4.29.2011

911 hang up calls are easy probable-cause

When the police want to have a look around inside a building, but don't even have the flimsiest excuse to put before a judge to get a warrant, all they need is a magic 911 call from no one.

In a recent article, we showed how the police blatantly lied about a 911 call in order to search a man's car that was sitting in the driveway of the private residence. As it turned out, there was not even a telephone line connected to the house. Scroll to the bottom of that linked article to see the video on that case.

Today we see an article published at PoliceOne, a blog and forum for law-enforcement officers to come together and share ideas and pat eachother on the back, where an empty vacant house miraculaously made an emergency call to 911 to tell police that a water pipe had burst. You can have a look at that article at this link...

http://www.policeone.com/news/3626965-Empty-house-makes-911-call/

So when police get suspicious and want to have a look around your house while you are out traveling, all they need is an alleged 911 call and a broken pipe. What will the come up with next?

Feds sting Amish farm

This is what your tax dollars are being spent on. Treating Amish farmers like drug smugglers.

A yearlong sting operation, including aliases, a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and surreptitious purchases from an Amish farm in Pennsylvania, culminated in the federal government announcing this week that it has gone to court to stop Rainbow Acres Farm from selling its contraband to willing customers in the Washington area.


The product in question: unpasteurized milk.


It’s a battle that’s been going on behind the scenes for years, with natural foods advocates arguing that raw milk, as it’s also known, is healthier than the pasteurized product, while the Food and Drug Administration says raw milk can carry harmful bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and listeria.

Yeah, but nevermind the fact that we have had huge, deadly outbreaks of E.coli and other foodborne illnesses at fast food chains like Wendy's and Taco Bell over the lettuce and tomatoes, and even in jars of peanut butter at the supermarket. So I guess it's okay if we import these diseases from other countries, but if you are an Amish farmer who sells milk, the FDA is gonna get ya!


“It is the FDA’s position that raw milk should never be consumed,” said Tamara N. Ward, spokeswoman for the FDA, whose investigators have been looking into Rainbow Acres for months, and who finally last week filed a 10-page complaint in federal court in Pennsylvania seeking an order to stop the farm from shipping across state lines any more raw milk or dairy products made from it.


The farm’s owner, Dan Allgyer, didn’t respond to a message seeking comment, but his customers in the District of Columbia and Maryland were furious at what they said was government overreach.


“I look at this as the FDA is in cahoots with the large milk producers,” said Karin Edgett, a D.C. resident who buys directly from Rainbow Acres. “I don’t want the FDA and my tax dollars to go to shut down a farm that hasn’t had any complaints against it. They’re producing good food, and the consumers are extremely happy with it.”

You can read the full article here:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/28/feds-sting-amish-farmer-selling-raw-milk-locally/


To understand why they are really doing this, you should read this article. Can't recommend it enough...

Wal-Mart: Our shoppers are 'running out of money'

I used to be part of the once a month crowd. I would go to Walmart and stock up on all my canned and dry goods, lots of frozen stuff too. Then throughout the month I would hit my local supermarket for fresh meats and produce. That changed for me this past winter. Suddenly, I saw a big rise in prices, and many of the products I used were no longer there. It was very sudden too. I mean from one month to the next. It only took me one visit and I decided I could do better stretching my limited cash and newly awarded allotment of foodstamps at my two local supermarkets, as long as I shopped with the sale flyer in hand. I haven't been back to Walmart since for groceries.


NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Wal-Mart's core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and the retail giant is worried, CEO Mike Duke said Wednesday.


"We're seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure," Duke said at an event in New York. "There's no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact."


Wal-Mart shoppers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, typically shop in bulk at the beginning of the month when their paychecks come in.


Lately, they're "running out of money" at a faster clip, he said.


"Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year," Duke said. "This end-of-month [purchases] cycle is growing to be a concern.

Full article from CNN Money at link:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/27/news/companies/walmart_ceo_consumers_under_pressure/index.htm

Maybe I should go back to school

I posted earlier about serious lack of employment. So the other line I always get is, "Go back to school if you can't find work." Well, going to school doesn't create jobs as I found out the hard way, blowing five-grand on a trade license and still never got so much as an interview.

