The Truth Or The Fight

By Tom McGregor

Gun owners are protected under the auspices of the Second Ammendment of the United States Constitution, but their rights are not protected when President Barack Obama becomes a signatory of a United Nations’ treaty on global gun-control restrictions.

The Obama administration announced this week its support for the UN Small Arms Treay. This international agreement poses as a grave danger for freedom for both in the United States and around the globe by making it more strenuous – if not outright illegal – for law-abiding U.S. citizens to keep and bear arms.

According to the Washington Times, “the U.N. claims that guns used in armed conflicts cause 300,000 deaths worldwide every year, an inordinate number of which are the result of internal civil strife with individual nations. The solution proposed by transnationalists to keep rebels from getting guns is to make the global pool of weapons smaller through government action. According to recent deliberations regarding the treaty, signatory countries would be required to ‘prevent, combat and erradicate’ various classes of guns to undermine ‘the illicit trade in small arms.’ Such a plan would necessarily lead to confiscation of personal firearms.”

This may appear as reasonable solution for governments that don’t trust their citizens, yet it represents a dictatorial disregard for the safety and freedom of all U.S. citizens. Not all insurgencies are evil, first of all. As U.S. history reveals, one method of destroying a despotic regime is to revolt against it. That is the very reason why authoritarian regimes such as Syria, Cuba, Rwanda, Vietnam, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone, enforce strict gun control laws.

As reported by the Washington Times, “the U.N. Small Arms Treaty opens a back door for the Obama administration to force through gun control regulations. Threats to the Second Ammendment are real today as ever.”

To read the entire article from the Washington Times, link here:

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-8983-0-9-9–.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Agence France-Presse

JERUSALEM (AFP) – At least 10 people were killed as Israeli forces stormed a boat carrying pro-Palestinian activists bound for Gaza, Israeli television and radio stations reported on Monday.

According to Israel’s private channel 10 television, Israeli marine commandos had opened fire after being attacked with axes and knives by a number of the passengers on board the aid ships, the television said, without giving the source of its information.

The station did not say whether the dead and injured were passengers or members of the Israeli navy.

Israel’s army radio said between 10 and 14 people had been killed in clashes which broke out after the passengers allegedly tried to grab weapons off the naval commandos who tried to storm one of the boats.

It was not clear whether the clashes were taking place on just one of the six boats making up the aid convoy, and the Israeli army had no immediate comment on the incident.

Shortly afterwards, the Israeli military censor ordered a block on all information regarding those injured or killed during the storming of the ship.

The Israeli ambassador was summoned to the Turkish foreign ministry Monday after the incident, a Turkish diplomat said.

“The ambassador (Gabby Levy) was summoned to the foreign ministry. We will convey our reaction in the strongest terms,” the diplomat, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0531/at-10-dead-israel-storms-aid-convoy-israeli-tv/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Article HERE

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 29, 2010

Video HERE

Remember death panels? They’re baaaaack now that Obamacare is law of the land.

Before Obamacare became the law of the land, liberals and “progressives” went ballistic over Sarah Palin’s Facebook entry stating an obvious fact — Obamacare will realize its savings on relegating seniors to sub-standard health care via rationing. Libs were outraged and said there was no evidence the government plans to implement “death panels.” Palin’s assertion was subsequently deemed “lie of the year.”

That was then, this is now. Earlier this week, Health and Human Services Secretary (and Bilderberg member) Kathleen Sebelius said Dr. Donald Berwick is “absolutely the right leader at this time” to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Obamacare will cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare over the next decade as the Boomers retire and enter old age.

Berwick is the right man for the job. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open,” Berwick said while discussing the council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, which was tasked with researching and evaluating the cost of medical treatments and their outcomes. It was part of the $787 billion stimulus package and one of the building blocks Obama wanted in place before the health-care takeover bill was passed, writes Jane Chastain.

During debate on Obamacare, mechanisms for rationing embedded in the legislation were revealed — the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the Independent Medicare Advisory board, the CMS Innovation Center and the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force — but few in the corporate media paid attention. Most of them were too busy attacking criticism of the bill.

“I’m really pleased that the President nominated Dr. Donald Berwick,” Sebelius gushed. “He’s known nationally as an enormously competent physician and an enormously passionate health care provider and someone who, I think, is incredibly well suited to help increase the quality of health care delivered to the 40-plus million Americans who rely on Medicare services and also the 30-plus million on Medicaid services.”

Dr. Berwick is enamored with the British healthcare system that “uses end-of-life death pathways, which withhold expensive treatment in favor of morphine and hand-holding. Physicians have charged that this leads to premature death for many British citizens,” according to Chastain.

“During the debate on the health-care takeover bill, Obama ridiculed those like [Senator] Roberts who tried to warn us about rationing and Sarah Palin who used the term ‘death panels.’ Now that his administration has admitted that rationing is part of the plan, at the very least, he owes these folks an apology,” writes Chastain.

Apologize? Go fish. No apology will be forthcoming. Our eugenicist rulers are determined to eventually reduce the global population to around 500 million people who will be reduced to robotized slaves. Obama’s deathcare operation is one small step in this direction.

It is no secret the primary goals of the Bilderberg Group are a one-world government, a one-world monetary system and a vast reduction in world population. In 2009, the “billionaires club” — Bill Gates, David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, George Soros and Michael Bloomberg — gathered in New York to discuss the “disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat” your continued existence poses to the global elite. Gates and Buffett in particular have donated huge sums of money for population control.

For the global elite and their minions, we are contemptible useless eaters. “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburgadmitted last year.

The elite believe they can maintain the facade of a Constitution and Bill of Rights as they go about decimating world population. Obama’s science czar, John P. Holdren, said as much when he wrote in EcoScience (page 837): “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Gates and Buffett have announced the “crisis” of world population is “sufficiently severe to endanger the society” of global elite.

It is no mistake a Bilderberg member is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. It is also no mistake Obamacare was passed and will be implemented at the precise moment millions of Baby Boomers enter retirement and old age.

Millions of Boomers — who dutifully paid their taxes including taxes for Medicare — will suffer the fate of Edward G. Robinson in the 1973 film Soylent Green:

http://www.infowars.com/bilderberger-praises-medicare-rationing-advocate/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Here they go… the wheels of smear & fear are in full motion…  Chris Matthews has a double diamond black-belt in being a shameless whore shill.”

-Fred Face 5/28/10

(“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.” ) — Mahatma Gandhi

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
Friday, May 28th, 2010

MSNBC has begun airing trailers for an upcoming documentary, which the network has titled “Rise Of The New Right”, that prominently features interview footage with Alex Jones.

The show, to be broadcast on June 16th, is presented by Hardball host Chris Matthews and will include segments of an interview Matthews conducted with Jones earlier this year in Austin, Texas.

“There’s a rising tide on the right voiced not just by extremists but by recruits from the neighborhood.” Matthews states in the trailer, which also features footage from Rand Paul’s victory speech after he won the Kentucky primary two weeks ago.

“The Tea Party is determined to take power – what does that mean for America?” Matthews continues, as the trailer cuts to Alex saying that America has fallen into deep tyranny.

“I’m Chris Matthews with a hard look at the rise of the new right” the MSNBC anchor states as the trailer ends.

The slick graphics include an image of the Gadsden flag. The iconic flag depicting a rattlesnake with the words “Don’t tread on me”, dates from around 1775 and was used by The United States Marine Corps as an early motto flag. Apparently MSNBC now think it’s an extremist right wing symbol.

Real Clear Politics blog, which refers to Alex as a “radical conspiracy theorist” has a video of the trailerhere.

When Chris Matthews asked the Infowars team if he could travel to Austin to interview Alex some months ago, the general consensus was that MSNBC was preparing another hit piece on the freedom movement and the alternative media, targeting Alex as a key figure.

Alex has had previous run ins with the network, and with Chris Matthews, however, despite these misgivings Alex and the team decided to go ahead with the interview, knowing that though the finished article may be a smear attempt, those with enough intelligence to see through it could be reached.

It remains to be seen how the interview with Alex is used and to what extent parts of it will be taken out of context, however, judging from the trailer we are about to get everything we expected from MSNBC.

The network also seems to be carrying on where Rachel Maddow left off with its attack on Rand Paul. Following the release of a falsified transcript from the Maddow interview, the networkdevoted a full day to attacking and smearing Paul last week, painting up the mild mannered son of Congressman Ron Paul as some kind of virulent racist extremist.

