An anonymous bidder has paid more than $600,000 to have coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook. The opportunity, which will take place at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, comes as part of a charity auction hosted by Charity Buzz. … Read More
Turkmenistan – RFE/RL correspondent held arbitrarily for past four days
Reporters Without Borders calls on the authorities to explain why they have been holding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent Rovshen Yazmuhamedov in the northeastern city of Turkmenabat since 6 May. “Yazmuhamedov’s unexplained detention for the past four days is completely arbitrary and represents a gross violation of his constitutional rights and the international conventions ratified by Turkmenistan,” Reporters Without Borders said. “What is he accused of, and on what basis? When (…) … Read More
Damage Control? Obama’s Psy-Op Commencement Speech
Categories: Controlling the Herd, Editor’s Choice, Videos and MediaTags: commencement, Obama, ohio state, propagandaPresident Obama gave the commencement address at Ohio State University yesterday, May 5. He took that opportunity to try and get a message across to the new graduates.(Read more…) … Read More
Nigeria – Charges dropped against Leadership journalists
Reporters Without Borders is relieved to learn that Abuja’s federal high court withdrew all charges yesterday against journalists Tony Amokeodo and Chibuzor Ukaibe in connection with an article published in the independent Leadership newspaper. The two men were detained for two days in early April and were charged on 16 April. 10.04.2013 – Newspaper reporters released conditionally after two days Leadership newspaper reporters Tony Amokeodo and Chibuzor Ukaibe were released at around 5 (…) … Read More
Oblivion and Upstream Color
Oblivion is a light sci-fi snack of gently pre-chewed
elements from other, meatier futuristic movies. Biding your time as
these familiar tokens drift by — the Blade Runner
identity games, the hovering white pods and menacing red HAL eye of
2001: A Space Odyssey, a half-buried urban landmark not
unlike the one in Planet of the Apes — you think: not
bad, not bad. Then you go back to biding your time.
Tom Cruise brings his usual what-a-pro presence to this sleekly
designed but otherwise unremarkable film. He plays Jack, a
post-apocalyptic repairman on an Earth that was reduced to barren
wastes and rubble during an alien invasion 70 years earlier. The
rest of the human race has relocated to Titan, the main moon of
Saturn, leaving a crew of overseers in a floating galactic
headquarters to monitor planetary mop-up operations down below.
Jack and his partner/sweetie Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) live in
the last cool loft in Manhattan (or in the clouds high above it,
anyway). Victoria, oddly togged-out in a tasteful cocktail dress,
runs the control console while Jack jets off to work each morning,
tending a fleet of armored drones that patrol the trashed landscape
for pockets of evil, stay-behind aliens called Scavs. Since Jack
and Victoria have both been subjected to mandatory memory-wipes,
this is the only life they know, and they’re placidly content.
(Question: If their memories have been wiped, how do they know
their memories have been wiped? And since they do know, why aren’t
they suspicious about it?)
Jack has been having persistent dreams about a familiar-looking
woman he can’t quite identify. When a time-traveling spacecraft
plummets into his domain one day, he jumps into his snazzy
neo-helicopter to investigate and finds that the only survivor of
the crash is the woman, literally, of his dreams. Her name is Julia
(Olga Kurylenko), and, stranger still, she recognizes him,
too. ;
Before long we learn that the fearsome Scavs — led by Morgan
Freeman in a black cape and steampunk goggles, flourishing a
post-apocalyptic cigar — aren’t what they’ve been made out to be.
And not long after that, Jack begins to wonder if anyone else is,
either.
