification (Oh, yeah: "Technology could help identify terrorists")
• AlterNet - Top 10 Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories (Pick your favorite, you right winger you. I'm always reminded of the posters along the Berlin Wall insisting a Berlin Wall wasn't being built.)
• AlterNet - 6 Reasons to Have Casual Sex (From the site that wants you to get sterilized to save Mother Earth and doesn't want you to get married unless you're gay. Of course, according to the previous article, all that "population control" stuff is just a big conspiracy.)
• USA Today - FDA chief on salmonella: Agency needs more authority (I was waiting for this. Thanks for not disappointing. Will this authority be used to crack down on monstrous and profitable chicken factories which engender disease, or small farms and local food clubs?)
• Paul M Peterson - Crowd Swarm in Atlanta, Georgia Over Section 8 Housing (30,000 people, 13,000 applications, 200 riot police)
• AP - NY Candidate: Prison Dorms for Welfare Recipients
• Time - Training Pastors, Rabbis, and Imams Together
• UK Guardian - Israeli army's female recruits denounce treatment of Palestinians
• UK Guardian - Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups
• AlJazeera - Iran unveils 'unmanned bomber' (Reminds me of the Trailer Park Boys' space rocket)
• USA Today - Who, exactly, is a 'Christian'? Obama? You?
• Reuters - Google CEO Exposes Dark Side of Social Networking (The people who store too much information are worried they're storing too much information?)
• UK Guardian - Outrage at UN decision to exonerate Shell for oil pollution in Niger delta
• SoHum Parlance II - "The last scientific astrologer" (Clips from Carl Sagan's COSMOS)

This is a dinosaur-sized egg on somebody's face. Again, my suspicious nature drives me to ask, who's protecting this guy and why?

• UK Guardian - Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accused of rape
• BBC News - Swedish rape warrant for Wikileaks' Assange cancelled