No doubt the ridiculous attempt to smear the anti-establishment candidate for the Senate will continue in this special.

Chris Matthews himself has a history of injecting phony race talking points into his programming as a divisive technique in an attempt to alienate anyone who questions government policy or the actions of President Obama.

Indeed, the effort to quash the grass roots Tea Party movement in its infancy was initiated by MSNBC race baiting.

It was on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann last year that Jeanane Garofalo called tea party protesters “a bunch of tea bagging rednecks”, contending that the frustration expressed over the direction of the country was code for racism.

One year later Olbermann smirked and giggled his way through a celebration of the fact that the word “teabagger” has entered popular lexicon.

The daily injection of race into news segments with no context whatsoever is exactly the kind of irresponsible media display that allows groups such as the ADL to stir up the notion that legitimate grass roots political protest in America is nothing more than an explosion of intolerable racist rage.

Indeed, it was MSNBC that pathetically attempted to link Alex Jones to the bigoted cop killer Richard Poplawski just over a year ago when they discovered that Poplawski had left racist remarks on the Prisonplanet.com forum. It was of no matter to the network that Poplawski had also attacked Jones for not advocating violence and sharing his intolerable prejudices.

Under a George W. Bush presidency, MSNBC routinely ran programming warning that America was slipping into a police state nightmare – yet now the network labels us racists and extremists for continuing to expose such activity, even though nothing has changed save for a different puppet residing inside the White House.

MSNBC has become the most pro-establishment network over the past two years, picking up the mantle from Fox news, which ran similar shows for eight years depicting freedom lovers and anti-establishment figures as dangerous left wing commies while Bush was in office.

MSNBC is the epitome of the controlled corporate mainstream media, being as it is 80% owned by General Electric, operated by military industrial complex giant General Dynamics, whose primary business comes from supplying arms and weapons systems to the US government and its international allies. It is not and never has been sympathetic to anti-establishment or anti-war activism – this is the same network that cancelled Jesse Ventura’s talk show simply because he opposed the Iraq war.

It is not surprising that Chris Matthews throws around the “dangerous right winger” label as often as he does, given that he admits he analyzes politics “from a Marxist perspective” and that his idol isCommunist ideologue Saul Alinsky. If you chart Matthews on the political scale, virtually everyone resides to the right of his views, simply because they are not hardcore Communists.

As we have previously exposed, when it comes to attacking the grass roots, Matthews floats the exact same talking points as Glenn Beck – proving that the left-right paradigm is completely phony and that the real political battle resides between the establishment and the American people.

Matthews routinely urges his viewers to believe that anyone who is skeptical of, or expresses disdain toward, anything the government does is psychologically insane.

As regular readers of this website and listeners to the Alex Jones show will understand, we urge people to reject the phony paradigm of left and right in politics – we expose the ongoing agenda that is ever present, no matter which party is in government. We show how both parties are controlled under the same system of elitist oppression. In short – for eight long years under Bush we were labeled radical left wing lunatics – overnight that changed and we are now described as dangerous right wing racists.

However, anyone who can remember further back than eighteen months ago will see through this propaganda – that is why we must view even the most obvious of hit pieces like this one as opportunities that cannot be ignored.

http://www.infowars.com/rise-of-the-new-right-msnbc-documentary-cites-alex-jones-rand-paul-as-extremists/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

By Andrew Hough

Students in Manchester are having their thumbprints digitally transformed into electronic codes, which can then be recognised by a computer program. Under the scheme, pupils swipe a bar code inside the book they want borrow then press their thumb on to a scanner to authorise the loan. Books are returned in the same way.

The scheme is being trialled on junior classes at Higher Lane Primary in Whitefield, Bury, Greater Manchester.

Officials confirmed it is due to be extended to all pupils at the school, one of the areas largest primary schools, with 453 pupils aged four to 11.

School authorities defended the scheme on Thursday, and moved to reassure parents that the voluntary system, is heavily encrypted or coded and that no images of fingerprints would be stored.

But critics said they were “appalled” at the system, developed by Microsoft which is also being trialled in other parts of the country.

“This is quite clearly appalling,” said Phil Booth, national coordinator of NO2ID, a privacy campaign group.

“For such a trivial issue as taking out of library books the taking of fingerprints is way over the top and wrong.

“It conditions children to hand over sensitive personal information.”

He added: “The money for such a system could be spent on actual school resources. How about some more books for the library instead?

“This needs to be rolled back or stopped. I would argue there is no justification for such a scheme.

But Lesley Isherwood, the school headmaster, defended the system, saying it was introduced as a more efficient way of books being borrowed from the recently renovated library.

She confirmed it would be extended to all pupils, adding that parents would be given the choice to opt in or out.

“We have researched this scheme thoroughly. It is a biometric recognition system and no image of a fingerprint is ever stored. It is a voluntary system,” she said.

“The thumbprint creates a mathematical template. All parents have been written to and we have told them what the system is all about. From the responses we have had there has been overwhelming support.”

She added: “We hold a lot of information about children because we are a school. This is no different.”

All pupils’ details are erased when they leave school.

It comes after schemes to fingerprint children as part of payment for their school dinners was introduced around the country.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/7771112/Children-as-young-as-4-to-be-fingerprinted-to-borrow-school-books.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Ron Paul
May 28, 2010

Dear Friend,

It sure didn’t take long for the entire establishment to attack my son Rand in the days after he won the Kentucky Senate primary.

As I left Kentucky last week, I was both happy for Rand and anxious for what I knew would be coming at him soon. But it came sooner than even I feared.

A mainstream media network has gone into all-out warfare against Rand, beginning with a full 24 hours of repeating outright lies by Rand’s Democrat opponent.

It’s funny. Rand’s opponent’s ideas are anti-freedom. They’re pro Big Government. They’re pro-welfare state, and will stand lock-step with the Obama agenda. And if they are the issue, he can’t beat Rand in Kentucky. So he’s trying to make sure this race is on a different playing field.

Rand needs to fight back. Some of it will be now, some will be in the coming months. But he needs your help to do it.

I know it seems like he won his primary by a lot, and it certainly was a great achievement. But having done this many times before, I urged him to take nothing for granted, and to run like he was 10 points behind. He did just that, and it was an amazing victory to watch! I was very proud of him and his team.

And thanks to you, he had the funds to do everything he needed to do. But he wisely used those funds in the primary, and has only a small amount left in his campaign treasury as we begin the general election.

And now he’s under all-out attack.

I hope you’ll help him out the way you did in the primary. We can’t count on others to help. Sure, he’ll have a few more friends now. But we need that to be in ADDITION to what our movement can give him. We can’t rest now, this is one of the biggest opportunities for a liberty minded candidate in a long time.

Please consider helping Rand today, and as often as you can throughout the general election. He’s going to need to raise three of four times what he raised in the primary to compete with the national special interests that will pour money into Kentucky to stop him.

These early attacks prove one thing for sure: The establishment and the powers that be in Washington are scared to death of a Senator Rand Paul. And they should be.

Now let’s start helping him get there to shake up the Senate!

Please donate today at www.RandPaul2010.com.

In Liberty,
Ron Paul

http://www.infowars.com/ron-paul-defends-rand-against-concerted-corporate-media-attack/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Casey Kazan via Oxford University

Like a scene out of Star Trek, Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with important implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

In this week’s Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UK’s Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.

Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

Professor Wark added: ‘What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: it’s almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!’

The researchers believe that the new approach is an ideal way to create and study such exotic states of matter and will lead to further work relevant to areas as diverse as planetary science, astrophysics and nuclear fusion power.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/05/-flash-laser-leads-to-discovery-of-new-state-of-matter.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+

Galaxy%3A+News+from+Planet+Earth+%26+Beyond%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“More support after the “set-up” civil rights smear campaign.”

-F.F.

Editorial of The New York Sun

The New York Sun wasn’t publishing in 1964, but we have no doubt that it would have supported the Civil Rights Act, as the editor who now conducts these columns did then and as the Sun does now. We revere the great figures of the civil rights movement. When their names — Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Thurgood Marshall, to mark but three who are still in the news columns — come up at the dinner table, we speak to our children about their righteousness, courage, and heroism. We haven’t the slightest hesitation in supporting the authority of the federal government to outlaw racial discrimination in public or private businesses and myriad private transactions, such as, say, the sale of real estate. We favor aggressive enforcement of civil rights laws, even after the dismantling of Jim Crow.

