Strange News: June 2013

20130622

Sailing Stones:- Racetrack Playa,Death Valley (Video Included)

Sailing Stones:- Racetrack Playa,Death Valley (Video Included)

The Racetrack playa is 3608 feet (1130 m) above sea level, and 2.8 miles (4.5 km) long (north-south) by 1.3 miles (2 km) wide (east-west). It is also exceptionally flat and level. Racetrack is dry for almost the entire year and has no vegetation. When dry, its surface is covered with small but firm hexagonal mud crack saucers that are typically 3 to 4 inches (7.5 to 10 cm) in diameter and about an inch (2.5 cm) thick.

Racetrack Playa from space‎ Sailing stone in Racetrack Playa

Sailing stones, sliding rocks, and moving rocks all refer to a geological phenomenon where rocks move in long tracks along a smooth valley floor without human or animal intervention. They have been studied in a number of places around Racetrack Playa, Death Valley, where the number and length of travel grooves are notable. The force behind their movement is not confirmed and is the subject of research. It really is an Unexplained mystery.

The stones move only every two or three years and most tracks develop over three or four years. Stones with rough bottoms leave straight striated tracks while those with smooth bottoms wander. Stones sometimes turn over, exposing another edge to the ground and leaving a different track in the stone’s wake. Trails differ in both direction and length. Rocks that start next to each other may travel parallel for a time, before one abruptly changes direction to the left, right, or even back the direction it came from. Trail length also varies – two similarly sized and shaped rocks may travel uniformly, then one could move ahead or stop in its track

Learn more about Racetrack Playa in Wikipedia.

20130621

Five reasons the euro-optimists are wrong

Five reasons the euro-optimists are wrong

Hope springs eternal in the hearts of the European optimists. Despite the fact that Europe is still mired in its longest post-war economic recession and despite every sign that austerity fatigue now characterizes Europe’s beleaguered periphery, the optimists cling to the hope that an economic recovery is just around the corner and that somehow Europe will muddle through its economic and political crisis.

Sadly this optimism is not well grounded. Rather it rests on a series of myths, which time will tell are no different from the wishful thinking entertained by European policymakers over the past three years.

Myth 1: The European economy is about to recover. Ever since the European debt crisis began in early 2010, optimists have assured us that the economic recovery was just around the corner. Yet that economic recovery has proved to be elusive, especially in the European economic periphery. Delaying that recovery has been the application of severe budget austerity at a time that the troubled European banks have been cutting back on credit. This has all been done within a euro straitjacket that has precluded devaluation as a means to boost exports, which might have served as an offset to highly restrictive domestic demand management policies.

Today the economic policy mix in the European periphery is little different from its immediate past. Although there has been some relaxation in the budget austerity being required of euro members by the European Commission, one still has countries deep in recession being forced to pursue budget austerity within a euro straitjacket. And they are now being required to do so at a time that Europe’s credit crunch persists, the external economic environment has deteriorated, and the euro is now appreciating.

This all begs a question that the European optimists prefer not to ask. If this same sort of economic policy mix deepened Europe’s economic recession in the past, why will it not deepen that recession in the period that lies immediately ahead? And if the European recession does indeed deepen, why will the European banks’ troubles not worsen, and why will Europe’s credit crunch not be more prolonged?

Myth 2: Markets are regaining confidence in Europe. The optimists point to the marked narrowing in European interest rate spreads over the past year as a sure indication that markets are impressed by the improvement in European economic fundamentals. They do so seemingly oblivious to the Wall Street adage that when the winds are strong even turkeys fly. Nor do they seem to pay attention to the fact that those winds have never been stronger considering the unprecedented pace at which the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan have been adding to global liquidity. The question that the optimists do not ask is why once the Fed and the BOJ music stops countries with unsustainable public debt dynamics will not be subject to the market’s full fury as has happened all too often in the past?

Myth 3: The European Central Bank provides a safety net for the euro. The optimists take much comfort in Mario Draghi’s pledge to do whatever it takes to save the euro and in the ECB’s Outright Monetary Transaction (OMT) program announced last September that was intended to give substance to that pledge. However, they gloss over the fact that the activation of the OMT program for countries like Italy and Spain is very much conditioned upon those countries first negotiating IMF-style economic adjustment programs with the European Stability Mechanism. They also choose to ignore the clearest of signs that the political circumstances of Italy and Spain are such that those countries are progressively losing their willingness to continue with budget austerity and structural reform.

