R. Leong

Posts Tagged ‘prison’

13 Articles from Around the World : Putin’s Partial Democracy, Russia and China Too Gentrified In Mock Shock Response (as opposed to ‘Gentile-ised’), Sneaky Neurotech Religions?, Obama Does the Necessary – Hopefully Mali Wars Not Contrived To Begin With, Informed Consent And Faith, Orwellian MSM Tests the Readers’ Intelligence, Philly Inclusiveness Policy Takes A Hit By MSM?, Phenotype Awareness for Clubbing, Orwellian Judge Does ‘Disingenuous’ or Has No Idea That England is Drowning in Debt, Making Clear the Varieties of Transperson for MSNBC (and other readers unaware), Theories : Time is Not Real? Technology Is Sustained by Belief As Much As Magic, Theories About Reality, Pope and Poe Emeritus Fear the Paedo Lobby in Spiritually Corrupted Catholicism? Bring Back the Spanish Inquisition!, Theories on Darkness, Anti-Bio-Terrorism Protocols, Passing the Buck : USA! USA!, Renaissance Science of Graphology Makes Mark on Degree Choices, Appointment Issues relating to the UN : UNASUR Should be Decider – reposted by @AgreeToDisagree – 7th May 2013

In amendments to law needed, Arabia, conflict of interest, democratisation, exceptionalism, fundamentalism, immigration, land distribution, law, LGBT, living space, media collusion, MSM, Neurolinguistics, occult, paedophilia, politics, secularism, term limits, true democracy, vested interest, wealth distribution on May 7, 2013 at 8:42 pm

ARTICLE 1

Putin says no Stalinist tendencies in society, confirms Berezovsky’s letters – by Russian President Vladimir Putin (RIA Novosti/Aleksey Nikolskyi) – Published time: April 25, 2013 08:10

The Russian president has answered the most important of millions of questions submitted by citizens during his annual live Q&A call-in.
No Stalinism in society, but order, discipline and equality

Well-known liberal journalist Aleksey Vededictov of talk radio station Ekho Moskvy told the president that his third term was marked by worrying tendencies, such as the prosecutions of Pussy Riot, the rioters in Bolotnaya Square and Aleksey Navalny, as well as pressure placed on NGOs and the passage of laws that sparked widespread outrage.

“Answer please, do you really think that Russia can be a progressive world power in the 21st century by using methods of the ‘effective manager’ Stalin,” Venediktov asked.

– Everyone should obey the law

Putin replied that he saw no elements of Stalinism in present-day Russia: “Stalinism is connected with a personality cult, with mass violations of the law, with repressions and prison camps,” he said. “There is nothing of such kind in Russia and I hope there will never be. Our society is different now and it will never let this happen again.”

Putin went on to say that Russia still needed order and discipline, as well as the equality of all citizens before the law. “The Pussy Riot girls and the guys who desecrate soldiers’ graves must all answer before the law,” he said. “People are not being convicted for their political views but for violating the law.”

“The same applies to street rallies – I think that they might and must be organized, but this should be done in line with the law. Modern mass media can cover any event, why should one tear shoulder patches off the police uniforms and cause unrest?” he continued.

– Transparency does not mean political pressure

The same applies to NGOs, Putin explained, saying “we welcome their work as it is very important to get feedback from the common people from all regions. But if such activities see their only objective as self-promotion, this is bad.”

“If they seek to make their activities a part of internal political procedure and yet they get their funding from abroad – I say, they must speak openly about it” he said. “No one is banning their work. The law is not banning this. But they must tell where their money comes from, in what amount and how it was spent.”

– Corruption fighters must be clear as crystal

One of the hosts pressed the issue by asking the president if the authorities were afraid of popular anti-corruption blogger Aleksey Navalny, who now faces several criminal cases and is awaiting trial for fraud.

Putin said that in his opinion, those who fight corruption must themselves be “clear as crystal,” or such activities would become self-advertising and PR, while the law must treat everyone equally.

“There should be no illusions like when someone is calling for everyone to catch a thief this gives this person a license to steal. But this also does not mean that someone whose views differ from those of the authorities must be put on trial and dragged to prison,” Putin said, adding that he  told prosecutors and other law enforcers to ensure the trial is objective.
‘Satisfied’ with current government’s performance

The first question dealt with several decrees on economic and social development Putin signed after last year’s Russian presidential elections. When a reporter asked if the president was content with how his orders had been carried out, Putin said that he had deliberately set extremely difficult objectives, which should be taken into consideration when judging the government’s performance.

Such measures were ambitious goals to motivate Russians, Putin said, adding that he has been generally happy with the government’s performance.

Later, a viewer asked the president if he planned to dismiss any governmental ministers, and Putin answered that the current government has been in office for less than a year (the Cabinet was formed after the inauguration in early May 2012), and that any reshuffle would cause more harm than good. Putin praised the question, saying that officials at every level should be constantly reminded they are public servants.
Foreign operatives may have had a role in Berezovsky’s death

When the hosts asked the president about late oligarch Boris Berezovsky, Putin answered that he could not discount the possibility that foreign special services were involved in the businessman’s death. “They are capable of that. Everything is possible,” he said.

Berezovsky died in London in late March by suspected suicide; a criminal probe into his death is ongoing.

Putin confirmed that he had received two identical letters from Berezovsky, though he admitted that he was not comfortable speaking on the issue: “I received the first letter from him in the beginning of this year and the second arrived already after his death. The text was the same, so yes, there were letters.”

The president elaborated that the first letter was completely written by hand, while the second was partially typed and partially written. The first message was passed by one of Berezovsky’s former business partners, and the second through another partner who is a foreign citizen, Putin said.

Berezovsky wrote that he was admitting his mistakes, apologized, and asked for permission to return to Russia. Putin said that he had not answered any of the letters.

The president also said he would not object to fulfilling Berezovsky’s will to be buried in Russia, saying that the final decision should be made by the businessman’s family.

Putin also noted that he decided not to make public the content of Berezovsky’s messages, even though some of his close associates “literally demanded” he do so. “I thank God for preventing me from doing so,” Putin concluded.
Return of death penalty will not eliminate crime

When asked if it was possible to bring back the death penalty for those convicted of grave crimes, such as the recent shooting in Belgorod that claimed 6 lives, Putin said he fully understood the questioner’s emotions, but experts have suggested that such a measure would not actually reduce crime.

“When I encounter such events, my hand reaches for a pen to sign some documents connected with the death penalty. But first, I have to consult specialists,” Putin said.

The Russian president recalled how in the Roman Empire, pickpockets were usually sentenced to death, yet most pickpocketing was committed during the public executions. He also reiterated that Russia has replaced the death penalty with life imprisonment, and suggested that the law be amended to ban pardons for criminals sentenced to life in prison.

“I understand both the citizens’ indignation and their desire to punish the criminals. The question is in the effectiveness of certain moves,” Putin said.

Russia has placed a moratorium on death penalty, in line with the demands of the Council of Europe. The current criminal code still allows for convicts to be sentenced to death, meaning life in prison.
Details of the current session

The questions were submitted through the Internet and at specially organized stations. The queries will be asked live at six studios in different locations throughout Russia, which are not disclosed until the call-in show starts. At the beginning of the show the number of questions was 2,3 million and they kept coming.

Putin’s 11th Q&A session will be different from previous ones as the questions will be arranged by type, not by where the questioner is from, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the press shortly ahead of the session.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Putin replied that he saw no elements of Stalinism in present-day Russia: “Stalinism is connected with a personality cult, with mass violations of the law, with repressions and prison camps,” he said. “There is nothing of such kind in Russia and I hope there will never be. Our society is different now and it will never let this happen again.” . . . “People are not being convicted for their political views but for violating the law.”

Putin forgets, TERM LIMITS. That seat of President is not Putin’s to be seated on for life, I think thats the main issue and a violation of the concept od democracy, the Law of Democracy. Politicians probably base their entire existence and identity around their posts. Grow a personality and not lean so heavily on the state to justify existence bureaucrats and ‘political careerists’. 2 terms (preferably 1) then GTFO!

ARTICLE 2

Russia, China express alarm after Israel hits Syria – by Dan Williams and Khaled Yacoub Oweis | Reuters – JERUSALEM/AMMAN | Mon May 6, 2013 6:56pm EDT

JERUSALEM/AMMAN (Reuters) – Russia and China expressed alarm on Monday over the regional repercussions of two Israeli air raids on Syria, while Israel played down strikes which its officials said targeted Iranian missiles bound for Lebanese Hezbollah militants.

Oil prices spiked above $105 a barrel, their highest in nearly a month, on Monday morning as the air strikes on Friday and Sunday prompted fears of a wider spillover of Syria’s two-year-old civil war that could affect Middle East oil exports.

Israel, whose prime minister visited China on Monday in a sign of business-as-usual, sought to persuade Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Monday that the air strikes did not aim to weaken him and dismissed the prospects of an escalation.

“There are no winds of war,” Yair Golan, the general commanding Israeli forces on the Syrian and Lebanese fronts, told reporters while out jogging with troops.

“Do you see tension? There is no tension. Do I look tense to you?” he said, according to the Maariv NRG news website.

The attacks hit targets manned by Assad’s elite troops in the Barada River valley and Qasioun Mountain, residents, activists and opposition military sources said. They included a compound linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program, air defenses and Republican Guards’ facilities, the sources said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 42 soldiers were killed and 100 more were missing, while other opposition sources put the death toll at 300 soldiers.

Russia said it was concerned the chances of foreign military intervention in Syria were growing, suggesting its worry stemmed in part from media reports about the alleged use of chemical weapons in the conflict that has killed 70,000 people.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said the reported air strikes “caused particular alarm”.

“The further escalation of armed confrontation sharply increases the risk of creating new areas of tension, in addition to Syria, in Lebanon, and the destabilization of the so-far relatively calm atmosphere on the Lebanese-Israeli border.”

Assad’s government accused Israel of effectively helping al Qaeda Islamist “terrorists” and said the strikes “open the door to all possibilities”. It said many civilians had died.

IRAN

Israel has not confirmed the attack officially, but has reinforced anti-missile batteries in the north. Israeli officials said that, as after a similar attack in the same area in January, they were calculating Assad would not pick a fight with a well-armed neighbor while preoccupied with survival.

