Monday, April 1, 2013

Obama’s Energy Secretary Nominee Reveals Assets and Posts, Including BP, GE and Saudi Arabia

Obama’s nominee for Energy Secretary has recently disclosed his connections to corrupt oil corporations like BP and General Electric, including other interests in Saudi Arabia.

U.S. President Barack Obama arrives for an event announcing the nominations of MIT professor Ernest Moniz as Energy Secretary, Gina McCarthy, to head the Environmental Protection Agency and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the President of the Walmart Foundation, as his budget chief, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House March 4, 2013 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

By JG Vibes
Intellihub.com
April 1, 2013
It’s no secret that monopolist corporations work so closely with the government that they are arguably the same entity, this fact is highlighted by the revolving door that exists between these two different factions of the ruling class. Most people who find themselves in high level political positions were once CEO’s of fortune 100 companies and those who aren’t will likely become a well-connected lobbyist upon leaving office.
Some obvious examples of this revolving door would be Dick Cheney, former vice president and top executive at Halliburton, Michael Taylor of both the FDA and Monsanto or Goldman Sachs CEO turned treasury secretary Henry Paulson. Each of the crooks in question undoubtedly used their political positions to influence events in such a way that would greatly benefit their respective businesses, this is commonplace in Washington.
Now with Obama’s most recent nominations for various regulatory agencies, that revolving door is just as present as it ever was.
According to the New York Times:
President Obama’s nominee for energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, is a consultant to the energy giant BP and a member of the advisory council and board of trustees of King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center, of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, among other positions, according to disclosure statements filed with the government and released on Friday….

In all, he holds assets worth $4.6 million to $17.9 million. He is also a consultant to General Electric and IHS CERA, the consulting firm formerly known as Cambridge Energy Research Associates, and a director at American Science and Engineering of Billerica, Mass., a company that does security work, including cargo screening.

The following is taken from the Edmonds Institute and found through Rense, this list gives a comprehensive look at the revolving door that exists between the political and corporate world:
David W. Beier . . .former head of Government Affairs for Genentech, Inc. . . . chief domestic policy advisor to Al Gore when he was Vice President.
Linda J. Fisher . . .former Assistant Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pollution Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances…now Vice President of Government and Public Affairs for Monsanto Corporation.
Michael A. Friedman, M.D. . . former acting commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Department of Health and Human Services . . .now senior vice-president for clinical affairs at G. D. Searle & Co., a pharmaceutical division of Monsanto Corporation.
L. Val Giddings . . . former biotechnology regulator and (biosafety) negotiator at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA/APHIS) . . .now Vice President for Food & Agriculture of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO).
Marcia Hale . . . former assistant to the President of the United States and director for intergovernmental affairs . . .now Director of International Government Affairs for Monsanto Corporation.
Michael (Mickey) Kantor. . . former Secretary of the United States Department of Commerce and former Trade Representative of the United States . . . now member of the board of directors of Monsanto Corporation.
Josh King . . . former director of production for White House events. . . now director of global communication in the Washington, D.C. office of Monsanto Corporation.
Terry Medley . . . former administrator of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture, former chair and vice-chair of the United States Department of Agriculture Biotechnology Council, former member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food advisory committee…and now Director of Regulatory and External Affairs of Dupont Corporation’s Agricultural Enterprise.
Margaret Miller . . . former chemical laboratory supervisor for Monsanto, . . .now Deputy Director of Human Food Safety and Consultative Services, New Animal Drug Evaluation Office, Center for Veterinary Medicine in the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).*
Michael Phillips . . . recently with the National Academy of Science Board on Agriculture . . . now head of regulatory affairs for the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
William D. Ruckelshaus . . . former chief administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), . .now (and for the past 12 years) a member of the board of directors of Monsanto Corporation.
Michael Taylor . . . former legal advisor to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Bureau of Medical Devices and Bureau of Foods, later executive assistant to the Commissioner of the FDA… still later a partner at the law firm of King & Spaulding where he supervised a nine-lawyer group whose clients included Monsanto Agricultural Company… still later Deputy Commissioner for Policy at the United States Food and Drug Administration, . . . and later with the law firm of King & Spaulding… now head of the Washington, D.C. office of Monsanto Corporation.*
Lidia Watrud . . . former microbial biotechnology researcher at Monsanto Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri, . . .now with the United States Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Effects Laboratory, Western Ecology Division.
Jack Watson. . .former chief of staff to the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, . . .now a staff lawyer with Monsanto Corporation in Washington, D.C.
Clayton K. Yeutter . . . former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, former U.S. Trade Representative (who led the U.S. team in negotiating the U.S. Canada Free Trade Agreement and helped launch the Uruguay Round of the GATT negotiations), now a member of the board of directors of Mycogen Corporation, whose majority owner is Dow AgroSciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company.
Larry Zeph . . . former biologist in the Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, . . . now Regulatory Science Manager at Pioneer Hi-Bred International.
*Margaret Miller, Michael Taylor, and Suzanne Sechen (an FDA “primary reviewer for all rbST and other dairy drug production applications” ) were the subjects of a U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation in 1994 for their role in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of Posilac, Monsanto Corporation’s formulation of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbST or rBGH). The GAO Office found “no conflicting financial interests with respect to the drug’s approval” and only “one minor deviation from now superseded FDA regulations”. (Quotations are from the 1994 GAO report).
This situation is an inevitable consequence of a process known as “regulatory capture”. According to the Mises Wiki page:
Regulatory capture is a theory associated with George Stigler, a Nobel laureate economist. It is the process by which regulatory agencies eventually come to be dominated by the very industries they were charged with regulating. Regulatory capture happens when a regulatory agency, formed to act in the public’s interest, eventually acts in ways that benefit the industry it is supposed to be regulating, rather than the public.
Beyond this it is even more typical for those involved in monopolist corporations to develop quiet and cooperative relationships with people who already have political power, this allows them to direct policy from behind the scenes by simply befriending or bribing politicians.
******

Read more articles by this author HERE.
J.G. Vibes is the author of an 87 chapter counter-culture textbook called Alchemy of the Modern Renaissance, a staff writer, reporter for Intellihub.com and Executive Producer of the Bob Tuskin Radio Show. You can keep up with his work, which includes free podcasts, free e-books & free audiobooks at his website www.aotmr.com

