And I learned that you can have a mind expanding experience whilst blindfolded with a towel.. provided you have access to the proper meat.
On another note, I panned the last Esther Schindler post and I would like to mention for the record that this one is not as lame. Still not something worth mulling over.. but worth a quick scan.
Someone linked to your blog on/. and it is not going well for you, your ideas, or your writing style. You might want to disable your comments section - just based on my analysis of your failure to grasp the basic tenants of reporting.
June 28, 2009 5:25 AM
Mods, skip this post as it has nothing to do with the story, I just want to help easyTree out;)
I was actually posting about this here because I was hoping that someone more current in conspiracy research could remind me of some missing parts of my recollection.
It has been years, but I remember more as I think about this. I can tell you where to look, but I am no longer interested enough to dig through all the FOIA paperwork - which is where I saw just enough substantiating evidence to pique my interest in some otherwise totally unsupported assertions that a guy I knew made.
Some search terms for further research are 'artichoke' 'bluebird' and 'mkultra' - the last of which I would expect most people to recognize. These were all American 'human factor' experiments which were fascinating to my adolescent mind back when I heard about them in the late eighties/early nineties.
My 'source' - if we can call him that - told me that the 'psychological nature' (his words, not mine) of the war on drugs made him suspect a nazi psychologist's students were taking control of America.
Unfortunately, my source was a blow-hard conspiracy theorist, and I couldn't find out anything about the psychologist he cited beyond what was published in an amateur conspiracy rag.
I should note here that I suspected my source of being the author of the amateur piece simply due to the scarcity of any corroborating evidence for his outlandish claims about the expansion of mkultra to the general populace through the war on drugs.
Then, a number of years later I saw a documentary that was on French Canadian tv that made reference to some newly released documents that connected human factor experiments performed in a Montreal(?) sanitarium to the American human factor experiments.
Furthermore, and I don't recall the original source for this - it may have been the documentary - former third reich scientists who could not work in the US because of relations to Nuremburg figures were running the Canadian project directly or advising on site in some manner.
IIRC the experiments were later acknowledged both by Canada and by Bill Clinton and some sort of reparation was either made or being publicly sought by survivors of the experiments.
At some point during all of this I saw this nazi referenced definitively with relation to the design of post-war Allied human factor research. Unfortunately, I used to read a lot of FOIA stuff and I think that is where you are going to have to go for more.
Anyhow, I now had some substantiation that my source had somehow gotten hold of at least a thread of truth about the presence of a nazi scientist who had maintained a very low profile.
That is flimsy support for the detailed charges that had been made, though, and you can search other scientists from that period in America to find plenty of amateur conspiracy fluff supported by equally flimsy evidence.
J.W.Parsons is one example. He supposedly was paying an insider to put aborted fetuses around the Los Alamos testing grounds to see if they would reanimate.. and he founded JPL. If you are not American I would remind you that this is the time period of Roswell/the birth of American UFO mania and is ripe for exploitation by amateur conspiracy theorists - so it is not unusual to find this type of conspiracy from this time period.
Finally, this is where everything verifiable ends and we are left only with the word of a nut about the way in which mkultra was being applied to the American populace.... AND HERE IT IS!:
Our anonymous nazi scientist had developed a new take on the results of the human factor experiments and redefined the fight-flight continuum which was defined at the time by the three observable states of a sentient being during a self-preservation reflex response: Fight/Camouflage/Flight.
Our nazi concluded that both 'flight' and 'camouflage' reflex reactions belonged in the same meta-category because after exhibiting a camo re
OMFG. I read 'cut and paste' in some article and assumed this was a case of photoshopping. Weird how the misinterpretation translates to meta-commentary on my original point.
This whole situation sounds bizarre, but I was just reading in the strip-search constitutionality stories about the 'expectation' that a person would understand the constitutionality of their actions.
As we start seeing more of these strange cases that have been made possible by the advancement of technology I wonder if the expectation of understanding defense will be employed.
After all - what legal precedence addressing a situation of this nature has reached a level of widespread understanding that a given individual could be expected to be familiar with the society's legal expectations.
