Anything else that happens will have to be taken care by the government and other top officials around the world. I can’t really say how bad it will get, but if you think it’s going to be catastrophic, save up supplies like food and water and be prepared for looters, just like you would for a zombie apocalypse, and make sure to get in bunkers, in case an all out nuclear war happens.
The looming threats of cyber attack are real and growing. Have your individual, personal Internet Disaster Recovery Plan ready and make it a priority — and prepare for the worst possible outcome—human annihilation.
Software tycoon John McAfee, wanted for questioning in the shooting death of his neighbor, has made his escape from Belize to Guatemala, where he told ABC News he will be seeking asylum.
“Thank God I am in a place where there is some sanity,” McAfee said. “I chose Guatemala carefully” …
[Now], all the misdirection may be coming to any end. Asked if he feels safe, McAfee told ABC News, “Oh, absolutely. I feel like I’ve come home.”
Go now to Guatemala for the holidays, journalist suckers.
Now, it’s important to underline that John McAfee, a pioneer in the anti-virus industry, has had nothing to do with the business since the 1990s.
One thing John McAfee remains, however, is a character …
But it would be ironic indeed if John McAfee, a man who was a leading light in the anti-virus industry 20-25 years ago, was located by the authorities because of sloppy IT security. [Cluley describes an iPhone snapped picture of McAfee that made news because it contained the ex-anti-virus king’s coordinates] The lesson that all of us should learn is to be very careful about what information a photograph might be secretly carrying within it regarding the when and where a picture was taken.
This wasn’t an easy article to write, as it involves someone who – although I never met him – I feel was an important element in the early years of my career in computer security.
From deep inna hart of WhiteManistan, worth 10,000 words.
Above, Cody Wilson, the now much publicized University of Texas student determined to make 3-D manufacturing plastic gun plans available to everyone via the Internet.
Defense Distributed has applied to the IRS to become a nonprofit 501(c)(3) that will focus on “charitable public interest publishing” – or distributing schematics of the weapons online for free. A new research and development limited liability company called Liberty Laboratories will manufacture and test the guns. A third company, the name of which Wilson would not provide, will manage the finances of the project as a private asset organization.
“[Wilson] met independently with ATF officials and even applied for another license, or ‘special occupation taxpayer,’ [for the manufacture of] more powerful weapons like machine guns,” continues the Guardian.
More recent news stories show at least the 3-D manufacturing publicity trip is honest. A YouTube video of an AR-15 — the lower bout of which is a 3-D plastic piece — falls apart in the hands of the shooter on the range after a few shots. (No link, Google)
“How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet?” Wilson’s company site asks, rather brainlessly, here.
We already know how the US government acts, despite loud protestations of UN conspiracies to take away all firearms by the National Rifle Association.
So it’s quite obvious Americans really do need home 3D printers and plans to make plastic guns because soon, really soon, all their boom sticks will be taken away.
And in central Africa everyone will access to the Internet and 3-D printing very shortly so all the despots better watch out! 3-D gun manufacturing, a revolution in, basically — nothing, is upon us.
“Based on the limited data that are comparable among nations, the U.S. income distribution appears to be among the most unequal of all major industrialized countries … Empirical analyses estimate that the United States is a comparatively immobile society,” it reads.
Obviously, we have offsetting benefits. Like a geek and supporters who will bring us a “redoubt” of 3-D plastic gun manufacturing.
Disruptive technology is giving us such innovation, progress and collective and individual empowerment to the trivial gadgeteers and extremists, it’s hard to know what’s next. God bless the USA.
John McAfee’s goose is now well and truly cooked with the media. Few trust what he writes or says and the consensus opinion, although not always flatly stated, is he’s a drug addict despite regular denials. The media in the US realizes the truth is impossible to get from him since so much of his life has been devoted to unusual media deceptions.
In this, McAfee resembles one part of very old hacker culture typified by those who got some of their kicks through a kind of malicious and reflexive horse-shitting and ranking on acquaintances.
Eventually, it always backfired. And so it has for the ex-anti-virus tycoon.
