House passes cyber bill despite veto threat

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives passed a cybersecurity bill on Thursday that would allow the government and companies to share information about hacking, but which has raised privacy concerns and a veto threat from the White House.

The House approved the bill 248-168, prompting the top Republican and Democrat on the intelligence committee who sponsored it to issue a joint statement lauding the bipartisan approval.

Full Article

Cybersecurity Vote Friday‏ – Please “Withdraw Your Consent!

 

Quote of the Day: "If you believe in privacy and free markets, you
should be deeply concerned about the proposed marriage of government
intelligence gathering with private, profit-seeking companies. CISPA
is Big Brother writ large, putting the resources of private industry
to work for the nefarious purpose of spying on the American people." -
Rep. Ron Paul
<http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/223067-cispa-is-the-new-sopa>

Thanks to you . . .

Rep. Mike Rogers has embraced "good changes" to his cybersecurity bill
(CISPA). You can see the changes here.
<https://www.cdt.org/blogs/leslie-harris/2404cispa-progress-flaws-remain>

You caused this. DC Downsizers were part of an army that "withdrew
consent" from CISPA. And Rogers addressed some of your concerns.

Congratulations! 

But . . .

* There are STILL fundamental flaws to the bill.

* And the House Rules Committee has refused to allow amendments to
address these flaws.
<https://www.cdt.org/pr_statement/cdt-opposes-cispa-going-forward>

This means CISPA must be defeated... and the House vote is scheduled
for Friday. <http://majorityleader.gov/floor/weekly.html>

Please call your Rep. You'll see the number when you log in at our
"Hands Off the Internet" campaign.
<https://secure.downsizedc.org/etp/hands-off-the-internet/>

You can say this . . .

I'm calling to oppose the CISPA cybersecurity bill. I don't want
companies spying on me, and then sharing my private info with the
government. I don't see how this protects me from cyber attacks.

It's that simple. And while you're on the page of our "Hands Off the
Internet" campaign, please send a letter too.
<https://secure.downsizedc.org/etp/hands-off-the-internet/>

You can copy or edit this one . . .

Oppose CISPA (HR 3523). I don't want companies spying on me and giving
my private info to the Feds. I'm shocked that this bill would allow my
Internet activities to flow directly to the NSA. If I want to talk to
the NSA I'll call them. Otherwise the Constitution and common sense
says they need a warrant to spy on me.

I don't even trust the motives behind this bill. As TechDirt asks
(http://bit.ly/J9piUB
): Why should I be afraid of cyber-attacks if Congressmen don't even
secure their own websites? You're a more likely target than I am. I
think this bill is a fraud. 

I withdraw my consent to be governed in this way. Oppose CISPA!

END LETTER

You can send your letter using DownsizeDC.org's Educate the Powerful
System. <https://secure.downsizedc.org/etp/hands-off-the-internet/>

We thank you for taking action, and for sharing this with your social
networks and friends.
<http://www.downsizedc.org/blog/cybersecurity-vote-friday>

James Wilson

Policy Research Director

DownsizeDC.org, Inc.

‘I made a mistake’: Gaia theory scientist James Lovelock admits he was ‘alarmist’ about the impact of climate change

 

• British scientist admits he had ‘extrapolated too far’ in earlier book
• Claims other environmental commentators such as Al Gore did the same

By Lydia Warren

Daily Mail

 

Environmental scientist James Lovelock, renowned for his terrifying predictions of climate change’s deadly impact on the planet, has gone back on his previous claims, admitting they were ‘alarmist’.

The 92-year-old Briton, who also developed the Gaia theory of the Earth as a single organism, has said climate change is still happening – just not as quickly as he once warned.

He added that other environmental commentators, such as former vice president Al Gore, are also guilty of exaggerating their arguments.

The admission comes as a devastating blow to proponents of climate change who regard Lovelock as a powerful figurehead.

Five years ago, he had claimed: ‘Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.’

But in an interview with msnbc.com, he admitted: ‘I made a mistake.’

He said: ‘The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,’ he told ’We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear cut, but it hasn’t happened.

‘The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world.