Wasn't there some third reich psychologist who came to America during Paperclip and was known for espousing that the only way to govern a nation was to make the majority of the citizens your enemy? Or prevent them from being able to get through life without breaking the law at some point or something?
I can't find a link - but your comment reminded me of this.
Did you RFTA? RIM doesn't totally open up their API to 3rd party developers.
You are not communicating that right. The RIM specific API (ie: device specific functionality) is open to developers but different generations of functionality from these APIs are available only on certain devices.
If you want to access the entire market you have to stay plain vanilla and use straight java.
The author does a good job explaining it if anyone would care to RTFA.
A lot about it. That is a pretty long posting with some insight for people completely unfamiliar with the world of blackberry development.
The story gets an upmod for that, though I suppose it could be seen as a really long plug for the guy's product. He mentions the surge from advertising on blogs and even includes graphs showing his trials vs. sales over time with some bumps pointed out.
We outside this situation need to continue to stand for openness in the vetting of our national security policies or we will lose ground even as we watch the Iranians struggle for the freedoms we supposedly enjoy.
The only way to establish trust in the security community is to measure your own words and actions with a sure hand.
This does not mean we cannot assist like minded people through the power of the internet, only that we recognize that others can be made to bear the responsibility for actions we take.
Upon further reflection, and further reading down this thread, I am stunned. How are people suggesting that Iranians who have obviously not prepared themselves for resistance begin resisting either through violence or setting up amateur radio transmitters etc..?
Imagine if you had family over there. Literally, the people who were prepared for this eventuality do not need our help. The people who were not prepared for the completely predictable irregularities in this election need to hunker down and ride it out, and perhaps next time they will pay attention before it is too late.
This is many times better than justifying a total crackdown in the minds of their more conservative fellow citizens by undertaking actions that endanger other civilians. The one thing that liberal Iranians should not do now is alienate their hardline brothers and sisters in the civilian populace - there will be no end to that bloodshed.
So seriously, all you noob Iranians who want to resist but don't know how, stfu and get your head down. Petition for U.N. observers, or whatever else you need to do, but don't go Hollywood Hacker on anyone or you will be out in the cold for good.
Ok, how does that change the propaganda aspect? Suddenly we have people who absolutely n33dz teh Hax0r Sk!llz posting on slashdot?
Hurry, post some docs for an ad-hoc wireless mesh network before teh death star blows these people up!!
Seriously, in times of turmoil the last thing anyone should be doing is adding new skills - that is how you get busted on trumped up charges and executed as an enemy of the revolution.
Screw the one byte per star thing... I want my random numbers mined from cosmic background radiation, and my network time servers synchronized by pulsar.
The whole article seems wrongheaded in exactly the way you point out.
Let's see how many people can figure out the target audience of this article... So lets see..
1. We are targeting an audience that doesn't know what a Code Jam is:
A sprint (sometimes called a Code Jam or hack-a-thon) is a short time period (three to five days) during which software developers work on a particular chunk of functionality.
2. This audience doesn't know why an IT manager might want a code jam, but hey, it might be cheap!:
For many IT managers, the most compelling reason for the company to sponsor a sprint is financial, because you just might be able to cover the costs out of petty cash.
3. The target audience is likely to relate to a comparison of the cost of this 'Code Jam' to monthly marketing costs, specifically, client dinners:
In short: In an open source sprint, you can add new functionality to your most important application for less money than your marketing department spent last month on a single fancy client dinner.
Any guesses on who this author wants to start trying to exploit the OSS dev webs?
'Backports' is the operative phrase for Ubuntu users experiencing upgrade anxiety - and installing them should be through enabling of the backports repos (or is it automatic now for security?)... https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
Quote from the link:
"This is where Ubuntu Backports comes in. The Backports team believes that the best update policy is a mix of Ubuntu's security-only policy AND providing new versions of some programs. Candidates for version updates are primarily desktop applications, such as your web browser, word processor, IRC client, or IM client. These programs can be updated without replacing a large part of the operating system that would affect stability of the whole system."
No, they didn't accept knowingly forged SSNs. There is only one legal way to check an SSN prior to hire without violating equal opportunity laws - and that is by paying a background check company to run every potential hire (if you only run one race you are in for trouble according to the auditor I spoke with). And even that only works well if the SSN and name are mismatched.
