Archive for the ‘The Perfect Storm’ Category

Man Robs Bank…for Health Care?

Friday, June 24th, 2011

– Healthcare in the US.  Almost an oxymoron at times.

– Some friends here in NZ are thinking of trips to the US and they are looking into healthcare insurance they can buy here to protect them in the US.  Because if you get sick in the US without insurance – God help you.

– So prices were discussed and I had to reflect how those prices compared with what I paid for healthcare in the US.

– For seven or eight New Zealand dollars a day, you can buy travel insurance here in NZ that will cover you in the US.   That’s medical insurance AND travel insurance all wrapped up in one package.

– And, get this:   If you get seriously sick in the US, this NZ insurance will put you on a plane and fly you back to NZ to have you treated here – all on the insurance company’s dime!

– When I was still in the US, my ex and I paid approximately $900 US dollars a month for our healthcare insurance.   That’s $450 each.  And, we each had a $2500 per year deductible on this policy.  So, we had to spend the first $2500 each year out of our pocket before the insurance kicked in and then, after that, it paid 80%.

– $450 per month works out to $15 US dollars per day.  But, if you also calculate in the $2500 deductible each, that’s another  $208 US dollars a month so your insurance is really costing you $450 + $208 = $658 per month for 80% coverage.   That’s $21.93 a day !!!

– Compare that with the seven or eight dollars a day I’ll pay a New Zealand insurance company to cover me in the US – and you get the idea, yes?

– Here’s a story for you now to put the cherry square on top of this sweet little story for you:

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Having already set his affairs in order, James Verone calmly walked into an RBC bank in North Carolina and committed his first crime in his 59 years on this planet. Verone handed the teller a note that read “This is a bank robbery. Please only give me one dollar,” took the dollar from the terrified clerk, and sat down on a couch in the bank’s lobby.

“‘I’ll be sitting right over there in the chair waiting for the police,” Verone told the bank teller. And wait he did. Police arrived moments later and apprehended him, hauling him off to the jail cell he so desperately wanted to enter.

No, James Verone isn’t crazy. He isn’t a career criminal. He didn’t rob the bank to get drugs or booze. He didn’t do it to get attention or on a lark. James Verone walked into that bank and committed a felony because going to jail was the only way he could receive the health care he needed to survive.

Verone is one man, but he could really be any one of us. He’s 59 and well past the point of finding a new career. He was laid off from his 17-year job and, with unemployment hardly a survivable wage, took the first job that came his way. He developed a growth on his chest – the sort of medical condition that could be life-threatening – and earned two ruptured disks in his back, along with problems with his left foot.

After depleting his life savings and realizing he had, literally, nowhere else to turn, Verone committed the crime, hoping he could get the medical care that he so desperately needs.

This is what America has come to? Otherwise honest folks, with no where to turn in life, have to resort to fake-robbing a bank with the hopes they’ll be arrested so they can receive medical care?

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Another burst of six articles on CyberChaos

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Thousands of websites exposed in hack attack

High-profile hacks spur security investment

Sega says hackers stole data of 1.29 million users

US builds net for cyber war games

Virgin alerts infected customers

Soca website taken down after LulzSec ‘Ddos attack’

Fukushima: It’s much worse than you think

Sunday, June 19th, 2011

– There’s a lot of information and, probably, misinformation going about concerning what’s happened at Fukashima in Japan.   And, I’m the first to admit that I don’t know the truth of it.   But I do know that governments do try to hide bad news.   So, I’ll just present this and time will tell what’s true and what’s not.

– dennis

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Scientific experts believe Japan’s nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public.

“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.

Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.

“Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,” he said, “You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.”

TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water – as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.

“The problem is how to keep it cool,” says Gundersen. “They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?”

Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.

“The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor,” Gundersen added. “TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water.”

Independent scientists have been monitoring the locations of radioactive “hot spots” around Japan, and their findings are disconcerting.

“We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,” said Gundersen. “The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.”

– More…

– Research thanks to Tony B.

Hackers attack Malaysia government websites

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Hackers have attacked dozens of government websites in Malaysia, days after a hacking group criticised the country over censorship.

Malaysian officials said attempts had been made to hack 51 websites, and at least 41 had been disrupted.

The “Anonymous” group of hackers had threatened Malaysia with an attack this week, accusing the government of blocking some websites.

No group has yet said they carried out the attack.

But Anonymous said in an earlier web post that Malaysia’s censoring of films and television shows and its blocking of file-sharing websites amounted to a denial of human rights.

The exact nature of the attacks was not immediately clear, and it may be that they were denial of service overloads, rather than hacking intrusions into the computer servers.

The main Malaysian government portal was among the websites that was targeted, and it was still inaccessible on Thursday.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said attacks on websites with the .gov.my domain began late on Wednesday.

“We do not expect the overall recovery to these websites to take long as most websites have already recovered from the attack,” the commission said in a statement.

