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Friday 31 January 2014

Canadian Scientists Ask: Could Bubonic Plague Strike Again?

 www.occupycorporatism.com
Susan Posel 

Scientists from the McMaster University (MMU) in Canada have discovered the Justinian Plague (JP) and the Black Death (BD) were derived from distinct strains of the Yersinia pestis bacterium.

The team of researchers compared 12 skeletons from a Bavarian cemetery and uncovered the YPB in low levels of teeth tested.

Hendrik Poinar, lead author of the study and professor at MMU, explained that regardless of the fact that this research cannot be 100% conclusive, it is their educated opinion that the YPB was present in the teeth of these people buried in the cemetery and these findings are “backed up by similar elements of the bacteria that were discovered in a mass grave of victims from the 1348 bubonic plague in London.”

The bubonic plague “making” DNA material was found by the team. This bacterium is supposed to travel with small rodents and fleas.

The concern of the scientists is whether or not this strain of plague could strike again.

Read more

The Meaning Of Dieudonné


Since the 1968 Student Revolution, the European and American Left, together with a herd of Jewish progressive intellectuals, have invested enormous effort in attempting to break society down into multiple segments of identities. The Left adopted this peculiar approach because it could never cope with its own failure to bond with working people.

The Jewish intellectuals, who led the campaign, realized that fragmented and divided nations are far less dangerous for Jews. As we know, Jews are threatened by cohesive, patriotic nationalism, and for a good reason. After all, they were amongst the prime victims of such an ideology.

Bizarrely enough, dazzled by the emerging false prophecy of post-68 ‘identity politics,’ the Left was quick to drop its universal ethos. While in the past it aimed to cross the divide and unite the working people, the post-68 Left actually split and ghettoized the Western subjects by means of identification.

Instead of being and celebrating who and what we are, we’ve learned to identify with ready-made soundbites. Rather than simply being Jill, Joseph, Abe or Youssef, we are now identified ‘as a woman’, ‘as a gay’, ‘as a Jew’, ‘as a Muslim’, and so on. In practice, the New Left has been erecting walls around us in an attempt to separate us into infinitesimally small, marginal identity groups. Peculiarly, it is the post-68 Left, rather than the capitalists, that drove us into segregation, isolation and political paralysis.

But then, pretty much out of the blue, Dieudonné, a black French comedian, has managed to re-unite the working people: the migrant communities, the Black, the Muslim, the North African as well as the White proletarian and at the same time, to deliver a universal message.

Dieudonné has reminded us what the Left stood for in the first place, before it was conquered by Marcuse and his Frankfurt Yeshiva’s pals.  It is the French entertainer who brings to light the most instinctive Left insight – we are actually united and identified in opposition to our oppressors, namely, the establishment.

The ‘quenelle’ — a salute that was initially introduced by Dieudonné — embodies a modest and graceful openness of true resistance. It is a simple, restrained and poetic take on the crude Anglo-American ‘up yours’. The gesture is obviously universal and an open call — everyone, including Jews, are welcome in, as opposed to the post-68 identity discourses that are largely defined by biology and race. Being an emblem of an ethically driven and universalist standpoint the quenelle also symbolizes an opposition to the primacy of Jewish suffering and the tyranny of political correctness.

Dieudonné is the definitive hero of genuine socialist thinking in the spirit of the Paris Commune, and as such, he indeed poses a great danger to fake New Leftists and their paymasters at CRIF. The kosher Frankfurt graduate sees the French masses gathering momentum and the people marching in the streets of Paris shouting ‘the emperor has no clothes’. In fact, there is not much to be concealed or suppressed anymore. Once again, the bare truth reveals itself and against all odds.


The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity politics and Jewish Power in particular – available on Amazon.com  & Amazon.co.uk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSkUq-3JF3M

Police 'culture of disbelief' over rape claims alarms official monitoring group

The Guardian

Official concern over a "culture of disbelief" in rape cases has been raised as new figures show that some police forces are writing off up to a third of all allegations reported to them.

A report by the high-powered joint government and police rape monitoring group confirms that a postcode lottery is operating in the way the 43 forces in England and Wales deal with rape allegations.
The figures show that the "no crime" rate for adult rape – the rate at which forces dismiss allegations initially recorded as a crime because of later details that emerge about the case – varies from only 3% in Cumbria to 33% in Lincolnshire.

Seven forces have a "no crime" rate for adult rape of 20% or more: Lincolnshire, Leicestershire (29%), Hertfordshire (21%) and the West Midlands (21%), Cleveland (20%), Derbyshire (20%) and Northumbria (20%). The national average "no crime" rate in adult rape cases is 12%, compared with 2% for all victim-based crime recorded by the police.

Dru Sharpling, HM Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC), who chairs the rape monitoring group, said the figures raised serious questions about whether a culture of disbelief persisted in some police forces when it comes to women making rape allegations. The police watchdog's recent report on the Jimmy Savile affair detailed the difficulties encountered by rape victims in going to the police, including lack of confidence, she said. She added that there might be a range of other explanations for the disparities between forces, but questions over disbelief had to be raised.