If we were voting in Kentucky today, however, we’d vote for Rand Paul for senator. It’s not that we care to cavil about the fine points of the Civil Rights Act. It’s no mere artifact of a great struggle. On the contrary, we’re of the view that without it, the danger of a retreat would be a constant worry, even in the early 21^st century. But the law itself is settled and secure. What does not seem settled and secure are other matters — property rights, say — on which Dr. Paul stands heads and shoulders above his opponent, Jack Conway, one of the most aggressive state attorneys general advanced by a Democratic party that has shown scant regard for the principles of federalism, for the constitutional contract that undergirds our republic, and for the negative way the constitution vouchsafes our rights.

By this we mean, Dr. Paul comprehends that the Bill of Rights is largely a prohibition on the government. When one listens to him talk, one gets the sense that he comprehends that the Founders of America feared that the biggest threat to our rights was from our own government. He has this streak of constitutional fundamentalism that one hears among the Tea Party enthusiasts, but among not only them. One hears it from the Libertarians, and from a growing number of neoconservatives who are taking a fresh look at the Constitution at a time when advocates of limited government are unlikely to find much encouragement from the Congress or the administration.

There are those who belittle this constitutionalist streak, including, to pick a recent example, the columnist Michael Gerson, who, Ira Stoll noted in a post at Futureofcapitalism.com, complained of what “might be called ‘constitutional conservatism.’” Mr. Gerson reckons such conservatism has “the virtue of being easily explainable — and the drawback of being impossible.” This prompted Mr. Stoll to point out that it did pretty well — not flawlessly, but pretty well — in the century-and-a-half before the New Deal. By our lights the blitheness with which so many are prepared to breeze past the plain language of the Constitution, and past such bedrock as the idea of enumerated powers, is breathtaking. That Rand Paul has the grit to challenge all this is, we’d like to think, connected to his popularity.

* * *

This is one of the traits of both of the Pauls, father and son. We have many times remarked that we part company with them, and other libertarians, on many aspects of foreign policy (though Ron Paul would not abandon the fight against Al Qaeda; we have already endorsed his plan to use against Osama Bin Laden Congress’s power to grant letters of marque and reprisal). But they are an outstanding pair when it comes to this idea of constitutional conservatism — or, our preference, plain language constitutionalism. A lot of things can happen between now and election day. But our guess is that if Rand Paul prevails, one of the reasons will be his attention to the theoretical underpinnings of our constitutional republic, a trait that he shares with the architects of the Civil Rights Act we amire so much.

http://www.nysun.com/editorials/rand-paul-and-the-constitution/86970/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“This is another reason why some people preach about throwing your TV out the window… and that your being brainwashed by your television. And watch-out… people don’t like being told that they are actually being brainwashed! For most people it’s not like your walking around drooling like an oversexed zombie… it’s just little stupid sound bites leaked into your conscious little by little and if you watch enough TV it could influence your thinking without you realizing it. I haven’t watched TV for a long time but I heard the show “24″ is pretty ridiculous with the propaganda mumbo-jumbo-columbo-retarded innuendo-shut up-and go play your nintendo.

(These little (probably) pentagon bank rolled scripts are mostly for the people that don’t know what fluoride really is, doesn’t know that our government puts it in our public water supplies for absolutely no health beneficial reason what so ever,  doesn’t know the history behind it… like when Hitler used it in the water given to concentration camp prisoners to keep them docile and “a bit out of it” and discourage any type of rebellious spirit, doesn’t know the health & mental adverse affects it causes from long term consumption). So, when these travesties are finally brought to light in the public stratosphere, you’ll have a certain percentage of people with this weird little association with fluoride/terrorism. Then of course out of fear of being labeled a big bad terrorist and because of a bit of lazy-ass thinking, they’ll stay clear of the issue and… never look into it for themselves. Maybe… who the fuck knows?”

-Fred Face 5/27/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

• By Ryan Singe

Facebook’s getting lots of advice these days on how to get out of the current jam it’s in over its recent, ambitious drive to put itself at the center of the net by pushing users to be more public.

One of the best is a call from Will Moffat, a San Francisco-based coder who created a site called Openbook that lets searchers see what people have written in status updates that are public to the world. Many of those — try a search on DUI — fall squarely in the category of “too much information.”

Last week, Facebook let slip that it would offer new “simplistic” privacy choices for users, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post Monday.

Still unknown is what those simplified controls will look like.

Moffat, who says that “Facebook has a moral obligation to protect their users,” has a simple idea:a slider on a user’s profile page, with a promise from Facebook never to move it more toward public without getting permission first.

“Dragging to the right makes everything public. Dragging to the left makes everything private. Simple. Just how it should be,” Moffat’s site suggests.

When Facebook does unveil its new controls in the coming days or weeks, Moffat’s example will make for an interesting comparison.

Moffat calls himself an “accidental activist,” pulled into the ongoing debate after he built Openbook just to see what people were posting publicly.

Now he’s angry.

“They are trying to change society to make it less private,” Moffat said. “But given they have such a monooply on social networking, I think they have a moral responsibility to respect social norms.”
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/openbook-facebook-design/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

by Ron Paul

Congress, with its insatiable appetite for spending, is set to pass yet another “supplemental” appropriations bill in the next two weeks. So-called supplemental bills allow Congress to spend beyond even the 13 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. These are akin to a family that consistently outspends its budget, and therefore needs to use a credit card to make it through the end of the month.

If the American people want Congress to spend less, putting an end to supplemental appropriations bills would be a start. The 13 “regular” appropriations bills fund every branch, department, agency, and program of the federal government. Congress should place every dollar in plain view among those 13 bills. Instead, supplemental spending bills serve as a sneaky way for Congress to spend extra money that was not projected in budget forecasts. Once rare, they have become commonplace vehicles for deficit spending.

The latest supplemental bill is touted as an “emergency” war spending bill, needed to fund our ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. The emergencies never seem to end, however, and Congress passes one military supplemental bill after another as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on.

Many of my colleagues argue that Congress cannot put a price on our sacred national security, and I agree that the strong, unequivocal defense of our country is a top priority. There comes a time, however, when we must take stock of what our blank checks to the military industrial complex accomplish for us, and where the true threats to American citizens lie.

The smokescreen debate over earmarks demonstrates how we have lost perspective when it comes to military spending. Earmarks constitute about $11 billion of the latest budget. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the $708 billion spent by the Pentagon this year to expand our worldwide military presence. The total expenditures to maintain our world empire is approximately $1 trillion annually, which is roughly what the entire federal budget was in 1990!

We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and far more than we spent during the Cold War. These expenditures in many cases foment resentment that does not make us safer, but instead makes us a target. We referee and arm conflicts the world over, and have troops in some 140 countries with over 700 military bases.

With this enormous amount of money and energy spent on efforts that have nothing to do with the security of the United States, when the time comes to defend American soil, we will be too involved in other adventures to do so.

There is nothing conservative about spending money we don’t have simply because that spending is for defense. No enemy can harm us in the way we are harming ourselves, namely bankrupting the nation and destroying our own currency. The former Soviet Union did not implode because it was attacked; it imploded because it was broke. We cannot improve our economy if we refuse to examine all major outlays, including so-called defense spending.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6d5Nls830g&feature=player_embedded

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=881

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

On Friday, Congressman Paul appeared on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. to discuss the price of gold and the markets.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

According to two surviving crew members of the Deepwater Horizon, oil workers from the rig were held in seclusion on the open water for up to two days after the April 20 explosion, while attorneys attempted to convince them to sign legal documents stating that they were unharmed by the incident. The men claim that they were forbidden from having any contact with concerned loved ones during that time, and were told they would not be able to go home until they signed the documents they were presented with.

Stephen Davis, a seven-year veteran of drilling-rig work from San Antonio, told The Guardian’s Suzanne Goldenberg today that he was held on a boat for 36 to 40 hours after diving into the Gulf from theburning rig and swimming to safety. Once on a crew boat, Davis said, he and the others were denied access to satellite phones or radio to get in touch with their families, many of whom were frantic to find out whether or not they were OK.

Davis’ attorney told Goldenberg that while on the boat, his client and the others were told to sign the statements presented to them by attorneys for Transocean — the firm that owned the Deepwater Horizon — or they wouldn’t be allowed to go home. After being awake for 50 harrowing hours, Davis caved and signed the papers. He said most of the others did as well.