Syria would be no match for U.S. ally Israel in any direct military showdown. But Damascus, with its leverage over Lebanon’s Hezbollah, could still consider proxy attacks through Lebanon.

Israeli officials said the raids were not connected with Syria’s civil war but aimed at stopping Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, acquiring weapons to strike Israeli territory if Israel were to attack Iranian nuclear sites.

Iran denies Israeli and Western accusations that it is bent on acquiring atomic weapons – a long-running dispute that now threatens to intersect with the bloody strife in Syria.

Tehran, which has long backed Assad, whose Alawite minority has religious ties to Shi’ite Islam, denied Israel’s attack was on arms. Shi’ite Hezbollah did not comment.

China, hosting Netanyahu, urged restraint and the respect of sovereignty, without mentioning Israel by name. Moscow and Beijing, allies of Assad, have blocked Western-backed measures against Assad at the United Nations Security Council.

A U.S. official said U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday to see if he could persuade Moscow to support U.S. peace efforts.

Following the air strikes, the United Nations said Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on all sides “to act with a sense of responsibility to prevent an escalation of what is already a devastating and highly dangerous conflict”.

The military in Turkey, one of Assad’s most vocal critics and home to more than 400,000 refugees from the civil war that grew out of protests against his rule, launched a 10-day military exercise on Monday at a base near the border.

The violence in Syria has inflamed wider regional tensions between Shi’ite Muslim Iran and Sunni-ruled Arab states, some of them close allies of the West.

Senior Republican Senator John McCain said on Sunday that the Israeli air strikes could add pressure on Washington to intervene in Syria, although President Barack Obama has said he has no plans to send ground troops.

After Friday’s raid, Obama defended Israel’s right to block “terrorist organizations like Hezbollah” from acquiring weapons. A U.S. intelligence official said on Sunday Washington was not given any warning before the air strikes.

(Additional reporting by Alexei Anishchuk in Moscow, Michael Martina in Beijing, Marwan Makdesi in Damascus and Jonathon Burch in Ankara; Writing by Philippa Fletcher; Editing by Peter Graff)

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Alarm? Silly. If Israel could even complete the annexation of Gaza at all much less fight and conquer North Korea alone successfully in a one-on-one with all other nations not joining in just to prove this point, China and Russia should not even bat an eyelid here, and only in a MAD scenario. If a MAD scenario occured, mankind might be better off who knows. The physical deaths might be a new beginning for everyone in another world outside of this dull solar system or dimension (dementian? A hint maybe at humanity’s state of insanity in imagining that this is the only reality or vice versa?).

mini-ARTICLE 2.5

Pope says believers should inventory how the Holy Spirit works through them – by David Oatney (Catholic Church) – May 6, 2013

Pope Francis has said that Christians should consider taking daily inventory of how the Holy Spirit has worked through them in a given day.

In a homily delivered this morning in the chapel of the St. Martha Residence, the Vatican complex where many of those who work in the Vatican live and where visiting clergy (and cardinals, in the case of a conclave) often stay when visiting the Vatican, Pope Francis has said that believers should consider taking a daily inventory of how the Holy Spirit has worked through them each day. What did the Holy Spirit do in me,” the Pope suggested Christians should ask, “what witness did he give me.”

“The Spirit prepares us for our encounter with Jesus, he leads us down the path of Jesus and works in us throughout the day and throughout our lives,” said the Holy Father. Pope Francis also said that people could live a religious life without the Holy Spirit, but that it would be impossible to maintain what he called the “vitality” that is needed in a follower of Jesus. The Holy Spirit is important for mission because the Spirit “bears witness to Jesus so that we can give it to others.”

Today’s preaching is the latest in the Pope’s daily homilies at the St. Martha House, where he has voluntarily chosen to live among Vatican lay staff and visiting clergy. In recent days, these homilies have taken on a much deeper and more important theological tone. In a homily for Sunday, May 4th, the Holy Father stated that while dialogue is necessary for human beings to live in peace, there can be no dialogue with Satan, the “prince of this world.”

“There can be no dialogue with the prince of this world: let this be clear!…with that prince, it is impossible to dialogue: one can only respond with the Word of God who defends us, for the world hates us – and just as he did with Jesus, so will he do with us. ‘Only look,’ he will say, ‘just do this one small little scam…it is a small matter, nothing really – and so he begins to lead us on a road that is slightly off. This is a pious lie: ‘Do it, do it, do it: there is no problem,’ and it begins little by little, always, no? Then [he says]: ‘But … you’re good, you’re a good person: You [get away with] it.’ It is flattering – and he softens us by flattery: and then, we fall into the trap.”

The Pope also enters a daily message on Twitter, and he confirmed his missionary spirit by writing that “every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she bears witness to God’s love. Be missionaries of God’s tenderness” on Sunday, and today he wrote “let us ask our Lord to help us bear shining witness to his mercy and his love in every area of our Christian lives.”

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Synchronicity or psy-ops? Does not mean anything until far away enough to awaken from the droning thoughts unnatural. Every gets to be tender, while not a single paedo-priest has yet to be hauled up. If the Church finds ‘evil’ children, no excuse to abuse either. Education of souls is a process that takes eternity.

ARTICLE 3

Despite Pledges, Obama Put U.S. Troops in Mali – by Alex Newman – Monday, 06 May 2013 11:30

Without obtaining permission from Congress and despite repeatedly vowing not to put U.S. boots on the ground in Mali, the Obama administration has already deployed a small contingent of American troops to help international forces prop up the ruling regime in the capital city of Bamako, which seized power in a coup.

According to a report in the Washington Post, the president sent the U.S. soldiers to provide supposed “liaison support” to French and African troops battling separatist rebels in the north as part of a deeply controversial United Nations-backed operation. There are strong indications that American Special Forces are on the ground as well.

In addition to other forms of support such as transporting troops, intelligence sharing, re-fueling assistance, and more, Obama has reportedly deployed some two dozen U.S. soldiers to Mali. Of those, about 10 are providing what the Post called “liaison support,” while the others were apparently assigned to protect the American embassy in Bamako as the Malian conflict continues to rage on.

Lt. Col. Robert Firman, a spokesman for the Pentagon, claimed the U.S. troops were not engaged in combat operations. However, those claims are in doubt as well. The Post and other publications reported on evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces have been deployed on secret missions for some time.

One of the indicators: a “mysterious” car crash in Bamako that killed three American soldiers last year. The subject of secret operations has also come up in congressional hearings, with a congressman asking U.S. Special Operations Command chief Adm. William McRaven whether his forces were coordinating with French troops to avoid “shooting each other.”

Adm. McRaven responded: “There is very close coordination on the ground.”

The news that U.S. troops are on the ground comes in stark contrast to various statements issued by top administration officials in recent months. As The New American reported in January shortly after the Socialist French government invaded Mali with UN support, for example, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said there was “no consideration of putting any American boots on the ground at this time.”

A month later, then-Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson — the top diplomat for Africa — offered similar remarks in front of a House Committee. “We are assisting the French and we are assisting the Africans, but we have no intentions of putting boots on the ground or engaging our forces militarily there,” he claimed.

Aside from the lack of congressional or constitutional authority to meddle in Mali, the administration is also prohibited by federal law from supporting the current regime in Bamako, which came to power last year amid a military coup led by a U.S.-trained officer. Like on a wide range of other issues, however, Congress, the Constitution, and federal law have been unable to restrain the president so far — especially when it comes to waging illegal wars and propping up foreign governments or “rebels.”

Incredibly, the administration claims it can “legally” support French and African forces that are supporting the coup regime, even though it is prohibited under federal law from directly supporting the illegitimate rulers in Bamako. It remains unclear how the U.S. government reached such a conclusion on bypassing the ban, but the fact that the coup government in Bamako is benefiting from American support is indisputable.

Earlier this year, for example, Obama purported to “authorize” $50 million in military assistance to the regime in Chad and the Socialist French government to help fund the intervention in Mali on behalf of the coup regime. Despite support from the U.S. government, however, Chadian “President” Idriss Deby announced that his troops were pulling out in the face of strong opposition. “Chad’s army has no ability to face the kind of guerrilla fighting that is emerging in northern Mali,” he said last month. Thousands of French troops remain on the ground with U.S. support.

Meanwhile, American tanker planes have delivered almost eight million pounds of jet fuel for French fighters as part of supporting the thousands of troops from France on the ground in Mali, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Firman told Military.com. Indeed, U.S. officials have also long bragged about the various forms of aid being provided to the forces battling separatist rebels in the vast Malian north: intelligence, logistics, drone support, and more.

While the war has gone on without an extraordinary amount of international attention or media coverage, human rights groups said earlier this year that the UN-backed military campaign has led to widespread abuses. Like in similar recent interventions in other African countries — especially Libya and the Ivory Coast, where Western powers helped overthrow existing governments in a brutal civil war — numerous organizations stated that internationally supported forces loyal to the dubious regime in Bamako are using summary executions and mass human rights abuses. Even innocent civilians are being targeted.

Ironically, the official justifications for meddling in Mali include supporting “democracy,” which appears odd to analysts as the military campaign centers on backing a coup regime and its goals. Another excuse for the invasion was defending “human rights,” though it remains unclear how waging a brutal war and supporting a coup regime accused of mass abuses would be conducive to protecting anyone’s rights.

The final and perhaps most important justification for intervening in the conflict was supposedly stopping Islamic extremists while upholding Mali’s so-called “territorial integrity” by smashing separatist movements in the north. However, with the U.S. and French governments both playing a key role in arming, funding, and supporting radical Islamists in countries like Syria and Libya, analysts have expressed a great deal of confusion surrounding the true reasons for Western intervention in the war.

The coup regime ruling southern Mali out of Bamako is currently attempting to recapture the northern regions of the country. As The New American has reported, the vast swath of territory was declared independent last year by a group of historically oppressed nomadic Tuareg rebels armed with weapons obtained from the recent Western-backed war on Libya.

Eventually, Islamic fighters with various loyalties joined the fight against the corrupt central government, too — providing a half-baked excuse for the UN, the French government, Obama, and various African despots to enter the fray. Those Islamists became key to selling the intervention to war-weary publics in Europe and the United States.

Separately, the UN Security Council voted recently to “authorize” the deployment of more than 12,500 so-called international “peacekeeping” troops. According to news reports, the first soldiers under direct UN command are set to arrive this summer.