Read more


Holder: Tsarnaev will face death penalty in Boston bombing case

Comment:  Another patsy flushed down the military-corporate-intelligence toilet. The evidence for entrapment operation that bolster and even create terrorism is overwhelming - it's called The Terror Industry. See HERE, HERE and HERE.

See also:

Were The Boston Marathon Bombers 'Mind Controlled'?
Boston Bombings: The most obvious staged event since 9/11 
Media Fog of War Ensues in Wake of Boston Marathon Bombing 
Boston Bombing Involves Clearly Staged Carnage

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RT

United States Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday that the Department of Justice will seek the death penalty against Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the 20-year-old ethic Chechen man accused of being involved in last year’s deadly Boston Marathon bombing.

“After consideration of the relevant facts, the applicable regulations and the submissions made by the defendant’s counsel, I have determined that the United States will seek the death penalty in this matter,” Holder said in a brief statement released Thursday afternoon. 

No trial is currently set for Tsarnaev, but the attorney general said prosecutors will ask that he be sentenced to die if he’s found guilty of using a weapon of mass destruction. 

"The nature of the conduct at issue and the resultant harm compel this decision," Holder said in a statement released Thursday. 

In an official Notice of Intent to Seek the Death Penalty filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts on Thursday, US attorney Carmen Ortiz wrote that Tsarnaev is worthy of execution because he intentionally killed, inflicted serious bodily injury and participated in acts that resulted in death. 

“Tsarnaev intentionally and specifically engaged in acts of violence,” Ortiz wrote at one point, “knowing that the acts created a grave risk of death to a person or persons, other than one of the participants in the offense, such that the participation in the acts constituted a reckless disregard for human life.”

Read more

 

Thursday 30 January 2014

The Brazilian Slum Children Who Are Literally Swimming in Garbage


 photo by Diego Nigro/JC Imagem

The Brazilian city of Recife is known for its majestic bridges, but in November a newspaper photo highlighted one of the metropolis’s uglier aspects. Published in the Jornal do Commercio, the picture showed a nine-year-old kid named Paulo Henrique submerged in a garbage-filled canal beneath one of those famous bridges, picking cans out of the filthy water so he could sell them.

According to government estimates, some 6,500 children live in the slums in the Arruda and Campina Barreto neighborhoods on Recife’s north side. Many of them wade through garbage to eke out a living just as Paulo does, but it was only after his image appeared in the press that the local government and international authorities took notice of their plight. In response to the photo and the accompanying article, the government promised to place Paulo, his mother, and his five siblings on welfare.

Unfortunately, this publicity hasn’t yet resulted in the other children of the slums getting more money or services.

“We try to keep them busy, give them education and proper food, but with the money we get, we can only assist 120 of these young kids [at a time],” said Anatilde Costa, a social worker at the Asylum Home of Divine Providence, a local NGO that provides food, clothing, and education to the children. “Many others live in a pitiful situation... Like they are animals.” Her organization receives a small amount of money from the federal government, but it subsists mostly on donations.

Larissa Silva, a ten-year-old who has chronic ringworm covering 80 percent of her body, lives a few miles away from the Asylum’s headquarters. When I met her at the cardboard house she shares with her family she asked me, “Do you think I like living here?” I said no, and she responded, “But I do. It’s the only life I know.”

Fabiana, Larissa’s mother, told me, “We spend two months collecting all kinds of aluminum material and then we sell it to a company that pays us 130 reals [around $55] for recycling. I raise my three kids like this.”

On my way out of the slum I ran into Jeferson, Larissa’s brother. He told me he hopes it rains soon so that he can take a bath and play on the garbage rivers at high tide.



Russia pledges 'unlimited' intervention as emerging market sell-off continues


The Telegraph


Russia's central bank has pledged "unlimited" intervention to maintain the strength of the rouble as emerging markets continued to come under pressure from the Federal Reserve's withdrawal of stimulus.

Capital flight from emerging markets continued on Thursday after the US Federal Reserve confirmed fears it would trim another $10bn off its massive asset purchase programme. 

A closely-watched survey showing that Chinese manufacturing contracted for the first time in six months in January also exacerbated jitters in the market. 

In a statement, the Russian central bank said it would stage "unlimited" interventions in order to keep the rouble's exchange rate within its target corridor, as the currency fell to a record low against the euro and a five-year low against the US dollar. 

The bank runs a "dirty" float in which it conducts currency interventions when the rouble approaches the boundaries of a seven-rouble corridor against a currency basket made up of dollars and euros. It wants to move to a free float by the start of next year, but the rouble's 6 percent slide this year has already led Economy Minister Alexei Ulyukayev - a former central banker - to call for a delay.

Ben Bernanke, outgoing Federal Reserve chairman, on Wednesday said the US central bank would continue tapering its massive quantitative easing programme by reducing asset purchases to $65bn in February from January's $75bn. This is the second $10bn reduction in as many months

The Fed's move, although widely expected, has intensified pressure on emerging market currencies and stocks, which have been on a downward trajectory ever since Mr Bernanke first raised the prospect of a taper in May last year

The ongoing sell-off underlines the supremacy of the Fed as traders apparently dismissed efforts by emerging market central banks to stem capital flight by raising interest rates. A bumper interest rate hike in Turkey to 12pc from 7.75pc, a less-aggressive rise in South Africa and unexpected tightening in India this week have failed to ease outflows

"The pressure on these currencies has been relentless and it seems like places like South Africa, Hungary and Turkey are trying to force policymakers to bring real rates to much higher levels," said Manik Narain, emerging market strategist at UBS

"Rate hikes have been effectively rejected by the currency markets... Institutional investors have remained faithful (but) it may be that some of these positions are starting to crack.

