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In an already Struggling Economy and deep Depression, Police will arrest you from selling lemonade at the Washington Capital.
Ed Coleman is an Indianapolis City-County Councilman. He won election four years ago as a Republican running at-large, but before long, he grew very disenchanted with the Republican Party and the dictatorial leadership on the Council that wanted him to vote contrary to his principles and conscience, and toe the line. So, he defected to the [...]
The Libertarian National Committee has voted to make a significant contribution to Re-election of Indianapolis City-County Councilor Ed Coleman. The LNC will contribute $50,000 to the highest ranking Libertarian official in the United States seeking to stay on the Council. Coleman was elected in 2007 to office as a Republican to an At-Large seat on [...]
Are you surprised? I'm not.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster back in 1975.
If you think that’s a few spies too many – spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment – one doesn’t have to go too deep into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.
Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes.
The FBI has in recent years used trained informants not just to snitch on suspected terrorists, but to set them up from the get-go. A recent report put together by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkley analyses some striking statistics about the role of FBI informants in terrorism cases that the Bureau has targeted in the decade since the September 11 attacks.
The report reveals that the FBI regularly infiltrates communities where they suspect terrorist-minded individuals to be engaging with others. Regardless of their intentions, agents are sent in to converse within the community, find suspects that could potentially carry out “lone wolf” attacks and then, more or less, encourage them to do so. By providing weaponry, funds and a plan, FBI-directed agents will encourage otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks, only to bust them before any events fully materialize.
Additionally, one former high-level FBI officials speaking to Mother Jones says that, for every informant officially employed by the bureau, up to three unofficial agents are working undercover.
The FBI has used those informants to set-up and thus shut-down several of the more high profile would-be attacks in recent years. The report reveals that the Washington DC Metro bombing plot, the New York City subway plot, the attempt to blow up Chicago’s Sears Tower and dozens more were all orchestrated by FBI agents. In fact, reads the report, only three of the more well-known terror plots of the last decade weren’t orchestrated by FBI-involved agents.
The report reveals that in many of the stings, important meetings between informants and the unknowing participants are left purposely unrecorded, as to avoid any entrapment charges that could cause the case to be dismissed. Perhaps the most high-profile of the FBI-proposed plots was the case of the Newburgh 4. Around an hour outside of New York City, an informant infiltrated a Muslim community and engaged four local men to carry out a series of attacks. Those men may have never actually carried out an attack, but once the informant offered them a plot and a pair of missiles, they agreed. Defense attorneys cried “entrapment,” but the men still were sentenced to 25 years apiece.
"The problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," Martin Stolar tells Mother Jones. Stolar represented the suspect involved in a New York City bombing plot that was set-up by FBI agents. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can claim a victory in the war on terror." For their part, the FBI says this method is a plan for "preemption," "prevention" and "disruption."
The report also reveals that, of the 500-plus prosecutions of terrorism-related cases they analyzed, nearly half of them involved the use of informants, many of whom worked for the FBI in exchange for money or to work off criminal charges. Of the 158 prosecutions carried out, 49 defendants participated in plots that agent provocateurs arranged on behalf of the FBI.
Experts note that the chance of winning a terrorism-related trial, entrapment or not, is near impossible. "The plots people are accused of being part of – attacking subway systems or trying to bomb a building – are so frightening that they can overwhelm a jury," David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, tells Mother Jones. Since 9/11, almost two-thirds of the cases linked to terrorism have ended with guilty pleas. “They don't say, 'I've been entrapped,' or, 'I was immature,’” a retired FBI official remarks.
All of this and those guilty pleas often stem for just being in the right place at the wrong time. Farhana Khera of the group Muslim Advocate notes that agents go into mosques on “fishing expeditions” just to see where they can get interest in the community. "The FBI is now telling agents they can go into houses of worship without probable cause," says Khera. "That raises serious constitutional issues."
From the set-up to the big finish, the whole sting operation is ripe with constitutional issues such as that. A decade since 9/11, however, the FBI is reaching through whatever means it can pull together to keep terrorists – or whom they think could someday become one – from ever hurting America.
Reprinted with permission from Russia Today.
