Massive .50 caliber rifle used to shoot down helicopters found inside El Chapo's Mexican hideout was sold through government Fast and Furious program

Posted by George Freund on January 20, 2016           I'm sure Congressional gun banners are screaming about this case. We arm radical terrorists and drug lords, but American citizen hands up and lean against the wall while we check you out.

Fast and Furious program was designed to take down cartel arms dealers

Involved ATF agents intentionally selling weapons illegally to smugglers

Guns were then tracked south over border and used to make arrests

However, agency ultimately lost track of 1,400 of 2,000 weapons it sold   ~ YEA "RIGHT" LOST TRACK lol   UM HUM YEA YUP YEP HEHE

.50 caliber rifle would have been used to down helicopters, agents say  ~ heheheeehheheee bet IF an Amereeeecan cit bought 1 .. ole uncle sammy wouldn't "lose track" of it  ???   kinda like ALL thum soccer moms "laundering" $$$$$ billions &billions & BILLIONS of "drug" $$$$$    thru OUR  "vaunted" banks ?  yea folks, go head & "put" 10,001 $ in yer bank account  & C how fucking fast ole Bond, James Bond cums swoop~in down on yer house in a black helly  LOL  .... but thum fucking "sneaky" "evil" "smart" soccer moms put~in 9,999  $   thru "their" bank acct  "they" (gov./bank)   ass ~facials just can't seem ta catch ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLL thum BILLIONS of drug $$$$  thum  ...fucking "evil" sock moms  

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I'm sure Congressional gun banners are screaming about this case. We arm radical terrorists and drug lords, but American citizen hands up and lean against the wall while we check you out.



Look Ma! No morals.   ~ & THIS IS FROM THE KOOK THAT WANTS TO BAN  U.S. CITIZENS FROM HAVING GUNS ...HEHE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS YEA !  BUT U.S. CITIZENS  .....NO   & WE ALL "WONDER" WHAT THAT SMELL CUM~IN OUTTA D.C. (DDEGENERATE CITY) .....IS  :0  ONLY IN AMEREEEEEEKA 

What's The Difference Between 'Mass Surveillance' And 'Bulk Collection'? Does It Matter?

from the words,-words,-words dept     ~ hehe & WHO is "It" they r REALLY look~in 4   humm ...maybe "it's" somebody that looks like us ,acts like us & talks like us ...but is REALLY NOT ....us ?!?  food fer thought  hehe here's more food... maybe, just MAYBE "they" gotta have ALL the cams,survall, EVERYWHERE ..cuz the "new" tech cummin down the pike               ( released) can B used fer GREAT  good     & GREAT ....bad    Oops  nawww  "it's" just the NWO & blah blah &blah crowd  hehe  UN feeme's camps ,black helly's  yeaaaaa yep yup ....look over there E.T.'s at "it" ...again :)

As numerous Techdirt stories make clear, the particular words used to describe something can make a big difference in how it is perceived. For example, intelligence agencies like to avoid the use of the bad-sounding "mass surveillance," with its Orwellian overtones, and prefer to talk about "bulk collection," which can be presented as some kind of cool big data project. No one is more vociferous in insisting that they are not engaged in mass surveillance, but merely bulk collection, than the UK's Home Secretary, Theresa May. She was pushing that line again last week, during a grilling by a UK Parliamentary committee about her proposed Snooper's Charter. As BBC News reported:

She said the security minister, John Hayes, had written to the committee of MPs and peers scrutinising the draft bill to give the reasons why the government did not want to reveal the kinds of data investigators were accessing.

She insisted the practice -- and the sweeping up by the security services of large quantities of internet traffic passing through the UK -- did not amount to "mass surveillance" as civil liberties campaigners claim.

"The UK does not undertake mass surveillance," she told the committee.

Given what we know that GCHQ is already doing, and adding in what the UK government says it wants to do, that seems an absurd thing to say. But Paul Bernal, Lecturer in Information Technology, Intellectual Property and Media Law at the UK's University of East Anglia, thinks that there is more to this than meets the eye:

Precisely what constitutes surveillance is far from agreed. In the context of the internet (and other digital data surveillance) there are, very broadly speaking, three stages: the gathering or collecting of data, the automated analysis of the data (including algorithmic filtering), and then the 'human' examination of the results of that analysis of filtering. This is where the difference lies: privacy advocates and others might argue that the 'surveillance' happens at the first stage -- when the data is gathered or collected -- while Theresa May, [former GCHQ director] David Omand and those who work for them would be more likely to argue that it happens at the third stage -- when human beings are involved.

If surveillance occurs through the act of gathering personal data on a large scale, then clearly what the UK government does (and wants to do more of) is mass surveillance. But if surveillance only takes place once a human operator looks at some of the gathered data, then Theresa May can plausibly argue that what the UK government is engaged in is not mass surveillance, because relatively little personal data is scrutinized in this way. So the question then becomes: at what point is it most appropriate to say that surveillance has occurred? Bernal offers a helpful analogy. What the UK government wants to do with the Snooper's Charter would be like:

installing a camera in every room of every house in the UK, turning that camera on, having the footage recorded and stored for a year -- but having police officers only look at limited amounts of the footage and only when they feel they really need to.