Many economists argue that emerging markets must endure a sharp correction to adjust for increased demand in the developed economies and that lower currencies will stoke economic growth in the long term by boosting exports.

MSCI's index of emerging market stocks fell 0.8pc on Thursday to a fresh four-and-a-half month low. The Turkish lira recovered slightly on Thursday but remained near record lows against the US dollar and the South African rand hit a fresh five-year low of 11.39 against the greenback.




A Sorry State of the Union

Lew Rockwell
Andrew Napolitano

What if the state of the union is a mess? What if the government spies on all of us all of the time and recognizes no limits to its spying? What if its appetite for acquiring personal knowledge about all Americans is insatiable? What if the government uses the microchips in our cellphones to follow us and listen to us as we move about?

What if the Constitution expressly prohibits the government from doing this? What if the government has written laws that are interpreted in secret by judges who meet in secret and are applied by federal agents who operate in secret and their secret behavior doesn’t even resemble what the laws say they can do?
What if the feds have seized the content of every text message, email, mobile and landline telephone call, utility bill, credit card bill and bank statement of everyone in America for the past four years? What if no law has authorized them to capture this? What if when asked by members of Congress, in public and under oath, high-ranking officials, at least one with ribbons on his chest and stars on his shoulders, lied about what the government is doing?

What if the government’s spies have so insinuated themselves into our computers that they can capture every keystroke we press on all of our computers before we hit “send”? What if the feds have hacked into the servers of every major computer service provider in the country and they know what we have typed before we even make corrections? What if the feds have a copy of what we have deleted? What if our typed innermost thoughts and even second thoughts that were never sent in emails nevertheless reside in the government’s databank?

What if the president knows all this and supports what his spies are doing? What if he secretly authorized all this, but only admitted to some of it when he got caught? What if he uses his spies to tell him what he wants to know about those who oppose him?

Read more

 

Coup in Western Ukraine: the Arab Spring unleashed in Europe

Voltaire Network
Andrew Korybko

Rioters have seized the administration building in Lvov and forced the governor to resign. It is not known who is currently in power in this region, but a puppet government formed by ‘opposition forces’ may soon be set up. Demands for ‘autonomy’, or quite possibly, explicit separatist flirtations, may give Klitschko and his thugs added bargaining power to use against the democratically elected government during ‘negotiations’. It is likely that even more extremist activity will occur, led by Klischko, as he proclaimed on 22 January that, “If I have to go (on to the streets) under bullets, I shall go there under bullets.” 

Batkivshchyna Party leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk seconded this provocative threat to delve Ukraine into de-facto civil warfare, as he similarly stated on 22 January that “Tomorrow [23 January] we will go forward together. And if it’s a bullet in the forehead, then it’s a bullet in the forehead, but in an honest, fair and brave way.”

It is evident now that both men kept their threats in encouraging their respective militias to unleash carnage within the country. As with the Arab Spring events, these provocateurs are fiending for ‘some of their own’ to be killed by government forces seeking to re-establish control over anarchic areas. A full-fledged military or Berkut response by Yanukovich is exactly what Klitschko and Yatsenyuk want. For them, the more dead ‘protesters’, the better. It should be kept in mind that 1980s Poland was placed under martial law for much less violent disturbances than what we are witnessing in Ukraine at the moment.

The authorities now have to make a tough decision over whether to try to restore order to the restive region or to attempt to regain control over the capital. The situation is extremely grave, and it is now obvious that this hybrid Color Revolution/Arab Spring frankenstein is schizophrenically taking on more characteristics of the latter (not that any is good, for that matter). The Libyan method has apparently been ‘perfected’ to the point where outside actors feel comfortable deploying this Pandora’s Box inside of Europe itself.

It is clear that ever since the ‘Bulldozer Revolution’ in Serbia over a decade ago, the Color Revolution template has evolved into the Arab Spring, and now the two have morphed into EuroMaidan, a new type of warfare for our century. Because of the ease of NGO infiltration of targeted nations in today’s globalized world, as well as the synchronized terrorist and weapons-trafficking rings under the strong influence of various intelligence organizations, the threat of this ‘social’ weapon/virus being deployed in more and more countries has never been higher. It should be seen as no coincidence that 3,000 Middle Eastern terrorists were planned to be relocated to Romania, possibly for use in militantly training certain elements of the Ukrainian ‘opposition’. This demonstrates that the outside powers are intent on digging in for the long-run and unleashing as much destabilization as possible. Ukraine’s "peaceful pro-European" protesters leave a burnt land behind.

Read more

Fifth of Neanderthals' genetic code lives on in modern humans

Comment: Does make you wonder if this is where certain genetic predispositions to psychopathy made an entry?  Cro-Magnon man became infected for evermore. For more on this you might want to read this astounding article. But prepare to have your beliefs challenged.

