Month: July 2014

On Friday, I blogged the bizarre story
about an online article by Natural News nutjob Mike Adams in which
he compared researchers and
supporters of modern biotech crops to Nazis. He then argued
…

…it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of
human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing
of those engaged in heinous crimes against
humanity.(emphasis his)…

Today, Monsanto collaborators — publishers, journalists and
scientists — have signed on to the Nazi genocide machine of our
day: the biotechnology industry and its evil desire to dominate the
world’s food supply and blanket the planet with deadly chemicals
that have been scientifically shown to cause horrific cancer
tumors. They use many of the same tactics as the Nazi regime, too:
intimidation, character assassination, threats and fabricated
disinformation. Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda, it turns out, is
alive and well today in America. Its headquarters is not in Berlin
but St. Louis….

I’m hoping someone will create a website listing all the
publishers, scientists and journalists who are now Monsanto
propaganda collaborators. I have no doubt such a website would be
wildly popular and receive a huge influx of visitors, and it would
help preserve the historical record of exactly which people
contributed to the mass starvation and death which will inevitably
be unleashed by GMO agriculture (which is already causing mass
suicides in India and crop failures worldwide).

And voila, just such a website- Monsanto Collaborators –
appeared the next day. The website helpfully listed “collaborators”
over whom the “moral right” to kill might presumably be exercised.
After the backlash, Adams hastily claimed that the Monsanto
Collaborators website must be a false flag operation established by
evil pro-biotech forces with the goal of discrediting him and other
organic revolutionary guards.

Nick Price over at This Week in Pseudoscience has used
his internet sleuthing skills to try to trace the orgin and advent
of the Monsanto Collaborators website. He has uncovered some
intriguing clues that
strongly suggest that Mike Adams is lying and that he is
responsible creating Monsanto Collaborators. Price reports:

After doing a bit of digging, what I found has convinced me that
Mike Adams published MonsantoCollaborators.org himself using an
offshore hosting company and domain registrar to attempt to hide
his identity, and then claimed it was from a third-party to shield
himself from liability for posting a “hit list” on an article
saying that his followers were morally obligated to kill these
people.  When there was too much public backlash and the
authorities were contacted, he finally claimed it was a “false
flag” attack against himself and his followers, whilst leaving the
site online and further distancing himself from it, as well as his
previous statements.

What I found was pretty convincing.  I found that
MonsantoCollaborators.org was registered hours before the
article it was supposedly responding to was even put online.
 Furthermore, there are a number of similarities between
NaturalNews and MonsantoCollaborators.org, from sharing entire
files (which do not appear elsewhere on the internet), to shared
graphics, to using the same proprietary fonts, to similar code
structure, matching file naming conventions, and other code
quirks.

As Price notes, what he has found is not definitive. It will be
interesting to see how this conspiracy develops.

Big hat tip to frequent H&R commenter
SugarFree.

Imagine a company hiring a debt collector that
sends armed representatives to customers’ homes and threatens to
put them in cages if they don’t pay up. That’s not allowed in
America, unless your company is the government. NBC Philadelphia
reports on the latest instance of police brutality during petty law
enforcement to
make the news:

The [Pennsylvania state] constable [in Lehigh County] told the
District Attorney he felt his life was in danger as he tried to
serve 38-year-old Kevin McCullers.

McCullers, who had 31 outstanding parking tickets, was shot as
he tried to back out of his driveway along the 3400 block of
Portland Drive in Whitehall Township around 7:30 a.m. Thursday. His
girlfriend says McCullers was on his way to Dunkin’ Donuts and was
surprised by the constable.

“They never knocked on the door! No nothing! I just heard the
gunshots! He pulled the car out of the garage and all I heard were
gunshots,” said Hafeezah Muhammad, who added that McCullers,
who was hit in the back, may not walk again. “For parking tickets?!
It’s insane.”

Does Lehigh County or Pennsylvania need to hire constables to
serve warrants over parking tickets? Setting aside for a moment the
ethical questions arising from government fining regimes, couldn’t
local cops flag vehicles with an excessive number of parking
tickets for towing? A lot of cops spend a lot of time running
plates on shift anyway.

