April 21, 2014

Whereas the National Geographic Channel’s web site seems to go out of its way to obscure the sequence of episodes, I have found a WikiPedia article Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey that lists the episodes in numerical order.

I am hoping that this list will enable me to break through the barrier of confusion of The NatGeo web site that is preventing me from finding out if there is an online video for the episode that I missed.

No, Charter Subscribers are still not allowed to watch the recent videos online, even though Charter carries The National Geographic Channel on its cable service.

April 9, 2014

I have discovered that you need to use a valid cable TV subscription to view the videos on the Web.

I have such a subscription with Charter Communications, but Charter is not one of the cable providers that NatGeoTV supports.

March 31, 2014

I have finally found the links to the episodes of Cosmos on the National Geographic web site.  I found that the first episode that I watched last week was episode 3.

So here is the list of episodes already aired.

The first episode will only be on the web site for the next 30 or so days, so you’d better look at it now.  I just watched this episode on my computer.  Watching it without commercial interruption is a blessing.

The upcoming episodes on the National Geographic Cable TV channel are shown in the next table.

I think the following table lists all the remaining episodes.

I have questions to think about after watching these episodes. I don’t see a good forum for talking about those questions on the web. Perhaps this post as echoed on my Facebook page will form that place for a few of us.

The UK Express has the story Malaysian plane: 20 passengers worked for ELECTRONIC WARFARE and MILITARY RADAR firm.

Freescale Semiconductor, which makes powerful microchips for industries including defence, released the powerful new products to the American market on March 3.

Five days later, Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people on board including 20 working for Freescale.

Twelve were from Malaysia, while eight were Chinese nationals.

This is not the most incendiary rendition of this story I could find, but it may be close.  Of course, if you go directly to the conspiracy theory websites, you’ll find even more breathless prose.

You can compare this telling of the story to the Austin, Texas Statesman story Freescale mum on new Malaysia Airlines reports.

Now, I wouldn’t even present this if Roger and João hadn’t goaded me  into it 🙂

Naked Capitalism has the post Cokie Roberts Picked a Fight With Alan Grayson on the TransPacific Partnership. Guess Who Won?  There are several links and commentary by Yves Smith in the post.

One of the links is to Alan Grayson’s rebuttal Cokie Roberts Attacks Us: This Is How DC Works. Warning: The links in the quote below take you to the page for contributing to Alan Grayson’s campaign.

Recently, ABC infohack Cokie Roberts, doyenne of the D.C. Establishment, attacked me in her nationally syndicated column. Why? Because I dared to speak the truth about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a so-called “free trade agreement” that has lobbyists and Washington insiders alike clamoring to stuff their pockets with corrupt corporate cash. And because I dared to speak the truth about “Fast Track,” legislation whose sole purpose is to cram TPP and other corporate rip-offs down our throats.

I am not sure the size of the trade deficit in and of itself is quite as big a problem as Grayson makes it, but that is really a minor quibble with what he has to say. The problems the trade deficit causes are certainly something to worry about.  Grayson explains them very well.

By the way, I have long since given up listening to Cokie Roberts and Steve Roberts.  Her penchant for ignoring truth in order to make her point became more than I could take.  Her husband, Steve, was a little less obvious in his biased approach to “reporting”.

New Economic Perspectives has the article MMT and Social Movements.  If you can get through the following excerpt, I ought to give you a bronze medal.  If you actually read the article, you get silver.  If you read the discussion in the comments, you get gold.  If you come away from this with the hint of an understanding of what this conversation is all about, you get platinum.  These rewards are all virtual and you are on the honor system in specifying the level of award you claim.

The Nature of Social Movements

Since relying upon the historicist political ideology is a core source of oppression, pausing to examine the actual dynamics of progressive social movements is worth their description. When I researched this process, for historical examples, for theoretical statements which seem to satisfy adequacy, applicability, validity, and reliability relative to my direct experience doing community organizing, the best summation I found was in “Beyond Revolution,” by Daniel A. Foss and Ralph Larkin (1986). The core statement they made was in a somewhat dense paragraph, found on page 143:

“The difference between a social movement and episodic dissidence is that it builds upon itself in a process of intensification, wherein the hegemonic (dominating) ideology (world view) is rendered problematic (challenged) by dissidents. This “reinterpretation of reality” provides the subjective basis for further- and more drastic- action. As social reality is reinterpreted in the struggle, movement participants attempt to reclaim those aspects of human subjectivity that have been alienated from themselves as part of their socialization to positions of social subordination. So long as these three aspects of a social movement are a mutually reinforcing totality – intensification of a conflict, reinterpretation of social reality, and the redefinition of the self and its capacities – a social movement is ongoing. Their fragmentation signals the point of the incipient decline has been reached, Such phenomena must be viewed as a whole, since there are often temporary defeats and retreats within the process of intensification of a social movement, as well as phases of overt conflict alternating with cultural (or subjective) intensification” from Foss and Larkin, Beyond Revolution (1986).

The most effective social movement of the 20th century at least in the US was the US Civil Rights movement. It is also offered as a historical model worth emulating, though its interpretation most often focuses upon the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr. The actual back-story closely fits Foss and Larkin’s description in “Beyond Revolution” of a social movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was himself a participant in training for community organizers that was offered by the Highlander Folk School, later known as the Highlander Research Center. The training offered there was led by Myles Horton and Septima Clark. Prior to the establishing of the national significance of the US Civil Rights movement the Highlander Folk school “trained” some 40,000 people who were distributed mostly across the southern states.

I claim at least gold and perhaps a tad of platinum for myself.

Here is a very interesting interview, 3-17-2014 Voice of Russia Interview with Field McConnell, that was buried in one of the links in my previous post Boeing wins patent on uninterruptible autopilot system.

OK, so now have I gone completely wacky to be following this trail and presenting it to you?

I know this sounds wacky, but I decided to Google it anyway.  Here are a few of the hits that I read or watched.

Something called Homeland Security Newswire had the article Emergency landing round-up: Boeing wins patent on uninterruptible autopilot system published 4 December 2006.

New technology can be activated by the pilots, government agencies, even on-board sensors; not even a tortured pilot can give up control; dedicated electrical circuits ensure the system’s total independence

The UK Daily Mail had the article New autopilot will make another 9/11 impossible published 3 March 2007.

The so-called ‘uninterruptible autopilot system’ – patented secretly by Boeing in the US last week – will connect ground controllers and security services with the aircraft using radio waves and global satellite positioning systems.

After it has been activated, the aircraft will be capable of remote digital control from the ground, enabling operators to fly it like a sophisticated model plane, manoeuvring it vertically and laterally.

A threatened airliner could be flown to a secure military base or a commercial airport, where it would touch down using existing landing aids known as ‘autoland function’.

After it had landed, the aircraft’s built-in autobrake would bring the plane safely to a halt on the runway.

Boeing insiders say the new anti-hijack kit could be fitted to airliners all over the world, including those in the UK, within the next three years.

Then I found the CNN report Remote Controlled Autopilot Boeing Patent.

So what’s wrong with these reports? Snopes has nothing to say about this.

If you keep looking you run across things like the story from Before It’s News MH370 $MultiBillion Patent Passengers: Pilot Warned About Crisis, Gagged, Speaks Out.  I guess the only thing to keep in mind is that Faux Noise makes up stories all the time that millions of people believe.  That doesn’t mean that this one is necessarily untrue.

Obviously we ought to check the US Patent Office to even see if there truly is such a patent.  7,142,971 System and method for automatically controlling a path of travel of a vehicle.

The method and system for automatically controlling a path of travel of a vehicle include engaging an automatic control system when the security of the onboard controls is jeopardized. Engagement may be automatic or manual from inside the vehicle or remotely via a communication link. Any onboard capability to supersede the automatic control system may then be disabled by disconnecting the onboard controls and/or providing uninterruptible power to the automatic control system via a path that does not include the onboard accessible power control element(s). The operation of the vehicle is then controlled via the processing element of the automatic control system. The control commands may be received from a remote location and/or from predetermined control commands that are stored onboard the vehicle.

Assignee: The Boeing Company (Chicago, IL) , Filed: February 19, 2003

2017/06/04

Disabled the link to the U.s. Patent office above because of suspected malware at the link.

I found the link to this video on Max Keiser: Financial War Reports blog in the article U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson: we should be applauding Russian action in Ukraine and Crimea…

Alan Grayson may be right, but this is sure to be fodder for his political opponents. You can tell from the comment by the person who made this video clip. I almost wish he had been a little more cautious in his words, but then that would not have been Alan Grayson.

One of the commenters posted a substantial excerpt from a 2002 article Big Oil and US Foreign Policy.

I don’t know anything of the provenance of these blogs, so there is no guarantee that goes along with any of this. Of course I will take the C-SPAN excerpt as reliable until proven otherwise.

There is the Reuters article I quoted in a previous post Exxon says pursuit of Ukraine Skifska block on hold that does corroborate some of the remarks about the oil.

Naked Capitalism has the article Bengt-Ake Lundvall: The Portuguese Manifesto Sends a Message to Europe’s Elite That Austerity Has Failed and “Project Europe” Must be Rethought.  I’ll leave you with the final words of the article.

Q: That means that a debt restructuring operation in Portugal is not sufficient, you need a Euro-wide initiative?

A: As I said in the beginning a debt restructuring could result in a shake-up of the current economic and political order. But what is needed is a radical rethinking of the relationships between economic integration on the one hand and political and social integration on the other hand. We would need European leaders who were honest on the fact that economic integration without political and social integration leads to growing inequality and to instability. One important signal could be to call for a time-out for economic integration while Europe starts to establish some elements of a common fiscal and social investment policy. It could begin with modest measures related to minimum income and unemployment support. European-wide programs aiming at upgrading the skills of the low skilled, labor market flexicurity and modern open education systems would send signals to all Europeans that Europe from now on would build it competitiveness on competence and not on low wages. Green investment plans would show that Europe takes into account also the survival of the coming generation.

Q: Is it politically feasible in the present European context?

A: As I see it, what appears to be feasible now brings us closer to the end of the European project. Therefore the only possible strategy is to ask for what seems to be out of reach. We know that history offers us surprises from time to time. Let us hope for a positive surprise.

Maybe there are some good ideas here for fixing what ails us in the U.S.

Here, I have saved you the trouble of looking up flexicurity.

PC World has the article Trial to proceed in Silicon Valley employee ‘no poaching’ case.

A lawsuit that accuses Google, Apple and other top Silicon Valley companies of driving down wages by agreeing not to hire each other’s workers can go to trial, a judge ruled on Friday.
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Some 64,000 technology workers could be affected by the suit, which was first filed in 2011 by five software engineers.

It’s not nice to fool software engineers.

Press TV has the story Flight 370 The CIA Hoax: Gordon Duff.

The CIA along with Joint military commands set up during the Global War on Terror, tracked Flight 370, monitoring it continually, monitoring the murder of its passengers, monitoring its landing, monitoring its refueling and know exactly where it is.
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Sources claim the plane landed on Diego Garcia, was refueled, dead passengers “disembarked” and was moved elsewhere?

Is this a better explanation than flying to the South Pole hidden from the world through multiple simultaneous failures of safety, communications, counter-hijacking and autopilot systems?

 If you decide you want to believe this story, then do not use Google to find out who Gordon Duff is.

On the other hand, you can read my previous post Conjecture On Where That Plane Really Is. No doubt, there are some who think I am as wacky as Gordon Duff.