Davis’ story seems to be backed up by a similar account given to NPRby another Deepwater Horizon crewmember earlier in the month. Christopher Choy, a roustabout on the rig, said that the lawyers gathered the survivors in the galley of a boat and said, “‘You need to sign these. Nobody’s getting off here until we get one from everybody.’ … At the bottom, it said something about, like, you know, this can be used as evidence in court and all that. I told them, ‘I’m not signing it.’ ”

Choy said that once he was finally allowed to get off the boat, he was shuttled to a hotel, where he met up with his wife. At the hotel, representatives from Transocean confronted him again and badgered him to sign the statement. Exhausted, traumatized and desperate to go home, Choy said that he finally relented and signed.

Choy’s lawyer, Steve Gordon, is incensed over what transpired in the hours after the explosion. He, along with other attorneys for DeepwaterHorizon workers, is trying to get the documents voided by the courts.

“It’s absurd. It’s unacceptable, and it’s irresponsible,” Gordon told NPR.

— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100521/sc_ynews/ynews_sc2191

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Kim Jong-Il has put North Korean troops on combat alert and threatened military action if the South trespasses in its waters as global stock markets freak out at the prospect of a war which, if it occurs, can be blamed on the U.S. government’s history of arming the Stalinist dictator with nuclear weapons.

Korean markets plunged 3.3 per cent overnight as investors were spooked at escalating tensions between the two countries following South Korea’s allegation that the North was responsible for the March 26 torpedoing of one of its warships

Kim Jong-il responded to the charge by putting his military on combat alert, telling them to “prepare for war,” and threatening action if South Korea trespasses in its waters off the peninsula’s west coast.

On Monday, President Obama also told the U.S. military to prepare for conflict as it plans to carry outanti-submarine and other naval exercises with South Korea.

As we have documented, North Korea’s nuclear belligerency was almost exclusively a creation of the U.S. government in that they armed the Stalinist state both directly and indirectly through global arms dealers under their control, namely Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. While labeling North Korea as part of the “axis of evil,” the U.S. government was enthusiastically funding its nuclear weapons program at every stage.

Both the Clinton and Bush administrations played a key role in helping Kim Jong-Il develop North Korea’s nuclear prowess from the mid 1990’s onwards.

Just as with Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program, it was Donald Rumsfeld who played a key role in arming Kim-Jong-Il.

Rumsfeld was man who presided over a $200 million dollar contract to deliver equipment and services to build two light water reactor stations in North Korea in January 2000 when he was an executive director of ABB (Asea Brown Boveri). Wolfram Eberhardt, a spokesman for ABB confirmed that Rumsfeld was at nearly all the board meetings during his involvement with the company.

Rumsfeld was merely picking up the baton from the Clinton administration, who in 1994 agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ claimed that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, who stated, “LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs — a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”

“These reactors are like all reactors, they have the potential to make weapons. So you might end up supplying the worst nuclear violator with the means to acquire the very weapons we’re trying to prevent it acquiring,” said Sokolski.

The U.S. State Department claimed that the light water reactors could not be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it didn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. At the time, Russia was building light water reactors in Iran.  According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.

In April 2002, the Bush administration announced that it would release $95 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to begin construction of the ‘harmless’ light water reactors in North Korea. Bush argued that arming the megalomaniac dictator Kim Jong-Il with the potential to produce a hundred nukes a year was, “vital to the national security interests of the United States.” Bush released even more money in January 2003, as was reported by Bloomberg News.

Bush released the funds despite the startling revelation, reported by South Korean newspapers, that a North Korean missile warhead had been found in Alaska.

Construction of the reactors was eventually suspended, but North Korea had an alternative source through which they could obtain the nuclear secrets vital to building an atom bomb arsenal – CIA asset and international arms smuggler AQ Khan.

In 2004, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb program, admitted sharing nuclear technology via a worldwide smuggling network that included facilities in Malaysia that manufactured key parts for centrifuges.

Khan’s collaborator B.S.A. Tahir ran a front company out of Dubai that shipped centrifuge components to North Korea.

Despite Dutch authorities being deeply suspicious of Khan’s activities as far back as 1975, the CIA prevented them from arresting him on two occasions.

“The man was followed for almost ten years and obviously he was a serious problem. But again I was told that the secret services could handle it more effectively,” former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers said. “The Hague did not have the final say in the matter. Washington did.”

Lubbers stated that Khan was allowed to slip in and out of the Netherlands with the blessing of the CIA, eventually allowing him to become the “primary salesman of an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how,” according to George W. Bush himself, and sell nuclear secrets that allowed North Korea to build nuclear bombs.

“Lubbers suspects that Washington allowed Khan’s activities because Pakistan was a key ally in the fight against the Soviets,” reports CFP. “At the time, the US government funded and armed mujahideen such as Osama bin Laden. They were trained by Pakistani intelligence to fight Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Anwar Iqbal, Washington correspondent for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, told ISN Security Watch that Lubbers’ assertions may be correct. “This was part of a long-term foolish strategy. The US knew Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons but couldn’t care less because it was not going to be used against them. It was a deterrent against India and possibly the Soviets.”

In September 2005 it emerged that the Amsterdam court which sentenced Khan to four years imprisonment in 1983 had lost the legal files pertaining to the case. The court’s vice-president, Judge Anita Leeser, accused the CIA of stealing the files. “Something is not right, we just don’t lose things like that,” she told Dutch news show NOVA. “I find it bewildering that people lose files with a political goal, especially if it is on request of the CIA. It is unheard of.”

In 2005, Pakistani President Pervez Musharaf acknowledged that Khan had provided centrifuges and their designs to North Korea.

Through their policies in aiding North Korea to build light water reactors, and via the CIA asset AQ Khan who was protected at every step of the way while he helped provide North Korea with the means to build a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government itself is directly complicit in providing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il with the nuclear weapons he now threatens to use against U.S. ally South Korea.

North Korea is controlled by a hereditary Stalinist dictatorship that has starved two million of its citizens to death in favor of building a million-man army. Some people put the figure at four million, one-quarter of the population. In the far north of the country there is a network of forced labor gulagswhere people who have ‘expressed a bland political opinion’ are, along with their entire families, tortured, raped and executed. Horrific bio-chemical experiments are performed on mass numbers of people. Babies are delivered and then stamped to death by the camp guards. If the mother screams while the guards are stamping on the baby’s neck, she is immediately assassinated by a firing squad. These guards are rewarded with bonuses and promotions for ripping out prisoners’ eyeballs.

The North Korean people are enslaved by a government that is using food as a weapon. Perhaps this is why the EU and the United States, via the UN World Food Program, resumed the shipment of hundreds of thousands of tons in food aid at the end of February 2003. This goes directly to the sitting dictatorship, which then decides who gets it by their level of allegiance to the state. Food aid only increases the power of Kim Jong-Il and yet it is veiled by the UN in bleeding heart humanitarian rhetoric. The money goes straight to enabling the North Korean leadership to live in the lap of westernized luxury with casinos and lavish new cars.

President Bush publicly claimed to loathe Kim Jong-Il and yet his administration, like Bill Clinton before him, set the policy to help North Korea obtain nuclear expertise. The U.S. intelligence network also protected AQ Khan and allowed him to provide the means with which North Korea acquired their nuclear capability.

If the tensions between the Koreas were to escalate into all out war, don’t expect the castrated American corporate media to mention how Kim Jong-Il grew to be such a threat in the first place – with the aid of nuclear weapons enthusiastically supplied by the U.S. government and its surrogates.

http://www.infowars.com/nuclear-war-between-koreas-brought-to-you-by-the-u-s-government/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Kinda like all the other videos they have faked.”

-F.F.

Jeff Stein

During planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group kicked around a number of ideas for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people.

One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project.

“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”

The idea was to then “flood Iraq with the videos,” the former official said.

Another idea was to interrupt Iraqi television programming with a fake special news bulletin. An actor playing Hussein would announce that he was stepping down in favor of his (much-reviled) son Uday.

“I’m sure you will throw your support behind His Excellency Uday,” the fake Hussein would intone.

The spy agency’s Office of Technical Services collaborated on the ideas, which also included inserting fake “crawls” — messages at the bottom of the screen — into Iraqi newscasts.

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

Eventually, “things ground to a halt,” the other former officer said, because no one could come to agreement on the projects.

They also faced strong opposition from James Pavitt, then head of the agency’s Operations Division, and his deputy, Hugh Turner, who “kept throwing darts at it.”

The ideas were patently ridiculous, said the other former agency officer.

“They came from people whose careers were spent in Latin America or East Asia” and didn’t understand the cultural nuances of the region.

