Branding All Protest Against Fascism With An "Unfavorable Stain"

There Are Many Ways To View Wealth

In the Northwest, the more you give away, the wealthier you become.

Potlatch

A potlatch is a gift-giving festival and primary economic system practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and United States. This includes Heiltsuk Nation, Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Makah, Tsimshian, Nuu-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka'wakw, and Coast Salish cultures. The word comes from the Chinook Jargon, meaning "to give away" or "a gift"; originally from the Nuu-chah-nulth word p̓ačiƛ, to make a ceremonial gift in a potlatch. It went through a history of rigorous ban by both the Canadian and United States' federal governments, and has been the study of many anthropologists.

At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of wealth.

Different events take place during a potlatch, like singing and dancing, sometimes with masks or regalia, such as Chilkat blankets, the barter of wealth through gifts, such as dried foods, sugar, flour, or other material things, and sometimes money. For many potlatches, spiritual ceremonies take place for different occasions. This is either through material wealth such as foods and goods or non-material things such as songs and dances. For some cultures, such as Kwakwaka'wakw, elaborate and theatrical dances are performed reflecting the hosts' genealogy and cultural wealth. Many of these dances are also sacred ceremonies of secret societies like the hamatsa, or display of family origin from supernatural creatures such as the dzunukwa. Typically the potlatching is practiced more in the winter seasons as historically the warmer months were for procuring wealth for the family, clan, or village, then coming home and sharing that with neighbors and friends."

my future wife accepted my gift of salmon, and I became all the richer for it
click for biggery

How Bad Is It?

20,000 applications for 877 jobs

"It should not come as a surprise with unemployment over 8% (sic) that good paying jobs in manufacturing are harder than ever to land.

At the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Alabama more than 20,000 people have applied for one of the 877 job openings.

The surge of people applying may seem unusual, but it's not.

Take a look:

• Last summer Ford had more than 18,000 people apply for one of 1,800 jobs at the retooled Louisville plant. That plant will open and start building the Edge SUV in mid-June.
• In 2011, more than 41,000 applied for one of the 1,300 positions at the new Toyota plant in Tupelo, Mississippi.
• In 2009, more than 65,000 applied for one of the 2,700 jobs at the new Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, TN. Since opening, that plant has added shifts and is currently hiring another 820 workers.

"I'm going to Detroit to find happiness in the auto industry" 1974

Oh Look Over There - Sports And Sex

Why Does The Mainstream Media Ignore The Bilderberg Group?

"Over the next several days, more than a hundred of the most powerful people on the planet will attend a secret conference at a hotel in Chantilly, Virgina. Some of the biggest names in politics and business will be there. The hotel is going to be completely locked down and will be swarmed by hordes of security guards carrying machine guns. This conference is so important that even the U.S. Secret Service is rumored to be involved in providing security. These meetings have been held yearly since 1954, but no record of what goes on at them has ever been officially released to the public and all the attendees are sworn to secrecy. Decisions made at this conference will affect the lives of every man, woman and child on the planet. But the vast majority of Americans will have no idea that the Bilderberg Group is meeting about 20 miles from Washington D.C. this year because the mainstream media in the United States ignores the Bilderberg Group almost entirely year after year. Based on the coverage it gets from the U.S. media, you would think that the Bilderberg Group was a non-event. But if some of the most powerful people on the planet are getting together to discuss our future, don't you think the mainstream media should be covering it?"

Empire's Mercs Hack Innocents To Death For Propaganda Purposes

NATO's 'Civil War' Machine Rolls Into Syria

"It was only a matter of time before NATO's hired killers were tasked with carrying out a massacre in Syria that NATO stooges at the UN could then attempt to blame on the Syrian government. This time however, the con job isn't going quite according to plan.

On Monday 28th May 2012 ('Memorial Day' in the US, for those who enjoy irony) the world's public received a full frontal propaganda attack by the Western and other duplicitous media outlets parroting NATO and UN Security Council condemnations of a "massacre by Syrian troops" in the Syrian village of Houla on Friday 25th May.

Although the Houla victims were Assad supporters, the media has been primed to unleash a torrent of abuse against the Syrian government in the hope that it will carry enough weight to justify precision-strike democratization in the very near future.

UN Security Council 'ambassadors' from the UK, Germany, France and Azerbaijan (no less!) wasted no time in pointing the finger at the Syrian government and making false claims that there was "clear evidence of artillery fire and tank shelling by the Syrian regime". In fact, it has since been revealed that the vast majority of the victims were killed at close range, many of them with limbs hacked off by axes."

"It has already been well and officially documented that there are hundreds of US, Israeli and British-backed mercenaries operating in Syria and armed to the teeth with American weapons. Their job is to create chaos and fear through the indiscriminate murder of Syrian civilians and thereby provide Western war mongers with the justification to intervene militarily or, they hope, force the removal of President Assad. Even the nutty UN Secretary General Ba Ki Moon acknowledged 10 days ago that 'al-Qaeda' were behind the many car bombings that killed so many innocent Syrians. "

I noticed the discrepancy in the official narrative immediately and was going to mention it, but this fine article from SOTT beat me to it. The propagandists weren't on the same page with their condemnation of the Syrian government, which should scream lies and bullshit to anyone listening. Plus, where are the crowds in the streets? All that's happening are bombs and snipers, indicative of foreign intervention rather than any homegrown discontent.

Movies

Battleship flops at US box office

"Battleship, Rihanna's latest film, has overtaken John Carter as the worst ever US opening box office flop compared to the size of its budget.

The naval war film, which sees the singer in her first major role, cost $209 million (£133m) to make but only took $25.3 million (£16m) in its first weekend.

The Dictator also didn't do as well as expected for its first weekend in the US.

Both films lost out to The Avengers.

The comic superhero film is still number one at the box office in America.
Male audience

In Battleship, 24-year-old Rihanna, plays a tough naval petty officer and although the singer appears a lot in the film, she never says more than one line at a time.

According to market research firm CinemaScore the movie has struggled to attract young movie-goers.

Fifty-five percent of its audience were at least 30 years old, according to CinemaScore and men accounted for 57% of ticket sales.

The film now overtakes notorious box office flop John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch, as having the worst domestic opening in the US made with a budget of at least $200 million (£126m). Taylor Kitsch is also in Battleship.

Next weekend is the Memorial Day holiday in the US with Universal hoping that will help boost sales.

Battleship has so far earned $226.8 million (£143m) overseas, which could help the movie to recover from its disappointing opening in the States."

I watched this execrable naval recruiting piece of junk this morning. It was a screen capture, meaning it was recorded in a theater somewhere, probably in China because of Chinese characters appearing now and then. But it was done professionally so it was watchable but not for it's content.
It's so stupid it's not even worth reviewing but I will say a few things.
Whatever dues Liam Neeson had to pay to appear in it as a box office draw he paid it off in spades. He's heavy in the trailer but actually has only a bit part. With the version I saw you could hear the audience break out in spontaneous laughter all through the movie. Taylor Kitsch should find another line of work.

May 30 1942

"Returning home from a night of drinking and reminiscing about the recent death of John Barrymore, movie star Errol Flynn flips on the lights and is horrified to discover Barrymore's corpse propped up in a living room chair. Some of Flynn's friends had given a funeral director $200 to borrow the body for a couple of hours."

The Really Big Question

Why does the World Shadow Government destroy its own home (planet)?

"Don’t these people live on the same planet, work in the same world, and play on the same turf as the rest of us?!