Hurricane Irene from the ISS last Monday. Click for larger. Image credit: NASA
I am in hurricane Irene’s bullseye, not good. Fortunately I am inland a ways. Depending on the model I look at things go from bad to worse. Likely, no, almost certainly I will loose power and internet connection for an extended period. Tomorrow is the “get ready” day outside, Saturday will be get some milk and maybe some food although I should be pretty well set for that.
If you live along the east coast – anywhere along the east coast from the Carolinas north, do what you have to to be safe and fool with this one – be ready as much as you can be. Trudy - Be safe!
The image I have above was taken from the International Space Station on Monday morning.
Oh speaking of the ISS, yesterday I told of the Progress 44 crash and I am heartened to know my lamenting of the US space program direction is shared by some of the “powers that be”.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) (and a senior member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology) issued the following statement in reaction to today’s failure of the Russian Progress Soyuz cargo rocket (source: Rep. Rohrabacher) :
“Today, Russia’s Soyuz launch vehicle failed to boost the Progress M-12M cargo ship into orbit to deliver needed supplies to the International Space Station. This failure should be a cause of grave concern, and a moment of reexamination of America’s space strategy,” said Rohrabacher.
“Today’s Russian rocket failure will interrupt ISS cargo deliveries, and could threaten crew transportation as well. NASA needs to conduct an investigation before another Soyuz spacecraft with new ISS crew members can be launched, and it is unknown how long such an investigation will take.”
“I hope this is a minor problem with a quick and simple fix,” said Rohrabacher. “But this episode underscores America’s need for reliable launch systems of its own to carry cargo and crew into space. The only way to achieve this goal is to place more emphasis on commercial cargo and crew systems currently being developed by American companies.
“We need to get on with the task of building affordable launch systems to meet our nation’s needs for access to low Earth orbit, instead of promoting grandiose concepts which keep us vulnerable in the short and medium terms. The most responsible course of action for the United States is to dramatically accelerate the commercial crew systems already under development.
“I am calling on General Bolden, the NASA Administrator, to propose an emergency transfer of funding from unobligated balances in other programs, including the Space Launch System, to NASA’s commercial crew initiative. Funding should be used to speed up the efforts of the four current industry partners to develop their systems and potentially expand the recent awards to include the best applicants for launch vehicle development.
“NASA could potentially transfer several hundred million dollars from this long term development concept, since the SLS project has not even started, to the more urgently needed systems that can launch astronauts to ISS, reliably and affordably. This transfer will boost the development of American controlled technology and greatly reduce our dependence on the Russians.”
Ironically not long after we closed the door on the shuttle program a Progress resupply ship is lost. Perhaps they can find it.
UPDATE: They found it – crashed
From NASA HQ:
Mission Control Moscow reported that communication with the Progress 44 cargo craft was lost 5 minutes, 20 seconds after its launch at 9 a.m. EDT today. Preliminary data from the Russian Federal Space Agency indicate there was a problem with the propulsion system, and that the vehicle did not reach its desired orbit.
International Space Station Program Manager Michael Suffredini will hold a news conference on NASA Television at noon EDT.
Just after 11 a.m., Mission Control Moscow radioed a report to the crew on board the station:
“At 1300 (GMT), we lifted off, following 320 seconds of flight there was a failure in the upper stage of the launch vehicle. We lost communications after a while with the launch vehicle and we did not report stage separation,” said Maxim Matuchen, the head of the Russian Mission Control Center.
“In the previous communications pass we attempted to contact the vehicle through every possible channel. Orbital monitoring telemetry and we have just finished our second communications pass where we invoked all of the communications facilities. We sent commands to activate the communications pass on board, unfortunately it failed.”
“Understood,” replied Expedition 28 Commander Andrey Borisenko.
“This is it for the moment, we’ll try to figure out what has happened and what the cause was. I just wanted to keep you informed.”
“Thank you for letting us know so quickly,” Borisenko added. “Thank you from the entire crew.”
Progress 44 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome into a cloudless sky at 7 p.m. Kazakhstan time bound for the International Space Station and a docking on Friday. At the time of launch, the space station was flying 230 miles over Equatorial Guinea on the west coast of Africa. The spacecraft is carrying 2.9 tons of food, fuel and supplies for the space station.