Once the employee is hired and has been with you across the turn of a tax reporting period (quarterly notices are unusual, W-2 usually triggers contact).
The earliest correspondence related to mismatched SSN/Name pair on W-2 is around 6 months.
At this point the employer is contacted and must update the employee's information with the feds including hours worked/wages/etc.. and sign a form saying they have passed along an informational packet to the employee with an explanation that their SSN and their names are mismatched.
That is the last the employer ever hears about it because the employee usually moves along rather quickly.
In the event that the SSN and name match the employee will most likely not be reported as suspect by the feds.
And for those wondering where the self-check line has wandered off to... the results out of that service were abysmal with false positives all over.
How about the contractors who accept forged SSNs and then proceed to duly withhold and file all payroll related taxes? My understanding is that this is the majority situation with regards to construction as opposed to agriculture related industries due to the insurance situation.
Long story short, your career as a contractor is over if something happens on a job and your insurance co finds a way out of paying - and provided you have a properly completed I-9 on file you are covered even if the employee involved is not actually legal.
For those who believe all these illegal immigrants are working under the table without paying taxes into the system, it just ain't so... Agriculture is the one industry that is supposedly utilizing fully undocumented workers. Everyone else is paying taxes (ie: all the fast food chains).
Hiring is the problem. If you require highly specific skill sets you end up paying relocation... and who knows how well the relocation itself goes for the candidate.
Slashdot Mirror
And I learned that you can have a mind expanding experience whilst blindfolded with a towel.. provided you have access to the proper meat.
On another note, I panned the last Esther Schindler post and I would like to mention for the record that this one is not as lame. Still not something worth mulling over.. but worth a quick scan.
pr0n. Compuserve. Anyone else remember the Nagel phenomenon... all those people sharing Nagelpics like they were some sort of risque commodity?
Did that only happen on my little corner of the world?
Why do you play games at all? Seriously, the writer of the above post sounds like they would be happier compulsively pulling on a slot-machine handle.
And look, already a comment on the Switzerland story.. maybe the first of many? Who knows? *shrugs*
From http://limuxwatch.blogspot.com/2009/05/switzerland-acknowledges-that-there-is.html#comments:
Anonymous said...
Someone linked to your blog on /. and it is not going well for you, your ideas, or your writing style. You might want to disable your comments section - just based on my analysis of your failure to grasp the basic tenants of reporting.
June 28, 2009 5:25 AM
so which one is it?
Dunno, but I'm not gonna match wits with this guy when death is one the line.
Mods, skip this post as it has nothing to do with the story, I just want to help easyTree out ;)
I was actually posting about this here because I was hoping that someone more current in conspiracy research could remind me of some missing parts of my recollection.
It has been years, but I remember more as I think about this. I can tell you where to look, but I am no longer interested enough to dig through all the FOIA paperwork - which is where I saw just enough substantiating evidence to pique my interest in some otherwise totally unsupported assertions that a guy I knew made.
Some search terms for further research are 'artichoke' 'bluebird' and 'mkultra' - the last of which I would expect most people to recognize. These were all American 'human factor' experiments which were fascinating to my adolescent mind back when I heard about them in the late eighties/early nineties.
My 'source' - if we can call him that - told me that the 'psychological nature' (his words, not mine) of the war on drugs made him suspect a nazi psychologist's students were taking control of America.
Unfortunately, my source was a blow-hard conspiracy theorist, and I couldn't find out anything about the psychologist he cited beyond what was published in an amateur conspiracy rag.
I should note here that I suspected my source of being the author of the amateur piece simply due to the scarcity of any corroborating evidence for his outlandish claims about the expansion of mkultra to the general populace through the war on drugs.
Then, a number of years later I saw a documentary that was on French Canadian tv that made reference to some newly released documents that connected human factor experiments performed in a Montreal(?) sanitarium to the American human factor experiments.
Furthermore, and I don't recall the original source for this - it may have been the documentary - former third reich scientists who could not work in the US because of relations to Nuremburg figures were running the Canadian project directly or advising on site in some manner.
IIRC the experiments were later acknowledged both by Canada and by Bill Clinton and some sort of reparation was either made or being publicly sought by survivors of the experiments.