‘[The temperature] has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising – carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that.’

After two books – Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity, and The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can – he is writing a third.

 

It will not go back on climate change, he said, but will admit he had been ‘extrapolating too far’. It will suggest how people can change their habits to co-ordinate with the Earth’s natural systems.

 

Now he admits: ‘We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit.’

A long-time advocate of nuclear power, he suggested we should cut back on burning fossil fuels.

The independent scientist, who is based in south west England and has conducted research at Yale and Harvard universities, has been a respected member of the academic community for decades.

He discovered the presence of harmful chemicals – CFCs – in the atmosphere in the 1960s.

In 2007, Time magazine named him as one 13 leaders and visionaries in an article on Heroes of the Environment.

In 1990, he became a CBE, presented to him by Queen Elizabeth II, and in 2003, she awarded him a Companion of Honour for his achievements in science.

Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Centre, told msnbc.com he agreed Lovelock had been too alarmist.

But he added that Lovelock has ‘had a lot of good ideas and interesting thoughts’.

‘I like the fact he’s provocative and provokes people to think about these things,’ Stott said.

The world’s average temperature has risen by around 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

By 2100, it will rise by another 2 to 11.5 degrees, it predicts.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration added that data collected by satellites and sensors ‘continue to show that the average global surface temperature is rising’.

It added that extreme weather – such as heat waves and heavy rain – were becoming more frequent and that there had been decreases in snow and glaciers.

‘All 11 years of the 21st century so far rank among the 13 warmest in the 132-year period of record. Only one year during the 20th century, 1998, was warmer than 2011,’ it said.

Many people will lose Internet connection in July

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections after early July.

The problem started when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual move, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system will be shut down this summer.

Full Article

DARPA releases results of 13,000-mph test flight over Pacific (video)

 

The results are in from last summer’s attempt to test new technology that would provide the Pentagon with a lightning-fast vehicle, capable of delivering a military strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour.

In August the Pentagon’s research arm, known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, carried out a test flight of an experimental aircraft capable of traveling at 20 times the speed of sound.

The arrowhead-shaped unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, into the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere aboard an eight-story Minotaur IV rocket made by Orbital Sciences Corp.

After reaching an undisclosed altitude, the aircraft jettisoned from its protective cover atop the rocket, then nose-dived back toward Earth, leveled out and glided above the Pacific at 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20.

The plan was for the Falcon to speed westward for about 30 minutes before plunging into the ocean near Kwajalein Atoll, about 4,000 miles from Vandenberg.

But it was ended about nine minutes into flight for unknown reasons. The launch had received worldwide attention and much fanfare, but officials didn’t provide much information on why the launch failed.

On Friday, DARPA said in a statement that the searing high speeds caused portions of the Falcon’s skin to peel from the aerostructure. The resulting gaps created strong shock waves around the vehicle as it traveled nearly 13,000 mph, causing it to roll abruptly.

The Falcon, which is built by Lockheed Martin Corp., is made of durable carbon composite material, which was expected to keep the aircraft’s crucial internal electronics and avionics — only a few inches away from the surface — safe from the fiery hypersonic flight. Surface temperatures on the Falcon were expected to reach more than 3,500 degrees, hot enough to melt steel.

“The initial shock wave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” DARPA Acting Director Kaigham J. Gabriel said in a statement. “That’s a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight.”

The flight successfully demonstrated stable aerodynamically controlled flight at speeds up to Mach 20 for nearly three minutes.

Sustaining hypersonic flight has been an extremely difficult task for aeronautical engineers over the years. While supersonic means that an object is traveling faster than the speed of sound, or Mach 1, “hypersonic” refers to an aircraft going five times that speed or more.

The Falcon hit Mach 20. At that speed, an aircraft could zoom from Los Angeles to New York in less than 12 minutes — 22 times faster than a commercial airliner. Take a look at what that looks like from the ground in the video below.

The August launch was the second flight of the Falcon technology. The first flight, which took place in April 2010, also ended prematurely with only nine minutes of flight time.

There aren’t any more flights scheduled for the Falcon program, which began in 2003 and cost taxpayers about $320 million.

