The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is taking a
rare step of allowing public comments prior to issuing a decision on a
study that could result in outlawing certain types of shotguns currently
available to citizens.
The ATF completed a study regarding the importability of
certain shotguns. The basis for a possible ban is based on a loosely
defined “Sporting Purpose” test. Using the vague definition almost all
pump-action and semi-automatic shotguns could be banned as they are all
capable of accepting a magazine, box or tube capable of holding more
than 5 rounds. Other characteristics determined to be “military” by the
ATF can also be used as a basis for a ban.
Ironically, many shotguns with “military” features are
currently being used in shooting competitions held by the USPSA, IDPA
and IPSC. The rules could also result in obscure regulations where an
individual would be unsure if he is violating them or not.
Dudley Brown, Executive Director of Rocky Mountain Gun
Owners, said if the ATF succeeds with the banning of tactical shotguns
it “will be the most dangerous interpretation of the 1968 Gun Control
Act ever envisioned and will outlaw thousands of perfectly legitimate
home defense shotguns.”
The ATF is currently allowing public comments on the study
until the end of the month. Those wishing to express concerns about the
study can send an email to shotgunstudy@atf.gov
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – The CBS 3 I-Team has learned that a Catholic priest who was removed from the ministry over sex abuse allegations now holds a sensitive security post at Philadelphia International Airport.
The security checkpoint between Terminals D and E is a busy place where thousands of people – including lots of kids – pass through every day. But you might not believe who the I-Team observed working as a TSA supervisor at that checkpoint this week: Thomas Harkins.
Until 2002, Harkins was a Catholic priest working at churches across South Jersey. But the Diocese of Camden removed him from ministry because it found he sexually abused two young girls. Now, in a new lawsuit, a third woman is claiming she also is one of Harkins’ victims.
Article continues at link above.
Now in this piece the TSA is saying that they do background checks on their people, but that this persons' record is "too old" for them to uncover the details on. So I suppose if you blew up an airliner back in the 70's, they would miss that too. But we also know from this previous report, that the TSA is actually letting people work without any background check at all. Read about that here:
Stumbled across this old post from my buddy Jack that he posted years ago on a conspiracy forum. Bizarre stuff:
I have had some really strange synchronicities in
the past two days surrounding “What’s the Frequency Kenneth?” I can’t
get it out of my head,
so I looked into it a bit. Now I feel like my brains are scrambled.
Here are some oddities I have noticed as I started digging. First stop,
YouTube. The video itself is filled with all sorts of strobe effects. I
shouldn’t have to tell any serious CT about strobes.
The song is based on a bizarre event which took place on October 4,
1986. Anchorman Dan Rather was approached by two men, while he walked
down Park
Avenue at abou 11 p.m. One of the men attacked him from behind and began beating him, shouting in demand, “Kenneth! What’s
the frequency Kenneth?!!!”
Now let’s skip back to the previous month. Rather had signed off his
newscasts for a week somewhat enigmatically, with the single word
“courage.” That same week in September, Arab extremists had threatened to “become familiar with your skyscrapers and
extend the terror campaign to the United States.” Coincidentally enough, the topic of Dan Rather’s last piece was the 9/11
attacks, and he signed off his final broadcast with that word “courage.”
Anything odd related to Dan Rather specifically linked to the date of September 11? Well, yes there is actually. On September
11, 1987, the year after the “Kenneth” attack, Dan Rather up and
walked off the set leaving the networks scrambling to fill the slot.
There was a full six minutes of dead air. A huge no no for television.
A few months later, Rather publicly assailed then Vice-President, and
frontrunner for the Republican nomination, George H.W. Bush over the
Iran-Contra
scandal during a live on-air interview. It turned out to be a pivotal
point in both of their careers. Rather’s ratings began a steady decline
from
that point on, while many believe this was a pivotal point in Bush’s
successful run for President. The animosity between the anchorman and
the Bush
family was permanent. Neither President Bush has ever granted Dan Rather
another interview.
Dan Rather was also intimately involved with news surrounding
Afghanistan, when it was the Soviets who were invading. The following
article has some
insights there. Obviously I don’t have to point out the connections with
9/11, Afghanistan, and the Bush’s.
Back to the main topic. On the last day of August 1994, the day before September,
a man named William Tager murdered NBC
stagehand Campbell Montgomery outside of the “Today” show studio. The
motivations for the murder take several tracks, but supposedly the
murderer
believed that the media had him under surveillance and were beaming
hostile messages to him. In 1997 a writer for the NY Daily News claimed
to have
solved the mysterious attack on Dan Rather, saying that it had been
William Tager, demanding to “know the frequency,” all those years
earlier. Dan
Rather positively identified the man from a picture.