Mirage of 'care' in Obamacare fades as system plunges toward 'third-world experience'

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Originally published April 1 2013

Mirage of 'care' in Obamacare fades as system plunges toward 'third-world experience'

by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) A key component of the government healthcare takeover known as Obamacare is already shaping up to be a complete failure, according to reports, and it has not yet even come into effect. An official in charge of the Obamacare insurance exchange program recently told guests at a conference that the federal government is working on contingency plans for the struggling program, which was insinuated as potentially becoming a "third-world experience" if not properly handled.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (HHS), the Obamacare insurance exchange, which was supposed to begin enrolling members nationwide on October 1, 2013, is no longer expected to be ready in all 50 states by that date. In fact, there is a chance that a majority of states will not be ready by the proposed start date, which means it will have to be either modified or reapportioned, or the expectations of its performance greatly lowered.

"The time for debating about the size of text on the screen or the color or is it a world-class user experience, that's what we used to talk about two years ago," said Henry Chao, an official at the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services who is heading up the technology behind the Obamacare insurance exchange change. "Let's just make sure it's not a third-world experience."

What Chao is essentially implying here is that all the grandiose claims made several years ago about the insurance exchange aspect of Obamacare are completely unrealistic, and were never actually going to happen. And based on the way things are currently going, the focus now needs to be on simply making sure the program operates at least a little bit better than government-run health care schemes in developing, third-world countries.

"We are under 200 days from open enrollment, and I'm pretty nervous," stated Chao to an audience filled with representatives from the insurance industry.

According to the same announcement, roughly half of all states were expected to have their insurance exchanges run directly by the federal government, while some 18 states and the District of Columbia were expected to run their own insurance exchanges. Another seven-or-so states were expected to create insurance exchanges run by state-federal partnership programs.

"I think it's only prudent to not assume everything is going to work perfectly on day one and to make sure that we've got plans in place to address things that may happen," added Gary Cohen, Director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.commonwealthfund.org

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2525132

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CO2 myth busted: Why we need more carbon dioxide to grow food and forests

naturalnews.com

Originally published March 31 201

CO2 myth busted: Why we need more carbon dioxide to grow food and forests

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) If you talk to the global warming crowd, carbon dioxide -- CO2 -- is the enemy of mankind. Any and all creation of CO2 is bad for the planet, we're told, and its production must be strictly limited in order to save the world.

But what if that wasn't true? What if CO2 were actually a planet-saving nutrient that could multiply food production rates and feed the world more nutritious, healthy plants?

CO2 is a vital nutrient for food crops

As it turns out, CO2 is desperately needed by food crops, and right now there is a severe shortage of CO2 on the planet compared to what would be optimum for plants. Greenhouse operators are actually buying carbon dioxide and injecting it into their greenhouses in order to maximize plant growth.

The science on this is irrefutable. As just one example, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food says:

CO2 increases productivity through improved plant growth and vigour. Some ways in which productivity is increased by CO2 include earlier flowering, higher fruit yields, reduced bud abortion in roses, improved stem strength and flower size. Growers should regard CO2 as a nutrient.

If you want to understand why CO2 is an essential nutrient for food crop growth, check out this informative slide show. It explains that "CO2 may be repidly depleted during crop production" daylight hours, because the plants pull all the CO2 out of the air and use it in photosynthesis.

The CO2 found in modern-day atmosphere is 340ppm. But food crops would grow far faster if the concentration of CO2 were closer to 1000ppm, or roughly 300% higher than current levels. In fact, most greenhouse plant production causes a "CO2 depletion" to happen, shutting down photosynthesis and limiting food production. As the "Carbon Dioxide in Greenhouses" fact sheet explains:

Ambient CO2 level in outside air is about 340 ppm by volume. All plants grow well at this level but as CO2 levels are raised by 1,000 ppm photosynthesis increases proportionately resulting in more sugars and carbohydrates available for plant growth. Any actively growing crop in a tightly clad greenhouse with little or no ventilation can readily reduce the CO2 level during the day to as low as 200 ppm.

Thus, greenhouse plants are "running out" of CO2. They are starving for it. And when you add it to food crops, you get higher yields, improved taste, shorter flowering times, enhanced pest resistance and other benefits.

Why we should pump carbon dioxide into greenhouses

This brings up an obvious answer for what to do with all the CO2 produced by power plants, office buildings and even fitness centers where people exhale vast quantities of CO2. The answer is to build adjacent greenhouses and pump the CO2 into the greenhouses.

Every coal-fired power plant, in other words, should have a vast array of greenhouses surrounding it. Most of what you see emitted from power plant smokestacks is water vapor and CO2, both essential nutrients for rapid growth of food crops. By diverting carbon dioxide and water into greenhouses, the problem of emissions is instantly solved because the plants update the CO2 and use it for photosynthesis, thus "sequestering" the CO2 while rapidly growing food crops. It also happens to produce oxygen as a "waste product" which can be released into the atmosphere, (slightly) upping the oxygen level of the air we breathe.

This is a brilliant solution because humans want to live on a world with low CO2 that supports frozen ice caps in order to keep ocean water levels low, but they want to eat a volume of food that requires high CO2 for production. The answer is to concentrate CO2 into greenhouses where food production is multiplied by CO2 nutrition.

I'll bet you've never heard Al Gore talk about CO2 as "nutrition." He declares it a pollutant and wants to tax you for producing it. But CO2 is actually a key nutritive gas for food crops. Without carbon dioxide, we would all have starved to death by now.

Shutting down power plants to destroy America's power infrastructure

The U.S. government's solution to power plant emissions, however, is to just shut down coal-fired power plants, causing rolling blackouts across the USA, especially during hot summer days. The EPA has forced hundreds of power plants to shut down across the USA, achieving a loss of power infrastructure that vastly exceeds what would even be possible by an enemy invasion of high-altitude warplanes dropping bombs.