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Many of the Neanderthal genes that live on in people today are involved in making keratin,
a protein used in skin, hair and nails. Photograph: Jose A Astor/Alamy

The Guardian

The last of the Neanderthals may have died out tens of thousands of years ago, but large stretches of their genetic code live on in people today.

Though many of us can claim only a handful of Neanderthal genes, when added together, the human population carries more than a fifth of the archaic human's DNA, researchers found.

The finding means that scientists can study about 20% of the Neanderthal genome without having to prise the genetic material from fragile and ancient fossils.

The Neanderthal traces in our genetic makeup are the lasting legacy of sexual encounters between our direct ancestors and the Neanderthals they met when they walked out of Africa and into Eurasia about 65,000 years ago.

The populations of both groups were likely so small that interbreeding was a rare event, but the benefits of some Neanderthal genes were so great that they spread through the population and linger on in modern non-Africans today.

Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey at the University of Washington in Seattle sequenced the genomes of more than 600 people from Europe and eastern Asia. They then used a computer analysis to find gene variants that bore all the hallmarks of having come from Neanderthals.

To see whether the technique worked, they checked the genes against the official Neanderthal genome, which was sequenced from fossil remnants in 2010 by researchers in Germany.

The researchers found that while most non-Africans carried 1 to 3% Neanderthal DNA, the total amount in modern humans reached about 20%. "Although Neanderthals are extinct, there's still a lot of genetic information about them floating around, in our own genomes. It's not necessarily useful in that it will cure cancer, but it helps us to learn about our history," Vernot told the Guardian. Details of the study are reported in Science.

The researchers now believe that even deeper mining of modern genomes could help to find genetic traces of other archaic humans.

Read more

Migrants Should Pay £2,000 When They Arrive In The UK, Says Think Tank

Comment: On the original link there's an opportunity to vote on the idea. At the moment most folks are in favour...

-------------------------------



Huffington Post (UK)

Charging all migrants £2,000 as soon they arrive in the UK would lead to a more tolerant and transparent immigration system, a think tank claims.

The radical suggestion comes from the CentreForum, which says it would end the charge that people can come to the UK and claim welfare without paying taxes first.

The liberal think tank also hit out at the "arms race" of tough talk on immigration and slammed the government's "perverse" target on migrant numbers.

But the most eye-catching proposal was the £2,000 "National Insurance Advance".

It would be paid upon entry to the UK by non-EU economic migrants only and refunded once they had made sufficient tax contributions, or left the country without claiming welfare.

CentreForum's report also contains plans to extend the period before EU migrants can claim out of work benefits to 12 months.

And it joins calls to scrap the Conservative party's policy of reducing net migration to "the tens of thousands".

The report comes as the Immigration Bill returns to the House of Commons.

Alasdair Murray, report author, said: "Politicians are engaged in an arms race around immigration policy which appears to have more to do with looking tough than genuinely addressing people's concerns with practical policy.

"It is possible to restore confidence in the immigration system by making it more transparent, ending the perception that migrants can access the benefits system without first contributing and developing a target that reflects the real social and economic needs of the country."

The exorcisms of Latoya Ammons

Comment: I occasionally post a few stories about anomalous events and occurrences. Any physicist worth his salt will tell you that reality traverses many more densities and dimensions then merely the physical. These dimensions have been dressed up and re-interpreted via religion, folklore and mythology. Nonetheless, reality is like a radio station and depending on your level of awareness and/or sensitivity it is possible to tune in to the relevant frequency of a given density and/or dimension but perceive phenomena housed in that reality. Due to a mix of environmental, biological and spiritual factors various phenomena indicative of a very vibrant and rich Universe can seep through. According to your belief system - religious or materialist - this can be deeply unsettling. The story below is another one that made it to the mainstream, despite the fact that such events happen much more often than we realise. 

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Latoya Ammons
Indy Star

A woman and three children who claimed to be possessed by demons. A 9-year-old boy walking backward up a wall in the presence of a family case manager and hospital nurse.

Gary police Capt. Charles Austin said it was the strangest story he had ever heard.

Austin, a 36-year veteran of the Gary Police Department, said he initially thought Indianapolis resident Latoya Ammons and her family concocted an elaborate tale as a way to make money. But after several visits to their home and interviews with witnesses, Austin said simply, "I am a believer."

MORE COVERAGE: How other outlets handled 'The exorcisms of Latoya Ammons'

Not everyone involved with the family was inclined to believe its incredible story. And many readers will find Ammons' supernatural claims impossible to accept.

But, whatever the cause of the creepy occurrences that befell the family — whether they were seized by a systematic delusion or demonic possession — it led to one of the most unusual cases ever handled by the Department of Child Services. Many of the events are detailed in nearly 800 pages of official records obtained by The Indianapolis Star and recounted in more than a dozen interviews with police, DCS personnel, psychologists, family members and a Catholic priest.

Ammons, who swears by her story, has been unusually open. While she spoke on condition her children not be interviewed or named, she signed releases letting The Star review medical, psychological and official records that are not open to the public — and not always flattering.

Furthermore, the family's story is made only more bizarre because it involves a DCS intervention, a string of psychological evaluations, a police investigation and, ultimately, a series of exorcisms.

