Philosophers stone

Maria Alyokhina was denied access to her own parole hearing

Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot. | NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/GettyImages

By RJ Cubarrubia

Jailed Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina has started a hunger strike to protest having been denied access to her own parole hearing. The 24-year-old Russian artist was scheduled for a hearing today, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, she was not allowed to attend. In response, she barred her attorney from attending in her stead. “I’m declaring a hunger strike and order my defense lawyers not to take part in this court trial,” Alyokhina said.

Alyokhina argued that the regional court in Berizniki was only across the road to the penal colony in the Urals, where she’s been imprisoned since she and two bandmates were sentenced to two years in prison last year after they were convicted of hooliganism motivated by religous hatred for staging a “punk prayer” protest against Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral.

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by Amir Alwani

Predators must have knowledge about their prey if they are going to be successful hunters.  It is clear that we have been studied and our weaknesses have been exploited in an effort to exhaust us economically, physically and spiritually.  Renowned researcher, Alan Watt goes so far as to state that the perpetrators responsible for this ultimately want to destroy any sense of individuality in us whatsoever.

Regardless of who’s doing the aggression, we can see that there is a war on the individual as we are assaulted on many fronts and are losing our individuality to such an alarming degree, with such intensity and in such a rapid time, that it drastically reduces the likelihood that this is happening by accident.  It seems there are predators who are coercing us and creating an atmosphere ripe for the rotting of minds.  The identity of the predators, while crucial, is controversial, however their actions leave scars that are less debatable and if we can agree on what those are, we can perhaps have an easier time building a consensus about what is happening in general and what we can do about it.  That said, it’s not very difficult to agree on what those scars are.  They’re in front of our faces all the time.

For instance, many people today are drugged up on pharmaceutical medication and lost in their smart-phones/i-pads with very little intuition or common sense remaining, not to mention extremely diminished critical thinking skills.  People simply can’t think.  People in the US seem to be having an even harder time thinking.  A recent article titled “America #1: In Fear, Stress, Anger, Divorce, Obesity, Anti-Depressants, Etc.” illustrates the effects of Americans’ actions and/or non-actions and is not surprising given the lack of ability to “think”.  This stuff is not limited to America, of course, as those that seek a world government and the destruction of every country’s sovereignty have long had their tentacles reach far across the entire globe.

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from the overreaction-is-our-only-reaction,-which-always-starts-off-a-chain-reaction dept

The weather’s (mostly) hot. School’s almost out. And what better way to celebrate summer being almost here than being arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for throwing water balloons.

Hail academia, forever teaching our youth that anything and everything will be punished to the fullest extent of the law, even childhood hijinks our parents would have approved of, if only they weren’t so busy being arrested themselves.

Seven teenage students in North Carolina were arrested on Thursday and charged with a misdemeanor for throwing water balloons during a school prank. A parent was also arrested during the incident.

The seven boys, all between the ages of 16 and 17, threw balloons filled with tap water as an end-of-year prank at Enloe High School in Raleigh. The balloons were rumored to be filled with “other substances,” but Wake County Public School System spokeswoman Renee McCoy said “all indications” were that only water was used.

Six of the teens were charged with disorderly conduct. The seventh was charged with assault and battery for hitting a school security officer with a balloon.

You’ve got to respect the uniform — even if that uniform is a 50/50 polyester/ugly blend. If other students, teachers and administration staff get hit, that’s a paddlin’ simple “disorderly conduct” (a.k.a., the cop’s best friend). And if you can’t respect the security guard’s uniform, you had damn well better respect the boys in blue, or you’ll get thrown to the ground for throwing water balloons.

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by David Icke

This may have been an horrific attack but to hear the holier-than-thou condemnations from Cameron about a ‘sickening attack’ and ‘appalling crime’ is both sickening and appalling.