Here are some other interesting facts about college...

#1 Since 1978, the cost of college tuition in the United States has gone up by over 900 percent.


#2 In 2010, the average college graduate had accumulated approximately $25,000 in student loan debt by graduation day.


#3 Approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loans.


#4 Americans have accumulated well over $900 billion in student loan debt. That figure is higher than the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.


#5 The typical U.S. college student spends less than 30 hours a week on academics.


#6 According to very extensive research detailed in a new book entitled "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses", 45 percent of U.S. college students exhibit "no significant gains in learning" after two years in college.


#7 Today, college students spend approximately 50% less time studying than U.S. college students did just a few decades ago.


#8 35% of U.S. college students spend 5 hours or less studying per week.


#9 50% of U.S. college students have never taken a class where they had to write more than 20 pages.


#10 32% of U.S. college students have never taken a class where they had to read more than 40 pages in a week.


#11 U.S. college students spend 24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7% of their time studying.


#12 Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of the full-time students who began college in 2001 received a bachelor's degree within four years.


#13 Nearly half of all the graduate science students enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States are foreigners.


#14 According to the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for college graduates younger than 25 years old was 9.3 percent in 2010.


#15 One-third of all college graduates end up taking jobs that don't even require college degrees.


#16 In the United States today, over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.


#17 In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.


#18 In the United States today, approximately 365,000 cashiers have college degrees.


#19 In the United States today, 24.5 percent of all retail salespersons have a college degree.


#20 Once they get out into the "real world", 70% of college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the "real world" while they were still in school.


#21 Approximately 14 percent of all students that graduate with student loan debt end up defaulting within 3 years of making their first student loan payment.

The full article and source material can be found at this link:

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Student_Loan_Debt_Hell%3A_21_Statistics_That_Will_Make_You_Think_Twice_About_Going_To_College/13691/0/0/0/Y/M.html

Facebook Facial Recognition Could Get Creepy

In early April, Engadget posted a short article confirming a rumor that Facebook would be using facial recognition to suggest the names of friends who appeared in newly uploaded photos. You’d be allowed to opt out of tagging, and only friends would be able to tag each other in albums. Nevertheless, a commenter beneath the story quipped, “Awesome! Now I can take pictures of cute girls at the grocery store or at the park, upload them and Facebook will tell me who they are! (I’m pretty sure that’s not [how] it works but I’m sure it will get there.)”


The commenter’s confidence says a lot: Facial recognition may be just one more way for Facebook to push the visual part of the social graph (photos of us) toward being more public and far less private. Facebook has a history of asking for forgiveness after the fact instead of asking for permission in advance, and its new face-recognition feature could become the latest example of a seemingly innocuous development morphing into a serious threat to the privacy of our (visual) data. And as usual, some Facebook users will like the convenience of the new features so much that they will forget the privacy trade-off altogether, or just choose not to worry about it.


Features You Didn’t Know You Had


As it stands, Facebook’s current feature uses facial recognition technology to pick out faces in your photos. Once you’ve uploaded your album, Facebook will take you to a new screen where you can enter the name of each person below their face. Sometimes (depending on your privacy settings and the clarity of the photo), Facebook will go a step further: If a face matches one you previously tagged in another album, Facebook may suggest that person’s name for you. Facebook quietly added the feature to the Privacy Settings, allowing users to disable the peppy-sounding ‘Suggest photos of me to friends’ option. Most Facebook users probably don’t know that the extra privacy setting is there.


Technological advances in the last 10 years are making it possible for computers to match images and names with impressive accuracy. Though every company using the technology handles it a little differently, the president of Applied Recognition, Ray Ganong, shared some insight into how his company’s product Fotobounce gets the job done: “We scan each image as a bitmap and look for potential face images that qualify. We try to see the two eyes, and based on the eye location we reorient the face and then generate a digital signature, based on that face.” Many builders of facial recognition technology base their matches on “faceprints” of people, where an engine synthesizes information using many photos of the same person from different angles or with different lighting to make a more accurate match. Given that Facebook users had uploaded 60 billion photos by the end of 2010, the prospects for accurate facial recognition on the social network are better now than ever before.