Director Joseph Kosinski, the architecture grad who concocted
this story, has whipped up the sort of sleek CGI environments that
are by now obligatory in this kind of picture. (Jack and Victoria’s
fabulous pad is so luxe it even has a big swimming pool, perfect
for PG-13 skinny dipping.) However, the nifty digital confections
here aren’t quite up to the standard of the neon eye bath Kosinski
provided in his first film, the 2010 TRON: Legacy. And
while the movie’s barren wastes — simulated in exotic Iceland –
actually are pretty spectacular, at least as seen from on high,
they’re nowhere near as impressive down on the ground. Long before
the picture passes the two-hour mark, our eyes have grown sated,
and the story — despite all the requisite Cruisian action jolts –
has leaked away most of the narrative verve with which it started
out. ;
Cruise could play this kind of role in cryo-sleep, but his
movie-star magnetism and likeability are what carry the film even
after it starts to drag. Kurylenko (who also stars in Terrence
Malick’s To the Wonder) is affecting beyond the call of
hotness, and Riseborough is revealed to be an even snappier actress
than was apparent in the 2011 Madonna disaster W.E. Also
on hand are muscular Game of Thrones guy Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau, as a renegade human, and the admirable Melissa Leo,
as a floating overseer (trapped on a video screen throughout the
film, unfortunately). It’s a strong cast. May they meet again
someday in a stronger
movie. ; ; ; ; ; ;
Upstream Color
If Upstream Color marked the debut of a freshly minted
film-school graduate, it might be dismissed as pretentious
nonsense. Or maybe not. In any case, Shane Carruth, the 40-year-old
Texan who did assemble this strange picture, has never set foot in
a film school. A one-time software programmer with an obsessive
interest in movies, he taught himself to write, produce, direct,
shoot, edit, score, and act in his own projects. Over the years
since his only previous film — the 2004 Primer, a
tech-talky sci-fi item, made for $7000 — Carruth wasted
considerable time beating his head against the Hollywood wall
before turning his back on the big time in order to maintain total
control of his work. (He’s even distributing this new movie
himself.) The result is a picture that’s baffling from beginning to
end, at least on first viewing; but it’s also woozily beautiful.
And since Carruth is clearly no poser, I think we have to accept
that this is the movie he really, really wanted to
make.
The story ignores standard notions of comprehensibility. A young
woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) is abducted by a man who force-feeds
her a liquid brewed from live maggots (or maybe some other sort of
icky grub). He proceeds to drain her personality by making her
hand-copy Thoreau’s Walden in its entirety. When she tells
him her net worth is $36,000 — all in coins, whatever that could
mean — he proceeds to drain her bank account as well. There
follows an unexpected bit of pig surgery (pigs loom large in this
picture), and then Kris finds herself back in the workaday world,
now coinless and, after her extended absence, unemployed.
On a subway she meets a man named Jeff (Carruth), whose own life
is also a study in devastation. Then we make the acquaintance of
another man, called — in the credits, at least — the Sampler
(Andrew Sensenig). When he’s not tending a large pen stocked with
muddy pigs, this fellow wanders around with a small keyboard
recording samples of odd sounds — rocks dropping in a storm drain,
a file scraping metal, who knows why? Kris moves in with Jeff, who
lives in a big hotel that appears to be otherwise unoccupied.
There’s a bit of knitting, some business with a grommet machine,
intermingled memories, many more pigs — the end.
Doesn’t sound like a fun night out, does it? But Carruth’s iron
conviction that he’s actually saying something in this movie is
interesting in itself (even though, yeah, what could it be?). His
cinematography, intently focused on skin textures (and the
occasional insistently significant flower), is elegantly austere;
and the editing (a collaboration with David Lowery this time) jumps
in and out of time frames with an energy that tugs us along. All of
this is bathed in Carruth’s thick, Eno-esque synth washes, which
sometimes seem to be navigating a plot of their own.
But the movie’s most appealing feature, apart from Carruth’s
smooth, broody performance, is Amy Seimetz. An indie-film veteran
who’s also a writer-director herself, Seimetz anchors the movie’s
dreamy proceedings with glimmers of real-world feeling — the more
confusing things get, the more of a pleasure she is to watch. In
the end, even the equally befuddled pigs are
charmed. ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; … Read More
Russian War Games send a strong message against NATO intervention in Syria?