This is the man who ordered and campaigned for the mass slaughter in Libya where horrific murders of this kind became the daily norm and he is supporting the ‘rebels’ in Syria where beheadings and chopping people to pieces are an almost daily occurrence. He argues for these insane people to be supplied with weapons by the West (more than they already are) so they can be even more deadly.

Cameron said after the Woolwich attack that ‘we will never buckle’ in the face of terrorism. Well, that’s just as well when he has to look at a terrorist in the mirror every morning.

Cameron, Obama, Bush and Blair – terrorists the lot of them and all with the blood of the innocent on their hands on a fantastic scale.

Read more …

[Source]

The British government has approved plans for opening controversial military-style state schools as a likely new method to lure British children into the armed forces.

The UK Education Secretary, Michael Gove is proposing a system of a chain of state-funded “free schools” that impose an influential Armed Forces culture at the same time that the United States government plans to do.

The revelation came as the Department for Education granted approval for one military-style school in Oldham – the first of its kind in Britain.

According to the plans, The Phoenix Free School will open from September 2014, which will be staffed by former members of the Armed Forces and led by an active Army captain.

Meanwhile, two campaign groups announced in April that the UK government continues to recruit 16 and 17-year-olds to its armed forces irrespective of the fact that most countries in the world had stopped the practice a long time ago.

The argument stated that while under-18s are banned in Britain from many activities considered harmful — including drinking alcohol and smoking — they are allowed to risk their lives in military exercises.

[Source]

Article first appeared in the Commondreams.org:

Results from a year-long investigation into the activities of the United States’ expansive counter-terrorism apparatus found that, throughout the country, the government has turned the tax-payer-funded intelligence-gathering against its own citizens in an effort to suppress dissent.

The DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy, the report, Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street (pdf), focuses primarily on the many instances of “fusion center” monitoring of Occupy Wall Street activists nationwide.

“Put simply,” the report states, “heavily-funded municipal, county, state and federal ‘counter-terrorism’ agencies (often acting in concert through state/regional ‘fusion centers’) view citizens engaged in movements of political and social dissent, such as Occupy Wall Street, as nothing less than nascent, if not bona fide, ‘terrorist’ threats.”

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by Jon Rappoport | www.nomorefakenews.com

Sharyl Attkisson (twitter) is the one thing CBS News has going for it. She’s the real article. As real as you can be in the current news climate, while still working for a major media outlet.

She crashed the credibility of the CDC, as it was lying through its teeth about numbers of Swine Flu cases and overplaying the fake “epidemic.”

She’s taken on the horrific effects of vaccines, to the point where her Wikipedia page, through a series of unethical maneuvers, continues to characterize her as irrationally “anti-vaccine.”

She broke key elements of Fast&Furious. She’s a hound on Benghazi, and the Obama administration’s funding of “green programs.”

Now, she states that her computer was compromised in 2011, as she was covering Fast&Furious. She’s still working to find out what happened.

From Politico:

“Sharyl Attkisson, the Emmy-award winning CBS News investigative reporter, says that her personal and work computers have been compromised and are under investigation.

“‘I can confirm that an intrusion of my computers has been under some investigation on my end for some months but I’m not prepared to make an allegation against a specific entity today as I’ve been patient and methodical about this matter,’ Attkisson told POLITICO on Tuesday. ‘I need to check with my attorney and CBS to get their recommendations on info we make public.’

“Attkisson told WPHT that irregular activity on her computer was first identified in Feb. 2011, when she was reporting on the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal and on the Obama administration’s green energy spending, which she said ‘the administration was very sensitive about.’”

end Politico excerpt

Two computers compromised. Star reporter. Somebody gained physical access or remote access to those machines. Strong likelihood it started as a government response to Attkisson’s coverage of Fast&Furious. (Although, unfortunately, Attkisson should also look to someone at CBS as the possible hacker.)