Don’t they drink the same water, eat the same food, breathe the same air?

Truly, the leaders of the World Shadow Government (WSG) have soiled their own nest in ways that are forever irremediable and irreversible. Sounds totally crazy, does’t it? That’s because it is! However, the question still remains —–>

Why?

If ever there was a 64,000 dollar question, THIS IS IT.

Why would TPTW (The Powers That Were) destroy their own home … ruin their own living environments … spoil their own stretches of beautiful and pristine beaches, and mar their mountaintop enclaves. Does acid rain somehow avoid their hidden chalets? Do oil spills decide not to wash up on their private shorelines? Do the different vectors of dissemination of radioactvity conveniently discriminate in their favor?

If there is one question which permeates every nook and cranny of the alternative internet culture and is asked more than any other, this is the one in 2012. Why do those who populate the peak of the New World Order hierarchy pursue an agenda of relentless planetary destruction?

There are three primary reasons why the World Shadow Government has permitted the unmitigated and ongoing destruction of the planetary environment … on every level … in every sphere of life … on every continent … in every ocean. There are in fact more than just these 3 reasons, but these are the prime movers. These are the underlying, overarching explanations, which simply cannot be refuted.

For those who want the short story, it is as follows:

I. End-Time Madness prevails around the world during the end of the Kali Yuga

II. The Kali Yuga is always known for a proliferation of mind-altering drugs and chemicals coupled with genetic mutation and years of inbreeding among the ruling families.

III. The end days of Kali Yuga are always defined by technospheric breakdown, environmental destruction and societal degeneration

How do these three statements inform the previously stated fact of life on Planet Earth in 2012? That those who reside at the pinnacle of worldly power have clearly allowed, and even encouraged, the systematic destruction of the entire earth realm."

I applaud this blog for seeing the big picture. We and the earth are under relentless attack for some hidden reason and the ancient understanding of cycles in human evolution are certainly a part of it all. Hello Kali Yuga.
But I suspect there's more and it gets a little woo woo.
There seems to be a shadowy presence behind much of what's going on and I suspect it's not human. It would account for much of the accelerated inhumanity plus the weird exalted hubris that roams the planet pulling off incredible acts of destruction. Think Bramley's "The Gods of Eden" or Ickes reptilians and you catch my drift. Also think the ziofascist creed - "God's Chosen People".
Whatever it is it doesn't want us here. It can't or won't just wipe us out, but it's deluding humanity's upper echelon manipulators into thinking that death and earthly destruction will somehow mean a special place in the aftermath. Whatever it is, it's convinced humankind's decision makers to do the dirty work for them.

The Mother Of All Trojan Horses

Security backdoor found in China-made US military chip

"Cambridge University researchers find that a microprocessor used by the US military but made in China contains secret remote access capability.

A microchip used by the US military and manufactured in China contains a secret "backdoor" that means it can be shut off or reprogrammed without the user knowing, according to researchers at Cambridge University's Computing Laboratory."

This isn't news. This has been known for years and I even linked to an article from 2008 last year:

"The geniuses at Homeland Security who brought you hare-brained procedures at airports (which inconvenience travelers without snagging terrorists) have decreed that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month. This means The Investigator -- at the risk of compromising national insecurities -- would be remiss not to make you aware of the hottest topic in U.S. counterintelligence circles: rogue microchips. This threat emanates from China (PRC) -- and it is hugely significant.

The myth: Chinese intelligence services have concealed a microchip in every computer everywhere, programmed to "call home" if and when activated.

The reality: It may actually be true."

If the militaary is still using compromised chips after all this time, knowing full well the havoc they'd produce in conflict, then priorities are a bit different than they seem. My guess is that aafter installing hundreds of millions of them in everything from guided missiles to toasters, announcing a giant fuckup and trying to replace them would have been a colossal logistical, expensive and public relations nightmare. So apparently our Einsteins made the decision to go on a wing and a prayer and hoped nothing would happen that would expose the dangerous flaw.

Empire Brings Al Qaeda Into Syria, Now We Must Invade Because Al Qaeda Is There

Iraq Veteran Tells It Like It Is

No Doubt "Depleted" Uranium Plays A Big Part

Almost half of new vets seek disability

"America's newest veterans are filing for disability benefits at a historic rate, claiming to be the most medically and mentally troubled generation of former troops the nation has ever seen.

A staggering 45 percent of the 1.6 million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now seeking compensation for injuries they say are service-related. That is more than double the estimate of 21 percent who filed such claims after the Gulf War in the early 1990s, top government officials told The Associated Press.

What's more, these new veterans are claiming eight to nine ailments on average, and the most recent ones over the last year are claiming 11 to 14. By comparison, Vietnam veterans are currently receiving compensation for fewer than four, on average, and those from World War II and Korea, just two.

It's unclear how much worse off these new veterans are than their predecessors. Many factors are driving the dramatic increase in claims — the weak economy, more troops surviving wounds, and more awareness of problems such as concussions and PTSD. Almost one-third have been granted disability so far.

Government officials and some veterans' advocates say that veterans who might have been able to work with certain disabilities may be more inclined to seek benefits now because they lost jobs or can't find any. Aggressive outreach and advocacy efforts also have brought more veterans into the system, which must evaluate each claim to see if it is war-related. Payments range from $127 a month for a 10 percent disability to $2,769 for a full one.

As the nation commemorates the more than 6,400 troops who died in post-9/11 wars, the problems of those who survived also draw attention. These new veterans are seeking a level of help the government did not anticipate, and for which there is no special fund set aside to pay."

Apartments In Hong Kong

No.
Just no.

A Headline Only Some Dope In A DC Office Would Think Up

Fire, winds force ghost town to evacuate

Police State Gestapo, They Want You To Get Used To This

Collateral Damage in the War on Protesters: Neighbors of the NATO3 Cuffed, Held at Gunpoint

"Whether or not they are guilty of illegal activity, the original three activists facing terrorism charges in Chicago and their six apartment-mates are not the only people who were raided and harassed the night of Wednesday, May 16, in the days leading up to the NATO protests. In this exclusive, three neighbors of the accused activists give their stories of aggressive, politically reactionary, seemingly incompetent and extralegal harassment by the Chicago Police Department.

n the apartment across the hall from the arrested activists, around 11:30 that night, Ben (not his real name) was coming out of his bathroom when his door crashed in and 25 to 30 armed police burst into his living room. One of them approached him, pointing a gun at his face and yelling at him to get down. When he didn’t get down quickly enough, the man shoved him to the ground and cuffed him.

“I thought I was being robbed,” Ben said. “They were wearing dark clothes, and I thought if they weren’t police, I was being robbed, and if they were, I didn’t know why this was happening.”

His apartment mate Olli woke up to two guns in his face, and was, he said, “rolled over and cuffed immediately” while other officers started going through the belongings in his room. They brought him into the living room and sat him on the ground next to Ben.

“That’s when the interrogation and harassment started,” Olli said. “It went on for a while, at least an hour and a half of them hurling insults and questions, really leading questions. The whole experience was really terrifying but it was also kind of hilarious, just the notions they have about whoever they were after.”

The police brought out Olli’s books on Marx, Bakunin, feminism and magic, and started asking questions about them. They called Olli and Ben “commie faggots” and “said we were gonna get our assholes widened in County, but we’d probably like that.”

They asked Olli, “You got Karl Marx here, do you like Hitler?”