But apparently there is much more to the story. Read the following…
This article really blew my mind when I found it, because I had a
synchronicity yesterday in relation to the downright bizarre movie “12
Monkeys.”
So, now we have Tager supposedly arriving in New York City on September 1, 1986 from a parallel universe in the twenty-third
century. (Born 2265. Half of 22 is 11.) One day shy of eight years later, on the last day before the month of
September, Tager commits murder. Twenty two days later (11 x 2) R.E.M. releases the single “What’s the
Frequency Kenneth”
Then there is a completely different explanation for the attack on Dan
Rather that is full of its own synchronicities. Notice the word “world”
in
here, I think it’s toward the end. And remember that Dan Rather used to
sign off saying, “…and that’s part of your world tonight."
Now we have the death of Dan Rather’s career over the documents relating
to Bush Jr. and his service in the National Guard. I don’t have to
rehash
that whole scandal, but it seems pretty clear that Rather was set up
with phony documents, that were probably actually telling the truth. The
Bush’s
decided to finally crucify him. Rather broke the story, on September 8, 2004. On September 19, 2007,
Rather filed a lawsuit against CBS. The following article spins him into the land of “bizarre conspiracy” and irrelevance.
Asexual artist Mao Sugiyama underwent elective genital removal surgery on his 22nd birthday, and decided to not let his man-bits go to waste. First he contemplated eating his removed genitals himself, but then offered them up to the public instead, at $250 a plate. A banquet was held in Tokyo, where cannibalism is not illegal apparently, and served his junk with button-mushrooms and Italian parsley to five daring diners. The rest of the ballsy-banquet goers sucked on plates of beef and crocodile for the event.
What was the verdict by the five eaters? Were there any leftovers?
According to the deleted blog post by Matsuzawa, the hard, rubbery penis
root almost bent his fork, and he spit it out after a few chews. The
only taste was of the red wine that it had be pre-stewed in. The scrotum
was surprisingly even harder and rubberier than the penis, but
tasteless. (He didn’t mention the pubic hair.) The testicles were hard
on the outside, soft and glutinous in the middle, with a fishy or gamey
taste. One of Matsuzawa’s friends in attendance asked for a piece of the
penis and ate it, but after the event became distraught and expressed
regret that he had lost common sense in the heat of the moment.
There was a noise complaint. An hour later the Denver PD showed up. Without provocation or cause, according to witnesses, they simply began to pummel the disabled war veteran who was waiting on the sidewalk for a taxi, along with his girlfriend. Still offering no resistance, and laying on the ground unable to breathe, the Special Forces veteran endured a beating that which is said to have lasted 7-10 minutes while police screamed their mantra "stop resisting!" His face was crushed in, the sidewalk was covered in blood, and he had no pulse when EMT's arrived.
Clearly this video points out a very serious problem in our criminal justice system. As if it weren't bad enough that most people who are in prison today are there for non-violent offenses, or that we have more people in prison than any other nation in the world including Communist China, we see here how overzealous police and prosecutors actually are sending so many innocent people to prison. Worse, to death row. It is for this reason, if not any other, that the death sentence should be abolished in every state.
In Bozella's case, the Dutchess County District Attorney's office hid evidence that proved he was innocent. This isn't the only time someone has been wrongfully accused of murder in Poughkeepsie either. Two detectives from the city's police department, along with the city itself, are being sued by a woman who spent a year in jail accused of murdering her father. As it turns out, police coerced and threatened a key witness to give false testimony to the grand-jury, in order to secure an indictment against Debra Briceno.Two other people have since been charged in that case.
So given these figures by these two studies, it begs the question how many innocent people have been imprisoned, or put to death that we will never know about? Pretty safe to assume that the number is much higher than those who were exonerated in the long run.