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Perhaps the best answer to the question posed to Bernanke moments ago whether US unemployment is structural or cyclical comes courtesy of Microsoft, which announced earlier that it was set to hire “several thousand” workers. Sadly, the catch is that the hires will be in China.

From BusinessWeek:

Microsoft the largest software maker, will hire several thousand workers in China to support new cloud computing services and smartphones using its Windows operating system, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer said.

The workforce (MSFT) expansion, from a current base of 4,000 staff, will take place during the next year, Ballmer said today at a press conference in Shanghai that was streamed live on the Internet. He didn’t provide a specific number for new workers.

China has become the fastest growing market (MSFT) for the company’s smartphone operating system, Ballmer said. The Redmond, Washington-based company will start a public preview of its Windows Azure service in the country next month, making Microsoft the first multinational to offer public cloud computing in the nation.

“I visited China last about one year ago in May and it is remarkable to me how much has changed,” Ballmer, 57, said. “At Microsoft this is an incredibly exciting time.”

For future Chinese employees of Microsoft it is a quite exciting time too. For those Americans who will not be hired by Microsoft as a result of this decision, it is not nearly as exciting. But at least those unhired workers can take solace that their E*trade daytrading P&L is green for the day.

[Source]

Situated in the Aleutian Arc about 625 miles (1,000 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage, Alaska, Pavlof volcano began erupting on May 13, 2013 and Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO) changed its volcanic alert level from Advisory to Watch and aviation color dode from Yellow to Orange. The volcano spewed lava into the air with an ash cloud reaching 6 km (20,000 feet), extended southeastward over the North Pacific Ocean. The volcanic eruption at Pavlof volcano continues.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) photographed these striking views of Pavlof volcano on May 18, 2013.

When photograph ISS036-E-2105 was taken, the space station was about 475 miles south-southeast of the volcano (49.1° North latitude, 157.4° West longitude) on May 18, 2013. (Credit: The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth)

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By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

(Photo: Monsanto via The New York Times)

The common problem we face is the power of concentrated wealth and monopolistic corporate interests. This has created a crony capitalist economy that uses government to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the people, often threatening our basic necessities for life.A clear example of this is found in the behavior of the chemical and seed corporation, Monsanto.

Monsanto threatens the world’s food supply; this is a major challenge of our era. This struggle is central to the global ecosystem, economy and energy crises. Monsanto also pushes poisonous chemicals into the environment and promotes agricultural practices that exacerbate climate change.

Monsanto’s actions truly affect each of us. They put their profits over the need for healthy foods, diverse seed supplies and the stability of the agricultural economy. They employ a variety of tools to control access to seeds and aggressively push genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and toxic chemicals despite serious safety concerns about them. And they accomplish this with great help from the US government.

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By Rebel of Oz

The other day I got into trouble with a family friend, whose 7-year-old came home from a play date with my son claiming ‘Santa does not exist!’ It’s all my fault. My son had heard at school from a school mate that there is something fishy about the Santa story. He knows that I have never lied to him, so he asked me, “Dad is it true what my friend told me that Santa does not exist?”

I didn’t dare to directly answer his question for fear of the wrath of my wife. However, I didn’t want to lie to him either. So I asked him back what he thinks. He told me that he had thought about it and that he thinks that it is logistically and technically impossible that the official story was true. There is no way that Santa would be able to deliver billions of packages all around the world in as little as 24 hours. The presents wouldn’t all fit in his sleigh either and what is more, not all houses had chimneys for Santa to slip in.

I could have weaselled my way out of this by referring to miracles and magic, but I couldn’t make myself abuse his trust. On his insistence to receive a straight answer, I replied back that he had answered the question himself. “Trust your common sense,” I said. I should have also told him to keep this mouth shut about what he had just found out. When, during his play date, the topic of Santa came up he showed off what he had just found out. His friend’s mother was not impressed.

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(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon is asking Congress for more than $450 million for maintaining and upgrading the Guantanamo Bay prison that President Barack Obama wants to close.