Insane Spaniards

"Castellers gather every two years to see who can build the most intricate human castles."
But after all, this is the culture who enjoys running with the bulls, bullfights and tomatowars.

Endless Lies

Exclusive dispatch: Assad blamed for massacre of the innocents

"In a massacre of unprecedented savagery that brings Syria close to civil war, some 32 children and 60 adults have been slaughtered in villages in the Houla area of central Syria. Anti-government militants blame pro-regime gunmen for carrying out the butchery in which children and their parents were hacked and shot to death."

The key phrase above is 'that brings Syria close to civil war'. The government would never have done such a thing even if it wasn't under such international scrutiny. So much to lose in the court of public opinion. It makes absolutely no sense. Western and western stooge sponsored death squads on the other hand are free to carry out atrocities while corrupt media blames the Syrian government.
Syria Under Attack by Globalist Death Squad Experts
Death Squads Ravage Syrian Town - West Calls For 'Action'

We had nothing to do with those deaths. Besides no one died anyway - NATO
NATO airstrike kills family of 8, Afghans say

Syrian doctors are torturing patients

Gadhafi Forces on Viagra-Fueled Rape Spree

Saddam's WMDs

The Kuwaiti baby incubator hoax

Anything to keep up mouthbreather support for the fascist death march.

Weather Modifying, Earthquake Producing Mind Control Facilities Worldwide

Your Taxes During Wartime

Afghan market flourishing with coalition goods

"KABUL — At Camp Eggers, the headquarters of NATO’s training mission in Afghanistan, shelves at the U.S. military store grow ever more bare as Pakistan’s halt on coalition supply shipments drags into its sixth month.

But while most troops here don’t know it, there’s no shortage of coalition supplies in Afghanistan’s capital city. The only problem is, those supplies aren’t on coalition bases.

A few miles from Eggers, at a bazaar behind a gold-windowed office building, Afghan men stroll cramped corridors browsing shelves of Colgate toothpaste, Red Bull energy drink and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, stopping now and then to place a bottle of Heinz ketchup or Cheer detergent in a wheelbarrow pushed by an eager attendant.

This is Kabul’s “Bush Market” — a name bearing an unsubtle hint about the origins of its merchandise — a one-stop shop for everything from hand tools to hair gel, all at discount prices. While it can take some work to sift through off-brands and knockoffs, about half the merchandise is the very same found in coalition chow halls, exchange stores and supply closets. No doubt, that’s just where it was supposed to go.

A labyrinth of some 500 stores, the Bush Market is a virtual mall of commercialized corruption where Afghans and the occasional Westerner come to buy, as shopkeepers boast, “American-quality” merchandise.

A similar black market sprang up during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, doing a “brisk trade in Soviet machinery and spare parts,” the AP reported in 1988.

Here, cases of U.S. military field rations, Army workout shirts and energy drinks in limited-edition military-themed packaging are piled near glass display cases showing off Oakley sunglasses, 5.11-brand watches and Gerber multitools of the sort issued to soldiers and sold at on-base shops.

Scores of footlockers conforming to U.S. Postal Service standards and cartons of American-made paper goods, chemicals and cleaners, some of which still have their military shipping labels affixed, offer more evidence that the merchandise isn’t where it belongs. Never mind the stacks of Pop-Tarts, Cheez-It crackers or six-packs of nonalcoholic St. Pauli Girl beer with its trademark fraulein baring her cleavage to conservative Afghan shoppers.

Some stores are specialized, selling health and beauty products, clothing or groceries with names familiar to American consumers: Irish Spring, North Face and Campbell’s. Alongside those brands are obscure labels like Exchange Select, DSCP and Skilcraft, which are made exclusively for U.S. government organizations and not available on the open market even in the States.

On a recent visit, military equipment was up for grabs as well, including an air compressor marked with a stencil naming its previous owner (Company F, 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry: you can have it back for a few hundred dollars).

While American troops aren’t allowed to shop in the Bush Market, the bazaar and others like it are known to U.S. officials, who believe the trade extends well beyond the capital."

Life In An Incompetent, Uncaring Police State

Deputies Mistake Jeopardizes Spring Valley Family

NEVER call the cops.

"A case of mistaken identity put a Spring Valley family in jeopardy.

Deputies surrounded a house on Nereis Drive on reports that an armed gunman, suspected of robbing a medical marijuana delivery provider, was inside. Turned out it was just a family cooking dinner.

Christine Houston told 10News...deputies ordered everyone out of the house and ignored her plea to go back in and turn off the stove. Moments later a fire broke out, trapping three people upstairs, including a seven year old girl. Deputies grabbed a sledge hammer and a skateboard and broke off the metal bars on the windows, then broke the windows to get inside. All eleven people escaped relatively unharmed. one person suffered a minor case of smoke inhalation.

That can't be said for the kitchen which is a charred mess. A Sheriff's spokeswoman is denying reports that the department has offered to pay for the damages."

No. Hundreds Of Words To Use All The Time

Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don’t want the government spying on you

"The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.

The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’.

Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats.

The words are included in the department’s 2011 ‘Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

Department chiefs were forced to release the manual following a House hearing over documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which revealed how analysts monitor social networks and media organisations for comments that ‘reflect adversely’ on the government."

Free speech is free speech. I'll say whatever I want at any time. People don't have to pay any attention because it's their right to do so just as it is mine to say anything I choose. Exercising your rights in the face of repression is the highest form of patriotism and the more people who do so ensures fascism fails.
Sometimes I wonder about Alex Jones.

Wenlock

The CCTV all seeing eye surveillance state mascot for the Brit 2012 olympics.

Don't forget the 2012 logo:

Helpful Guide To Memorial Day

Email From Police Officers Union Surfaces

Miami Beach Police Deny They Have a 2,000 Person Arrest Quota for Memorial Day Weekend

"Are Miami Beach Police planning to arrest 2,000 people during the notorious Memorial Day weekend parties on South Beach? As in they've actually set a quota regardless of whether or not 2,000 deserve to be arrested. To put that in prospective, the record number of arrests over Memorial Day weekend ever in Miami Beach was just over 1,000.

Rumors of such a number emerged this week, but Police Chief Raymond Martinez has denied that his department has set a real quota.

According to Local 10, rumors of the quota first emerged in an email complaint from the police officers' union that called the quota "aggressive, patently unfair, and unjust."

Martinez denies that such a quota exists.

"I want to be clear, there is no arrest quota for Memorial Day weekend or any other day on Miami Beach," he wrote in an email to Local 10.

This weekend will be Chief Martinez's first real test since officially taking over the department in March. Last weekend's festivities were marred by multiple police-involved shootings.

Martinez's plans for the weekend are nothing short of aggressive. There will be more than 600 officers on patrol. DUI checkpoints will be established towards the entrance of South Beach, and high tech scanners will scan every license plate that comes onto the island. Proof of residency will also be needed to enter certain residential areas of the beach by car. All in all the city will spend more than $2 million on crowd control.

Martinez explained to CBS Miami that the 2,000 arrest number was not an order but does hope his officers are more strict this year."

Good Neighbor, Bad Neighbor

‘Iran’s electricity exports to four neighboring countries up by 40%’

"An Iranian Energy Ministry official says Iran’s electricity exports to four neighboring countries have increased by 40 percent since the beginning of the current Iranian calendar year (started March 20, 2012).

Abdolhamid Farzam, the Energy Ministry official in charge of foreign exchanges, said Sunday that Iran’s power exports to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Turkey have seen a major boost in the past two months.

