"The Northern California Rail and Port Truckers Association had called for the work stoppage after hundreds of drivers were prevented from entering the port's marine terminals Tuesday, the deadline to comply with new state air-quality rules.
All drivers were required to have radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags that verified the truck's compliance with the California Air Resources Board truck registry database. But hundreds of drivers were turned away because the transmitter units were faulty, or because there was a discrepancy between the vehicle identification numbers entered in the CARB database and the RFID database. In some cases the vehicles hadn't been registered at all."...more
"Pope Benedict XVI's appearance at Rome's Great Synagogue on Sunday did nothing to quell the controversy over plans to confer sainthood on Pius XII, the wartime pontiff who has been called Hitler's pope. In fact, he may have made matters worse when just two days earlier he took a further step in the process by declaring Pius's 'heroic virtues.'
One prominent Italian rabbi and a number of Holocaust survivors boycotted the pope's visit in protest the beatification of Pius. Riccardo Pacifici, the president of Rome's Jewish community, did attend and declared, 'The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done.'
To this day, the Vatican has produced no hard evidence that Pius uttered a word or lifted a finger to help when, on October 16, 1943, the Germans rounded up 1,021 Roman Jews and held them for two days just across the Tiber from the Vatican before sending them to Auschwitz; only 17 returned after the war.
'The cries of the victims were met by Pius with silence,' said Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.
Benedict told his audience on Sunday that the Church had aided Jews in a 'hidden and discreet way' during the Holocaust, but he offered no specifics about Pius's own involvement.
IF THERE is evidence it lies buried deep in the Vatican vaults. For a decade the Church has been promising to open its wartime records to scholars 'soon,' but the latest word is it will be at least another five years. When some prewar archives were opened to a handpicked Catholic scholar, John Cornwell, to write a Vatican-sanctioned biography of Pius, he was shocked by what he found" ...more
"IBM has filed applications for a dozen patents that seek a whole new level of airport security.
Forget full-body scans, which are currently being touted as the Next Big Thing™ in security in the wake of the Christmas Day Nigerian crotchbomber. We can't even be sure they would have stopped him.
The IBM patent applications, turned up by InformationWeek's Alexander Wolfe, outline technologies that track you as you stroll through an airport, sniff you, check out what you're eating and drinking, scrutinize your attire, watch for 'furtive' eye movements, and employ a host of other sensors.
That information is then fed to an inference engine that compares the sensors' data to a knowledge base and alerts security if its set of rules determine you might be a threat. And all of this will be done in real time - or, at least, real enough to nab you before you get on an airliner and activate your lethal underpants.
The core idea of the patents is to use a variety of sensors arrayed throughout an airport, both indoors in out. These sensors attempt to both spot suspicious activity and find already-identified suspects, matched to a knowledge base of possible terrorists."...more
"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think. ...
By James Russell Lowell
I will speak and hold back No syllable of truth.
Why should we soothe Your ears with stories, only to appear Liars thereafter? Truth is always right."
"The tax on banks proposed by Washington guarantees Wall Street $US 4 trillion which means top banks will keep playing the same game in the future, economic trend forecaster Gerald Celente warned.
“Goldman Sachs is nothing more than a big hedge fund, period and paragraph. If they went under – people don’t have go to the ATM machine to get their money out of the Goldman Sachs bank, they do not have Goldman Sachs cheques, they are just fronting for Wall Street and all Wall Street is doing is gambling and their risks are covered by the American taxpayer,” said Celente.
“America was at its greatest when it was not about Wall Street but Main Street; when it was not about the Walmart but moms and pops and community; when it was not about factory farms but family farms. Everything in America has gone corporate,” grieved the forecaster.
Celente concluded by saying, “the merger of state and corporate powers, according to Mussolini, who knew a thing or two about it, is called fascism and fascism is coming to America.”" ...more
"Glenn Beck recently said that he was inundated with messages from people concerned about an Obama executive order giving special rights to the international police organization known as Interpol. But what about the global campaign by the Vatican to establish a “World Political Authority” with “teeth.” Don’t look for Beck, O’Reilly or anybody else in the media to take on Pope Benedict XVI. It is just too controversial. Commentators who question the Vatican run the risk of being labeled anti-Catholic bigots.
Many Catholics, especially of a conservative persuasion, are embarrassed and troubled by what is happening inside their church. But they are mostly reluctant to say anything publicly. The facts, however, speak for themselves, and they are available on the Vatican’s own website in the actual words and statements being uttered by the Pope.