Facial recognition in a social networking context is not particularly new. Third-party app builders have been offering face detection on Facebook since Face.com entered the scene in 2009 with its Photo Finder app, which scanned thousands of photos to find images in which the user appears but isn’t tagged. But the difference between third-party apps and Facebook’s new recognition feature is that the former have always required participants to actively opt in to the feature, whereas at Facebook the feature is turned on by default and requires the user first to learn that it’s in use, and then to expressly opt out. Even then, Facebook’s servers don’t lose the information they’ve acquired for associating your face with your name. They just comply with your request not to use it for the time being.

Full article at link:

Yahoo.com/PCWORLD

Police-state meets armed Judge on Easter

Broward Circuit Court Judge Ilona Holmes, her sister and her sister’s family says they were ordered at gun point by several Broward Sheriffs Deputies on Easter Sunday to come out of her sister’s home with their hands up.


It was no evening of peace for the Deerfield Beach family, who’d just finished dinner with friends and family, and sent extra Easter dinner to a needy family connected with their church. Then, at 8:20 p.m., police got a call about a possible burglary next door. But a bad address caused police to go to the wrong home.


“Do I feel safe?” asked Carmita Scarlett, the homeowner and sister of Judge Holmes. "No, absolutely not. No, no. So much confusion, so much anger. So much, almost like, resentment. You know, ‘you made the mistake and,’ I told them, ‘I'm the victim and you're upset with me?’”


...


“The one that first recognized her, he picked the gun up, opened it up, took the bullets out, he started giving her a speech: ‘Judge Holmes, you know, these guys may not know who you are. I know who you are. This could have been so different.’ And my sister said, ‘everyone of ya'll know me. Ya'll been before me’.”

See the full article here:

http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/Broward-judge-ordered-by-deputies-come-out-with-your-hands-up-120755199.html?dr






View more videos at: http://nbcmiami.com.


Mexican drug lord asserts he was working for U.S. government

Surprise surprise. CIA has been running coke since at least the 1970's. But here is the legal document in pdf form where Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla makes his claim that he was an asset of the DEA and FBI...

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/userfiles/70/Zambada.Notice.Rule12.3.pdf

And here is an in-depth report by Bill Conroy at Narcosphere:

Trail of Government Intrigue Leads Back to Cocaine Jet That Crashed in Mexico’s Yucatan

Get a job you f@@kin' bum!

That's what I hear all the time. That's the answer to America's financial woes. That's the answer when I complain about how difficult it has been to live on food stamps the past few months. Get a fuckin' job. Well let me tell you folks, I am one of the long-term unemployed for reasons that go well beyond my resume skills. I got my first real job when I was 14, I have some college, two professional licenses, and a wide variety of work experience from labor, to service, to management. Yet I have not worked full-time in almost three years now. I even dumped five grand on re-training. What a fuckin waste that was. I have filled out thousands of applications, made thousands of phone calls, forwarded my resume thousands of times. Not once, not even once did I get a call to come in for an interview. The handful of calls I did get were courtesy calls from companies basically telling me to stop bothering them because they were not going to hire me.

The other day I had some jagoff get wise with me and said that McDonald's was hiring. In fact they were. A huge hiring blitz. They intended to add a whopping 50,000 people to their national 400,000 person strong workforce. I was one of more than a 1,000,000 people who applied. Hoping, praying, that I would be one of the lucky ones who would get hired part time to scrub tables and mop out the toilets for a wage that won't even pay for the car insurance to get to and from that job. And like so many others, I did not get the job.


You can check out how Bloomberg reported on it at this link:

McDonald’s Hires 62,000 in U.S. Event, 24% More Than Planned

Half of New Jobs Came From McD's Hiring Blitz

4.26.2011

Homeless woman faces 20 years for enrolling her kid in school

A Connecticut mother who says she wanted to give her son a better education will be arraigned on Wednesday on charges for enrolling the 6-year-old in another town, sparking outrage and support from people nationwide.