The official stated that new power transfer lines and installations have become operational for exporting electricity to Iraq, raising Iran’s electricity exports to its western neighbor to 1,200 megawatts (MW).

Farzam added that electricity exports to Pakistan have been more than doubled in the same period, saying Iran’s capacity to export electricity to Pakistan has increased from 30 MW in winter to 70 MW right now.

He said Iran is exporting an average of 30 MW of electricity to Afghanistan, while power exports to Turkey have increased from 110 MW to more than 170 MW.

The official stated that Iran will increase its power export capacity to Turkey to 500 MW in the next few days.

On May 10, Iran’s Energy Ministry published a report saying that the country’s electricity exports to its neighboring countries have increased by more than 38 percent since the beginning of the current Iranian calendar year compared to the previous year.

The report added that Iran has exported a total of 1,347 gigawatts per hour (GW/h) of electricity to the neighboring countries during the aforementioned period, up by 38.57 percent compared to the previous Iranian calendar year (ended March 19, 2012).

Iran, which seeks to become a major regional exporter of electricity, has attracted more than USD 1.1 billion in investment to build three new power plants."

Gaza fleet leashed by Israel, starved for fuel

"Israeli gunboats and an Egyptian clampdown on fuel smuggling into the Gaza Strip are strangling the Palestinian enclave's little fishing fleet, slowly turning a generation of fishermen into fishmongers.

Since 2009, they have been unable to sail out beyond three miles because of Israel's strictly enforced blockade. This year they can hardly afford to go out at all because diesel has nearly tripled in price.

There are about 3,700 full-time fishermen in the Gaza Strip ready to serve a market of 1.7 million Palestinians. They used to export to Israel. Now Gaza imports about 80 percent of its needs from the Egyptians and the Israelis.

"Once we made enough to let us give away fish to the poor and needy people. These days we are begging for aid," said Mahmoud Al-Assi, 66, a fisherman most of his life and currently the chairman of Gaza's non-profit Fishermens' Society, which supports boat owners with tools, ice and fuel.

"Just like the fish, we will die if we're out of the water for too long," said Al-Assi."

Say Goodbye To The Northern Hemisphere.

Doctor Caldicott has been one of the only voices telling the truth about radiation for decades.
What she's saying in no uncertain terms here is that Fukushima is a wordwide extinction event.

It's The Nutrition

1 in 3 is obese - even the homeless

"Obesity is a widespread epidemic, even among the homeless.

While the popularized image of a homeless individual is one of skin and bones, a new study shows the reality is not so. One in three (32.3%) homeless individuals in the United States is obese, highlighting a hunger-obesity paradox.

The paradox is that hunger and obesity can exist in the same person. And although a person may be overweight or obese, he or she can lack proper nutrition.

Nutrition is a daily challenge for homeless people, as the foods they manage to get are often full of preservatives and high in sodium, fats and sugars. They may not have access to healthier options like fresh fruits and vegetables.

“It’s the lowest socio-economic group who has the biggest obesity problem,” said Paul Montgomery, one of the authors of the study published in the Journal of Urban Health. “No one looked at the homeless problem before. What we found was this group has a significant obesity problem that wasn’t known.”

The obesity rate in a sample of 5,632 homeless adults seen at the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program was similar to that seen in the general population.

“It just mirrors what Americans look like in general,” said Barbara Dipietro, policy director of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. “It follows the homeless in general. They are more economically driven. They are intact families and people who are coming into homelessness, who don’t come with behavioral health issues. When we look at the homeless population, we think they’re different, but they’re like everyone else.”

Two out of three homeless individuals were either overweight or obese. The study found that 32.6% were normal weight and that 1.6% was underweight."

Junk food is cheap but lacks vitamins and minerals. Your body craves nutrition so your persistent hunger drives you to eat more junk food loaded with carbs and fat. Hence the obesity.

Libyan Horror Paves The Way For Reconquest Of Africa

Libya, Africa, and Africom: an ongoing disaster

"The scale of the ongoing tragedy visited on Libya by NATO and its allies is becoming horribly clearer with each passing day. Estimates of those killed so far vary, but 50,000 seems like a low estimate; indeed the British Ministry of Defence was boasting that the onslaught had killed 35,000 as early as last May. But this number is constantly growing. The destruction of the state’s forces by British, French and American blitzkrieg has left the country in a state of total anarchy - in the worst possible sense of the word. Having had nothing to unite them other than a temporary willingness to act as NATO’s foot soldiers, the former 'rebels’ are now turning on each other. 147 were killed in in-fighting in Southern Libya in a single week earlier this year, and in recent weeks government buildings – including the Prime Ministerial compound – have come under fire by 'rebels’ demanding cash payment for their services. $1.4billion has been paid out already – demonstrating once again that it was the forces of NATO colonialism, not Gaddafi, who were reliant on 'mercenaries’- but payments were suspended last month due to widespread nepotism. Corruption is becoming endemic – a further $2.5billion in oil revenues that was supposed to have been transferred to the national treasury remains unaccounted for. Libyan resources are now being jointly plundered by the oil multinationals and a handful of chosen families from amongst the country’s new elites; a classic neo-colonial stitch-up. The use of these resources for giant infrastructure projects such as the Great Manmade River, and the massive raising of living standards over the past four decades (Libyan life expectancy rose from 51 to 77 since Gaddafi came to power in 1969) sadly looks to have already become a thing of the past.
But woe betide anyone who mentions that now. It was decided long ago that no supporters of Gaddafi would be allowed to stand in the upcoming elections, but recent changes have gone even further. Law 37, passed by the new NATO-imposed government last month, has created a new crime of 'glorifying’ the former government or its leader – subject to a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Would this include a passing comment that things were better under Gaddafi? The law is cleverly vague enough to be open to interpretation. It is a recipe for institutionalised political persecution.
Even more indicative of the contempt for the rule of law amongst the new government – a government, remember, which has yet to receive any semblance of popular mandate, and whose only power base remains the colonial armed forces – is Law 38. This law has now guaranteed immunity from prosecution for anyone who committed crimes aimed at "promoting or protecting the revolution". Those responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Tawergha – such as Misrata’s self-proclaimed "brigade for the purging of black skins" - can continue their hunting down of that cities’ refugees in the full knowledge that they have the new 'law’ on their side. Those responsible for the massacres in Sirte and elsewhere have nothing to fear. Those involved in the widespread torture of detainees can continue without repercussions – so long as it is aimed at "protecting the revolution" – i.e. maintaining NATO-TNC dictatorship.
This is the reality of the new Libya: civil war, squandered resources, and societal collapse, where voicing preference for the days when Libya was prosperous and at peace is a crime, but lynching and torture is not only permitted but encouraged."

more

Somebody Wants The Korean Imbroglio To Continue

30 North Korean Officials Involved In Talks With The South Have Died In 'Traffic Accidents'

"Thirty officials of the North Korean regime who were involved in talks with South Korea have been executed or died in "staged traffic accidents," according to a human rights report."

Fascist In Liberal Garb Digs Cop Brutality

Obama hails police state methods in Chicago

"President Barack Obama on Monday praised the performance of Chicago city officials and the Chicago Police Department after a week of violence, repression and frame-ups directed against antiwar demonstrators in the city.

Speaking at the conclusion of the NATO summit, Obama paid tribute to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, his political crony and former White House chief of staff, and added, referring to the thousands of police mobilized against protesters, “Chicago’s finest did a great job under significant pressure and a lot of scrutiny.”