The EPA, under the excuse of "saving the planet," is destroying America's power infrastructure and leading our nation into a third-world scenario where power availability is dicey and unsustained. It seems to be just one part of the overall plan to gut America's economy, offshore millions of jobs, put everybody on welfare and destroy small businesses.

But what if we harnessed coal-fired power plants instead of shutting them down? What if we used them as "CO2 generators" that fed CO2 into vast greenhouse operations that produced organic, high-growth foods that could feed the nation? Coal-fired power plants can produce both electricity and food nutrition at the same time.

Better yet, if you combine this concept with aquaponics, you get simultaneous production of plants and fish while using no soil, no GMOs and one-tenth the water of conventional agriculture.

See, the solutions to all our problems already exist. The only reason we are suffering as a nation is because political puppets try to brainwash us into believing complete falsehoods like, "carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant" or "the people don't need healthy foods; they need medications and vaccines." When societies believe falsehoods, they crumble and collapse.

That's where America is headed, of course. And it's all being accelerated by deceptive bureaucrats who want to convince you that growing real food is bad and we should all be punished for exhaling carbon dioxide, an essential nutrient for food crops. Carbon dioxide is not the enemy it's been made out to be. It's actually plant nutrition that helps regrow rainforests, food crops and wetlands. In fact, higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere would make the planet more lush and abundant in terms of plant life, forests, trees and food crops.

Big banks take advantage of money laundering epidemic in US

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Published time: April 01, 2013 15:13

AFP Photo / Noel Celis

Banking, Crisis, Economy, USA

The attorney general of the United States says the country’s largest banks may be too big to jail, but the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund isn’t exactly convinced.
Simon Johnson, the former top IMF economist and a current professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, published a blistering editorial in Bloomberg News this week that makes an argument for imprisoning the banksters responsible for the nation’s last financial crisis — and possibly the next one — much to the chagrin of Attorney General Eric Holder.
Large international banks, writes Simon, are guilty of money laundering to the degree of epidemic proportions. If recent admissions from the biggest name in the American economy are any indication, though, they have nothing to fear.
“Governor Jerome Powell, on behalf of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, recently testified to Congress on the issue, and he sounded serious. But international criminals and terrorists needn’t worry. This is window dressing: Complicit bankers have nothing to fear from the U.S. justice system,” writes Simon.
Speaking to Congress last month, US Attorney General Eric Holder admitted, "I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” Johnson, on the other hand, implores the US Justice Department in his latest op-ed to follow in the footsteps of other countries and to once and for all condemn the corrupt practices that banks have been given a mere slap on the wrist for — and now harsh prosecutions.
In the editorial published Sunday evening, Johnson attacks both the Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve for failing to take action against the big banks.
“There may be fines, but the largest financial companies are unlikely to face criminal actions or meaningful sanctions,” he writes. “The Department of Justice has decided that these banks are too big to prosecute to the full extent of the law, though why this also gets employees and executives off the hook remains a mystery. And the Federal Reserve refuses to rescind bank licenses, undermining the credibility, legitimacy and stability of the financial system.”
Last December, the US government demanded Standard Chartered Bank — the fifth largest bank in the UK—pay up $327 million in fines after being caught guilty of laundering a quarter of a trillion dollars. Bartlett Naylor, the financial policy reform advocate for Public Citizen's Congress Watch, writes for Huffington Post that the sum is “paltry” when put into perspective of what banks should be paying, but even the attorney general — the nation’s top prosecutor — cannot figure a way to pursue much more.
In that regard, writes Simon this week, there’s very little to worry about for banking that may be considering colossal laundering schemes. “[I]nternational criminals and terrorists needn’t worry,” he writes.
Is the US actually becoming a haven for international banks to commit massive money laundering operations? The nations’ top economists seem to admit as much, but why, then, isn’t anything being done? “If you or I tried to launder money, even on a small scale, we would probably go to jail. But when the employees of a very big bank do so — on a grand scale and over many years — there are no meaningful consequences,” writes Johnson.
According to the attorney general, it might just not be possible. "I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large,” Holder said on Capitol Hill last month.

Prosecutors seeking death penalty for accused Colorado shooter Holmes

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Published time: April 01, 2013 15:43

James Holmes (AFP Photo / Pool)

Court, USA

Prosecutors will officially seek the death penalty for James Holmes, the 25-year-old Colorado man accused of killing a dozen moviegoers at an Aurora, CO cinema last July.
In a Centennial, CO courtroom Monday morning, prosecutors confirmed that they’d be asking that Holmes be put to death if convicted over the gruesome massacre that occurred last year just minutes into a midnight screening of "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises.”
"It is my determination and my intention that in this case for James Eagan Holmes, justice is death," Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler said, reports CNN.
According to the Associated Press, officials with the Arapahoe County District Attorney’s Office reached out to more than 800 family members of victims of last year’s assault in making the determination.
Twelve people in all were killed in the July 20, 2012 rampage, with an additional 70 suffering serious injuries. Holmes surrendered to authorities immediately after the assault and has been in the custody of police ever since, awaiting an eventual trial where he’ll have to go up against 166 counts of murder and attempted murder.
Last week, attorneys for Holmes asked prosecutors to accept a deal in which he would be spared the death penalty in lieu of a guilty plea. "Mr. Holmes is currently willing to resolve the case to bring the proceedings to a speedy and definite conclusion for all involved," Holmes' lawyers said in their motion. The request was refused, however, when the Arapahoe County District Attorney firing back that "the defendant knows that he is guilty, the defense attorneys know that he is guilty and that both of them know that he was not criminally insane."
"Not only improper, but grossly improper," prosecutors said of the proposed plea in a Thursday court filing, calling the request "For the intended purpose of generating predictable publicity."
Even with the DA asking for the death penalty on Monday, though, Holmes isn’t necessarily guaranteed to be killed by the court. "Even if they give notice on Monday that they are seeking the death penalty, they can come off that and enter into a plea bargain any time," attorney Dan Recht, former president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, told the Associated Press.
"I support the death penalty for the severity of the case, what he has done, the amount of people it's affected. Me personally knowing my whole life that he's alive and he's being protected for killing my child, I'm not comfortable and I'm not happy with that or satisfied at all," Ian Sullivan, whose 6-year-old daughter Veronica Moser-Sullivan was killed in the massacre, tells Colorado’s 9News.

CIA Chief Technology Officer: we collect everything we can and store it forever

Submitted by sosadmin on Sat, 03/23/2013 - 21:46

^{_{Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long term cookie on your computer.}}
When the CIA's Chief Technology Officer, Gus Hunt, spoke at a GigaOm conference last week in New York, he told the audience that the CIA collects and stores every bit of information it can get its hands on, and then deploys data mining tools to extract meaning from the swirling and ever growing matrix. (You can see the slides from his talk here.)
"The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time. Since you can't connect dots you don't have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever," he said.
Hunt's talk, embedded above, works from the assumption that data mining can identify terrorist threats. But that's a faulty, if widely held, view. The National Academy of Sciences studied the question back in 2008 and found that it is "not feasible" to successfully deploy data mining in terrorism prevention. On the other hand, the aggregation and mining of data about all of us is all but guaranteed to have a substantial impact on our privacy and civil liberties.
Data mining for terrorism prevention doesn't work because, thankfully, there aren't very many terrorists attacks. The terrorists attacks that do occur are so wildly different, and are executed by people with disparate backgrounds and motivations, using different tools, who organize and plot and execute the attacks with varying styles. So it's basically impossible for computer scientists to teach computers how to look for information that may identify terrorists: there is no single 'terrorism pattern' to teach the machines to watch out for.
The risk of 'false positives' is also huge, because there are high stakes when the government incorrectly identifies someone as a terrorist -- ranging from getting placed on a no fly list to being detained or killed. The CIA's own 'signature strikes' program uses behavioral profiling to target for death people the agency can't even identify, but simply assumes are terrorists based on a set of data points.
Here at home, DHS is deploying data mining to control air travel, using a system it calls the Automated Targeting System. The National Counterterrorism Center collects information about every US citizen and mines it for so-called 'terrorism' indicators, and also feeds possible kill targets to other government agencies.
Does data mining for terrorism work? Hardly. Will that stop the government from doing it? Absolutely not.
But it's not all failure: the government's obsession with data collection and mining is very effective at enforcing social control.

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Secretive TrapWire company's affiliations revealed

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Published time: September 19, 2012 22:27
Edited time: September 20, 2012 06:34

AFP Photo / NYPD Handout

USA

Just discovered documentation concerning the TrapWire secret surveillance system suggests that the San Diego-based Cubic Corporation did have a direct connection with the program, despite repeated attempts to dismiss allegations of their involvement.
Although Cubic has gone on the record on several occasions to refute claims that they have at one time or another been directly tied to the Abraxas Applications, the Northern Virginia company believed to have developed TrapWire, a post published this week on the PrivacySos.org blog discusses evidence that links the two firms to one another. Cubic has repeatedly insisted that it has no link to TrapWire, a widespread, international surveillance and intelligence system brought to light in emails distributed by WikiLeaks, but new revelations expose a relationship between the two that was documented on a federal website as recently as February of last year.
As RT unraveled the TrapWire saga earlier this year, investigations into both Cubic and Abraxas revealed a number of associations among the two. In an August 13, 2012 press release, Cubic came forth and admitted to acquiring Abraxas Corp in December of 2010, but insisted, “Abraxas Corporation then and now has no affiliation with Abraxas Applications now known as Trapwire, Inc.” The latest revelation directly discredits that claim.
PrivacySos reports that a website maintained by the US Homeland Security Department’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) includes TrapWire as a product for sale to law enforcement agencies and first responders. It’s there that the background and operational concept of the system are described in detail and direct curious customers to AbraxasCorp.com for more information. When a link to the URL is clicked, the banner at the top of the developer’s homepage described Abraxas as “A Cubic Company.” On the FEMA page, the product information is detailed as provided directly by Abraxas Applications
"The Products Section includes commercially available product information that has been uploaded directly and voluntarily by the manufacturer,” the FEMA page acknowledges.
If that is indeed the case, either the federal government is hosting falsified information about TrapWire to prospective customers, or else the program was overseen to a degree by Cubic as previously suspected. If it’s the latter, then the August 13 statement was a downright lie.
On the PrivacySos post, published Tuesday, its acknowledged that Cubic has previously been confirmed as operating fare systems for major mass transit programs and Anonymizer, an IP-masked tool described by its publicists as “the leader in consumer online anonymity solutions.”
“If the government's facts are correct, the Abraxas Corporation was managing sales for the TrapWire system at least as recently as February 2011 – meaning Cubic had its hands on both highly sensitive private information on millions of ordinary people and a networked surveillance system sold to governments,” PrivacySOS notes.
In addition to the press release that attempted to distance Cubic from TrapWire, activist and Project PM founder Barrett Brown uploaded a phone call to YouTube he alleged to be between himself and Cubic Corp. Communication Director Tim Hall. In the clip, published August 21, Mr. Hall denied his company’s involvement with TrapWire and also insisted that Cubic has never been tied to Ntrepid, a separate corporation that was awarded $2.76 million worth of taxpayer dollars to create phony Internet “sock puppets” to propagate US support.
“There is no connection at all with Abraxas Applications and Trapwire and or Ntrepid,” the man perpetrated to be Hall explains in the clip. Research into the entities, however, led to the discovery of Abraxas Corporation’s tax filings from late 2011, and with it, a common bond: TrapWire Inc. was registered in 2009 to a Margaret A Lee from Virginia, who also served on the Ntrepid board of directors.
“Since the government's intelligence and data management contracting operations are so secretive and opaque, we may never know what's really going on – whether Cubic in fact operates transit data systems, so-called IP anonymizers and surveillance systems sold to governments,” the PrivacySOS post reads. “[It] doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. That's because we know more than enough to be convinced that we need a mass movement for privacy in the United States, whether or not these connections are real.”

