Society's ChildS


Airplane

Is FBI behind the mystery plane that was circling the Sacramento area for the past few weeks?

A 19-year-old college student has discovered the secret behind a mysterious plane that has been been circling parts of Sacramento for weeks.

There were actually multiple aircraft and the flights had nothing to do with training or radar calibration as some had speculated.

"It's the FBI," the college student said, asking that News10 not identify him to avoid potential problems. "They're obviously watching something."

The young man had been seeing the flashing aircraft navigation lights over Sacramento's Arden-Arcade area, but didn't feel compelled to research the source until he saw News10's report featuring residents expressing curiosity and even annoyance at the constant orbits, day and night.
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© WekTrakThe track of FBI surveillance aircraft JENA231 on March 18, 2014
He found the answer through a link on the Sacramento County Airport System's website designed to help people identify aircraft so they can file a noise complaint.

Horse

Abhorrent climate ugliness courtesy of Lawrence Torcello - assistant philosophy professor, Rochester Institute of Technology

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© RITFrom his RIT website: Lawrence Torcello Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy. Lawrence Torcello received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University at Buffalo in 2006. His research interests include ethical theory and applied ethics, social and political philosophy, moral pluralism, and skepticism. His current projects investigate the practical consequences and ethical responsibilities implicit to democratic citizenship in morally diverse societies, particularly in the domains of medicine, education, animal welfare, the environment, public policy, and political discourse. Dr. Torcello’s recent work pursues the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.
While the Anti Defamation League turns a blind eye to their own home grown hypocrisy and ugliness, Lawrence Torcello comes up with even more.

Via Delingpole at Breitbart:

Scientists who don't believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.

Lawrence Torcello - assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about "global warming" should face trial for "criminal negligence". (H/T Bishop Hill)
What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.

Comment: Lawrence Torcello sounds an awful lot like an Authoritarian follower. From the Hypocrisy of the Authoritarians:

"The authoritarian mind doesn't simply adjust reality to its beliefs; subconsciously, it also adjusts ITSELF to the most apparent currents of the objective reality around it. Because of this, the authoritarians are conformists and conventional thinkers. This has been shown repeatedly in research, notably by Milgram. Following his thought, conformity can be linked to respect for the power of authority, including that of consensus. Robert Altmeyer made another profound observation. Since authoritarians have no genuine internal convictions, they simply lack basic individuality and sense of identity:
[..] I also discovered that if you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place "being normal" substantially higher than most people do. It's almost as though they want to disappear as individuals into the vast vat of Ordinaries. [..]

They are quite capable of adhering to the beliefs emphasized by their in-groups when these conflict with what is held by society as a whole. Nevertheless, they do get tugged by what they think everybody else is saying and doing. [..]
Altmeyer also mentions that:
[T]hirty years ago the solid majority of high RWA students in my samples said premarital sexual intercourse was flat-out immoral. Now most say it is moral if the couple plans to get married"



Radar

Malaysian jet: signals on radar puzzle officials

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© Binsar Bakkara/AP
Indonesian Air Force officers at a base in Medan, Indonesia, examined a map of the Strait of Malacca after a search operation.
After four days of reticence and evasive answers, the Malaysian military acknowledged on Wednesday that it had recorded, but initially ignored, radar signals that could have prompted a mission to intercept and track a missing jetliner - data that vastly expands the area where the plane might have traveled.

Radar signals from the location where the missing aircraft, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, was last contacted by ground controllers suggested that the plane may have turned away from its northeastward course toward Beijing, officials said. Military radar then detected an unidentified aircraft at several points, apparently headed west across the Malaysian peninsula and out into the Indian Ocean, the head of the country's air force told reporters. The last detected location was hundreds of miles to the west of where search and rescue efforts were initially focused.

The military took no immediate action on Saturday to investigate the unidentified blips, whose path appeared to take the aircraft near the heavily populated island of Penang, and only later realized the significance of the radar readings. The search area was then expanded to take in waters west of the peninsula as well as east - encompassing almost 27,000 square nautical miles, an area bigger than South Carolina - but officials did not give a full explanation for the move.

Binoculars

Oil rig worker off Vung Tau, Vietnam coast says he saw missing plane go down

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© Vacationstogo.com
ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff has obtained a letter that an oil rig worker in Vietnam wrote to his employer claiming he saw Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 go down in flames.