As to the ethical questions, Brian Doherty
has written about how the fines attached to petty violations
like jaywalking, suspended licenses, or marijuana in public view,
and the fines attached to paying the initial fines late, helps the
government trap lower income and marginalized people in a cycle of
indebtedness and imprisonment. It happens on a daily basis, usually
without the use of lethal force. So long as the policing priorities
(like using the police as a revenue generator) that create
situations where people are shot and paralyzed over their
government debts remain unquestioned, incidents like this will keep
happening.

Tesla, Nissan, Google, and several carmakers have
declared that they will have commercial self-driving cars on the
highways before the end of this decade. Experts at the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers predict that 75 percent of
cars will be self-driving by 2040. So far California, Nevada,
Florida, Michigan, and the District of Columbia have passed laws
explicitly legalizing self-driving vehicles, and many other states
are looking to do so.

The coming era of autonomous autos raises concerns about legal
liability and safety, but as Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey
explains, there are good reasons to believe that robot cars may
exceed human drivers when it comes to practical and even ethical
decision making.

View this article.

It’s really not a surprise that Congress
can’t be trusted to edit an online encyclopedia—and let’s be
clear, it’s not really Congress, but
one shared IP address associated with the House of
Representatives. The obvious question then is: What else can’t
lawmakers and their minions be trusted to edit?

Strictly speaking, if “persistent disruptive editing” of the
Mediaite entry at Wikipedia is a problem, then whatever the fuck it
is the nation’s lawmakers have been doing to health care, the tax
code, the national budget, the (un)leashing of the various spook
and law enforcement agencies, and any other policy you care to
imagine probably deserves a few stronger words.

Wikipedia editors have taken to referring to the specific person
or persons abusing privileges at Wikipedia as “trolls,” but the
folks who voted the PATRIOT Act into being
certainly live under a bridge. And they’re sitting on the heads of
whoever crafted the accumulated detritus—or authorized the Internal
Revenue Service to do so—of the rules many of us pay
accountants good money to navigate (or just sweat it out ourselves)
so that we don’t face fines or imprisonment every time April 15
rolls around.

The tale of edit-blocked legislators and congressional staffers
at Wikipedia is funny as hell, but it’s a sign of a larger problem.
We’re at the mercy of a bunch of petty and malicious trolls who
really do have the power to screw with us by switching around the
arrangement of a few words, or adding and deleting verbiage, in the
U.S. Code. Whatever they do,
the rest of ue results.

Now if only the executive branch
weren’t at least as
unworthy of trust with any sort of serious responsibility.

It’s really not a surprise that Congress
can’t be trusted to edit an online encyclopedia—and let’s be
clear, it’s not really Congress, but
one shared IP address associated with the House of
Representatives. The obvious question then is: What else can’t
lawmakers and their minions be trusted to edit?

Strictly speaking, if “persistent disruptive editing” of the
Mediaite entry at Wikipedia is a problem, then whatever the fuck it
is the nation’s lawmakers have been doing to health care, the tax
code, the national budget, the (un)leashing of the various spook
and law enforcement agencies, and any other policy you care to
imagine probably deserves a few stronger words.

Wikipedia editors have taken to referring to the specific person
or persons abusing privileges at Wikipedia as “trolls,” but the
folks who voted the PATRIOT Act into being
certainly live under a bridge. And they’re sitting on the heads of
whoever crafted the accumulated detritus—or authorized the Internal
Revenue Service to do so—of the rules many of us pay
accountants good money to navigate (or just sweat it out ourselves)
so that we don’t face fines or imprisonment every time April 15
rolls around.

The tale of edit-blocked legislators and congressional staffers
at Wikipedia is funny as hell, but it’s a sign of a larger problem.
We’re at the mercy of a bunch of petty and malicious trolls who
really do have the power to screw with us by switching around the
arrangement of a few words, or adding and deleting verbiage, in the
U.S. Code. Whatever they do,
the rest of ue results.

Now if only the executive branch
weren’t at least as
unworthy of trust with any sort of serious responsibility.