– More…

CyberChaos – a new category on Samadhisoft

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

CyberChaos

CyberChaos

– I don’t often add a new category to the site.  But, as I watch the passing river of information and events go by, I’m seeing a new thread beginning to clearly stand out from the background and I think I need a new category to tie my observations together.

– So, the CyberChaos category is born.

– Hacking, Cyber Warefare, Malware, Viruses, Root Kits, Back doors, Worms, Keyloggers, Cyber Vandalism, attacks by individuals, attacks by organizations (Anonymous and LutzSec, for example) and attacks by nation states (Stuxnet and Iran) and, finally, some of the bizarre ways that the new technologies are weaving themselves into the fabric of our lives.

– I’m not surprised.   I read a lot of cutting edge science fiction and these things have all been predicted loosely for years.   But, the present becomes the future, inexorably, and here we are – science fiction is becoming reality.

– I’ve been vacuuming up a number of stories of late that are part of this thread and I think I’m going to introduce what I’ve collected here in one whack to get the new category off to a good start.

Enjoy (or go hide under the bed – as you like):

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Targeted cyber attacks an ‘epidemic’

Cyber crime stats ‘tip of the iceberg’

Firesheep Sniffs Out Facebook and Other User Credentials on Wi-Fi Hotspots

Personal data stolen from UK developer Codemasters

IMF hit by ‘very major’ cyber security attack

Citibank confirms hacking attack

Catholic church gives blessing to iPhone app

Government ‘may have hacked IMF’

Lulz attacks: US orders review as Senate site hacked

LulzSec opens hack request line

LulzSec hackers claim CIA website shutdown

Dark corners of the net

– And more here… (everything that’s in the CyberChaos category thus far)

Has America Become a Corporate Police State?

Saturday, June 4th, 2011

– This is definitely what I think is happening.   These changes have been creeping up on us so slowly that we’ve scarcely noticed their aggregation and increasing power over the years.

– Corporations (large ones, anyway) are primarily (by law) about maximizing the profits of their shareholders.  At some point in their growth and increasing competitive sophistication, they realize that shaping government policies is a viable strategy  for maximizing their shareholders profits – and the game is on.

– In the end, mankind will have to make a collective decision about this.   Their are two schools of thought about the choice:

– One point-of-view is that the maximization of individual profit and power is the highest thing humans can aspire to and thus what corporations and extremely wealthy individuals are about is a good thing.

– The second point-of-view is that our governments, laws and societies should primarily be about maximizing the quality of life for all of the people here on the planet.

– Thus far, our species and most of our societies haven’t made a conscious choice.   Indeed, I’ve seldom even seen the question/issue posed.

– But, there will come a time (it’s nearly upon us now) when the consequences of  letting the power and profit obsessed (both individual and corporate)  run free among us like wolves through the sheep will become blindingly obvious.

– dennis

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In just the last few years, the Corporate Police State has reared its head at every level of government.

“Corporate Police State,” it’s a fraught — some might even say, overwrought — term. But in its purest, apolitical form, it simply describes the periodic commingling of state and corporate power to protect private interests.

In the American psyche, any discussion of that phenomenon typically brings one of three images to mind. There’s the Old Corporate Police State — the sepia-toned America of decades long past, a place where state militiasmurder striking mine workers on behalf of Gilded Age barons and Congress empowers the government to forcibly ban work stoppages that defy corporate executives’ wishes. There’s the Fictional Future Corporate Police State — that smoldering bombed-out world depicted in “Robocop,” “Fortress” and every other dystopian flick in Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic catalog. And there’s the Foreign Corporate Police State — think Dubai, Singapore, Monaco and every other lavish enclave defined by lots of rich people, lots of corporate headquarters, lots of heavily armed cops — and almost no civil liberties.

By imagining the Corporate Police State primarily as a historical, fictional or foreign monster, these snapshots encourage us to believe that this monster poses no threat to us in the here and now. They encourage us, in other words, to ignore the monster’s creeping advances in present-day America.

In just the last few years, the Corporate Police State has reared its head at every level of government.

States and municipalities, for instance, have toughened criminal penalties and immigrationlaws at the behest of the private prison industry; empowered Wall Street banks to not only collect taxes but levy additional tax penalties; and allowed energy companies to exploit so-called forced pooling statutes, thereby creating what one Republican governor calls a new power of“private eminent domain.” One state is now even considering making it a criminal act to share your Netflix password with friends and family, because that is cutting into Netflix revenues.

In Washington, D.C., the federal government just enacted a healthcare bill whose individual mandate forces citizens to purchase private insurance, and the Pentagon has developed a reliable pattern of using military power to occupy resource-rich countries — and then to privatize those resources at the barrel of a gun.

