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Wednesday April 01, 2015
News Articles

4 Dead In Pemex Oil Platform Explosion, Hundreds Evacuated
ZeroHedge | author | 04/01/15

Mexico's state-owned PEMEX says an oil platform has exploded in Campeche Bay. 300 workers have been evacuated and the company says 8 boats are attempting to bring the blaze under control. ... Read more
4 Dead In Pemex Oil Platform Explosion, Hundreds Evacuated [0:29]

Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled "torture" with the Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" ... the media is re-labelling "Mass Surveillance" as Merely "Bulk Collection".

The Orwellian Re-branding Of "Mass Surveillance" As Merely "Bulk Collection"
firstlook.org/theintercept | Glenn Greenwald | 03/13/15

This re-definition game goes as follows: yes, we vacuum up and store literally as much of the internet as we possibly can. Then we analyze all the data about what you're doing, with whom you're speaking, and who your network of associates is. Based on that analysis of all of you and your activities, we then read the communications that we want (with virtually no checks and concealing from you what percentage of it we're reading), and store as much of the rest of it as technology permits for future trolling. But don't worry: we're only reading the Bad People's emails. So run along then: no mass surveillance here. Just bulk collection! It's not mass surveillance, but "enhanced collection techniques."

Read more
BBC | Glenn Greenwald & Former GCHQ Director David Omand on ISC Surveillance Report - Newsnight (03/12/15) [12:20]

NSA Locations
offnow.org | author | date

The NSA spies on the world. To accomplish this, the agency needs a network of facilities across the Unite States. In all likelihood, the NSA has operations close to your own back yard. ... Read more

  1. All 50 States - The NSA once promised it was only spying on people in other countries. Then the agency swore it was only on "terrorists." Now we know the NSA funnels data and other information captured without a warrant, as required by the 4th Amendment, to local law enforcement via a previously-secret organization connected to the DEA called Special Operations Division (SOD).
  2. 42 States - The NSA has established deep partnerships with over 170 universities around the country. These partnerships not only provide a massive recruiting ground for future NSA spies, it serves as a major source of research and testing.
  3. Ft. Meade, Maryland - NSA is the largest employer in the state of Maryland. In 2006, the Baltimore Sun reported that the NSA had maxed out capacity of the Baltimore-area power grid via Baltimore Gas and Electric.
  4. Bluffdale, Utah - The new "Data Center" is a massive complex. Officials estimate it will use 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate once it's at full capacity. The electricity is provided by Rocky Mountain Power. The computer will reportedly produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
  5. San Antonio, Texas - The Texas Cryptologic Center is being built on the site of a former Sony warehouse, just down the road from a new Microsoft data center.
  6. Augusta, Georgia - The city of Augusta handles water and sewage treatment for the Threat Operations Center located there. Before a partnership in 2006 with Georgia Power, outages were a regular occurrence on post. This was particularly a problem during the summer, when heavy demands were placed on the system.
  7. Yakima, Washington - The "listening post" is scheduled to be closed and moved to Colorado. No date "in the future" has been confirmed.
  8. Aurora, Colorado - Intelligence collected from the geostationary satellites, as well as signals from other spacecraft and overseas listening posts, is relayed to this facility outside Denver. About 850 NSA employees track the satellites, transmit target information, and download the intelligence haul.
  9. Oak Ridge, Tennessee - Some 300 scientists and computer engineers with top security clearance toil away at a facility in Oak Ridge. They labor to build the world's fastest supercomputers. A new facility was recently built on the East Campus of Oak Ridge.
  10. Oahu, Hawaii - Focuses on intercepts from Asia. Built to house an aircraft assembly plant during World War II, the 250,000-square-foot bunker is nicknamed the Hole.
  11. Sugar Grove, West Virginia - The Sugar Grove Station downloads a "staggering" amount of communications per NSA expert James Bamford.
Read more

WEALTH Is Being Extracted From Our Economy, Under Our Very Noses!

Fracking Town's Desperate Laid-off Workers: 'They Don't Tell You It's All a Lie'
AlterNet | Evelyn Nieves | 03/28/15

From the looks of it, the nation's boomtown is still booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks like a dust bowl -- all that traffic -- and natural gas flares, wasted byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like bonfires. Not to mention that Walmart, still the main game in town, can't seem to get a handle on its very long lines and half­ empty shelves.

But life at the center of the country's largest hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, boom has definitely changed. The jobs that brought thousands of recession­-weary employment­-seekers to this once peaceful corner of western North Dakota over the last five years have been drying up, even as the unemployed keep coming.

Downtown, clutches of men pass their time at the Salvation Army, watching movies or trolling Craigslist ads on desktop computers. The main branch of the public library is full, all day, every day, with unemployed men in cubbyholes. And when the Command Center, a private temporary jobs agency, opens every morning at 6am, between two and three dozen people are waiting to get in the door. ... Read more

JPMorgan Chase
In the past four years alone, JPMorgan Chase has paid out $28,902,150,000 in fines and settlements for fraudulent and illegal practices. You could be next.




Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Wednesday, April 01 [10:56]
DN | Indiana Scrambles to Contain Growing Corporate, Public Outcry over Anti-LGBT "Religious Freedom" Law (01/01/15) [15:14]
DN | Started by Abolitionists in 1865, The Nation Magazine Marks 150 Years of Publishing Rebel Voices (01/01/15) [17:44]
Glenn Greenwald
ReasonTV | Glenn Greenwald's Plan to Poke, Prod, and Piss Off the Powerful (02/03/15) [42:01]
Glenn Greenwald VS Alan Dershowitz "NSA Fourth Amendment Debate"
*Citizen Four (2014) [2:14:00]
If the above link doesn't work try the following:
Citizen Four (2014) [2:14:00]
*Enemy Of The State (1998) (full movie) [2:12:12]
Stable multi target tracking in real time surveillance video (03/22/15) [1:10]
Pentagon Papers | Daniel Ellsberg
Woody Harrelson discusses "The Most Dangerous Man in America" [4:17]
The Most Dangerous Man In America, Part 1 [43:25], Part 2 [43:25]
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg on the Vietnam & Afghanistan Wars (2009) [41:15]
*TRNN | Willam Hartung says Saudi Arabia has become the second leading arms importer in the world (04/01/15) [11:24]
Excerpt from the interview above
JAY: Now, I don't know if you followed the story. We've done it many times, with Senator Bob Graham and the Joint Congressional Investigation into 9/11. The twenty-eight redacted pages, pages redacted by the White House, which according to people that have seen them, and pretty much according to Senator Graham, named the Saudi government as having actually been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Using Graham's words, facilitated and funded.

If that's true, and I've asked him and others, why has this not become a bigger issue? Many people point to the arms sales.

HARTUNG: I think it, that could be part of it. I mean there's, you know, there's different opinions as to did they directly do it, did they let the Sheikhs do it, how exactly that connection may have happened. But certainly they've gotten off the hook, as has Pakistan, compared to countries like Iraq, which actually had nothing to do with it.

So there's a very backwards policy that we've seen for the last decade that's cost a lot of money and a lot of lives, and hasn't really reduced the threat of terrorism.
*TRNN | Patrick Cockburn says, wars in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya are escalating, intensifying and cross infecting each other and the contradictory positions the US faces gives the IS an advantage (04/01/15) [8:11]
TRNN | Glen Ford says: Using the Gulf Monarchies to Project US Power in the Region is Unraveling (04/01/15) [12:23]
TYT | What Really Happens In The Church of Scientology (03/31/15) [12:08]
Scientology: My First Audit (03/30/15) [3:54]
TYT | Video Catches Cop Planting Drugs, Assaulting Unarmed Black Man (03/31/15) [4:22]
*RT | The Yemen Template (04/01/15) [24:45]
Thom Hartmann - www.thomhartmann.com/
Surveillance State | NSA | $2 Billion Utah Data Center ($2 Billion more for upkeep)
$2 Billion NSA Utah Data Center, also known as the NSA Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center
Ever wonder how fast the computer is in the NSA Utah Data Center: it can do 27,000 trillion calculations a second.
Ever wonder what 42 trillion file cabinets stacked together would look like?

According to a report by NPR, the NSA data center in Utah will be capable of saving 5 Zettabytes (5 billion Terabyte). Assuming that a filing cabinet with 60 files (30,000 pages of paper) uses up 0.4 m², which would correspond to 120 MB of data, the printed out Utah data center would use up 17 million square kilometers.


The National Security Agency -- which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication -- to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."1 Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be -- or may one day become -- a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story. DOES this seem ripe for Blackmail???? Wikipedia | Utah Data Center (article)

Computer Capacity
  1. Named Jaguar for its speed, it clocked in at 1.75 petaflops, officially becoming the world's fastest computer in 2009.
  2. But alas, by late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan's "K Computer," with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops.
  3. Its next goal is to reach exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and eventually zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop.

Storage Capacity
  1. Total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes.
  2. Global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year.
  3. A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.
  4. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Needs and Costs
  1. Initially Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag -- about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
    When the computer gets to yottaflop size...
  2. It will have an extraordinary appetite for electricity, eventually using about 200 megawatts, enough to power 200,000 homes. The computer will also produce a gargantuan amount of heat, requiring 60,000 tons of cooling equipment, the same amount that was needed to serve both of the World Trade Center towers.
Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

04.01.2015. 14:36



Special Interest Important stuff
GOOD Shorts Videos

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I'm still working on this

GOOD Short Videos
Newer Documentaries You Might Not Have Seen

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I'm still working on this

Newer Documentaries
Documentaries You've Never Seen

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Documentaries (small | pop-up)
Documentaries (big | full screen)
Good YouTube Documentaries

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Great YouTube Docs. (small | pop-up)
Good YouTube Docs. (big | full screen)

Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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