Off the coast of Western Australia

Container port, Long Beach, CA

Nile River Delta, Egypt

Oil fields (left), near Odessa, TX

Oil tanker disgorging, Long Beach, CA

Farm land in Ukraine

See also:

Brainwashed by a neuroparasite

Discover Magazine Gallery – Zombie animals and the parasites that control them

Cymothoa exigua is a parasitic crustacean of the family Cymothoidae. It tends to be 3 to 4 cm long. This parasite attaches itself at the base of the spotted rose snapper’s (Lutjanus guttatus) tongue, entering the fish’s mouth through its gills. It then proceeds to extract blood through the claws on its front three pairs of legs.

As the parasite grows, less and less blood reaches the tongue, and eventually the organ atrophies from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the fish’s tongue by attaching its own body to the muscles of the tongue stub. The fish is able to use the parasite just like a normal tongue. It appears that the parasite does not cause any other damage to the host fish. Once C. exigua replaces the tongue, some feed on the host’s blood and many others feed on fish mucus. They do not eat scraps of the fish’s food.This is the only known case of a parasite functionally replacing a host organ.

There are many species of Cymothoa, but only C. exigua is known to consume and replace its host’s tongue.

[More]

“Holy Ghost People” by Peter Adair, which shows folks in Appalachia (in what very much looks like trance-like states) handling snakes. You can also get this documentary in a series of six YouTube clips starting here

Thaipusam Ritual: Pain & Trance.

Next nature featured one of those discoveries to emerge out of archeology that cannot help but give one a smile of pause and a thought that this too, indeed, will pass.

Doggerland is the name of a vast plain that joined Britain to Europe for nearly 12,000 years, until sea levels began rising dramatically after the last Ice Age. Taking its name from a prominent shipping hazard—Dogger Bank—this immense landbridge vanished beneath the North Sea around 6000 B.C.

Like all landbridges, Doggerland seems to have been a pretty busy thoroughfare for ancient hunters and gatherers. But archaeologists hardly gave it a thought until 2002, when a small group of British researchers laid hands on seismic survey data collected by the petroleum industry in the North Sea.

It is thought that the sea level rose no faster than about one or two meters per century, and that the land would have disappeared in a series of punctuated inundations. According to marine archaeologist Nic Flemming, a research fellow at the National Oceanography Centre of University of Southampton, UK. “It was perfectly noticeable in a generation, but nobody had to run for the hills.”

Although hunter-gatherers usually have any sense of ownership, land would have become an increasingly precious resource as the sea rose, which according researchers Clive Waddington &  Nicky Miller might have led directly to the development of sedentism and territoriality.

An interesting interview about TIGR, a recently deployed DARPA project in Afghanistan and Iraq. With a timeliness which is impressive for its contemporary awareness, TIGR integrates many layers of data (satellite photos, census data, road conditions) with metadata generated by military patrols (attack reports, experience with certain houses, etc). In this way, knowledge that is lost when units cycle out of a certain districts is able to be transferred to their replacements. The interview gives a sense of the development process, infrastructure and the uses of the system. I wonder if this sort of thing will be deployed in domestic law enforcement. In any event, it is interesting to observe how the widespread fervor and innovation of Web 2.0 technologies in the civilian realm prefigure military applications — almost a reverse dual use to the things.  [link]

These QSL cards a really quite beautiful — they seek to give visual form through one, light-stock, piece of card board: a terrestrial marker of an ethereal enterprise. To wit,

QSL cards (or letters) are exchanged to acknowledge ham radio contact between stations. Broadcast stations (mediumwave and shortwave) also offer colorful QSL cards to listeners who send in reports of reception. These souvenirs of the radio listening hobby (or “DX’ing,” as it’s sometimes called) are slowly vanishing as the radio hobbies shrink. Nowadays hams often “QSL” contacts via the internet, bypassing the cost and postage of physical QSL cards. Many international shortwave broadcasters have either drastically cut back services or closed down altogether as their target audience migrates to the internet and satellite radio. Thus, most of these QSL cards are echoes of stations long gone, and a knob-twiddling pasttime whose glory days have passed. [link]

The following list reviews hundreds of instances in which the United States has utilized military forces abroad in situations of military conflict or potential conflict to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. The list does not include covert actions or numerous instances in which U.S. forces have been stationed abroad since World War II in occupation forces or for participation in mutual security organizations, base agreements, or routine military assistance or training operations.

Selections:

1810  West Florida (Spanish territory).
Gov. Claiborne of Louisiana, on orders of the President, occupied with troops territory in dispute east of the Mississippi River as far as the Pearl River, later the eastern boundary of Louisiana. He was authorized to seize as far east as the Perdido River.

1894-95
China. A naval vessel was beached and used as a fort at Newchwang for protection of American nationals.

1899  Samoa. February-May 15.
American and British naval forces were landed to protect national interests and to take part in a bloody contention over the succession to the throne.

1903  Syria.
September 7 to 12. U.S. forces protected the American consulate in Beirut when a local Moslem uprising was feared.