It's a tale, they say, that started with flies.

Read more

U.S. Farmer Sentenced After Being Tracked By DRONE and Arrested, For Refusing To Return Cows

Political Blindspot

Rodney Brossart is the first U.S. citizen to be tracked by drone and arrested. Beyond this historic “first,” his case could not be more bizarre. Brossart is a farmer who was arrested after a Predator drone tracked him. Law enforcement swarmed in with a SWAT team after Brossart said he would not return three cows that had apparently wandered on to his property.

The standoff occurred in 2011, but Brossart was sentenced yesterday, making him the first American to be sent to prison as a result of domestic drone spying.

The “armed standoff between Brossart, his three sons and a SWAT team” only ended after members of the Brossart family were located by a Predator drone borrowed from Customs and Border Patrol.

The disturbing precedence of the Brossart case, says that police are able to spy on you without a warrant, using a drone. Brossart tried to get the entire case thrown out, saying that there was no warrant for the drone surveillance. The federal judge in this case rejected the motion.What are your thoughts? Is this just a matter of course in our growing surveillance state? Or should we be outraged by the use of warrantless drone searches?

(Article by James Achisa; Eli Khalil and Shante Wooten; image via Foreign Policy)

A Posthumous Twist in the Story of a Disgraced Senate Aide

The Atlantic

Jesse Ryan Loskarn was an aide to a U.S. senator until last month, when he was arrested for buying child pornography. Disgraced, he committed suicide last week. Politico has a summary of the details that were known at the time of his death. "According to a federal complaint, he made 'several purchases' from November 2010 to March 2011 from a Toronto-based movie production company," it reports. "Court documents said 'the majority of these films featured young nude boys."

But it turns out there's more to the story. His apparent suicide note has been posted online by his family. Its audience should be as wide as the one exposed to his crime. Here's an excerpt:
I’ve hurt every single human being I’ve ever known and the details of my shame are preserved on the internet for all time. There is no escape. My family has been wounded beyond description. My former boss and colleagues had their trust broken and their names dragged through the mud for no reason other than association. Friends’ question whether they ever really knew me.
Everyone wants to know why.

... The first time I saw child pornography was during a search for music on a peer-to-peer network. I wasn’t seeking it but I didn’t turn away when I saw it. Until that moment, the only place I’d seen these sorts of images was in my mind. I found myself drawn to videos that matched my own childhood abuse. It’s painful and humiliating to admit to myself, let alone the whole world, but I pictured myself as a child in the image or video. The more an image mirrored some element of my memories and took me back, the more I felt a connection. 
This is my deepest, darkest secret. As a child I didn’t understand what had happened at the time of the abuse. I did know that I must not tell anyone, ever. Later the memories took on new and more troubling meaning when I became a teenager. They started to appear more often and made me feel increasingly apart from everyone else. In my mind I instigated and enjoyed the abuse—even as a five and nine year old—no matter the age difference.  Discussing what had happened would have meant shame and blame. I always worried someone might look at me and know, so I paid close attention to others for any sign they might have figured it out. No one ever did. By my late teens I reached a sort of mental equilibrium on the matter.  I couldn’t stop the images from appearing altogether, but I generally controlled when they appeared. As an adult I thought I was a tougher man because of the experience; that I was mentally stronger and less emotional than most. I told myself that I was superior to other people because I had dealt with this thing on my own.
There's more.
 
Loskarn concluded, "to the children in the images: I should have known better. I perpetuated your abuse and that will be a burden on my soul for the rest of my life."
 
The ban on child pornography is one of the few prohibitionist policies that I support. Child pornography ought to be illegal. Possessing it ought to be stigmatized as well. But what this letter brings home is the importance of eliminating stigmas against having been abused as a child, and far more controversially, against the unrequited desire to buy child porn. Our charge is to create a society where people with that impulse seek professional help before giving in to it. That would do far more to protect children than mercilessly vilifying the unrequited impulse. Today, someone who announced, "I have this compulsion to watch child pornography and I'm afraid I'll act on it without help!" would be labeled a pervert and shunned. But seeking help would actually be brave and honorable. 
 
Were I confronted with someone seeking help of that sort, I'd probably feel creeped out. I hope I'd also be kind, helpful, and mindful of just how lucky I am: that is to say, mindful that it isn't elevated moral status or choice of any kind that has caused me to only have sexual feelings for people of roughly my own age. It's just luck. So many of us enjoy that particular kind of luck that it's easy to stigmatize those who don't. We'd do better to vilify acts rather than compulsions, so that more people with compulsions seek help and fewer children are victimized.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

Mind Control in American Politics


Illinois health officials shut down 11-year-old's cupcake business

Comment: Yet another great example of America's descent into inverted totalitarianism... Extraordinarily pathetic.

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Freshly-baked cupcakes on a tray (File/UPI/Bill Greenblatt)
| License Photo
UPI (via Moral Anarchism)

 TROY, Ill., Jan. 29 (UPI) -- The Belleville News-Democrat ran a story about an 11-year-old girl making about $200 a month selling cupcakes that apparently left a bad taste in the mouths of Illinois health officials.