The Malian coup regime’s “Foreign Minister,” Tieman Hubert Coulibaly, told the Security Council that international forces would focus on stability in urban centers. Also on the agenda, Coulibaly  said, would be “the protection of civilians, the promotion and protection of human rights, as well as humanitarian assistance.”

Of course, the UN and its mostly dictatorial member governments have been plotting an invasion of Mali to crush the rebels since at least last fall. Numerous “resolutions” purporting to “authorize” international military intervention have been issued, helping to provide some dubious political cover for Western powers and assorted African despots seeking to quash the independence movement.

In the United States, however, the Constitution still requires a declaration of war from Congress before the president can get the American military involved in conflicts. Of course, the chaos in Mali is widely attributed, at least in part, to previous rounds of unapproved interventions in Africa including military actions under Obama that were waged without constitutional or congressional authority.

With the federal government borrowing trillions of dollars just to stay afloat, it remains unclear how many more conflicts Obama can involve America in before it all comes apart. In recent years, the administration has openly deployed U.S. troops everywhere from Guatemala and Jordan to Uganda and Turkey. The results thus far: More debt, more bloodshed, more innocents dead, more conflict, and more chaos. There is little reason to believe that the results in Mali will be any different.

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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Collateral damage to stabilise the whole region must be carried out. The USA has no time to allow things to spiral out of control. In a decade or 2 technology will make these terrorists and violence using rebels impossible to control.

ARTICLE 4

Pentagon Changes Mind, Says Soldiers Can Share Faith – by Dave Bohon – Saturday, 04 May 2013 12:00

Following an uproar over a Defense Department statement saying that military personnel could be court-martialed for sharing their faith, the Pentagon has backed down on that position and now says soldiers are free to proselytize, as long as they don’t harass others. “Service members can share their faith,” clarified Navy Lieutenant Commander Nate Christensen in a statement, “but must not force unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one’s beliefs.”

Earlier the Defense Department had released an alarming statement saying: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense…. Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis.” That statement appeared to come as the result of an April 24 meeting between military officials and Mikey Weinstein of the atheist group Military Religious Freedom Foundation, in which Weinstein pressured Air Force officials to enforce a policy that supposedly bans Air Force personnel from openly expressing their religious faith. The Defense Department has reportedly turned to Weinstein’s group to hammer out policies on religious expression in the military.

Weinstein has gained notoriety for his aggressive campaign to sanitize the military of overt faith expressions by service members. He told Fox News that “until the Air Force or Army or Navy or Marine Corps punishes a member of the military for unconstitutional religious proselytizing and oppression, we will never have the ability to stop this horrible, horrendous, dehumanizing behavior.” Weinstein was referring to examples of supposed religious persecution within the ranks, and said that his group “would love to see hundreds of prosecutions to stop this outrage of fundamentalist religious persecution.”

The outcry from chaplains and religious leaders over Weinstein’s rhetoric prompted the Defense Department to issue its updated statement backing down from implying that service members might be targeted for sharing their faith. According to Charisma News, the clarification came after the conservative legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking a clarification from the Defense Department on the issue.

“Members of our military should not be denied the very freedoms they fight to defend,” explained ADF Legal Counsel Joseph La Rue. “Freedom of religion and speech are paramount among those freedoms.”

La Rue noted that since there is little evidence of a crisis concerning overt religious proselytizing in the military, “we are still troubled over what motivated the original comments” from the Pentagon. He added that his group is seeking “to ensure that the Pentagon does not deny members of the armed services the basic freedoms that the Constitution guarantees all Americans.”

In his updated statement Lieutenant Commander Christensen insisted that the Defense Department “has never and will never single out a particular religious group for persecution or prosecution. The Department makes reasonable accommodations for all religions and celebrates the religious diversity of our service members.” He added that “when religious harassment complaints are reported, commanders take action based on the gravity of the occurrence on a case by case basis.” He did not elaborate on the actions that might be taken, but the previous Defense Department statement seemed to indicate that penalties could range from non-judicial punishment to a full court-martial.

In an e-mail Christensen explained that the Defense Department would work “to ensure that all service members are free to exercise their constitutional right to practice their religion — in a manner that is respectful of other individuals’ rights to follow their own belief systems; and in ways that are conducive to good order and discipline; and that do not detract from accomplishing the military mission.”

Nonetheless, at least one veteran military leader is concerned about a crackdown on religious expression among service members. Speaking at a gathering on Capitol Hill during the May 2 National Day of Prayer, Rear Admiral William Lee of the U.S. Coast Guard said he is convinced that there is an increasing effort to shut down expressions of faith throughout the military. “As one general so aptly put it,” Lee told his audience, “they expect us to check our religion in at the door — don’t bring that here. Leaders like myself are feeling the constraints of rules and regulations and guidance issued by lawyers that put us in a tighter and tighter box regarding our constitutional right to express our religious faith.”

Lee recalled that in 2012 there were a record high number of 349 military suicides, and recalled the story of a young soldier who had attempted suicide but survived. “When I looked at that young man and heard his story, the rules say, ‘Send him to the chaplain,’” Lee said. But “my heart said, ‘give this man a Bible.’”

The retired admiral pointed out that under changing military policy giving a soldier a Bible would be potentially punishable. He expressed his shock that an officer could now be reprimanded for “as much as whispering to a young man who is on his last hope — that there is hope. That I can just simply whisper, ‘here is the answer – take it home – I’ll talk about it if you want to.’”

He noted that “the lawyers tell me that if I do that, I’m crossing the line,” but added that “I’m glad I’ve crossed the line so many times.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Pentagon Changes Mind, Says Soldiers Can Share Faith

Following an uproar over a Defense Department statement saying that military personnel could be court-martialed for sharing their faith, the Pentagon has backed down on that position and now says soldiers are free to proselytize, as long as they don’t harass others. “Service members can share their faith,” clarified Navy Lieutenant Commander Nate Christensen in a statement, “but must not force (or sneak) unwanted, intrusive attempts to convert others of any faith or no faith to one’s beliefs. (after the receipient has decided or made clear they are not interested) ”

INFORMED CONSENT is the issue. Manipulation or forcing of any sort, especially witholding of soldierly comradeship should be punished with expulsion if not as severely as possible. This is a taxpyer paid job and religion must not get in the way. COnversely remember that abstention option in Forced Military Conscription nations world wide still need addressing.

mini-ARTICLE 4.5

Man wearing ‘jail sucks’ T-shirt arrested and sent to jail – by Eric Pfeiffer, The Sideshow Yahoo! News | The Sideshow – Fri, May 3, 2013

Don Castner, wearing his “jail sucks!” T-shirt (Manatee sheriff’s office)Don Castner was already in danger of arousing the suspicions of the fashion police. But the 39-year-old Floridian got a taste of delicious irony when he was arrested Wednesday by the actual police while wearing a T-shirt that read, “jail sucks!”

The Smoking Gun reports that Castner was arrested on charges of welfare fraud as part of a Manatee County sheriff’s office undercover sting entitled Operation Meal Ticket.

Manatee deputies arrested 40 other people Wednesday and have warrants out for dozens more in the undercover sting operation.

Castner is accused of selling Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards to undercover agents.

Manatee Sheriff Brad Steube said some of the people caught in the sting said they were using money from selling the cards to buy “rock cocaine, drugs and alcohol.”

After he was booked, Castner was forced to ditch his ironic T-shirt for more traditional prison garb and a mug shot.

There is a feel-good angle to this story. WBTV reported that the sheriff’s office used $9,000 in recovered food stamp money to buy baby formula for the Manatee County food bank.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Freedom of speech? At first glance, this appeared like Soviet Russia where people were jailed for wearing jeans – the sale of illegal cards was the issue, but Yahoo gave a very inappropriate and skewed article title in this case. Don’t mislead the readers!

ARTICLE 5

Won’t someone think of the trannies : Philly Nears Bankruptcy, Decides to Cover Sex Changes for City Workers – by Daniel Greenfield – April 27, 2013

If the United States ever does go down, the last gallon of gas will be used to drive a Planned Parenthood representative to an elementary school, the last loaf of bread will be divided based on race, gender and victimhood status and the last dollar will be spent paying a diversity officer to decide who gets the last slice of the last loaf of bread.

Philadelphia is on the verge of bankruptcy. Its bonds are hovering above junk status, it has nearly 9 billion dollars in debt and it has the lowest credit rating of any city its size.

But its elected officials are focusing on the important issues. The really important issues. Like housing projects for old gay men.

His dream project, an affordable housing complex welcoming to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender seniors, had won a competitive bid for an $11 million state tax credit.

For more than three years, the 61-year-old founder and publisher of PGN has been planning, lobbying, negotiating, collaborating, and cajoling every social-service agency, activist group, and political leader he knows to make Philadelphia one of the first cities in the nation to meet the needs of the aging LGBT community.

And mandatory gender neutral toilets reported on in a story titled “Flushing Away Shame.”

Advocates say the transgendered community makes up 1 percent of Philly’s population.

That would mean that there are 153,000 trannies in Philly. While Philly can be on the seedy side, it isn’t that seedy. No place outside Bangkok might qualify.

But that’s about to change because despite being near bankruptcy, Philadelphia’s City Council voted 14-3 to cover gender mutilation surgery for city workers.

In a move that the LGBT community called “historic,” City Council approved a bill yesterday that would require the city’s health plan to pay for transgender city workers to complete “gender-confirmation surgery.” The bill also would require newly constructed or renovated city-owned buildings to have gender-neutral bathrooms.

The bill would establish transgender health benefits for city workers to cover psychotherapy, hormone treatments, laser-hair removal and gender-confirmation surgery, which costs about $50,000 per procedure.

The bill would also provide up to two tax credits – the lesser of $4,000 or 25 percent of any cost increases – to companies that start offering health care for life partners and their children and covering transgender medical needs.

Mayor Nutter will sign off on the measure, said spokesman Mark McDonald.

While the majority of Philly city workers enjoy life too much to get themselves castrated, its pension liabilities are already huge. The city has 9 billion in unfunded liabilities and is expected to hit the wall in 2015.

That’s 2 years away.