Facial recognition and GPS tracking: TrapWire company conducting even more surveillance

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Published time: March 27, 2013 17:51
Edited time: March 29, 2013 09:30

Image from news.com.au

Stratforgate
Anonymous, Hacking, Information Technology, Security, Transport, USA, WikiLeaks

An internationally-spread Orwellian surveillance system uncovered by RT has been linked to a software company that collects the GPS coordinates of cell phone users in over 100 major cities.
The discovery of the TrapWire risk mitigation program last year and its ability to match human faces caught on camera against massive databases of intelligence led to an outcry from privacy advocates around the world. Now once again the burgeoning preponderance of Big Brother is being put into perspective.
In late 2011, members of the loose-knit hacktivist group Anonymous pilfered data from the servers of private intelligence firm Stratfor that were in turn handed over to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks for dissemination. When internal emails alluding to a service called TrapWire surfaced in the leak, an investigation uncovered a program that, according to the company’s founder, “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition.”
TrapWire developers Abraxas later became the subject of several investigative reports by RT and others, and further analysis revealed that that company was acquired in 2010 by technology giants Cubic Corporation of Southern California. Cubic would eventually deny any affiliation ever existed between their San Diego headquarters and the spy-program discussed by Stratfor execs, but links were nevertheless still evident. A Department of Homeland Security website, in fact, all but affirmed that TrapWire was being sold to government agencies as a product of Abraxas as recently as February 2011.
Cubic — and to a lesser degree Abraxas — have since been linked at least to some degree with a number of other suspicious spy products. One item, Tartan, “exposes and quantifies key influencers and hidden connections in social networks using mathematical algorithms for objective, un-biased output,” its website claims. “Our analysts, mathematicians and computer scientists are continually exploring new quantification, mining and visualization techniques in order to better analyze social networks.” Tartan was marketed by Ntrepid, a Northern Virginia company that’s board of directors shared four names directly involved in the finances of Abraxas. Now a blogger has uncovered yet another connection, and this one puts Cubic directly in touch with the exact whereabouts of potentially millions of Americans.
Under the radar of Cubic’s critics, earlier this year the California company acquired NextBus, a “real-time transit information” program that helps mass transportation customers in over 100 North American cities get precise travel and traffic information about bus and rail systems. Cubic made the acquisition at a cost of just over $20 million, and with it gained yet another resource for collecting personally identifiable information: namely the exact global position coordinates for NextBus’ massive user base.
NextBus bills itself as providing “real-time passenger information solutions” by collecting GPS data volunteered by willing customers and then uses that information to help them get from point A to point B by accurately matching up transportation routes with up-to-the-second travel information. It exists to make the dreadful bus commute a little more reliable, but in doing so demands that customers sacrifice a sizeable chunk of privacy.
“While your riders stay warm and safe, they can easily find out exactly when to expect the next bus,” reads an advert from NextBus website that’s used to sell their service to major metropolitan areas across North America. The Los Angeles, California metro became NextBus’ eightieth client in 2011, and joined a roster of established clients that includes Toronto, San Francisco, Washington DC and Boston.
“When you get a message from the Panopticon, the Panopticon also gets a message from you, or rather, your GPS enabled device,” writes the administrator of Female Faust, a blog where the connection between NextBus and Cubic was first written about this week.
For Cubic, though, the latest acquisition isn’t anything out of the ordinary. Cubic has been tied to services in cities around the globe that involve not just accumulating biometric data using TrapWire, but tracking the transportation habits of metro riders in New York, Chicago and other cities abroad. Cubic’s transportation division is reported to be the world’s leader when it comes to implementing automated fare collection cards and the infrastructure used in mass-transit systems across the globe, meaning TrapWire cameras in cities such as Washington, DC are just a stone’s throw from the very machines that commuters use their credit cards at to pay for bus fare—transactions done with Cubic’s own vending machines.
“Over the past decade, Cubic has implemented more than 80 percent of the major smart card systems in the US now active today,” Cubic admits by their own right. With the acquisition of NextBus, though, one major behemoth of the private surveillance sector is allowed to scoop up yet more sensitive information about customers who are likely none the wiser.
"Transit agencies and their communities worldwide are racing to utilize information more effectively – optimizing their resources and providing intelligent travel information to their riders," says Steve Shewmaker, president of Cubic Transportation Systems, in a statement from January. "Since 1996, NextBus has been a pioneer and a market and technology leader at the forefront of this trend. As part of the Cubic family, NextBus will have the additional resources and capabilities to expand more rapidly while adding further depth to our own Nextcity vision, which emphasizes better utilization of information, wireless communications and mobile devices as key technologies for the future of public transit."
On the Cubic website, NextCity is described as a program that “enable[s] customers to manage how they travel – whether by train, bus, taxi, private vehicle or bike – by providing both operators and travelers real-time, dynamic information that will make their journey faster and more reliable.”
“The NextCity platform will provide passengers and travelers with a single, whole of transport payments account meaning that no more will passengers need to maintain an account associated with a transport smartcard, one or more toll accounts, a congestion account and various methods of paying for parking. It will be integrated, seamless and convenient for the traveller.”
Thanks to Cubic’s latest acquisition, the company is being trusted with yet another trove of sensitive data. And while it’s facetious to assume that Cubic’s many divisions around the world are working in cahoots to collect and build personal profiles that scan faces, sniff out social network habits and scoop up insanely accurate GPS stats on travel patterns, the buy-out of NextBus doesn’t make a company seem any less like a prime example of how privacy is slowly but surely being eroded in the exchange for a little bit of serenity and whole lot of surveillance.

