rawstory.com
Agence France-Presse

The FBI has said it is monitoring a growing extremist threat from “sovereign citizen” movements, and is targeting their activities to prevent a repeat of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Followers of “sovereign citizen” ideologies reject all government authority, refusing to pay taxes, not recognizing US currency, and sometimes engaging in acts of violence, FBI officials told reporters on Monday.

“They could be lone wolves, too,” said Stuart McArthur, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division, who said it was the agency’s mission to “deter and detect” potential acts of “catastrophic violence.”

The worst act of domestic terrorism in US history was the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, which claimed the lives of 168 people and left a federal office building in ruins.

Its main perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, was sentenced to death and executed in 2001.

The FBI said the “sovereign citizen” militants are distinguishable from other ultra-right extremists by their use of homemade license plates, documents and diplomatic credentials, as well as the terminology they use.

“The ideology itself promotes violence and encourages violence,” said special agent Casey Carty, who said the FBI had a duty to be proactive in dealing with the potential threat.

The number of convictions in “sovereign citizen” cases rose from 10 in 2009 to 18 in 2010 and another 18 last year.

“We want to focus on this particular threat,” said McArthur, adding that evidence of the alarming movement is found “all over the country.”

http://american3rdposition.org/

It’s going to take a lot more than self-guided bullets, fleets of kamikaze robots, suitcase assassin drones, electric stun rockets, and hypersonic bombs that travel five times the speed of sound to convert me to revolutionary pacifism. They’ll need mind control for that.

———————————————-

wired.com
Katie Drummond

The U.S. military has been after self-guided bullets for years. Now, government researchers have finally made it happen: A bullet that can navigate itself a full mile before successfully nailing its target.

The breakthrough comes courtesy of engineers at Sandia National Laboratory, owned by Lockheed Martin. They’ve successfully tested a prototype of the bullet at distances up to 2,000 meters — more than a mile. The photo above is an actual image taken during one of those tests. A light-emitting diode was attached to the bullet, showing the amazing pathway that the munition made through the night sky.

Of course, Lockheed’s been a longtime partner in the military’s quest for the ultimate, self-guided munition. In 2008, they scored a $14.5 million contract as part of Darpa’s “Exacto” program, which sought to develop sniper rifles with guided bullets. They’ve also been involved in the agency’s “One Shot” initiative, which is trying to develop scope-mounted lasers that can help snipers compensate for weather conditions.

Each self-guided bullet is around four inches in length. At the tip is an optical sensor, that can detect a laser beam being shone on a far-off target. Actuators inside the bullet get intel from the bullet’s sensor, and then “steer tiny fins that guide the bullet to the target.” The bullet can self-correct its navigational path 30 times a second, all while flying more than twice the speed of sound.

Read more.

Has anyone read this?

———————————————

This book refutes criticisms of tribal rights and answers about every question you might have about them: how they live; their history; what they want; and what they have given the world. Governments will hate it.

Check it out.

Adrian Chen
gawker.com

It’s been eight months since we exposed Silk Road, the underground online marketplace where you can anonymously buy any drug imaginable. After our article, a couple U.S. senators declared war on Silk Road. But it hasn’t been shut down. It’s bigger than ever, and now you can buy a Glock with your LSD.

Yesterday, Betabeat pointed out that Silk Road still exists, and is still home to hundreds of users openly trading illegal drugs using the nearly-untraceable hacker currency Bitcoins.

So I fired up my TOR anonymizing network browser, which is the only way to visit Silk Road’s unusual URL, to see what was new with the site. What was new was guns: Back when we broke the story in June, Silk Road’s anonymous administrator said he wouldn’t allow weapons to be sold on the site. But since then, an entire subcategory for firearms has sprung up.

Here are some of the 13 firearms for sale right now on Silk Road:

* IMI 9 mm uzi

* 44 magnum Desert Eagle

* 9 mm Beretta handgun

* 50 rounds of .22 ammunition

* 9 mm machine pistol with silencer

Plus, all the guns in the image below are from vendors on the site.

Read more.

Spencer Ackerman
wired.com

It’s not just for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars anymore. The Department of Homeland Security is interested in a camera package that can peek in on almost four square miles of (constitutionally protected) American territory for long, long stretches of time.

Homeland Security doesn’t have a particular system in mind. Right now, it’s just soliciting “industry feedback” on what a formal call for such a “Wide Area Surveillance System” might look like. But it’s the latest indication of how powerful military surveillance technology, developed to find foreign insurgents and terrorists, is migrating to the home front.