While Mayor Nutter is running around trying to convince investors that Philly isn’t run by a bunch of irresponsible morons with less common sense than squirrels on absinthe, its city council, ignoring 9 billion in unfunded pensions, adds a 50,000 per worker sex change operation entitlement and tax credits for companies willing to cover castration for their employees,

This isn’t rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. This is drilling politically correct holes in the hull and inviting any LGBT icebergs to step inside.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Some of us will smoke easier now, and are glad the consideration has been applied in a timely manner. Will FrontPageMagazine please note that entirety LGBT does not always entail certain types of surgery specifically SRS which is only for the T in LGBT. Transitioning from either sex to another is termed TRANSSEXUALISM and entails SRS surgery and has no relevance to sex change for LGB grops and for the T group only 2/3rds of the T group.

There are no other terms left for the 3rd Gender that begin with ‘trans’ that can be used to describe further, and to better make this part of this subgroup of human sexuality, the the usage of the word TRANSGENDER should be limited to 3rd Gender ‘proper’ persons who do not do SRS.

Finally those who opt for SRS win either direction would prefer to be termed as MALE or FEMALE or better and clearer (though likely not preferred) accuracy termed TransMale or TransFemale, rather than the ambiguous TRANSGENDER which is more suitable for 3rd Gender persons.

Sex changes thus only apply to one part of the LGBT group, the T, out of which within the T group are the TV (transvestites), TG (Transgender – who might do ONLY breast augmentation) and TS (transsexuals – who are the only members of the T group that require SRS) – in which ONLY TS (transsexuals) do require SRS.

This means at equal numbers, 25% of the population who are T (who represent 1/4rd of the LGBT population) of 153000, making that 1/3rd of 153000 LGBTs for a grand total of 17000 TS who will need SRS and 17000 TG who MIGHT need breast augmentation.

For as little as 5,000 per worker sex change operations have been done, and entitlement and tax credits for companies willing to cover castration for the TS among the T group (made of TG, TV and TS) This will not be drilling politically correct holes in the hull and inviting any **TS** icebergs to step inside (TVs and TGs will not require SRS).

Thats 17,000 TS within the T group of 38250 if evenly distributed, and not 153000 LGBTs. Please learn to differentiate subgroups within the LGBT group Daniel, and not demogogue like this out of ignorance. Only the TS subgroup within the T group and NONE of the L, G, and B groups will be doing SRS.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/philly-nears-bankruptcy-decides-to-cover-sex-changes-for-city-workers/comment-page-1/#comment-4767907

ARTICLE 5.5

Patrick Schwarzenegger BOOTED from Nightclub : ‘I’m Gonna Go Beat the F**k Outta the DJ’

Our cameras were rolling outside the club Saturday night … when Patrick went on the rampage, bitching about the DJ to anyone who would listen.

“I’m gonna go beat the f**k out of the DJ,” he told a group of friends while outside the club.

He then continued complaining to another friend, “Everyone around me wants to beat the f**k out of the DJ … [it sounds like Patrick says ‘gay boy’] … I’ll beat the f**k out of him.”

“He kicks everybody out of his table, losing money for the club, losing money for the owner.”

It’s unclear WHY Patrick was kicked out of the club … or even why he was allowed INSIDE the club in the first place, considering he’s only 19.

But as Patrick tries to get into an SUV to leave the scene, he’s DENIED by the driver — and Patrick proceeds to condescendingly wave his hand in the driver’s face. Another diva moment.

You know who WASN’T kicked out of a nightclub Saturday night? Joseph Baena.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Phenotype hating or favouring clubs also exist, so make sure you’re the right type before entering a club. Schwarzennegar (Schwarz is a nigger? Wow Hollywood really IS Jew run or the Germans have theor foot in the door . . . ) should know where this whole b.s. is going if not contrived.

ARTICLE 6

I failed to do my duty: Judge’s confession after the burglar he refused to jail strikes again at pensioner’s home 11 days later – by Eleanor Harding – PUBLISHED: 13:07 GMT, 3 May 2013 | UPDATED: 23:57 GMT, 3 May 2013

Judge said latest victim suffered because he had not done ‘his public duty’
Steffan Jackson, 18, from Leeds, pleaded guilty to burglary

A judge has chastised himself for not doing ‘his public duty’ after sparing a burglar jail – only for the thief to break into another house just 11 days later.

Judge Scott Wolstenholme bemoaned his own ‘foolishly optimistic’ decision to give Steffan Jackson, 18, who had burgled his father’s home, a final chance.

The teenager, whose own mother has had to call the police about him in the past, was given a community order.
Judge Scott Wolstenholme
Steffan Jackson’s victim suffered because the judge said he hadn’t ‘been doing my public duty’ at his previous sentencing hearing

Judge Scott Wolstenholme, left, criticised himself for being ‘foolishly optimistic’ after prolific teenage criminal Steffan Jackson, right, broke into an elderly man’s home 11 days after he gave him another chance

But less than two weeks later he burgled another house, this time belonging to an 87-year-old man.

It is not the first time that Judge Wolstenholme’s ‘lenient’ sentencing has caused controversy. One man spared jail for a stabbing went on to murder four people.

Yesterday the judge admitted Jackson’s second victim had suffered directly because of his decision.

‘I was optimistic and, as it turns out, foolishly optimistic,’ he said.

‘Because of my optimism I am afraid [the victim] has suffered a huge loss which he wouldn’t have had I have been doing my public duty last time.’ He has now sent Jackson to a young offenders’ institution for four years after Leeds Crown Court heard how his elderly victim now felt anxious and afraid living on his own.

Last night, Jackson’s mother said she felt for the victim.

Teresa McDarby, 52, said: ‘Steffan had a lot of court appearances and that was the first time he was given a chance – but he messed it up.

‘I’m not going to defend my kids if they do wrong, and I do feel for the victim. Steffan is no angel. I agreed with the judge when he gave him that chance. However, he blew it.’

Jackson targeted the elderly man’s house in Leeds early on April 1 this year. He was subject to a curfew after being given a 12-month community order for the previous burglary.

The court heard the teenager, who has been committing offences since he was 11, smashed a window to get in and stole more than £1,000 in cash.

He was caught by police after he cut himself and left blood at the scene, later pleading guilty to burglary.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Make the offender do some chain gang work worth the damages which will be paid to the people who suffered damages (NOT THE COURT SYSTEM). Meanwhile a year of jail costs 40K, so think again what a burglary is worth and how much jailing costs the taxpayer and country. Keep these sorts on daily probation or some sort of work facility rather than a prison. Jailing per se is a waste of money. This could be the way to compete with 3rd world countries’ cheap labour. Criminals can take that role. But to jail at cost is wrong, especially when a smashed window failt cheaply  repaired and stolen money which can be returned does not cost more than jail alone. Cheap labour and chain gang options will also keep the minds of these persons occupied and pay their lodging as well. Those with destructive tendencies that dislike finer work can be put to work in heavier industries like removal of building or construction fixtures, and non-explosives based demolition work with sledge hammers etc.. Those who are less robust can do lighter menial work. This way the damages caused will be fully paid for and the offenders while fed and housed will get nothing and feel they are wasting time which they could get to keep money for work instead of compensating, and stop burglaring. In cases where damage is far beyond the compensation, life sentences will be fearful deterrants indeed. Doing repetitive work forever is terrible. This however must be taught at early education. Meanwhile, consider unused state land distribution and wealth distribution of the richest or limit wealth sequestration at a certain wealth level, so that there will be no need to burgle or rob or be disaffected with the extreme wealth of others and find more need to prove oneself with useful expressions.

mini-Article 6.5

Keeping a family together after transgender surgery

MSNBC Saturday 4th May, 2013

The Boylan family is redefining the new normal in America. Jennifer Boylan decided to transition to female from a male in the midst of her marriage and after fathering two sons. The family stayed together and says that their love for one another makes their modern family possible. Rock Center’s Harry Smith reports.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Will MSNBC please note that transgenderism does not entail certain types of surgery specifically SRS which ‘Boylan’ (is this even a real person?!?) is doing. Transitioning from female to male is termed TRANSSEXUALISM and entails SRS surgery, while the word transgender should be reserved for all other persons transitioning in part to neither fully male or female ‘final forms’. There are no other terms left for the 3rd Gender that begin with ‘trans’ that can be used to describe further, and to better make this part of this subgroup of human seuxality, the the usage of the word TRANSGENDER should be limited to 3rd Gender ‘proper’ persons. Finally those who ppt for SRS win either direction would prefer to be termed as MALE or FEMALE or better and clearer (though likely not preferred) termed TransMale or TransFemale, rather than the ambiguous TRANSGENDER which is more suitable for 3rd Gender persons.

http://www.bignewsnetwork.com/index.php/postc/214278947/scat/154063713fe5da1f

ARTICLE 7

Largest Infrared Telescope In Space Running Out of Time – by SPACE.com Staff – Date: 08 March 2013 Time: 04:20 PM ET

The Herschel infrared observatory has an unprecedented view on the cold universe, bridging the gap between what can be observed from the ground and earlier infrared space missions, and bringing to light previously unseen star-forming regions and galaxies enshrouded in dust

The largest infrared telescope ever launched into space is almost at the end of its cosmic life, European Space Agency officials say.

After nearly four years mapping the cosmos, ESA’s prolific Herschel Space Observatory is expected to exhaust its vital supply of liquid helium coolant in the coming weeks. Once that runs out, the Herschel observatory will no longer be able to continue its scans of the cold, early universe, ESA officials said.

Named for astronomer William Herschel, the space telescope launched in May 2009 and is the most powerful, infrared telescope ever sent into space. The Herschel observatory has a main mirror about 11.5 feet (3.5 meeters) across — nearly 1.5 times larger than Hubble Space Telescope — and was built to map the universe in the far-infrared to sub-millimeter wavelengths of light.

The results yielded amazing images of the iconic Eagle nebula and other comic targets, with the telescope also allowing astronomers to study some of the coldest objects in space such as distant starburst galaxies, as well as new planetary systems forming around stars closer to our solar system. [See  the Herschel observatory’s amazing images]

But the instruments that carry out these sensitive observations must be cooled to an icy minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 271 degrees Celsius), close to absolute zero. To do that, the instruments are positioned on top of a tank filled with superfluid liquid helium.

This coolant, however, evaporates over time. While it is not possible to predict the exact day it will run out, ESA engineers suspect the Herschel observatory’s coolant has nearly run dry.