Mercury's Rembrandt crater from the Messenger spacecraft on August 7, 2011. Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Yes, in case you were wondering and even if you weren’t the Messenger spacecraft orbiting around Mercury is alive and well and still returning very nice images.
The ESA is planning their own mission to Mercury with their Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) which is going through a bit of testing at the moment. I’ll tell you more about the ESA mission in a day or two.
Here’s the Messenger informational caption for the image:
This limb image shows Rembrandt, the second largest impact basin on Mercury after Caloris. Discovered during the second MESSENGER flyby, Rembrandt is one of the youngest impact basins on Mercury, as indicated by the relatively low density of impact craters on its rim. A large lobate scarp trending from the southwest to the north crosscuts Rembrandt and several of the smaller craters that have impacted the smooth interior plains.
Ohpir Chasma of the Valles Marineris -- check out the enlargement of this image
During its examination of Mars, the Viking 1 spacecraft returned images of Valles Marineris, a huge canyon system 5,000 km, or about 3,106 miles, long, whose connected chasma or valleys may have formed from a combination of erosional collapse and structural activity. This synthetic oblique view shows Ophir Chasma, the northern most one of the connected valleys of Valles Marineris. For scale, the large impact crater in lower right corner is about 18.5 miles, or 30 km, wide.
Ophir Chasma is a large west-northwest-trending trough about 62 miles, or 100 km, wide. The Chasma is bordered by high-walled cliffs, most likely faults, that show spur-and-gully morphology and smooth sections. The walls have been dissected by landslides forming reentrants. The volume of the landslide debris is more than 1,000 times greater than that from the May 18, 1980, debris avalanche from Mount St. Helens. The longitudinal grooves seen in the foreground are thought to be due to differential shear and lateral spreading at high velocities.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS
Click here to view the embedded video.
LOL. Not really. I just like the gimmicks the weather people on TV use to get viewers. We had Storm Tracker 5000, then it was Doppler 5000 with the phony radar like screens and now it’s back to just plain Storm Tracker 5. What I really dislike is the TV guys/gals using those touch screens. You can’t tell a darned thing because they are waving their arms around a hundred miles an hour like some crazy person possessed drawing nonsensical lines and boxes and such…geesh.
Yep, the TV folks do all that marketing and then when the time comes they kind of babble on and lull the viewers into a kind of stupor so they miss the forecast. This, I suspect happens so it’s hard to prove when the forecaster gets it wrong. Ever happen to you?
Oh yeah the video, the STEREO spacecraft can watch CME’s all the way from the Sun to Earth which is pretty amazing.
Speaking of storms, I can hear the first line of thunderstorms moving on in so time to get off line.
PS: If YOU are a TV weather person, no offense intended, merely an observation. 
Someone on twitter was curious about GOP attitudes toward astrology. I left the party breakdown out of the previous post because ideology accounts for most party differences. In other words, conservatives are more skeptical of astrology than liberals, and Republicans more than Democrats, but the second result just seems to emerge from the Republican’s greater conservatism.
Astrology very scientific
Astrology somewhat scientific
Astrology not scientific
Strong Democrat
6
31
63
Democrat
7
30
63
Lean Democrat
4
28
67
Independent
7
37
57
Lean Republican
3
26
71
Republican
4
21
75
Strong Republican
4
20
76
Why are independents so gullible? It probably has to do with their lower average intelligence (this goes for moderates too). So I simply limited the sample to those with at least bachelor’s degrees to control for intelligence:
Limited to those with college degrees or more
Astrology very scientific
Astrology somewhat scientific
Astrology not scientific
Strong Democrat
3
21
76
Democrat
4
17
79
Lean Democrat
2
21
78
Independent
4
22
75
Lean Republican
1
9
90
Republican
0
11
88
Strong Republican
1
10
89
The distinctiveness of independents diminishes somewhat, but Democrats with college degrees or more remain more gullible than Republicans with the same (the difference remains if you control for sex by the way).