What was this “great job?”

• Downtown Chicago was effectively shut down for four days, Friday through Monday, not by the protesters, never more than 5,000 people, but by a huge mobilization of police and paramilitary forces who frequently outnumbered the demonstrators. The entire area around McCormick Place, site of the summit, was under lockdown.

• Police arrested well over 100 demonstrators in the course of the week, including more than 60 Sunday, a day of tense confrontations in which police continually vented their hostility towards the demonstrators, who were opposing the US-NATO war in Afghanistan and other imperialist military interventions.

• The violent dispersal of the protesters late Sunday afternoon was entirely one-sided, as described by the Chicago Sun-Times—a staunchly pro-police tabloid—which headlined its account, “Riot Gear Cops Rain Down Blows on Protesters.” The beatings were so widespread and indiscriminate that one of the newspaper’s own reporters was among those bloodied. At least 25 demonstrators were injured, with a dozen requiring hospital treatment.

• Most ominously, five protesters were arrested in police raids targeting individuals supposedly preparing “terrorist” attacks on the NATO summit. The same two informants fingered all five men, after the undercover cops had circulated widely among the protesters looking for anyone they could instigate or entrap.

The charges of “conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit,” brought before the Cook County Circuit Court, are a deliberate attempt to intimidate opponents of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan and other imperialist military interventions either under way or being planned by the Obama administration.

The whole machinery of provocation and frame-up, erected over the past decade in the name of the “war on terror,” is now being used against the democratic rights of working people and youth who oppose the policies of the American government."

Liberal president appoints death czar.

Life In Predatory Capitalism

Turn Out The Lights - The Largest U.S. Cities Are Becoming Cesspools Of Filth, Decay And Wretchedness

"Once upon a time, the largest U.S. cities were the envy of the entire world. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Sure, there are areas of New York City, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles that are still absolutely beautiful but for the most part our major cities are rapidly rotting and decaying. Cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis and Oakland were all once places where middle class American workers thrived and raised their families.

Today, all of those cities are rapidly being transformed into cesspools of filth, decay and wretchedness. Millions of good jobs have left our major cities in recent decades and poverty has absolutely exploded. Basically, you can turn out the lights because the party is over. In fact, some major U.S. cities are literally turning out the lights. In Detroit, about 40 percent of the streetlights are already broken and the city cannot afford to repair them. So Mayor Bing has come up with a plan to cut the number of operating streetlights almost in half and leave vast sections of the city totally in the dark at night. I wonder what that will do to the crime rate in the city. But don't look down on Detroit too much, because what is happening in Detroit will be happening where you live soon enough.

A recent Bloomberg article described Mayor Bing's plan to eliminate nearly half of Detroit's streetlights....

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can't afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing's plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

What this means is that there are going to be a lot of neighborhoods that will have the lights turned off permanently.

So which neighborhoods will those be?

According to one top Detroit official, "distressed areas" are going to be on the low end of the totem pole....

"You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population," said Chris Brown, Detroit's chief operating officer. "We're not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas."

City officials know that they cannot force people to move from "distressed areas", so they are going to encourage them to leave by cutting off services."

more

"This Is How It Used To Work In The Old Days, Before Money Was Involved"

The Physical Realm Exploitation Masters

Israelis run organ trafficking network

"An illegal network of organ harvesters and traffickers, which exploits both the organ donors and recipients, has been uncovered in Israel.

According to Ha’aretz, at least 10 Israeli citizens were arrested for membership in the organ trafficking gang. Investigation into the ring began after representatives of several countries contacted the Israeli authorities and provided them with the names of suspects, who are all Israeli citizens.

In a November report, CNN said that the organs of the individuals trying to enter Israel from the Sinai desert had been trafficked.

The Italian New Generation Foundation for Human Rights and the Everyone Group has presented evidence indicating that Sinai locals harvest the organs of the people they transfer to Israel. In this connection, a number of mass graves have been found containing the corpses of Africans who were missing some of their organs."

Again, The Repug Convention Could Be Extremely Interesting

MSM is busy shoving Romney down everyone's throats, but Ron Paul's campaign strategy is stealth delegates.

Ziofascist Agitation Spreads Through Israel's Arab Neighbors

Winds from Syria unrest blow into Lebanon: Clashes spark fears of another war

"Fed by the 14-month crisis in neighbouring Syria and rumours of renewed civil unrest, turbulence across Lebanon is stoking fears the situation in the country may take a turn for the worse.

On Wednesday night, a gunbattle broke out in the Caracas district of west Beirut, followed by a clash that lasted several hours and left two dead, according to security officials.

The spark for the clash, during which gunmen used hand grenades against the Lebanese security forces, was a "personal dispute" between at least one of the men and a woman in her early 20s, the officials added.

Though the shootout was an "isolated incident," a security official at the scene said, "the timing of the incident is very bad, because people in Lebanon are nervous about the overall situation."

Uncertainty turned news of a crime into a new cause for alarm. That some of those involved in the clash were Syrian nationals sparked rumours on the streets the next morning.

Some wondered where the gunmen got the weapons from, others said their real target was the Lebanese army, and still others raised questions about whether the gunfight had a political backdrop."

"All Animals Are Equal, But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others"

Report: Ex-trooper smelled of alcohol, had trouble standing

"HAVERHILL — Newly obtained police reports show former state trooper Charles Noyes smelled of alcohol, could not maintain his balance, and had no memory of slamming his Cadillac Escalade into a utility pole in West Newbury March 30 before driving into Haverhill with his air bags deployed.

But Haverhill police did not arrest the 62-year-old highly decorated trooper or charge him with drunken driving after his mangled luxury SUV was found in the travel lane on Amesbury Line Road within minutes of the West Newbury accident — and Haverhill officials are still refusing to say why.

"This investigation will be completed when I feel that we have done everything necessary to obtain all the relevant facts regarding this incident," Haverhill Public Safety Commissioner Alan DeNaro said in an e-mail to an Eagle-Tribune reporter yesterday. "We will not be rushed to accommodate your mandated time table."

"The pole, which was mounted on a cast iron base and sunk into the ground, was broken off cleanly and landed in the roadway approximately 50 feet west of its original position," Johnson wrote in his report.

Following a fresh line of "some sort of automotive fluid down Main Street" into Haverhill, the officers found a man in a white Escalade parked in the travel lane at the intersection of East Broadway and Amesbury Line Road, according to the police reports. Behind the wheel was Noyes, who retired in 2006 with the second-highest rank in the state police.

In his report, Cena said he detected a "strong odor of alcohol" on Noyes' breath and that Noyes had "extreme difficulty maintaining his balance." Cena said he asked Noyes why he didn't stop after the accident in West Newbury.

"The male (Noyes) replied that he didn't know that he had gotten into an accident despite the extensive front end damage of the vehicle," Cena wrote."

Cop Fired For Speeding 143 MPH While Drunk Gets Job Back

Forest Service Using Slave Labor

One of those little side benefits of the 'drug war'.

Insects And Me

In the mid seventies I was living in upstate New York. A former girlfriend came up to visit and told me she was moving out to Oregon and we agreed to travel together because I was tired of living there. On the way we stopped in Yellowstone and decided to clean off in a hot pool along the Firehole River. Perfectly fine said a ranger as long as we didn't use soap and such.
We languished for an hour in this natural hot tub next to a babbling river in a surreal misty morning, while a herd of elk clomped by. Yellowstone, for fuck's sake.
Three days later we both found out to our horror that we had a raging case of body crabs. Apparently the water temperature was perfect for the creatures and we both had them everywhere, even our eyebrows.