This same government, which has granted corporations the rights of “personhood,” has also used its power to let corporations avoid the responsibilities of personhood — effectively using state power to create a new privileged status that is above the law. For instance, federal statutes have trampled the concept of “equal protection” by deliberately exempting corporate interests from the laws the rest of us live under — laws like the Safe Drinking Water Act (whichdoesn’t apply to natural gas drillers) and antitrust statutes (which still don’t apply to private health insurers). Federal courts have used judicial power to limit corporations’ legal and financial liability for fraud and lawbreaking.

– More…

UN: World Food Prices Highest in at Least 20 Years

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Prices for major crops climbed Thursday as a U.N. agency said food costs are now at their highest point since the agency began tracking them 20 years ago.

Global prices have surged 2.2 percent just in the past month, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. The FAO’s index, which measures the price of staple food items and big commercial crops like corn and soybeans, reached its highest level since 1990.

The price increases have been driven by cereals, meat and dairy products. After rising for eight months, global prices of corn, wheat and soybeans are near record levels set in 2008, when riots erupted in countries like Haiti and U.S. food prices jumped.

U.S. consumers are relatively shielded from the higher grain costs. Average incomes are higher in the United States than in most of the world. And the cost of grain represents only a small portion of the prices U.S. consumers pay for food products. Still, U.S. prices are expected to creep up later this year for items ranging from poultry to soda to wheat bread.

In the developing world, the effects have been dire. Higher food prices have pushed an estimated 44 million people into extreme poverty. Economists think the problem could worsen as governments curtail grain exports to increase their own stockpiles.

– More…

Should we be taking a closer look at the potential dangers of nanotechnology?

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Nanotechnology offers many benefits, but what about the possible downsides? When it comes to emerging technology, our ability to predict the outcomes of its application is often limited

It is impossible to deny the potential and excitement that nanoscale technology offers for the future. Whether it is in aerospace materials, medical treatments or improving computer devices, nanotechnology cannot be ignored.

But with any emerging technology comes potential risk. How much do we really know about the impacts on society and on health of the tiny nanoscale particles that are being churned for commercial and scientific purposes? Are nanoparticles released as we use those products causing harmful effects to the environment? The application of nanotechnology seems limitless, but where could these powerful ideas lead?

The classic worry about nanotechnology is the “grey goo” nightmare, a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology. Imagine, some time in the far future, that an oil tanker has run aground and is spilling its billions of gallons of cargo into a pristine natural habitat. A flotilla of tiny oil-munching nanorobots is deployed to break down hydrocarbons, rendering the spill harmless. In this science fiction scenario, the nanorobots have the capability of self-replicating, making hundreds of copies in minutes. And, instead of eating only hydrocarbons, the robots begin to eat everything around them. It doesn’t take long before everything on Earth is consumed by the proliferating mass of robots. Life, as we know it, would be gone.

The idea was first raised by Eric Drexler in his 1986 book, Engines of Creation. For those worried about nanotechnology, grey goo is a good reason to pause any progress until we can confirm we completely understand the process and its implications.

Fortunately, Drexler’s scenario is highly improbable – fast-replicating nanorobots would need so much energy and produce so much heat that they would become easily detectable to policing authorities who could stamp out the threat. In 2004, Drexler himself made public attempts to play down his more apocalyptic warnings.

But no technology is entirely safe, and the scientists working in any new field have a burden of responsibility as they step into the unknown.

– More…

Social Security Statement

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

– People say that the US’s Social Security System is going to be fine and others say that its days are numbered and that those in future generations will never get out of it what they’ve paid into it.

– Well, I don’t know the truth of it one way or the other but I did find this disquieting when I visited the US Social Security website this evening:

Social Security Website 31May2011

Social Security Website 31May2011

– Click it to make it bigger.

May was warmest on record – Niwa

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

– Here in New Zealand, this May was the warmest ever.   I talked to a friend in central Washington State in the USA today, and she said that they’d just had the coldest May ever there.

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Balmy temperatures and sub-tropical conditions saw New Zealand experience its warmest May on record, in a month that included floods, storms and a tornado.

Data from climate agency Niwa shows the month was almost 2.5 degrees Celcius warmer than usual, with rainfall double normal levels.

The figures won’t be official until tomorrow morning, but principal climate scientists James Renwick said the provisional numbers were extraordinary.

“Two-point-five degrees doesn’t sound like much, but for the average over the whole month that’s huge,” Renwick said.

“Normally 0.5 of a degree is a record-breaker.”

The average monthly temperature had been 13.1C, a temperature normally expected for April, Renwick said.

The previous hottest May, recorded in 2007, had a mean temperature of 12.4C.

Rainfall totals were also extreme, especially in the eastern Bay of Plenty and Nelson regions.

The rain gauge at Whakatane airport showed the region had experienced 2.5 times its normal rainfall, while at Nelson airport, 3.5 times the normal levels were recorded.

Both regions had suffered heavy flooding during May, with residents evacuated from their homes in coastal areas of the Bay of Plenty mid-month due to slips closing roads.

A number of Nelson homes were evacuated last week when rivers burst their banks and threatened to inundate homes.

– More…