The Department of Homeland Security says it’s interested in a system that can see between five to 10 square kilometers — that’s between two and four square miles, roughly the size of Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood — in its “persistent mode.” By “persistent,” it means the cameras should stare at the area in question for an unspecified number of hours to collect what the military likes to call “pattern of life” data — that is, what “normal” activity looks like for a given area. Persistence typically depends on how long the vehicle carrying the camera suite can stay aloft; DHS wants something that can fit into a manned P-3 Orion spy plane or a Predator drone — of which it has a couple. When not in “persistent mode,” the cameras ought to be able to see much, much further: “long linear areas, tens to hundreds of kilometers in extent, such as open, remote borders.”

If it’s starting to sound reminiscent of the spy tools the military has used in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should. Homeland Security wants the video collected by the system to beam down in “near real time” — 12 seconds or quicker — to a “control room (T) or to a control room and beyond line of sight (BLOS) ruggedized mobile receiver on the ground,” just as military spy gear does. The camera should shift to infrared mode for nighttime snooping, and contain “automated, real time, motion detection capability that cues a spotter imager for target identification.” Tests for the system will take place in Nogales, Arizona.

Read more.

C4SS links back to southern nationalist network

——————————

Dear C4SS Supporters,

This week I’ve submitted 9,083 Center op-eds to 2,763 publications on seven continents. So far I’m tracking six “pickups” of those op-eds:

• Kevin Carson’s “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery … and Fighting Back is ‘Aggression’” appeared on Antiwar.com and in the Baltic Review on January 14.
• Darian Worden’s “Urinating on Life” appeared in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age on January 15; the Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Malay Mail on January 16; La Tribuna Hispana USA (as “Orinándose sobre la vida”) on January 17; and the Deming, New Mexico Headlight on January 18.

This week’s pseudo-random reciprocal blogospheric link love goes out to Information Clearing House, Lisbon Maine.Net and the Southern Nationalist Network (yes, I was like “WTF?” too).

Have a great weekend!

Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Center for a Stateless Society

salon.com
Emma Mustich

Is grease good? His hairstyle reminds us of Gordon Gekko, film’s top vulture capitalist, but goes back further

For businessman-turned-politician Mitt Romney, “looking the part” isn’t necessarily a good thing. At a time when the presidential candidate is being pilloried as a vulture capitalist by rivals from both parties — yesterday’s revelation about his low income-tax rate is just more fodder for an already healthy fire — he also sports the hair of a vulture capitalist. It recalls the slicked-back style of “Wall Street’s” infamous Gordon Gekko.

When slicked-back hair is associated with the likes of a corporate raider like Gekko — Maureen Dowd wrote just last week that Republicans in New Hampshire were “painting Romney as a ruthless Gekko, complete with a 1980s-era slicked-back mane” — it’s safe to say the signals that it sends are negative. That’s particularly the case in the current, Wall Street-wary climate. But where did the slicked-back style originate? What other cultural connotations does it command?

Slicked-back hair has gone in and out of fashion since at least the 18th century, when a more dramatic iteration of the style was popularized by Madame de Pompadour, mistress of France’s King Louis XV. In her “Encyclopedia of Hair,” Victoria Sherrow says the ancien regime socialite “set a trend among women by wearing tall hairstyles built around a wire frame,” explaining that “pomade was used to set the style.” The male version of the look “is combed back off the face without a part, forming a mound of hair above the forehead … Elvis Presley wore a version of this hairdo during the 1950s, as did movie idols, including Marlon Brando and James Dean.”

Read more.

nakedsecurity.sophos.com
Graham Cluley

If you visit the English-language version of Wikipedia today you’ll see this:

As has been widely reported, Wikipedia is one of a number of high profile websites which is shutting its doors today in protest at US anti-piracy moves.

That’s bad news if you’re a student hoping to use your usual trick of scouring Wikipedia for cut-and-paste into your homework.

But don’t fear, there’s an easy way to access Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s blackout is achieved using some JavaScript. So, all you need is a trusty copy of the Firefox web browser and the popular NoScript add-on.

Read more.

github.com

Reddit and many other sites are planning a blackout to protest SOPA/PIPA on January 18th, 2012.

This plugin lets you easily join them. For 24 hours, based on the timezone in your WP settings, your blog will be replaced with a simple splash screen displayed below to help raise awareness about SOPA.

According to the FBI, Insane Clown Posse music fans are more dangerous than any white power skinhead gang in America. Antifa?