Twenty five years ago I woke my wife up one week by abruptly sitting up in bed because there was a fluttering in my ear similar to when you get water in there that sloshes around. When it got too egregious I stuck a Q Tip in to see if I could drain it. It came out a little bloody so into immediate care I went.
When the doctor looked in he said "Whoa, something's looking back."
Apparently a silverfish had been living in my ear for about three days, living off my ear wax. I laid on my side while the doctor filled my ear canal with water and he plucked the thing out when it floated up.

On a later trip to Yellowstone the Mrs and I decided to explore a river with boiling fumaroles. We were promptly attacked by hordes of deerflies. During our hasty retreat we were so distracted beating these things off each other that we almost stepped into one of the pots. Aside from a faulty parachute during college days and a motorcycle wreck ten years later, it was the closest I've ever been to dying.

Up in Oregon I kept a lot of dry food in big containers. Unfortunately I never realized that wool moths really, really also loved rice, millet and such, so a whole bunch of good food went into the compost bin. By the way, I've learned that a simple way to prevent infestation is to wrap your food in black plastic bags.

Down here in the SW, if you have beloved and very valuable Navajo rugs, flufficate them regularly to keep the moth larva out of them.

As a gardener I was advised to watch out for tomato hornworms by friends and neighbors. So when as I was tilling the soil and I found giant larvae I'd toss them out for the birds to eat, thinking they were hornworms in the making. Unfortunately they were innocuous giant rhinoceros beetles, very common around here and they actually make great pets if you feed them fruit.

And being an organic gardener I discovered neem oil, an extract from an Asian tree that isn't exactly an insecticide, but has the chemical properties to make leaf eating insects just go to sleep and die.

There's A Question About Our Nouveau Police State?

The New American Order: Using Weapons of Compliance To Stamp Out Protest

"We’re entering the final phase of America’s transition to authoritarianism, a phase notable for its co-opting of civilian police as military forces. Not only do the police now look like the military – with their foreboding uniforms and phalanx of lethal weapons – but they function like them, as well. No longer do they act as peace officers guarding against violent criminals. And no more do we have a civilian police force entrusted with serving and protecting the American people. Instead, today’s militarized law enforcement officials, having shifted their allegiance from the citizenry to the state, act preemptively to ward off any possible challenges to the government’s power.

In such an environment, free speech is little more than a nuisance to be stamped out. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way police deal with those who dare to exercise their First Amendment right to “peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” For example, most recently, Chicago police in riot gear and gas masks, as well as SWAT teams, clashed with thousands of anti-war protesters who gathered to air their discontent during the NATO summit that took place on May 20-21, 2012.

Anticipating a fracas, police had, in the weeks leading up to the NATO summit, equipped themselves with $1 million worth of militarized riot gear. Then, a few days before the summit commenced, fighter jets – including Air Force KC-135 tankers, Air Force F-16s, and Coast Guard HH-65 Dolphin helicopters – took to the skies over Chicago, as part of a “security” drill. Surveillance drones were also sighted. Police also arrested six activists and held them in solitary confinement for 18 hours, then released them without charge. News reports have indicated that some of those “arrested” may have been undercover officers.

All of these tactics of intimidation – the show of force by heavily armed police, the security drills by fighter planes and surveillance drones, even the arrests of protesters – were done with one goal in mind: to deter and subdue any would-be protesters.

Case in point: in anticipation of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions taking place in Charlotte and Tampa later this year, government agencies in conjunction with the militarized police are already preparing to head off any protests, refusing to issue permits, cordoning off city blocks, creating “free speech” zones and passing a litany of laws banning everything from protesters wearing masks to carrying string. And the few protesters who manage to take to the streets will be faced with an array of non-lethal weapons meant to incapacitate them.

Originally designed to help restrain violent individuals, so-called “non-lethal” weapons such as tasers, sound cannons, and tear gas were first introduced with a government guarantee of safety for the citizens. However, the “non-lethal” label seems to have caused police to feel justified in using these dangerous weapons much more often and with less restraint – with some even causing death. For instance, a 9-year-old Arizona run-away was tasered as she sat in the back seat of a police car with her hands cuffed behind her back. In Texas, a 72-year-old great-grandmother was tasered after refusing to sign a speeding ticket. Equally troubling is law enforcement’s use of these weapons to intimidate and silence protesters.

Unfortunately, advances in crowd control technology are providing police with ever-greater weapons of compliance. For example, Intelligent Optics Systems, Inc. has developed a hand-held, flashlight-like device that uses light emitting diodes “to emit super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths, causing disorientation, nausea and even vomiting in whomever it's pointed at.” Raytheon has developed a “pain ray” which shoots an electromagnetic beam composed of high frequency radio waves, causing a burning sensation on the target’s skin. In December 2011, the Telegraph reported that police in the UK were planning on testing a shoulder-mounted laser that can temporarily blind protestors and rioters.

Sound cannons are used by both military and police to emit high-pitched tones of 153 decibels, well beyond the threshold for causing hearing damage and auditory pain, with the potential to damage eardrums and cause fatal aneurysms. In 2009, the Pittsburgh police used an LRAD to subdue protesters during the G20 Summit, their first use on American citizens.

Drones, outfitted with the latest in high-definition cameras and crowd control technology such as impact rounds, chemical munitions rounds and tasers, will eventually be star players in the government’s efforts to clamp down on protest activities and keep track of protesters. The Shadowhawk drone, which is already being sold to law enforcement agencies throughout the country, is outfitted with lethal weapons, including a grenade launcher or a shotgun, and weapons of compliance, such as tear gas and rubber buckshot.

What we are dealing with in America today is a cowering populace, far greater in number than those who rule us, who nonetheless have allowed the government’s manufactured fear-mongering and propaganda to override their common sense and usurped their freedoms. In this way, with the American people now seen as the greatest domestic threat to the nation’s security, is it any wonder that we are being subjected to all manner of surveillance by the government, with our phone calls listened to, our emails and letters read, our web browsing tracked, and our spending monitored?

Is there any hope at all of turning back the authoritarian tide? Yes, but it will take courage, the willingness to think for ourselves, the fortitude to challenge the status quo, a true commitment to freedom, and a rejection of the partisan politics that keeps us divided. As Howard Zinn advises, “[t]he situation require[s] not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order,” which applies not only to entrenched, corrupt government bureaucrats but also the mindset that sees government as the cure for whatever ails us. Only by uprooting “the old order” can we hope to make any headway as far as resuscitating our republic and restoring our freedoms."

NRA Caves, Has Always Caved

And I sadly say this as a life member. At this point the NRA completely stinks.
Can you say "perpetual contribution whore"?
The 2nd amendment wasn't about collecting or duck hunting.
The 2nd amendment was about protecting ourselves from predatory government.

The NRA Views on Weaponry

MSM Disintegrates Before Our Eyes

CNN Hits 20-Year Weekday Primetime Low

"The only ratings news CNN is getting lately is bad news. Last week, the cable news network had its lowest-rated weekday primetime in 20 years in terms of total viewers. From May 14-18, CNN averaged 395,000 viewers in primetime with Anderson Cooper’s AC360 and Piers Morgan Tonight. The full seven days of last week was the third-lowest-rated full week in primetime since March 1997. Additionally, last Monday to Friday was also the network’s fourth-lowest-rated weekday primetime week among adults 25-54. CNN scored just 111,000 viewers in the demo. CNN’s previous worst weekly weekday primetime among adults 25-54 was May 15-21, 2000, when the network recorded 91,000 viewers among adults 25-54.