New details on the administration’s budget request emerged on Tuesday and underscored the contradiction of the president waging a political fight to shutter the facility while the military calculates the financial requirements to keep the installation operating.

The budget request for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 calls for $79 million for detention operations, the same as the current year, and $20.5 million for the office of military commissions, an increase over the current amount of $12.6 million. The request also includes $40 million for a fiber optic cable and $99 million for operation and maintenance.

The Pentagon also wants $200 million for military construction to upgrade temporary facilities. That work could take eight to 10 years as the military has to transport workers to the island, rely on limited housing and fly in building material.

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By MARTIN CRUTSINGER

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said late Monday he will begin tapping into two government employee retirement funds to buy more time before the U.S. Treasury is faced with the prospect of defaulting on the national debt.

In a letter to congressional leaders, Lew said that he would tap the civil service retirement and disability fund and a similar fund that covers retired postal workers. The law allows him to remove investments from these funds to clear room for more borrowing until Congress votes to raise the debt limit

Under the law, any investments diverted from the pension funds must be replaced with interest once Congress approves raising the debt limit.

Lew has said the various bookkeeping measures he is allowed to employ should provide enough maneuvering room to keep the government from defaulting on its debt until after Labor Day. Other estimates say Lew may be able to forestall a default until as late as November.

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Bill Bard says:

What a fucking scam.

By H. Schreuder & J. O’Sullivan

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth’s atmosphere.

NASA’s Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing a key role in the energy balance of air above our planet’s surface.

NASA’s Langley Research Center instruments show that the thermosphere not only received a whopping 26 billion kilowatt hours of energy from the sun during a recent burst of solar activity, but that in the upper atmospheric carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide molecules sent as much as 95% of that radiation straight back out into space.

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Remember that scene in Scarface?

Two members of the FBI’s elite counterterrorism unit died Friday while practicing how to quickly drop from a helicopter to a ship using a rope, the FBI announced Monday in a statement.

The statement gave few details regarding the deaths of Special Agents Christopher Lorek and Stephen Shaw, other than to say the helicopter encountered unspecified difficulties and the agents fell a “significant distance.”

Last month, the team was involved in the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings. And in February, it rescued a 5-year-old boy held hostage for six days in an underground bunker in Alabama.

“Whenever things go really wrong, the FBI calls in the Hostage Rescue Team. It’s the government’s 911,” Coulson said.

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Bill Bard says:

Seems convenient way to kill off two who might just know a bit more about Boston than was good for them.

By David Ingram

U.S. President Barack Obama (2nd L) and Vice President Joe Biden (L), along with members of the national security team, receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House, May 1, 2011. REUTERS/White House/Pete Souza/Handout (Ho New Reuters, / May 12, 2011)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the U.S. government had properly classified top secret more than 50 images of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden taken after his death, and that the government did not need to release them.

The unanimous ruling by three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a request for the images by a conservative nonprofit watchdog group.

Judicial Watch sued for photographs and video from the May 2011 raid in which U.S. special forces killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, after more than a decade of searching.

The organization’s lawsuit relied on the Freedom of Information Act, a 1966 law that guarantees public access to some government documents.

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Bill Bard says:

What are they hiding?

Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. has been sentenced to almost three decades in jail after conspiring with private prisons to trade kids for cash.

By Emily Smith

Mark Ciavarella Jr.

In the private prison industry, longer sentences earn more money from the state.

Since 2003, Ciavarella received millions of dollars in bribes for condemning minors to maximum prison sentences. In one case, Ciavarella sentenced a 10-year-old to two years in a detention facility for accidentally bottoming out his mother’s car.

According to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, over 5,000 young men and women were unjustly sentenced to prison and denied their constitutional rights. Many of them have now been released and cleared of their charges.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has overturned some 4,000 convictions issued by him between 2003 and 2008, claiming he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles – including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. Some of the juveniles he sentenced were as young as 10-years old.