Middle-schooler Chloe Stirling of Troy, Ill., quickly learned a tough lesson about government regulation on small businesses after the story ran on Sunday. Madison County Health Department officials informed her family that the pastry party was over on Monday.

“They called and said they were shutting us down,” said Chloe’s mother, Heather Stirling.

According to the Post-Dispatch, health officials informed the Stirlings that they would have to “buy a bakery or build her a kitchen separate from the one we have” for Chloe to continue selling cupcakes. 

“Obviously, we can’t do that,” Heather said. “We’ve already given her a little refrigerator to keep her things in, and her grandparents bought her a stand mixer. But a separate kitchen? Who can do that?”

Chloe was charging $10 for a dozen cupcakes and $2 specialty cupcakes. "I'm saving for a bakery," Chloe said in the piece that got her into trouble

“The rules are the rules. It’s for the protection of the public health,” said health department spokeswoman Amy Yeager. “The guidelines apply to everyone. People will react how they choose to react. But it is our job.”

Chloe’s mother indicated she would be willing to get the necessary licenses and permits for her middle-schooler to continue operating her small business -- after a tough lesson on government regulation.

[St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
[Belleville News-Democrat]

Save the Internet: Stop Fast Track

Boing Boing

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Want to help save democracy?The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a super-secretive trade agreement that threatens everything you care about. It's been negotiated behind closed doors with ample input from over 600 corporate lobbyists -- but no access for journalists or the public. Sound bad? It gets worse. The corporate interest groups pushing for the TPP are the same folks that brought us SOPA, ACTA, and NAFTA."
No one knows exactly what's in the TPP, since it's shrouded in so much secrecy, but from leaked texts, we know that the it would lead to a more censored, policed, and expensive Internet -- and it would undermine important protections for workers rights, public health, and the environment. Over 80 organizations oppose Fast Track for the TPP. You can read why -- in their own words -- at StopFastTrack.com
 
Ready for the good news? The U.S. government needs Congress to pass a bill called "Fast Track" or that gives the President the ability to ratify trade agreements without meaningful debate or amendments from Congress. Without Fast Track, other countries won't be willing to agree to the extremist Internet-killing copyright policies that the U.S. is pushing, since they know that Congress could just amend any agreement they come to. If Fast Track fails, experts are saying that the whole TPP could likely fall apart, and that the worst pieces of it will almost certainly be off the table.

It's that simple. If we stop Fast Track, we stop the TPP. We need to melt phones, fill up inboxes, and raise our voices high to defend democracy and save the Internet. Here's the link, you know what to do.  

Weather expert accuses Met Office of 'warm bias' in getting annual predictions wrong 13 out of the last 14 years

Daily Mail

The Met Office has got every annual global forecast so far this century wrong, bar one, a BBC weatherman said.

Paul Hudson, a forecaster for BBC's regional programme Look North, said the Met Office's predictions had been wrong for 13 years out of the last 14, and said the incorrect predictions had all been 'on the warm side' rather than too cold.

He said on his BBC weather blog that they had predicted the global temperature in 2013 would be 0.57C above the 1961-1990 average temperature of 14C, when in fact it was only warmer by 0.49C.

Mr Hudson, a trained meteorologist with 20 years' experience, said the global average temperature for 2013 meant that: 'So far this century, of 14 yearly headline predictions made by the Met Office Hadley centre, 13 have been too warm.'

He added: 'It’s worth stressing that all the incorrect predictions are within the stated margin of error, but having said that, they have all been on the warm side and none have been too cold.'

He said the 2013 annual temperature also meant that another Met Office prediction, that half the years between 2010 and 2015 would be hotter than the hottest year on record (1998) was wrong already.

The forecaster, who previously worked for the Met Office, wrote: 'The Met Office believe one of the reasons for this ‘warm bias’ in their annual global projections is the lack of observational data in the Arctic circle, which has been the fastest warming area on earth.

Read more

Fascistbook: What Every Facebook User Needs To Know

Tales from the World 

For those of you who think Facebook is a medium for freedom of speech and self-expression, you’re wrong. My page, and others like it, are constantly being monitored the NSA and fake spy accounts. They continuously remove pictures from our pages that question the effects our current political-economic system has on other people, while suspending our posting privileges for days at a time

For example, one picture showed 5 African children drinking muddy water, with the caption “Tell me again how hard your life is”. It got removed and my posting permissions were suspended for several days for making a post that violated their community standards. You read that right. My account was suspended from posting privileges because I posted a photo of poor children drinking dirty water. Now how in the world could this picture “violate community standards”? Another one said “There is more fruit in a rich man’s shampoo than on a poor man’s plate” and was also taken down, with posting permissions suspended once again. These photos, as you can see below, are not explicit in nature. I guess this kind of post doesn’t coincide with an elitist, capitalist, and materialist philosophy. My apologies.

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Ukraine considers amnesty as former president warns of civil war

The Guardian

Ukraine's parliament is considering measures to grant amnesty to those arrested during weeks of protests, but possibly with conditions attached that would be unacceptable to the opposition.

Two amnesty proposals are up for a parliamentary vote on Wednesday, one of which says amnesty would be granted only if demonstrators left the streets and vacated buildings that they occupy.

