Sunday, December 19, 2010

Your Apps Are Watching You - WSJ.com

Your Apps Are Watching You

Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.

An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, ...



Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704368004576027751867039730.html#ixzz18cMmAtSM

£500 on electricity bills to pay for green energy - Telegraph

£500 on electricity bills to pay for green energy - Telegraph

Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, will outline government plans today to encourage energy companies to develop low-carbon power plants, including nuclear power stations and wind farms.

Energy analysts say the Coalition's plans will put Britain on course for a "high cost, low carbon" electricity market where consumers pay the price for environmentally friendly generating technology.

Energy companies say that the shift will require them to invest more than £200 billion in new power stations and networks over the next 20 years.

According to uSwitch, the price comparison website, funding that investment will cost households more than £500 a year on top of the current total average energy bill of £1,157. Mr Huhne's officials dispute that figure and insist that the direct costs of specific government policies will be much lower.

A new consultation will push energy companies into investing billions of pounds in technology, costs that companies say will be passed on to consumers.

Hillary Clinton: Population Control Will Now Become The Centerpiece Of U.S. Foreign Policy

Hillary Clinton: Population Control Will Now Become The Centerpiece Of U.S. Foreign Policy

Official portrait of Secretary of State Hillar...
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During remarks that she made for the 15th Anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the launch of a new program that according to Clinton will now become the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. This new program is known as the Global Health Initiative, and it is being incredibly well-funded at a time when the U.S. government is drowning in debt. According to Clinton, 63 billion dollars will be spent by the U.S. to prevent pregnancies and to improve "family planning" services around the globe over the next six years. In other words, the new centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy is all about eugenics and population control.

The following is an excerpt from Clinton's remarks....

In addition to new funding, we’ve launched a new program that will be the centerpiece of our foreign policy, the Global Health Initiative, which commits us to spending $63 billion over six years to improve global health by investing in efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality, prevent millions of unintended pregnancies, and avert millions of new HIV infections, among other goals. This initiative will employ a new approach to fighting disease and promoting health

Ghost towns of China: Satellite images show cities lying completely deserted | Mail Online

Ghost towns of China: Satellite images show cities lying completely deserted


These amazing satellite images show sprawling cities built in remote parts of China that have been left completely abandoned, sometimes years after their construction.

Elaborate public buildings and open spaces are completely unused, with the exception of a few government vehicles near communist authority offices.

Some estimates put the number of empty homes at as many as 64 million, with up to 20 new cities being built every year in the country's vast swathes of free land.

The photographs have emerged as a Chinese government think tank warns that the country's real estate bubble is getting worse, with property prices in major cities overvalued by as much as 70 per cent.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html#ixzz18cDmQEeV
No cars in the city except for approximately 100 clustered around the government headquarters

Ray McGovern Defends Julian Assange! "You Should Be Following His Exampl...

Veterans for Peace White House Civil Disobedience to End War

Rebellion at White House victory for hope (video) - National Human Rights | Examiner.com

Rebellion at White House victory for hope (video) - National Human Rights "Dozens of speakers including Daniel Ellsberg and Ray McGovern were also arrested."

  • December 18th, 2010 6:08 pm ET
Daniel Ellsberg (L) Chris Hedges (R) at White House fence to get arrested for defending human rights
Photo: Op Ed News

When you put your body on the line and you say you won't let this happen anymore and you'll do whatever it takes to make that happen, it's something spiritual. - Veteran for Peace, Washington DC, December 16, 2010

______________________________

Hope: What corporate state saturating our airwaves with lies seeks to obliterate

Among those in Washington DC Thursday for civil disobedience, willing to be arrested for resisting war crimes, was Chris Hedges, American journalist, author and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle East politic and societies. Hedges addressed some five-hundred human rights defenders led by Veterans for Peace at the White House fence.

Hedges speech, about what hope is and is not, will be noted for years among other profound addresses in American history.

The official count of people arrested Thursday at the White House in an action to end the Long War is 131 according to Veterans of Peace. The arrested included board executive committee of Veterans for Peace.

Approximately 2/3rds of those arrested were veterans.

Also arrested were a number of women from Code Pink.

Dozens of speakers including Daniel Ellsberg and Ray McGovern were also arrested.

Hedges began his empowering and motivating addresses saying, "Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state."

"All who resist, all who are here today keep hope alive.

"All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become an enemy of hope.

"They become in their passivity, agents of injustice

Interviews of veterans were documented in the video, Veterans for Peace White House Civil Disobedience to End War, (below). Each veteran answered why they had had gone to the gates of the White House to get arrested. The first veteran, out of the military for two and half years, answered:

"I can't sit by anymore and let these atrocities continue. I was with 10th Mountain Division in New York in the initial surge..deployed August 6, 2006. I was injured.. came back stateside... deployed back, wounded."