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By: DSWright

Foreclosure Protester Arrested At DOJ

As Occupy Our Homes demonstrates at the Department of Justice the fraudclosure crisis continues unabated.

A Florida family man who not only made his mortgage payments on time but made payments early faces foreclosure by Wells Fargo. The explanation for initiating the foreclosure proceedings by Wells Fargo is nothing short of amazing and offers a sad commentary on how little has changed despite the 2008 financial crisis and supposed reforms like Dodd-Frank.

Etienne Syldor said he’s worked his whole life for a home in Orlando for his wife and three children.

Syldor is an immigrant from Haiti and a bus driver at Walt Disney World. At times, he said he has worked multiple jobs to make sure he never missed a mortgage payment.

Last year, Wells Fargo offered him mortgage modification, and he was told if he made four monthly payments during a trial period, the modification would be permanent.

So far so good. Family man working multiple jobs to make sure he is paying his bills – personal responsibility and all that jazz. Court records confirm that Syldor made his payments.

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Bill Bard says:

Bankers make the rules up as they go along.  Fucking ludicrous.

by Anthony Gucciardi

A new precedent has been set. Despite extensive denial that drone strikes would endanger Americans, Attorney General Eric Holder has now openly admitted that four US citizens were killed through overseas drone strikes since 2009. 

While not on United States soil, the deaths of the US citizens in nations like Yemen and Pakistan highlight the new precedent being set by US government heads who wish to use drones as a form of lethal enforcement on US soil.  With Holder admitting that Americans have already died via drone strikes following his statements that Obama can alreadyinitiate drone strikes on US soil, we are now seeing the way paved to go ahead and announce armed drones to fight terrorism here in the US.We all remember the initial rhetoric that drones were ‘no real threat’, and that they were simply unarmed scouting machines used to save lives overseas.

Then, we saw them rapidly enter the nation, and we heard the same tired reassurances. We saw them killing innocents overseas with the high powered weaponry being attached to these ‘scouting’ drones, and we see them still doing so today. But, once again, we’re told not to worry. Political talking heads like Eric Holder assure us that domestic drones, for which over 1,400 permits have been issued, are not meant to be used as weapons. Well, that is unless Obama decides to use the drones as a weapon of war on US soil.

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Suspicious0bservers

By Jon Queally | Common Dreams

(Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster)

Revelations about the targeting of whistleblowers, journalists and news agencies exposes president to increasing scorn

Saying the Obama administration “has gone overboard in its zeal to find and muzzle insiders,” the New York Times editorial board on Wednesday added its voice to the growing chorus of media outlets, journalists, and First Amendment advocates who say the White House is engaged in an assault on press freedom and investigative journalism itself.

In an additionally troubling pattern for the president this week, others have made the argument that Obama’s behavior is reminiscent of former president Richard Nixon when it comes to the obsessive protection of information and control of political narratives.

The list of critics has grown exponentially since revelations about the Department of Justice’s “unprecedented” monitoring of Associated Press journalists last week was made worse by new reporting this week that the DOJ also targeted a Fox News journalist as a possible “co-conspirator” for simply receiving information from a government source.

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[satire]

EDL supporter

The sickening terrorism attack on a soldier in Woolwich has really brought out the caring, tolerant and inclusive sides of society, according to reports this morning.

With numerous calls to ‘send em back’, ‘bomb the hell out of wherever they come from’ or ‘let the people on the street deal with them’, British society is celebrating one of its finest hours.

English Defence League member Steve Matthews told us, “When I heard the news I was sickened, but then I began sporting a huge erection when I realised how this will give me an opportunity to spout my vile opinions.”

“There’ll be a rally near you soon, I guaranteed it.”

“What everyone needs to realise is that he best way to beat extremism is with a different type of extremism.”

“And our extremism is based on skin colour rather than religion, so it’s much more valid.”