Over the course of two months, anti-government protesters have established a large tent camp in the main square of Kiev and seized three buildings that they use as operations centres and sleeping quarters. They have also put up barricades of ice, wood and other materials.

Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine's first-post independence president, urged deputies to come to an agreement on the amnesty issue, warning that the country was "on the brink of civil war".

"It is a revolution. It is a dramatic situation in which we must act with the greatest responsibility," Kravchuk – president from 1991 to 1994 – said to applause and a standing ovation.

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WiFi banned from pre-school childcare facilities in a bold move by French government

Natural News

The French National Assembly has adopted a bill to limit exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by wireless technologies - cell phones, tablets, Wi-Fi etc. This bill will mean the following:

• A ban on Wi-Fi in all childcare facilities for children under the age of 3.
• Cell phone manufacturers will have to recommend the use of hand-free kits.
• A ban on all advertising targeting children under 14.

Children's exposure a cause for concern

Children's EMF exposures are a particular cause for concern. Studies show that children's brains can absorb up to three times as much radiation compared to adults.

A recent International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) report suggested that EMF exposures can be more devastating in children because their:

• Brain tissue is more conductive.
• Skull is thinner.
• Smaller brains and softer brain tissue allows radiation to penetrate more effectively.
• Potentially longer period of exposure due to use beginning at an earlier age.

This new French bill seems to have taken these concerns into account.

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Stem cell 'major discovery' claimed

BBC News

Stem cell researchers are heralding a "major scientific discovery", with the potential to start a new age of personalised medicine.

Scientists in Japan showed stem cells can now be made quickly just by dipping blood cells into acid.
Stem cells can transform into any tissue and are already being trialled for healing the eye, heart and brain. 

The latest development, published in the journal Nature, could make the technology cheaper, faster and safer.

The human body is built of cells with a specific role - nerve cells, liver cells, muscle cells - and that role is fixed.

However, stem cells can become any other type of cell, and they have become a major field of research in medicine for their potential to regenerate the body. 

Embryos are one, ethically charged, source of stem cells. Nobel prize winning research also showed that skin cells could be "genetically reprogrammed" to become stem cells (termed induced pluripotent stem cells). 

Acid bath
 
Now a study shows that shocking blood cells with acid could also trigger the transformation into stem cells - this time termed STAP (stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency) cells.
Dr Haruko Obokata, from the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology in Japan, said she was "really surprised" that cells could respond to their environment in this way.
She added: "It's exciting to think about the new possibilities these findings offer us, not only in regenerative medicine, but cancer as well."

The breakthrough was achieved in mouse blood cells, but research is now taking place to achieve the same results with human blood.

Chris Mason, professor of regenerative medicine at University College London, said if it also works in humans then "the age of personalised medicine would have finally arrived."

He told the BBC: "I thought - 'my God that's a game changer!' It's a very exciting, but surprise, finding.
"It looks a bit too good to be true, but the number of experts who have reviewed and checked this, I'm sure that it is.

"If this works in people as well as it does in mice, it looks faster, cheaper and possibly safer than other cell reprogramming technologies - personalised reprogrammed cell therapies may now be viable."
For age-related macular degeneration, which causes sight loss, it takes 10 months to go from a patient's skin sample to a therapy that could be injected into their eye -and at huge cost.

Prof Mason said weeks could be knocked off that time which would save money, as would cheaper components.

'Revolutionary'
 
The finding has been described as "remarkable" by the Medical Research Council's Prof Robin Lovell-Badge and as "a major scientific discovery" by Dr Dusko Ilic, a reader in stem cell science at Kings College London.

Dr Ilic added: "The approach is indeed revolutionary. 

"It will make a fundamental change in how scientists perceive the interplay of environment and genome."
But he added: "It does not bring stem cell-based therapy closer. We will need to use the same precautions for the cells generated in this way as for the cells isolated from embryos or reprogrammed with a standard method."

And Prof Lovell-Badge said: "It is going to be a while before the nature of these cells are understood, and whether they might prove to be useful for developing therapies, but the really intriguing thing to discover will be the mechanism underlying how a low pH shock triggers reprogramming - and why it does not happen when we eat lemon or vinegar or drink cola?"

The Gospel according to millionaire war criminal Saint Tony Blair

Comment: More from the eternally and almost inexpressibly repellent Tony Bliar.

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Stop the War Coalition

All hail. For lo verily, the Prophet Anthony Blair, millionaire warmonger and late convert to Catholicism, hath descended from his spiritual retreat with Bono on Mount Davos and come amongst us,  bearing not tablets of stone, but a column in The Observer containing his proposals on how the world and the Middle East might pursue peace in the 21st century.

Casting his compassionate eye across our troubled world,  Saint Tony is saddened by a ‘ghastly roll call of terror attacks in the obvious places: Syria, Libya, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia and Pakistan.’   He is also appalled by acts of terror ‘ in places where we have only in recent years seen such violence: Nigeria, and in many parts of central Africa, in Russia and across central Asia, and in Burma, Thailand and the Philippines.’

