Lives in a Shoe

Who Runs the World? Scott Explains It All to You

 

 

"Total Chaos" - Cyber Attack Feared As Multiple Cities Hit With Simultaneous Power Grid Failures

From Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge: Friday

The U.S. power grid appears to have been hit with multiple power outages affecting San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

Officials report that business, traffic and day-to-day life has come to a standstill in San Francisco, reportedly the worst hit of the three major cities currently experiencing outages.

How Am I Supposed to Make a Hat?

TSA is confiscating aluminum foil?  Really?

We Are Not Subjects

Mass defiance in Connecticut against assault weapon registration law

A bit of miltary wisdom has it that you should never give an order you know won't be obeyed. Issuing such an order accomplishes nothing except to undermine your authority and expose the extent to which, no matter what enforcement mechanisms are in place, you rely upon voluntary compliance. But now that Connecticut's resident class of politically employed cretins has awoken to the fact that, in their state, like everywhere else, people overwhelmingly disobey orders to register their weapons, they're acting like this is a shocking revelation.

The Hartford Courant is raging, raging that Connecticut is home to scofflaws (armed scofflaws) and apparently wishes they could all be sent to -- well, maybe Siberia.  That'll teach 'em.

One of the saddest things I have ever seen is this photo of seemingly well-intentioned people trying to do the right thing, lining up to obey the registration edict.  Connecticut, United States of America.

 

 

Heard Discussion of This? Me Neither.

From Wired Magazine:

…Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”

Oh.

“We’re going to suspend your rights to protest, bear arms, privacy, and trial by jury.”

“Why?”

“To protect you from terrorists.”

“Why do we need to be protected from terrorists?”

“They hate you for your freedom.”

 

Fashioning my Tinfoil Hat...

Ann Althouse is a lawprof at UW Madison.  The other day she posted that a man came to her door with a clipboard and government ID from the National Health and Alcohol Study, wanting to interview her or her husband.  Study participants, volunteers, would be paid a total of $90 the man said, and after completing the interview -- "Questions like age and education, drinking, medicine and drug use, mood, anxiety, behavior and medical conditions and personality" -- would be asked to spit into a tube.  The brochure didn't mention a reason for collecting the saliva, just that it woud be used "to better understand the health care needs of the American people." The man told Althouse's husband the saliva was for DNA, said Althouse, "something about checking one's ancestry for alcohol (and drug?) related problems."

Take a look:

http://www.althouse.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-us-government-sent-man-to-our-door.html

Creepy?  Uh huh.  Not a one-off deal though.  Look here:

http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/surveillance.html