————————-

businessinsider.com
Eric Goldschein and Luke McKenna

More than 1.4 million Americans are wearing the colors of more than 33,000 gangs across the country, according to a report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Based on evidence from federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement, the FBI says gangs commit 48% of violent crime, and are only becoming more dangerous. Some even source weapons from the military.

While many of these groups are regional and only loosely organized, many gangs are expanding their ranks and establishing themselves at international levels.

Check them out.

heraldsun.com.au
Lucy Carne in London

IT HAS been pitched as the Battle of Britain – Braveheart taking on Lionheart.

Scottish independence hopes ignited with passion last week in an extraordinary stand-off between feisty Edinburgh and forthright London.

Three centuries after England and Scotland voted to unite as a single kingdom, many Scots feel the partnership must end.

Bitter exchanges erupted on Monday when, at a Cabinet meeting, British Prime Minister David Cameron said any decisions affecting British sovereignty could be determined only by Westminster, as specified in the 1998 statute that granted limited self-government power to Scotland.

Scotland could have a referendum only on a date set by Westminster and which complied with terms that would ensure the result was legal, decisive and fair.

Alex Salmond, the popular Scottish First Minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, said it would be only on his terms.

He accused Mr Cameron of being Thatcheresque and trying to interfere in Scottish democracy.

And he then defiantly announced a referendum on Scottish independence would be held in the autumn of 2014.

It was a canny move, allowing Salmond time to continue drumming up support for independence.

The date also coincides with the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and the vanquishing of Edward II’s army by Robert the Bruce.

It would be, Salmond said, Scotland’s most important decision in 300 years.

Read more.

thedailybell.com

Introduction: Patrick Buchanan has been a senior advisor to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. From 1966 through 1974, Patrick Buchanan was an assistant to Richard Nixon, and from 1985 to 1987, White House Director of Communications for Ronald Reagan. In 1992, Mr. Buchanan challenged George Bush for the Republican nomination and almost upset the President in the New Hampshire primary. In 1996, he won the New Hampshire primary and finished second to Sen. Bob Dole with three million Republican votes. Patrick Buchanan has written ten books, including six straight New York Times bestsellers: A Republic, Not an Empire, The Death of the West, Where the Right Went Wrong, State of Emergency, Day of Reckoning and Churchill, and Hitler and The Unnecessary War. His most recent book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

Pat Buchanan: I went to journalism school right after college and went out to St. Louis where I became an editorial writer for three years. Then I joined up with Richard Nixon in 1965 and was with him both through the out years until 1969 and the five years of his presidency up to August 1974.

Then I became a syndicated columnist, which I had always intended to be, and ten years later I went into Ronald Reagan’s White House. I spent two years there and went with him to the summits in Geneva and Reykjavik.  Right after that I went back to writing a column until I challenged my old friend, George Bush, in the New Hampshire primary in 1992.  We did very well. We closed the gap from about 65 points to about 14 but we didn’t win.

I ran in 1996 again and we won the New Hampshire primary and came in second for the nomination out of a field of ten. In 2000 I ran again, on the Reform Party ticket, which was unsuccessful.

Since then, I have been writing books, writing a regular column and appearing on The McLaughlin Group and MSNBC.  We have had success with the books; we’ve had seven New York Times bestsellers in the last seven books.  We’ve had some failures, too, and that is pretty much my background.

Daily Bell: Are you more libertarian and less conservative now or vice versa? What is the difference between a libertarian and a conservative? Are you surprised at the ascendency of libertarian thought in the 21st century?

Pat Buchanan: I am more of a traditionalist conservative than I am a libertarian but I share with Ron Paul the view that America has become an over-extended empire.  After the Cold War we should have downsized the empire dramatically and returned to become a more normal nation in a more normal time.

I believe government has gotten too huge. Republicans have colluded with Democrats to make it so and I am pessimistic that we’re ever going to be able to turn this around.

Daily Bell: Tell us about your latest book, Suicide of a Superpower.

Pat Buchanan: Well, the United States is certainly not a failed nation or a failed state but we are failing. We’re unable to control our borders, we are unable to balance our budgets, we’re unable to win or end our wars successfully and achieve our objectives, and we’re unable to stop the hemorrhaging of American jobs and manufacturing abroad.

I think the annual deficit of 9-10% of GDP indicates that the American empire and the massive US government are to be downsized, if not through political action, then through a de facto default on the debt via inflation.  And I fear we are headed down the road toward the end of the United States as a traditional nation, which is one people, one nation, under God, indivisible.