While on his way from Durban in South Africa, where the BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa —announced they were forming a new development bank to challenge the IMF and World Bank, Russia’s Vladimir Putin gave the go ahead for unscheduled war games in the Black Sea. By themselves the games mean little, but in a global context they mean a lot.According to the Kremlin, the war games involved about 7,000 Russian servicemen, Russian Special Forces, Russian Marines, and airborne rapid deployment troops. All of Russia’s different services were involved and used the exercises to test their interoperability. Over thirty Russian warships based out of the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol in the Crimean Peninsula and the Russian port of Novorossiysk in Krasnodar Krai will be participating. The objective of the games are to show that Russia could mobilize for any event at a moments notice.The war games surprised the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Who even complained the Russian war games started in the Black Sea without prior notice. In fact, NATO asked Russia to be more open about its moves and give NATO Headquarters in Brussels notice of its military movements in the future. Alexander Vershbow, the American Deputy Secretary General of NATO, even demanded “maximum transparency” from Russia. One may ask, why the rattled bones?Russian response to war plans against the Syrians?Is it mere coincidence that Russia is flexing its muscles after NATO revealed it was developing contingency plans for a Libya-style intervention in Syria on March 20? Two days later, Israel and Turkey ended their diplomatic row through a timely agreement that was supposedly brokered by US President Barack Obama in twenty minutes while he was visiting Israel. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that with Obama’s help a deal was made with Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Erdogan to end the diplomatic rift over the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara in 2010.Days later, this event was followed by the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) — a phoney opposition organization constructed by the US, UK, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — being ceremoniously given Syria’s seat at the Arab League. In what appears to be an attempt at repeating the Libya scenario, the SNC is being recognized as the government of Syria. At the Arab League summit, the SNC’s leader Moaz Al-Khatib immediately called for NATO military intervention in coordination with Qatar’s call for regime change and military intervention in Damascus on March 26.In a stage-managed move, the puppet SNC has asked the US, UK, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and NATO to enforce a no-fly zone with the aim of creating a SNC-controlled emirate or enclave in northern Syria. Al-Khatib has announced that he has talked to US Secretary of State John Kerry to use the NATO Patriot Missiles stationed in Turkey to create the no-fly zone over northern Syria. Effectively what he is talking about is the balkanization of Syria. Kerry seems to be on top of it. Victoria Nuland, the spokeswoman of the US Department of State, said the US is considering the request about imposing a no-fly zone. Even earlier, Kerry made a surprise visit to Baghdad and threatened the federal government in Iraq to fall into line with Washington’s regime change plans against Syria. He said he wanted the Iraqis to check Iranian passenger planes heading to Syria for weapons, but much more was said.The American Empire’s satraps are all on the move. Qatar and Saudi Arabia no longer hide the fact that they are arming and funding the insurgents in Syria. In February, the UK and France lobbied the rest of the European Union to lift its Syrian arms embargo, so that they can openly arm the anti-government foreign fighters and militias that are trying to topple the Syrian government. Israel and Turkey have been forced to mend fences for the sake of the Empires war on the Syrians.Obama realigns Israel and Turkey against SyriaThe Israeli and Turkish rapprochement conveniently fits the aligning chessboard. Obama’s visit to Israel was about imperial politics to maintain the American Empire. As two hostile neighbours of Syria, Tel Aviv and Ankara will have deeper cooperation in the Empire’s objectives to topple the Syrian government. All of a sudden, the governments in both countries started complaining in line with one another about how the humanitarian situation in Syria was threatening them. In reality, Israel is not hosting any Syrian refugees (and oppresses Syrians under its occupation in the Golan) whereas Turkey has actually neglected many of its legal and financial obligations to the Syrian refugees it hosts on its territory and has tried to whitewash this by labeling them as foreign “guests.”According to Agence France-Presse, the Israelis have even opened a military field hospital to help the insurgents topple the Syrian government. The military facility is located in an area named Fortification 105 in Syria’s Israeli-occupied Golan Heights (originally referred to as the Syrian Heights in Israel). It is essentially a support base for anti-government forces and only the tip of the iceberg in regards