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StormCloudsGathering

American Airlines planes taxi past a terminal at Miami International airport in Miami, Florida. (Reuters)

A shipment of gold valued at $625,000 vanished in a suspected heist after arriving in Miami on an American Airlines flight, authorities announced Thursday.

A police report says the gold, which arrived in a box, was brought on the flight from Guayaquil, Ecuador to the Miami International Airport early Tuesday, WSVN reports.

The plane’s cargo was unloaded by five crew members, but the box containing the gold disappeared after apparently being loaded onto a motorized luggage cart or tug, the report said.

The cart was found in front of a gate of the same terminal were the flight from Ecuador was unloaded, about an hour after workers emptied the cargo hold, but without the box containing the gold.

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The Organic Prepper

The Monsanto Company likes to proclaim that they are the good guys, here to selflessly feed the world, help with sustainable agriculture, and, as if those lofty goals are not enough, champion human rights across the globe.  All you have to do is look at their commitments page to see how worthy they are of a shiny corporate halo:

At the heart of Monsanto is a very clear and principled code of conduct – one we expect all employees, contractors and management to live by every day. We operate under a genuine value system—our pledge—that demonstrates integrity, respect, ethical behavior, perspective and honesty as a foundation for everything we do.  

A key part of fulfilling the promise of our value system is by engaging our communities in a significant and positive manner. Not only do we work hard to support the family farmer in a variety of ways, but we also:

• provide extensive educational programs – particularly in science and agriculture – for students around the world

• fund numerous research grants for graduate students

• work in partnership with government bodies, non-profit agencies and advocacy groups to make agriculture more sustainable

If you happen to have your hip-wader boots on, you can delve even further into their purported goodness by reading, in it’s entirety, The Monsanto Pledge:

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By Deirdre Imus

For decades, fluoride has been marketed and heralded as essential for good dental hygiene and used in most toothpastes and mouthwashes. In addition, parents have been routinely encouraged to give their kids cavity-fighting fluoride treatments when they visit the dentist.

Beginning in the late 1940s, aided by mass industry lead lobbying campaigns, the government encouraged municipal water authorities to add fluoride to their community’s drinking water. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), approximately 70 percent of the U.S. population ingests fluoride through their community drinking water today and they want this percentage to continue to climb. This is in stark contrast to other developed European nations were fluoride is rarely added to drinking water – Britain provides only about 10 percent of their population with fluoridated water.

The “experts” and the government told us fluoride would strengthen tooth enamel, help prevent tooth decay and is, of course, perfectly safe.

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Connecting The Dots And Changing Course The young people of this world are the turning point generation. They are strong in numbers, more conscious than ever, facing more challenges than ever and united by the internet. It’s perhaps the best of times and the worst of times, but there is no time for distractions anymore. This video is produced by Generation Waking Up, which is “igniting a generation of young people to bring forth a thriving, just, sustainable world.” It’s a video with dozens of young voices expressing how they feel about their influence and potential impact at this turning point in history. “We are writing a different story than the one we have been led to believe is inevitable.” says one young woman proudly. Hoorah for that! –Bibi Farber

[Source]

Activist Post

Dees Illustration

Up until now the Obama Administration has been coy about their policy to kill Americans abroad using drones.

Today, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that this administration has killed four Americans with drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, and admitted one was killed deliberately.

According to the New York Times:

In a letter to Congressional leaders obtained by The New York Times, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. disclosed that the administration had deliberately killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen.

The American responsibility for Mr. Awlaki’s death has been widely reported, but the administration had until now refused to confirm or deny it.

The letter also said that the United States had killed three other Americans: Samir Khan, who was killed in the same strike; Mr. Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, who was also killed in Yemen; and Jude Mohammed, who was killed in a strike in Pakistan.

The letter says “Since 2009, the United States, in the conduct of U.S. counterterrorism operations against al-Qa’ida and its associated forces outside of areas of active hostilities, has specifically targeted and killed one U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi (Awlaki).”