At some point during all of this I saw this nazi referenced definitively with relation to the design of post-war Allied human factor research. Unfortunately, I used to read a lot of FOIA stuff and I think that is where you are going to have to go for more.
Anyhow, I now had some substantiation that my source had somehow gotten hold of at least a thread of truth about the presence of a nazi scientist who had maintained a very low profile.
That is flimsy support for the detailed charges that had been made, though, and you can search other scientists from that period in America to find plenty of amateur conspiracy fluff supported by equally flimsy evidence.
J.W.Parsons is one example. He supposedly was paying an insider to put aborted fetuses around the Los Alamos testing grounds to see if they would reanimate.. and he founded JPL. If you are not American I would remind you that this is the time period of Roswell/the birth of American UFO mania and is ripe for exploitation by amateur conspiracy theorists - so it is not unusual to find this type of conspiracy from this time period.
Finally, this is where everything verifiable ends and we are left only with the word of a nut about the way in which mkultra was being applied to the American populace. ... AND HERE IT IS! :
Our anonymous nazi scientist had developed a new take on the results of the human factor experiments and redefined the fight-flight continuum which was defined at the time by the three observable states of a sentient being during a self-preservation reflex response: Fight/Camouflage/Flight.
Our nazi concluded that both 'flight' and 'camouflage' reflex reactions belonged in the same meta-category because after exhibiting a camo re
OMFG. I read 'cut and paste' in some article and assumed this was a case of photoshopping. Weird how the misinterpretation translates to meta-commentary on my original point.
This whole situation sounds bizarre, but I was just reading in the strip-search constitutionality stories about the 'expectation' that a person would understand the constitutionality of their actions.
As we start seeing more of these strange cases that have been made possible by the advancement of technology I wonder if the expectation of understanding defense will be employed.
After all - what legal precedence addressing a situation of this nature has reached a level of widespread understanding that a given individual could be expected to be familiar with the society's legal expectations.
Rand is not who I am thinking.
I first heard about it from a crazy who was into WWII history but then saw mentions of it elsewhere.
The guy was one of the people scooped from Paperclip and was involved with the human factor experiments at Dachau IIRC.
Totally OT and not that important though.
Wasn't there some third reich psychologist who came to America during Paperclip and was known for espousing that the only way to govern a nation was to make the majority of the citizens your enemy? Or prevent them from being able to get through life without breaking the law at some point or something?
I can't find a link - but your comment reminded me of this.
Did you RFTA? RIM doesn't totally open up their API to 3rd party developers.
You are not communicating that right. The RIM specific API (ie: device specific functionality) is open to developers but different generations of functionality from these APIs are available only on certain devices.
If you want to access the entire market you have to stay plain vanilla and use straight java.
The author does a good job explaining it if anyone would care to RTFA.
A lot about it. That is a pretty long posting with some insight for people completely unfamiliar with the world of blackberry development.
The story gets an upmod for that, though I suppose it could be seen as a really long plug for the guy's product. He mentions the surge from advertising on blogs and even includes graphs showing his trials vs. sales over time with some bumps pointed out.
A decent read overall.
So instead of an intelligent point of view you are projecting a frightened and ignorant POV onto this man. Why? Because he is old.
We outside this situation need to continue to stand for openness in the vetting of our national security policies or we will lose ground even as we watch the Iranians struggle for the freedoms we supposedly enjoy.
The only way to establish trust in the security community is to measure your own words and actions with a sure hand.
This does not mean we cannot assist like minded people through the power of the internet, only that we recognize that others can be made to bear the responsibility for actions we take.
New mods, don't mod this reply to myself...
Upon further reflection, and further reading down this thread, I am stunned. How are people suggesting that Iranians who have obviously not prepared themselves for resistance begin resisting either through violence or setting up amateur radio transmitters etc..?
Imagine if you had family over there. Literally, the people who were prepared for this eventuality do not need our help. The people who were not prepared for the completely predictable irregularities in this election need to hunker down and ride it out, and perhaps next time they will pay attention before it is too late.
This is many times better than justifying a total crackdown in the minds of their more conservative fellow citizens by undertaking actions that endanger other civilians. The one thing that liberal Iranians should not do now is alienate their hardline brothers and sisters in the civilian populace - there will be no end to that bloodshed.