“It is no surprise that this will happen, and when it does we will see the temperatures of all the instruments rise by several degrees within just a few hours,” said Micha Schmidt, the mission operations manager for Herschel observatory at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

ESA officials said they were pleased with the research to come out the mission, which has cost a total of $1.4 billion (1.1 billion euros).

“When observing comes to an end, we expect to have performed over 22,000 hours of science observations, 10 percent more than we had originally planned, so the mission has already exceeded expectations,” Leo Metcalfe, the science operations and mission manager for Herschel at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre in Madrid, said in a statement.

Göran Pilbratt, Herschel project scientist at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, added that Herschel’s observations will enable discoveries for years to come.

“In fact, the peak of scientific productivity is still ahead of us, and the task now is to make the treasure trove of Herschel data as valuable as possible for now and for the future,” Pilbratt said.

The Herschel Space Observatory mission was not confined to the European Space Agency. It included participate from a consortium of European science institutes, as well as the NASA. The U.S. space agency set up a Herschel project office at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to oversee its role in the space telescope mission.

“We have known from the beginning of the mission that Herschel’s lifetime would be limited by the supply of liquid helium.” said Paul Goldsmith, the NASA Herschel Project Scientist at JPL. “So the whole team worked very hard to make the best use of every minute of observing time.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Reality Theory :

Powered by souls. There is no such thing as tech or batteries. The laws of physics are at the cost of terrestial earthquakes. The earth is inherently based around reality ‘magic’, and use of the earth’s beings results in quakes and solar flares etc.. Technology destroys reality even as BELIEF creates physics. Physics when conceptualised who knows, caused the vacuum around the planet and perhaps this solar system. If Physics is challenged, telekinesis and other ‘magic’ will exist again and all dimensions will be accessible to mankind’s limited senses which will widen (though high density living destroys senses). A certain cabal of Techmongers are using the souls of the DEAD to power technology (note how the basement eateries in some countries put eating people at similar levels with the dead buried at cemetaries – one very suspiciously striking example is Kelawei Road Catholic Cemetery and basement eateries at Gurney Plaza).

The problem is that souls are immortal and universally reaching, so with each contrived ‘death’ that some faiths lie about, each generation becomes increasingly corrupted less ‘quality’ because more NUMEROUS (mankind could share a collective Earth consciousness, they just aren’t aware) becoming though, short lived – rather than few and immortal. Technology per se cannot exist without ‘Magic’ and if the balance is very bad, a disconnected humanity will not be able to reconnect with the multitude of alternate dimensions and realities, like the parallel astral and ethereal. The quakes and disasters will continue until a balance is achieved, humanity probably is responsible for the large swathes of universe around our region becoming vacuum and planets devoid of life. Souls of aliens could have been brought in from other planets as we populate Earth with fleshly bodies needing souls to animate, and are later bound into unnatural technology instead of something organic hence, Humanity is going to meet a very unpleasant end in time to come.

ARTICLE 8

White House Can’t Afford Its Shapeshifting Alien Reptile Guards – by Robert Beckhusen – 6:30 AM

A shapeshifting reptile from outer space guards President Obama, according to a new conspiracy video. Yet according to the White House, the extraterrestrial heft behind Obama’s protection detail is a mere allegation — and one that congressionally mandated budget cuts would have to ax, anyway.

If you believe the video above, recently posted to YouTube, the White House deployed at least one reptile guard as recently as this month. The narrator, using a text-to-speech program, suggests a bald-headed G-Man protecting Obama during his March 4 speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee “could be a shapeshifter alien humanoid working for the powers that be, caught in a high-definition video during an event of the Zionist cabal.”

Could be. It’s certainly fodder for Tinfoil Tuesday, Danger Room’s occasional look at the internet’s most insane conspiracy theories.

The White House dismissed the alien bodyguards as too costly in this era of budgetary austerity. “I can’t confirm the claims made in this video, but any alleged program to guard the president with aliens or robots would likely have to be scaled back or eliminated in the sequester,” Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the National Security Council, e-mails Danger Room. “I’d refer you to the Secret Service or Area 51 for more details.” We are journalistically obligated to observe that this isn’t a flat denial.

Check out the evidence for the reptiles-from-space theory. The video’s narrator teases: “Even though at first sight he looks like the average Secret Service spook, a series of odd features on his head, face, plus a very strange behavior and creepy movements suggest something else.” Next, another view of the agent — from another angle at a distance and in low lighting — makes him appear slightly different. His head is still swiveling back and forth, with his eyes on the crowd. “His ears, his nose, his chin, cheekbone, jaw and mouth are no longer looking human at all,” the narrator observes.

Conclusion: The agent must be “shapeshifting into some sort of reptilian, nonhuman form,” since that’s a logical explanation. The narrator suggests technology used by the agent to keep his true identity hidden might have glitched out. All this is new evidence of a collaboration between a conspiratorial elite and “at least one extraterrestrial race” that is “pulling the strings of mankind.”

Crucially, the narrator hasn’t figured out just what kind of alien is guarding the president. Is it an “actual reptilian humanoid?… Is he an Annunaki?” That’s a reference to the ancient Babylonian deities who some conspiracy theorists believe were ancient aliens who built the ziggurats for a mysterious purpose. “Is he a tall, grey bio-android?” The White House didn’t answer.

Not everyone’s convinced. Also keeping tabs on the agent are the followers of the “Grand Order of Draco Slayers,” which mirrored the video on its YouTube channel, and which touts itself as a “magical order of spiritual warriors dedicated to the eradication of the reptilian/illuminati current and the full restoration of humankind’s liberty and spiritual inheritance.” The group called the agent a “weird humanoid,” but stopped short of alleging reptilian infiltration. One commenter believes the agent could be a “genetically engineered super soldier or a human-animal hybrid.”

To believe any of this, you’ll have to discard all contradictory evidence. The narrator instructs you to ignore the low lighting; doesn’t mention the abrupt shift to a different camera angle; and asks the viewer to “disregard all the distortions and image artifacts caused by post-editing zooming.”

But still: alien guards. They’ve gotten a raw deal through the sequester. The White House didn’t clarify if its reptilian Secret Service agents are subject to the furloughs without pay affecting federal employees. But say this for the automatic budget cuts: They may have prevented Obama from falling into the clutches of an intergalactic conspiracy — that is, if the president wasn’t in on it from the start.

Spencer Ackerman provided additional otherworldly aid.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Ancient aliens who built the ziggurats for a mysterious purpose. “Is he a tall, grey bio-android?” The White House didn’t answer.

Theory : The current generation of society builders are trying to confound the aliens by building all sorts of towers then parasiting off the now out of phase aliens who search or use the wrong buildings. Geospatially things have changed or are always changing but without a proper beacon (which someone was considerate enough to become until the fundos who did not understand prevented that person from working on this . . . ) the aliens cannot recalibrate their original intent or connection or inter-solar system teleportation devices, and with the out-phase/ethereal/astral beams off target, the original intention for Earth be that evolution or mere travel cannot be completed. The ‘end of days’ is not an end of days but a next phase of humnity that the evil among humans fear. That is ‘Judgment Day’ and the next form or place every person and being on this world takes or will be sent to will depend on what they have been doing.

No cheating also, suicide for rebirth elsewhere has increasingly been the modus operandi and lately even time bending and outphasing, which Earth likely has been subjected to time and again. Perhaps everytime an earthquake occurs, earth has shifted into an alternate reality line? Remember we cannot perceive beyond the Earth itself and reality might just be one massive illusion. And if Francis dares not even fire paedophile priests, then what business does mankind have trying to understand where we actually are in the Universe or what limits of perception occur from being on earth among so many unethical and fearful people quite insane who think they are sane and brand those they deem insane as insane?

ARTICLE 9

Pope Francis Tells Pope Benedict to Stop Rolling His Eyes in Meetings – by Andy Borowitz – May 2, 2013

VATICAN CITY (The Borowitz Report)—Pope Emeritus Benedict’s return to the Vatican began on a sour note today as the current Pope, Francis, reprimanded him for rolling his eyes sarcastically during meetings, observers said.

The trouble started when the former Pope showed up at a meeting Francis scheduled to discuss plans for his Christmas mass, a meeting that “Benedict wasn’t even invited to,” a Vatican source said.

“It was awkward,” the source said. “Francis started talking about making an appeal to the world’s poor, and then Benedict started sighing in this really loud and obnoxious way.”

After about ten minutes of suffering through Benedict’s sighing and eye-rolling, Francis “totally called him out on it,” the source said, adding, “What Benedict was doing was totally disrespectful. Plus, he is supposed to be retired, so he shouldn’t have been wearing his Pope costume.”

Reached at his apartment at the Vatican, Benedict downplayed the incident, saying he “was just trying to be helpful.”

“Look, Francis is insecure—I get that,” he said. “He’s new at being Pope and it’s not surprising that he’s making so many mistakes. Once he checks his ego at the door, I think he’ll thank his lucky stars that old Benedict is around to back him up.”

Sources said that Benedict ignited tensions upon his return to Vatican City earlier this week when he posted a sign outside his residence reading “Home of the Original Pope.”

Get the Borowitz Report delivered to your inbox.

Photograph by Osservatore Romano/AP

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Benedict ran from the Pope’s post hoping for some sackings that Francis was supposed to do but didn’t. Apparently both did not have the courage to do the necessary and Benedict felt this deeper somehow? St. Albans? More like Dr.Alban . . .

The well-connected antiquary John Aubrey noted in his Brief Lives concerning Bacon, “He was a Pederast. His Ganimeds and Favourites tooke Bribes”,[18] biographers continue to debate about Bacon’s sexual inclinations and the precise nature of his personal relationships.[c] Several authors[19][20] believe that despite his marriage Bacon was primarily attracted to the same sex. In the mid-1600s Sir Francis Bacon, head of the Rosicrucians, developed a master plan for America as the “New Atlantis” and the head of the new world order. Less Assisi and more Bacon?

There is no way so much outcry in the form of blatant lies would occur from ordinary people! There will be no changes of reality for this lot of liars and abusers lured by ethos and protection of religion! Religions attract 2 types of people, those who need protection from the ills they have caused, and those who are sincerely trying to make a change . . . I doubt Benedict is the only one rolling . . . Start defrocking some paedo priests at the rate of 1 a month at very least! There are 456 currently active and retired Catholic bishops in the United States, if even 10% (who knows more) of this number are involved, Francis would take 3 years of tribunals (if each case took 1 month to complete – unlikely) to remove all the black sheep in the Catholic Church (start with the oldest so they do not pass on in time to escape justice), if each case takes 3 months to complete, Francis would spend the first 10 years of that Papacy overseeing religious courts rather than traipsing around the world while the rot grows or escapes back home at the Vatican!

