Heating Funds for Poor Get Cut as Trillion-Dollar Budget Gets Passed

The government just passed a TRILLION-dollar budget, but there is no money for the poor, many of whom will die as a result. Meanwhile oil companies continue to post tax-free record profits and fuel prices continue to climb as the cold weather settles in just in time for the holidays.

Northeast states cut heating aid to poor

Mary Power is 92 and worried about surviving another frigid New England winter because deep cuts in federal home heating assistance benefits mean she probably can’t afford enough heating oil to stay warm.

She lives in a drafty trailer in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood and gets by on $11,148 a year in pension and Social Security benefits. Her heating aid help this year will drop from $1,035 to $685. With rising heating oil prices, it probably will cost her more than $3,000 for enough oil to keep warm unless she turns her thermostat down to 60 degrees, as she plans.

“I will just have to crawl into bed with the covers over me and stay there,’’ said Power, a widow who worked as a cashier and waitress until she was 80. “I will do what I have to do.’’

Thousands of poor people across the Northeast are bracing for a difficult winter with substantially less home heating aid coming from the federal government.

“They’re playing Russian roulette with people’s lives,’’ said John Drew, who heads Action for Boston Community Development, Inc., which provides aid to low-income residents in Massachusetts.

Read more at link: http://articles.boston.com/2011-12-11/news/30505478_1_heating-aid-heating-oil-home-heating

Herd Mentality

I was recently debating my pet hot-button issue of the month, drug testing of welfare recipients. My opponent made the logically-void argument that their position was correct, because nearly 3 million people have voted in favor of drug testing the poor, while I voted in the minority of less than 150,000 people who are against the drug testing laws. I have seen this same sort of argument made many times, over various issues, that that the majority is always right. This same mentality is why our Constitution has been reduced to nothing more than a scrap of paper. After all, the Constitution is there to protect ideas that are not popular. Popular ideas don't need to be protected. But let me stop myself there before I go off on a little rant about the lessons of logic and liberty, and instead show you this clear example, that even the most simple-minded among the sheeple might grasp the lesson of...

12 Extremely Disappointing Facts About Popular Music

1. Creed has sold more records in the US than Jimi Hendrix

2. Led Zeppelin, REM, and Depeche Mode have never had a number one single, Rihanna has 10

3. Ke$ha's “Tik-Tok” sold more copies than ANY Beatles single

4. Flo Rida's “Low” has sold 8 million copies – the same as The Beatles' “Hey Jude”

5. The Black Eyed Peas' “I Gotta Feeling” is more popular than any Elvis or Simon & Garfunkel song

6. Celine Dion's “Falling Into You” sold more copies than any Queen, Nirvana, or Bruce Springsteen record

7. Same with Shania Twain's “Come On Over”

8. Katy Perry holds the same record as Michael Jackson for most number one singles from an album

9. Barbra Streisand has sold more records (140 million) than Pearl Jam, Johnny Cash, and Tom Petty combined

10. People actually bought Billy Ray Cyrus' album “Some Gave All…” 20 million people. More than any Bob Marley album

11. The cast of “Glee” has had more songs chart than the Beatles

12. This guy exists.

 

"All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach." -Adolf Hitler

DNA Hackers Will Exploit You as Easily as Your PC

From the "freaky files" of our probable not-too-distant future comes the following article. If people realized what power their DNA holds, particularly in the hands of someone who might not be looking out for your best interests, society would be taking things a lot more seriously when it comes to things like DNA testing and other collections of biological sampling. Would you trust a cop in a random traffic stop enough to hand over your bank account password to them? Probably not, but this is by far a lot worse. Not even because of potential abuses by the powers-that-be. But because of the risk that your DNA data might wind up in the hands of criminals and terrorists.

DNA Hackers: Synthetic biology weaponized virus, zero-day exploit to infect your brain?


From the let's get futuristically freaky department, future hacking crimes could take a decidedly sinister twist; not hacking to breach systems but brains, bodies and behaviors. This DNA hacking goes way beyond potentially using police bees to bust biohackers, or even storing unhackable data in box of bio-encrypted bacteria. It's not science fiction to hack insulin pumps or to use jamming signals to stop hackers from lethal pacemaker attacks, but now bioengineers and security futurists are warning that the day is coming when criminals and bioterrorists hunt for vulnerabilities that will give a new meaning to zero-day exploits. In the future, a weaponized virus will aim to infect you, your brain and body biology, and not just your computer or mobile device.

While some people resist the idea of needing antivirus or other security software defenses for their smartphones, in the world of synthetic biology, a world where bits, bytes, atoms and biology mix dreams with nightmare realities, it could be lethal to lag behind in patching potential vulnerabilities. Some day, when you hear about something going 'viral,' it will not apply to an idea or video but to a DNA hack going viral to infect the masses. When a computer is infected with malware or a virus, you can reformat a hard drive, but will a future security scenario include needing to worry about BSOD and reformatting your brain?

Read the rest of the article from Computerworld here: http://blogs.computerworld.com/19409/dna_hackers_synthetic_biology_weaponized_virus_0day_exploit_to_infect_your_brain