Tanya McDowell, a 33-year-old homeless woman whose last known address was in Bridgeport, Conn, is scheduled to be arraigned on charges of larceny and conspiracy to commit larceny for allegedly stealing $15,686 from Norwalk schools. Prosecutors allege that figure is the value of her son's education at Norwalk's Brookside Elementary School between the time he was illegally enrolled in January and McDowell's arrest on April 14. If convicted, she faces up to 20 years in prison.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/04/25/arrest-homeless-connecticut-woman-enrolling-son-school-illegally-sparks-debate/#ixzz1KftASGcM

SWAT raids house becasue man failed to password protect his network

Now don't get me wrong here, I think child molesters and kiddie pron freaks need to have their nuts choppedoff. But it seems to me that the knee-jerk reaction of the public to terms like "pedophile" are a police-state wet dream. Who the hell is going to come out to defend an alleged sex creep? No one. Which means that the police can get away with whatever the fuck they want under the guise of going after kiddie fiddlers. Alleged sex offenders and pornographers are the proverbial canary in the coalmine. What happens to them today, will be happening to the rest of us in ten years from now as the fascist police state nudges the goalposts along under the guise of "protection." Shit like this should NEVER happen in a free country. And they sure as shit should not be blaming the victim of police violence for not putting a password on his damn router.


NY case underscores Wi-Fi privacy dangers


BUFFALO, N.Y. – Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of "pedophile!" and "pornographer!" stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents.


That new wireless router. He'd gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.


"We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of images at 11:30 last night," the man's lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the agents saying. They referred to a screen name, "Doldrum."


"No, I didn't," he insisted. "Somebody else could have but I didn't do anything like that."


"You're a creep ... just admit it," they said.


Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.

Full article here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110424/ap_on_hi_te/us_wi_fi_warning



"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." ~Blackstone's Formulation


Car Wars: Roadmaps to Libya's Ground Conflict

This article is a bit of a solicitation for much more Western intervention on the ground, but it does give some good insight into history and military tactics.

Car wars: Roadmaps to Libya's ground conflict
Almost exactly one hundred years ago on November 1, 1911, air war was invented in the Italian invasion of Libya when army pilot Lt Giulio Gavotti dropped four grenades on Ottoman positions in the oasis of 'Ain Zara just outside Tripoli.

In the century since, the air campaign has become the spectacular centrepiece of western warfare, but the failure of NATO's intervention to tip the balance against Gaddafi is a reminder that it's hard to win a war from 10,000 feet.

The horrifying siege of Misurata, whose only relief comes from the sea, not the air, and the back and forth movement on the road that links Benghazi to Sirte by way of Ajdabia, Brega and Ras Lanuf suggest that this war will be played out on the ground.

In the last weeks the alliance between NATO and the Libyan rebels has begun to fray. NATO airstrikes decimated a convoy of rebel tanks and a bus full of fighters between Brega and Ajdabiya on April 7, and NATO refused to apologise. The rebels have found that close air support without sufficient ground resources is not the magic bullet that many supporters of intervention imagined.

With only few paramilitary intelligence officers on the ground in Libya, tactical attacks on Gaddafi's mobile forces are severely limited and isolated in their scope.

Full story at link:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011421122738383699.html

U.N. Prepares to Debate Whether 'Mother Earth' Deserves Human Rights Status

 Wow. I'm not sure most people will realize how dangerous this is, and what this really means. The U.N. is thought by many to be the seat of power for the coming New World Order. This idea of giving the planet human rights is a primary tenet of what this new order will be. In a nutshell, this pretty much proves the premise of the conspiracy theory that social engineering mechanisms are being put in place to exterminate billions of human beings in order to create a state of "harmony" with the Earth in which the planet will be revered as a deity.

Now I am all for treating our natural environment with respect. A lot more respect than we have been treating the planet with for centuries. But the planet is not a person and should not be afforded HUMAN rights. It's more dangerous than giving corporations the same rights of people and citizens.

If you are totally lost and have no clue what this is really about, I suggest you look into the Georgia Guidestones.

U.N. Prepares to Debate Whether 'Mother Earth' Deserves Human Rights Status


United Nations diplomats on Wednesday will set aside pressing issues of international peace and security to devote an entire day debating the rights of “Mother Earth.”