I’m still scratching my head over the rather atrocious Brian Palmer piece in Slate, Double Inanity: Twin studies are pretty much useless. It’s of a quality which would make it appropriate for WorldNetDaily. Here are the responses of Jason Collins, Daniel MacArthur, and Alex Tabarrok. The comments at Slate were rather scathing too. I observed over at Genomes Unzipped that many of the assertions in the piece were in the “not even wrong/what does that even mean?” class. Palmer is apparently a freelancer at Slate, and they’re doing a bunch of stories on twins this week. I wonder if they just sent him the assignment with instructions on the slant, and he took it a little too far. Even if it was a polemic it was a shoddy and embarrassing one. My main concern is that many people perceive Slate to be an organ which publishes “smart” and well researched pieces, and they’ll take Palmer’s screed at face value.
The scientific problems with the article are legion. But still: how does something like this get published in a relatively high-end publication? Brian Palmer has editors presumably. If the copy was an undergraduate paper the prose would be ...
“This study measured the frequency of pubic hair transfer between a limited number of consenting heterosexual partners. The results derive from controlled experiments with a number of human subjects rather than forensic casework. Standardized collection procedures were observed, situational variables were tracked. Participants (forensic laboratory employees and their spouses) were six Caucasian couples who collected their pubic hair combings immediately following intercourse. Subjects provided informed consent in accordance with the protocol for human subjects approved by the U.A.B. institutional review board. The experiment was replicated ten times for five couples, and five times for another couple (total n = 110). Transfer frequencies were calculated from instances where foreign (exogenous) hairs were observed. Results showed at least one exogenous pubic hair in 17.3% (19/110) of combings. Transfers to males (23.6%, or 13/55) were more prevalent than transfers to females (10.9%, or 6/55). Only once were transfers observed simultaneously between both male and female. A total of 28 exogenous pubic hairs were identified. Subjects reported intercourse duration of 2-25 min, intervening intervals of 1-240 h, pre-coital bathing intervals of 0.25-24 h, and predominantly missionary position (76%). No clear relationship among these other ...
The first hurricane of the 2011 season hits the U.S. east coast, as seen by a NASA Earth-observing satellite:
[Click to encoriolenate, or grab the nearly one-to-one sized 6000x7000 pixel version.]
This image was taken on August 26, 2011 at 16:30 UTC. For more images and video of Irene, keep an eye on the NASA GSFC Flickr page and follow them on Twitter.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team
Related posts:
- Putting the eye in Irene
- Come on, Irene
- Attack of the Cyclones
- Hurricane double whammy
Artist’s concept of the pulsar and its planet. The system could fit into our Sun, represented by the yellow surface.
What’s the News: An international team of astronomers has found an exotic planet possibly made of diamond, located about 4,000 light-years away from Earth. The researchers believe that the unusual planet was once a sun-like star, transformed into its current state by its hungry stellar companion, a millisecond pulsar.
How the Heck:
When a massive star dies in a supernova, it sometimes collapses into a pulsar, a highly compacted stellar corpse that emits periodic beams of electromagnetic radiation from its poles. If a pulsar is part of a binary system, it can feed on its nearby stellar friend and speed up its spin to hundreds of rotations per second, effectively becoming a millisecond pulsar. (About 30% of millisecond pulsars found are solitary—astronomers don’t know how they formed.)
Astronomers detected the pulsar, known as PSR J1719-1438, during a large ...
What’s the News: Researchers have now found a well-preserved fossil of the earliest known member of the animal group that encompasses today’s placental mammals, which includes humans. The shrew-like creature, named Juramaia sinensis, or “Jurassic mother from China,” dates back to 160 million years ago, 35 million years earlier than the oldest mammal fossil previously discovered. The Nature study gives some tangible support to genetic evidence suggesting that the two main types of mammals split well before the previous oldest mammal fossils.
How the Heck:
Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and his colleagues analyzed the Juramaia fossil, which was unearthed in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, a hotspot for paleontology. The fossil consisted of an incomplete skull, a partial skeleton, a full set of teeth, and impressions of residual soft tissues like hair.
After comparing the fossil’s features with those of other ancient mammals, the ...