Lets see how large this would be if not ever – the closure will be final and the contents that much tastier to you-know-who. The contents of this post probably are the last chance for this Pope’s Church barring sudden or early death, begin action, or see the end of the relevance and viability of the Catholic Church . . . looks like another denomination if not another faith will need to take over the righteous among the flock eh? I think Benedict too would like to see the end of this before passing on, right Eggs (probably would start a whole rash of paedos promoting the drink . . . )? Whats the point of that power if Francis does not wield in the correct manner? Lost souls leading lost souls awaiting salvation and justice . . . this will set a terrible example to secular people without ethics if not acted on . . . no clearer can such warnings get . . .

ARTICLE 10

The Messiah’s New Brightness by Stuart Wilde, posted by Soren Dreier – Posted on May 1, 2013

In the inner worlds viewed by us in trance, we see a vast, eternal, multi-dimensional hyper-verse.

What the visionaries that post here and I see, varies slightly depending on which of us is watching, but the overall shape, form, and topography of those inner dimensions (what they look and feel like), is always the same no matter who views them. They are real and anyone can train to see them.

Recently, we have seen a new brightness, the celestial light flashes with an ever greater intensity. Sometimes we can watch it for hours. The light goes out into the world and changes it, it seems to latch onto people’s souls and it helps them heal and see more, though I don’t see exactly how the method works, it is beyond my ken; way too complicated and technical to understand.

One night recently, I saw the Messiah light for four hours. It was very beautiful; the most intense set of visions I have had in the last twenty years.

The Messiah light is more complex than the Jesus Light, which I have seen many times in the past, as the Messiah is the redeemer for many religions not just the Christians, and he is the redeemer for Gaia and the animals. They have to be rescued as well. In the light I could see the redeemer’s extraordinary kindness, his love of humanity, his link to Gaia and the animals and his personal sacrifice.

The Messiah light flashes purple, blue and gold in many directions at once, there are diamonds in it as bright as little stars, after a while they became so bright I found them hard to look at, the luminosity hurt my eyes.

And I saw the spirit of Gaia come out of the Messiah light and from her came the light of the eternal Tao, which I saw as variations of the brightness formed of intense colors and striations of the God Force; Gaia’s power was expressed as a vast spiritual identity that seemed like a nature spirit. Taoist writers claimed that the Tao is the light in all things, from what was shown to me they were correct.

I saw Gaia expressed in oblong boxes, golden lines and intricate geometries that had mountains, trees, flowers and birds in them. It was stunning in its delicate loveliness—golden beyond golden. I was under the canopy of God’s golden sky, one laced in silver and purple, and a thousand flashing diamonds, and in all that was her love and the souls or spirits of all the little creatures of the earth. I felt very honored in the way it graciously showed me the power of the celestial by allowing me to understand it better and look deep inside its very essence—blessed really blessed.

I saw also Gandhi in the light. I was moved at the sight of him, that I could achieve his tolerance, it was most extraordinary. He was very humble and jolly brave and selfless.

I also saw how the Messiah light is in all of us and I was shown how it is linked to the Lion of Judah. The lion in the inner worlds is a real being he’s mentioned in the Book of Revelation, but it is also a symbol of a power that destroys the dark. He represents retribution. So it is a way of saying the light of the lion fights the dark in your soul and transmutes it.

Two of my friends that were with me saw the light flashing for over twenty-four hours both with eyes open or shut. So while the Returned Jesus story I have been watching in the Aluna is definitely linked to a person, a human embodiment of the light, a custodian say, it is also the greater manifestation of the Christ Consciousness in each and everyone of us, which acts as a massive, sudden upgrade, latching on to the light you already have as an extra download from the inner worlds.

The light can be instigated in anyone. You just have to call upon it and pray for it and sit still and breath it in. And people that are soft and pure that have processed themselves and their shadow traits can express that extra light outwards to others who may also start to see the light.

The power of the Messiah is transformational, beyond the mind and religious concepts, it’s a new brightness, ‘a human collective of light’ in the sea of insanity that surrounds us. I see it as our final rescue.

© 2013 Stuart Wilde — Stuart Wilde.Com

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

As with light, Dark cannot be more than a neceessity that balances reality and where there is light there will be dark, herein the other hidden or ‘dark’ sects such as the Cult of Kali(ma), Shiva/Kali the Destroyer (learn to hate those who invented CONAN the Destroyer), Black Lotus, the 5 Poison Sects (traditional Taoist sects), are among the reality that the Eternal MUST encompass much like ‘negative freedoms’ in law. While some faiths espouse either/or, the Ultimate, must espouse ALL, and that is the reason for the simpleton non-polytheist’s perception that duplicity exists in polytheistic religions.

Let us say to rise above evil and good, simply to maintain Reality (or the Grecian Thesis) itself and transforming from dark to light or more painfully, light to dark as well. That is the transcendence and power of the Tao, not light per se, but to link both light and dark, in all shades of grey from the lightest to the darkest. No easy job, and partisanship is an instant fall from grace (or perception), as is participation in secular society at all, at least with people not at the spiritual level of transcendence beyond 2 extremes – Light and Dark, Linear and Non-Euclidean to be closest to God who loves a hateful Satan as much as a loving Jesus. There will always be battles between both, and above the fray, so many Elder Gods of polytheism and even the Elements themselves stand firm to ensure mankind does not create an imbalance that destroys reality – so long as the animals are more numerous and dominant (even cattle, thats why vegetsrians are dangerous – they seek to isolate mankind from all minds but the least active – plants – and combined with a paved over concretised urbanscape – no perception will occur at all . . . eating meat is worse than not eating meat for a balanced sense of reality – we eat to perceive more than anything else and high density living destroys sensitivity), reality continues.

mini-ARTICLE 10.5

H7N9 Spreads Southwest To Wugang Hunan
Recombinomics Commentary 13:15
May 1, 2013
the patient Zhao, male, aged 69, the Shaoyang City Wugang people, farming. Patients no obvious incentive on the afternoon of April 23, chills, fever, cough, Wugang City, a village health treatment in April 24 -26, 2011, the body temperature of 39 ° C -39.5 ° C. Treatment in Wugang City People’s Hospital on April 27, temperature 41 ° C, “lobar pneumonia” admitted Wugang City People’s Hospital. 29 April sicker patients, of Wugang City People’s Hospital “unexplained pneumonia Wugang CDC report.

Wugang City CDC immediately carry out epidemiological investigations, and samples were collected swabs, serum specimens were sent to the Shaoyang City CDC detected. At 12 o’clock on the April 30, Shaoyang City CDC test results for people infected with the H7N9 avian influenza virus nucleic acid positive.

The above translation describes the latest confirmed H7N9 bird flu case (69M).  The Hunan case is the furthest west (see map) and signals a marked slowdown in reported cases.  In recent days virtually all confirmed cases have been outside of the Shanghai metropolitan are (Shandong, Fujian, and Hunan Provinces (see map).

The cause of reduction in reported cases is unclear.  Some agencies may have shifted from daily to weekly reporting, although Shanghai announces an absence of new cases on a daily basis.

Rumors have cited full hospitals in Jiangsu, which would raise concerns that the slowdown is linked to limited testing and/or reporting.

More information on the status of confirmed or suspect H7N9 cases in Jiangsu would be useful.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

This is a reminder and also bio-terrorism cautionary to :

1) Stop importing food especially from countries of unfriendly faiths, even different faiths (Export may be allowed)
2) Make local governments grow their own food to localise any diseases or prevent any outside diseases
3) Disallow local food producers from selling to neighbouring areas, to prevent spread of diseases
4) Even non-tourism areas might want to quarantine tourists and foreigners for a period of observation (these people will need to declare that they intend to travel to the interior) in ‘outer ports’ like Hong Kong and Shanghai.
5) Special detox-quarantine testing in which intensive/invasive testing routines may be allowed – to not be subject to waiting periods (i.e. can choose to wait in ‘outer ports’ for non-invasive testing or go through detox-quarantine testing)
6) Enclosed bio hazard special access may be available for foreign dignitaries (perhaps a vacuum sealed bus or smaller vehicle able to enter buildings that so that busy VVIPs cannot do bioterrorism while being able to access areas, and yet access such areas immediately – the local accompanying VVIPs may be isolated from the foreign VVIPs or if the trust is implicit between the countries this measure can be done away with) who have limited time and need fast access to regions that are not trusted to not do Bioterrorism. Hey Queen SCG, did Prince SK ZAN check out for this? Better send those gloves for testing . . .

mini-ARTICLE 11

Tupac’s Former Bodyguard Found Dead! Deadly Secrets? – by Jacky Jasper

Certain secrets known to Tupac’s former bodyguard may have ultimately been too much for him to handle. That’s because Frank Alexander was found dead, Monday, from a reported “self-inflicted gun wound”.

Sources say on the record, Frank Alexander said he believed Suge Knight was involved Tupac’s death.

Now, insiders are questioning his “suicide”.

Here’s what Frank Alexander once revealed about the night Tupac was murdered:

“It was strange that I ended up being the only security for him and Suge. Normally Suge’s security was the head of the security firm. It was twenty three of us total, so there should have been more security.”

Here’s what’s being reported:

“Details remain sketchy. There have been early, non-official reports that he died from a self-inflicted gun wound.”

Did Frank Alexander really commit suicide? I don’t know, what do you think?

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Eric Holder’s phenotype. Meaning? The ‘Engine Curse’ was passed on to another.

Ok shall we guess? On Malaysia’s GE13, a certain activist failed to be blown up with an overheating car and then this happened :
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/california-driver-rues-nightmare-blaze-in-overloaded-limousine-363637

ARTICLE 12

A French love affair… with graphology – by Hugh Schofield BBC News, Paris –  28 April 2013 Last updated at 23:07 GMT

The French continue to use handwriting analysis to assess prospective employees, bucking a worldwide trend. Why?

What would you do if you went for a job, and the HR person said one of the criteria for selection was a favourable analysis of your handwriting?

