City ambassadors or pseudo police?

It took nearly an entire year to reconstruct Swanston Street, one of the most frequented bits of Melbourne's CBD. Most of the time, hardly anyone could be seen actually working on the reconstruction, and most passers-by were busy enough to squeeze through the narrow bits of pavement left for the pedestrian part of the population.

Unlike many European City centres, traffic is still allowed to pass through, not only Melbourne's iconic (privatised, over-aged and not build for capacity) trams, but cars can still make their way through as well. The planners came up with a solution for cyclists that only convinced car fans can conceive, having a bike path between the waiting area for tram passengers and the tram lines.

In good old Australian fascist fashion, markings on the pavement tell the pedestrian what they should do. The bike path is marked with dozens of 'KEEP CLEAR' stencils, large signs for cyclists order them to stop and let tram passengers pass at the four stations along the reconstructed area. As it takes a while to re-educate the population to a new set of rules, I take a lot of care while using the bike path on my unicycle, as it's often taken as convenient short cut to cross the road, or as waiting area despite the 'Keep clear' markings.

The latest station to be finished is in front of the RMIT, and many students have sufficient attention deficits to bumble into the bike path, which really doesn't bother me much, as I'm not too fast on the unicycle.

The architectural preference of Europe in the 80s dominated the station design: cool metal and glass, and strange blue lights potentially as tribute to the 21st century. I haven't waited in rainy conditions for a tram there, but I guess the idea of sheltering waiting passenger is meant rather symbolic than practical, like at many tram stops in Melbourne.

The benches, made of thin steel bars, are not only cold and uncomfortable, they are outright dangerous as I had to find out today. I got distracted on my way to one of them, and hit my knee against the side of a bench. Although I was moving in a rather slow pace, the sharp profile of the thin bars poking out at the side of it left a gashing wound. I guess many people will be injured by this stupid design, which ironically happened while I observed some activity most likely intended to increase the safety at the newly build stations.

Melbourne has some volunteers acting as city ambassadors, wearing bright red shirts and caps, available usually to answer questions. They usually roam Swanston Street in pairs, the pair I asked about the spy cams at the intersection I met them didn't even know about their existence in first place. Unlike described on the city councils website, the cameras that look eerily similar to those that became more familiar after the reporting about Trapwire, there's no signage indicating their presence. As the MCC promotes the pervasive CCTV surveillance to increase the feeling of safety, I wonder how this can be achieved when hardly anyone notice them.

Today, however, two ambassadors approached cyclists and pedestrian who didn't follow the proper rules of making use of the redesigned tram stop in front of RMIT. When I saw them ganging up on a cyclist for rolling a bit along the tram, I tripped into the bench as I couldn't really believe what I saw.

I didn't even notice the bleeding until after I sat down - hitting your knees always hurts a lot, but this was the first time I ran into something that sliced the skin so easily. After telling the cyclist off, the ambassadors continued to have a watchful eye on everyone passing through their area of righteousness. The older one of them even walked after a guy in suit for 10 metres or so to inform him that he went on the 'wrong' part of the tram stop.

Give a man a uniform, and he turns into a fascist, drunk by power and self-importance. I wonder whether they acted out of their own idea to preserve law and order at the tram stop, or if the ambassadors are now trained to interfere with the dangerous elements of society that lack obedience to the writing on the pavement, and in an incredible act of defiance, walk on the bike path.

The most liveable city on this planet, now with power-tripping ambassadors, 'free' bikes that only cost a couple of dollars (not refundable), soon without single tickets for public transport, instead with a Myki that can be conveniently ordered and sent to your home for only $10 (non refundable). If you dare not to understand the PT ticketing system, gangs of ticket inspectors might detain you for a while, and after some weeks of using stations like Flinders Street or Melbourne central you will find your way around, and no longer complain about the lack of signs towards the platforms or the exit.

The zombie apocalypse has already begun, people leave their common sense at home because in public it's neither required nor appreciated. If you break the rules, someone in uniform will fine you so that sufficient memory traces for obedient behaviour are burned into your neurons. As neither Orwell nor Huxley got it 100% right, the mixture of 1984 and Brave New World is now normal Australian behaviour - distracted by sex and drugs, permanently surveilled and bossed around by people in uniform just following orders. Hooray!