“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East — nobody cares,” agreed a third former CIA official with extensive experience in the region. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the accounts, or deny them.

“While I can’t confirm these accounts, if these ideas were ever floated by anyone at any time, they clearly didn’t go anywhere,” the official said.

The reality, the former officials said, was that the agency really didn’t have enough money and expertise to carry out the projects.

“The military took them over,” said one. “They had assets in psy-war down at Ft. Bragg,” at the army’s special warfare center.

“The agency got rid of most of its non-paramilitary covert action in the 1980s, after Bill Casey died,” said the third former official. “He was a big fan of covert action, but neither Bob Gates, who succeeded him as acting [CIA] director, or any after him, wanted anything to do with it.”

“There was a flurry of activity during the first Gulf War,” the official added, “but [Gen. Norman] Schwarzkopf made it clear he had to approve everything, and he basically approved nothing, except, reluctantly at first, surrender leaflets. By the late ’90s there were very few people left who knew anything about covert action or how to do it. “

The leaflets also had “unintended consequences,” the former official added.

“In the perverted logic of Iraq, the Iraqi soldiers decided they had to have a leaflet to surrender, so they fought us to get one.”

According to histories of the 2003 invasion, the single most effective “information warfare” project, which originated in the Pentagon, was to send faxes and e-mails to Iraqi unit commanders as the fighting began, telling them their situation was hopeless, to round up their tanks, artillery and men, and go home.

Many did.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/05/cia_group_had_wacky_ideas_to_d.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Augusto Pinochet

By Ray Fisman

After being rejected by a number of large publishers, John Perkins sold his memoirs to a smallish press called Berrett Koehler in 2004.Confessions of an Economic Hitman—equal parts political exposé and James Bond novel—recounts his role in what he claims is a carefully choreographed effort by the U.S. government to promote American commercial interests abroad. In Perkins’ retelling, everything from economic advising to CIA paramilitary operations served the same master: U.S. corporate interests. Confessions struck a chord among believers in grassy knollsand Roswell and became a best-seller. (Berretclaims on its Web site that 850,000 copies have been sold, making the book its top-seller ever.) The State Department responded with “Confessions—or Fantasies—of an Economic Hit Man,” a document disputing many of Perkins’ claims of government involvement.

But conspiracy theories die hard. Is the State Department response setting the record straight, or is it just a coverup? Though most of Perkins’ book may be pulp fiction—we’ll probably never be able to verify his tales of payoffs, espionage, and sexual escapades—one of his claims just received unexpected confirmation from a group of serious scholars. New York University researchers Daniel Berger, Bill Easterly, Shanker Satyanath—together with Harvard economistNathan Nunn—have analyzed Perkins’ “economic hitman” theory—that is, the theory that the U.S. government has used the CIA to promote American corporate interests abroad. (The economists prefer the term “political influence hypothesis” to “economic hitman theory.”) Based on information from declassified documents detailing covert CIA operations during the Cold War, the social scientists find that Perkins’ claims are backed up by the numbers: Countries targeted for CIA political interventions started importing more U.S. products, a sign of American economic imperialism at work.

The study by Berger and his colleagues is a product of the relatively young field of forensic economics, which aims to shed light on shadowy corners of the economic world that trade in much speculation but few verifiable facts. Forensic economists have applied their analytic techniques to expose shenanigans ranging from vote-trading by Olympic figure skating judgesto insider trading to political favor-seeking by companies in America and around the world.

All of this work is based on the insight that backroom deals and illicit transactions often leave traces in the data, which creative researchers can find. The authors never get to hear wiretapped conversations between Richard Helms—Director of Central Intelligence under Nixon—and Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who came to power in a Nixon-backed coup. But they do see how such political interventions affected American business interests by looking at international trade data.

The authors put together a list of the years that the CIA was active in each of 156 countries, using recently declassified documents detailing the agency’s clandestine operations around the globe during the Cold War, when American intelligence was trying to thwart the spread of Soviet influence. (The KGB was similarly engaged in countering the specter of American capitalist imperialism.) The CIA’s activities ranged from active interventions, like operatives blowing up dams or “neutralizing” opponents, to the softer touch of handing out propaganda pamphlets and providing funds or expertise for the campaigns of U.S.-friendly politicians. (One shocking fact the researchers mention in passing—fodder in itself for conspiracy theorists—is that the CIA operated secretly in nearly a third of the countries on earth at some point between 1947 and 1989.) They match up this history of CIA interventions to data on imports and exports between the United States and each of its trading partners over the same time span to see whether trade was affected by CIA operations. Indeed it was: In years the CIA was active in a country, the United States enjoyed a boost in exports to that country of about 13 percent. Over a few years, this adds up to a lot of extra business for U.S. companies. For example, the authors estimate that the multi-year commitment of Helms and his successor to support Pinochet may have translated into a doubling of exports to that country by 1988, relative to what they would have been in the absence of CIA involvement.

Unfortunately for the local Chilean economy, the United States didn’t reciprocate by taking Chile-produced goods—the authors find no effect on exports to the United States from Chile or other CIA-targeted economies. Nor is it the case that imports were growing simply because U.S.-style capitalism was good for economic development overall: CIA operations don’t affect total imports, suggesting that U.S. business came at the expense of imports from other countries.

How did the CIA persuade these friendly governments to “Buy American”? A pair of additional analyses in the study provide some answers. First, the researchers find that the boost to imports came from CIA operations that helped to install or maintain U.S.-friendly dictatorships—it seems that the will of the people in democracies was effective in counteracting CIA influence. So U.S. exports didn’t benefit from “softer” interventions like the ones in postwar Japan or failed attempts at regime change, as in Syria, for example. (This may explain why CIA operations so often promoted dictatorships at the expense of democracy, a finding that a subset of the same authors report in a separate study.) Further, the authors report that the CIA-produced increase in U.S. imports is greatest for countries with government-dominated economies. It’s not that dictators were foisting U.S. toasters or microwaves on their people. Rather, U.S. interests were served primarily through the export of American-made power plants, fighter planes, and other government purchases.

With this evidence in hand, it seems harder for the State Department to fall back on the “fantasy” defense, at least when it comes to the economic implications of Perkins’ storyline. It can provide a statistical rebuttal—the study, after all, is work that has yet to be fully vetted by the academic peer review process. Alternatively, government officials might own up to the fact that America has in its closet economic skeletons to go along with the many political ones that have already been exposed courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act. It might also suggest that American foreign policy in the 21^st century is on a more enlightened path than the cloak-and-dagger days of the Cold War. We can then wait for more forensic economists like Berger, Easterly, Satyanath, and Nunn to evaluate whether this is indeed the case.

http://www.slate.com/id/2254620/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“More sewerage leaked out of Satan’s asshole.”

-F.F.

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that three men who had been detained by the United States military for years without trial in Afghanistan had no recourse to American courts. The decision was a broad victory for the Obama administration in its efforts to hold terrorism suspects overseas for indefinite periods without judicial oversight.

The detainees, two Yemenis and a Tunisian who say they were captured outside Afghanistan, contend that they are not terrorists and are being mistakenly imprisoned at the American military prison at Bagram Air Base.

But a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled unanimously that the three had no right to habeas corpus hearings, in which judges would review evidence against them and could order their release. The court reasoned that Bagram was on the sovereign territory of another government and emphasized the “pragmatic obstacles” of giving hearings to detainees “in an active theater of war.”

The ruling dealt a severe blow to wider efforts by lawyers to extend a landmark 2008 Supreme Court ruling granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A lower court judge had previously ruled that the three Bagram detainees were entitled to the same rights, although he had found that others captured in Afghanistan and held there were not.

A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and an influential lawmaker in the long-running debate over detentions, called the ruling a “big win” and praised the administration for appealing the lower court’s ruling.

“Allowing a noncitizen enemy combatant detained in a combat zone access to American courts would have been a change of historic proportions,” he said. “It also would have dealt a severe blow to our war effort.

“There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release. It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.”

It was not entirely clear how the ruling might affect detention policies for terrorism suspects caught outside Afghanistan or Iraq. While the Obama administration has stepped up the use of Predator drone strikes to kill terrorism suspects and has relied on other countries, like Pakistan, to hold and interrogate suspects who are captured alive, it is not known whether the United States has directly captured anyone outside Afghanistan or Iraq recently — and, if so, where it has taken them.

A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, would not comment on the decision.

David Rivkin, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the Special Forces Association urging the court to side with the government, said the ruling would have broad significance by removing doubts over whether the United States could capture and interrogate terrorism suspects without worrying about having to collect, in dangerous situations, evidence that would later stand up in court.