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A study claiming that fish oil provides no benefit in heart disease is being hyped as the final word on the issue. But is it? No, it is not. In fact, the study is absurdly blatant pseudo science, with two errors so glaring it’s hard to believe they were made. Why do the researchers do it? Why do they care so little about the truth and your health?

by Heidi Stevenson

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine purports to show that fish oil provides no benefit whatsoever in prevention of heart disease.^[1] At first glance, it would appear to be true. The study is, after all, double blind and placebo controlled, not to mention having a significant number of participants. But is it for real, or is there some sleight of hand at work?

There’s one initial clue that should give pause. The study’s endpoints had to be changed. That’s always a bad sign. In fact, it breaks the rules of good research. But, they had to do it because they found that their study participants weren’t dying as fast as they’d anticipated.

Now, if they’d been interested in the truth, they’d have tried to figure out what was wrong. After all, the odds of dying when people have signs of heart disease are pretty well understood. Otherwise, how could they possibly have anticipated the rate at which deaths would occur?

Of course, they didn’t sit back and wonder what they might be doing wrong. Instead, they just added new end points to their study.

How They Cheated: Basic Trick

There’s a blatantly obvious reason that the death rate was lower than expected, but we’ll get to that in a minute, after demonstrating the study’s primary flaw:

There was no placebo!

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By JIm Kirwan

A partial response to ‘Obama’s Endgame’ by Dave Hodges

“In summary, the MSM is forcing Obama’s hand to go for broke. Obama has limited time to act given the magnitude of the five Watergate scandals he presently faces. Obama has been backed into a corner and he is desperate.

Obama is going to start a war with Syria and Iran and ultimately with Russia and China to save the backsides of the Federal Reserve and their precious Petrodollar. However, he cannot commence a war until he has eliminated the leadership of those that would oppose him. Then he must gain total national compliance and acquiescence to the catastrophic war that he must launch this country into in order to save the Petrodollar.” (1)

The Petrodollar has already been killed. Libya paid for that with the end of their nation. Libya had their own bank, not a Rothschild’s franchise.

Libya had the world’s finest sweet-crude-oil, and a lot of gold. Libya was about to offer Africa a gold-backed currency based upon their Libyan gold. Their citizens were free, wealthy and technologically advancing. Libya was a beacon for real life and planned to lead all of North Africa out of the deserts with their discovery of ice-age fresh waters beneath Libya. They had already begun to build the pipelines to distribute that water free to North African nations. These were some of the reasons why Libya had to be destroyed.

USI has not faced a serious military force since the end of WW II. Iraq was, along with the Iran of today, once a technologically-sophisticated nation, until we began degrading Iraq over twenty years ago. The N.W.O. has chosen to fight only artificially-degraded nations that no longer have navy, air forces, fully operational armies, wealth or accessible natural-resources: Which is why under-threat nations were targeted.

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A Freeman’s Perspective Special Report

It started with an article of ours entitled, The Good Guys are NOT Coming to Save Us, in which I
wrote the following:

A lot of Americans know that the US government is out of control. Anyone who has cared enough to study the US Constitution even a little knows this. Still, very few of these people are taking any significant action, and largely because of one error: They are waiting for “the good guys” to show up and fix things.

Some think that certain groups of politicians will pull it together and fix things, or that one magnificent politician will ride in to fix things. Others think that certain members of the military will step in and slap the politicians back into line. And, I’m sure there are other variations.

There are several problems with this. I’ll start with the small issues:  [see rest of article here...]

That message seemed to resonate with many people as more resources for free thinkers picked it up
– from lewrockwell.com to alt-market.com, to fromthetrenchesworldreport.com to zerohedge .com.

And while it was gratifying to see my work spread throughout the Internet, it also raised a lot of
questions about the crucial follow-up – about the DOING.