Myth 4: Europe’s economic recession will not undermine its politics. The optimists do not tire of making the point that high as European unemployment rates might be today, Europe need not fear a return to the politics of the 1930s. This blinds them to the substantial erosion that has already occurred over the past two years in the popular support for the established political parties in countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. It also blinds them to the bailout fatigue that is now all too evident in countries like Germany, Finland and the Netherlands. The question that they choose to duck is why a prolonged period of extraordinarily high unemployment in the period ahead will not exacerbate the political tensions already so apparent between Europe’s South and its North.

Myth 5: Everything will change after the German elections. Ever hopeful, the European optimists believe that once the September 2013 German elections is out of the way Germany will throw its full support behind an early move toward a European banking and fiscal union. Little attention do they seem to pay to the fact that all the major German political parties are very mindful to how German taxpayer money might be spent. Even less attention do they seem to pay to the domestic constitutional obstacles or to the visceral opposition of the respected Bundesbank that lie in the way to any such move.

One has to hope that the five myths sustaining the European optimists prove to be well-founded. However, both European and non-European policymakers would be making a big mistake to base their policymaking on such wishful thinking

20130620

Booze nation - shock alcohol stats

Booze nation - shock alcohol stats

Irish adults drink in a more dangerous way than nearly any other country, according to shock statistics published yesterday.

The report of the Steering Group on National Substance Misuse Strategy reveals that the average Irish adult drank 11.9 litres of pure alcohol in 2010, corresponding to 482 pints of lager, 125 bottles of wine or 45 bottles of vodka per year.

"Given that 19 per cent of the adult population are abstainers, the actual amount of alcohol consumed per drinker is considerably more. While alcohol consumption has reduced since 2000, adults in 2010 were still drinking more than twice the average amount of alcohol consumed per adult in 1960," the report states.

It points out that Ireland's per capita alcohol consumption is 11.3 litres per adult - the tenth highest of 40 countries in 2009. The OECD average is 9.1 litres per adult in 2009.

Irish adults binge drink more than any other European country, with one-quarter of Irish adults reporting that they binge drink every week, the report reveals.

The Steering Group said if every adult (15+ years) restricted his/her alcohol consumption to the recommended maximum low-risk limit on every week of the year, the actual per capita consumption would be 9.2 litres of pure alcohol per adult (15+ years), or 23 per cent less than was consumed in 2010.

Over half of drinkers here have been identified as having a harmful drinking pattern. This equates to nearly 1.5 million adults in Ireland drinking in a harmful pattern.

The report says Irish children are drinking from a younger age and drinking more than ever before - over half of Irish 16 year old children have been drunk and one in five is a weekly drinker.

The average age of first alcohol use in children decreased from 15 years for children born in 1980 to 14 years for children born in 1990, according to the report.

The Steering Group identifies cheap off-licence sales as a contributory factor to alcohol misuse.

It says there was a 161 per cent increase in the number of off-licences operating between 1998 and 2010 and over the same time period the number of pub licences decreased by 19 per cent.

In 2010 the average cost of a 500ml can of lager from the off-licence was €1.77 while the average price of a pint of lager in the on-trade sector was €4.35.

The off-licence sector accounted for half of the alcohol market share in 2008 and, given the much cheaper price of alcohol in the off-licence, the volume of alcohol sold from the off-licence was much greater than that sold in the on-trade, the report reveals.

The Steering Group has proposed measures to curb alcohol misuse, including the phasing out of sponsorship of sporting events by the drinks industry and a 'social responsibility levy' on the drinks industry.

However, Government Ministers appeared to give a lukewarm reception to the report when it was published yesterday. Health Minister James Reilly did not attend the press conference launching the report and Minister for Primary Care Roisin Shortall did not stay to answer questions on its recommendations.

The report shows that the alcohol industry provided an estimated 50,000 jobs in 2008 and the alcohol manufacturing industry had a turnover of €2.95 billion in that year.

20130619

The Scale of the Universe 2 — Other Languages

20130617

New Subduction Zone Forming Off Spain's Coast

New Subduction Zone Forming Off Spain's Coast

A budding subduction zone offshore of Spain heralds the start of a new cycle that will one day pull the Atlantic Ocean seafloor into the bowels of the Earth, a new study suggests.

Understanding how subduction zones start is long-lasting mystery in plate tectonics, said lead study author João Duarte, a research fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Subduction zones are key players in creating supercontinents and opening and closing Earth's oceans. In a subduction zone, one of Earth's tectonic plates dives beneath another, sinking into the mantle, the layer under the crust. As oceanic crust disappears, continents may draw closer together and collide, as has happened numerous times in the history of the planet. Subduction zones also spawn the biggest earthquakes on the planet, as in Japan, Chile and Alaska. [The 10 Biggest Earthquakes in History]

On the flip side are passive margins, the seamless transition between oceanic and continental crust, as is seen along eastern North America and northern Europe.