“This is an excellent decision,” said Mr. Rivkin, who was a White House lawyer in the administration of the first President Bush. “It has restored a considerable degree of sanity to what threatened to be a crazy legal regime that would have deprived the United States, for the first time in history, of the opportunity to capture and detain — outside of the United States, in theaters of war — high-value combatants. That has been solved, and it will apply to many other situations in the future.”

The case was brought on behalf of a Tunisian man who says he was captured in Pakistan in 2002, a Yemeni man who says he was captured in Thailand in 2002, and another Yemeni man who says he was captured in 2003 at another location outside Afghanistan that has not been disclosed. (The government has disputed the second Yemeni’s claim.)

The men’s case was originally heard by Judge John D. Bates of the Federal District Court, an appointee of former President George W. Bush. The Bush and Obama administrations had both urged Judge Bates not to extend habeas corpus rights beyond Guantánamo, arguing that courts should not interfere with military operations inside active combat zones.

But in April 2009, Judge Bates ruled that there was no difference between the three men who had filed suit and Guantánamo prisoners. His decision was limited to non-Afghans captured outside Afghanistan — a category that fits only about a dozen of the roughly 800 detainees at Bagram, officials have said.

In urging the appeals court to let Judge Bates’s decision stand, lawyers for the detainees argued that reversing it would mean that the government would be able “to evade judicial review of executive detention decisions by transferring detainees into active combat zones, thereby granting the executive the power to switch the Constitution on or off at will.”

But in the appeal panel’s decision reversing Judge Bates, Chief Judge David B. Sentelle said there had been no such gamesmanship in the decision to bring the three detainees to Bagram because it happened years before the Supreme Court’s Guantánamo rulings.

Still, he left the door open to approving habeas corpus rights for prisoners taken to prisons other than Guantánamo in the future, writing, “We need make no determination on the importance of this possibility, given that it remains only a possibility; its resolution can await a case in which the claim is a reality rather than speculation.”

Ms. Foster vowed to keep fighting. But Mr. Rivkin said that the detainees’ chances for overturning the decision were dim because the three appeals judges spanned the ideological spectrum: Chief Judge Sentelle, appointed by President Ronald Reagan; Judge Harry T. Edwards, appointed by President Jimmy Carter; and Judge David S. Tatel, appointed by President Bill Clinton.

It could also be difficult to win a reversal by the Supreme Court, where five of the nine justices supported giving habeas rights to detainees in the Guantánamo case. Among the narrow majority in that case was Justice John Paul Stevens, who is retiring.

The nominee to replace him, Elena Kagan, who as solicitor general signed the government’s briefs in the case, would most likely recuse herself from hearing an appeal of the decision, and a four-four split would allow it to stand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world/asia/22detain.html?hp

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

http://www.judicialwatch.org/6123.shtml

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Ellan Brown

“I understand that these cuts are very painful and they affect real lives. This is the harsh reality and the reality that we face. Sacramento is not Washington – we cannot print our own money. We can only spend what we have.”

- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger quoted in Time, May 22, 2009

Christmas comes early, Governor. You can print your own money. Fiscally solvent North Dakota is doing it…and so can California. Now!

In a May 22 article in Time titled “Billions in the Red: Fiscal Reckoning in CA,” Juliet Williams reports that since California voters have now vetoed higher taxes and further state government borrowing, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated that he intends to close the budget gap almost entirely through drastic spending cuts. The cutbacks could include laying off thousands of state workers and teachers, ending the state’s main welfare program for the poor, eliminating health coverage for about 1.5 million poor children, halting cash grants for about 77,000 college students, slashing money for state parks, and releasing thousands of prisoners before their sentences are finished. Schwarzenegger bemoaned the fact that the state could not print its own money but said it could only spend what it had.

But the state can create its own money. After all, banks do this every day. Certified, card-carrying bankers are allowed to do something nobody else can do: they can create “credit” with accounting entries on their books. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas explains on its website:

Banks actually create money when they lend it. Here’s how it works: Most of a bank’s loans are made to its own customers and are deposited in their checking accounts. Because the loan becomes a new deposit, just like a paycheck does, the bank…holds a small percentage of that new amount in reserve and again lends the remainder to someone else, repeating the money-creation process many times.

President Obama has also acknowledged that banks create money, through what he calls the “multiplier effect.” In a speech at Georgetown University on April 14, he said:

[A]lthough there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks — “where’s our bailout?” they ask — the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.

Money in a government-owned bank could give us the best of both worlds. We could have all the credit-generating advantages of private banks, without the baggage cluttering up the books of the Wall Street giants, including bad derivatives bets, unmarketable collateralized debt obligations, mark to market accounting issues, oversized CEO salaries and bonuses, and shareholders expecting a sizeable cut of the profits. A state could deposit its vast revenues in its own state-owned bank and proceed to fan them into eight to 10 times their face value in loans. Not only would it have its own credit machine, but it would control the loan terms. The state could lend at ½% interest to itself and to municipal governments, rolling the loans over as needed until the revenues had been generated to pay them off. According to Professor Margrit Kennedy in her 1995 book Interest and Inflation-free Money, interest composes, on average, fully half the cost of every public project. Cutting costs by 50% could make currently-unsustainable projects such as low-cost housing, alternative energy development, and infrastructure construction not only sustainable but actually profitable for the government.

If all this seems too radical and unprecedented to venture into, consider that one state has had its own bank for 90 years; and it has not only escaped the credit crunch but is doing remarkably well…

The Innovative Bank of North Dakota

Only three of 50 states are now solvent, meaning they have the revenues to meet their state budgets; andone of them is North Dakota. It is an unlikely candidate for the distinction. It is a sparsely populated state of fewer than 700,000 people, largely located in isolated farming communities afflicted with cold weather. Yet since 2000, the state’s GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and wages have grown 34%. The state not only has no funding issues, but this year it actually has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion, the largest it has ever had.

North Dakota boasts the only state-owned bank in the nation. The Bank of North Dakota (BND) was established by the state legislature in 1919 specifically to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. The bank’s stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota. By law, the state must deposit all its funds in the bank, which pays a competitive interest rate to the state treasurer. The state rather than the FDIC guarantees the bank’s deposits, which are plowed back into the state in the form of loans. The bank’s return on equity is about 25%, and it pays a hefty dividend to the state, which is expected to exceed $60 million this year. In the last decade, the BND has turned back a third of a trillion dollars to the state’s general fund, offsetting taxes. The former president of the BND is now the state’s governor.

The BND avoids rivalry with private banks by partnering with them. Most lending is originated by a local bank. The BND then comes in to participate in the loan, share risk, and buy down the interest rate. The BND provides a secondary market for real estate loans, which it buys from local banks. Its residential loan portfolio is now $500 billion to $600 billion. Guarantees are also provided for entrepreneurial startups, and the BND has ample money to lend to students (over 184,000 outstanding loans). It purchases municipal bonds from public institutions, and it backs loans made to new farmers at 1% interest. The BND also has a well-funded disaster loan program, which helps explain how Fargo, when struck by a disastrous flood recently, managed to avoid the devastation suffered by New Orleans in similar circumstances.

North Dakota has also managed to avoid the credit freeze, through the simple expedient of creating its own credit. It has led the nation in establishing state economic sovereignty. In California and other states, workers and factories are sitting idle because the private credit system has failed. An injection of new money from a system of publicly-owned banks on the model of the Bank of North Dakota could thaw the credit freeze and bring spring to the markets once again.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/but-governor-you-can-crea_b_207806.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Vito Acconci… watch the whole video through.. it gets nicer at the end.  Acconci lectured at my school, he’s one of the few video artist I enjoy. Smart as a whip.

(I don’t think this is on of “his” videos, he just narrates this story).”

-F.F.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vito_Acconci

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

Live ITV News interview with Peter Power, the Managing Director of Crisis Management firm Visor Consultants who was ‘actually running an exercise… based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations that happened’.
Recorded at 8:20pm on the evening of the London Bombings.

Kinda like in America when…

On 11 September 2001, a key U.S. intelligence agency was running a drill in which a plane hits a government building. While U.S. spy satellites could easily observe what actually happened in New York City and Washington, this “bizarre coincidence” sent the people who operate America’s “eye in the sky” home.