Before he went underground, Mr. McAfee led a noisy, opulent and increasingly stressful life here [in Belize]. He was known for the retinue of prostitutes who he says moved in and out of his house …
Some McAfee watchers have a different theory — namely, that he grew paranoid and perhaps psychotic after months of experimenting with and consuming MDPV, a psychoactive drug. These experiments were described in detail by Mr. McAfee himself, under the pseudonym “Stuffmonger??? in a forum on Bluelight, a Web site popular with drug hobbyists.
So, here’s one hypothesis: Rich man doses himself to madness while seeking sexual bliss through pharmacology. Then shoots neighbor in a rage. Case closed, right? Ah, but those Bluelight posts were a ruse, Mr. McAfee would later blog …
Throughout his varied, occasionally confounding and hoax-filled career, the one constant has been a genius for self-promotion.
Mr. McAfee bought this [Belize] property four years ago and, like much else about him, the reasons for his relocation, and what he was doing here, are a bit murky.
What is certain is that he bought a water taxi service and started a couple of small local businesses. The most ambitious was QuorumEx, a biotech start-up that aspired to develop natural antibiotics with plants in the Belizean rain forest …
The idea for the company made a certain sense: a guy who had spent years fighting computer viruses turns his attention and talents to combating bacteria. [Actually, it makes no sense. The two have nothing in common. I learned bacteriology as an avocation, about computer viruses as coincidental accident. And there’s no connection in which knowledge about one leads to knowledge about the other.]
Whether these Bluelight posts [by the anti-virus tycoon on ‘bath salts’ use] were just a charade, as Mr. McAfee contends, is impossible to say. But Dr. Paul Earley, an addiction specialist in Atlanta, said that MDPV users commonly rhapsodize about their early experiences, claiming the drug makes them alert, activated and in some cases fantastically randy.
“That’s part of the danger,??? Dr. Earley said. “The absence of any apparent side effects lures users into heavier and heavier doses and at some point, for reasons we don’t fully understand, MDPV becomes extremely toxic. Users become psychotic and paranoid. They hallucinate monsters. Often they think the police are after them. That is the classic MDPV profile.???
In 1992, the same year [McAfee Associates] had gone public, he began hyping the threat of a virus called Michelangelo, contending in television and newspaper interviews that it would waylay millions of computers.
The scare came and went with little notable impact, other than the one it had on the balance sheet of the company (very positive) and the reputation of Mr. McAfee (very negative).
Read all of it. If there’s a way to write something more damning and which, essentially, has the ring of truth, I don’t know it. By the end of the piece it’s clear David Segal, the Times reporter, has had all he can stand of the legend.
Again, McAfee is tied to drug runners, addiction, seedy bribery and a taste for young prostitutes. His blog, although occasionally amusing, instead of revealing any compelling counter-story has been a public relations disaster.
There may be a book in the shabby crack-up of John McAfee’s life but it won’t be successfully done by an amateur and peddled as an R. Crumb-like graphic novel. There’s no new Hemingway or Hunter Thompson in the pipeline, no Fear and Loathing in Ambergris Caye.
McAfee explained that infectious bacteria become dangerous only when they multiply to a certain concentration, at which point, thanks to a process called “quorum sensing,” they collectively shift to a pathogenic mode. The signal that modulates this response is a certain chemical pheromone — if a drug can block its action, the bacteria will never become dangerous. And because no bacteria are killed, the accelerated evolution that results in antibiotic resistance never occurs.
Yes, all bacteria are good little pups until they agree, in a big group, not to be. Quite.
While the reporter isn’t quite up enough on science to immediately call bullshit, he does get at it another way in looking at the man’s history and ways prior to his arrival in Belize.
Back at the end of 2010 I enumerated a year end list — the biggest threats to the nation’s security. They were all internal and that old list is here.
All the threats still exist. But number 4 on the list — the Republican Party — has climbed to the top. And that is because since December 2010, the stakes have become higher, the disasters greater. Even less has been done.
