The NSA Can Remotely Turn On Mobile Phones

Full Interview of Ed Snowden by NBC's Brian Williams

Federal regulations require cellphone makers to install GPS chips or other location technology in nearly all phones. The Federal Communications Commission required U.S. cellular providers to make at least 95% of the phones in their networks traceable by satellite (GPS chips send signals to satellites to track your location) or other technologies by the end of 2005. Federal law allows carriers to turn over data to law enforcement in 'emergencies' without subpoenas. Police often claim they need data immediately for an emergency and, therefore, don't have time to obtain a warrant. Law-enforcement's easy access to such data makes the systems easy to abuse. Carriers would like to have a system in place requiring agents to get warrants. Without such a requirement, there is little carriers can do to resist warrantless requests. Federal law says carriers may comply with such requests, and law-enforcement agencies have pressured them to maintain the tracking systems. [Source]

Can the NSA Remotely Turn On Mobile Phones?

May 30, 2014

Tom's Guide - Is it possible for the National Security Agency (NSA) to remotely power up a mobile phone and use it as a listening device? 

In an interview that aired last night (May 28), American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden told NBC's Brian Williams that the agency can.

"Can anyone turn it on remotely if it's off?" Williams asked Snowden, referring to the "burner" smartphone Williams used for travel to Russia. "Can they turn on apps? Did anyone know or care that I Googled the final score of the Rangers-Canadiens game last night because I was traveling here?"

"I would say yes to all of those," Snowden replied. "They can absolutely turn them on with the power turned off to the device."

Cellphone security experts are divided over whether that's true — and whether Snowden knew what he was talking about.

Snowden's revelation technically isn't new. In July 2013, a month after the first Snowden leaks appeared, a Washington Post article on the NSA's use of cellphone surveillance reported that the NSA had implemented such a program years earlier to aid American forces hunting insurgents in Iraq.

"By September 2004," the Post reported, "a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] troops called this 'The Find.'"

Those few lines set off a firestorm of controversy in the cellphone-security community as experts tried to figure out how it might be possible to turn on a powered-off smartphone. Snowden's comments in the NBC interview last night restarted the conversation.

As with most things, the issue is a bit more complicated than it sounds. Turning on a cellphone remotely would involve something called a baseband hack, and it's not simple to pull off.

"Snowden saw programs that were widely successful at getting intelligence from phones, but he doesn't understand the details," wrote Robert David Graham, founder of Atlanta security company Errata Security, in a blog response to the NBC interview.

"Yes, there may be a model of phone out there where the NSA was able to 'remotely turn it on' (probably because a baseband processor was never truly off)," Graham wrote. "But that doesn't mean that when you turn off your iPhone, the NSA can do anything with it."

Smartphones actually have two computers in them: a baseband processor (the "phone" part that deals with radio waves) and the operating-system processor, which runs iOS, Android or Windows Phone and controls apps and the rest of what you see on the phone's screen. When you use your phone, you're interacting with the operating system, not the baseband.

When you power your phone off, you're shutting down the operating system. But are you turning the baseband processor off as well?

Back in 2004, when the NSA allegedly first gained the ability to remotely turn on cellphones, the answer may have been yes. When some so-called "feature phones" were powered off, their baseband chips still communicated with cell towers operated by carriers such as AT&T or Verizon Wireless. Only when the batteries were removed from such phones did the baseband truly turn off.

So do today's smartphones — many of which, such as iPhones, have no removable batteries — also keep their basebands on when the handsets are powered down (not just in resting mode in a pocket)?

It's very unclear. Jonathan Zdziarski, a Boston-area independent security expert who specializes in retrieving information from iPhones, says that today's baseband chips may very well remain active even when a phone is powered down.

"The baseband has to be programmed to remain in a ready state while the device is powered off," Zdziarski told Tom's Guide. "I can't tell you with any certainty if that's how the iPhone baseband is programmed."

"The baseband could be programmed so, while the power source is connected, it stays in a ready mode," he said. "That seems to be at least a plausible assumption based on, and only based on, a number of other articles citing FBI and CIA and the agencies that have been able to locate these devices while they're turned off."

It's difficult to be certain whether a modern smartphone's baseband chip remains on in some capacity when the phone is switched off. Baseband chips are made by a handful of companies and run closed, proprietary code that few outsiders have access to.

It's also possible that even if baseband chips don't always stay on by default, the NSA may have found ways to push out tailored firmware updates to targeted cellphones to make sure the baseband chips do stay on for those particular handsets.

Rounding the basebands 

That brings us to the next question: If the baseband chip somehow stays on, could you contact it and command it to turn on the rest of the phone, including the smartphone operating system, so that the phone can be used as a listening device? Does the baseband chip have that capability?

Connecting to the baseband in the first place is not difficult. There are plenty of ways to trick a phone into connecting with a malicious tower instead of with a carrier's tower. The FBI has a tool for this called the Stingray; it's been common knowledge for years, and similar methods have been demonstrated at hacker conferences.

But once you're connected to the targeted phone, how do you gain control of the baseband processor?

"The code in baseband processors is crap," wrote Graham. "It's relatively easy to find vulnerabilities that can be used to take control of the baseband processor ... The code is so fragile it's hard not to find a bug in it."

Finding a bug in a baseband processor may only be a matter of time, but the NSA would need to find bugs in every single type of processor, and sometimes find new bugs when old ones get patched.

But even if you have control of the baseband, you still aren't into the operating system, which you would need to do in order to get really important information such as emails, contact lists, documents and more. Do the baseband processors have enough control over the operating-system processor to turn the phone on?

Dial 0 for Operating System 

Accessing a phone's operating system from its baseband "requires a whole new set of exploits, which sometimes won't work," wrote Graham.

He argued that it's safe to assume that most phones are safe from remote activation. The NSA may be looking for such vulnerabilities, but that doesn't mean it always has them.

Zdziarski takes a different stance.

"Based on what we know NSA's abilities are," he said, "they are probably putting their best people on trying to find exploits for [mobile phones] and I think it's entirely possible they could have exploited certain phones to this degree."

Zdziarski pointed out that all smartphones have a number of strong links between the baseband and the operating system, such as the federally mandated ability to make emergency calls. Even if a phone's access screen is locked by a PIN or password, it can still call 911.

"If the baseband is the master of that main processor, I'd think one way or another, it would have some type of control over being able to power up that processor," Zdziarksi told Tom's Guide.

It's possible that a means of accessing the operating system from the baseband is built right into the phone. The NSA has put "backdoors" — hidden exploits — into other products, so it's not unreasonable to assume something similar happens in a mobile phone. Zdziarski has come across many undocumented features buried in iPhones that seem to be designed to yield the phone's data.

The NSA also has an enormous budget, and it's been known to pay top dollar for zero-day (previously unknown) exploits on the black market.

"I'm not saying this is easy. Even if [NSA] had zero cooperation [from phone companies], I can see a process like this costing tens of millions of dollars," said Zdziarski. "But the NSA has tens of millions of dollars to spend."

Ultimately, all of this is speculation. Snowden might have read a document about baseband hacks that has not yet been released to the public. Several independent hackers and researchers have published research on hacking a baseband, but so far no one has issued a proof-of-concept hack for remotely turning a phone on by going through the baseband.

Malware, that's where
 

There is another possible explanation for the NSA's alleged ability to turn on depowered smartphones, but it is far less broad, and requires compromising a smartphone before you're able to remotely activate it.

A phone infected with malware, ideally during a brief period when spies have physical possession of the device — sometimes called an implant — could be made to turn on via remote command, or do a number of other things.
 