On the very day that planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the “super-secret” intelligence agency that “designs, builds, and operates U.S. reconnaissance satellites” had planned to conduct an emergency drill in which a simulated plane from the nearby Dulles International Airport would have crashed into their building. When reality intruded in New York and Washington the exercise was cancelled and nearly all of NRO’s three thousand employees, the people who operate the nation’s “eye in the sky,” were sent home.

The NRO, which works closely with the Dept. of Defense and CIA, had planned a simulated exercise in which a small jet “crashes” into one of the four towers at the agency’s headquarters on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The government said it was a “bizarre coincidence” that one of the most important U.S. intelligence agencies had planned a mock plane-into-building crash on Sept. 11, according to the Associated Press who reported the story on August 22.

http://www.legitgov.org/9_1_1_oddities.html

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“This video was censored twice on youtube. I’m not reposting it because I like to watch horrible shit… it’s very important that people see the reality of war. Maybe it will motivate them to take more of a stand against complacency. Our media will not even show footage of a dead US soldiers funeral. If you don’t see it on the television… it must not be happening….”

-Fred Face 5/22/10

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xde8w5_u-s-soldiers-murder-old-iraqi-man_news?start=2

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Oh man, Democrat operative Maddow is sooo obnoxious. Do you really have to ask the question to Paul.

There are dumb white people talking stupid racist shit.

There are dumb mexican people talking stupid racist shit.

There are dumb black people talking stupid racist shit. etc, etc.

They are a small stupid minority. Like Paul said, this is America and they have the freedom to talk shit even if it’s fucked up. If you watch the news enough… they’ll make you think there is a racist on every corner about to carve up your particular race.

You see… our government is fucked. They just raped you financially through the bailouts and thats just the tip of the iceberg. Their credibility is plummeting fast, even with the “slow to catch on” public. And instead of the American people, (Black, White, Brown, Whatever), focusing their anger on the real enemy, (I.E. THE US GOVERNMENT & BANKING INSTITUTIONS), they want us at “each other’s” throats. I’ll say it again… Divide & Conquer.”

-Fred Face 5/21/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“This isn’t good…”

-F.F.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

• By David Kravets

Federal lawmakers are using the purse strings to coax more states into adopting rules that require suspects who are arrested for various crimes — but not charged — to submit to DNA sampling for inclusion into a nationwide database.

It doesn’t matter if the suspect was charged or even acquitted.

Sponsored by Harry Teague (D-New Mexico), the measure provides $75 million to the nation’s financially broken states — all in a bid to coax the 11 states with such DNA-testing laws to keep them on the books, and to entice others to follow suit. The Senate Judiciary Committee received the package Wednesday, a day after the House passed the bill on a 357 to 32 vote.

All Democrats voting approved the bill, CNET’s Declan McCullagh points out. And it’s likely to sail through the Senate. President Barack Obama, who supports DNA collection upon arrest, is expected to sign it.

The House’s passage of the so-called “Katie’s Law,” or HR 4614, comes as the states and federal government are slashing budgets in response to record-setting financial shortfalls.

All the while, a civil rights challenge to California’s DNA-collection law is pending in San Francisco federal court, a lawsuit threatening to derail similar laws in Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota and Vermont.

Teague said the package was long overdue.

“The fact is that the science has advanced and we should allow law enforcement to use all the technology available to them, including the fingerprint of the 21st century, to reduce expensive and unjust false convictions, bring closure to victims by solving cold cases, better identify criminals, and keep those who commit violent crime from walking the streets,” he said on the House floor.

A spokesman for the Senate Judiciary Committee said Thursday no hearing date has been set.

Under the measure, increased federal crime-fighting funding would be available to the states that have DNA-collection programs or doled out to those adopting them.

To receive funding under the measure, states would be required to conduct DNA sampling when an adult is arrested for murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, certain sex crimes, kidnapping, burglary, attempted burglary and aggravated assault.

The American Civil Liberties Union has brought the legal challenge to California’s law, which requires compulsory DNA sampling of anybody arrested for a felony. The lawsuit does not challenge sampling of convicted felons.

The ACLU says DNA sampling is different from the compulsory fingerprinting upon arrest that has been standard practice in the United States for decades. A fingerprint reveals a person’s identity. A DNA sample encodes a person’s family ties and some health risks. And, according to some, it can predict a propensity for violence.

California authorities are allowed to conduct so-called “familial searching.” When a genetic sample does not directly match another, authorities start investigating people with closely matched DNA in hopes of finding leads to the perpetrator.

The ACLU’s lawsuit cites California Justice Department figures that show that, of the 332,000 people arrested for felonies in 2007, 101,000 were not convicted of any crime.

The Supreme Court has not squarely addressed the constitutionality of the DNA law at issue in the ACLU’s case, according to a congressional study.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/congress-dna-database/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“What… is business sagging for the CIA, NSA, front company? Still be very weary. Just use Ixquick.”

-F.F.

• By Ryan Singel

Google users can now run encrypted searches using the company’s flagship search site simply by navigating to https://www.google.com.

UPDATE: Many users are being redirected to the non-encrypted main site — a function of Google rolling this out to all its servers. Also it is necessary to include WWW. Don’t assume your searches are encyrpted, unless the url starts with HTTPS and you see the lock icon.

The move brings the same web security system that protects online banking, website logins and shopping to search — a first for a major search engine.

The encryption makes it incredibly difficult for anyone in between your computer and Google’s servers to see what search terms you use or what results Google sends back. Additionally, when you click through a search result on Google’s new secure page, your browser will not send along “referrer data” revealing the search terms you used.

The new option does not, however, keep Google from knowing and storing what you searched on and does not make you anonymous to them. It’s designed to prevent eavesdroppers from analyzing the URL or content to see the search terms you are sending to Google, or the results.

With HTTPS on, all an eavesdropper can see is that you are using Google. When not using SSL, a user of a school or corporate network can have their e-mail and web traffic read by those who control the network, while anyone using an open Wi-Fi connection can have their traffic sniffed by a hacker using simple tools.

HTTPS will be an option, not the default, though users have the ability to set the search bars in their browsers to use it as their default. The page will have a different logo and not include links on the search page to Google’s map and image search, since those do not yet have an HTTPS option.

The encrypted option is perhaps most useful for routing around censorship from countries like China, which often block searches on politically sensitive terms. However, HTTPS is only an option currently for Google.com, not for country specific sites like Google.co.hk, the Hong Kong-based search that Mainland Chinese users are being directed to as a way for Google to stop running a censored search engine in China.

Non-English speaking users who want encryption need to use Google.com for now, choosing results in their preferred language — though this loses much of the local features that country-specific Google search sites offer.

Google’s embrace of HTTPS could begin a move by web services such as social networks to begin offering encryption for more than just logins. Such increased adoption would cut down on network eavesdropping and also have the added benefit of preventing some online attacks.

Ironically, the new option came after the search company admitted it had been mistakenly eavesdropping and recording what people were doing on unencrypted Wi-Fi networks as its Street View cars were taking pictures of cities around the world and recording the IDs of Wi-Fi networks and routers. That data is used to help geolocate people using devices without GPS, but the company said for years it was not collecting session data.

It’s doubtful Google collected very much info on any one user — as the cars are constantly in motion and cycling through the channels used for Wi-Fi, but now users of https://google.com would be safe from any similar effort.

Google turned on encryption — better known as https:// — as a default for Gmail users earlier this year.

Gmail was the first major webmail service to offer encryption for full sessions, rather than just for logins. Google allowed power users to use https:// for years, and under pressure from privacy and security advocates turned it into the default for all users earlier this year. Microsoft’s new version of Hotmail, available sometime this summer, will allow users to choose HTTPS or not, but isn’t making it the default.

Using HTTPS, rather than HTTP, is not technically difficult for smaller sites, but the authenticating handshakes between a server and a browser do require more resources from both a server and the browser. That means it costs a company more to run a service and can slow down an application. Google says it’s been working for several months on the service, and that it’s not simple, given that it search results are blended — combining information from a number of services, including YouTube, that didn’t have the capability to send information via HTTPS.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/google-https-search/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Because the majority of people in this country have had their backs broken and they won’t make a peep about being robbed.”

-F.F.

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Calderon’s Hypocrisy on Illegal Immigration…

This guys such a joke. The mexican government is one of the most corrupt in the world. If a bunch of South American illegal immigrants held a march in Mexico demanding citizenship they be slaughtered… literally.

The US government worked hand-in-hand with the Mexican government to break down the country of Mexico. Now it’s the Mexican governments turn to return the favor. But buy into all the cornball race crap on the news if you liked being played.”