A bloc of mostly socialist governments lead by Bolivia have put the issue on the General Assembly agenda to discuss the creation of a U.N. treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature.


Treaty supporters want the establishment of legal systems to maintain balance between human rights and what they perceive as the inalienable rights of other members of the Earth community -- plants, animals, and terrain.

Full article at link:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/04/18/prepares-debate-rights-mother-earth/?test=latestnews

Georgia Guidestones



1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

Here is a fantastic in depth article on the Guidestones presented by Vigilantcitizen:

http://vigilantcitizen.com/sinistersites/sinister-sites-the-georgia-guidestones/

~~~


Guantanamo saga continues

One of the stand-out atrocities of the Bush years and his prosecution of war in the Middle East is the legacy of the Guantanamo Bay prison. There is a wealth of material available on the internet about the GITMO prison, extraordinary rendition, prisoner torture, etc.

Over the years, a number of prisoners have been found to be innocent of any crime and released. The full length feature film Taxi to the Darkside is an excellent in-depth look at how America handles their prisoners and the role the Guantanamo Bay military prison has played in what any reasonable person would conclude to be war crimes. 

The following linked article is another chapter in the saga and includes two videos. The article talks about the dozens, if not hundreds of innocents that have been held at the GITMO facility, in an expose made possible by the Wikileaks dump of reams of classified government documents. Presented by al-Jazeera, they also make a point to focus on the case of one man, an al-Jazeera employee who was held for six years before finally being released, having never been charged with any crime. It is claimed they had captured him in order to gain intelligence on the well-respected international al-Jazeera news network.

You can read that article and see those video at this link:

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2011/04/201142561524783918.html

To this day, the Guantanamo Bay military prison is still in operation, holding captive an untold number of innocent people, however dangerous some other prisoners may actually be.




Taxi to the Darkside (Full Documentary)

This video is routinely scrubbed from YouTube. Updated July 2013.



Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 Academy Award-nominated documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film focuses around the controversial death in custody of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base. Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America's policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA's use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defense of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularization of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24. The film is said to be the first film to contain images taken within Bagram Air Base. On November 19, 2007, Taxi to the Dark Side was named by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of 15 films on its documentary feature Oscar shortlist, and was ultimately one of five films nominated for a prize in the "Best Documentary Feature" category.....The film did go on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature.

The film is said to be the first film to contain images taken within Bagram Air Base.

It is part of the Why Democracy? series, which consists of ten documentary films from around the world questioning and examining contemporary democracy. As part of the series, Taxi to the Dark Side was broadcast in over 30 different countries around the world from October 8--18, 2007. The BBC cut the film to 79 minutes for broadcast.....In my opinion, not the best cutting and editing job on the film (video and sound do not match up perfectly)....but it gets the point across just the same.

Check out the official website: http://taxitothedarkside.com/Taxi/


Blog del Narco

The uncensored, unsanitized, brutal face of the narco wars in Mexico. Mainstream media sources won't touch the stuff that is written about, and shown in gory graphic detail on this blog that is being operated anonymously. Be warned, it is not for the faint of heart, but it is the reality of the war raging on the Unites States' porous southern border.

You can read more about the blog in this news article by al-Jazeera:

Mexico's narco blog: Drug deaths in real time

And of course, here is the link to...


The default language is Espanol, but there is a key up toward the top left you can click to translate the page into several different languages.

4.25.2011

U.S. praises Saddam-like crackdown on press in Iraq

Ahhh, the stench of hypocrisy.

Stop the presses, literally in Iraq


The US military praises Iraqi security forces as they crack down on press freedom.


The first months of this year have been grim for free speech in Iraq.


As revolts swept across the Middle East and North Africa, they spread to Iraqi cities and towns, but took on a very different cast.