Does the surveillance happen when the cameras are installed? When they’re turned on? When the footage is stored? When it’s filtered? Or when the police officers actually look at it.

Most people would probably find the automated video recording of everything they did in the privacy of their own home intrusive, and clearly a form of surveillance, even if it was unlikely the footage would ever be seen by a human being. And in Europe, the question has already been settled by the courts:

Privacy invasion occurs when the camera is installed and the capability of looking at the footage is enabled. That’s been consistently shown by recent rulings at both the Court of Justice of the European Union and of the European Court of Human Rights. Whether it is called ‘surveillance’ or something else, it invades privacy -- which is a fundamental right. That doesn’t mean that it is automatically wrong -- but that the balancing act between the rights of privacy (and freedom of expression, of assembly and association etc that are protected by that privacy) and the need for 'security' needs to be considered at the gathering stage, and not just at the stage when people look at the data.

That's important, because it is precisely this issue that the courts will have to consider when the inevitable legal challenges are brought against the UK's Snooper's Charter once some version of it becomes law. In the end, whether the Home Secretary thinks what she is doing is mass surveillance or merely bulk collection is irrelevant -- the UK and EU courts will be the ones that decide whether it's allowed.  https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160115/09582933351/whats-difference-between-mass-surveillance-bulk-collection-does-it-matter.shtml

'More Realistic' Modelling Of TPP's Effects Predicts 450,000 US Jobs Lost, Contraction Of Economy

from the accelerating-the-global-race-to-the-bottom dept                ~ hehe member when back yonder when that lil feller wit the big ears said ...that GIANT sucking sound u's hear IS ALL the JOBS leaving this cuntry ???   ...welll ALL u's dummycocks & republipubes kooks ...it's STILL sucking    HUH   fuck~in A gotta love u's lesser of 2 evils crowd ...ONLY in amerika u's kooky nutty natery fucked in the heads "regis~terds "voteer's" .... can't fucking figger OUT       evil+evil= fucking EVIL ...dip shit & my o my we's ALLLLL head~in down 2 a 5th or 6th RATE CUNTRY  humm   welcome ta wal mart motherfucker :)  

Last week we wrote about a World Bank report that predicted that TPP would produce negligible boosts to the economies of the US, Australia and Canada. Of course, that's just one study, and it could be argued that it might be unrepresentative, or unduly pessimistic. That makes the publication of yet more econometric modelling of what could happen particularly welcome. It comes from Jerome Capaldo and Alex Izurieta at Tufts University, and starts off by making an important point that is too often overlooked when considering other TPP predictions:

The standard model assumes full employment and invariant income distribution, ruling out the main risks of trade and financial liberalization. Subject to these assumptions, it finds positive effects on growth. An important question, therefore, is how this conclusion changes if those assumptions are dropped.

Assuming that TPP won't change employment levels in any of the participating nations seems a stretch, not least because previous trade liberalization has caused sizable job losses, as the new study notes. At the very least, it means that those using these models to argue in favor of TPP shouldn't be making any claims about its effects on employment, since these don't exist by definition. Capaldo and Izurieta are able to look at how jobs are affected because they use a different model, which they claim is superior to the one found in most other studies:

In this paper, we review existing projections of the TPP and propose alternative ones based on more realistic assumptions about economic adjustment and income distribution. We start from the trade projections put forward in the main existing study and explore their macroeconomic consequences using the United Nations Global Policy Model.

Most of the paper is spent taking a rather critical look at previous results, and will probably be mostly of interest to economists, especially academic ones. But the final results of the new calculation are certainly worth noting:

Given the small changes in net exports, the resulting changes in GDP growth are mostly projected to be negligible. We present two sets of growth figures: ten-year totals, which measure the overall effect of the TPP on growth rates compared to the baseline, and annual averages, which measure the average changes in growth rates due to the TPP.

That underlines another point often missed: that the GDP growth figures quoted by politicians and TPP supporters reflect the overall effect after ten years. Here's what Capaldo and Izurieta found:

Total ten-year changes in growth rates are projected to be below one percent, by 2025, in all regions but two. In East Asia and Latin America, GDP growth is projected to increase by 2.18 percent and 2.84 percent respectively under the TPP. By comparison, during 2005-2015, GDP in the two regions is estimated to have grown by 50 percent and 47 percent respectively.