"It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death." ~Moses ben Maimon
UK stuntman is thought to have become the first person to jump out of a
helicopter and land safely without deploying a parachute. Gary Connery, 42, used a "wingsuit" to make his descent from 2,400ft (730m) above Oxfordshire. The 42-year-old said he felt "elated" after landing on a pile of 18,600 cardboard boxes. He was fitted with a parachute for the jump, which saw him accelerate to 80mph, but it was not deployed. The entire flight took less than a minute to complete. During the flight, father-of-two Mr Connery dropped for three seconds before his suit "started to fly". 'Plotting challenge'
He used a landing strip of cardboard boxes, known as a box rig, covering about 350ft (100m) by 45ft (15m). Cameraman Mark Sutton also jumped from the helicopter in a wingsuit but deployed a parachute before landing. Minutes after landing, Mr Connery said: "I feel incredible, just completely elated. "I have been training and planning for this record attempt for many years now and I am so proud to have achieved a world first. "I want to thank everyone involved for their support and belief in me because this really has been a team effort. "Tonight will be all about celebrating with friends and family. Tomorrow I will be plotting my next daring challenge. "I was absolutely fine afterwards. I was completely buzzing." The jump had been planned for early April but had to be postponed due to poor weather conditions, he said. Mr
Connery, who has worked on films including Die Another Day, Batman
Begins and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, said
performing stunts was "his life". He has already completed about 880 skydives and 450 base jumps. Before
carrying out the flight in countryside near his home in
Henley-on-Thames, Mr Connery, whose wingsuit has the ability to
dramatically reduce speed on descent, said he was "100% confident" he
would be successful.
Throughout most of human history being overweight was a sign of wealth. beauty, and even good health. The robust and jolly outwardly displayed their access to a wide variety of food and plenty of it. In fact many cultures still today hold that obesity is desirable, rather than unhealthy or grotesque as we have come to view it in modern western society in the last century.
We mistakenly accept that obesity is a cause of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and a wide variety of other health afflictions. We have also jump to the erroneous conclusion that people who are overweight are lazy, degenerate, mentally unsound, and ultimately a financial threat to our own well-being because of the public costs associated with healthcare. We postulate that the overweight are collectively responsible for this plague, rather than victims of it. Even we who are overweight, find ourselves in an impossible situation we don't fully understand but which tends to fill us with anger and self-loathing, rather than addressing the actual causes of obesity.
I have made a study of these issues myself over the years, and for a few brief moments I saw a glimmer of hope that the-powers-that-be were finally ready to acknowledge true causes of obesity and affiliated health concerns when I read these few headlines...
Imagine my disappointment when I realized that headlines like these were nothing more than propaganda as usual, controlled opposition, put out there to set the stage in order to rip off the public financially, yet again, through taxation in a typical problem-reaction-solution scheme. Another shove against the goalposts encroaching personal freedom, and another way to scam us out of a buck. One week the media is telling us that obesity has nothing to do with personal choice, and then in the next week they are broadcasting proposals for steep penalties on personal choice. Their "solution" is to impose a fine on individuals who purchase foods classified as unhealthy by whatever committee is thrown together to act in the interests of government and corporate profiteering.
I have a better idea. Let us levy fines against the corporations who are pumping unhealthy, even deadly franken-foods at us relentlessly through clever advertising, manipulation of the media, economic pressure, government payoffs, and leaving us with a total lack of real choice. Obesity is not the cause of our ill-health, it is just another symptom of it. The things that are being done to our food is what is causing most obesity, organ damage, etc. The fat itself is not the problem.
As pointed out already, obesity has never been associated with ill-health, just the opposite actually. Today there are plenty of people suffering diseases which are commonly associated with obesity, yet they are not fat themselves. Even scientists have been so indoctrinated by the brainwashing telling us obesity is the cause of health problems, that they are confounded when their own studies show that one can be obese and perfectly healthy. Discriminating against fat people is as ignorant as poking fun at cancer patients, a limbless war veteran, or saying that blacks are a liability to the healthcare system because of sickle-cell anemia. Obesity might be a sign that someone is having health problems, but it is not the cause of those problems. A fat tax completely misses the point.
Let's imagine for a second that our food supply is like a town's water supply. Now lets imagine that all of the chemicals and treatments and genetic modifications being done to our food supply, are like bacteria in our water making everyone sick, even killing people. The source of the bacteria is a new condo community who decided to start dumping raw sewage into the reservoir, rather than pay for proper processing. What do we do to solve the problem? Do we impose fines against the townspeople down below who turn on the tap? Do we penalize someone who got sick from drinking poisoned water? Certainly not, because that does not address the source of the problem. Instead we would levy fines against the condo community. Fines that are more costly than what they have been saving by dumping their waste in the reservoir.
That is what must be done here. The profit motive for corporations (and the government by proxy) to pump us full of chemicals and ruin our food must be removed, so that they start growing and distributing food of a quality we still had as little as fifty or sixty years ago. To deliver food that is actually food, not a simulated food-like product with addictive qualities, toxic ingredients, and stripped of nutrients. A tax on these foods only creates a financial incentive for the government to support unhealthy foods, not protect us from them.