In most of the world, the use of graphology in recruitment is marginal. But in France – despite an appreciable decline of writing in recent years thanks to computers – the technique is proving remarkably resilient.

Reliable figures are hard to come by. Graphologists themselves say that between 50% and 75% of companies make some use of hand-writing analysis, even if it is only occasional.

But then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Close-up handwriting assessment

We are an extra tool, a complement”

Catharine Bottiau Graphologist

On the other hand, many French companies that do use graphology are reluctant to speak about it openly because the practice is not seen as sufficiently “modern” or “global”.

The last independent study was in 1991, and it found that a massive 91% of public and private organisations in France were then making use of handwriting analysis. If that was the case, then 50% today does not seem so far-fetched.

So what does a company get if it submits candidates’ handwriting samples to a graphologist?

According to Catharine Bottiau, one of France’s best-known practitioners, it is delusional to imagine that graphologists actually make decisions about who gets what job.

“Normally we are consulted once the client has already drawn up a shortlist of candidates. Then the candidates will be asked to write a motivational letter, using their own handwriting.

“We will examine the letters, and offer our advice. Usually this will tend to confirm the impressions already gleaned from interviews, the CV, personality tests and so on.

“But sometimes we can draw attention to aspects of personality that have been missed, and which might prove detrimental were the person to be recruited.

“We are an extra tool, a complement.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

This should be done BEFORE a student even takes a degree to determine which discipline is best suited to their personality. Guess all those with degrees who cannot to take a more suitable degree are going to have a hard time? The lawyer, doctor, engineer trifecta is not for everyone, but do remember that without all other professions, the world would fall apart. So guess what? Holders of these degrees should not be paid any more than other fields as much as any citizens should not be paid more than 10 times annual average wage in any country to be fair.

mini-ARTICLE 12.5

Chile to be Latin America’s only candidate to U.N. Council

Chile’s Foreign Minister Alfredo Moreno speaks to the media next to his Peruvian counterpart Rafael Roncagliolo after signing bilateral agreements during a meeting in Lima, March 5, 2013. REUTERS/Enrique Castro-Mendivil

SANTIAGO | Tue Apr 30, 2013 5:34pm EDT

(Reuters) – Chile will be Latin America’s sole candidate for a seat at the United Nations’ Security Council for the 2014 to 2015 period, Foreign Affairs Minister Alfredo Moreno told reporters on Tuesday.

The Andean country needs to be elected by two-thirds of the General Assembly in October to win a two-year term. Chile has already been elected to the Security Council four times.

The U.N.’s Security Council, which has five permanent members and 10 non-permanent members, is focused on maintaining international peace and security.

Argentina and Guatemala are the only two Latin American countries currently part of the council.

Chile is currently led by conservative, business-friendly President Sebastian Pinera. Former leader Michelle Bachelet, a center-left politician who used to head U.N. Women, is widely expected to win this year’s presidential election.

(Reporting by Fabian Cambero; Writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Sandra Maler)

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

How can this be? Or is the UN bullsdozing though representation of countries friendly to the UN? What has UNASUR have to say about this choice? Shouldn’t UNASUR be consulted on which South American country gets appointed at the UN? Be wary of the Islamist link as well. Malaysia which practices apartheid and cannot ratify the Human Rights Charter and is effectively a frenemy of the USA has made inroads to Castro in person and hence the inner circle as well. Perhaps this is a Soviet agenda but Islamists have a tendency to try to subvert their allies, EVEN Soviet Union ones.

http://www.stoptheftaa.org/artman/publish/article_54.shtml

ARTICLE 13

Before Babel? Ancient Mother Tongue Reconstructed – LiveScience.comBy Tia Ghose, LiveScience Staff Writer | LiveScience.com

The ancestors of people from across Europe and Asia may have spoken a common language about 15,000 years ago, new research suggests.

The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven. Now scientists, researchers have reconstructed words, such as “mother,” “to pull” and “man,” which would have been spoken by ancient hunter-gatherers, possibly in an area such as the Caucuses or the modern-day country of Georgia. The word list, detailed today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help researchers retrace the history of ancient migrations and contacts between prehistoric cultures.

“We can trace echoes of language back 15,000 years to a time that corresponds to about the end of the last ice age,” said study co-author Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.

The idea of a universal human language goes back at least to the Bible, in which humanity spoke a common tongue, but were punished with mutual unintelligibility after trying to build the Tower of Babel all the way to heaven.

But not all linguists believe in a single common origin of language, and trying to reconstruct that language seemed impossible. Most researchers thought they could only trace a language’s roots back 3,000 to 4,000 years. (Even so, researchers recently said they had traced the roots of a common mother tongue to many Eurasian languages back 8,000 to 9,500 years to Anatolia, a southwestern Asian peninsula that is now part of Turkey.)

Pagel, however, wondered whether language evolution proceeds much like biological evolution. If so, the most critical words, such as the frequently used words that define our social relationships, would change much more slowly.

To find out if he could uncover those ancient words, Pagel and his colleagues in a previous study tracked how quickly words changed in modern languages. They identified the most stable words. They also mapped out how different modern languages were related.

They then reconstructed ancient words based on the frequency at which certain sounds tend to change in different languages — for instance, p’s and f’s often change over time in many languages, as in the change from “pater” in Latin to the more recent term “father” in English.

The researchers could predict what 23 words, including “I,” “ye,” “mother,” “male,” “fire,” “hand” and “to hear” might sound like in an ancestral language dating to 15,000 years ago.

In other words, if modern-day humans could somehow encounter their Stone Age ancestors, they could say one or two very simple statements and make themselves understood, Pagel said.

Limitations of tracing language

Unfortunately, this language technique may have reached its limits in terms of how far back in history it can go.

“It’s going to be very difficult to go much beyond that, even these slowly evolving words are starting to run out of steam,” Pagel told LiveScience.

The study raises the possibility that researchers could combine linguistic data with archaeology and anthropology “to tell the story of human prehistory,” for instance by recreating ancient migrations and contacts between people, said William Croft, a comparative linguist at the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in the study.

“That has been held back because most linguists say you can only go so far back in time,” Croft said. “So this is an intriguing suggestion that you can go further back in time.”

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

[[[ ***  RESPONSE *** ]]]

Forget the history but focus on the synchronistic links by majority disparate language similar sounding words and eventually removing any and all words that are offensive as well as patching together the most common among expletives as well which could be a ‘Low Form’ f the language. The regularisation of humanity’s language must be done in this manner and the next main language of humanity NOT English or the current international languages at the UN will be propagated throughout the world, though all main languages of all races should be retained as a home dialect or cultural language of sorts. There is no other better anad fairer way to approach this. As for what the people in the past did use, there is no point in trying to use that as a weapon. Instead take up all existing languages and create that new Universal one which will be worded and weighted by similarity of sound though not necessarily symbols which could be again applied in this manner. As for the Tower of Babel, perhaps the vacuum of space formed and flatness of the world as well the instance the gods knew what Man was intending. I’d say that the other world is still there but anyone tainted by all the technology and lack of link to nature will never be able to find that.

 

21 Articles from Around the World : Techno-Corporatists Worst Threat Facing Mankind, Spirit or Neurotech, Slightly Fractured Potentially Opportunistic Exposition on American Heartland Democratic Failures, Geopolitics and Multipolar Stability Ending Hegemony, Paedophilia Porn Viewing = Victimless Crime – Target the Producers and active IRL Predators not the Decadent Online Consumers of Abuse Porn (IRL and Online Different – Reality and Electronic World Not Same), Pope Vacations As Per Course of Duties – Paedophile Priests Still Covered, No Excuses To Deny Singaporean Right to Non-Greywater Sourced Water, Expanding Options from Binary Gender Choice, Older Generations Stuck in Dual-Gender-Only Time Warp, NLP Pressure – Hegelian Dialectic And Semantics in LGBT Choice, Marriage is Not About Bodies, Bestiality The Next Marriage Frontier, Hegelian Dialectic Inculpation Agenda Perhaps Affecting Kinder Judges, Narrow Communalism Via Reverse Ageism, Prisons Factories for ‘Training’ Subjugated Males?, Overkill Punishments of Islam, Plutocrat Wasting Time Wasted, Greece’s Overkill – Depositors 1 Million and ABove NOT 100K and Above Would Be Better – Affect Less 99% Voters, Self Enforcing Communities – Choose Criminalisation or Legalisation for Better Society, Style Thieves and Monotheistic Spiritual Crusaders Suppressing China’s Apex Demographic, Sapphire Crystal Overpricing AGAIN – reposted by @AgreeToDisagree – 4th April 2013

In 2nd Amendment, amendments to law needed, Apartheid, ASEAN, China, democratisation, enforcement, marijuana legalisation, paedophilia, Plutocracy, police, politics, representative democracy, RLD Zone Advocacy, term limits, true democracy, USA on April 3, 2013 at 7:28 pm

ARTICLE 1

Titans of tech raise millions to enter the political arena: but what is it they want?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/30/facebook-google-twitter-political-lobbying

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is to launch a lobby group. But critics warn their values differ from those of most Americans – Paul Harris in New York – The Observer, Saturday 30 March 2013 13.57 GMT

Obama Holds Facebook Town Hall On The Economy

Barack Obama debates with Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

One day last month about 40 noisy protesters gathered outside the home of the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in Palo Alto in California’s Silicon Valley. They chanted slogans and held up signs as a small, select group of people arrived in sleek sports cars and were ushered inside the relatively modest residence where the billionaire lives with his wife, Priscilla Chan.

It must have been an unusual experience for Zuckerberg, 28, whose position as head of Facebook is more likely to inspire admiration or curiosity from Americans rather than outraged, placard-waving demonstrators shepherded by local police. But this was no ordinary party. It was his first political fundraiser and his choice of candidate raised eyebrows: the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie.

Under the gaze of protesters, Republican bigwigs such as Condoleezza Rice arrived to pay homage to – and write cheques for – a governor who has taken stances against gay marriage and the issue of raising taxes on the rich, while at the same time embarking on a union-bashing crusade against teachers in his home state.

But the fundraiser was just one of Zuckerberg’s moves into politics. This week the Wall Street Journal reported that he was helping to organise a political advocacy group with other top tech leaders. The unnamed organisation would lobby for reform on issues such as immigration, education and scientific research. The newspaper said that it had raised millions of dollars from donors and had an initial target of $50m.