There to be arrested was what the veteran said was "very difficult and at the same time, very easy" because of the others standing with him.

"Hope has a cost," Hedges told those soon to be arrested. "Hope requires personal risk."

"It is not about the 'right attitude' or 'peace of mind.'

"Hope is action. Hope is doing something.

Hope which is always non-violent... knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on all of us."

A second veteran said he knew when he went to Iraq, "it wasn't right."

"You can't come home from that... You can't know you took human life and not want to do something... being there five years... blowing their homes apart and watching the infrastructure degrade instead of improve.

"There was nothing going on benefiting the people of Iraq," he said. "Consistent night raids, check points and harassment was the daily routine of what we did in Iraq. From a moral standpoint, nobody would agree with that."

Hedges oration included:

"Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don't resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations. No. Above all do not think. Obey."

The resisters at the gathering chanted loudly as they resisted police orders to get away from the White House fence: "They say, "Get back." We say, "Fight back.

"Hope, from now on, will look like this," Hedges said. "Hope will not come in trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people.

"It will not be realized by... attempting to influence the Democratic Party. It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions -- from the press, to the withered stump that is the labor movement.

It is not having a positive attitude or pretending that happy thoughts and false optimism will make the world better.... Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil or the government.

"If the enemies of hope are finally victorious in this station, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are the last thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

"When you put your body on the line and you say you won't let this happen anymore and you'll do whatever it takes to make that happen, it's something spiritual," explained a Veteran for Peace.

"I did things I'll never forgive myself for. I did my job. Those were just people trying to defend their homes. not have the intestinal fortitude to stand up when I knew I should have refused to serve."

Hoping to stop President's Big Lie

At the White House fence Thursday, Daniel Ellsberg stated that the problem is the big lie, Joseph Goebel's "Big lie" that was Bush's and is now Obama's Big lie: Keeping troops in the Middle East is protecting Americans at home.

Ellsberg said he can kind of excuse President Obama telling the lie to troops in the field that he sent into harm's way wrongly, and even to their families - even when it's not true.

"But if he looks us in the eye on the television camera and blows that same smoke at us and tells us that those troops in Afghanistan,... "Vietnamistan," are protecting Americans at home - that's not just false. That's the opposite of the truth," said Ellsberg.

"By creating universal hostility to us in the Muslim world by wrongful killing of Muslim civilians and Arabs and perhaps some day Iranians, he's recruiting for Al Qaeda. He's giving aid and comfort to Osama Bib Laden and Mula Omar."

A female veteran told the reporter, "I was deployed to Iraq twice. And, once you've been there, you realize we're not anything good for those people. Just because we throw them some water and some blankets and some water sometimes doesn't make up for the fact that we are killing them day and night for no reason whatsoever.

"Once you come to that realization, you know this is where you have to be. These are the kinds of stand you need to take."

Hedges concluded is address with:

"If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish today is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war, that he or she is not alone, our act will be successful. But hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen.

"Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself."

Read Hedge's full speech, Hope, from now on will look like this, on Op Ed News: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Hope-from-now-on-will-lo-by-Chris-Hedges-101218-773.html.

Following his address, Hedges said to a reporter, "I've been in jail before, but I never tried to get arrested. That was all when I was a foreign correspondent.

"This is first time I figured that this is sort of inevitable.'

Asked why now he went to be arrested Thursday, Hedges answered, "Because it's all we have left at this point. The normal mechanisms by which democratic participation are rendered possible in this country have been closed shut.

"If we don't do this, we die. This is what's left of hope in this country."

Go Green, KILL PEOPLE! (Crowder Visits Mexico)

Go Green, KILL PEOPLE! (Crowder Visits Mexico)

FreedomizerRadio | Internet Radio | Blog Talk Radio

FreedomizerRadio | Internet Radio | Blog Talk Radio

Snow Disrupts Flights at Zurich, Geneva as U.K. Braces for Weekend Freeze - Bloomberg

Snow Disrupts Flights at Zurich, Geneva as U.K. Braces for Weekend Freeze

Flights from European airports including London, Belfast and Geneva were canceled as the region braced for more snow and freezing temperatures over the last weekend before Christmas.

Belfast International will shut until at least 5:00 p.m., according to a statement on the airport’s website. London’s City Airport closed its runway earlier this afternoon. Airports including Zurich, Geneva, Schiphol and London Gatwick have also delayed and canceled flights.

“Within a turn of a head it’s like a blizzard out there,” Gatwick airport spokeswoman Sarah Baranowski said by phone. “We’ve had barely any snow at all and suddenly there’s a blanket down within minutes.”

