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Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years
Minuteman II missile test launch (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Sean Gallagher
Remember all those cold war movies where nuclear missile crews are frantically dialing in the secret codes sent by the White House to launch nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles? Well, for two decades, all the Minuteman nuclear missiles in the US used the same eight-digit numeric passcode: 00000000. That fact, originally revealed in an interview in the Guardian in 2004 by Dr. Bruce G. Blair, a former US Air Force officer who manned Minuteman silos, was mentioned in a paper by Steven M. Bellovin, a computer science professor at Columbia University who teaches security architecture.
The codes, known as Permissive Action Links (PALs), were supposed to prevent the use of nuclear weapons—and the nuclear weapons under joint control with NATO countries in particular—without the authorization of the president of the United States. The need for such controls became clear during the 1963-1964 Cyprus crisis, when NATO members Turkey and Greece were reportedly seeking control of NATO nuclear weapons—to use on each other.
For decades, the codes were carried with the President at all times in a briefcase commonly referred to as the “football.” At least that’s the way it was supposed to work, following an executive order from President John F. Kennedy. But at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, more than half of the missiles in Europe, including those in Turkey, lacked PAL controls. And while Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara directly oversaw the installation of PALs on the US-based ICBM arsenal, US Strategic Command generals almost immediately had the PAL codes all reset to 00000000 to ensure that the missiles were ready for use regardless of whether the president was available to give authorization.
Read More Launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years | Ars Technica.
Former NFL players sue Kansas City Chiefs over injuries
Kansas City Chiefs logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Al Jazerra America and Associated Press
Five former football players filed a lawsuit against the Kansas City Chiefs on Tuesday, claiming that the team’s management hid information and even lied to players about the risks of head injuries. The suit is the latest in a string of legal actions taken against the National Football League (NFL) and other professional sports leagues over the impact of head injuries sustained in sports.
The lawsuit was filed in Jackson County Circuit Court in Missouri on behalf of former players Leonard Griffin, Chris Martin, Joe Phillips, Alexander Louis Cooper and Kevin Porte, who played on the team between 1987 and 1993, a period when there was no collective bargaining agreement in place in the NFL.
The lawsuit seeks more than $15,000 in actual and punitive damages. All five players have opted out of a $765 million dollar settlement with the NFL announced in August that would compensate more than 4,500 former football players for their head injuries.
The Kansas City plaintiffs are allegedly suffering from post-concussion syndrome and latent brain disease because of multiple concussions they sustained while playing for the Chiefs. They also allege to be suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which can be definitively diagnosed only by examining the brain after death.
In recent years, a string of former NFL players and other athletes who suffered concussions have been diagnosed with CTE after their deaths. They included linebacker Junior Seau and safety Ray Easterling, who both committed suicide.
Read More Former NFL players sue Kansas City Chiefs over injuries | Al Jazeera America.
Noam Chomsky: America hates its poor
By Chris Steele
A portrait of Noam Chomsky (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is an excerpt from the just released second edition of Noam Chomsky’s “Occupy: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity,” edited by Greg Ruggiero and published by Zuccotti Park Press.
An article that recently came out in Rolling Stone, titled “Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail,” by Matt Taibbi, asserts that the government is afraid to prosecute powerful bankers, such as those running HSBC. Taibbi says that there’s “an arrestable class and an unarrestable class.” What is your view on the current state of class war in the U.S.?
Well, there’s always a class war going on. The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. The business classes are very class-conscious—they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is recognized.
We don’t use the term “working class” here because it’s a taboo term. You’re supposed to say “middle class,” because it helps diminish the understanding that there’s a class war going on.
It’s true that there was a one-sided class war, and that’s because the other side hadn’t chosen to participate, so the union leadership had for years pursued a policy of making a compact with the corporations, in which their workers, say the autoworkers—would get certain benefits like fairly decent wages, health benefits and so on. But it wouldn’t engage the general class structure. In fact, that’s one of the reasons why Canada has a national health program and the United States doesn’t. The same unions on the other side of the border were calling for health care for everybody. Here they were calling for health care for themselves and they got it. Of course, it’s a compact with corporations that the corporations can break anytime they want, and by the 1970s they were planning to break it and we’ve seen what has happened since.
This is just one part of a long and continuing class war against working people and the poor. It’s a war that is conducted by a highly class-conscious business leadership, and it’s one of the reasons for the unusual history of the U.S. labor movement. In the U.S., organized labor has been repeatedly and extensively crushed, and has endured a very violent history as compared with other countries.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Class Warfare, culture, greed, income inequality, Noam Chomsky, poor, United States
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Top 10 Ways the US Is the Most Corrupt Country in the World
US Capital (Photo credit: missycaulk)
By Juan Cole
Those ratings that castigate Afghanistan and some other poor countries as hopelessly “corrupt” always imply that the United States is not corrupt.