Rain-making act of 1967

During the last few weeks I noticed quite persistently skies above Melbourne that didn't look normal to me. Strange shapes, sometimes iridescent rings around the sun and moon, plenty of high altitude haze, clouds that seemed to fall from the sky while I was observing them.

I upset at least a couple of people by tweeting out my observations about what's nowadays called stratospheric aerial geo-engineering, carefully avoiding the term chemtrail. I avoided this term not only because of the association with conspiracy theory, and like every properly conditioned citizen will know, a conspiracy theory can only be fantasy, but mainly because I didn't see any blatantly obvious trails in the sky.

Colours, the structure (or lack thereof), shapes and movement were the give aways for my assumption that Melbourne gets quite persistently sprayed lately, so I investigated a bit more about what could happen here. Geo-engineering, also known as solar radiation management or climate remediation, is a topic not very publicly discussed.

While nearly everyone has heard nowadays about climate change, especially after the introduction of a carbon tax to ostensibly fight it, the nice sounding terms like solar radiation management or climate remediation disguise discussions and research focussing on alternatives to a reduction of CO2 emission into the atmosphere.

In times when markets go crazy, the idea that a market instrument like the carbon tax can save our planet needs multiple leaps of faith to become credible. Especially considering the fact that Australia (or rather some industries) makes some seizable amount of money with carbon-based fuels and are exempt from this tax anyway.

It took a long time to make the illusion of climate change sufficiently real and threatening to call for 'global solutions', and once a momentum of fear is created it can be used in different ways as well. The concept of solar remediation management reminds a little bit of Mr. Burns plans to withdraw sunlight from the hometown of the Simpsons, Springfield, and potentially bears as many good intentions as this cartoon story.

With less sunlight reaching the planet, less heat will be produced, hence the planet cools down. Precipitation (clouds) achieve this effect naturally, so what could possibly go wrong when we put more clouds in the sky to reflect the sun back before it heats the planet up? Only several things....

While the cloud cover reflects some of the sunlight back, it also keeps the heat that's already there in. It also requires a lot of planes bringing the artificial clouds out, which delivers the currently accepted culprit for global warming to a place where it's most effective. Last but not least, water vapour alone wouldn't be sufficient to create artificial clouds, so an interesting mix of nano-particles (according to existing patents) does the job.

The whole picture behind geo-engineering gets really spooky, feel free to go through this rabbit hole yourself. As I can't really tell what in the world are they spraying (which is the title of a good documentary available on the youtubes), I rather focus on what can potentially be done to find out what's already happening.

I don't believe that any entity would claim: Hey, I know how to stop global warming, shall we give it a go? Experiments on that scale happen usually in secret, as no one can anticipate consequences of newly introduced technology. Controlling nature in our favour often yields more problems than solutions, cane toads and GMO might serve as example here.

Once facts have been created, the marketing machinery starts to retroactively justify what already has happened. As I've seen chemtrails not only in Australia, but also many years ago in Germany, and as they are observed at least in the US, Europe and here I happily conclude that the planetary 'rescue' by climate remediation is already in full swing.

The case of Wikileaks has shown to the world that governments do a lot without asking their citizens, and taking away 'a little bit of sunlight' might not find consent, but a lot of opposition. In 2010, the Brumby government financed a conference about Geoengineering in California. Doing this far away from home fits into the secrecy about this topic, and the willingness to create facts without letting the affected citizens even know.

During this Asilomar conference, Brumby stated that he wanted to attract geo-engineering research to Victoria, not too surprising considering the amount of energy generated by brown coal in this state. As many decisions in parliament are taken without even being discussed beforehand, or being noticed by media afterwards, exposing Victorians to aerial spraying could already happen, even quite legally.

Section 2 of the Rain-making control act 1967 defines rain-making wide enough to cover geo-engineering:

rain-making operation means the seeding or nucleating of clouds by artificial means from a manned aircraft.

Section 3 fully fits into the scope of geo-engineering:

Whenever it appears to the Minister to be desirable in the public   interest to promote rainfall or otherwise modify natural cloud      processes in any part of Victoria-

(a)  for improving primary production either generally or locally and
        whether with respect to one or more than one primary product;
   (b)  for improving water storages either generally or locally;
   (c)  for reducing fire-danger in a forest area; or
   (d)  for any other sufficient purpose-
the Minister may authorise the carrying out of rain-making          operations in respect of the area or areas concerned.