But as Graham points out, it doesn't seem that Snowden and Williams were talking about implants.

"The question was Brian Williams holding a phone asking what the NSA could do to it — in the future (power it on)," Graham wrote. "He wasn't asking what they'd done to it in the past (install an implant)."

Baby turn me on 

So how worried should you be that the NSA is turning your phone on? The answer is, unless you're a foreign spy or a very high-value target, probably not very much.

While the NSA does do some broad surveillance on all Americans, Snowden told Williams that most high-level smartphone hacks, including turning it on remotely, hacking the microphone or camera, or stealing data stored on it, are aimed at specific individuals.
 
"It's important to understand that these things are typically done on a targeted basis," Snowden told Williams. "It's only done when people go, 'This phone is suspicious. I think it's being held by a drug dealer. I think it's being used by a terrorist.'"

Public Union Membership Plummets Two Years After 2011 Wisconsin Law Gutted Collective Bargaining

Public union membership plummets two years after WI Act 10

"Looks like many Public Sector employees don't see the need for a union when you work for the government, which highlights the oxymoron of unionized employees in protected government service jobs." - Bob Meirkatze

July 17, 2013

   

Wisconsin Reporter – The conclusion is succinct.

“Wisconsin teacher unions currently have substantial resources from their members and have been an active force in Wisconsin state politics,” wrote the authors of the “How Strong Are U.S. Teachers Unions” report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an advocate for education reform.

“But recent legislation, which sharply erodes their collective bargaining rights, likely heralds an era of diminished strength for public unions in general, and teacher unions in particular in the Badger State.”

Act 10, which gutted collective bargaining for most of Wisconsin’s public unions, passed in 2011.

“I would say that they (Wisconsin’s public unions) don’t have much of a role unless they can reassert themselves and regain what is supposed to be the role of a union, which is to negotiate, you know, working conditions and pay and most other things for members,” said Philip Dine, author of “State of the Unions,” a 2008 book updated late last year to include, among other things, an analysis of Wisconsin’s collective bargaining reforms.

Two years after Act 10’s passage, public sector organized labor is reeling in the Badger State. For some unions, the effects of Act 10 may be fatal.

AFSCME Council 24’s dues-paying membership fell from about 5,900 security and safety employee members pre-Act 10 to 690 in the early months of this year – an 88 percent drop — according to information posted on the Facebook site of the Wisconsin Association for Correctional Law Enforcement and obtained by Wisconsin Reporter.

WACLE is in the midst of a vote to break away from AFSCME Council 24, also known as the Wisconsin State Employees Union, or WSEU.

WACLE President Brian Cunningham said the ballots will be counted Thursday, and organizers will know within days, if not hours, after the vote whether members have chosen to be represented by WACLE, WSEU or neither.

Cunningham provided Wisconsin Reporter a copy of the information WACLE placed on its website and said that they were internal WSEU membership numbers, but he would not say where he got them.

Wisconsin Reporter left messages — an email and two voicemails — with WSEU Executive Director Marty Beil over the past two days requesting comment and membership numbers. Beil did not respond.
In December, however, he told the Wisconsin State Journal that WSEU’s overall dues-paying membership had dropped from 22,000 pre-Act 10 to fewer than 10,000.

Among other things, Act 10 made paying union dues voluntary.

For $36 a month

Cunningham criticized AFSCME leadership, including Beil, for being overly combative and focusing on attacking Gov. Scott Walker while doing too little to help union members within the confines of the new law.

He cited, as something that could be negotiated with the state, securing a minimum age requirement of 21 for prison guards. “The reality is that if some of these things are not addressed, a staff member, a correctional officer, could be on the wrong end of some type of assaultive situation that could have been remedied by having some type of communication with management, by being able to work together,” he said.

While Cunningham said members initially showed strong support for continuing to pay membership dues voluntarily, over time they began wondering what they were getting for $36 a month.

That’s evident in the large drop-off in dues-paying membership, he said.

“AFSCME continues to push that this (attempt to start a new union) is just six angry guys,” Cunningham said. “And that just isn’t the case.”

The WACLE-WSEU dispute is among the more notable episodes stemming from Act 10.

But it’s clear that other unions also have taken a hit, and the dust hasn’t settled.

For one thing, the state Supreme Court has decided to consider a case arguing Act 10’s constitutionality, based on state law. But the court hasn’t heard the case.

A federal court, meanwhile, largely upheld the law via a separate lawsuit.

Total labor union membership, public and private sectors, dropped to 11.2 percent of Badger State workers last year, down from 13.3 percent in 2011, according to U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in April.

That’s a significant drop, but it reflects a broader national trend of declining union participation, ongoing for decades.

With private union membership also dropping, Dine said, “If you destroy the public sector you basically destroy the labor (movement) at this point.”

AFSCME’s decline in Wisconsin has been precipitous.

The U.S. Labor Department reports the membership of Wisconsin’s AFSCME Council 40 dropped from 31,730 to 2011 to 20,488 this year.

The decline for Council 48, which represents city and county workers in Milwaukee County, was even more dramatic — a 61-percent drop in membership over two years, from 9,043 members in 2011 to 3,498 now.

The teachers’ unions haven’t been spared.

The Wisconsin Education Association Council and American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin have considered merging, partially in response to Act 10. Incoming WEAC President Betsy Kippers did not respond to an email seeking comment this week and could not be reached by phone. Outgoing WEAC President Mary Bell told the Wisconsin State Journal in October that WEAC membership is down about 29 percent, from a pre-Act 10 level of about 98,000 members.

Dine said anti-union groups, including business organizations, have capitalized on declining union membership and a faltering economy – which puts financial pressure on taxpayers and local governments – to push forward plans to destroy the public unions.

He finds fault with the unions, too.

Dine argues that having a strong labor-union force in the United States correlates with a strong middle class.
Likewise, he said, weak support for labor unions correlates with a weaker middle class.

But labor unions have done far too little to persuade the public that unions are relevant and beneficial to society, not just to their own members.

Labor unions need to use their political power to make the case to the public, rather than emphasizing passing or overturning specific legislation or getting a particular politician elected, Dine said.

“If the public doesn’t care about the messenger, it’s not going to care about the message,” he said, adding, “If constituents don’t care, politicians aren’t going to care.”

Supreme Court to Decide If Public Employee Unions are Unconstitutional

“A core problem with public sector unionism is that it creates a uniquely powerful interest group. In theory, bureaucrats are supposed to work for and be accountable to the elected representatives of the people. But suppose those bureaucrats organize into large, well-funded, powerful unions that can tip election results. With very few and very unique exceptions, no workplace in which the employees elect the supervisors functions well for long… In effect, public sector unionism thus means that representatives of the union will often be on both sides of the collective bargaining table. On the one side, the de jure union leaders. On the other side, the bought and paid for politicians. No wonder public sector union wages and benefits are breaking the back of state budgets. They are bargaining with themselves rather than with an arms’-length opponent.” - Stephen Bainbridge

The Supreme Court Case That Could Clobber Public-Sector Unions

A "radical" argument to make the entire United States a right-to-work nation

January 21, 2014

The Atlantic - William Messenger of the National Right to Work Committee asked the Supreme Court today to hold that public employee unions are unconstitutional.

“This is—I'm just going to use the word here, it is a radical argument. It would radically restructure the way workplaces across this country are—are run,” Justice Elena Kagan said from the bench.

Since 1948, she pointed out, states have had the power to enact “right-to-work” laws that limit union power.

Was Messenger arguing that “a right-to-work law is constitutionally compelled?”