Making Living Matter Programmable

By Berkeley, and University of California | March 31 2013

http://www.labmanager.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34887/title/Making-Living-Matter-Programmable/

ChemSW

BERKELEY — Thirty years ago, the future lay in programming computers. Today, it’s programming cells.
That was the message of panelists at an afternoon session March 25 in Stanley Hall auditorium titled “Programming Life: the revolutionary potential of synthetic biology.” Co-presented by University of California, Berkeley’s Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) and Discover magazine, the panels brought together a dozen of synthetic biology’s pioneers from academia and industry, in addition to ethicists focused on the societal impact of the technology.
Keynote speaker Juan Enriquez, a self-described “curiosity expert” and co-founder of the company Synthetic Genomics, compared the digital revolution spawned by thinking of information as a string of ones and zeros to the coming synthetic biology revolution, premised on thinking about life as a mix of interchangeable parts – genes and gene networks – that can be learned and manipulated like any language.
At the moment, this genetic manipulation, a natural outgrowth of genetic engineering, focuses on altering bacteria and yeast to produce products they wouldn’t normally make, such as fuels or drugs. “To do with biology what you would do if you were designing a piece of software,” according to moderator Corey Powell, editor at large of Discover, which plans to publish a story about the conference and post the video online.
UC Berkeley chemical engineer Jay Keasling has been a key player in developing the field of synthetic biology over the last decade. Enriquez introduced Keasling as someone “who in his spare time goes out and tries to build stuff that will cure malaria, and biofuels and the next generation of clean tech, all while mentoring students at this university and at the national labs and creating whole new fields of science.”
Keasling, director of SynBERC, a UC Berkeley-led multi-institution collaboration that is laying the foundations for the field, expressed excitement about the newest development: the release next month by the pharmaceutical company sanofi aventis of a synthetic version of artemsinin, “the world’s best antimalarial drug,” he said. Sparked by discoveries in Keasling’s lab more than a decade ago, the drug is produced by engineered yeast and will be the first product from synthetic biology to reach the market.
“There are roughly 300 to 500 million cases of malaria each year,” he said. “Sanofi will initially produce about 100 million treatments, which will cover one-third to one-quarter of the need.”
Biofuels from yeast
As CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute, Keasling is now focused on engineering microbes to turn “a billion tons of biomass that go unutilized in the U.S. on an annual basis … into fuel, producing roughly a third of the need in the U.S.”

Jay Keasling (left), director of SynBERC, and moderator Corey Powell of Discover listen as Monsanto scientist Virginia Ursin explains the company’s interest in synthetic biology. Photo credit: Christine Fu

But other advances are on the horizon, he said, such as engineering new materials and engineering “green” replacements for all the products now made from petroleum. “Some of these have the potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint, by say, 80 percent,” he said.
Virginia Ursin, Technology Prospecting Lead and Science Fellow at Monsanto Corp., noted that industry sees synthetic biology’s triumphs as being 10-20 years down the road, but anticipated, for example, producing enzymes used in manufacturing or even engineering microbes that live on plants to improve plant growth.
“Engineering (microbes) to increase their impact on (plant) health or protection against disease is probably going to be one of the nearer term impacts of synthetic biology on agriculture,” she said. Ultimately, she said, the field could have a revolutionary impact on agriculture similar to the green revolution sparked by the development of chemical fertilizers.
But the implications of being able to engineer cells go deeper, according to Enriquez.
“This isn’t just about economic growth, this is also about where we are going as a human species,” he said. Humans will no longer merely adapt to or adopt the environment, but “begin to understand how life is written, how life is coded, how life is copied, and how you can rewrite life.”
Scientists’ moral choices
Directly guiding “the evolution of microbes, bacteria, plants, animals and even ourselves,” as Enriquez put it, sounds like science fiction. George Church, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, suggested that we might want to bring back extinct animals, such as the mammoth to help restore Arctic permafrost disintegrating under the impact of global warming.
In response, ethicist Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University urged caution in exploiting the technology of synthetic biology.
“You could change the world, and you have a powerful technology,” she said. “I am more interested in what this technology makes of the women and men doing it. What sorts of interior moral choices they need to be making and how you create scientists who aren’t only good at all these technical skills but very good at asking and thinking seriously about ethical and moral questions and coming to terms with the implications of their work.”
Given the current crises of climate change and ecological change, she added, “frankly, without this work, I don’t think we have such great answers for (them).”
Church acknowledged that “we have an obligation to do it right. But because our environment, our world is changing, the decision to do nothing is a gigantic risk. The decision to do a particular new thing is a risk. We have to get better at risk assessment and safety engineering.”
Drew Endy, a bioengineering professor at Stanford, summed up his hopes for synthetic biology. “What I would like to imagine as a longer-term encompassing vision is that humanity figured out how to reinvent the manufacturing of the things we need so that we can do it in partnership with nature; not to replace nature, but to dance better with it in sustaining what it means to be a flourishing human civilization.”

From Bad to Worse: Herpes Virus Damages Memory, Cognition

by Ian Chant | 8:30 am, March 26th, 2013

Today, a study in the journal Neurology brings the surprising news that having herpes could be even worse than you think it is. The chronic, cold sore-causing virus may also wreak havoc on the brain, with a recent study conducted by Columbia University and the University of Miami suggesting that people suffering from high levels of infection with herpes and other common viruses may be more likely to suffer cognitive decline as they age than their uninfected peers.
It’s not just the common cold sore herpes virus — herpes simplex type 1 — that seems to cause cognitive impairment in the long term. Researchers also looked at subjects’ exposure to herpes simple type 2 — which causes genital herpes — and cytomegalovirus, as well as bacteria like the respiratory infection Chlamydia pneumoniae and the stomach bacteria Heliobacter pylori.
Patients full exposure to these diseases was termed their “infectious burden,” and subjects with a higher burden also had a 25% higher chance than their peers of scoring below average on a mini-mental state exam, a short test used by researchers to discern cognitive impairment by testing math, memory, and basic motor skills. The results were most stark in subjects who didn’t get much exercise in addition to having a high infectious burden.
That last detail suggests to researchers that chronic infections could increase inflammation over the course of a patient’s life, leading in time to brain damage and dementia. Since regular exercise has been found to counter inflammation, the fact that the most serious impairment was found in sedentary patients could mean their inflammation has been worse over time.
(via Medical Xpress)