In February, in places like Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul and Tikrit, protesters took to the streets, intent on reform - focused on ending corruption and the chronic shortages of food, water, electricity and jobs - but not toppling the government of prime minister Nuri al-Maliki.


The response by government security forces, who have arrested, beaten, and shot protesters, leaving hundreds dead or wounded, however, was similar to that of other autocratic rulers around the region.


Attacks by Iraqi forces on freedom of the press, in the form of harassment, detention, and assaults on individual journalists, raids of radio stations, the offices of newspapers and press freedom groups have also shown the dark side of Maliki's regime.


Many journalists have been prevented from covering protests or have curtailed their reporting in response to brutality, raising the spectre of a return to the days of Saddam Hussein's regime when press freedom was a fiction.


Maliki's US allies, however, have turned a blind eye to the violence and repression, with the top spokesman for the US military in Iraq praising the same Iraqi units which eyewitnesses have identified as key players in the crackdown while ignoring the outrages attributed to them.


In addition to providing training to these units, the US military is currently focused on upgrading the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces, including the creation a national intelligence and operations centre and more sophisticated use and understanding of social media, which some fear may further increase state repression.

Full article available at link:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011415181326266737.html


Then again, it's not like we are any shining beacon of free speech here in America anyway...

H. Clinton touts free speech as she watches veteran being beaten by security

 

 

Vaccines causing narcolepsy, hallucinations, paralysis in children

New concerns over swine flu jab after children given it 'hit by sudden sleep syndrome'


A swine flu vaccine which has been given to thousands of children in Britain may cause the sleep disorder narcolepsy.


Symptoms include excessive daytime sleepiness and nodding off suddenly without warning.


All packets of the vaccine Pandemrix will have to carry a warning about the risk following a ruling by the EU regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA).


The EMA, which is currently investigating the effects of the vaccine, has also told doctors to weigh up the potential risks before injecting children against the deadly H1N1 virus.


There have been seven reported cases of narcolepsy in the UK linked to the GlaxoSmithKline vaccine – four of them children.


The condition can also cause temporary muscle paralysis, hallucinations and problems concentrating.

Read the full article at link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1379943/New-concerns-swine-flu-jab-children-given-hit-sudden-sleep-syndrome.html



And a little history behind vaccinations. Plenty more material out there if you Google "forced vaccinations" too.





USDA violates court order so industry can pump you full of cheap junk food


USDA moves to let Monsanto perform its own environmental impact studies on GMOs
by Tom Philpott
19 Apr 2011 2:16 PM


Last August, Federal Judge Jeffrey White issued a stinging rebuke to the USDA for its process on approving new genetically modified seeds. He ruled that the agency's practice of "deregulating" novel seed varieties without first performing an environmental impact study violated the National Environmental Policy Act.


The target of Judge White's ire was the USDA's 2005 approval of Monsanto's Roundup Ready sugar beets, engineered to withstand doses of the company's own herbicide. White's ruling effectively revoked the approval of Monsanto's novel beet seeds pending an environmental impact study, and cast doubt upon the USDA's notoriously industry-friendly way of regulating GM seeds.


A rigorous environmental impact assessment would not likely be kind to Roundup Ready sugar beets. First, sugar-beet seeds are cultivated mainly in Oregon's Willamette Valley, also an important seed-production area for crops closely related to sugar beets, such as organic chard and table beets. The engineered beets could easily cross-pollinate with the other varieties, causing severe damage to a key resource for organic and other non-GMO farmers. Second, Monsanto's already-unregulated Roundup Ready crops -- corn, soy, and cotton -- have unleashed a plague of Roundup-resistant "superweeds," forcing farmers to apply ever-higher doses of Roundup and other weed-killing poisons. Finally, the Roundup herbicide itself is proving much less ecologically benign than advertised, as Tom Laskawy has shown.


How has the Obama USDA responded to Judge White's rebuke? By repeatedly defying it, most recently in February, when the agency moved to allow farmers to plant the engineered seeds even though the impact study has yet to be completed. Its rationale for violating the court order will raise an eyebrow of anyone who read Gary Taubes' recent New York Times Magazine piece teasing out the health hazards of the American sweet tooth: the USDA feared that the GMO sugar beet ban would cause sweetener prices to rise. Thus the USDA places the food industry's right to cheap sweetener for its junk food over the dictates of a federal court.