to Israeli involvement in Syria. Israel’s January strikes on Syria were the fruits of the cooperation between the Israelis and insurgent militias.Sensing the suspicious eyes gazing at the Turkish government and perhaps getting unnerved by the Kremlin’s muscle flexing, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has rejected he claims that Tel Aviv and Ankara were closing ranks against Syria. Davutoglu must have been unaware of what was said in Israel about their rapprochement. Even though Netanyahu vowed never to apologize for the killing of Turkey’s citizens on the Mavi Marmara, Tel Aviv’s apology to Turkey was publicly justified by the Israeli government on the basis of addressing Syria through coordination with Turkey. Many of the suspicious eyes that turned to look at the Erdogan’s government over the deal with Israel are Turkish. Davutoglu actually lied for domestic consumption, knowing full well that the Turkish public would be outraged to know that Prime Minister Erdogan was really normalizing ties with Israel to topple the Syrian government.The message(s) of the Russian war gamesThe American Empire is arranging the geopolitical chessboard with is satraps in its ongoing war on Syria. Perhaps it plans on using Israel to do a re-play of the Suez Crisis. In 1956, after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, the UK and France drew a plan with Israel to annex the Suez Canal by getting Israel to attack Egypt and then claiming to intervene militarily as concerned parties who wanted to keep the Suez Canal safe and open for international maritime traffic. A new assault against Syria under the banners of the Israelis is possible and could be used as an excuse for a Turkish and NATO “humanitarian invasion” that could result in the creation of a northern humanitarian buffer zone (or a broader war).A pattern can be depicted from all these events. At the start of 2013, Russia held major naval drills in the Eastern Mediterranean against a backdrop of tension between Moscow and the US-led NATO and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) coalition that has been destabilizing Syria. After the US and its anti-Syrian coalition threatened to intervene militarily and deployed Patriot missiles on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, a Russian naval flotilla was dispatched off the Syrian coast to send a strong message to Washington not to have any ideas of starting another war. In turn, the US and its allies tried to save face by spreading rumours that the Kremlin was preparing to evacuate Russian citizens from Syria, because the Syrian government was going to collapse and the situation was going to get critical.Paralleling the Russian war games in the Black Sea, the Russian Air Force held long-range flights across Russia. This included flights by Russian nuclear strategic bombers. On the other end of Eurasia, China also conducted its own surprise naval war games in the South China Sea. While the US and its allies portrayed the Chinese moves as a threat to Vietnam over disputed territory in the South China Sea, the timing of the naval deployment could be linked to either Syria (or North Korea) and coordinated with Russia to warn the US to keep the international peace.In a sign of the decline of the American Empire, just before the Russian war games in the Black Sea, all the increasingly assertive BRICS leaders warned the US against any adventurism in Syria and other countries. The Russian and Chinese muscle flexing are messages that tell Washington that Beijing and Moscow are serious and mean what they say. At the same time, these events can be read as signs that the world-system is coming under new management. … Read More
Facial recognition and GPS tracking: TrapWire company conducting even more surveillance
The discovery of the TrapWire risk mitigation program last year and its ability to match human faces caught on camera against massive databases of intelligence led to an outcry from privacy advocates around the world. Now once again the burgeoning preponderance of Big Brother is being put into perspective.In late 2011, members of the loose-knight hacktivist group Anonymous pilfered data from the servers of private intelligence firm Stratfor that were in turn handed over to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks for dissemination. When internal emails alluding to a service called TrapWire surfaced in the leak, an investigation uncovered a program that, according to the company’s founder, “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition.”TrapWire developers Abraxas later became the subject of several investigative reports by RT and others, and further analysis revealed that that company was acquired in 2010 by technology giants Cubic Corporation of Southern California. Cubic would eventually deny any affiliation ever existed between their San Diego headquarters and the spy-program discussed by Stratfor execs, but links were nevertheless still evident. A Department of Homeland Security website, in fact, all but affirmed that TrapWire was being sold to government agencies as a product of Abraxas as recently as February 2011.Cubic — and to a lesser degree Abraxas — have since been linked at least to some degree with a number of other suspicious spy products. One