The US and Japan are projected to suffer net losses of GDP of 0.54 percent and 0.12 percent respectively compared to the baseline

Although those growth figures are worse than previous predictions, they confirm that TPP's impact on GDPs will be small. What's new in this paper is an estimation of the agreement's effect on jobs:

While projected employment losses are small compared to the labor force, they clearly signal an adverse effect of liberalization not taken into account in full-employment models. In TPP countries, the largest effect will occur in the US, with approximately 450,000 jobs lost by 2025. Japan and Canada follow, with approximately 75,000 and 58,000 jobs lost respectively. The smallest loss -- approximately 5,000 jobs -- is projected to occur in New Zealand, where the increase in net exports is projected to be the largest. Overall, projected job losses in TPP countries amount to 771,000 jobs.

Also novel is the report's comments about the global effects of TPP:

when analyzed with a model that recognizes the risks of trade liberalization, the TPP appears to only marginally change competitiveness among participating countries. Most gains are therefore obtained at the expense of non-TPP countries.

Globally, the TPP favors competition on labor costs and remuneration of capital. Depending on the policy choices in non-TPP countries, this may accelerate the global race to the bottom, increasing downward pressure on labor incomes in a quest for ever more elusive trade gains.

Although this is just one (more) study, it does seem to confirm the more gloomy predictions for TPP. It inevitably poses a key question with yet more force: why exactly are politicians in TPP nations pushing so hard to ratify a controversial agreement that seems have few quantifiable benefits, and very considerable costs?    ~ hehe maybe JUST maybe "It's" the hiddden  A~gen~daaa https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160119/09463933377/more-realistic-modelling-tpps-effects-predicts-450000-us-jobs-lost-gdp-contraction.shtml

ANTARCTIC TUNNELS AS TALL AS THE EIFFEL TOWER FOUND   ~ hehe ALL over this Planet(& off ?) we's got "people" look~in fer "stuff" have BEEN look~in for "stuff" 4 a very ,Very ,VERY  longgggggggg  time ? & this "stuff" has been 'hidden' & 'around' 4 a very ,very ,Very,VERY  longggggggggggggg ... time

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Joseph P. Farrell • http://gizadeathstar.com/2016/01/antarctic-tunnels-as-tall-as-the-eiffel-tower-found/

I absolutely had to blog about this one, since so many people sent me versions of this story, and because I've written about Antarctica in conjunction with the persistent postwar rumors of some sort of Nazi base there, and because of the persistent rumors of "high strangeness" on the southern polar continent.
Tunnels as tall as the Eiffel Tower discovered under Antarctic ice sheets
Here's the crux of the story:

Researchers from a number of UK universities and the British Antarctic Survey - a research centre based on the continent - detected the tunnels when they flew a plane over the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in West Antarctica.

Radar from the plane, as well as satellite photos, revealed that ridges and cavities on the surface of the ice sheet corresponded to tunnels lying at its base.

The 820-foot tunnels are nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower - which measures just over 987 feet - and more than four times as tall as Tower (Bridge) - which comes in at 213 feet.

Researchers concluded that the placement of the tunnels means that they were most likely formed from meltwater - water released from melting ice - that flowing underneath the ice sheet, over land, and into the ocean.

The data revealed that water moved beneath the ice in concentrated channels, similar to rivers. (Emphasis added)

This intrigues me for the obvious reason that it appears to confirm in some respects those persistent stories about Nazi bases in Antarctica that have been around since the Nazi Neuschwabenland expedition to the continent in late 1938 and early 1939, that I review in my books Reich of the Black Sun, and again in Roswell and the Reich. These rumors have always included the idea, in some circles, that the Nazis actually built and maintained research facilities on the continent for the development of advanced and exotic technologies, a view which I have disputed and continue to dispute, simply because such a possibility would seem to be beyond the logistical capabilities of the German navy during the war, and more importantly, when more secure, less logistically vulnerable possibilities existed for the placement of such facilities in southern Latin America.

But the presence of such tunnels, of such a large scale, hollowed out but under-ice flows of water, suggest the possibility, one which I have entertained as a distinct possibility, of hidden u-boat bases under the ice. Such possibilities would have been within the capabilities of the German navy, and such bases would have been of value for a variety of reasons.

So let's indulge in our trademark high octane speculation once again. Why would one look for such tunnels in the first place, and why would it be the British doing it? the geological and scientific reasons are fairly obvious and do not need to be rehearsed. It's the hidden possibilities, the historical ones, that intrigue me. Tunnels of such size could hide any number of things, large things, and thus perhaps one is looking at yet another attempt to corroborate the existence of lost secret Nazi bases, or even something more ancient. The discovery of the tunnels(or perhaps, re-discovery) places the famous expedition of Admiral Byrd, Operation Highjump, in late 1946 and early 1947, once again into a unique light, for let it be recalled that this expedition was outfitted for a stay of several months, and yet, only stayed for a few weeks, when the Admiral called it quits, and headed back to the USA, giving an interview with the El Mercurio newspaper of Santiago, Chile, on the way back, in which he warned that the USA would have to prepare defenses against "enemy fighters that can fly from pole to pole with tremendous speed."