Personal Computer Just Got Way More Literal With Creation of New Bio-Transistors

Bioengineering Jerome Bonnet Standford University transcriptors transistors

by Jeff LaSala | 2:45 pm, March 29th, 2013

Do you know what the Singularity is? It’s that apocryphal-unless-it-happens sci-fi-like event, championed by Ray Kurzweil, in which humans and machines merge and we as a species are forever transformed. None can say whether the the artificial mind and the real mind will become as one, but we’re making advances in that direction every day. Now bioengineers at Stanford University have made transistors from genetic materials in lieu of the semiconducting materials normally used. A nice big step toward Singularity. Biological computers!
It starts with the transistor, the primary building block of the digital world and the reason we have cars, phones, and video games.
Published in Science, this new development is the work of postdoctoral scholar of bioengineering Jerome Bonnet and his team. They’re calling their bio-transistors “transcriptors,” and they’re made from DNA and RNA. “Transcriptors are the key component behind amplifying genetic logic,” says Bonnet.
This means engineers can compute inside living cells, giving them the ability to monitor what goes on around them or even toggle on and off cell reproduction. Transcriptors determine the flow of a specific protein or RNA polymerase (RNA-producing enzymes) in a strand of DNA, like electrons through a wire.
In electrical engineering, there is something called a logic-gate, another of the building blocks of a computer, which uses Boolean logic — a system of 1s and 0s which represent on or off, open, or closed. Bonnet’s paper says their transcriptors have their own biological version, which they’re calling “Boolean Integrase Logic” (“BIL gates” for short), and these are the third and final component of a complete biological computer.
So what’s the use of logic? Bonnet said the possibilities for logic are as endless in a biological setting as in electronics:

“You could test whether a given cell had been exposed to any number of external stimuli — the presence of glucose and caffeine, for instance. BIL gates would allow you to make that determination and to store that information so you could easily identify those which had been exposed and which had not.”

The team used very specific enzyme combinations to control the flow of enzymes through DNA. “The choice of enzymes is important,” he went on to say. “We have been careful to select enzymes that function in bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, so that bio-computers can be engineered within a variety of organisms.”
As a fan of fungi, that’s intriguing to me! Computer toadstools are hopefully the future. Maybe.
But seriously, the application of this technology is wide open and Bonnet is happy to share his team’s work with the public:

“Most biotechnology has not yet been imagined. Let alone made true. By freely sharing important basic tools everyone can work better together.”

All right, so there won’t be any synthetic people walking around anytime soon, but it may not be too long before bio-compute

Walmart's Death Grip on Groceries Is Making Life Worse for Millions of People (Hard Times USA)

Walmart's growing control of our food system has been to intensify the rural and urban poverty that drives unhealthy food choices.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

hey America How's them 10$ hr jobs working out 4 U.S.

March 26, 2013 |

This article was published in partnership with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

When Michelle Obama visited a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, a few weeks ago to praise the company's efforts to sell healthier food, she did not say why she chose a store in Springfield of all cities. But, in ways that Obama surely did not intend, it was a fitting choice. This Midwestern city provides a chilling look at where Walmart wants to take our food system.

Springfield is one of nearly 40 metro areas where Walmart now captures about half or more of consumer spending on groceries, according to Metro Market Studies. Springfield area residents spend just over $1 billion on groceries each year, and one of every two of those dollars flows into a Walmart cash register. The chain has 20 stores in the area and shows no signs of slowing its growth. Its latest proposal, a store just south of the city's downtown, has provoked widespread protest. Opponents say Walmart already has an overbearing presence in the region and argue that this new store would undermine nearby grocery stores, including a 63-year-old family-owned business which still provides delivery for its elderly customers. A few days before the First Lady's visit, the City Council voted 5-4 to approve what will be Walmart's 21st store in the community.

As Springfield goes, so goes the rest of the country, if Walmart has its way. Nationally, the retailer's share of the grocery market now stands at 25 percent. That's up from 4 percent just 16 years ago. Walmart's tightening grip on the food system is unprecedented in U.S. history. Even A&P — often referred to as the Walmart of its day — accounted for only about 12 percent of grocery sales at its height in the 1940s. Its market share was kept in check in part by the federal government, which won an antitrust case against A&P in 1946. The contrast to today's casual acceptance of Walmart's market power could not be more stark.

Having gained more say over our food supply than Monsanto, Kraft, or Tyson, Walmart has been working overtime to present itself as a benevolent king. It has upped its donations to food pantries, reduced sodium and sugars in some of its store-brand products, and recast its relentless expansion as a solution to "food deserts." In 2011, it pledged to build 275-300 stores "in or near" low-income communities lacking grocery stores. The Springfield store Obama visited is one of 86 such stores Walmart has since opened. Situated half a mile from the southwestern corner of a census tract identified as underserved by the USDA, the store qualifies as "near" a food desert. Other grocery stores are likewise perched on the edge of this tract. Although Walmart has made food deserts the vanguard of its PR strategy in urban areas, most of the stores the chain has built or proposed in cities like Chicago and Washington D.C. are in fact just blocks from established supermarkets, many unionized or locally owned. As it pushes into cities, Walmart's primary aim is not to fill gaps but to grab market share.

***

The real effect of Walmart's takeover of our food system has been to intensify the rural and urban poverty that drives unhealthy food choices. Poverty has a strong negative effect on diet, regardless of whether there is a grocery store in the neighborhood or not, a major 15-year study published in 2011 in the Archives of Internal Medicine found. Access to fresh food cannot change the bottom-line reality that cheap, calorie-dense processed foods and fast food are financially logical choices for far too many American households. And their numbers are growing right alongside Walmart. Like Midas in reverse, Walmart extracts wealth and pushes down incomes in every community it touches, from the rural areas that produce food for its shelves to the neighborhoods that host its stores.

Walmart has made it harder for farmers and food workers to earn a living. Its rapid rise as a grocer triggered a wave of mergers among food companies, which, by combining forces, hoped to become big enough to supply Walmart without getting crushed in the process. Today, food processing is more concentrated than ever. Four meatpackers slaughter 85 percent of the nation's beef. One dairy company handles 40 percent of our milk, including 70 percent of the milk produced in New England. With fewer buyers, farmers are struggling to get a fair price. Between 1995 and 2009, farmers saw their share of each consumer dollar spent on beef fall from 59 to 42 cents. Their cut of the consumer milk dollar likewise fell from 44 to 36 cents. For pork, it fell from 45 to 25 cents and, for apples, from 29 to 19 cents.

Onto this grim reality, Walmart has grafted a much-publicized initiative to sell more locally grown fruits and vegetables. Clambering aboard the "buy local" trend undoubtedly helps Walmart's marketing, but, as Missouri-based National Public Radio journalist Abbie Fentress Swanson reported in February, "there's little evidence of small farmers benefiting, at least in the Midwest." Walmart, which defines "local" as grown in the same state, has increased its sales of local produce mainly by relying on large industrial growers. Small farmers, meanwhile, have fewer opportunities to reach consumers, as independent grocers and smaller chains shrink and disappear.