So seriously, all you noob Iranians who want to resist but don't know how, stfu and get your head down. Petition for U.N. observers, or whatever else you need to do, but don't go Hollywood Hacker on anyone or you will be out in the cold for good.
Ok, how does that change the propaganda aspect? Suddenly we have people who absolutely n33dz teh Hax0r Sk!llz posting on slashdot?
Hurry, post some docs for an ad-hoc wireless mesh network before teh death star blows these people up!!
Seriously, in times of turmoil the last thing anyone should be doing is adding new skills - that is how you get busted on trumped up charges and executed as an enemy of the revolution.
Screw the one byte per star thing... I want my random numbers mined from cosmic background radiation, and my network time servers synchronized by pulsar.
Carry on.
The whole article seems wrongheaded in exactly the way you point out.
Let's see how many people can figure out the target audience of this article... So lets see..
1. We are targeting an audience that doesn't know what a Code Jam is:
A sprint (sometimes called a Code Jam or hack-a-thon) is a short time period (three to five days) during which software developers work on a particular chunk of functionality.
2. This audience doesn't know why an IT manager might want a code jam, but hey, it might be cheap! :
For many IT managers, the most compelling reason for the company to sponsor a sprint is financial, because you just might be able to cover the costs out of petty cash.
3. The target audience is likely to relate to a comparison of the cost of this 'Code Jam' to monthly marketing costs, specifically, client :
dinners
In short: In an open source sprint, you can add new functionality to your most important application for less money than your marketing department spent last month on a single fancy client dinner.
Any guesses on who this author wants to start trying to exploit the OSS dev webs?
Solid, yet still floats on water... What could it be?!
'Backports' is the operative phrase for Ubuntu users experiencing upgrade anxiety - and installing them should be through enabling of the backports repos (or is it automatic now for security?)... https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
Quote from the link:
"This is where Ubuntu Backports comes in. The Backports team believes that the best update policy is a mix of Ubuntu's security-only policy AND providing new versions of some programs. Candidates for version updates are primarily desktop applications, such as your web browser, word processor, IRC client, or IM client. These programs can be updated without replacing a large part of the operating system that would affect stability of the whole system."
No, they didn't accept knowingly forged SSNs. There is only one legal way to check an SSN prior to hire without violating equal opportunity laws - and that is by paying a background check company to run every potential hire (if you only run one race you are in for trouble according to the auditor I spoke with). And even that only works well if the SSN and name are mismatched.
Once the employee is hired and has been with you across the turn of a tax reporting period (quarterly notices are unusual, W-2 usually triggers contact).
The earliest correspondence related to mismatched SSN/Name pair on W-2 is around 6 months.
At this point the employer is contacted and must update the employee's information with the feds including hours worked/wages/etc.. and sign a form saying they have passed along an informational packet to the employee with an explanation that their SSN and their names are mismatched.
That is the last the employer ever hears about it because the employee usually moves along rather quickly.
In the event that the SSN and name match the employee will most likely not be reported as suspect by the feds.
And for those wondering where the self-check line has wandered off to... the results out of that service were abysmal with false positives all over.
How about the contractors who accept forged SSNs and then proceed to duly withhold and file all payroll related taxes? My understanding is that this is the majority situation with regards to construction as opposed to agriculture related industries due to the insurance situation.
Long story short, your career as a contractor is over if something happens on a job and your insurance co finds a way out of paying - and provided you have a properly completed I-9 on file you are covered even if the employee involved is not actually legal.
For those who believe all these illegal immigrants are working under the table without paying taxes into the system, it just ain't so... Agriculture is the one industry that is supposedly utilizing fully undocumented workers. Everyone else is paying taxes (ie: all the fast food chains).
Hiring is the problem. If you require highly specific skill sets you end up paying relocation... and who knows how well the relocation itself goes for the candidate.
In New England, we have four seasons:
Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction.
You are forgetting mud season. Right after still winter and well into construction. At least in Vermont.
the other 2 books
You do know, don't you, that the HHGTTG Trilogy ended up with five volumes.
That's what makes it a trilogy.