This ratings news comes less than a week after the network hit its lowest primetime among adults 25-54 in 15 years on May 15 with Pier Morgan Tonight. That followed a terrible April where CNN had its lowest-rated month in a decade."

Imperial Ambitions Will Always Fail

The New War in Iraq: US Occupation Shifts to Proxy Subversion

"Since the withdrawal of US military forces from Iraq, there has been an ongoing campaign of demonization and subversion of Prime Minister Maliki. Though this effort likely began with an assassination attempt in December of 2011, it has come to a head in recent months with the warrant, flight, and subsequent trial of Vice President Hashemi. This conflict illustrates not only the deep divides that exist within the ruling power structure in Baghdad, but also the attempts by foreign powers to exert control and influence over the future of Iraq.

the new Saddam

Prime Minister Maliki came to power by overcoming the opposition of US puppet figures such as Allawi and Chalabi who, despite incredible financial support and propaganda, were unable to establish coalitions or even legitimate bases of support. Instead, Maliki emerged as the Shiite leader who was able to unify officials from a variety of ethnic and religious groups. At the time, this seemed a positive development for US military leadership and the Bush administration, anxious to have anyone who could exert control over Iraq.

However, in the years since then, Maliki has developed into a strong, nationalist leader who, in the interests of the Shiite majority and Iraq more generally, has exponentially expanded relations with Tehran, consolidated political control (particularly in the Kurdish North), and broken with the United States and its proxies in the GCC on issues such as Libya, Syria, and oil contracts. Naturally, this is anathema to US designs for Iraq and has lead to this concerted effort to remove, by any means necessary, Prime Minister Maliki.

Assassination Attempt a Warning To Maliki

In the midst of the withdrawal of US troops from Iraqi soil last December, a very rare event took place: a bomb exploded inside the heavily fortified Green Zone of Baghdad. Although the event garnered little international attention against the backdrop of the so-called “end of the Iraq War”, it sent a very clear message to the leadership in Baghdad – toe the US line or suffer the consequences. In the aftermath of the bombing, Maliki stated publicly that the plot was clearly an attempt on his life. However, instead of capitulating to such threats, the Prime Minister immediately denounced the episode and proceeded to meet with Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Undoubtedly, this decision conveyed to the United States that idea that Maliki would not succumb to pressure and threats."

Scientific Mating

Mechanical Matchmaking: The Science of Love in the 1920s

"Online dating sites like eHarmony and OkCupid claim they can find you the perfect romantic match by using algorithms. These kinds of sites have catchy slogans like “date smarter, not harder,” implying that they’ve finally perfected a scientific approach to matchmaking. Just answer a few questions, and their super-secret love science will find the person who is right for you.

While much of the “science” behind online dating sites has been called into question, that doesn’t seem to dissuade us from wanting to make the messy (and often frustrating) world of romantic love into something quantifiable. This idea, of course, is nothing new—and at least one futurist thinker of the early 20th century hoped that new technological developments might one day create the perfect matchmaking device.

The April 1924 issue of Science and Invention magazine ran an article by Hugo Gernsback, the magazine’s publisher, which examined the different “scientific” ways to determine if a marriage will succeed or fail.

How much would the average man or woman give to know beforehand if his or her prospective married life is to be success or failure? At present, marriage is a lottery. It seems impossible to predict beforehand how your prospective mate will turn out in the future. Through certain fundamentals, which can easily be ascertained, one can be reasonably certain as to one’s choice. We take extreme care in breeding horses, dogs and cats, but when we come to ourselves we are extremely careless and do not use our heads nor the means that science puts in our hands for scientific breeding. There are certain basic tests which can be made today and which will give one a reasonable assurance of married happiness."

via the consistently reliable Disinformation

Millions Of Tons Of Radioactive Garbage Ahoy

Major clean-up begins as Japanese tsunami debris bombards Alaskan island
caution, FAUX link

"MONTAGUE ISLAND, Alaska – An "unprecedented" surge in debris from last year's Japanese tsunami is washing up on Alaska's coastline, environmentalists said Tuesday as they embarked on a major cleanup operation.

Floating material including buoys and Styrofoam has washed up on Montague Island, about 120 miles southeast of Anchorage, in volumes that clearly suggest a wave of debris from the 2011 disaster, AFP reported.

The March 11, 2011, tsunami killed more than 15,000 people and washed parts of cities out to sea.

"The debris found on initial surveys of the island showed an absolutely unprecedented amount of buoys, Styrofoam and other high floating debris," said Patrick Chandler of the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies.

He said debris from Asia has been washing up on Alaska shores for years, but "we have never seen the amount we see now. In the past we would find a few dozen large black buoys, used in Japanese aquaculture, on an outside beach cleanup. Now we see hundreds."

The large-scale clean-up will begin Thursday and take 12 days.

Millions of tonnes of debris are expected to wash up in the coming months and years from the Japanese quake."

Not Just People Are Drama Queens

Brace Yourself

The American Empire Is Over & The Descent Is Going To Be Horrifying

Give Me A '66 Convertabile GTO

This is the music I grew up with, but I have a dream I've lived with since then.
I always wanted a Pontiac GTO, the original muscle car.
Sure, the Corvette was faster especially with the 427 engine, and other cars were sexier and sleeker. But I'm telling you the GTO was dynamically and cosmetically more roomy and gorgeous, as well as extremely powerful.
These babies went for less than $4000 back in the sixties.

When Your Only Skills Need To Be Raising Money, Rigging Elections And Obeying Israel

Congress Is Getting Stupider, According to Lexical Analysis

"If you've ever felt stupider after watching Congress bicker about some issue for a couple of hours, you're not wrong. The nation's lawmakers are, in fact, dumbing themselves down, according to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation.

An analysis weighing congressional speeches against the Flesch-Kincaid scale—best known as that numerical score that tells you how smart you are when you run the word count diagnostic in your word processing software—reveals that legislators speak at a 10.6 grade level.

That's down from 11.5 just seven years ago. In the span of less than a decade, Congress' rhetorical skills have receded nearly a full grade, the Sunlight Foundation discovered. The report readily admits the unreliability of the Flesch-Kincaid test, which grades language on complexity, not clarity. But it is still a decent metric for judging the quality of one's words.

That quality is declining on Capitol Hill, and it's a bipartisan effort. Democrats in the 112th Congress speak at a 10.8 grade level, with Republicans declaiming at a 10.5 mark. But the GOP could take some solace in the knowledge that a reading of Democratic scores showed that the further left a member of Congress is ideologically, the more his or her grade tends to decline.

Still, it's not entirely a measurement of innate dumbness. Maybe, the Sunlight report argues, the drop in Congressional perspicacity could be attributed to more floor speeches being delivered in campaign-speak and Internet-friendly sound bites:

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact cause of the decline. Perhaps it reflects lawmakers speaking more in talking points, and increasingly packaging their floor speeches for YouTube. Gone, perhaps, are the golden days when legislators spoke to persuade each other, thoughtfully wrestled with complex policy trade-offs and regularly quoted Shakespeare.