Food production workers are being squeezed too. The average slaughterhouse wage has fallen 9 percent since 1999. Forced unpaid labor at food processing plants is on the rise. Last year, a Louisiana seafood plant that supplies Walmart was convicted of forcing employees to work in unsafe conditions for less than minimum wage. Some workers reported peeling and boiling crawfish in shifts that spanned 24 hours.

The tragic irony is that many food-producing regions, with their local economies dismantled and poverty on the rise, are now themselves lacking grocery stores. The USDA has designated large swaths of the farm belt, including many agricultural areas near Springfield, as food deserts.

***

One might imagine that squeezing farmers and food workers would yield lower prices for consumers. But that hasn't been the case. Grocery prices have been rising. There are multiple reasons for this, but corporate concentration is at least partly to blame. For most foods, the spread between what consumers pay and how much farmers receive has been widening. Food processors and big retailers are pocketing the difference. Even as Walmart touts lower prices than its competitors, the company's reorganization of our food system has had the effect of raising grocery prices overall.

As Walmart stores multiply, fewer families can afford to eat well. The company claims it stores bring economic development and employment, but the empirical evidence indicates otherwise. A study published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store openings nationally and found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers. Other research by the economic consulting firm Civic Economics has found that, when locally owned businesses are replaced by big-box stores, dollars that once circulated in the community, supporting other businesses and jobs, instead leak out. These shifts may explain the findings of another study, published in Social Science Quarterly in 2006, which cut straight to the bottom line: neighborhoods where Walmart opens end up with higher poverty rates and more food-stamp usage than places where the retailer does not expand.

This year, Walmart plans to open between 220 and 240 stores in the U.S., as it marches steadily on in its quest to further control the grocery market. Policymakers at every level, from city councilors to federal antitrust regulators, should be standing in its way. Very few are. Growing numbers of people, though, are drawing the line, from the Walmart employees who have led a string of remarkable strikes against the company, to the coalition of small business, labor, and community groups that recently forced Walmart to step back from its plans to unroll stores across New York City.

Back in Springfield, as Michelle Obama was delivering her remarks, framed by a seductive backdrop of oranges and lemons, a citizens group called Stand Up to Walmart was also at work, launching a referendum drive to overturn the City Council's vote and block Walmart from gaining any more ground in the city.

Stacy Mitchell is a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, where she directs an initiative on independent business. She is the author of Big-Box Swindle and also produces a popular monthly newsletter, the Hometown Advantage Bulletin. Catch her recent TEDx Talk: Why We Can't Shop Our Way to a Better Economy.

This article was published in partnership with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.
When Michelle Obama visited a Walmart in Springfield, Missouri, a few weeks ago to praise the company's efforts to sell healthier food, she did not say why she chose a store in Springfield of all cities. But, in ways that Obama surely did not intend, it was a fitting choice. This Midwestern city provides a chilling look at where Walmart wants to take our food system.

***

the gipster

Monday, April 1, 2013

Obama’s Energy Secretary Nominee Reveals Assets and Posts, Including BP, GE and Saudi Arabia

Obama’s Energy Secretary Nominee Reveals Assets and Posts, Including BP, GE and Saudi Arabia

Obama’s nominee for Energy Secretary has recently disclosed his connections to corrupt oil corporations like BP and General Electric, including other interests in Saudi Arabia.

Mirage of 'care' in Obamacare fades as system plunges toward 'third-world experience'

naturalnews.com

Mirage of 'care' in Obamacare fades as system plunges toward 'third-world experience'

CO2 myth busted: Why we need more carbon dioxide to grow food and forests

naturalnews.com

CO2 myth busted: Why we need more carbon dioxide to grow food and forests

CO2 is a vital nutrient for food crops

Why we should pump carbon dioxide into greenhouses

Shutting down power plants to destroy America's power infrastructure

Big banks take advantage of money laundering epidemic in US

Prosecutors seeking death penalty for accused Colorado shooter Holmes

CIA Chief Technology Officer: we collect everything we can and store it forever

Secretive TrapWire company's affiliations revealed

Facial recognition and GPS tracking: TrapWire company conducting even more surveillance

Making Living Matter Programmable

From Bad to Worse: Herpes Virus Damages Memory, Cognition

Personal Computer Just Got Way More Literal With Creation of New Bio-Transistors

Walmart's Death Grip on Groceries Is Making Life Worse for Millions of People (Hard Times USA)

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Monday, April 1, 2013

Obama’s Energy Secretary Nominee Reveals Assets and Posts, Including BP, GE and Saudi Arabia

Obama’s Energy Secretary Nominee Reveals Assets and Posts, Including BP, GE and Saudi Arabia

Obama’s nominee for Energy Secretary has recently disclosed his connections to corrupt oil corporations like BP and General Electric, including other interests in Saudi Arabia.

Mirage of 'care' in Obamacare fades as system plunges toward 'third-world experience'

naturalnews.com

Mirage of 'care' in Obamacare fades as system plunges toward 'third-world experience'

CO2 myth busted: Why we need more carbon dioxide to grow food and forests

naturalnews.com

CO2 myth busted: Why we need more carbon dioxide to grow food and forests

CO2 is a vital nutrient for food crops

Why we should pump carbon dioxide into greenhouses

Shutting down power plants to destroy America's power infrastructure

Big banks take advantage of money laundering epidemic in US

Prosecutors seeking death penalty for accused Colorado shooter Holmes

CIA Chief Technology Officer: we collect everything we can and store it forever

Secretive TrapWire company's affiliations revealed

Facial recognition and GPS tracking: TrapWire company conducting even more surveillance

Making Living Matter Programmable

From Bad to Worse: Herpes Virus Damages Memory, Cognition

Personal Computer Just Got Way More Literal With Creation of New Bio-Transistors

Walmart's Death Grip on Groceries Is Making Life Worse for Millions of People (Hard Times USA)