I’ve said it before: Saturn’s moon Hyperion is seriously freaky. New images from the Cassini spacecraft flyby of the tiny moon don’t change my mind one bit:
[Click to enchronosenate.]
What a weird place! Hyperion is a lumpy chunk of ice only about 270 km (170 miles) across on average, but yesterday (August 25, 2011) Cassini passed about 25,000 km away from it, so it got a lot of high-resolution shots.
As you can see, it’s saturated with craters. But they look funny! The overwhelming impression I get is that Hyperion is made of resilient foam, like a packing peanut. I’m also fascinated by the ginormous crater that dominates this face of the moon. If Hyperion were made of stiff rock, an impact that size would’ve shattered it like a bullet hitting a pebble. But if the composition of the moon is able to compress and compact — like foam, or something with lots of pockets of empty space inside it — the impact would do pretty much what we see here. Lots of asteroids appear to be "rubble piles" — chunks of material held together by their own ...
The Eastern Seaboard is warily watching the progress of Hurricane Irene, wondering what course the storm will take and just how ferocious it will be. Predicting the path of a hurricane still involves some guesswork—but thanks to rapidly improving computer models and data-gathering abilities, Tekla Perry reports in IEEE Spectrum, scientists are able to make more accurate forecasts farther in advance than they were even five or ten years ago. In fact, the predicted track of a hurricane over the next 48 hours today is as accurate as a prediction for the next 24 hours was 10 years ago—a day that can make a big difference for people deciding whether to evacuate and how to prepare before the storm. Boosts in computing power mean scientists can run more, faster, and more detailed simulations of the storm, and technologies like Dopper radar provide detailed data on wind speed, air pressure, and temperature as storms progress.
Irene has been a relatively easy storm to predict so far, Frank D. Marks Jr., a NOAA hurricane researcher, told Spectrum, but that doesn’t mean scientists are able to tell residents of any particular city exactly ...
WHAT? Noooooooo!
If you haven’t heard about the corkscrew kookiness that is duck genitalia by now, you need to check that stuff out ASAP.
Ducks’ twisting vaginas and telescoping penises are well-known part of an evolutionary arms race between the sexes that’s been going on for millennia, with each side trying to exert control over which males’ sperm fertilize the female’s eggs—a battle that, especially in birds, is fierce, occasionally violent, and weird as all-get-out. The most recently discovered example of what biologists deem “sexual conflict,” a little behavior hens have developed called sperm ejection, upholds that fine tradition.
Hens, like many female birds, don’t always have a lot of control over who mates with them. Roosters tend to resort to “sexual coercion,” aka rape, and so a female might have any number of sexual partners that she didn’t get to choose. What’s a hen to do? Well, according to a new study in The American Naturalist, evolve a method for getting rid of sperm from males she didn’t particularly like, thus making sure her offspring are of the best quality.
Scientists had already noticed that hens tended to squirt out semen after some acts ...
Greetings from Norway, where we’re about to embark on what is surely the most logistically elaborate conference I’ve ever attended. Setting Time Aright starts here in Norway, where we hop on a boat and cross the North Sea to Copenhagen. The get-together is sponsored by the Foundational Questions Institute, although it came together in an unusual way; I was part of a group that was organizing a conference, and we applied to FQXi for funding, at which point they mentioned they were planning almost exactly the same conference at the same time. So we joined forces, and here we are. Unity ’11!
The topic, if you haven’t guessed, is time. That’s a big subject, one that can hardly be done justice by sprawling books with hundreds of (admittedly quite charming) footnotes. You can see why the conference has to spread over two countries. We’re trying an experiment in interdisciplinarity: while the conference is a serious event meant for researchers, we have a wide variety of specialties represented, including biologists, computer scientists, philosophers, and neuroscientists, as well as the inevitable physicists and cosmologists. (There is also a public event, for those of you who find yourselves in Copenhagen next week.) I can’t wait to hear some of these talks, it should be a blast.
My job is to open the conference with an introductory talk that hits on some of the big questions. Here are the slides, at least as they are right now; last-minute editing is always a possibility. I think I put enough in there to provoke almost everyone at the conference one way or another.