Eurostar Group Ltd. imposed a speed limit on its rail services because of the severe conditions, the company said on its website, meaning journeys will take 30 minutes longer. Fourteen centimeters (5.5 inches) of snow fell at Frankfurt from yesterday evening until early today. About 400 flights at Frankfurt Airport were canceled today, according to Fraport AG spokesman Thomas Uber.

Police: Stabbing was probably a terror attack

Police: Stabbing was probably a terror attack

Police: Stabbing was probably a terror attack

Police: Stabbing was probably a terror attack

John McCain Calls 9/11 Health Bill "Fooling Around"

Lincoln, Secession and Slavery | Tibor Machan | Cato Institute: Daily Commentary

Lincoln, Secession and Slavery

Lincoln, Secession and Slavery

by Tibor Machan

This article appeared on cato.org on June 1, 2002.

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Over the last few years I have become obsessed with two questions: Was Abraham Lincoln a good American? And was he conducting his political life and, especially his presidency, in line with the principles of the Declaration of Independence?

When considering Lincoln, there are many statements from him that suggest that he believed what the Declaration of Independence says. But there are also quite a few policies he initiated that suggest that he was all too willing to compromise certain principles. Consider the following pro-Declaration statement from Lincoln: "The expression of that principle [political freedom], in our Declaration of Independence was most happy and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity."

Yet Lincoln has a blemished record of following the ideal of free government in his political life, as when he issued on May 18, 1864, the following order: "You will take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce ... and prohibit any further publication thereof.... You are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison ... the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforementioned newspapers."

Tibor Machan is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.

More by Tibor R. Machan

Granted, during a war one might believe that there is little a president can do but lay aside certain principles, such as the writ of habeas corpus, even the rights of the First Amendment of the Constitution. But perhaps those principles are so basic that they should never be compromised, even during war.

On another point, it looks like Lincoln's belief in the union went against the Declaration's view about when people have the right to dissolve their government, a view he himself seems to have held at one time in his political career. In January 1848 he said: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better."

So, what then is so sacred about the American union? Why can't a substantial segment of the citizenry separate from the country and go its own way? These are important questions when we consider that Lincoln supported secession on flimsier grounds than does the Declaration of Independence. It requires "a long train of abuses and usurpations," which reduce a government to "absolute despotism," before secession is justified.

But then there is that undeniable evil of slavery, associated with the Southern rebels, an evil that would appear to make a great deal of difference to whether secession is something justified. And many of the leaders of those rebels made no secret of their support for slavery. They endorsed numerous out-and-out racist ideas, including the idea that blacks were less than human and that whites had not just the authority but even the responsibility to hold them as slaves.

Lincoln, oddly enough, apparently shared some of these views. In his 1860 inaugural address, he said: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Two years later, President Lincoln wrote: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union (Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862)." And in 1858 Lincoln had written: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."

Still, when it comes to endorsing southern secession it is not enough to point out Lincoln's failures in his position on slavery. More important is whether one group may leave a larger group that it had been part of -- and in the process take along unwilling third parties. The seceding group definitely does not have that right. Putting it in straightforward terms, yes, a divorce (or, more broadly, the right of peaceful exit from a partnership) may not be denied to anyone unless -- and this is a very big "unless" -- those wanting to leave intend to take along hostages.

Seceding from the American union could perhaps be morally unobjectionable. It isn't that significant whether it is legally objectionable because, after all, slavery itself was legally unobjectionable, yet something had to be done about it. And to ask the slaves to wait until the rest of the people slowly undertook to change the Constitution seems obscene.

So, when one considers that the citizens of the union who intended to go their own way were, in effect, kidnapping millions of people -- most of whom would rather have stayed with the union that held out some hope for their eventual liberation -- the idea of secession no longer seems so innocent. And regardless of Lincoln's motives -- however tyrannical his aspirations or ambitious -- when slavery is factored in, it is doubtful that one can justify secession by the southern states.

Indeed, by the terms of the Declaration of Independence, secession is justified because everyone has the right to his or her life and liberty. Leaving a country with all of what belongs to one cannot be deemed in any way morally objectionable. Secession can be a sound idea; it comes under the principle of freedom of association, taken into the sphere of politics. It is a special case of the broader principle of individual sovereignty.

But secession cannot be justified if it is combined with the evil of imposing the act on unwilling third parties, no matter what its ultimate motivation. Thus, however flawed Lincoln was, he was a good American.

150 years later, state's secession still stirs, divides | greenvilleonline.com | The Greenville News

150 years later, state's secession still stirs, divides