A retail tax on certain foods would actually increase obesity and sickness very quickly which, some conspiracy-theorists might say, is actually the plan of the puppet-masters. To simply kill off certain segments of society, namely the poor and disenfranchised. It's frightening to think that such a theory actually has some merit too, considering this is actually what is happening already, even if not specifically planned that way by cabals of corporate overlords. The sad fact of the matter is that those in poverty run the highest rates of obesity and ill health. That is not because the poor are lazy either. If that were true, then we must also assume that our pets have all decided to become lazy as well. No, the simple truth is that our food is being poisoned. So many Americans, especially the poor, do not have access to healthy, completely organic foods. Which does of course have an impact on health, and which will make a less and less viable candidate for whatever jobs might be available in the long run, so an and so forth. The poorer you are, the greater your risk. A fat tax just makes people poorer.
Ask yourself, what you would prefer for dinner tonight. A bologna sandwich, or a steak? A pack of ramen, or a nice stir-fry with crisp, fresh vegetables and strips of lean meat? Poor or not, you probably picked the more nutritious, more expensive meal. The truth is that most people would prefer to eat healthier in general, but many simply cannot afford to. That is not a matter of personal choice. Granted, any of us might get a hankerin' for a Big Mac once in a while, but I can tell you from personal experience that surviving on the McDollar menu for any length of time will leave you with a feeling that you would prefer to never eat fast food again all the rest of your days. This is not to say either, that we should suddenly ban fast food joints, or Coca-Cola, or Doritos. We should maintain the right to eat whatever we want, even if it kills us. But there is a better solution anyway, an actual solution, to this health crisis.
The answer is not to make the (regrettably) most affordable foods less affordable to folks who are already having trouble paying for groceries. The answer is to make healthier foods more affordable and accessible to everybody. The fat tax creates financial incentive to block that access. Keep in mind here too, that we aren't just talking about folks on food stamps and in downright poverty either, but average middle class families who have had to cut corners in every facet of the household budget. Friday night pizza night has shifted from a few takeout pies, made fresh with whole natural ingredients at their local pizza shop, to heavily processed frozen pizzas from Wal-Mart. Now some might say that pizza in general is bad for you anyway, but that is not entirely accurate. It is the processed, refined, modified, hydrogenated pizza-ish product in a box that is unhealthy. A fresh pizza made with genetically unaltered semolina wheat, olive oil, fresh tomato sauce, fresh toppings, and fresh cheese is actually a quite healthy dish.
Which now bring us to the question of how the tax-man is actually going to decide which foods are healthy or not. What foods will this 20% tax be applied to? Butter perhaps? Surely the bacon will get whacked with the tax. So if we don't want to hand over one-fifth of our breakfast money to the cafeteria bully, I guess we will have to eat Quaker 100% Natural Granola, Oats, Honey n' Raisins. That was sarcasm actually, click those links and you'll see what I mean. We are lied to so often by "health officials," the media and so forth, that it's hard for anyone to actually know what we are actually supposed to be eating. This is one big reason the government cannot regulate what food can or cannot be purchased with food stamp benefits (.pdf), despite much public outrage over the years about how those benefits are spent.
Here we can also point out the fact that in many states things like soda-pop are already taxed, and require a nickel deposit per container. So we can foresee the failure of a proposed tax on a wider selection of foods labeled as "unhealthy" since the current tax is already proved to be no deterrent. Even if the government were to impose a 100% tax on things like a 99-cent gallon of store-brand fruit-punch flavored high fructose corn syrup, it will still be cheaper than a $6 gallon of orange juice, that may not actually be any healthier anyway.
So the fat tax still doesn't create any substantive incentive to eat healthy, it's just another government rip-off. And here's the real kicker. Those most at risk of obesity are immune from food tax. Even if the fat tax idea passes, the only people who are going to be affected by it are the middle class, and people on the verge of winding up on food stamps. Such a tax might even be the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back, and finally shoves a person or a family into poverty as they see 20% of their grocery budget swept away into the pocket of the tax man. Meanwhile, the folks who have already slipped below the poverty line, the ones we know are most at risk for obesity, are tax-exempt when they swipe their EBT card. So best case scenario is that this big plan to tax people into better health, will still completely pass by the people who need better food the most. Not to mention that it will actually encourage people on food stamps to use those benefits for junk food, or even to become exploited in fraud where they purchase these items for other people in exchange for cash. The higher the tax rate, the more profitable such fraud would become. So some might say we must remove the tax exemption, but all that would do is again, remove 20% of the grocery budget for people already on the edge of starvation, and force taxpayers to pay poor people's taxes. Basically it would be a double-tax on the working stiff for an idea that will never achieve its stated goal of encouraging people eat foods that are deemed to be more healthy.