 

• Also
• 
•  With so much at stake, companies turn to hired hackers
• 
• F-35 fighter jet’s escalating costs are on Washington’s radar
• 
• Flying car aims to take wing in the commercial market

Scientists To Soon Create Unlimited Supply of Humans In The Lab

The first human eggs grown from human stem cells could be fertilized with human sperm cells later this year, potentially adding one more peg in the ladder toward reproduction sans human interaction. In this case it would entirely bypass a woman’s donation of her eggs. But it could also turn stem cells into an infinite loop, of egg cells into embryos into stem cells, and on and on, in a fractal-like repetition of reproduction.

In February, a study was announced involving Japanese women whose reproductive stem cells were donated because they were undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital were able to coax these ovarian stem cells into becoming immature human egg cells, which were then incubated in mice so they’d have the proper ovarian structures. Now these same scientists, working with a team at Edinburgh University, want to fertilize them.

Full Article

Vt. Debates Letting Parents Say No to Vaccines

For Jennifer Stella, it’s a question of informed consent. Her son had a seizure after getting childhood vaccinations and her daughter suffered a “head-to-toe” eczema outbreak; she says parents should research the risks and benefits of immunizations and decide which ones are appropriate.

For Jill Olson, a mother of two, it’s a matter of trusting the experts. “There’s not really any way that as an individual I can do more scientific study and research than the American Academy of Pediatrics or the Centers for Disease Control.”

For Vermont House Speaker Shap Smith, the state motto sums it up: “freedom and unity” — individual choice versus the public health benefit of having a high percentage of kids vaccinated.

“It’s a balance between individual rights and our obligations to each other in society,” the Democratic speaker said.

For much of the legislative session, Vermont has been embroiled in a debate over whether to end the “philosophical exemption” — essentially a right of refusal for parents who want to enroll their children in school or child care without immunizations. The list of shots called for by the state Health Department and the CDC is roughly 20 by the time a child enters kindergarten.

The CDC and state health officials say Vermont is among the states with the highest exemption rates for childhood vaccinations. Some say it’s no coincidence that Vermont recently has seen an outbreak of one of the diseases the vaccines target: pertussis, or whooping cough.

Full Article

FDA Proposes Rules for Nanotechnology in Food

Regulators are proposing that food companies that want to use tiny engineered particles in their packaging may have to provide extra testing data to show the products are safe.

The Food and Drug Administration issued tentative guidelines Friday for food and cosmetic companies interested in using nanoparticles, which are measured in billionths of a meter. Nanoscale materials are generally less than 100 nanometers in diameter. A sheet of paper, in comparison, is 100,000 nanometers thick. A human hair is 80,000 nanometers thick.

Full Article

James Cameron, Google’s Eric Schmidt And Larry Page Back Space Exploration Project

 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters via HuffPo) – Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and billionaire co-founder Larry Page have teamed up with “Avatar” director James Cameron and other investors to back an ambitious space exploration and natural resources venture, details of which will be unveiled next week.

The fledgling company, called Planetary Resources, will be unveiled at a Tuesday news conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, according to a press release issued this week.

Aside from naming some of the company’s high-profile backers, the press release disclosed tantalizingly few details, saying only that the company will combine the sectors of “space exploration and natural resources” in a venture that could add “trillions of dollars to the global GDP.” The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Planetary Resources will explore the feasibility of mining natural resources from asteroids, a decades-old concept.

“This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources,’” according to the press release.

Planetary Resource was co-founded by Eric Anderson, a former NASA Mars mission manager, and Peter Diamandis, the commercial space entrepreneur behind the X-Prize, a competition that offered $10 million to a group that launched a reusable manned spacecraft. Other notable investors include Charles Simonyi, a former top executive at Microsoft, and K. Ram Shriram, a Google director.

The venture will be the latest foray into the far-flung for Cameron, who dived last month in a mini-submarine to the deepest spot in the Mariana Trench. The plot of his 2009 science fiction blockbuster film, “Avatar,” concerned resource mining on alien planets.

UK Eugenicists play God, again: SYNTHETIC DNA created. Behold: the X-NA

XNA, Synthetic DNA, Could Lead To New Life Forms, Scientists Say

Researchers create synthetic DNA called XNA

 

“There is nothing Goldilocks about DNA and RNA,” Holliger told Science. “There is no overwhelming functional imperative for genetic systems or biology to be based on these two nucleic acids.”

If that doesn’t sum up the dangerous God Complex pandemic rampant amongst the Ruling Class and their sycophantic Enablers, I don’t know what does.

They haven’t got the SLIGHTEST clue on how one of the most fundamental forces at play in our universe called the Gravity works, yet they want to play god with the Natural Order.

DNA alternative created by scientists

Artificial genetic material – XNAs – expected to reveal how molecules first replicated and drive biotechnology research

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 April 2012 14.28 EDT

Scientists have created artificial genetic material that can store information and evolve over generations in a similar way to DNA – a feat expected to drive research in medicine and biotechnology, and shed light on how molecules first replicated and assembled into life billions of years ago.

Ultimately, the creation of alternatives to DNA could enable scientists to make novel forms of life in the laboratory.

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in Cambridge, developed chemical procedures to turn DNA and RNA, the molecular blueprints for all known life, into six alternative genetic polymers called XNAs.

=============================================================

These arrogant monsters can’t even explain what they’re ‘studying,’ so being the ‘objective’ “scientists” that they are, they decided to moronically label something that they were completely clueless about in high Latin: “Junk DNA.”

Sure, they believe in natural selection and evolution, yet cannot intellectually accept why Nature must have continued to evolve to KEEP parts of DNA that they cannot understand why we need it. So being the ‘brilliantly objective scientists’ that they are, what do they do? At the height of hypocrisy, when faced with something that they cannot fathom why, they decide the very Mother Nature that they worship, MUST be stupider than they are.

And what do insecure children do, when faced with something infinitely more brilliant than they are? Ridicule it: “junk,” just because their neurotically childish and arrogant tiny little minds cannot fathom it.

Hm… what do you know: sounds just like how they treat Dr. Paul and the R3VOLution.

SO in their ‘if we can’t fathom it, it MUST be “junk“‘ so they decided they can and should create their own synthetic version of the DNA.

Just what is wrong with our species??

The arrogance of ‘scientists’ aka, the modern day Post-Vatican clergy, will be the downfall of us all!

Just you wait: like all things arrogant scientists modern-clergy release into the world, like DU, nuclear weapons, GMO, once it enters into the biosphere, it will poison and doom us all, eventually.

Hopefully, the more sane American warning wins the day in this arena:

In his article on the Cambridge study [Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California's Gerald] Joyce alludes to the potential dangers of synthetic genetics. He writes: “As one contemplates all the alternative life forms that might be possible with XNAs and other more exotic genetic molecules, the words of Arthur C Clarke come to mind. In 2010: Odyssey Two, HAL the computer tells humanity, ‘all these worlds are yours’, but warns – ‘except [Jupiter's moon] Europa, attempt no landings there’. Synthetic biologists are beginning to frolic on the worlds of alternative genetics but must not tread into areas that have the potential to harm our biology.”

PS. On a side note, you’ll see the vestiges of the British ‘Aristocracy’ funded Eugenics movement still rampant, and alive & well, if you regularly peruse The Nature, BBC, the Guardian, Telegraph, and DailyMail (the MOST important tabloid IMHO: along with their incessant & endless coverage of Pippa, Posh Spice, and the Kardashians, they manage to squeeze in some expose’ that are astoundingly more NYT than what NYT should be or have become), like I do, you’ll too soon conclude that MOST prolific eugenics news comes out of the UK press.

In fact, the Briton upper echelon inbreds are OBSESSED with it, still.

Hitler ain’t got nothing on the Anglo eugenicists!

Well, not surprising since, as anyone who have researched the topic would already know, the Anglo-American banksters actively formulated and funded Mussolini, Mao, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler et al; hell practically almost every “-isms” of the last 150+ yrs were funded by ‘them’ as series of controlled oppositions.

 

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