-Fred Face 5/21/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Lets Get On With The Revolution!!! Take a short break and pat yourselves on your back… and then lets get back on the job & turn this country around!!!”

-Fred Face 5/20/10

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“One of my favorite speeches of all time. Below the video is what happens to your civil liberties & privacy when you speak like this in America… and nothing has changed except that it’s worse now.”

-Fred Face 5/19/10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Savio

FBI controversy

In 1999, it was revealed that Savio had been trailed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the moment that he had climbed on to the police car that harbored Jack Weinberg. He was followed for more than a decade ‘because he had emerged as the nation’s most prominent student leader.’^[4] There was no evidence that he was a threat or that he had any connection with the Communist Party, but the FBI decided he merited their attention because they thought he could inspire students to rebel.^[4]

Even when he had quit the FSM, the FBI called him to their Berkeley office. They told Savio that they had received letters of a threatening nature towards him, but they would not speak with Savio’s attorney present. However, he would not agree, and instead criticised the FBI ‘for failure to make arrests and take action in the South where human rights are being violated every day.’^[2] At this point the meeting ended.

According to hundreds of pages of FBI files, the bureau:

• Collected, without court order, personal information about Savio from schools, telephone companies, utility firms and banks and compiled information about his marriage and divorce.
• Monitored his day-to-day activities by using informants planted in political groups, covertly contacting his neighbors, landlords and employers, and having agents pose as professors, journalists and activists to interview him and his wife.
• Obtained his tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service in violation of federal rules, mischaracterized him as a threat to the president and arranged for the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies to investigate him when he and his family traveled in Europe.
• Put him on an unauthorized list of people to be detained without judicial warrant in event of a national emergency, and designated him as a “Key Activist” whose political activities should be “disrupted” and “neutralized” under the bureau’s illegal counterintelligence program known as COINTELPRO.^[14]

The investigation finally ended at the beginning of 1975 and at that point an investigation in to the FBI’s abuse of power began. Savio’s ex-wife, Suzanne Goldberg, said that the “FBI’s investigation of her and Savio [was] a waste of money and an invasion of privacy.”^[4]

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Fuck ya! The tide be-a-changing!!!! (For the better). I’ll hold this guy & his Dad just as accountable as I would all the dumb Dem & Rep hacks that people blindingly follow because of their fake liberal rhetoric or their tired right rhetoric. This sets a big precedent! Libertarian Party ain’t fuckin’ around. He ran as a republican, like his Dad, but if you know anything about these guys… you know they don’t have much in common with your average Rep or Dem. Great news!!”

-Fred “The Big Take Over” Face 5/19/10

After trouncing his neo-con opponent comprehensively in the Kentucky Senate primary, Rand Paul savaged the man-made global warming scam for what it truly represents – an attack on the middle class and the industrialized world, as he warned President Obama and his sycophants, “we’ve come to take our government back”.

“I have a message, a message from the Tea Party – a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words – we’ve come to take our government back,” stated Paul to rapturous applause, adding that he would take on the special interests in Washington who treat the federal government as their own personal ATM.

“What you have done and what we can do can transform America,” said Paul, candidly warning that America’s greatness hinges on saving the country.

Paul added that America could be saved from its debt crisis “that is devouring our country and I think could lead to chaos.”

The victorious candidate then savaged President Obama for apologizing to Robert Mugabe, Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales for the industrial revolution.

“These petty dictators say that to stop climate change it’s about ending capitalism, they are explicit, and the President by attending Copenhagen gives credibility and credence to these folks and he should not go,” said Paul.

After Paul had started attacking Obama’s “green” agenda, CNN quickly cut away from his victory speech and began to talk over him. Perhaps that’s because Paul is perhaps the first person to address the fundamental threat that the global warming scam poses to the free world during such a major victory speech. This marks a new watershed in how much the credibility of climate change alarmism has collapsed in the last six months alone.

Paul is right in citing Mugabe, Morales and Chavez as acolytes to the climate cause, but similar sentiments have been expressed far closer to home.

The agenda to use global warming fear mongering as a pretext to lower living standards in the west has openly been declared by top globalists over and over again – people like EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso, who has called for a “post-industrial revolution” in which CO2 emissions are capped.

At the 2005 Bilderberg meeting sources inside the group told reporters Daniel Estulin and Jim Tucker, who have built up a credible reputation for accurately forecasting future events based on leaks from Bilderberg conferences, that the elite wanted to consolidate by bringing down the standard of living in the US and Europe, fearing that the middle class is out of control and has been granted too much credit which must be offset by a phase of consolidation.

Two years later we witnessed the beginning of the “credit crunch” which led to the massive economic turmoil of 2008 and 2009 which is now threatening to get even worse in 2010.

The move towards a “green economy” is integral to this agenda of a “post-industrial revolution” in which living standards in the west are drastically cut. Its impact is already being severely felt in Spain, where the unemployment rate is around 18 per cent as a result of 2.2 jobs being lost for every “green” job created.

A newly leaked internal document from Spain’s Zapatero administration outlines how Spain’s “green economy initiatives” have been a financial disaster. The report suggests that the real rate of job losses as a result of “green” policies is in actual fact worse than 2.2 jobs lost for every one gained.

“Today’s leaked document reveals that even the socialist Spanish government now acknowledges the ruinous effects of green economic policy,” reports Christopher Horner.

“Despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the disaster. This internal assessment preceded the Zapatero administration’s recent acknowledgement that the “green economy” stunt must be abandoned, lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece.”

President Obama has made it a foundation of his economic and environmental policy that America moves towards a similar “green economy,” which would spell disaster for the fragile U.S. economy and potentially trigger a new great depression. The fact that Rand Paul has rightly highlighted this issue as a major concern, allied with the leaked Spanish report, should act as a crushing blow to efforts on behalf of internationalists to impose such tyranny on every western nation in the form of a carbon tax on the very substance humans exhale.

http://www.infowars.com/rand-paul-savages-obama’s-catastrophic-green-economy/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“The Gates foundation is a eugenic pigs wet dream. The elite are obsessed w/ population control, (or mass genocide), depending on what angle you look at it from.”

-F.F.

TIFFANY O’CALLAGHAN

Among the 78 research projects to receive $100,000 grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this week as part of the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative, is an effort by researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to develop a non-invasive, reversible form of birth control for men — using ultrasound. Based on preliminary trials in rats, researchers James Tsuruta and Paul Dayton hope to develop a technique that would render men temporarily infertile for up to six months after one or two ultrasound exposures.

The project is one of 10 to receive grants toward the goal of creating new technologies for contraception. Other projects geared toward men include a male contraceptive pill that researchers say would work by limiting the maturation of sperm, and research into the specific chemical compounds in the vagina that guide sperm to egg — which researchers hope to recreate in the lab and potentially use to “disrupt” sperm navigation en route to the egg. (Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco uncovered clues about how pH levels impact how sperm swim, and expressed hope that further research in this arena could yield possibilities for male contraception as well.)

In early trials, Tsuruta and Dayton at UNC were able to halt rats’ sperm production for up to six months after giving the animals two blasts of ultrasound spaced by two days, the New Scientist reports. The researchers believe that ultrasound disrupts sperm production with a combination of heat and shaking, and plan to further explore the mechanism at work with the new funding.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to develop a contraceptive technique that could provide long-lasting yet reversible infertility for men. As Tsuruta told the BBC:

“We think this could provide men with up to six months of reliable, low-cost, non-hormonal contraception from a single round of treatment… Our long-term goal is to use ultrasound from therapeutic instruments that are commonly found in sports medicine or physical therapy clinics as an inexpensive, long-term, reversible male contraceptive suitable for use in developing to first world countries.”

http://wellness.blogs.time.com/2010/05/14/male-birth-control-stopping-sperm-with-ultrasound/

Bookmark It Punk!

Hide Sites

“Jesus… Anyone who has been seeing a shrink get out now & take some mushrooms.”

(Not that I think anyone would actually listen to me… but I wouldn’t suggest ingesting mushrooms if you have any intermediate or serious mental health issues… maybe I would suggest still leaving your psychiatrist, smoking weed once in a while, stop watching TV, reading more, etc. But who gives a fuck really).

-F.F.

George F. Will

“Once terms like identity doubts and midlife crisis become current,” De Vries wrote, “the reported cases of them increase by leaps and bounds.” And: “Rapid-fire means of communication have brought psychic dilapidation within the reach of the most provincial backwaters, so