In early April, the USDA made what I'm reading as a second response to Judge White, this one even more craven. To satisfy the legal system's pesky demand for environmental impact studies of novel GMO crops, the USDA has settled upon a brilliant solution: let the GMO industry conduct its own environmental impact studies, or pay other researchers to. The USDA announced the program in the Federal Register for April 7, 2011 [PDF].


The biotech/agrichemical industry has applauded the new plan. Karen Batra of the Biotechnology Industry Organization told the Oregon-based ag journal Capital Press that the program will likely speed up the registration process for GMO crops and make the USDA's approach less vulnerable to legal challenges like the rebuke from Judge White. Capital Press summed up Batra's assessment of the plan like this: "The pilot program will not only help move crops through the process more quickly, but the added resources will also help the documents hold up in court."


In other words, the industry plans to produce studies that find its novel products environmentally friendly, and fully expects the USDA to accept their assessments. Judge White had ruled that the USDA should be more rigorous in assessing the risks of new GMO crops, yet his decision seems to be having the opposite effect. No doubt the USDA's latest scheme reflects the administration's stated desire to not be too "burdensome" in regulating industry.


Tom Philpott is Grist’s senior food and agriculture writer. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/tomphilpott.

Be sure to visit the original source at Grist, in their Industrial Agriculture section linked here below, to get access to all of their supporting information and documents:

http://www.grist.org/industrial-agriculture/2011-04-19-usda-to-let-monsanto-do-own-environmental-impact-studies-on-gmos

Why are we in Libya?

Why are the U.S. and western powers supporting a rebellion of self-avowed terrorists with openly admitted ties to al-Qaeda who commit worse atrocities than the legitimate sovereign Qaddafi government was ever accused of?

The New World Order is something that conspiracy theorists have been talking about for years, and is even a term that George H.W. Bush used in Presidential address, yet somehow the general public here in America just rolls their eyes and turns their back every time they hear the term.





So why are we attacking the sovereign and legitimate government of Libya in support of a rebellious insurgency? Because Libya is one of the very last nations on the planet that have not fallen under the sway of the Zionist (not to be confused with Jewish) international banking cartel of the Rothschild family. This cartel seized control of the United States economy in 1913. Today, it is Libya's turn. One of the last hold-outs on the face of the planet. One of the last stumbling blocks along the road to a New World Order controlled by one small group of elite cartel families. 

Iraq was on that list. So is Sudan, another potential target of the African campaign. That hell-hole has long been a bastion of turmoil, genocide, and human suffering. Wouldn't take much at all to whip up public support for a war there "to save the poor Sudanese people."

And who else is on that list? Coincidentally enough, the short list is made up of the United States' leading long time enemies. The only nations left in the world now, that do not have a central bank dominated by the Rothschild cartel are Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. And of course Sudan as just mentioned, and Libya who is about to fall like Iraq did.

Now today, we have this article that comes out of Italy which lays bare the financial aspect of this war and the wholesale looting of Libya's sovereign financial wealth. This is the Rothschild cartel seizing control of Libya's finances.

Financial Heist of the Century: Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWF)

by Manlio Dinucci

The objective of the war against Libya is not just its oil reserves (now estimated at 60 billion barrels), which are the greatest in Africa and whose extraction costs are among the lowest in the world, nor the natural gas reserves of which are estimated at about 1,500 billion cubic meters. In the crosshairs of "willing" of the operation “Unified Protector” there are sovereign wealth funds, capital that the Libyan state has invested abroad.

The Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) manages sovereign wealth funds estimated at about $70 billion U.S., rising to more than $150 billion if you include foreign investments of the Central Bank and other bodies. But it might be more. Even if they are lower than those of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, Libyan sovereign wealth funds have been characterized by their rapid growth. When LIA was established in 2006, it had $40 billion at its disposal. In just five years, LIA has invested over one hundred companies in North Africa, Asia, Europe, the U.S. and South America: holding, banking, real estate, industries, oil companies and others.

Read the full article at GlobalResearch:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24479

Important UPDATE:

“Libyan Rebels” Create Central Bank, Oil Company

Libyan Rebels Have Already Established A New Central Bank Of Libya

Also related:

South Sudan formally declares independence