Which now brings us to another startling point. Studies show that people have already made a conscious effort to move away from fatty, sugary, and salty foods toward what were are told is a more healthy diet, to no avail. We are already eating more of what they tell us to eat to be healthy, yet we are still getting fatter and sicker by the year. The only conclusion that can be drawn there is that we are being lied to, suffering terrible health consequences as a result, and then being blamed for those consequences.
This graph is from a UK study, but is comparable to the US considering that we share very similar lifestyles, and is also relevant considering that these health concerns are now a global issue:
So we can see here a moderate decrease in vegetable purchases, but hardly enough to cause an epidemic of obesity and non-communicable disease. Especially considering an offset with a dramatic increase of fruits, which are often touted as the wonder drug for anti-obesity. Then too, especially considering the graph on the right, which shows a severe downturn in sugar, a significant downturn in fat, and a moderate downturn in salt. From those figures we might conclude that obesity is a actually a result of trying to eat more healthy. That theory is not quite in keeping with the data either though, considering that the obesity epidemic didn't starts until the 1980's but the food-type trend began in the 1940's. Either way, it seems logical to conclude from that data that obesity has some other cause than the types of food we are eating.
Prevalence of Obesity
What changed in our food supply in the 1980's? That is when genetic modification of food began. That is also the same time that other industrial processes to our food such as irradiation became regular practice. Processed foods are the culprit behind our health woes. Processes which start right in the seed, which has had it's DNA altered. Processes which start in meat from animals that have been treated with growth hormones. If we are all eating foods that have been treated in a way to grow larger and faster, doesn't it stand to reason that by ingesting such foods we too would begin to take on those characteristics, of growing larger at a pace we could never possibly keep up with through normal exercise and activity?
Will this proposed "fat tax" be imposed on all processed foods, or selectively against whatever foods the government chooses? Considering that roughly 90% of key crops such as corn and soy are genetically modified, and that those crops are in turn used in so very many other products, any shopper is already hard-pressed to find completely natural and organic foods. Especially considering that GM foods don't have to be labeled, and that the whole "organic" labeling trend is more of a public relations stunt than a mark of true organic foods. Even something as simple as beef, straight from the butcher's block at your local supermarket, is processed food. It is fed genetically modified grain, pumped full of steroids and growth hormones to bring it to market faster, and then after slaughter the meat is exposed to another whole series of industrial chemical processes.
There is so much more information out there about obesity and what is being done to our food supply, but given the information shared here we can conclude that a consumer "fat tax" on any foods is, at best, ineffective in combating our public health crisis. Our government has already shown negligence in failing to protect the consumer from the corporate predators, despite the billions of dollars we already pay in taxes for regulatory agencies such as the FDA and the EPA. For the government to become openly complicit and turn a direct profit from the killing of citizens, well that would be a high crime on a level the world has rarely seen from the most tyrannical regimes throughout history.
US shoots down own jet while bombing Yemen
-
[image: Preview] The US Navy inadvertently shot down its own F/A-18 fighter
jet in a friendly fire incident over the Red Sea
Read Full Article at RT.com
The Humility and Grace of the Virgin Birth
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Take a look at the book of John. (John 1:1-18) The Apostle John begins by
reminding us that the rebirth of the redeemed is comparable to the
miraculous...
Is OpenAI’s o3 Model AGI?
-
I doubt it’s actually AGI, but it looks impressive. If it’s any
consolation, they let it use a very nontrivial amount of compute to pull
this off. If/when ...
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The Hemp Industry / Staying Positive
-
Air Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2020
Doug Fine discussed the many amazing properties of hemp. Followed by Eldon
Taylor on staying positive in the COVID-19 era.
The Alzheimer’s Drug that Might Unlock Your Dreams
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As excited as I get about the potentiality of psychedelic drugs, I get far
more amped about pushing the boundaries of dreams as I’m not sure there are
an...
DOJ Stumbles at Hearing on Detaining Immigrants
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Criticizing an attorney for the government for arguing issues he never
raised in briefing, the First Circuit seemed likely at a hearing Wednesday
to u...
Mom Has Stacked Dinner Party Roster
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GOLDEN, CO—Their eyes widening in amazement as the 43-year-old rattled off
the names of heavy hitter after heavy hitter, impressed members of the
Dreesh...