OMG, global warming is coming, and we can't stop our power plants to prevent it - so when taking the climate change paradigm as reality, geo-engineering as prevention certainly fits the 'other sufficient purpose' catch-all phrase.

The act further describes that the Victorian PM can grant away the authority for 'rain-making acts' in a way that would allow daily spraying, and informing some other ministers. (Section 5)

(3) The Minister shall cause a copy of every authority issued under this Act
to be forwarded to Minister administering the Water Act 1989, the Minister
administering the Conservation, Forests and Lands Act 1987 and the Minister
administering Part 9 of the Local Government Act 1989.

So whatever happens above us, might already have left bureaucratic traces. I have no clue which divisions of the corporation Victoria handle above mentioned acts. Yet all three acts referred to have been recently amended (within the last two years), yet my duress for legalese is depleted for now, so I will stop my research here for today.

If all the spraying isn't officially permitted by the PM, the fines for 'unauthorised' rain-making are quite mild: $1000 a day. I wonder which path to go for Freedom of Information Acts to figure out who is spraying what so obviously and persistently over our heads.

PsyOp gone viral

If you want to learn about PsyOps, some contemporary event offers a splendid opportunity. Anyone still exposing themselves on a regular basis to the mind numbing mass media has been exposed to the latest talking point the dominator society threw into the global memepool: The anti-muslim movie.

Although I spend too much time on the internet, I didn't came across the source of all this hodge-podge of events until now. Many demonstration in front of embassies happened, even with some death casualties. The Sydney demonstration against the anti-islam movie made a headline in the Sunday Herald Sun: "Why police was FORCED to use violence against protestors".

Within 4 days, the cause of the latest global media storm had gone viral, with more 4 million views. It appeared in my youtube suggestion (without a user profile), so I watched it.

My first reaction was similar to reading Hitler's Mein Kampf - I didn't really fancy going through all the abysmal bs. However, 13 minutes of watching a video are easier to cope with than reading a  book filled with racist slur, so I persisted.

Although the video suggest very amateurish origins, it bears rather the hallmarks of some professional production. There's quite a large cast involved, about 10 different actors, with some good props (swords, tents) and lots of bluescreen technology. Most movie production methods have become much more affordable with Open Software, nevertheless the lighting, costumes and bluescreen suggest at least a semi-professional studio and a decent amount of money went into this movie.

Most surprising for me, having a youtube channel myself, was the speed in which it was recognised, in parts of the world which seem to be less internet-hooked than the western world. The uploader, DarkF3TT. had done some game captures of First-person shooter games, showing his abilities to do head shots.

I can't really tell how much of gamer's culture exists in the places where US embassies were torched, but somehow the idea of being a devout and radical muslim and playing video games heroising US based kill missions seems odd. The gamers I met in Australia were certainly impregnated with unconditional nationalism, extended to the big brother US.

As video games allow one to identify with the game character, I wonder how many people living in places that ostensibly have to hate the US would spend their free time impersonating US heroes liberating the world from evil Nazis and communists.

So how on earth did the people taking it to the street find out that this despicable peace of religious smear existed in first place? And how did they find out, before the global mass media picked up on the reactions?

Of course, it fits much better into the discourse that has been started to talk about religion, extremism, or any other topic suggested the main stream media than asking more obvious questions. The people I talked to about this had, like me by then, not seen or noticed the 'offending' video.

The obvious questions, however, make it look like a psyop. Nothing on the internet gets viral until its gets promoted to sufficient multipliers. Without someone embedded in a group sufficiently radicalised to push their noses into this pile of racist bullshit this video would have had the same fate as youtube video on a fairly unpopular/unknown youtube channel - not even getting more than 100 views.

Once people started protesting, the promotion worked out, and more than 4 million views happened. And as long as people don't care about how it kicked off, the media discourse fosters the divide and conquer meme.

Back to nerddom

As I used to work in IT, I liked to have an easy setup for the systems I use at home. While I was still considering to return to earning money with my nerd skills, I even ran my own web server as kind of a showpiece, but that times have long gone.

My preference for Mac systems remained until recently. For a long time of my life, these systems offered simply the most trouble free solutions for my sometimes exquisite demands. However, as I reduced my consumerist ways drastically, and don't like the idea to spend money every so often to get a decent system, I needed alternatives.

