U.S. intelligence wants our cute cat pictures!

A thought from My Heart's in Accra which started this ramble:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

The Cute Cat Theory with notes on political activism and censorship found here.

Meanwhile according to CNet the U.S. intelligence community is not happy with the direction the Internet is taking.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence--and conceivably military--consequences.

American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. "Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge," Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. "We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us."
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.

It seems that the mighty American security agencies would be bereft if they couldn't keep peeking at all those cute animal pictures (which are such an obvious front for urban terrorists and Taliban supporters) as they are being published on the Net.

Which begs the question of how subversive does the CIA or Homeland Security find the pic below?

Apologies to the dog's owner for making fun of such a sweet pic found at MSNBC News .

Smiling through the greenhouse gas.......

Someone at The Daily Telegraph obviously has a sense of humour.

Tim Blair (a renown climate change sceptic and purveyor of dubious 'coldening' facts) has a blog at this News Limited paper.

Yesterday his webpage featured the above advertisement.

* Click on graphic if Flashplayer freezes

Ch-ching! Rudd's grocery watch list for September

Well the first of the month slipped by without me remembering to click on to that oh so forgettable website, Rudders' Grocery Choice.

Breathless with anticipation, I logged on yesterdee arvo and found the same vacuous information as before - ie., a Basic Staples Basket along with other basket types from unspecified stores somewhere in North-East New South Wales.

Go directly to the national Woolworths site and you can find out the weekly specials in their stores nearest you.

Coles has a similar specials link, as well as Shop Online.

Even Franklins allows you to look up specials.

While Aldi lists its grocery selection.

All have more usable practical information than Grocery Choice, but make no mistake, none of this allows our regional mob any real purchasing choice.

A 100kms round trip to the nearest competitor to your local supermarket makes the whole thing laughable - the fuel costs involved in chasing these 'cheaper' groceries mean that there would be no actual savings.

So, Ch-ching!, once a month Rudders is going to offer us all a slap in the face because his website seemed like a good idea for that day's media sound bite a couple of months back.

In the lands of the seriously weird

• Rumour hits the blogosphere that Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, faked her last pregnancy to give 'birth' to her own grandson. Over 1,000 people comment on DailyKos post since Saturday.

• Obama for America camp contact the Huffington Post and try to make it a federal crime that the Republican camp didn't search the archives of Palin's hometown newspaper before announcing her as McCain running mate. At the same time, Obama campaign doesn't appear to think that sending a Democrat supporter up to Alaska to go through the same archives last weekend was just a little bit excessive.

• Obama and Biden flog a 5 inch "first edition" car magnet:
  

• The world is due to end in 8 days as it is eaten from the inside out according to boffin quoted in The Sun.


• Bloggers finally pointed out the visual and aural irony of the pairing of Obama and Biden. Here, there and everywhere. OBAMA-AND-BIDEN...SAY IT FAST..SOUNDS LIKE OSAMA BIN LADEN....MAYBE ITS JUST ME?

• Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd thinks that publicly threatening to suspend welfare payments made to a family, if one or more of their children is chronically truant, shows no punative intention.

• Advice on looking out for terrorists in the U.K. - if a neighbour can't tell you his exact travel plans he's in trouble:
  

• It has been reported that the Rev. fred Nile has been made national president for life of the Christian Democratic Party, which would make it the least democratic party since One Nation incorporated to keep out Chinese-Australian activists.