At this point certain inconsistencies cannot help but catch even the most casual reader’s attention.  Why does Blair’s indictment at contemporary violence only refer to the anti-government attacks in Egypt for example, and not the hideous slaughter of more than 1000 supporters of the ousted Muslim Brotherhood by Egypt’s military government last year, in a coup that he supported?   If Blair is so appalled by the ‘ghastly roll call’ of terror attacks in Syria, why was he calling for Western governments to arm the rebels last year?

Does he know that his great friends the Saudis, whose corrupt business investments he did so much to protect when he was in office,  threatened Russia with ‘terror attacks’ during the Winter Olympics last year if Putin did not change his policy on Syria?  What in fact, do the events that he describes actually have to do with each other at all?

That last question, at least, does have an answer.  For the Prophet hath looked deeply into all these events and concluded:
The fact is that, though of course there are individual grievances or reasons for the violence in each country, there is one thing self-evidently in common: the acts of terrorism are perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion. It is a perversion of faith. But there is no doubt that those who commit the violence often do so by reference to their faith and the sectarian nature of the conflict is a sectarianism based on religion. There is no doubt either that this phenomenon is growing, not abating.
An abuse of religion, golly who would have thought it?  So that’s why the Rohingyas have become a stateless and victimized minority in Burma.  That’s why anti-Russian rebels in the Caucasus have been fighting for years against Russian domination.   This is why Sunnis and Shiites are currently slaughtering each other in Iraq – something that they weren’t doing before the Prophet got together with his equally devout mate George Bush to plot the war that caused the collapse of Iraqi society.

Forget the corrupt oil politics that drive the insurgency in the Niger Delta.   Or the poverty and corruption that fuels the maniacally violent Boko Haram in northern Nigeria.  Forget authoritarian governance, police and military violence, politics, the unequal distribution of resources, the role of religion in forging political and ethnic identities within states and between -  forget all that because all these manifestations of 21st century violence are all the result of a ‘perversion of faith.’

To put it as politely as I can, and far more politely than Saint Tony deserves, this is total and unmitigated nonsense.  That reactionary religious extremism exists is indisputable.  It is also clear  that such extremism has increased its political influence, particularly in the Middle East.

But that does not mean that the wars and acts of violence in the 21st century are ‘religious’ conflicts, let alone that they are based on a ‘perversion of faith’, whatever that means.  Religious conflict did not cause the Syrian Civil War, anymore than it has caused the wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, or the ongoing violence in Palestine, Lebanon or any of the other countries that Blair so gormlessly attempts to envelop in his dim thesis.

In fact there is no need to ‘pervert faith’ in order to use religion as a justification for violence or a political instrument.  All religions contain messages of peace and violence that can be drawn upon depending on the circumstances.   Religion can be a tool of political control by states and governments, and in some cases such control can be exercised by favoring certain sectarian groups at the expense of others, or by using religion to promote geopolitical influence beyond their borders.

But religion can also provide a potent mobilising ideology for revolutionary violence, and the fantasy of a just state founded on religious purity tends to acquire more momentum under oppressive regimes where no other ideological critiques are permitted, as has so often been the case in the Middle East.  Religion can also provide a rallying call for resistance to occupation, as Britain and the United States have discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is no doubt that the belief that religiously-justified violence is sanctioned by God can lead to some spectacularly cruel and fanatical acts of violence, but in strategic terms, most acts that fall within Blair’s  ‘roll call of terror attacks’ stem from a template of modern revolutionary violence that can be both ‘religious’ or ‘secular.’

And however bloody some of these acts have been, they are no less fanatical  than Blair and Bush’s catastrophic and disastrously misconceived wars, with their utter disregard for the potential consequences.

When Blair calls for greater western engagement in the Middle East on the grounds that ‘ All over the region, and including in Iraq…the same sectarianism threatens the right of the people to a democratic future,’ he entirely neglects to mention the extent to which the previous intervention in Iraq that he so fervently advocated has actually fuelled sectarian conflict, and created a vortex of violence that has sucked in Iraq’s neighbours.

All that is neatly obliterated by Saint Tony’s reflection on ‘my experience post-9/11 of how countries whose people were freed from dictatorship have then had democratic aspirations thwarted by religious extremism.’

And the solution?  According to Blair, western governments must now set out to embark on a campaign to promote education and religious tolerance in the Middle East and across the world, against those who ‘disseminate hatred and division’ so as ‘not to allow faith to divide us but instead to embody the true values of compassion and humanity common to all faiths.’

Now resist the urge to be sick, readers, and sing hallelujah, for as Saint Tony reminds us, the world has the ideal instrument for realising this  agenda, in the shape of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

So there you have it, the man who took his country to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which his own foreign policy establishment once concluded were a major driving force behind acts of jihadist violence in Britain and beyond, who supported Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza, who has never yet seen a war that he did not support,  just wants us all to love each each other – and help him make even more money in the process.

And yet all this remains puzzling, not because Blair can make such stunningly shallow observations in the belief that they are profound thoughts – he has always done that.  But the real mystery is why so many powerful people take his fatuous and ill-informed pronouncements seriously – and why a former bastion of British liberalism feels the need to promote the views of this contemptible and dangerous narcissist,  whose own actions have proven again and again, that he actually doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Source: infernalmachine.co.uk

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