Mr. Woodruff tweeted an image of the letter saying, "Oil rig worker claims in employer confirmed letter-he saw the plane go down. Vietnamese say they found nothing."

The letter, by Michael Jerome McKay, alleges that he observed the plane "burning at a high altitude" while he was aboard the oil rig "Songa Mercur" off Vung Tau.

He notes that the plane appeared to be in one piece.

Bullseye

Millions have fallen out of the middle class - you could be next

worried man
© unknown

There are millions of American families that once lived very comfortable middle class lifestyles that have lost it all. When you are unemployed and you can't find a decent job, it can crush your soul. Every day you can see the disappointment or the disapproval in the eyes of your family and friends, and it can be really easy to want to give up completely. And then there are always those that choose to actively vocalize their disdain for those that are down on their luck. But telling people "to get a job" or shaming them for being on welfare isn't going to solve anything in an economy where there simply are not enough jobs for everyone. Only a small minority of welfare recipients are actually trying to abuse the system. Most people just want to work hard and take care of their families. Unfortunately, that is much harder to do than it was before the last financial crisis.

At this point, our economy has stabilized at a much lower level than it was at before. For example, 32 million Americans were on food stamps when Barack Obama took office, and subsequently that number shot up to about 47 million. Fortunately, that number has been relatively stable for the last couple of years, but there has been no recovery. This can be seen in lots of other economic statistics as well.

If we were going to have an "economic recovery", it should have happened by now.

Unfortunately, it has not materialized, and now the next downturn is coming.

Since I run a website called "The Economic Collapse", a lot of people seem to assume that I actually want an economic collapse to happen. But that is not the truth at all. I love this country, and just like most other people I really enjoy life in modern America. I wish that the party could go on forever. But I know that it cannot.

Display

Microsoft owns up to reading Hotmail inbox of blogger

Hotmail snooping Microsoft
© Getty ImagesMicrosoft started an investigation after details of its new Windows 8 operating system were released early
Microsoft is caught up in a privacy storm after it admitted it read the Hotmail inbox of a blogger while pursuing a software leak investigation.

On Thursday, the firm acknowledged it read the anonymous blogger's emails in order to identify an employee it suspected of leaking information.

Microsoft owns Hotmail, a free email service now called Outlook.com.

John Frank, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, said it took "extraordinary actions in this case".

While the search was technically legal, he added Microsoft would consult outside counsel in the future.

Legal actions

Microsoft's actions came to light this week as part of a legal case by US prosecutors against an ex-Microsoft employee, Alex Kibalko, who was a Russian native based in the company's Lebanon office.

In 2012, Microsoft had been alerted to the fact that the blogger, whose identity was kept anonymous in the court papers, had been given some stolen lines of code from the not-yet-released Windows 8 operating system.

The blogger then posted screenshots of the unreleased Windows operating system to his blog.

To figure out the source of the leak, Microsoft began an investigation and, as part of that search, looked into the blogger's accounts to find out the name of the employee.

The search was legal because it fell within Microsoft's terms of service which state that the company can access information in accounts that are stored on its "Communication Services", which includes email, chat areas, forums, and other communication facilities.

The terms of service add: "Microsoft reserves the right to review materials posted to the Communication Services and to remove any materials in its sole discretion."

Nonetheless, revelations of the search have led to renewed focus on the privacy violations of technology firms.

It has also left Microsoft in a difficult position, as the firm has often criticised rival Google for its automatic scanning of users' emails in order to serve them with advertising.

Comment: This incident only highlights the invasive nature of the 'terms of service' everyone must agree to in order to access services on the Internet.


Sheriff

Hawaii cops urge lawmakers to keep exemption that allows them to have sex with prostitutes

honolulu police
© Oskar Garcia/ AP PhotoA pedestrian walks in front of a Honolulu Police Department station in Honolulu's tourist area of Waikiki on Wednesday, March 19, 2014. As Hawaii lawmakers considered a measure that would crack down on prostitution, the Honolulu Police Department requested a change that has shocked human trafficking experts and victims rights advocates: Police wanted it to remain legal for undercover officers to have sex with prostitutes.
Honolulu police officers have urged lawmakers to keep an exemption in state law that allows undercover officers to have sex with prostitutes during investigations, touching off a heated debate.

Authorities say they need the legal protection to catch lawbreakers in the act. Critics, including human trafficking experts and other police, say it's unnecessary and can further victimize sex workers, many of whom have been forced into the trade.

