Big Government and Big Business ...

Big Government and Big Business ... will try to impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults and their children. To achieve this they will (unless prevented) make use of all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coercion and threats of physical violence. If this kind of tyranny is to be avoided, we must begin without delay to educate ourselves and our children for freedom and self-government. Such an education for freedom should be ... first of all in facts and in values — the facts of individual diversity and genetic uniqueness and the values of freedom, tolerance and mutual charity, which are the ethical corollaries of these facts.

   ~ Aldous Huxley: (Brave New World Revisited)

Google 'Pressure Cookers' and 'Backpacks,' Get a Visit from the Cops

Michele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which prompts the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?

Catalano (who is a professional writer) describes the tension of that visit.

[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. ...

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.
The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depend on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, include a variety of federal agencies. Among them: the FBI and Homeland Security.

Update 1:45 p.m.: In a conversation with The Atlantic Wire, FBI spokesperson Peter Donald confirmed The Guardian's report that the FBI was not involved in the visit itself. Asked if the FBI was involved in providing information that led to the visit, Donald replied that he could not answer the question at this point, as he didn't know.

We asked if the Suffolk and Nassau police, which The Guardian reported were the authorities that effected the raid, are part of the government's regional Joint Terrorism Task Force. They are, he replied, representing two of the 52 agencies that participate. He said that local police are often deputized federal marshals for that purpose — but that the JTTF "did not visit the residence." He later clarified: "Any officers, agents, or other representatives of the JTTF did not visit that location."

We are awaiting a response from Suffolk County police and the Department of Homeland Security which operates an investigatory fusion center in the region.

Ever since details of the NSA's surveillance infrastructure were leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency has been insistent on the boundaries of the information it collects. It is not, by law, allowed to spy on Americans — although there are exceptions of which it takes advantage. Its PRISM program, under which it collects internet content, does not include information from Americans unless those Americans are connected to terror suspects by no more than two other people. It collects metadata on phone calls made by Americans, but reportedly stopped collecting metadata on Americans' internet use in 2011. So how, then, would the government know what Catalano and her husband were searching for?

It's possible that one of the two of them is tangentially linked to a foreign terror suspect, allowing the government to review their internet activity. After all, that "no more than two other people" ends up covering millions of people. Or perhaps the NSA, as part of its routine collection of as much internet traffic as it can, automatically flags things like Google searches for "pressure cooker" and "backpack" and passes on anything it finds to the FBI.

Or maybe it was something else. On Wednesday, The Guardian reported on XKeyscore, a program eerily similar to Facebook search that could clearly allow an analyst to run a search that picked out people who'd done searches for those items from the same location. How those searches got into the government's database is a question worth asking; how the information got back out seems apparent.

It is also possible that there were other factors that prompted the government's interest in Catalano and her husband. He travels to Asia, she notes in her article. Who knows. Which is largely Catalano's point.

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1% of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.
One hundred times a week, groups of six armed men drive to houses in three black SUVs, conducting consented-if-casual searches of the property perhaps in part because of things people looked up online.

But the NSA doesn't collect data on Americans, so this certainly won't happen to you.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjNB0TgkJBg

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[China] Sex Toy Mistaken for Rare Mushroom

Sex Toy Fools Entire Chinese Village
By Audrey Wozniak | ABC News Blogs – 5 hrs ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4fQMf9A98

Sex toy mistaken for rare double headed mushroom

The discovery of a double-headed sex toy mistaken for a mystical rare fungus brought national notoriety to a Chinese village and TV program this week.

Villagers from Liucunbu, a rural community outside western Chinese city of Xi'an, encountered the sex toy while drilling a new well shaft. Hard-pressed to identify the flexible, fungi-like object, perplexed residents alerted the local news station, which immediately sent reporter Yunfeng Ye to the scene.

In her coverage of the finding, broadcast last Sunday on the station's investigative journalism program Xi'an Up Close, Ye thoroughly probed different aspects of the discovery, interviewing locals and inserting her own research on the alleged mushroom. Despite Ye's earnest reporting, her and the villagers' obliviousness of the object's real identity has now lent itself to national amusement.

The report opens with Ye proclaiming the discovery of the mysterious object, the likes of which "not even an 80-year-old local man has seen." Villagers crouch around the object, floating innocently in a water-filled bucket. "It has an eye and a nose, but we don't know what it is," says a man who was among the drillers who discovered the sex toy.

Describing the object's qualities in explicit detail, Ye and the villager determine that it is a type of lingzhi, a shelf fungus of the Ganoderma lucidum species, which according to legend has the ability to give immortality. Asserting that the mushroom is rarely seen because it grows underground, she says, "When the Emperor Qin Shi Huang [the First emperor of China] was on the hunt for the secret to longevity, it is said he discovered this lingzhi was the answer."

After the program aired, many viewers immediately recognized the object as a sex toy modeled after female genitalia, and online video of the report gained millions of views overnight. While the video received many comments lauding the station's and villagers' "purity," the day after the program aired the Xi'an news station posted an apology on Sina Weibo, a Chinese blogging website.

"Our program last night made everyone laugh," the apology said, expressing regret for an "uncomfortable and misleading" report. "Our reporter is very young and sheltered."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4fQMf9A98

http://www.last.fm/tag/slamming%20brutal%20death%20metal
Click to learn the differences between "slamming brutal death metal", "slamming guttural brutal death metal", just "guttural brutal death metal", and "slam death metal".

people gone a die

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I know that kind of nerds who does post rock or any like that kind of experimental music, and all of these are a crap musicians, so please real doomsters dont support this kind of music or the real doom metal was gone a die."