Churlish hamster Grover Norquist nearly brought the U.S. to the brink of default three years ago, pressuring legislators with his "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" into a debt ceiling battle that was both dangerous and inane. This year, Norquist plans to attend Burning Man, which he sees as a stateless capitalist Utopia.
CBS This Morning—a place Charlie Rose exists outside the dark void of his own studio—can't seem to wrap its head around why a former Minnesota governor and patriotic veteran might want to sue for defamation over an insulting, fabricated story that appeared in a New York Times bestselling memoir. Well:
A buried 321-page file has emerged from German intelligence detailing the existence of a secret army in Germany, marshaled by former members of the Nazi Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS. West Germany's Chancellor turned a blind eye when he learned of the group—according to the file—as did the good shepherds of our very own CIA.
Russia is hoping that 3.9 million roubles will be sufficient to produce a feasibility study on cracking Tor—a nonprofit service that reroutes internet traffic to anonymize user's IP addresses. Turns out: They could have saved over 3.7 million roubles just by switching to whatever these guys at Carnegie Mellon did!
Europe's Court of Human Rights has decreed that Poland must pay a ransom of 230,000 euros for allowing the CIA to practice the dark art of tradecraft in the forests near Stare Kiejkuty. Many believe that Romania and Lithuania will also pay for allowing the agency to establish "Black Sites" in their realms.
Innovation did not die with Steve Jobs. Apple has quietly installed data discovery software, including a file-relay tool that can bypass backup encryption, in around 600 million iPhones, iPads, and other devices running their latest iOS. You are correct to surmise that this has been a boon to law enforcement.
Remember John Schindler, the conservative talking head, retired NSA spook, and Naval War College professor who briefly went incognito after screenshots of (what appear to be) his penis leaked onto the Internet? While he has since reappeared on Twitter—where he first drew attention for defending domestic spying and criticizing Edward Snowden—he has refused to comment on the mysterious emails, sent to the Naval War College by an unnamed blogger, that prompted the school to place him on leave, and his penis under official investigation.
Star, a tentacle of tabloid kraken American Media, Inc., has a special "Who Shot JFK Jr.!" issue out. (No question mark!) Their answer: "Muslim terror kingpin Osama bin Laden." Or the Mob. Also, LBJ killed JFK, they report. It is a breathless corroboration of the far Right's favorite JFK conspiracy phantasies.
Inquiries into why Britain's Home Office mysteriously lost 100 files documenting allegations of an organized pedophile ring involving politicians seem to have stalled recently, with the panel's chair stepping down, due to a conflict of interest. Did America drop the ball on one these high-level child abuse cases too?
Megalomaniacal internet retailer Amazon began as an online seller of books—as CEO Jeff Bezos once explained it to a horrified Kansas City bookseller—because it allowed the company to gather data on affluent, educated shoppers. Their latest customer is the entire intelligence apparatus of your democracy. Checkmate!
The American Medical Association reports that over one third of adults suffer from obesity nationwide and that there have been "no significant changes in obesity prevalence in youth or adults" since 2003. Is this how the American mind came to be dominated by fears of a wholly invented monster called Slender Man?
Dropping from 33,000 feet above Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed yesterday, detonating into a dark plume of smoke upon impact with a field of bloomed wheat. The second tragedy to befall Malaysia Airlines this year, following the unresolved vanishing of flight 370, dude, it was aliens.
Whether you were touched by what the Associated Press described as his contentious, expletive-laden speech against the Sunni extremist group ISIS (now the Islamic State), or simply thought that his "Hello Kitty" notebook was cute — please be advised: Syrian Rebel Leader Zahran Alloush is not your friend, OK?
An organization called Fox News is upset that Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl could receive $350,000 in taxpayer monies, if a probe determines that Bergdahl was not a deserter when he came to be held captive in Afghanistan. But: What if Bergdahl was a CIA asset all along? And: How come Bergdahl's dad can speak Pashto? Well:
Cryptozoology was rocked this July by the release of a two-year study on alleged Bigfoot DNA by London's Royal Society (paid for by producers of the UK series Bigfoot Files). Now, the chief of America's largest Bigfoot research group (and host of Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot) has cried sample bias. Who's correct?
Hungary's Ministry of National Development (MND) quietly plans to spend 12 billion forints ($52,615,440 in USD) on a real-time, nationwide license plate-monitoring system tied to e-tolls. What follows is a translation of a post on Gawker's Hungarian-language site Cink, that I asked my friend's father to help with.
America laughed when Professor Isao Echizen unveiled his goofy-looking "privacy goggles" last year. But Isao did not get discouraged — and now allies within Japan's top eyewear firms have joined forces with Isao to develop glamorous frames that can beat facial recognition software. Google Glass, a challenger appears!