I hesitated for a long time to go the Intel way - but some years ago, when my PowerPC based MacBook went into a HDD nirvana, I got myself a shiny Macbook, and got even a free iPod touch on top of the deal.

For quite some time this remained a relatively satisfying solution. You get OpenOffice, I didn't mind to shell out some money for Photoshop elements, and what I wanted to do on a computer works out in satisfying speed. After all, no longer professionally working in IT, I had only little comparison to other systems, so things looked fine.

My preference for multi-tasking brought performance to a limit though. At some point, I let go of the familiar Firefox, and switched to Chromium, with lots of google integration which seemed to make life easier from a user perspective. However, lately I got pretty annoyed about the frequent stalls, not only with Chrome, but also with the entire system.

Depending on how many things ran in parallel, the system just denied me even switching application without either the rainbow, or no reaction at all. As I got myself a Windows based laptop for some other task, which now mainly runs on Ubuntu, I considered upgrading my Macbook to Ubuntu as well.

That was about four days ago, and I still struggle to get it working. Doh. Of course, there's plenty of information on the interwebs how to do it, yet many contradicting information, and the Mac idiosyncratic hardware doesn't really simplify things.

Ubuntu offers to try the system before installing, and as burning a bootable CD doesn't cause any problems, I had a quite satisfying taste of linux booted off CD. As I didn't want to make a complete switch before knowing I could still use all of images. music and other documents, I wanted to go down the dual boot route, or maybe just having a small linux on an usb stick before loosing all the data on my internal disk, which spoiled my fun with the Macbook I had before.

So far, after some four days of intense hacking, numerous reboot and installation attempts, I only learned some valuable lessons, without yet succeeding in setting up a workable Ubuntu installation. Luckily, I remembered some valuable ideas from my times as professional unix nerd, which so far prevented from losing my music, documents and images I gathered over the last few years/ Phew.

I just finished the second restore of the internal hard disk, so if you go for the adventure of installing Linux on a box that has already some valuable data/setup, here's the first important hint:
Clone your original disk with something Carbon Copy Cloner!

Luckily I had a big external USB with lots of stuff, but still sufficient space available, so before I started doctoring with the single partition of the internal disk, I made a clone that saved my ass already twice. I couldn't resize the disk - it was probably too cluttered after some years of use. To create a second partition, I needed to clone the system, delete all contents, create a second partition, and restore the original system.

I learned heaps of the boot process as well, which differs quite a bit between Apple and PC systems. PCs use traditionally BIOS booting, while my and all newer Macs use a method called EFI. These methods don't mix too well, although its possible to have the Mac emulating a BIOS to install Linux (and Windows as well). I forgot already what a default Ubuntu installation would do, as most description suggest a manual partitioning setup.

Each disk has a Master Boot Record (MBR), which you want to preserve for a dual boot system. I learned the hard way that installing a MBR onto the disk itself doesn't work well. MacOS still started, but appeared a bit sluggish, but more important, I couldn't get Linux to boot. Second highly important hint:
Don't install the MBR onto the disk, but in a dedicated small partition!

While from MacOS 10.7 onwards BootCamp offers a multiboot capability, mainly to run Windows parallel, the best solution seems a tool named rEFIt. I didn't manage to start the installation from USB stick without it, yet with it things started working out fine. That was the tool that enabled me to find out that I screwed up the MBR of my disk - after installing Linux two penguins appeared in the boot menu, none of which swam to the shores of a booting system.

After the second time I reinstalled my Mac from the clone, things started working out really well. I could use the USB stick for installation (less noisy and a bit faster than the CD installation), and finally, I could boot into a working Linux on my Mac. Hooray!

However, there's still plenty of things to sort out. My Linux partition is much smaller than the Mac part, and I want to access the files on the Mac partition (at least in read-only mode) from Linux. Though it's possible to boot Ubuntu with EFI, this needs some more doctoring. Also, the brightness control doesn't work yet. It still looks like I can now start figuring out how useful Ubuntu is while still being able to fall back to the comfort and settings of my Mac.

The aim remains to create a system which offers more privacy than MacOS. Apple has been caught lately with a lot of cooperation with the American spy authorities, and having a system that can't be spied on, and offers more Tor integration makes all the hacking worthwhile.