Sunlight's analysis was compiled by running the database of Congressional speech kept by the website CapitolWords.org through the Flesch-Kincaid system. Yet it's quite possible all that talk about homespun wisdom and Main Street values espoused by heartland politicians could be why Congress is more distant than ever from the clerisy that the legislative branch likes to think itself.

But this is not to say that Congress is without its loquacious types. Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) yaks at a 20.5 level, nearly five full grades better than the second-most verbose member, Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-Pa.). Lungren is not without his intellectual chops. Before his current stay in Congress (he first served from 1979 to 1989), Lungren was California's attorney general. He has degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University Law Center. Then again, his high score on the Flesch-Kincaid rubric could be more attributable to 62-word clunkers like this:

`This Justice Department, in my judgment, based on the experience I've had here in this Congress, 18 years, my years as the chief legal officer of the state of California and 35 or 40 years as a practicing attorney tells me that this administration has fundamentally failed in its obligation to attempt to faithfully carry out the laws of the United States.`

Yikes. That much self-admiration makes it difficult to tell if Lundgren was talking about himself or about U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Complex? Sure. Clear? Not at all.

Then again, Congress is also sporting some genuine rubes. Of the bottom 20 members, many are first-term House Republicans elected in the Tea Party wave of 2010, led by Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, with a middle-school worthy 7.95 Flesch-Kincaid score.

Democrats shouldn't get terribly inflated about that, though. Republicans also dominate the top of the rankings. As for President Obama? He might be one for aspirational grandiloquence on the campaign trail, but don't readily assume that his oratory is off the charts. Obama's three State of the Union addresses have averaged an eighth-grade level, well off the 10.7 mark set by the 67 previous presidential speeches to Congress."

It'll Be These Heroes Who Bring Fascism Down

We'd be fools to think our overlords and a good chunk of the military aren't paying attention to this.



The police and undercover stooges have heavily infiltrated the protest crowds in Chicago. But there was no way in hell they could disrupt this powerful repudiation of warmongering lies. They would have loved to stop this because it sends a big message into the military ranks. But they're savvy enough to understand busting veterans' heads while being video'd ain't a good idea.

previously:

It Was Always A Scam Just Like Any Other War

Legal highs making the drug war obsolete

"If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs.

If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009.

Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread.

Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010.

Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors.

A new study just published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology tracked the chemical composition of legal highs as the bans were introduced.

A key question was whether the legal high firms would just try and use the same banned chemicals and sell them under a different name.

The research team found that since the ban only 4.9% of the products contained any trace of the recently banned drugs. The remaining 95.1% of products contained drugs not covered by the law.

The chemicals in legal highs have fundamentally changed since the 2011 ban and the labs have outrun the authorities in less than a year.

Another new study has looked at legal highs derived from pipradrol – a drug developed in 1940s for treating obesity, depression, ADHD and narcolepsy.

It was made illegal in many countries during the 70s due to its potential for abuse because it gives an amphetamine-like high.

The study found that legal high labs have just been running through variations of the banned drug using simple modifications of the original molecule to make new unregulated versions.

The following paragraph is from this study and even if you’re not a chemist, you can get an impression of how the drug is been tweaked in the most minor ways to create new legal versions.

Modifications include: addition of halogen, alkyl or alkoxy groups on one or both of the phenyl rings or addition of alkyl, alkenyl, haloalkyl and hydroxyalkyl groups on the nitrogen atom. Other modifications that have been reported include the substitution of a piperidine ring with an azepane ring (7-membered ring), a morpholine ring or a pyridine ring or the fusion of a piperidine ring with a benzene ring. These molecules, producing amphetamine-like effects, increase the choice of new stimulants to be used as legal highs in the coming years.

New, unknown and poorly understand psychoactive chemicals are appearing faster than they can be regulated."

Terrorists: "Throwing Stars And A Hunting Bow"

Takes A Certain Level Of Thugness

Cops corral then beat protesters.
Kettle 'em so they have nowhere to go, then take out frustrations about not getting laid the night before.

"ReparativeTherapy", The Garbage Churches Have Used For Years

How One Flawed Study Spawned a Decade of Lies

"In 2001, Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, psychiatrist and professor emeritus of Columbia University, presented a paper at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association about something called “reparative therapy” for gay men and women. By undergoing reparative therapy, the paper claimed, gay men and women could change their sexual orientation. Spitzer had interviewed 200 allegedly former-homosexual men and women that he claimed had shown varying degrees of such change; all of the participants provided Spitzer with self reports of their experience with the therapy.

Spitzer, now 79 years old, was no stranger to the controversy surrounding his chosen subject. Thirty years earlier, he had played a leading role in removing homosexuality from the list of mental disorders in the association’s diagnostic manual. Clearly, his interest in the topic was more than a passing academic curiosity – indeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say he seemed invested in demonstrating that homosexuality was changeable, not unlike quitting smoking or giving up ice cream.

Fast forward to 2012, and Spitzer is of quite a different mind. Last month he told a reporter with The American Prospect that he regretted the 2001 study and the effect it had on the gay community, and that he owed the community an apology. And this month he sent a letter to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which published his work in 2003, asking that the journal retract his paper.

Spitzer’s mission to clean the slate is commendable, but the effects of his work have been coursing through the homosexual community like acid since it made headlines a decade ago. His study was seized upon by anti-homosexual activists and therapists who held up Spitzer’s paper as proof that they could “cure” patients of their sexual orientation."

Rugmunchers Accused As acting Like Jews

Lesbian Couple Charged With Staging Hate Crime

"A lesbian couple who claimed they were victims of a hate crime have been arrested after police determined they staged the incidents.

On Oct. 28, Aimee Whitchurch, 37, and Christel Conklin, 29, called police and reported the words "Kill the Gay" were scrawled in red spray paint on the garage door of their Parker, Colo., home.

The next day, the couple told deputies they found a noose hanging on the handle of their front door.

The women told officers they believed the incidents were retaliation from their neighbors and homeowner's association, who had complained the couple did not pick up after their dogs.

Due to the nature of the crimes, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office worked in tandem with the FBI to investigate. After reviewing witness statements, authorities determined Whitchurch and Conklin had staged the incidents.

Both women are charged with criminal mischief and false reporting. Whitchurch faces an additional charge of forgery."

Over and over again

Xtian Popsicles

Artist wants Jesus Popsicles to stand as statement on fanaticism, violence

"(CNN)–Sebastian Errazuriz has used art to take on an array of issues: New York's death rate, the Occupy movement, military suicide, children with disabilities, the brutal reign of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Now, the Brooklyn-based artist is taking aim at what he sees as religious extremism.

At a party this weekend celebrating New York Design Week, which begins today, the Chilean-born artist plans to hand out 100 "Christian Popsicles" made of "frozen holy wine transformed into the blood of Christ" and featuring a crucifix instead the tongue depressor that typically hosts the frozen treats, he said.

An image of Jesus Christ positioned traditionally on the cross is visible once the ice pop is consumed. As for the frozen wine..."

Fascists Are Legalizing Every Aspect Of Total Control

Congressmen Seek To Lift Propaganda Ban

"An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill, BuzzFeed has learned.

The amendment would “strike the current ban on domestic dissemination” of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon, according to the summary of the law at the House Rules Committee's official website.

The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts—the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987—that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government’s misinformation campaigns.

The bi-partisan amendment is sponsored by Rep. Mark Thornberry from Texas and Rep. Adam Smith from Washington State."