Messenger didn’t back off.

His clients, home-care providers paid by the state of Illinois with federal-state Medicaid funds, had started out arguing only that they were not “employees” for purposes of coverage by the Court’s previous labor precedents. (Though they get state paychecks, they are selected and supervised by the families they serve.) But after cert was granted, their lawyers, the NRTWC’s legal-defense fund, decided instead to go for the kill shot. They want the court to hold that permitting the unions to collect fees for representing non-members—the so-called “agency fee”—violates the First Amendment.

At least four members of the Court seemed ready to reach that “radical” result.

The fate of public employee unionism in the nation seemed, by the end of the argument, to lie in the hands of Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a series of decisions dating back to the 1950s, the Court has repeatedly said that states may, if they wish, allow private and public employers to make these contracts, and a number of states do. Their backers say they make workplace relations easier—the union brings employee concerns to the state, which addresses them in an efficient way. The contracts allow the unions to receive payment only for bargaining expenses. Other things unions do—backing candidates, lobbying legislatures, conducting high-impact litigation—are “non-chargeable” expenses, precisely because they might raise First Amendment “compelled-speech” concerns.

In this case, the state of Illinois in 2003 designated the home-care workers as state employees for the purpose of collective bargaining. The workers then held an official vote, and a majority voted to certify the Service Employees International Union as their “exclusive bargaining agent.”

Non-members, like the plaintiffs in this case, pay a fee that is a set annual “chargeable” percentage of union dues.   The rationale for the agency fees is that non-union employees benefit from the contracts unions negotiate, and thus would be “free riders” if the union could not charge them.  If unions cannot collect fees, soon employees would stop joining, and they would lose their ability to speak for workers.

Here’s a summary of that “free rider” argument:

What is distinctive . . . about the “free riders” who are nonunion members of the union's own bargaining unit is that in some respects they are free riders whom the law requires the union to carry-indeed, requires the union to go out of its way to benefit, even at the expense of its other interests. In the context of bargaining, a union must seek to further the interests of its nonmembers; it cannot, for example, negotiate particularly high wage increases for its members in exchange for accepting no increases for others. Thus, the free ridership (if it were left to be that) would be not incidental but calculated, not imposed by circumstances but mandated by government decree.

That defense was written by Justice Antonin Scalia in a 1991 case called Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Association. Much depends on whether he stands by those words today. 

The Court today is much more conservative than it was in 1991. Two years ago, in a case called Service Employees International Union v. Knox, the Court’s conservative majority sent a message to unions: You are a mistake; we will settle with you soon.  Knox called agency fees an “anomaly” under the First Amendment. It was a strong lure for lawsuits like this one.

The argument against public-sector agency fees is this: Since public employees work for government, everything they bargain about is political. Higher wages, better benefits, new work rules—all affect the state budget. Assessing fees from non-members thus requires them to pay for political speech.

All the expenses, in other words, are non-chargeable.

Scalia appeared skeptical of that argument, but it went over with three of the other four conservatives. (Justice Clarence Thomas, as usual, said nothing.) In essence, the three conservatives seemed to think that everything in government is completely corrupt and unions are just a part of the statist conspiracy—a special interest in league with big-government Democrats. 

Justice Alito, the author of Knox, took point Wednesday:

“Governor Blagojevich got a huge campaign contribution from the union and virtually as soon as he got into office he took out his pen and signed an executive order that had the effect of putting, what was it, $3.6 million into the union coffers?”

Verilli responded that after Blagojevich’s order, a bipartisan majority in the legislature had ratified the decision to classify the home care providers as state employees eligible to unionize.

Alito next argued that union members may not want all these supposed benefits:

“Now, what do you say to the young employee who is not very much concerned at this point about pensions, but realizes there's a certain pot of money, and it's either going to go for pensions or it's going to go for salary at the present time[?]”

Paul Smith, representing the union, noted that the workers had gotten hefty raises since voting to form a union. Alito scoffed.

“The State can say, this is how much these people are being paid, it's not enough, we want to increase it, we want to increase it by 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, whatever it is.  . . .  Why do they need to have the union intervene here?”

Chief Justice John Roberts seemed obsessed with the idea that this case concerns “Medicaid reimbursement rates.”  (It doesn’t; the home-care providers are paid in part with Medicaid funds, but are hourly employees who get regular paychecks from the state, unlike doctors or other professionals, who get reimbursement from programs like Medicare and Medicaid.) For him, Medicaid has been hijacked by the nanny state—in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, he wrote that Medicaid “is no longer a program to care for the neediest among us, but rather an element of a comprehensive national plan to provide universal health insurance coverage.”

Now he asked Verilli, “if the union wants to talk about Medicaid rates with the State because they would get a higher wage or could get a higher wage if Medicaid reimbursement was higher, is that within the -- their functioning as a union rather than a political group?” Verilli said that it would almost certainly not be.

Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that public-employee unions are bad because they deal with government.

“Suppose the young person thinks that the State is squandering his heritage on unnecessary and excessive payments or benefits and wages. Is that not a political belief of the highest order?...  [Y]our position is that the public employees must surrender a substantial amount of First Amendment rights to work for the government?”

Smith gamely pointed out that the Roberts Court has repeatedly held exactly that—for example, in a case called Garcetti v. Ceballos, where Justice Kennedy himself wrote that a “government entity has broader discretion to restrict speech when it acts in its role as employer” and when the speech being limited has the potential to “affect the entity’s operations”—a definition collective bargaining neatly fits.

The four Democratic appointees tried to keep the Court’s attention fixed on a long line of precedent.

“You're asking us to overturn a case that's been the law for 35 years,” Justice Stephen Breyer told Messenger. “I guess there are millions of instances in which employees and employers and others have relied on it in collective bargaining.”

He suggested that NRTWC wants the Court either to (1) hold that public employees cannot have unions or (2) that their unions can exist but can’t bargain about wages and benefits. There was a third possibility: “The courts of the United States are going to fashion, using the First Amendment as their weapon, a new special labor law for government employees.”

Messenger seemed indifferent to which of the three the Court picked. And he made it clear that he would be back soon with a case asking the court to invalidate “exclusive bargaining agent” contracts.

But millions of public employees will be watching this case closely.  Their collective-bargaining rights are hanging by a thread.

The problem is that public unions hold elected officials hostage to their demands via campaign money to get reelected. Even FDR realized that created a serious conflict of interest. The only reason public employees were allowed to unionize was because the politicians realized that the unions represented an easy way to get votes. I have no problem with private sector unions.

Public Unions Must Go (Excerpt)

Public Sector unions spend millions of dollars to elect Democrats who then in turn ‘collectively bargain’ with them for wage increases and benefits. It’s not the politicians’ money so they don’t care how they spend it nor do they care that creating the unsustainable benefits of public unions will directly harm taxpayers and residents of any given state.

February 23, 2011

National Review - Public unions have been a 50-year mistake.

Government unions are not the same thing as private-sector unions.

Traditional, private-sector unions were born out of an often-bloody adversarial relationship between labor and management. It’s been said that during World War I, U.S. soldiers had better odds of surviving on the front lines than miners did in West Virginia coal mines. Mine disasters were frequent; hazardous conditions were the norm. In 1907, the Monongah mine explosion claimed the lives of 362 West Virginia miners. Day-to-day life often resembled serfdom, with management controlling vast swaths of the miners’ lives. Before unionization and many New Deal–era reforms, Washington had little power to reform conditions by legislation.

Government unions have no such narrative on their side. Do you recall the Great DMV Cave-in of 1959? How about the travails of second-grade teachers recounted in Upton Sinclair’s famous schoolhouse sequel to The Jungle? No? Don’t feel bad, because no such horror stories exist.

Government workers were making good salaries in 1962 when President Kennedy lifted, by executive order (so much for democracy), the federal ban on government unions. Civil-service regulations and similar laws had guaranteed good working conditions for generations.

The argument for public unionization wasn’t moral, economic, or intellectual. It was rankly political.

Traditional organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic party, was beginning to lose ground. As Daniel DiSalvo wrote in “The Trouble with Public Sector Unions,” in the fall issue of National Affairs, JFK saw how in states such as New York and Wisconsin, where public unions were already in place, local liberal pols benefited politically and financially. He took the idea national.

The plan worked perfectly — too perfectly. Public-union membership skyrocketed, and government-union support for the party of government skyrocketed with it. From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME — the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees — gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5 percent going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government. Which is why, as the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga has been chronicling for years, public unions are the country’s foremost advocates for increased taxes at all levels of government.

And this gets to the real insidiousness of government unions. Wisconsin labor officials fairly note that they’ve acceded to many of their governor’s specific demands — that workers contribute to their pensions and health-care costs, for example. But they don’t want to lose the right to collective bargaining.

But that is exactly what they need to lose.

Private-sector unions fight with management over an equitable distribution of profits. Government unions negotiate with friendly politicians over taxpayer money, putting the public interest at odds with union interests, and, as we’ve seen in states such as California and Wisconsin, exploding the cost of government. California’s pension costs soared 2,000 percent in a decade thanks to the unions.

The labor-politician negotiations can’t be fair when the unions can put so much money into campaign spending. Victor Gotbaum, a leader in the New York City chapter of AFSCME, summed up the problem in 1975 when he boasted, “We have the ability, in a sense, to elect our own boss.”

This is why FDR believed that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” and why even George Meany, the first head of the AFL-CIO, held that it was “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”

As it turns out, it’s not impossible; it’s just terribly unwise. It creates a dysfunctional system where for some, growing government becomes its own reward. You can find evidence of this dysfunction everywhere. The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner notes that federal education spending has risen by 188 percent in real terms since 1970, but we’ve seen no significant improvement in test scores.

The unions and the protesters in Wisconsin see Walker’s reforms as a potential death knell for government unions. My response? If only.

Putin Calls Monsanto a Terrorist Organization

Is Putin Right to Call Monsanto a Terrorist Organization and Ban GMOs?

May 25, 2014

The Motley Fool - Russia has high hopes for organic farming -- maybe a little too high. 

Sometime before wrestling bears and after hunting tigers, Russian President Vladimir Putin found a few minutes to denounce the use of genetically modified crops (again).  

While Russia was widely believed to allow the use of biotech crops shortly after joining the World Trade Organization, the country believes it has found a way to remain GMO-free without violating its obligations as a member nation.

A new bill introduced to the Russian parliament would treat producers of biotech crops from companies such as Monsanto (NYSE: MON ), The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE: DOW ), and Syngenta (NYSE: SYT ) as criminals -- with fines comparable to terrorism.

As co-author of the bill Kirill Cherkasov told RT:

When a terrorist act is committed, only several people are usually hurt. But GMOs may hurt dozens and hundreds. The consequences are much worse. And punishment should be proportionate to the crime.

If the proposed bill becomes law, punishment could range from 15 years to life. That seems a bit harsh to me and, when coupled with numerous anti-science quotes and ideologies from the bill and its supporters, I just don't see how a policy could be sustainable scientifically or economically (what Russia really cares about) speaking. Additionally, most crops grown in Russia today (wheat, barley, sunflower, oats, potatoes) don't have GM varieties. That's good news for Monsanto and Syngenta shareholders, but Russia claims that it can grow enough organic food to never need biotech crops. Are those bold claims actually true?

Can Russia farm without engineered crops?

Russia is free to ban biotech crops, but it should do so with more accurately worded proposals. I'd start by scrapping the proposed bill or amending it to a point where it is generally unrecognizable from its initial submission. Then, Russia should insert language that speaks to (1) its concerns that GMOs are not sufficiently tested and (2) its belief that organic farming practices can sustain the country on their own.

After doing that, Russia must come to grips with reality.

Despite being nearly twice as large as the United States, Russia has substantially less arable land, irrigated land, and land dedicated to permanent crops. Consider the following land area comparison between Russia and the United States:

	Russia	United States
Total Land (sq. km)	17,098,242	9,826,675
Arable Land (sq. km)	1,215,685	1,600,765
Irrigated Land (sq. km)	43,460	266,440
Permanent Crops (sq. km)	17,098	25,549

2013 figures. Source: CIA World Factbook.

The United States is simply more efficient with its land and enjoys better geography than Russia, which suffers from a lack of proper soils and climates (too cold or too dry) for productive agriculture despite its size. Russian farmland is also threatened by "soil contamination from improper application of agricultural chemicals, groundwater contamination from toxic waste, and abandoned stocks of obsolete pesticides," according to the CIA World Factbook. Sounds pretty organic to me.

Russia intends to feed Europe with the majority of its organic food needs within the next decade, but it's far from being a global organic powerhouse. A recent Bloomberg analysis of 165 countries ranked by organic farmland failed to place the country in the top 20. That means Russia ranks behind the Czech Republic, Greece, and all eight (yes, eight) farmers and ranchers in Falkland Islands when it comes to organic farmland for raising livestock or cultivating crops. Indeed, a 2011 report from the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements estimated the value of Russia's organic products at only $60 million-$80 million.

Additionally, Russia simply doesn't support its farmers as well as its European counterparts. While traditional farming is subsidized to the tune of $410-$545 per hectare in the European Union, organic farming captures federal support of nearly $1,230 per hectare. The Russian Ministry of Agriculture offers domestic farmers just $200 per hectare for producing organic foods. Subsidies may be relative to the economics of each country, but Russia isn't doing much to compete with European organic farmers.

While the United States smoking Russia in terms of agricultural efficiency is bad enough, it gets worse when you consider that the Russian economy is substantially more reliant on agriculture. Consider the following economic comparison between Russia and the United States:

	Russia	United States
GDP	$2.553 trillion	$16.72 trillion
GDP From Agriculture	$110 billion	$180 billion
Total Labor Force	75.29 million people	155.4 million people
Labor Force Dedicated to Agriculture	7.3 million	1.09 million

2013 figures. Source: CIA World Factbook.

How is the United States so efficient with its agricultural land? There's strong support for farmers through various government policies, and there has been strong and constant investment in next-generation technologies. Like it or not, some of those next-generation technologies include biotech crops, which alone accounted for 0.9% of American GDP in 2012.

Russia will regret banning biotech crops

Putin and other political leaders can say whatever they want about the atrocities of biotech crops sold by Monsanto and Syngenta, but a quick investigation into the economics doesn't support claims that organic food is ready to supply the nation's food, not to mention the food for other countries. There may very well be a European market for Russia's future organic food products, but it's difficult to imagine the Russian economy enjoying much of a boost from organic farming anytime soon, if ever, given its dire state today.

At a time when Russia should be investing heavily in next-generation agricultural technologies such as biotech crops to catch up to leading nations, it seems to be taking a step backwards with old-world beliefs. I don't see agricultural policies in Russia having much, if any, material effect on biotech seed producers. Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dow Chemical shareholders have no reason to worry about Putin.

Google Glasses: Do We Want to Live in a World Where People Can Wear Devices on Their Faces That Can Record Anything at Anytime?

The Google Glass Culture War Meets Its Waterloo

May 25, 2014

The Wire - In perhaps the lamest page from our "the way we live now" handbook, Feast—a restaurant whose $24 squid ink pappardelle symbolizes what befell New York's once rough-and-tumble East Village—has become a flashpoint in the Google Glass battle.

At issue here is one key idea: Do we want to live in a world where people can wear devices on their faces that can record anything at anytime? As EVGrieve reports, when one woman was asked by Feast's management to remove her Google Glass and refused, things got heated quickly. The woman, Katy Kasmai, wrote an account of her travails on Google+ (it has since been seen 1.7 million times):

For the first time ever this place, Feast, in #NYC just asked that I remove +Google Glass because customers have complained of privacy concerns in the past. Never has happened to me before in the one year I've had Glass. I left. #throughglass Feast

Then came the cascade of negative reviews of Feast on Google+, which as it's been pointed out, is the very first search result for the restaurant.  Many of the reviewers mentioned absolutely nothing about the food and/or submitted reviews from far away, mostly deriding the restaurant for its Google Glass policy.

But as the negative reviews came tumbling in, they were counterbalanced by a spate of positive reviews, not only on Google+, but also on Yelp.

At play here are several components of our digital struggle. There's the already arbitrary and deleterious impact of online reviews on a business (that may or may not deserve it) mixed with an ideological schism over the extent to which we're entitled to privacy and whether wearable technology like Google Glass violates that privacy. 
 

As we noted earlier this year, Google laid out an etiquette guide for its Glass "explorers" to follow, specifically requesting that Glass users not be "Glassholes" by being "creepy" or "rude." Of course, there's nothing binding about that and stories of Google Glass wearers suffering assaults (but not thefts) speak to a broader discomfort with regard to the technology.

This kerfuffle doesn't seem all that different than businesses like Hot Bird, a bar in Brooklyn that recently banned babies and young children. While safety factored into the bar's decision, so did the wishes of the clientele. This was the same rationale given by Feast in explaining why it asked the Glass user to remove her device. Businesses thrive or die based on the wishes of its customers. Until attitudes change, restaurants like Feast will probably keep asking customers to stop making other customers uncomfortable, whether it's Google Glass, being too drunk, or actually ordering the beet ravioli.

As Google Glass becomes more ubiquitous, we should expect more fights like this to erupt. And then, once we all have our Google Glass, this whole chapter will probably just become an old image of ourselves that was taken when we hoped no one was recording.

Ben Carson Says Incompetent Government Cannot Manage Its Citizens' Health Care

Ben Carson Calls Veterans Affairs Scandal A 'Gift From God'

May 25, 2014

The Huffington Post - Dr. Ben Carson views the scandal over delayed treatments at the Department of Veterans Affairs as a "gift from God" meant to draw attention to what he sees as an incompetent government that cannot manage its citizens' health care.

“I think what’s happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider,” the Fox News contributor said Saturday. “And if we can’t get it right, with the relatively small number of veterans, how in the world with are you going to do it with the entire population?”

Carson argued that the VA scandal is just the latest example of a failed government program, comparing it to Obamacare.

“We need seriousness here rather than just political speak," he said. "‘How can I look better? How can my party look better?’ And I’m saying this to both Democrats and Republicans: Stop, and think about the people.”

Iran’s Supreme Leader "All But Said" That Negotiations Over the Country’s Nuclear Program are Over and Iran's Ideals Include Destroying America

Iran’s Supreme Leader: Jihad Will Continue Until America is No More

May 25, 2014

The Daily Caller - Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, all but said on Sunday that negotiations over the country’s illicit nuclear program are over and that the Islamic Republic’s ideals include destroying America.

“Those (Iranians) who want to promote negotiation and surrender to the oppressors and blame the Islamic Republic as a warmonger in reality commit treason,” Khamenei told a meeting of members of parliament, according to the regime’s Fars News Agency.

Khamenei emphasized that without a combative mindset, the regime cannot reach its higher Islamic role against the “oppressors’ front.”

“The reason for continuation of this battle is not the warmongering of the Islamic Republic. Logic and reason command that for Iran, in order to pass through a region full of pirates, needs to arm itself and must have the capability to defend itself,” he said.

“Today’s world is full of thieves and plunderers of human honor, dignity and morality who are equipped with knowledge, wealth and power, and under the pretence of humanity easily commit crimes and betray human ideals and start wars in different parts of the world.”

In response to a question by a parliamentarian on how long this battle will continue, Khamenei said,“Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist. … This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws on human mind, body and thought. … This requires a difficult and lengthy struggle and need for great strides.”

Khamenei cited the scientific advancement of the country. “The accelerated scientific advancement of the last 12 years cannot stop under any circumstances,” he said, referring to the strides the regime has made toward becoming a nuclear power.

As reported on May 19 on The Daily Caller, Iran has put up new roadblocks to reaching a deal with the P5+1 world powers over its illicit nuclear program. The powers are the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany.

Three days of negotiations in the fourth round of Geneva meetings ended recently without concrete results when the Iranian team presented the country’s new “red lines” — diminishing any hope by the Obama administration to claim victory in its approach to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, according to reports from Iran.

The Obama administration had hoped that with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif showing an eagerness to solve the nuclear issue and address the West’s concerns, there would be a possibility for a negotiated solution. An interim agreement penned last November in Geneva was touted as a “historic nuclear deal.”

Under that agreement, Iran, in return for billions of dollars in sanctions relief, limited its enrichment activity to the 5 percent level with a current stockpile of over 10 tons (enough for six nuclear bombs), converted much of its 20 percent enriched stock to harmless oxide and agreed to allow more intrusive inspections of its nuclear plants by the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspections were limited to only agreed-upon facilities.

The Iranian delegation last week presented new red lines that could not be crossed, including the expansion of the country’s research and development for its nuclear program, the need of the country to continue enrichment, and the fact that the country’s ballistic missile program — despite U.N. sanctions — is not up for negotiation.

At the same time, IAEA officials met again with their Iranian counterparts last week in Tehran to discuss information on the work on detonators and needed collaboration by the regime to clear outstanding issues on its nuclear program as part of seven transparency steps Iran had agreed to fulfill by May 15, which has yet to take place.

17 States Cut COLAs for Public Pensions

States cut COLAs for public pensions

May 22, 2014

Market Watch - One of the more surprising responses of public plan sponsors to the financial crisis and the ensuing recession was their reduction, suspension, or elimination of cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) for current workers and, in a number of cases, current retirees. The response was surprising because it has often been assumed that public plan participants have greater benefit protections than their private sector counterparts.

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA), which governs private pensions, protects accrued benefits but allows employers to change the terms going forward. In contrast, most states have legal provisions that constrain sponsors’ ability to make changes to future benefits for current workers. Yet they were able to change the COLA for current workers and often for people already receiving it.

Between 2010 and 2013, seventeen states (with a total of 30 plans) enacted legislation that reduced, suspended, or eliminated COLAs for current workers and often for current retirees. 

The cuts fell into three groups:

1. Three states with seriously underfunded plans – New Jersey, Rhode Island and Oklahoma – essentially eliminated the COLA for the foreseeable future.
2. Eight states that provided a guaranteed fixed percentage increase each year regardless of inflation – Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Ohio and South Dakota –  either reduced or temporarily suspended the guarantee or shifted to a Consumer Price Index (CPI)-linked COLA.
3. Six states with CPI-linked COLAs – Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming – made changes, mainly by reducing minimum or maximum adjustments or linking COLAs to the plan’s funded status or the participant’s benefit level.

Four states that cut their COLA – Colorado, Illinois, Maine, and Ohio – have plans where workers are not covered by Social Security. If inflation rises to 3% or 4%, participants in all four states will see the real value of their entire retirement income erode.

Of the 17 states that changed their COLA, 12 have been challenged in court. The courts have ruled in nine states and in all but one case have upheld the cut. The Rhode Island proposals to cut the COLA withstood the mediation process with only minor changes but police union members subsequently rejected the mediation agreement. The table below summarizes the status of these suits.  Suits have been filed in Illinois and Oregon, but no decisions have been reached.

The main rationale for allowing the COLA cut is that COLAs are not considered to be a contractual right. For example, in Colorado, where the decision is currently under appeal, the judge found that the plaintiffs had no vested contract right to a specific COLA amount for life without change and that the plaintiffs could have no reasonable expectation to a specific COLA amount for life, given that the General Assembly changed the COLA formula numerous times over the past 40 years. In Minnesota, the judge ruled both that the COLA was not a protected core benefit and that the COLA modification was necessary to prevent the long-term fiscal deterioration of the pension plan.

The courts clearly view COLAs very differently than core benefits. At this point, the legal hurdles to cutting COLAs appear to be quite low.

U.S. Student Loans Total $1.1 Trillion

The GI Bill led to the mass-marketing of higher education. In the decades that followed, politicians (at the behest of various activist groups, businesses and constituencies) plowed enormous amounts of easy money into the higher ed system. It came to be a virtual entitlement to the middle class. (Gloss over for the moment the problem of mistaking the markers of middle-classness for it’s causes). Higher ed is good! So more money! Nobody wanted be the meanie bear who cuts spending for aid to college students. So you have a situation where huge amounts of easy money are available for the purchase of a good, and relatively little of the cost is being borne by the purchaser of said good at the time of the sale. This is a recipe for rampant price inflation in ANY market. The prices skyrocket, which is used as justification for more easy money in order to make it more “affordable.” This easy money pushes prices up again. Rinse, repeat. It’s not unlike what happened in the housing market.

See College Costs Have Tripled Since 1980, and are Going Higher, Even as Wages for the Middle Class Have Stagnated

US Treasury sounds alarm over student loans

April 29, 2014

AFP - At least 40 million people have taken out a student loan, Raskin said, and by the time students graduate, the average amount of loans is $30,000, and they will spend ten years or more repaying.

And many never manage to repay them at all, Raskin said during a speech at the University of Maryland.

"While delinquency rates on many other types of debt have fallen in recent years, delinquencies on student loan debt are rising," said the Treasury Department number two, noting that some seven million Americans had defaulted on their student loans.

At the end of 2013, the total amount of US student loans approached $1.1 trillion, well above the total amount of credit card debt in the country.

And the percentage of students graduating with debt is on the rise -- 60 percent of graduates in 2012, compared to just 30 percent in 1993.

"These numbers are daunting; to what extent should we be concerned?" Raskin asked, emphasizing that such figures could have an impact on the rate of economic growth in the country.

Late payments and defaulting on student loans could later hinder the borrower from being able to get other loans, including mortgages and car loans.

And sometimes, she said, defaulting on a student loan could hinder a candidate from getting a job, because employers often check credit history and consider past problems to be a sign of irresponsibility.

The large majority of student loans in the United States are financed by the federal government, but distributed by agents or private banks.

Raskin, who left the Federal Reserve to join the Treasury Department last month, called on these lenders to make it easier to modify payment plans for borrowers who find themselves struggling to meet their obligations.

Michigan Delegates That It is Legal for Local Governments to Create and Enforce Ordinances Banning Farm Animals from Residential Zones

Michigan Bans Animals On Small Farms?

Governments could ban goats, chickens and even bee hives on properties where there are 13 homes within an eighth of a mile of a livestock property or another home within 250 feet of the property, under the Commission’s ruling. Eighty percent or more of the state lives in non-rural, non-agricultural zoned areas. What was NOT stated at the hearings was the fact that your livestock facility must setback off the road 1500 feet -- this is written in the body of the GAAMP. Also, your own house may or may not count as one of the 13 houses.

May 9, 2014

Off the Grid News - Many Michigan residents will lose their right to keep livestock on their own property due to a new ruling from the state’s Commission of Agriculture and Rural Development.

The Commission ruled April 28 that local governments have the right to ban livestock from any area zoned residential in the state.

The action will “effectively remove Right to Farm Act protection for many urban and suburban backyard farmers raising small numbers of animals,” Gail Philbin of the Michigan Sierra Club told Michigan Live. The Right to Farm Act is a state law designed to protect farmers from nuisance lawsuits and zoning regulations. The Commission ruled that the Right to Farm (RTF) Act does not apply to homeowners who keep small numbers of livestock.

“It’s all ‘Big Farm,’ and it’s ‘Big Farm’ deciding against the little farm,” Kim White, who raises chickens and rabbits, said of the Commission’s vote. “They don’t want us little guys feeding ourselves. They want us to go all to the big farms. They want to do away with small farms and I believe that is what’s motivating it.”
“The Commission is essentially taking sides in the marketplace,” Philbin said.

Bees, Chickens and Goats Now Illegal?

Governments could ban goats, chickens and even bee hives on properties where there are 13 homes within an eighth of a mile of a livestock property or another home within 250 feet of the property, under the Commission’s ruling, Michigan Public Radio reported.

“I believe we have over 100 communities in Michigan who have ordinances on the books against chickens and bees and other things, and they will be able to continue to move forward with those,” Jamie Clover Adams, the director of Michigan’s Department and Rural Development, told Michigan Radio.

The rationale for the Commission’s action is that officials are afraid there would be political pressure to repeal the Right to Farm to Act in order to stop backyard farming, Michigan Radio reported.

Opponents of the rule change have not laid out a course of action yet, although some backyard farmers are considering a legal challenge. Other possible courses of action include legislation in the state legislature and a ballot initiative.

Regulatory Limbo 

Some homesteaders in Michigan could find themselves in a complete regulatory limbo because of the Commission’s action. Blogger, writer and organic farmer Michelle Regalado Deatrick does not know if she’ll be able to keep her livestock, because about half of her 80-acre farm may not be zoned for farm animals.

“We’re building up a mixed production farm, planning to farm during retirement, and we have a permit in hand for a livestock facility,” Deatrick said, “but have waited with building until we were sure of what the GAAMP changes would be. Now we’re having to reconsider our business plans and may sell the farm and buy a farm in a more rural area with definite [Right To Farm] protection, or move to another state that’s more welcoming and protective of small farm rights.”

GAAMP refers to the Generally Accepted Agricultural and Management Practices, a set of guidelines put out by the state of Michigan. The current GAAMP designates many small farms as Category 3 lands where livestock might not be allowed.

“Category 3 sites may be zoned for agriculture, but are generally not suitable for livestock production facilities,” the GAAMP states. “They may be suitable for livestock facilities with less than 50 animal units.”

Another problem is that local governments in Michigan are under no obligation to follow the GAAMP. It is simply a set of guidelines.

Michigan is one of several areas where property owners have had to fight for the right to raise food on their own land. Off the Grid News has reported that property owners in Florida and Quebec have been barred from planting vegetable gardens.

