Category: The Current Situation

Good NYT article on probability and is (mis)uses. The focus here is on the mysterious post-9/11 deaths of a dozen or so microbiologists but the concepts here could be applied to any situation where someone is claiming events that are “a million to one odds” or something. Required reading for conspiracy fans after you finish C. Wright Mills.

Note that this is real life and is occurring right now. It is not a dystopic SF movie.

A mob moved out from Las Flores, a shantytown of trash heaps and metal shacks boiling over with refugees from the financial collapse of what was once Latin America’s wealthiest nation. Within minutes, 600 hungry residents arrived on the scene, wielding machetes and carving knives. Suddenly, according to accounts from some of those present on that March day, a cry went up.

“Kill the cows!” someone yelled. “Take what you can!”

Interesting paper on the weaknesses of the airport screening system and how the dependence on passenger profiles is the system’s biggest flaw. An algorithm called “Carnival Booth” demonstrates how a terrorist cell can defeat the CAPS system.

[via Boing Boing]

Punch in your zip code and Scorecard will tell you just how polluted your neighborhood is and who’s doing the dumping.

Of course I had to run it on home…

Based on EPA’s most current data, this county ranked among the dirtiest/worst 10% of all counties in the US in terms of the number of people living in areas where cancer risk from hazardous air pollutants exceeds 1 in 10,000.

2,805,785 people in ORANGE County face a cancer risk more than 100 times the goal set by the Clean Air Act.

89% of the air cancer risk is from mobile sources
10% of the air cancer risk is from area sources
0.46% of the air cancer risk is from point sources

In 1999, this county ranked among the dirtier 40% of all counties in the U.S. in terms of pm-10 24-hour average concentration.

In 1999, this county ranked among the dirtiest/worst 10% of all counties in the U.S. in terms of noncancer risk score (air and water releases)

2 Superfund sites in ORANGE County caused contamination of drinking water sources

16% of surface waters in ORANGE County have beneficial uses which are impaired or threatened. (Reports may be incomplete)

Some Rivers, Streams and Creeks are impaired by Pathogens and Nutrients
Some Lakes, Reservoirs and Ponds are impaired by Nutrients and Metals
Some Estuaries, Bays and Coasts are impaired by Pathogens and Metals

The leading sources of water quality problems are Nonpoint Sources, Construction, and Urban Runoff/Storm Sewers

total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.” needs a giant eye-in-the-pyramid.

Either they have a wicked sense of humor, or they’re totally serious. Scarily, I think they’re serious…

[via Boing Boing]

Next time you’re around a group of people, take a look around. Doesn’t matter if you’re at work, in class, at the grocery store, standing in line for a movie, at a party at someone’s house, or at a concert. Now imagine that one of people there is a snitch, recording your every move.

Feel safer?

The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups.

The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police. The program would use a minimum of 4 per cent of Americans to report “suspicious activity”.

Civil liberties groups have already warned that, with the passage earlier this year of the Patriot Act, there is potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens.

…

Highlighting the scope of the surveillance network, TIPS volunteers are being recruited primarily from among those whose work provides access to homes, businesses or transport systems. Letter carriers, utility employees, truck drivers and train conductors are among those named as targeted recruits.

A pilot program, described on the government Web site www.citizencorps.gov, is scheduled to start next month in 10 cities, with 1 million informants participating in the first stage. Assuming the program is initiated in the 10 largest US cities, that will be 1 million informants for a total population of almost 24 million, or one in 24 people.

[via Ambiguous]

My favorite High Weirdness site of the moment. All the hallmarks of primo-paranoia are here: gratuitous exclamation points, secret documents the government doesn’t want you to know about, oddly bolded and italicized text, trillions (TRILLIONS!) of unaccounted cash, the requisite product for sale, claims about the one-world government and how income taxes are unnecessary. Read now (if you can) before he gets disappeared by the Feds.

Perplexed by the number of corporate scandals? The Economist runs through the players and tells you who’s a crook, who’s “overly optimistic”, and who’s cooking the books.

[via Red Rock Eater]

The Bush II administration is using the Homeland Security reorganization as an opportunity to do some union busting.

On grounds of national security, Bush has iced a nascent union for federal prosecutors being aggressively organized at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami.

And he’s dissolved a handful of existing unions that represented about 500 Justice Department employees around the nation — including the 45-member Miami Local 512 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Local 512 had represented support personnel at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, including paralegals, clerks and secretaries, since the 1980s.

Bush based his actions on an exemption in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act which presupposes that unionized federal workers are an impediment to effective national security. That’s why labor leaders fear that what happened in Miami is the prelude to broader union busting by the White House once the homeland security reorganization of federal agencies is complete.

Their principal concern is that thousands of unionized workers transferred to the Department of Homeland Security will be stripped of their right to organize and collectively bargain. That includes 12,000 U.S. Customs Service employees now represented by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU).