[I_Like_Plants]

Should-be-famous quote about cellfones: Why "chip" people when you have an electronic tracking device that's never more than 18" from their body?

This is why I don't have a cell. I also don't use my credit card at the supermarket. I admit I used those saver cards though!

[JustWatch]

I've always thought that if TSHTF and TPTB wanted to gain control over us swarming masses, the first thing they'd most likely do is try to shut down the Internet. Think about it, it's the one thing we have that allows us to communicate easily and quickly on a country-wide scale. It would leave us totally in the dark about what was going on. Of course there's still TV and radio, but it's all a bunch of bs already, the real truth is found here. I kinda doubt they could do it, but that's what I'd be wanting to do if I were them. They might be watching us, but we have them so outnumbered I don't think that's much of a problem unless you did something to make yourself a specific target.

[cynicalheretic]

I just don't believe the government has the ability to just shut off the internet (though you never know) Though if you look at world war 1 when the government took control of radio and took all equipment from people who were using (Ham Operators, Colleges, etc...) You can believe they might try.

That would suck. Imagine no more free porn... the horrors!


Also with Russia coming back on the scene.. I am more worried about a round of renewed mcarthyism. I tell everyone I know that I am Liberal Commie. I really really don't want another red scare.

[Kylon]

I think with the way corporate corruption is going now days, they would want to draw attention away from communism.

They might find a lot of people would embrace it.

[I_Like_Plants]

Communism and USSR type Stalinism are not the same thing it appears - I've met a lot of Communists who abhor the USSR. Of course the USSR isn't around any more, notice you see little old ladies etc demonstrating with signs etc these days, since the old USSR system was better for them. "Red in tooth and claw" capitalism is not good for the old, the weak, the sick, the poor.

I've been reflecting on the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair a bit lately. The book was a sensation because all the nice middle class people read it and were appalled at how their nice canned hams etc might not be as clean and wholesome as they previously thought. But that was only part of the book's message. The greater message was the chewing up, using up, and spitting out, of workers in US style capitalism. That the book seems to only be considered a screed on food purity by Americans points out the self-centeredness of our "culture".

Upton Sinclair was a Socialist who ran for Governor of California, Jack London was Socialist also, these were people who went out and experienced the real world - not like today's "Socialist" yuppie-larva who call themselves Socialist because it's cool.

[shakespear1]

Well I'll throw this into this thread as it is about the same characters that are discussed here.

I just happened on the following and must say it made me very very disturbed about how bad things were and are apparently are getting. What is sad is that little is changing, as such stories only appear like meteorites. For a brief moment and then never to reappear.

Read on if you dare

$this->bbcode_second_pass_code('', 'Welsome soon discovered that the experiments were part of an even more disturbing story, in which the people in charge of testing the US nuclear arsenal had exposed thousands of Americans, including soldiers, to radiation poisoning over a period of decades until 1962. While no one had discovered the identities of the eighteen victims deliberately infected--as Welsome eventually would--the larger scandal had been aired in a newsletter called Science Trends in 1976 and in Mother Jones in 1981. It had also inspired a 60 Minutes investigation and a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, chaired by a then-unknown Congressman, Albert Gore Jr. Gore impressively identified what he called "the critical question" facing investigators: "Were the treatments for the patients altered in order to satisfy or facilitate the acquisition of the data?" But he dodged the obvious answer. Gore's subcommittee decided that the radiation experiments were "satisfactory, but not perfect." When Ed Markey became chairman three years later, he released a thorough and damning report detailing thirty-one human radiation experiments involving 700 people. Its revelations, too, were roundly ignored.

In 1992, five years after happening upon the initial documents, Welsome was finally able to piece together the identity of one of the victims: "CAL-3" was an African-American railroad porter named Elmer Allen of Italy, Texas. Allen had received a hypodermic needle loaded with plutonium on July 18, 1947, for what was then believed to be cancer and had his leg amputated at midthigh. He had told a friend that the doctors had "put a germ cancer in his leg." Allen died in 1991 knowing nothing of his role in the experiments.

At this point, the editors of the Albuquerque Tribune (circulation 35,000) realized they had a great story on their hands and soon got behind Welsome in a big way, providing high-powered legal assistance for her FOIA requests. Working full time on her investigation, Welsome began to uncover the identities of the rest of the victims. One was a housewife, another a janitor, a third owned a cigar store. Each received potentially lethal injections of plutonium from the government and nothing more: no disability, no admission of responsibility, not even an apology.')

The Article

This is beyond SAD

[Iaato]

HIPAA my a**. How did we get here? Don't answer that. I guess I know.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '"')Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

Collecting and analyzing personal health information in commercial databases is a fledgling industry, but one poised to take off as the nation enters the age of electronic medical records. While lawmakers debate how best to oversee the shift to computerized records, some insurers have already begun testing systems that tap into not only prescription drug information, but also data about patients held by clinical and pathological laboratories.

Traditionally, insurance companies have judged an applicant's risk by gathering medical records from physicians' offices. But the new tools offer the advantage of being "electronic, fast and cheap," said Mark Franzen, managing director of Milliman IntelliScript, which provides consumers' personal drug profiles to insurers."

[oilbear]

Powerdown will be a big blessing, this stuff will all disappear.

[pedalling_faster]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'I')'ll tell you (and the folks who monitor this board) one thing: If it ever comes to mandatory implanted chips, particularly if they are GPS-trackable, that is one of my threshold events for supporting a violent uprising.

[oilbear]

Remember that pink merthiolate (mercurichrome) that mom and grandma always put on your scrapes or cuts?
made your skin a bright pink/salmon red?

We found an old FIRST AID kit with that in it and it had a bottle of merthilate full in it.
We dont know how to get rid of it it is too toxice to dump in the toile or sewyar, we called the garbage dump and they referred us to a toxic waste dump but I have not called because they want to make you fill out papers before you can bring it there.

surely to expect a visit from someone and get you put on the list, so I am not sure what to do with it.

this is the stuff that everyone everywhere swabbed on their kids eyes ears nose and throats for anything, any itch or cut, you put that on a cut and it never got infected. and the kid calmed down and slept for days and was very meek after that, wonder why.

nothing like good old mercury poisoning.

oh, they now call that stuff thimerosol, same stuff

oh, they use it to preserve the inoculations now in multi dose vials.

Hey Maybe I can send my bottle to the pharmaceuticals, they can put it in their vaccines.

Good way to get rid of it.

Ever wonder why the adults today are so passive? Can't thin worth beans.

Oh my mom never used the stuff, my cousins mom did, he was always waling around with pink this and pink that. he is a paper pusher today, he can't even begin to understand peak oil.
I am sure there is brain damage from this stuff...

[jasonraymondson]

impressive uncovering from the dead vault. Nice to see cynicalheretic on here again, I always wondered whatever happened to that god among men

[Denny]

WE know a couple oif refuse to have the internet in their ouse, not that they are that cheap, but they don'gt anyway they can be linked to a physaical address. So, they do all interent stuff at the public library.

Maybe they are onto something there. I have started to worry that stock trading data and credit card payment records on line could be "unencrypted" and the passwords and the like used to mess me up financially.

No problems so far though.

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('oilbear', 'o')h, they now call that stuff thimerosol, same stuff

[Denny]

Big Brother is now allied with the big money interests.

Check out this article at Consumer Watchdog. Its absolutely creepy. But, its also all logical.

"Driving Data Could Be Used By Insurers to Discriminate By ZIP-Code

Santa Monica, CA – Legislation that would allow insurance companies to track when, where and how Californians drive passed the Senate Appropriations committee today. The bill authorizes different insurance rates for drivers who choose to protect their privacy and those who agree to place a “black box” in their cars.

“AB 2800 would force drivers to choose between fair insurance rates and protecting their privacy. No driver should have to make that choice,” said Carmen Balber with Consumer Watchdog. “Where I drive, when I get there and whether I stop on the way is not the business of my insurance company, or any other corporation who wants to place eyes in my car.”

Nothing in AB 2800 prohibits insurance companies from tracking whatever information they choose – including speed, acceleration, location and time of day – in addition to mileage. The bill allows insurance companies to give discounts for driver participation in a tracking program, but does not mention discounts for drivers who actually reduce their mileage, the purported purpose of the bill.

“Insurance companies fought mileage-based insurance rates for eighteen years after the voters mandated them in Proposition 103. The industry didn’t change its mind overnight. Insurers back this plan because it will get their spyware into Californians’ cars, while doing nothing to make them more closely tie insurance rates to how far a motorist drives,” said Balber. "

I do not like the idea of somebody, anybody, being able to run some kind of computer trace to see where I have been at any time in the past. Who is to say that it could not be used to show somebody who visited a massage parlor, and maybe insiders could even black mail people with certain information.

[Iaato]

My only consolation about all of this, Denny, is that the minute the power grid gets sketchy, this all stops. Or it least the behavior morphs into something a little more local and maybe manageable, like local mafia or something.