Comments from OffTheGridNews:

"Farms now exist on the whim of a local ordinance.Perhaps a bigger impact this change has is that it reduces (eliminates) the state oversight of the largest agriculture processors, CAFOs. CAFOs are now “self-certifying” for compliance to state and federal rules.The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) clearly support only corporate agriculture. The director of MDARD has been openly hostile towards the small farmer while at the same time travelling the country and world to promote Michigan Ag. MDARD wants to sell product in China while denying local access to healthy food. Most ironically is that small farming in Michigan is now potentially illegal (criminal) just as the USDA is promoting small farming for local food sourcing under the Farm Bill." - Randy Zeilinger, OffTheGridNews, May 3, 2014

"Fight against the underlying problem…the main problem…the cause of all this nonsense. FIGHT AGENDA 21. Agenda 21 being purposed by the United Nations will take all our freedoms, our land, our rights. They will force us all to give up our properties, and move to metropolis areas to live and work. No personal transportation other than bicycles and your feet. The only people that will live outside the metropolis areas will be the farmers growing our food [on corporate-owed farms]. Everything else will be contained within the metropolis and have to abide by their rules/regulations/government. They work disguised by sustainable/green cloak. They are working thru local governments in underhanded and deceptive manner. All our presidents from 1962 to present have signed on to their plan. If you don’t believe me…look it up on the net…I HATE AGENDA 21 AND WILL DO ALL I CAN TO STOP IT." - Agenda Hater, OffTheGridNews, May 3, 2014

"This is all part of Agenda 21′s ICLEI program. Many states, governors, mayors and municipalities have signed off on this treasonous program. The ones that have are being paid well to do so. This program basically sells out the Constitution in lieu of it’s own Charters and resolutions. This is a United Nations program. The “new world order” everyone’s been gossiping about–this is IT! Read through the law fast and get ready to protest because pretty soon, we’ll lose our rights to everything AND lose our land. Part of this program’s ultimate goal is to ‘stack and pack’ people into tightly grouped high-rise city settlements and BAN people from the majority of the land in the USA claiming it for ‘sustainability.’ Dictating what people can and can’t do on their land is only the beginning!" - EFHerne, Off the Grid News, May 3, 2014

"I live in Michigan and we had a right to have small farms with small animals like chickens, goats, rabbits, and to sell eggs, etc. there can no longer be any bee keepers either. We no longer have that right if there is 13 houses within 1/8 of a mile OR 250 feet from your property line. I agree with the 13 houses ruling but the 250 feet from the property line will hurt a lot of people. That includes property on each side of them, behind them, and across the road. Now my question is: Shouldn’t there should also be a ban on dogs? I mean, they make a barking noise and poop in everyone’s yards!! So what is the difference?? Is this law only because you are providing for your family food to eat and have an outside small building. WAIT UNTIL GOVERNMENT SAYS YOU CAN NO LONGER HAVE A GARDEN EITHER!! You can be sure that is next. Oh, ya, and nobody can have a septic system in the country either. So everybody has to give their home and property to the government and move to the city!! You folks need to read up on the UN Agenda 21 World government Agenda." - Stand 4 right, OffTheGridNews, May 6, 2014

"You need to worry just a tad. this isnt’ happening only in MI, it is happening across the nation. IF they control the guns, you can’t fight back, IF they control the healthcare, you can die, and IF they control the food source, you will be in deep straights. Now this is not a conspiracy theory, check what is happening with AGENDA 21…….the UN’s plan for globalization. Check to see what is happening with ‘the new world order plans……..connect the dots……..there is much to be aware of. And it has nothing to do with what you think………don’t panic get busy and write to your congressman, representative and use your voice." - becky, OffTheGridNews, May 5, 2014

"The Right to Farm Act was designed to prevent new suburbanites living next door to pre-existing farmers in areas where the suburbs grew up around the farm from complaining about the sounds and smells of their food supply living next door. If you move to the country, expect it to look and sound and smell like the country or go elsewhere. It really had nothing to do with the urban areas where people wanted to take their double lot and raise chickens and have a goat (it’s usually against zoning laws). But those 'urban homesteaders' saw the Right to Farm Bill as a means to protect them. If these changes are going to leave the authentic small farmers whose farms predated the surrounding area’s development back where they were, without protection from idiot new suburbanite neighbors and wealthy developers, then those changes need to be cancelled." - Betterhave, OffTheGridNews, May 5, 2014

"It is unfortunate that most people, whether they live in town or out in the country, are all being made to conform to a standard because a hand full of others decide to complain. If you read the rules that have just been passed, you’ll notice that this affects anyone who is zoned residential. Mind you, I live out in the country on a dirt road, bordered on three sides by vast farmed fields. I have one neighbor across the road who owns 15 acres that is farmed as well as a neighbor about a half a mile away that lives on a 30 acre plot. But, because our zoning has been changed to residential recently (and very quietly as no one was notified that this was happening), none of us will have the ability to own even one chicken if these new rules are enforced. If the complainers are allowed to run the show, if law makers run scared of these complainers, and if big agri-business is wiling to throw a bunch of money into the ring to ensure that we are all forced into buying food from them, well, law hasn’t improved our lives, but worsened it beyond repair. There are going to be a lot of people blindsided by this ruling who have lived for many years with the family pet horse, small flock of sheep kept for hand spinning purposes, goats kept for milking, or chickens kept for eggs that will be affected by all of this foolishness as the zoning is changed to conform to someone’s warped sense of controlling the masses. If rules must be put into place to control farming practices for people who live in town or suburban areas, please change the law to focus ONLY on these areas and not the entire State of Michigan.For those of you who do complain over the noisy rooster next door or a stinky manure pile, you have the ability to move away from the noise or the smell much easier than the farm can move the animals, buildings, fencing, equipment, manure compost facilities, etc." - Mousehunter, OffTheGridNews, May 2, 2014

"Let’s do math. There are 5,280 feet in a mile. That means one eighth of a mile is 660 feet – but it would be a square 1/8 of a mile, so 660×660 = 435,600 square feet. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so that would be 13 houses spread out over 10 acres. That is not urban. That is 3/4 acre lots – this is suburban type zoning – but here in NJ that would be the ex-burbs. Most suburban NJ communities allow 3 or 4 chickens at the most on a lot that size (no roosters), with 2 acres in many places being required for livestock (like one horse). You can easily have 4 hives (my main business) on 1/4 acre. Many NJ communities have NO regulations regarding animals on private property. So I regard this ruling as being extremely restricting. NJ is actually going in the reverse direction right now – we are the most densely populated state in the USA, but the NJ legislature is expanding right-to-farm." - Leeann, OffTheGridNews, May 2, 2014

"The price of freedom, aside from the greatest sacrifice of lives, is that a neighbor may exercise it in a way that you don’t like. If you can’t own animals on your property you don’t own the land. If you can’t own the land you don’t have freedom. I remember when the Michigan Right to Farm Act was passed. It was passed in response to municipalities growing, suburbia encroaching in on what was farm land and the yuppies that wanted to escape urban blight didn’t like the sound and smell of some farms. The farms were there first, however. I have 2 acres in a city. It’s been in my family for over 40 years. It’s been literal hell to just try to live there. The city has done everything from making me get rid of a tractor or else pour a cement slab for it with a rat wall to mowing down sunflowers, calling them noxious weeds, and the charging me to do it. Do you want freedom or not? If you don’t, you’re an idiot and need to go back to whatever rock you crawled out from under. Go back to living with someone’s foot on your throat." - William Wallace, OffTheGridNews, May 3, 2014

New Federal Report Paves the Way for Cap & Trade and Carbon Credit Exchange Markets

This federal report is timed perfectly for passage of the Climate Protection Act of 2013, introduced by Sanders and Boxer on February 14, 2013, which is currently before the Committee on Environment and Public Works. This bill will pave the way for a new carbon tax and cap and trade scheme.