At the time:
The Republican Party is a threat to security. And not solely because of its descent into right-wing extremism …
As the party that denies science, one that will put people in committee chairmanships overseeing science and technology issues in the House who are basically opposed to science whenever it contradicts their political views, the GOP poses a threat to America’s future.
You can’t have a forward-looking and capable nation with people in power who truly believe global warming and evolution are hoaxes.
During the past election, global warming was a third rail issue. The President would not speak of it.
In fact, about the only thing he would talk about with any connection to it was how avid a developer of fossil fuels he would be. And Mitt Romney made a joke of global warming it at the Republican National Convention.
And then came Sandy, a storm so violent it delivered notice that in the future there would be more of the same.
The nation’s lifelines — its roads, airports, railways and transit systems — are getting hammered by extreme weather beyond what their builders imagined, leaving states and cities searching for ways to brace for more catastrophes like Superstorm Sandy.
Even as they prepare for a new normal of intense rain, historic floods and record heat waves, some transportation planners find it too politically sensitive to say aloud the source of their weather worries: climate change.
Political differences are on the minds of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, whose advice on the design and maintenance of roads and bridges is closely followed by states. The association recently changed the name of its Climate Change Steering Committee to the less controversial Sustainable Transportation, Energy Infrastructure and Climate Solutions Steering Committee.
Still, there is a recognition that the association’s guidance will need to be updated to reflect the new realities of global warming.
In the immediate future, global warming is going to cost life. It means the continuing destruction of infrastructure on a national scale. We can only cope with it.
But at this time the gift of the Republican Party has made movement on the issue, except in sneaking inches by government agency, impossible. The GOP has successfully convinced almost half the nation to share in its dangerous know-nothing-ism, aided and abetted by reactionary mega-corporate interests, plutocrat money and the fossil fuel industries which choose to maintain a status quo at the expense of everyone else.
“[Several] climate scientists say sea level along New York and much of the Northeast is about a foot higher than a century ago, mostly because of man-made global warming, and that added significantly to the damage when Sandy hit,” wrote the AP.
Yet, “In conservative states, the term ‘climate change’ is often associated with left-leaning politics … Planning for weather extremes is hampered by reluctance among many officials to discuss anything labeled ‘climate change’ … The Obama administration has also shied away from talking publicly about adaptation to climate change. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s office refused to allow any department officials to be interviewed by The Associated Press …”
It is not a bipartisan issue. The Republican Party and its bankrollers are entirely responsible for paralyzing a national response to global warming and accurate assessment and preparation for catastrophic weather. Democratic politicians won’t address it because to speak of it immediately mobilizes millions of dollars against them in re-election campaigns, all furnished by the radical right.
If it were Switzerland, Luxembourg or Andorra perhaps this would not matter. But we are not those countries and it very obviously does matter.
And it should come as a source of great outrage to the American people that the Republican Party would appoint a science-denier, Lamar Smith of Texas, to chair that body’s science panel. One can look at it as purely a political step taken to help guarantee paralysis as a national response.
The paralysis also infiltrates security and mainstream pundits.
“The U.S. must meet challenges such as climate change … says Patrick Doherty,” reads the caption under a photo of wreckage.
“Climate change is already with us,” Doherty writes. “Superstorm Sandy, the Derecho, Arctic melting, and droughts in the Midwest, India, China, and Russia this past year confirm the scientifically proven trend.”
Nowhere in the piece does Doherty acknowledge the political obstacle, the Republican Party, which has made dealing with it, even in some small ways, virtually impossible.
In fact, Doherty points to a column from Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, as something which may carry good advice on meeting American challenges. His use is to imply how the US could mobilize business capital by, for example, giving a corporate tax break to America’s big multi-nationals. But the Blankfein column is more interesting for how anti-solving problems it is.
For the first time in several generations, it has become clear that abundant domestic energy resources are within our reach, and that we have the technology to responsibly and safely extract it. The government needs to work with the private sector to implement effective and far-reaching policies to develop these resources.
That’s what you call a gold-plated recommendation for expanded use and mining of fossil fuels. Call it the accelerate-and-exacerbate-global warming answer to the problem of climate change. Blankfein, of course, does not have to worry about this. When climate change turns the Manhattan neighborhood of Goldman Sachs into a skyscraper version of Stiltsville in the Biscayne Bay, he will be gone.
You also might not have noticed that we’re barreling toward a “world of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions.” Here in Washington, we’re too busy to pay attention to such trifles …
Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the legacy we pass along to future generations will be a parboiled planet.
But even Robinson can’t bring himself to write that it’s the GOP that has derailed the matter in the US.
To his credit he recommends the President do something:
And this is why President Obama should devote his next State of the Union address to climate change. He understands the science and knows the threat is real. Convincing the American people of this truth would be a great accomplishment …
The President has won re-election. There is no further political cost the GOP can extract from him. Telling the people about global warming in no uncertain terms is something he can do. Barack Obama can spell out who has blocked action, the very anti-science beliefs of the Republican Party, who supports them, and what the consequences have been at the federal and local level.
What was the Obama administration’s effort to battle climate change, or at least increase informed recognition of it, in the last year?
“Fueled by global warming, polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are now melting three times faster than they did in the 1990s, a new scientific study says,” reads a story, today, from the AP.
“Greenland is really taking off,??? National Snow and Ice Data Center scientist Ted Scambos told the news agency. Scambos is a a co-author of the paper referenced by the AP and published in the peer-reviewed journal, Science.
So if many in our country think that putting a modern Republican in power is a way to move the place forward, to help it deal with the very complex global problems with which it is currently faced, they’re one with entropy, which is the falling apart of everything, from order to disorder, until there is nothing left. That’s a tragedy and we should not delude ourselves that such actions, behaviors or opinions defend anything worthwhile.
Mr McAfee is on the run, fearful for his life and without a doubt in his mind Belize authorities are determined to kill him …
Belize police confirmed that authorities were searching for Mr McAfee but clarified that he was not a suspect at this time. On Wednesday police told the FT they had detained six people as part of the investigation including William Mulligan, 29, who is Mr McAfee’s bodyguard. He was arrested along with his wife, Stefanie, 22, and both have been charged with possession of arms and ammunition without a licence …
“Only last week, [McAfee] bought 40 stun guns and flashlights for the local police and yet he lives in fear of a police vendetta,??? [a local real estate agent told the FT]. “He is an extremely intense man – a tortured genius.???
From WhoisMcAfee, events continue:
Today [November 29], at 10:45 A.M, the GSU and the Coast Guard raided my property in San Pedro. They confiscated approximately $400,000 worth of property – cameras, computers, police gear purchased for donations (Note: I had donated tasers, pepper spray, to the SP Police department 4 weeks ago) and other items. They spent 3 hours ransacking every one of my buildings. This is the 8th search of my property since my disappearance. It is certain, in my mind that something or other was planted during this search. What it may be, I have no clue. This is the first time that they have openly taken items from me since the first raid in April of this year …
My a friends in the Police department have told me a wild tale. Barely believable, but it’s from multiple sources so I have to give it some credence.
Four weeks ago I donated about $100,000 worth of equipment to the San Pedro Police department.
Among the items donated were 40 or so brand new stun guns still in the box. Someone, at some point opened one of the boxes and inserted a bag of cocaine, and then resealed the box. Four weeks later, the box is opened and discovered. Among the items taken from my residence were close to 200 additional stun guns, still in the box, vallued at close to $80,000.
One of two things: the drugs were planted in order to give an excuse to confiscate more of my property (they have never returned any of my property confiscated during the April raid), or they intend to charge me with cocaine trafficking.
One may meditate on the revelation that John McAfee possessed 240 new stun guns, $80,000 worth, at a resort home. But this is a minor quibble.
Having issued a denial of a raid on McAfee’s property, the ex-anti-virus king has begun to post YouTube recording — audio only — of eye witness accounts of the raid, starting with the testimony of his girlfriend’s father.
“You are, by and large a kind and supportive group of readers,” McAfee writes. “From your comments, many of you are brilliant and talented. Many of you occupy positions of importance. All of you have hearts, and your loves and hopes, your dreams and ambitions, fears and attachments are the same as every occupant of this country who suffers under burdensome oppression [sic]. We are all of us, throughout the world, one people.”