The mass immigration that is taking place of peoples of every culture, creed, country, civilization, continent, is converting us into a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial, multilingual continent of a country, which has little or nothing to hold it together.  No such polyglot country has ever existed before and I don’t think we are going to succeed in creating one.  I think we are headed for Balkanization and break-up, not in the sense of a secession of the states or civil war, but in the sense that we will resemble the Balkan peninsula more than the country we were under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

Read more.

Most of us are DEPENDENT on a global network to get through the day. Unfortunately, this network is tightly coupled. Tightly coupled? What the heck is that? Tightly coupled is a term used by engineers. It’s a system where the parts are interdependent. As a result, a change or failure in one part of [...]

Resilient Communities

c4ss.org
David S. D’Amato

Back in June, I first mentioned a referendum that would put the question of Scottish sovereignty squarely to the country’s people. Six months later, MSNBC reports, “The Scottish and British governments [are] playing a cat-and-mouse game over the future of the 300-year-old union between Scotland and England.”

The government of the United Kingdom, of which Scotland is a part, challenges the idea of a referendum on Scotland splitting from the U.K. Although Scotland enjoys many traditional powers of an independent, sovereign state, it remains linked to London, and many in the British corner argue that it has no legal right to secede.

As novel and thorny as the legal question may be, there is another, far more crucial question at play, one that goes to the very meaning of self-determination; it inquires as to the foundations of control and compelled relationships.

“Political order,” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said, “rests fundamentally on two contrary principles: authority and liberty.” Contrasting the two, Proudhon observed that authority is at all times “tending to hierarchy, centralization, [and] absorption,” while liberty, a principle “supplied by the mind,” he described as “personal, individualist, critical, the instrument of dividing” (emphasis added).

Proudhon was a master of language, finding understanding and insight in the interaction of opposites. The first self-styled anarchist, he saw the lack of a state not as an avenue to chaos, but as coextensive with a different and better governing system — that of self-government based upon a continuing “division of power.”

Such indeed was the Principle of Federation that Proudhon so spellbindingly suggested, a radical partitioning of political power, on and on until each individual deals with every other on equal terms — secession pushed to its limit.

Read more.

google.com
AFP

WASHINGTON — Most Mormons believe Americans are ready to elect the first Mormon president in the upcoming election, according to results of a Pew Research Center survey announced Thursday.

The Pew Research Center, a public policy research foundation, conducted the survey independently from the Mormon church at a time Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, a Mormon, is leading in some polls to become the next US president.

“Many Mormons feel they are misunderstood, discriminated against and not accepted by other Americans,” the Pew report on the survey said. “Yet, at the same time, a majority of Mormons think that acceptance of Mormonism is rising.

“They have highly positive views of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a fellow Mormon, and a majority think the country is ready to elect a Mormon president.”

The survey found that most Mormons consider themselves to be religious and happy in their personal lives.

Greg Smith, who led the study, said the survey showed a “mixed picture.”

“Clearly, this is a population that in many ways still sees itself as being on the periphery of American society,” Smith said at a news conference.

Read more.

via cryptome [pdf]

guardian.co.uk

A 25-year-old man from the former Yugoslavia has been charged with an alleged plot to attack crowded locations in the Tampa area, including nightclubs, with a car bomb, assault rifle and other explosives, federal authorities said.

The US Department of Justice announced the arrest of Sami Osmakac, whose first appearance in federal court was scheduled for Monday afternoon.

Authorities say Osmakac is a naturalized US citizen who was born in the former Yugoslavia. He has been charged with one count of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

FBI agents arrested Osmakac on Saturday after he allegedly bought explosive devices and firearms from an undercover agent. The firearms and explosives were rendered inoperable by law enforcement.

The federal complaint says that shortly before his arrest, Osmakac made a video of himself explaining his motives for carrying out the planned violent attack.

Read more.

guardian.co.uk
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

Iran has sentenced an American citizen to death and reports have emerged that the country has started enriching uranium underground in a show of defiance of western sanctions.

The man, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, an Iranian-American born in Arizona in 1983, was shown on Iranian television in December confessing to being a CIA agent, sent to gain the trust of the Iranian government by pretending to offer US state secrets. Hekmati’s father said he had gone to Iran to visit his grandmother.

The announcement on Monday of Hekmati’s death sentence came as Keyhan, a newspaper with close connections to the conservative clerical establishment, reported that Iran has started enriching uranium at the Fordow plant, a heavily fortified site dug under a mountain near the city of Qom.