After all, if there are no Good Guys riding in to save us, then it falls to us to act on behalf of ourselves
and our families. And that is what we must do. But acting is of no value unless we act in ways that will
get us what we want. Not just any action will do. And in order to act correctly, we have to understand
our situation.

Unfortunately, the world we live in is very confusing. Even those people who try the hardest to figure it
all out come to wildly different conclusions. Their problem is not that they are lazy or stupid or ignorant (usually they are none of the above), it’s that they are focused on the daily outrages and the current loud debates.

What we need most in a situation like this is perspective. It’s very hard to understand the movement of
a hurricane while you are inside of it; you have to look at it from a great distance – like a satellite view –
to understand it.

And it precisely that type of “satellite view” that we can get from something that I call the Great Calendar…

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Ash and gases started to come out from the two openings of volcano from 8:30 am Tuesday. Courtesy of Ovsicori

By L. Arias

Residents in four provinces reported seeing the volcanic activity.

At 5 a.m. Tuesday morning, the Turrialba Volcano, located east of the province of Cartago, began to spew gas and ash from two crater openings, the Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Costa Rica (Ovsicori) reported.

By 8:30 a.m. a significant amount of volcanic material was released from the two openings of volcano, “which may indicate that these materials come from deep areas,” Ovsicori said.

“It is uncertain what will happen. Volcanologists are heading to the site to evaluate the activity,” the statement said.

Experts said Tuesday’s activity is “normal for an active volcano such as Turrialba,” but they recommended all nearby communities remain vigilant in coming hours.

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.

I have long spoken of the dangers inherent to centralization of power and the extreme concentrations of wealth centralization inevitably creates.

The Master Narrative Nobody Dares Admit: Centralization Has Failed (June 21, 2012)

The Solution to Concentrated Power: Decentralize, Diffuse and Devolve Power (June 22, 2012)

To Fix Healthcare, Let 100 Solutions Bloom (February 26, 2013)

Longtime contributor C.D. recently highlighted another danger of centralization: sociopaths/psychopaths excel in organizations that centralize power, and their ability to flatter, browbeat and manipulate others greases their climb to the top.

In effect, centralization is tailor-made for sociopaths gaining power. Sociopaths seek power over others, and centralization gives them the perfect avenue to control over millions or even entire nations.

Even worse (from the view of non-sociopaths), their perverse abilities are tailor-made for excelling in office and national politics via ruthless elimination of rivals and enemies and grandiose appeals to national greatness, ideological purity, etc.

As C.D. points out, the ultimate protection against sociopathology is to minimize the power held in any one agency, organization or institution:

After you watch these films on psychopaths, I think you’ll have an even greater understanding of why your premise of centralization is a key problem of our society. The first film points out that psychopaths generally thrive in the corporate/government top-down organization (I have seen it happen in my agency, unfortunately) and that when they come to power, their values (or lack thereof) tend to pervade the organization to varying degrees. In some cases, they end up creating secondary psychopaths which is kind of like a spiritual/moral disease that infects people.

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Wisconsin – Police work that has traditionally been conducted in public view is increasingly being shielded, as insurance companies and municipal attorneys throughout Wisconsin push departments to withhold names from reports due to liability concerns.

A long-ignored federal privacy law is driving the redactions, interpreted by some municipal leaders to overrule a state public records law that says the full reports should be released.
(Federal privacy law allows police to conduct secret arrests in AMERIKA! Is this the future of policing?)

With a growing number of departments redacting crash reports — and, in some cases, all incident reports — drivers injured in crashes may have no right to the identity of the other motorist, and communities can be kept in the dark about who police are arresting.

“It’s apparently gone to the point in Wisconsin that there is now such a thing as a secret arrest, which I think is just astonishing, and I think should concern every citizen deeply,” said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council. “If just checking information against driver’s records renders it secret, then you can keep just about anything secret by taking that additional step.”

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