sucking at the teat of the public purse

From Terry Gilliam's eerily prophetic masterpiece Brazil (1985)


"Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn’t revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program. [...]
     That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. 'Then you can see what they were saying in the past,' he says. 'By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.' The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade. [...]
     In the meantime Cray is working on the next step for the NSA, funded in part by a $250 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a massively parallel supercomputer called Cascade, a prototype of which is due at the end of 2012. Its development will run largely in parallel with the unclassified effort for the DOE and other partner agencies. That project, due in 2013, will upgrade the Jaguar XT5 into an XK6, codenamed Titan, upping its speed to 10 to 20 petaflops.
     Yottabytes and exaflops, septillions and undecillions—the race for computing speed and data storage goes on. In his 1941 story The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges imagined a collection of information where the entire world’s knowledge is stored but barely a single word is understood. In Bluffdale the NSA is constructing a library on a scale that even Borges might not have contemplated. And to hear the masters of the agency tell it, it’s only a matter of time until every word is illuminated."
— James Bamford, Wired
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transparently good for you

From: Found In Mom's Basement

"Gelatin, a protein produced from collagen extracted from the boiled bones, connective tissues, and intestines of animals, has been well-known and used for many years. [...] In Utah, where Jell-O is the official state snack, Jello salad is available in local restaurants such as Chuck-A-Rama. [...] In 2001, Green Jell-O was declared the 'Official State Snack' of Utah, with Governor Michael O. Leavitt declaring an annual 'Jell-O Week.' During the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the souvenir pins included one depicting green Jell-O."
 — Wikipedia
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"Since 1986 when the presence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as mad cow disease, was reported in Great Britain, there has been much concern about the processing of beef bones for the production of gelatin. In 1989, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the importation of cattle from the Department of Agriculture's list of of BSE-designated countries. However, a 1994 FDA ruling allowed the continued importation of bones and tissues for the production of pharmaceutical grade gelatin.
     By 1997, however, the FDA held hearings to reconsider its decision. After interviewing gelatin processors, the agency found that while gelatin has not been implicated in the spread of BSE, officials are not convinced that the manufacturing processing is extracting all possible agents that are responsible for the disease. It was generally agreed that beef sources carry more of a risk than those from pork, that bones carry a higher risk than skins, and that alkaline processing is more effective than the acid-extraction method. These findings will certainly affect the gelatin-processing industry in the next century."
—How Products Are Made
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"Amongst end users [...], food and beverage manufacturers comprise the largest market for gelatine, which is derived from collagen found in animal skin and bones, and is used for its neutral taste and emulsifying, binding, stabilising and gelling advantages in a range of foods.
     But GIA [Global Industry Analysts] warned that the industry’s steady growth trend is threatened by the growing trend towards vegetarianism among consumers, especially after scares over fatal neuro-degenerative disease BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), which have prompted food manufacturers to source gelatine substitutes.
     [...] gelatine manufacturers are using also new research to combat bad publicity, promoting gelatine as safe for human consumption and making 'concerted efforts to dissipate the misconception that gelatine is a potential carrier of BSE.'” — Ben Boukley, Food Navigator
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