1911  China.
As the nationalist revolution approached, in October an ensign and 10 men tried to enter Wuchang to rescue missionaries but retired on being warned away, and a small landing force guarded American private property and consulate at Hankow. Marines were deployed in November to guard the cable stations at Shanghai; landing forces were sent for protection in Nanking, Chinkiang, Taku and elsewhere.

1921  Panama – Costa Rica.
American naval squadrons demonstrated in April on both sides of the Isthmus to prevent war between the two countries over a boundary dispute.

1964  Congo.
The United States sent four transport planes to provide airlift for Congolese troops during a rebellion and to transport Belgian paratroopers to rescue foreigners.

1983-89  Honduras.
In July 1983 the United States undertook a series of exercises in Honduras that some believed might lead to conflict with Nicaragua. On March 25, 1986, unarmed U.S. military helicopters and crewmen ferried Honduran troops to the Nicaraguan border to repel Nicaraguan troops.

1983  Chad.
On August 8, 1983, President Reagan reported the deployment of two AWACS electronic surveillance planes and eight F-15 fighter planes and ground logistical support forces to assist Chad against Libyan and rebel forces.

2002  Yugoslavia/Kosovo.
On May 17, 2002, President George W. Bush reported to Congress, “consistent with the War Powers Resolution,” that the U.S. military was continuing to support peacekeeping efforts of the NATO-led international security force in Kosovo (KFOR). He noted that the current U.S. contribution was about 5,100 military personnel, and an additional 468 personnel in Macedonia; with an occasional presence in Albania and Greece.

2008 Terrorism threat/Kosovo/Afghanistan.
On December 16. 2008, the President sent to Congress “consistent with the War Powers Resolution,” a consolidated report giving  details of ongoing United States military deployments and operations “in support of  the war on terror,”and in support of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR). The  President reported that various U.S. “combat-equipped and combat-support forces”  were deployed to “a number of locations in the Centrol, Pacific, European, Southern,  and Africa Command areas of operation” and were engaged in combat operations  against al-Qaida and their supporters. The United States is “actively pursuing and  engaging remnant al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.” U.S. forces in  Afghanistan total approximately 31, 000. Of this total, “approximately 13, 000 are  assigned to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.”  The  U.S. military continues to support peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, specifically the  NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR). The current U.S. contribution to KFOR in Kosovo  is about 1,500 military personnel.

The US Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive recently published a four-part reader as an accompaniment to the lectures they conduct:

Our reader’s three volumes cover counterintelligence’s past and present. Nevertheless they form a whole: the first volume provides material elucidating counter- intelligence’s antecedents from the American Revolution to World War II. Volume two focuses on World War II while volume three begins with the Atom Bomb spies and concludes with the latest espionage cases. History is more than background; it is the framework of the present.

We have taken material from official government documents, indictments from several espionage cases, and articles written by professors, scholars and counterintelligence officers. We have abridged some selections while trying not to change the sense of the original but we have not altered the original usage of the English language.

Each chapter in the three volumes has an introduction, which sketches out the main trends and characteristics of the period in question. There is a chronology with each chapter for volumes one and three, but volume two only has one chronology to cover the entire period. At the end of each chapter is a selected bibliography. We hope this will help you get a sense of the period as a whole. The reader is not all-inclusive and people may disagree with our selections, but at least we hope to have provided sufficient material to entice our colleagues to do further research.

Counterintelligence is a fascinating and challenging discipline. Our response to these challenges is determined, not by the requisites of the immediate situation but by our historical legacy. Thus we urge that the materials presented in the three volumes be read, not as background to the present, but as part of the present itself.

A fourth volume covers recent spying successes, failures, programs and reports.

Cryptome ZIP of PDFs

NCIX Site

Schneier on Security linked to an excellent paper on the economics of spam. Interestingly, the authors were able to infiltrate the Storm worm network and monitored its doings in the course of their study.

After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100. Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88 — a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period or $140 per day for periods when the campaign was active. However, our study interposed on only a small fraction of the overall Storm network — we estimate roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we proxy. Thus, the total daily revenue attributable to Storm’s pharmacy campaign is likely closer to $7000 (or $9500 during periods of campaign activity). By the same logic, we estimate that Storm self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3500 and 8500 new bots per day.Under the assumption that our measurements are representative over time (an admittedly dangerous assumption when dealing with such small samples), we can extrapolate that, were it sent continuously at the same rate, Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam would produce roughly 3.5 million dollars of revenue in a year. This number could be even higher if spam-advertised pharmacies experience repeat business. A bit less than “millions of dollars every day,” but certainly a healthy enterprise.

Of course, the authors point out that it’s dangerous to make these sorts of generalizations:

We would be the first to admit that these results represent a single data point and are not necessarily representative of spam as a whole. Different campaigns, using different tactics and marketing different products will undoubtedly produce different outcomes. Indeed, we caution strongly against researchers using the conversion rates we have measured for these Storm-based campaigns to justify assumptions in any other context. [link]