Iran only acknowledged the existence of the Fordow site in September 2009, after it had been identified by western intelligence agencies. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported that Iran has recently installed centrifuges at the site, and western officials have said that the plant was ready to start functioning.

Read more.

torrentfreak.com
Enigmax

In October 2011, a court in Finland ordered local ISP Elisa to block The Pirate Bay to stop copyright infringement among its subscribers. Today, the blockade – which covers many domains and IP addresses – took effect, but behind the scenes there is an effort to unblock the site and render the court order useless. Meanwhile there is already collateral damage – the court order has succeeded in blocking a domain linking to Electronic Frontier Finland.

In May 2011, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the Finnish branch of the music industry group IFPI filed a lawsuit the District Court of Helsinki.

The groups demanded that local ISP Elisa should be forced to protect the copyrights of their members by stopping their subscribers accessing The Pirate Bay. Initially Elisa refused, described the blocking demands as “unreasonable”, but a subsequent court order left them with no choice.

On October 26th 2011, the District Court of Helsinki ordered Elisa to block a range of domains and IP addresses associated with The Pirate Bay. Although Elisa has contested the decision by filing with the Helsinki Court of Appeal, in the meantime they have to comply.

Today, Elisa has confirmed it has begun blocking the domains and IP addresses listed below:

Read more.

aljazeera.com

Philipp Hildebrand defends his achievements at financial institution as he bows to uproar over private currency deals.

The Swiss National Bank chairman has resigned abruptly, bowing to a public uproar over his private currency deals.

Philipp Hildebrand’s decision comes just as a Swiss parliamentary committee is preparing to grill him behind closed doors.

His resignation took effect immediately on Monday, Switzerland’s central bank said in a brief statement.

A short time later, Hildebrand called an impromputu press conference in the Swiss capital of Bern, where he emphasised that he was proud of his achievements at financial institutions in Switzerland and international organisations such as the World Bank.

“I would like to think I have been a damn good central banker,” Hildebrand said.

“I personally advocated strongly and early for stricter capital requirements for the big banks. The policy of the central bank was a success in recent years.”

For the past week, Switzerland has been awash with reports about public unease over the dollar swaps last year that earned Hildebrand and his wife, a former currency trader, tens of thousands of dollars in profits at the same time Hildebrand was working to lower the value of the soaring Swiss franc.

It was his second news conference in less than a week.

Read more.

mises.org
James E. Miller

Unlike the majority of us who live relatively boring lives, Kim Kardashian has made a career out of selling the public an up-close-and-personal view of her private affairs. This recently included a rumored farce of a wedding to NBA superstar Kris Humphries, which fizzled after only three days but made the reality star millions.

Ms. Kardashian’s financial success hasn’t been met warmly by everyone however. According to the Wall Street Journal, an activist group composed of union and left-wing political interests has started a campaign to push for an increase in California’s millionaire’s tax and is targeting Kardashian directly. Titling themselves “Courage Campaign,” this association is dedicated to “bringing progressive change and full equality in California and across the country.” In addition to their website TaxKimK.com, the group has created a video to promote their agenda. The video claims that Ms. Kardashian made more than $12 million in 2010 yet only paid 10.3 percent in taxes. That’s only “1 percent more” than the 9.3 percent that “middle class” Californians pay.

Like ravenous sharks at the smell of blood, Courage Campaign has its eyes set on more income ripe for plundering through taxation. Their aim is to increase the Golden State’s millionaire tax from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent for income over $1 million and 15.3 percent for income over $2 million. On top of California’s already horrendous business climate, this tax will undoubtedly provide more of an incentive for Atlases to do the proverbial shrugging and flee overzealous and overburdening government regulation.

Read more.

PC Overload…

——————————————

Steven Rosenfeld | Sourced from AlterNet

Anyone who has seen Pat Buchanan in person knows that as strong a speaker as he is, he attacks a certain ‘white power’ constituency. Apparently, those beliefs as expressed in his latest book and book tour have prompted MSNBC to suspend him from the air and say they do not know when or if he’s coming back.

Color of Change has called for his firing from MSNBC and deserves credit for spot-lighting his latest fulminations on the decline of white America. While on the Al Sharpton show, he apparently called Obama “your boy,” which Sharpton took great offense to as it has specific Old South connotations.

Buchanan has a way of not going away. He was one of the first to cycle between runs for the presidency and commentary slots in non-election years. But perhaps the political mainstream–never quite the avatar of change one hopes for–finally finds his views too far out of step in an increasingly multi-cultural America.