VOA reports :
While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $16 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.
1. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. House Majority leader John Boehner has actually just handed out cash on the floor of the House from the tobacco industry to other representatives.
When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L’Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven’t been anywhere near his house.
American politicians don’t represent “the people.” With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.
2. That politicians can be bribed to reduce regulation of industries like banking (what is called “regulatory capture”) means that they will be so bribed. Billions were spent and 3,000 lobbyists employed by bankers to remove cumbersome rules in the zeroes. Thus, political corruption enabled financial corruption (in some cases legalizing it!) Without regulations and government auditing, the finance sector went wild and engaged in corrupt practices that caused the 2008 crash. Too bad the poor Afghans can’t just legislate their corruption out of existence by regularizing it, the way Wall street did.
3. That the chief villains of the 2008 meltdown (from which 90% of Americans have not recovered) have not been prosecuted is itself a form of corruption.
4. The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside.
5. The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system.It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for e,g, three small thefts.
Read More Top 10 Ways the US Is the Most Corrupt Country in the World | Alternet.
Why $7-Per-Gallon Milk Looms Once Again
(Photo credit: cafemama)
By Tamara Keith
The leaders of the House and Senate agriculture committees are meeting Wednesday as they continue to try and work out the differences between their respective farm bills. If they fail, the country faces whats being called the “dairy cliff” — with milk prices potentially shooting up to about $7 a gallon sometime after the first of the year.
Heres why: The nations farm policy would be legally required to revert back to whats called permanent law. In the case of dairy, that would be the 1949 farm bill.
And if House and Senate negotiators fail to reconcile their farm bills, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warns, “Im going to be put in a position where I have to invoke and implement permanent law. And I will do my job because thats what I swore an oath to do.”
The problem is that back in 1949, the dairy industry was much smaller and less efficient than the one that exists today, so it received bigger price supports from the federal government. And if U.S. policy reverted to the old law, the government would be forced to go into the marketplace and buy milk, butter and cheese at about double the going rate.
Vilsack says this would distort the market: “So you, as a [milk] producer, would have a choice of selling it to your normal purchaser at $18 or $19 a hundred weight or to USDA at $38 a hundred weight. What do you think producers will do?”
Of course the producers would sell to the government. And that, says Jim Dunn, a professor of agricultural economics at Penn State University, “would be terrible.”
Read More Why $7-Per-Gallon Milk Looms Once Again : The Salt : NPR.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Dairy, economy, prices, Senate, Tom Vilsack, United States Department of Agriculture
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D.C. Council Unanimously Votes To Give Workers A Raise And Time Off
By Bryce Covert
(photo: Reuters)
On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C. Council unanimously voted to raise the city’s minimum wage to $11.50 an hour and to expand its current paid sick leave policy to cover tipped workers, who were originally left out.
Both bills need a final vote before they head to Mayor Vince Gray (D) for his signature. As the Washington City Paper explains, “the unanimous vote [for the minimum wage] all but guarantees that it could survive any veto attempt by Mayor Vince Gray,” who has said he supports a raise to $10 an hour. It’s currently $8.25. Under the Council’s proposal, the wage would eventually hit $11.50 in 2016 and from there on would be tied to inflation, automatically rising. Only 11 states automatically increase the minimum wage as the cost of living rises, and the federal wage isn’t tied to inflation and has been stuck at $7.25 for four years. If it had kept up with inflation since the 1960s, it would be over $10 an hour.
The council’s vote to expand the paid sick days policy means that the 80 percent of the city’s restaurant workers who previously didn’t have access to time off when they or their loved ones fell ill will now be covered. It has also been estimated to bring a net $2 million in savings to the area’s businesses, or $1.85 per worker per week, in reduced turnover, fewer illnesses at work, and higher productivity. Contrary to opponents who argue that the city’s paid sick days law would force businesses to move elsewhere, an audit of the current iteration found that it hasn’t encouraged them to relocate nor has it discouraged new businesses from setting up shop.
Read More D.C. Council Unanimously Votes To Give Workers A Raise And Time Off | ThinkProgress.
Affirmation
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged affirmation, inspiration, life, message, self-care, self-enlightenment
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Iggy Azalea – Change Your Life
Posted in Soul Brother's Music Videos
Tagged hip-hop, Iggy Azalea, music, r&b, video
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