item, Tartan, “exposes and quantifies key influencers and hidden connections in social networks using mathematical algorithms for objective, un-biased output,” its website claims. “Our analysts, mathematicians and computer scientists are continually exploring new quantification, mining and visualization techniques in order to better analyze social networks.” Tartan was marketed by Ntrepid, a Northern Virginia company that’s board of directors shared four names directly involved in the finances of Abraxas. Now a blogger has uncovered yet another connection, and this one puts Cubic directly in touch with the exact whereabouts of potentially millions of Americans.Under the radar of Cubic’s critics, earlier this year the California company acquired NextBus, a “real-time transit information” program that helps mass transportation customers in over 100 North American cities get precise travel and traffic information about bus and rail systems. Cubic made the acquisition at a cost of just over $20 million, and with it gained yet another resource for collecting personally identifiable information: namely the exact global position coordinates for NextBus’ massive user base.NextBus bills itself as providing “real-time passenger information solutions” by collecting GPS data volunteered by willing customers and then uses that information to help them get from point A to point B by accurately matching up transportation routes with up-to-the-second travel information. It exists to make the dreadful bus commute a little more reliable, but in doing so demands that customers sacrifice a sizeable chunk of privacy.“While your riders stay warm and safe, they can easily find out exactly when to expect the next bus,” reads an advert from NextBus website that’s used to sell their service to major metropolitan areas across North America. The Los Angeles, California metro became NextBus’ eightieth client in 2011, and joined a roster of established clients that includes Toronto, San Francisco, Washington DC and Boston.“When you get a message from the Panopticon, the Panopticon also gets a message from you, or rather, your GPS enabled device,” writes the administrator of Female Faust, a blog where the connection between NextBus and Cubic was first written about this week.For Cubic, though, the latest acquisition isn’t anything out of the ordinary. Cubic has been tied to services in cities around the globe that involve not just accumulating biometric data using TrapWire, but tracking the transportation habits of metro riders in New York, Chicago and other cities abroad. Cubic’s transportation division is reported to be the world’s leader when it comes to implementing automated fare collection cards and the infrastructure used in mass-transit systems across the globe, meaning TrapWire cameras in cities such as Washington, DC are just a stone’s throw from the very machines that commuters use their credit cards at to pay for bus fare—transactions done with Cubic’s own vending machines.“Over the past decade, Cubic has implemented more than 80 percent of the major smart card systems in the US now active today,” Cubic admits by their own right. With the acquisition of NextBus, though, one major behemoth of the private surveillance sector is allowed to scoop up yet more sensitive information about customers who are likely none the wiser.”Transit agencies and their communities worldwide are racing to utilize information more effectively – optimizing their resources and providing intelligent travel information to their riders,” says Steve Shewmaker, president of Cubic Transportation Systems, in a statement from January. “Since 1996, NextBus has been a pioneer and a market and technology leader at the forefront of this trend. As part of the Cubic family, NextBus will have the additional resources and capabilities to expand more rapidly while adding further depth to our own Nextcity vision, which emphasizes better utilization of information, wireless communications and mobile devices as key technologies for the future of public transit.”On the Cubic website, NextCity is described as a program that “enable[s] customers to manage how they travel – whether by train, bus, taxi, private vehicle or bike – by providing both operators and travelers real-time, dynamic information that will make their journey faster and more reliable.”“The NextCity platform will provide passengers and travelers with a single, whole of transport payments account meaning that no more will passengers need to maintain an account associated with a transport smartcard, one or more toll accounts, a congestion account and various methods of paying for parking. It will be integrated, seamless and convenient for the traveller.”Thanks to Cubic’s latest acquisition, the company is being trusted with yet another trove of sensitive data. And while it’s facetious to assume that Cubic’s many divisions around the world are working in cahoots to collect and build personal profiles that scan faces, sniff out social network habits and scoop up insanely accurate GPS stats on travel patterns, the buy-out of NextBus doesn’t make a company seem any less like a prime example of how privacy is slowly but surely being eroded in the exchange for a little bit of serenity and whole lot of surveillance. … Read More