But while northern Europe may have a gentle transition, the folded and fractured seafloor offshore of southwestern Spain leads scientists to think Earth's crust is poised on the brink between the two types of plate boundaries.

"We are precisely in the transition between a passive and an active margin. The plate is breaking in two and starting to converge," Duarte told OurAmazingPlanet in an email interview.

Squeezed crust

Duarte and his colleagues reached their conclusion, detailed online June 6 in the journal Geology,by carefully mapping the underwater faults near Spain and west of Gibraltar, in a zone called the southwest Iberia margin. The zone has spawned several great earthquakes, including the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which killed more than 10,000 people and may have sent a tsunami all the way to the Caribbean.

The team discovered active thrust faults throughout the supposedly passive margin. Thrust faults form when the crust is squeezed, in this case between the Eurasian and African tectonic plates.

"This shows that the margin is not passive anymore but is now being reactivated, i.e. a new convergent plate boundary is forming," Duarte said. "If you were looking for an embryonic subduction zone this is what you would expect to see."

Sharing subduction

The researchers suspect that the new Iberian subduction zone will get a little help from a tiny, ultra-slow subduction zone beneath the Straits of Gibraltar. The Gibraltar subduction zone is attached to the African plate. Over the next several million years, this conveyer belt may roll out toward the Atlantic and merge with the Iberian zone into an even bigger trench, the study suggests.

Subduction zones take million of years to form, but they leave behind few records of how the process works. (Most of the clues end up in the mantle.) The possible new subduction zone helps decipher their mysterious birth. One model proposed that old, strong oceanic crust near continents spontaneously cracked, collapsing and starting a new trench. But the embryonic subduction zone near Spain instead suggests that subduction spreads from ocean to ocean, Duarte said.

Duarte and his colleagues are now developing numerical models of subduction to better understand the forces driving and resisting plate motion. "Identification and understanding of such processes may provide new insights on how subduction zones may have initiated in the past and how oceans start to close," he said.

Making sense of the complex tectonics offshore of Spain and Portugal is also crucial for forecasting the region's seismic hazard, Duarte added. "Despite 20 years of intense investigation only now we are starting to understand the whole picture," he said.

20130615

I am free

20130614

HORRIBLE HISTORIES - King Pepi's Super Sticky Anti Fly Honey Slave (Awful Egyptians)

20130613

Muslims attack White youths in England

Muslims attack White youths in England

This is a video that has been taken in Ashton Under Lyne, England that shows a gang of Muslim youths attacking a group of white kids. Just before the filming had started one of the muslim youths had punched one of the white girls in the face. This is becoming a regular occurence on the streets of the UK.

20130612

Pay in Europe

https://plus.google.com/100470681032...ts/ALiR3L8BxsE

20130611

NSA Built Back Door In All Windows Software by 1999

Posted on June 7, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Government Built Spy-Access Into Most Popular Consumer Program Before 9/11

In researching the stunning pervasiveness of spying by the government (it’s much more wide spread than you’ve heard even now), we ran across the fact that the FBI wants software programmers to install a backdoor in all software.

Digging a little further, we found a 1999 article by leading European computer publication Heise which noted that the NSA had already built a backdoor into all Windows software:

A careless mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA “help information” trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.

The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren [an expert in computer security]. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA.

***

Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5. He found that Microsoft’s developers had failed to remove or “strip” the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. One was called “KEY”. The other was called “NSAKEY”.

Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their secret meaning, to “Advances in Cryptology, Crypto’99″ conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did not deny that the “NSA” key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users’ knowledge.

A third key?!

But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even Microsoft’s top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was “stunned” to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and report on the “entropy” of programming code.

Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code is said to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for modifications to be inserted without the knowledge of even the respective product managers.

Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be intended to let US government users of Windows run classified cryptosystems on their machines or whether it is intended to open up anyone’s and everyone’s Windows computer to intelligence gathering techniques deployed by NSA’s burgeoning corps of “information warriors”.

According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system “is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system“. The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards.

***

“How is an IT manager to feel when they learn that in every copy of Windows sold, Microsoft has a ‘back door’ for NSA – making it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer?” he asked.

We have repeatedly pointed out that widespread spying on Americans began prior to 9/11.