Consider, for example, Pope Benedict’s passionate embrace of the radical environmental movement. The Washington Times on Tuesday ran a front-page photo of the Pope greeting ambassadors to the Vatican during his new year’s address to the diplomatic corps. “The Pope denounced the failure of world leaders to agree on a climate change treaty last month,” the caption said. It’s true. Despite the Climategate scandal that has thrown the man-made global warming theory into disrepute, the Pope is still a believer in the discredited claims being made about the role of man in creating a hotter planet and he is trying to force world leaders to embrace and act on them" ...more
"Steve Perry, executive vice president of Visa Europe, says cash is expensive - a cost on society - and should be replaced by a cashless society"
Steve Perry, executive vice president of Visa Europe, has a different take on the folding stuff packed in our wallets that most of us take for granted. "Cash is expensive," he says. "We need to be using it less."
Expensive? Vintage wines, maybe. Designer clothes, yes. Modern art, almost certainly. But cash?
Why do you think supermarkets introduced cashback?" Perry asks rhetorically.
He has me stumped there. I tell him I always thought of it as a service for overdrawn students to drive a few more sales through the tills.
"No," he responds politely. "It's because they want cash out of the system so there is less to manage. Processing a transaction on a card can be cheaper than handling cash."
Perry is a leading cheerleader for the cashless society. It's hardly a surprising role, but its an argument he is finding increasingly easy to make. Last month, for example, the Payments Council announced to anguished outrage that in 2018 the cheque would be dead. ...more
"The “underpants bomber” has renewed calls for new and more invasive security measures. Already, there’s a push to install scanners that show travelers’ naked bodies through clothing, using either millimeter wave or backscatter X-ray imaging. But even those scanners might not have caught the terrorist who nearly brought down Northwest flight 253.
That’s why one company is trumpeting a sensor that can supposedly “detect substances such as explosive materials … hidden inside or outside of the human body.” First step: Actually build a human-sized machine.
There has already been one report of a suicide bomber carrying explosives internally. Many sources, including the BBC, carried an early report suggesting that Abdullah Hassan Al Aseeri adopted the new tactic of “carrying explosives in his anal cavity” for an attack in September. The target, a Saudi prince, survived, but Aseeri was reportedly blown in half by the blast. Later reports suggest the explosives were actually sewn into his underwear, but security experts believe there is a real danger of “internally carried” bombs, a technique used for years by drug smugglers."...more
"CHICAGO – A would-be terrorist tries to board a plane, bent on mass murder. As he walks through a security checkpoint, fidgeting and glancing around, a network of high-tech machines analyzes his body language and reads his mind.
Screeners pull him aside.
Tragedy is averted.
As far-fetched as that sounds, systems that aim to get inside an evildoer's head are among the proposals floated by security experts thinking beyond the X-ray machines and metal detectors used on millions of passengers and bags each year.
On Thursday, in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt over Detroit, President Barack Obama called on Homeland Security and the Energy Department to develop better screening technology, warning: 'In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary.'
The ideas that have been offered by security experts for staying one step ahead include highly sophisticated sensors, more intensive interrogations of travelers by screeners trained in human behavior, and a lifting of the U.S. prohibitions against profiling.
Some of the more unusual ideas are already being tested. Some aren't being given any serious consideration. Many raise troubling questions about civil liberties. All are costly.
'Regulators need to accept that the current approach is outdated,' said Philip Baum, editor of the London-based magazine Aviation Security International. 'It may have responded to the threats of the 1960s, but it doesn't respond to the threats of the 21st century.'
Here's a look at some of the ideas that could shape the future of airline security" ...more
Wikipedia quote:"The Byrds instead quickly recorded "Turn! Turn! Turn!", a Pete Seeger adaptation of a traditional melody, with some lyrics taken directly from the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, and the song became the group's second US #1 single, also headlining their second album (also titled Turn! Turn! Turn!)."
"The TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies. Will the'digital strip search' device just bring more of the same?"
Scan, baby, scan. That’s the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be “underwear bomber” could have been stopped by airport security if he’d been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s groin.
Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the "big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer" was "Why isn’t whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?" Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post, "You’ve got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get at. It’s either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven’t figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out."...more
Video of what the 'digital strip search' device shows
"Muslims are conquering Europe because Christians have become too selfish and pagan to defend the spiritual heritage of the continent, a Vatican cardinal said this week.
Miloslav Vlk, who has served as archbishop of Prague since 1991 and was considered as a successor to John Paul II, launched an outspoken attack on Christians living in Europe and accused them of allowing Muslims to 'Islamise' the continent.
He warned that Europe would 'fall' to Islam if people continued to deny their Christian roots.
In an interview published on his website, Vlk blamed immigration and high birth rates among Muslims for filling 'the vacant space created as Europeans systematically empty the Christian content of their lives'.
The 77-year-old said: 'Europe has denied its Christian roots from which it has risen and which could give it the strength to fend off the danger that it will be conquered by Muslims – which is actually happening gradually. If Europe doesn't change its relation to its own roots, it will be Islamised." ...more
"JERUSALEM, Israel - As international airports around the world beef up security in the wake of the failed Northwest Airlines bombing, Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport is introducing a biometric system to make security checks easier.
It's called Unipass - a revolutionary airport security system officials say is the first of its kind in the world.
'It's a biometric system that allows us to do a better security check that enables security checkers to use computerized tools, to remember the passenger using a biometric fingerprint…and to process the traveler in a faster and more efficient way,' airport security official Zohar Gefen explained.
The new machines installed at the airport recognize a passenger's details using a triple biometric identification system.
The machine first scans the passport, then scans the fingerprint and finally scans the Unipass card.
The system allows airport security guards to access any information about the traveler. It is intended to help security personnel determine if a passenger poses a risk.
Unipass is currently in use for business-class passengers only on Israel's El Al airlines. However, it's expected to be expanded next year. ...source
Security experts have long looked to Israel for help in making their airports safer.
Israel's Ben-Gurion airport near Tel Aviv is renowned for its tough security checks. It is also viewed as one of the safest airports in the world."
Leading Provider of Faith-Based Software Solutions to Offer M2SYS Fingerprint Readers and Biometric Software for Membership Management
'We are thrilled to provide this fingerprint recognition technology through our new relationship with M2SYS,' said Frank Canady, president of Shelby Systems. 'The integration with M2SYS is the latest example of how Shelby Systems strives to equip churches and other faith-based organizations with the best technology for improved security and streamlined operations. The biometrics solution will significantly benefit the check-in process for the ministries that we serve."...more
"Ten years ago, on a cold winter morning in New York City, the Catholic-Jewish Historical Commission, established to investigate Pope Pius XII’s response to the Holocaust, met for the first time to discuss its future work. I was the only Israeli historian among the six scholars (three Catholics and three Jews) designated by the Vatican and leading Jewish organizations to study this hotly contested issue.
A little under two years later, the project was abandoned as a result of the Holy See’s unwillingness to release materials from its own archives that could help clarify issues that our team of scholars raised in our provisional report. Already at that time, in the last years of Pope John Paul’s pontificate, there were moves afoot to place Pius XII on the fast track to sainthood, but they were probably slowed down by Israeli and Jewish protests and a desire by church authorities to prevent a serious rupture in Catholic-Jewish relations.
At issue was the silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust and his indirect complicity in the Nazi mass murder of Jews. These allegations, which first emerged around 1964, had prompted the Vatican to publish 11 volumes of its own documents (edited by four trusted Jesuit scholars), most of them appearing in the 1970s. It was these documents in Italian, German, French, Latin and English that we were originally asked to review. The million or so unpublished documents from the pontificate of Pius XII (1939–1958) according to the Vatican’s most recent estimate, will only be available in about four years’ time.
It is in this context that we need to see the recent decree on the “heroic virtues” of Pius XII, just signed by Pope Benedict XVI. Most Jews have interpreted this act as yet another signal that the Vatican is determined to beatify the controversial wartime pope — whom some even consider to have been anti-Semitic — regardless of what the historical evidence may indicate." ...more
SIGNS are emerging that Australia is moving towards a cashless society, with the number of consumers making ATM cash withdrawals dropping to the lowest point in more than six years.
Data from MWE Consulting, which specialises in debit and credit card analysis, showed that debit card ATM withdrawals per account fell about 6.3 per cent to 2.39 a month last year. That compared with 2.55 in the previous year and 2.62 in 2006, when monthly transactions peaked.
'We have been seeing a reduction in cash transactions on credit (card) for a long time . . . but what is significant is this (debit card) reduction, which accelerated in the last year,' said MWE managing director Mike Ebstein.
'I think that's a sign that Australians are beginning to move away from cash as their staple payment product.'
MWE estimates that between 65 and 70 per cent of all transactions in Australia were still cash. Typically, cash is used for transactions of less than $25.
For the first time, he said, figures showed a reduction in cash usage, indicating that "we are finally beginning to move towards a cashless society". ...more
"In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that 'passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’'
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that 'extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan' to 'disorderly regions and diffuse enemies.' He called this 'global security' and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: 'We have no interest in occupying your country.'"...more
"f you’re anything like me, this was the day you finally realised it was time to start shopping for presents. Of course, if there’s one day you don’t want to be stuck in a queue at the cashpoint, it’s Christmas Eve. So how much money should you take with you while you brave the high street?
A couple of years ago, a Harvard professor called Greg Mankiw worked out that the ideal amount to have in one’s wallet at any time was $600 (£375), on the basis that time spent topping up at the cash machine is time wasted, and that you’re far less likely to be mugged or lose your wallet than you think. But I’ve got a different answer: absolutely nothing."
I don’t mean, of course, that we don’t need any money. But Mankiw’s findings are already out of date – because cash is inexorably becoming redundant. Last week, the Payments Council caused howls of outrage when it announced that come 2018, the cheque will be sent to the great till in the sky. But it won’t be long before notes and coins follow suit.