Police haven't said how often - or even if - they use the provision. But when they asked legislators to preserve it, they made assurances that internal policies and procedures are in place to prevent officers from taking advantage of it.

But expert Derek Marsh says the exemption is "antiquated at best" and that police can easily do their jobs without it.

"It doesn't help your case, and at worst you further traumatize someone. And do you think he or she is going to trust a cop again?" asked Marsh, who trains California police in best practices on human trafficking cases and twice has testified to Congress about the issue.

A Hawaii bill cracking down on prostitution was originally written to do away with the sex exemption for officers on duty, but it was amended to restore that protection after police testimony. The revised proposal has passed the state House and will go before a Senate committee Friday.

Eye 1

Former cop convicted of FBI snooping now working plum job at IRS

fbi snoop Irs employee
Mohammad Weiss Rasool
New questions arise about background check system

The Internal Revenue Service, already facing accusations that its workers improperly snooped through tax files, has hired a former police officer convicted just a few years ago of illegally accessing FBI records and providing information to a subject of a counterterrorism investigation involving an infamous al Qaeda figure.

Mohammad Weiss Rasool, or Weiss Russell as he is known at the IRS, was sentenced to two years of probation in 2008 after pleading guilty in federal court to illegally accessing the FBI's National Crime Information Center database to run license tag numbers for a friend he thought was being followed. That friend, it turned out, was the subject of an undercover FBI operation and a close associate of the al Qaeda-linked cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the American Islamist militant who preached to three of the 9/11 hijackers and inspired the Fort Hood shootings, according to court records and interviews.

Government watchdogs told The Washington Times that Mr. Rasool's hiring by the IRS raises red flags about the quality of the federal government's background checks and is alarming given his previous admission that he misused a police database.

At the IRS, Mr. Rasool serves as a financial management analyst - three rungs away from the highest-level career position - working audit-related issues and matters. He was hired by the IRS after he served his probationary period.

"This is absolutely outrageous," said Chris Farrell, director of investigations at Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group. "Rasool has already demonstrated he's not worthy of a position of trust within the government - he's already broken one public oath - the last place you'd want him is at the IRS."

Judicial Watch has started its own investigation into the matter, demanding that the IRS explain how Mr. Rasool got his job and who at the agency, or within the Obama administration, made the final call on his employment.

Mr. Rasool declined to comment for the record when contacted by The Times.

The IRS told The Times that under federal privacy rules it cannot comment on individual employees within the agency, but that all workers undergo federal background checks and screening reviews as administered by the agency.

"It's astounding to me, with his activities at the police department, that he should have a position within the federal government that involves a matter of trust and responsibility," said Philip Manuel, a former U.S. counterintelligence agent and chairman of the investigative firm MBD International. "There's something fishy here as to how someone with his background could get cleared."

Light Saber

'Scum of the earth' who punched 8-year old boy, stole his iPad is chased down by good Samaritan

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© CBS
Police say cell phones and other mobile devices are being stolen more often, but a violent robbery involving an 8-year-old boy had some people shaking their heads and a Minneapolis man leaping to action.

Last Thursday, a boy was punched and the iPad in his hands was stolen outside a Minneapolis restaurant.

Aaron Stillday, 32, was arrested and charged with first-degree aggravated robbery. Police caught him after a good Samaritan chased him down.

"Poor kid," said Mohammad Armeli, the man who chased down the robber. "I can't believe it, the blood was all over his face. Could have broken his nose."

Surveillance video shows the 8-year-old following his aunt out of a day care building. What happened next left Armeli's blood boiling.

Handcuffs

New Mexico man in federal custody for threatening Obama over Medicaid card delay

Obama
© unknown
A 55-year-old homeless man from New Mexico pleaded guilty on Thursday to making a telephone threat against President Barack Obama in which he said he would shoot the president, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

Tracy York White of Las Cruces was arrested in October, four days after he is accused of telling a Social Security Administration employee in Ohio by phone that he planned to get a firearm, travel to the White House and kill the president, the statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office in Albuquerque said.

"In his plea agreement, White stated that he made the threat in frustration and knew what he was doing was wrong," U.S. Attorney's Office spokeswoman Elizabeth Martinez said of the plea in federal district court in Las Cruces.

White was accused of making the threat after he became agitated when he was told a new Medicaid card would take two weeks to reach him after he moved from Texas to New Mexico, according to the criminal complaint.