Federal report: Warming disrupts Americans' lives

May 6, 2014
 
Associated Press - Global warming is rapidly turning America the beautiful into America the stormy, sneezy and dangerous, according to a new federal scientific report. And those shining seas? Rising and costly, the report says.

Climate change's assorted harms "are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond," the National Climate Assessment concluded Tuesday. The report emphasizes that warming and all-too-wild weather are changing daily lives, using the phrase "climate disruption" as another way of saying global warming.

Still, it's not too late to prevent the worst of climate change, says the 840-page report, which the White House is highlighting as it tries to jump-start often-stalled efforts to curb heat-trapping gases.

White House science adviser John Holdren called the report, the third edition of a congressionally mandated study, "the loudest and clearest alarm bell to date signaling the need to take urgent action." Later this summer, the Obama administration plans to propose new and controversial regulations restricting gases that come from existing coal-fired power plants.

Some fossil energy groups, conservative think tanks and Republican senators immediately assailed the report as "alarmist." Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said President Barack Obama was likely to "use the platform to renew his call for a national energy tax. And I'm sure he'll get loud cheers from liberal elites — from the kind of people who leave a giant carbon footprint and then lecture everybody else about low-flow toilets."

Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana said the report was supposed to be scientific but "it's more of a political one used to justify government overreach."

The report — which is full of figures, charts and other research-generated graphics — includes 3,096 footnotes to other mostly peer-reviewed research. It was written by more than 250 scientists and government officials, starting in 2012. A draft was released in January 2013, but this version has been reviewed by more scientists, including twice by the National Academy of Science which called it "reasonable," and has had public comment. It is written in a bit more simple language so people can realize "that there's a new source of risk in their lives," said lead author Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Environmental groups praised the report. "If we don't slam the brakes on the carbon pollution driving climate change, we're dooming ourselves and our children to more intense heat waves, destructive floods and storms and surging sea levels," said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Scientists and the White House called it the most detailed and U.S.-focused scientific report on global warming.

"Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," the report says. "Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington state and maple syrup producers in Vermont are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of recent experience."

The report looks at regional and state-level effects of global warming, compared with recent reports from the United Nations that lumped all of North America together.

"All Americans will find things that matter to them in this report," said scientist Jerry Melillo of the Marine Biological Laboratory, who chaired the science committee that wrote the report. "For decades we've been collecting the dots about climate change, now we're connecting those dots."

In a White House conference call with reporters, National Climatic Data Center Director Tom Karl said his two biggest concerns were flooding from sea level rise on the U.S. coastlines — especially for the low-lying cities of Miami, Norfolk, Virginia, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire — and drought, heat waves and prolonged fire seasons in the Southwest.

Even though the nation's average temperature has risen by as much as 1.9 degrees since record keeping began in 1895, it's in the big, wild weather where the average person feels climate change the most, said co-author Katharine Hayhoe, a Texas Tech University climate scientist. Extreme weather like droughts, storms and heat waves hit us in the pocketbooks and can be seen by our own eyes, she said.

The report says the intensity, frequency and duration of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes have increased since the early 1980s, but it is still uncertain how much of that is from man-made warming. Winter storms have increased in frequency and intensity and have shifted northward since the 1950s, it says. Also, heavy downpours are increasing — by 71 percent in the Northeast. Heat waves, such as those in Texas in 2011 and the Midwest in 2012, are projected to intensify nationwide. Droughts in the Southwest are expected to get stronger. Sea level has risen 8 inches since 1880 and is projected to rise between 1 foot and 4 feet by 2100.

Climate data center chief Karl highlighted the increase in downpours, which are jumping by 30 percent to 60 percent elsewhere in the country besides the Northeast. He said last week's drenching, when Pensacola, Florida, got up to two feet of rain in one storm and parts of the East had three inches in one day, is what he's talking about.

"The projections for these kinds of changes are to continue as the globe continues to warm and the atmosphere is able to hold more water vapor," Karl said.

Since January 2010, 43 of the lower 48 states have set at least one monthly record for heat, such as California having its warmest January on record this year. In the past 51 months, states have set 80 monthly records for heat, 33 records for being too wet, 12 for lack of rain and just three for cold, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal weather records.

The report also says "climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways." Those include smoke-filled air from wildfires, smoggy air from pollution, and more diseases from tainted food, water, mosquitoes and ticks. And ragweed pollen season has lengthened.

Flooding alone may cost $325 billion by the year 2100 in one of the worst-case scenarios, with $130 billion of that in Florida, the report says. Already the droughts and heat waves of 2011 and 2012 added about $10 billion to farm costs, the report says.

Related:

Climate Protection Act of 2013 (Boxer-Sanders) Will Increase the Price of Fuel and Other Goods and Services and Will Destroy Manufacturing

Box Trucks Converted to Sex Suites on Wheels for Casual Hookups in San Francisco Area

Hook Up Truck Hits The Street Offering Haven For Casual, Safe Sex

May 1, 2014

CBS SF - The Hook-Up truck – a conceptual “art” installation consisting of a box truck converted to a sex suite on wheels, including temperature controls, birth control, safe sex accouterments, and a camera option, in case you and yours decide to make the escapade a YouTube sensation, is finally open for service the weekend of May 2nd and 3rd.

The “Hook-Up Truck” is the brainchild of artist Spy Emerson. According to their website, the box truck is a car service, like a mobile hotel room, available for short-term rentals.

“The room is designed with cleanliness in mind.  I’ve created a very minimalist room.  Everything is wiped down and cleaned before and after every person.  It’s probably cleaner than the BART or any public toilet you’ve used.”

• UPDATE: ‘Hook-Up Truck’ Rolling Through Oakland, San Francisco’s Mission District

The room has no bed or bedding.  Instead, there’s a custom-built metal-and-wood bench covered with vinyl, which is stain-resistant.

“Instead of a traditional bed – which is bedding and absorbent – this is a bench, in the shape of a ‘C’,  and designed to facilitate positioning for the average-sized bodies,” Emerson said.

Emerson said her lawyer has checked, and as far as he can tell, the hook-up truck is legal. No permits or inspections needed.  But until they’re sure, the use of the truck will be free of charge.

“It’s not necessarily a grey area.  It’s an unlegislated area,” Emerson said.  “It hasn’t been done yet.  I’ve got a wonderful attorney who has consulted with all the legal people who could guide us.  He’s really putting out the effort to find where we need to register or what we need to do to make this legal.  So there isn’t a place for us yet.  This weekend, we’re starting out free.  I’m not accepting any money yet.”

Emerson said she knows there are people who are upset about the hook up truck.  Her message to them:  “they need more fun in their lives.”

“I think a lot of this finger-wagging and blaming and anger comes from jealousy.  This is great.  It’s making people feel really happy.  It isn’t anything nefarious or ugly.  It’s making sex safer and more fun.  Anyone who finds something ugly about this is looking for something negative.  I’m sorry for them.”

Emerson says she does have some rules, though, including “No drunks!”

Saturday, from 6-9 p.m., it will be in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood for the Art Murmur, before heading to San Francisco’s Mission District where Emerson will be on the air with Radio Valencia at 10 p.m.

Street musicians are scheduled to stop by, possibly to serenade the “sexcapaders.”

On Sunday, it returns to Oakland for a party at NIMBY on Amelia Street from 5-9 p.m.

The truck also can be reserved through mobile dating apps “for immediate dispatch.” It can also be pre-booked for festivals, weddings, or holiday parties. Users of the truck must be at least 21 and registered with the service online.