Martial law a 'courtesy'

There has been much debate since 9/11 over the use of military troops to act as police, patrolling on American soil. From the brutality of the undeclared martial law in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to sobriety checkpoints on public highways manned by U.S. Marines.

Now in Columbus, Georgia, military personnel will begin a part-time garrison of public streets wearing armbands that read "Courtesy Patrol." This comes in the wake of a fight where five soldiers beat up an ex-soldier, and in another incident a man shot up a restaurant, killing a person. The latter incident appears to have no connection to the military though. So what are these patrolling troops really there for?

On the one hand, it might be a good idea to have a military officer on hand to order unruly drunk soldiers back to base. As the Mayor of Columbus states in the video below, you can't just arrest someone for being drunk. Well yes, as a matter of fact you can if they are publicly intoxicated for one thing. For another, if their intoxication is creating any sort of disturbance, the police can also slap on a disorderly conduct charge.

But let's just say for the sake of argument, and to cut through a lot of red tape, it does not sound entirely unreasonable that a few Army officers might be on hand to send some drunken unruly soldiers back to base before things get out of hand, and in order to avoid all sorts of sticky legal matters and petty arrests of soldiers. Seems to me that in an Army town, they would already have something like this in place, with a liaison officer between the local PD and the MP's.

So why a uniformed patrol then by military troops on public streets? Over a single bar brawl? As I already pointed out, the other shooting incident didn't even have anything to do with the military, so why are they even bringing it up in this video?

The other unsettling part of the video is where they parade out that scared little pea-brained woman saying it's not enough, that they are going to have to increase security. That she is afraid to walk alone. Boy, talk about some propaganda, softening up the people to make them more malleable to the idea of even more military patrols.

And that is what these things are always about. The slippery slope. Moving along the goalposts, inch by inch, ever closer to an outright totalitarian fascist police state. And of course, the best way to do that is by selling fear. If the people are afraid, they will continue to demand more patrols, more invasions of privacy, more shredding of the remnants of our Constitution and everyth8ing it ever menat to be an American in the first place.

One, wakka, two, wakka, three, wakka, what are wee fighting for? Don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop Afghanistan. And it's five six seven open up the Pearly Gates. Ain't no time to wonder why, whoopeee! we're all gonna die!



6 Underground (Perfecto Mix)

Truth in 'satanism'

Cats attack unfit mother?

Sperm important to women's health

The finding that women who do not use condoms during sex are less depressed and less likely to attempt suicide than are women who have sex with condoms and women who are not sexually active, leads one researcher to conclude that semen contains powerful—and potentially addictive—mood-altering chemicals.


Study author Gordon G. Gallup, Ph.D., a psychologist at the State University of New York in Albany, also found that women who routinely had intercourse without condoms became increasingly depressed as more time elapsed since their last sexual encounter. There was no such correlation for women whose partners regularly used condoms.

More at the link to Psychology Today:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200210/crying-over-spilled-semen

4.24.2011

What is the national debt?

Man in pink women's shoes holds up shoe store

Town of Newburgh police say the man, Robert Figueroa, 47, stole cash Saturday morning from a Payless Shoes store on Route 17K, a class-D felony. Police said Figueroa bought a pair of pink women’s “wedge” shoes, wore them out of the store and then returned, claiming he had a weapon in his pocket and demanding cash, according to the victim.

Full article at link:

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/article/20110424/NEWS01/110424011/Police-Newburgh-man-buys-wears-pink-women-s-shoes-then-holds-up-store?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|PoughkeepsieJournal.com

Western Media Blackout of Libyan Rebel Atrocities

What the fuck are we really doing in Libya? That's the big question. But this article also reveals how the propaganda machine works, how Americans are being lied to, and how the real news is being blacked-out even from alternative sources.

Check out the article including graphically violent video at this link:

http://msmreview.blogspot.com/2011/04/western-media-blackout-of-libyan-rebel.html

BAE Builds a Secret Microwave Gun for the High Seas

Defense contractor BAE Systems isn’t ready to talk about this just yet. But one of its forthcoming projects is a microwave weapon that can fry the electronics of watercraft engines and other seaborne dangers.

Details at link:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/bae-builds-a-secret-microwave-gun-for-the-high-seas/#more-44668

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