My satellite snap from Google maps probably properly identified his Ambergris Caye villa in Belize.
It also discusses property in Molokai — which he is said to have never moved into — and a palace built in New Mexico. (Readers will remember his fabricated Molokai Island Times press pass.)
“[It is] in Belize that he or may not have lost his mind, killed his dogs, his neighbor, then gone on the lam … McAfee’s epic rise to fame and fortune is officially in free fall,” reads the piece.
Repeal Obamacare. Lower income tax rates and simplify the tax code. Cut Medicaid by a third and make it a state-controlled block-grant program. Overhaul Medicare by giving beneficiaries money to buy competing public and private health plans. Reduce non-entitlement spending to its lowest level since World War II.
Repeatedly labeled a flim-flam man by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. Rejected in the recent election. Making it almost impossible to satirize the United States in 2012.
Hilary Hinton “Zig??? Ziglar, 86, the man of a million motivational maxims who bucked up and cheered on three generations of Willy Lomans over a 40-year international speaking career, died near his home in Plano, Texas, Wednesday …
Mr. Ziglar’s peripatetic speaking career reached hundreds of thousands of salesmen, corporate executives, business owners and would-be entrepreneurs, many of whom issued Facebook tributes Wednesday as news of his passing spread.
As an important part of the corporate brainwashing industry, Ziglar was described by Barbara Ehrenreich, in Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America.
“[The message] of the featured speaker Zig Ziglar was — ‘It’s your own fault; don’t blame the boss, don’t blame the system — work harder and pray more.”
Ziglar occasionally merited mention in this blog because of his traveling carnivals in which big name speakers were and are paid handsomely to tell thousands of the desperate and gullible how to turn their lives around.
A sample from one such Powell speech, delivered to census workers who were thought to be laggards, by a supervisor, in 2010:
Never receive counsel from unproductive people.
Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how.
Not everyone has a right to speak into your life.
You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person.
Don’t follow anyone who’s not going anywhere.
With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it.
Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life.
Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships.
If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights.
Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided fully examined this inspirational brainwashing, of which Ziglar was a part, first taken from the standpoint of its role in the wellness industry. However, Ziglar-like thought, the equivalent of a pick-yourself-up grab bag of cheap-ass slogans, maxims and sermons, has been applied to everything in the American group belief that a certain Norman Vincent Peale-outlook in life must always be conveyed to become an accomplished and well-rounded person.
Ziglar was 86. And in case you’re still wondering why he was the topic of even minor posts at DD blog — well, he was one of the great contributors to our Culture of Lickspittle.
Specifically, Santorum, joined by Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), urged the Senate to reject the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities – a treaty negotiated during George W. Bush’s administration and ratified by 126 nations, including China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, and Syria.
The former presidential candidate pronounced “grave concerns” about the treaty, which forbids discrimination against people who have AIDS, are blind, use wheelchairs, and the like. “This is a direct assault on us,” he declared.
Lee, too, has “grave concerns” about the threat to U.S. sovereignty. “I will do everything I can to block its ratification …
To the demented Republican Party, the UN is always a looming menace to the country.
And I’ve never been able to figure out how anyone gloms onto the idea that an agency as demonstrably powerless as the UN could take the guns, or anything, off the nation that has the most powerful military in world history. It’s impossible to even approach trying to understand minds that believe such things. It’s a real chasm of mental, social and cultural division.
Nevertheless, here we are.
“He’ll be loyal to our land/There is hope for our nation, again … ,” they sang, months ago.
Ex-anti-virus king John McAfee is now making the rounds of internet radio, presumably to tell his lengthy story.
And who has he chosen?
The leader of the tin foil hat demographic, Alex Jones. And some guy who was a color commentator for Ultimate Fighting, from the looks of it, a steroidal goon slightly notorious for “choking out” people in video on YouTube.
No links.
With regards to being taken seriously, these were unhelpful choices. That’s my free advice for the day.
From deep inna hart of WhiteManistan, worth 10,000 words. 