This is a bold statement to make: currency has been an integral part of our world, in one way or another, since 3,000BC. But the simple fact is that we can survive without it. In fact, abolishing notes and coins could make the world and its economies far less dysfunctional.
To understand why, let’s go back to first principles. Money has two main purposes: to be a medium of exchange (helping us swap things of value) and a unit of account (a yardstick against which things can be priced). The textbooks also say it should be a store of value, although anyone who has experienced inflation will realise it hardly fulfils that role these days.
But while pounds and pence will survive, notes and coins are no longer all that relevant. Cash transactions account for only 4 per cent of overall money use: next year, for the first time, we will spend more using our debit cards than with cash. ...more
"Despite the many, many, many times that “The Simpsons,” above, has mocked or satirized religion, that long-running animated series has earned an endorsement from the official Vatican newspaper on the occasion of the show’s 20th anniversary, The Associated Press reported. In an article published on Tuesday in L’Osservatore Romano under the headline “Aristotle’s Virtues and Homer’s Doughnut,” “The Simpsons” was praised for its “realistic and intelligent writing” (and rapped on the knuckles for “excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters”). Noting plots in which Homer Simpson has variously renounced his faith and mispronounced the name of Jesus, L’Osservatore Romano wrote that Homer nonetheless “finds in God his last refuge” and that the character’s attitudes toward religion were “a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith."...source
"Paper cheques in Britain are set to be phased out by 2018 as the nation moves towards an increasingly cashless society.
The UK Payments Council has said that there will be a gradual move towards contactless smart cards and electronic payment systems, which will see the end of the paper cheque by October 31st 2018.
'There are many more efficient ways of making payments than by paper in the 21st century and the time is ripe for the economy as a whole to reap the benefits of its replacement,' says chief executive Paul Smee.
He goes on to add that the cheque is in long-term decline, with usage dropping by 40 per cent in the past five years alone.
The council has advised that it will be promoting the use of other payment methods, such as smart cards, so that consumers have an alternative to the traditional cheque when it is phased out.
According to BBC News, in three to five years it is expected that the use of cash will have been eradicated to such an extent that the nation will become a cashless society." ...Source
"One of the country's larger banks has told to its customers that it is to stop handling cash in its branches.
National Irish Bank says it is moving to a Scandinavian model of 'cashless banking' - with an increased reliance on ATMs and debit cards.
NIB has told customers that its branches will no longer handle cash withdrawals or lodgements, nightsafe lodgements or foreign exchange cash.
They are instead urging customers to use ATMs or get cash back on their laser cards if they need notes. Branches will continue to accept cheques and postal orders.
The bank says the idea of 'cashless banking' will be rolled out over the next 18 months, and that the model is that used by its Danish parent company.
NIB says Irish dependence on cash is amongst the highest in Europe." ...source
"Someone makes you a promise that seems too good to be true: they sound persuasive – but if only you could look inside their brain, you would know whether to trust them.
Scientists from universities in Zurich and Konstanz, Germany have uncovered how brains behave in people who make promises they know very well they are going to break.
The researchers, economists and neuroscientists, discovered that although to all outward appearances trustworthy and untrustworthy people behave the same way, the ones who do not keep their word show increased activity in the areas of the brain that play important roles in processes of emotion and control.
More importantly, the research showed that patterns of brain activity make it possible to predict whether a person is likely break a promise.
Applying the results of the research could “in the (distant) future” help prevent fraudulent and criminal intrigues, Zurich University said in a press release."...more return to rampartproductions.com
'The minute you store biometric information on all citizens of Israel, you've created an explosive situation,' she said. 'Imagine that tomorrow a demonstration over a controversial issue occurs - hardly a rare event in Israel - and the protest is filmed by the ever-growing number of municipal cameras being installed.
'The images could then be cross-referenced with facial recognition software, and authorities could have all of the information on those who took part. This creates troubling questions regarding privacy and the public domain. Would demonstrators still take part if they knew they could be tracked down and harassed later down the line?'...more return to rampartproductions.com
We haven’t heard much from the company since a dipping stock price nearly got it delisted from the NASDAQ in March. But it’s still alive, and in November it pulled off a seemingly incongruous acquisition. Now called PositiveID, the new company is a merger between VeriChip and Steel Vault, the people behind NationalCreditReport.com.
With a human-implantable microchip maker now running a credit-scoring and identity-theft-protection website, privacy activists are worried again. “The attraction to investors is the potential for synergies,” says Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “You have to anticipate over time there will be an attempt to integrate the services.”
“Sci-fi wise, you could have a chip read by a scanner that determines your credit-worthiness,” says Evan Hendricks, editor of Privacy Times. “Or you could have a credit card implant." return to rampartproductions.com