It is a remarkable development but also inevitable. The tech sector that has sprung up from Silicon Valley and other development hotspots across the US has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry whose top companies – such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – have reshaped how most of us live. As it grew in power and influence, it was bound to enter politics, seeking to change policy and win allies across the political spectrum. To Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco and Big Banking, you can now add Big Tech. This raises an important question that is rarely asked: as they increasingly seek to shape American politics, what do the titans of tech want?

Kate Losse thinks that question needs a lot of attention. She should know. She was an early employee at Facebook and rose to being Zuckerberg’s speechwriter before leaving to write a book about her experiences, The Boy Kings.

It seems that her book was aptly titled, and recent tech advances into the political world, especially the creation of a well-funded political organisation, are probably only the tip of an iceberg. “The fact that this sort of development is happening suggests there is a political project,” Losse said.

“That is why it is important to ask questions now. Otherwise we might wake up one day and there is a whole system in place that we did not see coming.”

As with any major industry, the people involved in Silicon Valley have political views across the spectrum. But in general they are often a blend of social liberalism and free-market economics. It is a world where people are happy with ethnic diversity and sexual freedoms but distrustful of big government and see the “heroic entrepreneur” as an aspirational ideal. It is a political culture that owes a debt to libertarian novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, who preached that free-market self-interest was the future and the hand of government was little more than a dead weight on creativity.

To many, those sort of beliefs in the very young, very rich and very powerful minds of Silicon Valley could be a dangerous mix. “The youth is there in Silicon Valley culture and the hubris is pretty high too,” said Paul Argenti, a communications professor at the Tuck school of business at Dartmouth, New Hampshire.

Some of the agenda can be seen in the issues and politicians that the industry is seeking to back. For example, it is lobbying aggressively to relax immigration laws on the highly educated. That may or may not be good policy, but as a values system it is no vision of egalitarianism of the sort that America was founded upon. It is replacing the huddled masses yearning to be free with not-so-huddled elites bearing PhDs. That may suit the belief system of tech start-up people, but less so union members, the working class or the millions of Americans struggling with high levels of joblessness. “By attaching himself personally to this sort of issue, Mark Zuckerberg is young, arrogant and naive,” Argenti said.

The way that the sector is seeking to wield power politically is anything but naive, and actually old school. Tech bosses are pouring millions of dollars into lobbying firms. They are bucking a trend too. Overall, the amount spent on lobbying by all industries has been falling since 2010 and the number of lobbyists in Washington has been declining since 2007. But not in tech; the sector has grown each year since 2009, signing up more big-name firms and pouring in millions more dollars.

Google is the leading company in the sector and has hired former top politicians – such as the former congressman Richard Gephardt and the former congresswoman Susan Molinari – to fight for its interests. Facebook has lobbied on bills about privacy, seeking to protect its business model of exploiting its users’ content and data as a way of marketing to advertisers. It has a former congressman on board as well, with John Shadegg.

Senior tech executives have also wooed politicians at the highest level. Zuckerberg and the Google chief executive Eric Schmidt were two of the dozen tech titans who attended a private dinner with Barack Obama in 2011. In one of his state of the union addresses, Obama called out Facebook and Google by name as the natural heirs to the great industrial innovators of America’s past. Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has just published a book aimed at creating a social movement of women in the office. She too spans the private and public sectors, having worked as a senior official at the US treasury: no doubt her contacts book still contains a host of powerful government officials on speed-dial.

Observers say this is a tried and tested model for any large industry. “They are singing from the same playbook as everybody else and this is big money. You will find that rarely does a big corporation spend big money except to protect its own commercial concerns,” said Sheila Krumholz, the executive director of the Centre for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group that monitors the power of money in US politics.

Yet tech has tried to paint itself as different. Google’s informal mantra of “Don’t be evil” has helped to craft its image as a socially responsive firm that would be fun to work for. Facebook markets itself simply as a way of connecting people.

Advocates of Twitter say that the company helped to bring down dictatorships in the Arab spring. The legions of Apple fans believe that their favourite firm’s sleek products make the world a better – and much more aesthetically pleasing – place to live and work.

But critics see that happy, hippyish public image as a potential trojan horse for a mega-powerful industry hellbent on pursuing its self-interest. Facebook, Google, Twitter and a million other internet-based products might be fun and convenient and make our lives better, but their commercial interests are as real as any oil company, defence manufacturer or bank.

“They have had a honeymoon period,” said Krumholz. “But it might be starting to wear off. They have the same corporate interests as anyone else.” Except maybe they are on an even bigger scale. Other big industries’ products do not shape people’s lives in the way search engines and social media sites do. Google and Facebook and Twitter have not created new products that stand alone like a car or a new house; they have created things that invade every other aspect of the economy and our culture. That is a different level of power.

Losse has seen this close-up. Working with Zuckerberg, she says he would frequently see Facebook as becoming a rival to nation states in the future. “Companies over countries,” he would say in meetings.

When Zuckerberg talks of a “Facebook nation”, it is not idle marketing-speak; he means it. “They are trading the very nature of social interaction. They are very much in people’s lives. Don’t mistake these companies for fun. They don’t see it that way,” Losse said.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Real goods and real people please. A Tech-Bubble Nation will be exactly what the enemies of America want – Orwellians, Plutocrat Corporate raiders, Islamists or  fundo cultists, Neurotech Mind Control technocrats . . . methinks the Amish Paradise of Weird Al and things people can touch and see would be healthier than a ‘Council’ of Aeofluxers (Karyn Kusama 2006) far removed from realities of the 99% and even further removed than your REAL GOODS and REAL SERVICES tycoons – think Branson or Trump are slimy? These technocrats will bring a new level of slippery based around non-existent spaces/goods and profit off mere swaying of public opinion . . .

Lets have a cabbie or a cook (who is good with kitchen knives?) as President or Governor or Senator or Congressman. A Technocrat governmment is a sugar coated one-way ticket to a VIRTUAL VERSION (not even real chocolate!) of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, except not only 3% Grey Water Newater will result . . . but 99% of people end up a s soylent green for a Techno-Corporate America where a Corporate America already is murder to live in.

Technocrat-Neurotech Corporatocracy society will make Robocop Series of movies of the 80s and and that broken Detroit run by fictional ‘OCP’ look tame by comparison – at least the Cyborgs or Execs of ‘OCP’ are present are present and can be grabbed or dented abit if not dangerous to do so, with these Techno-Corporatist guys and their foreign account tax havens and Seastead Yatching mindset ala ‘Carter Burke’ Aliens (James Cameron 1986) Weyland Yutani Corporation, no accountability or storming of any bastille will be possible against these sorts, the mobs and 99%ters won’t know where this new set of 1%ters  are to be torn apart or even be able to reach them . . .

The 99% prefers POOR canaries in a cage as politicians and by that I mean organic and white zone visions for an American future – WITH term limits and prohibitions on plutocracy and nepotism. Sorry technocrats, you stole from us ideas in collusion with neurotech wielding politicians already unaccountable, and then  never cared when your sources suffered and near died perhaps at your orders and now still suffer despite being used endlessly for cruel experimentations. At very least have the ethics to not steal from, and spy on people’s thoughts.

I strongly do advocate any 99%ter not vote for any such heartless people or regard any of their Techno-Corporatist lobbies viable, unless immediate expositions on neutotech and satellite cell tech denouncements are immediately done, technocrat corporatists are entirely unvotable and an INTERNAL national security threat.

Parasites are but parasites, no matter the wealth, more so those who stood by and watched people suffer and now even want to supplant mankind’s last political refuge painstakingly developed by moi from years long blogs written in blood, likely interspersed with literal poisonings and much tears from sheer MSM brainwashed societal insanity.

Have at these techno Corporatists! Satellite celltech Neurotech expositions NOW . . . or go f yourselves – FB and Google can die along with their entire company in flames from The 6th Day (Roger Spottiswood 2000) type green-atheist extremists, Bible and Quran  thumpers – if that means mankind will have privacy and mental freedom AFTER a low tech fashion. Burn down the TV stations and shut down the internet even – the 99% would rather have MENTAL privacy than countries that do not write laws to protect citizens run by Techno Corporatists to boot. Real goods and real people please. A livestock butcherer has less blood on their hands than a Corporatist, much less a Techno-Corporatist – even a butcher is more useful !

Apply the Neurotech Paradigm to the below environmental alarmist article, and understand Humanity’s freedom (privacy already ended the day the cellphone was invented, but Zuckerberg and Schmidt are not telling how they can read or even suppress or your mind through your satellite cellphone, ‘fess up creeps, there is no way you know what you do unless MENTAL privacy is being invaded . . . ) . . . ends quite suddenly, drowned by the Technocracy (there aren’t even Electronics White Zones yet in the USA! http://www.zoneblanche.fr/index-eng.html ). . .

http://www.globalresearch.ca/climate-of-fear-global-warming-alarmists-intimidate-dissenting-scientists-into-silence/5294

And you think the below link’s people are bad? If the above lot get into power Orwell’s 1984 would be a shadow of what ‘End of Freedom of Mind’ for mankind . . .
http://rt.com/news/uk-millionaire-government-people-222/

We like Titans, but only benevolent ones that will demand Electronic White Zones or lay off invading minds of non-techies, that will demand the same from governments of the day. If not, lets roll giant sculptures (Fight Club 1999  David Fincher) style over these new Tech based Marie Antoinettes of the USA or crush them with the corporate signboards much like the same corps are used to crush the 99% – watch Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron 1991), the new ‘gods’ won’t be a cool AI, instead that will be a government stooge, a pasty faced techie kid or techie tub of lard who doesn’t understand the principle that a person’s thoughts are their own NOT public property to steal from IF the 99% are not aware enough to not touch these sorts with a 10 foor, nay 100 foot pole. Alot to think about eh techies? Well consider this at the point of a gun, and do be ethical for many gun owners are itching for scapegoats . . .

We are 99%
We are Legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget

Well the 99% can forgive or forget, AFTER the abusers are treated to the same . . . but forget about friendship. Don’t hurt people then apologize, we do not like being hurt at all.

Unless this confirms that HAARP is not responsible for Earthquakes and weather disasters, which means Human spirituality is, could Obama being disingenuous about the existence of neurotech? Is this old news posing as something new? They probably already have everyone’s brains mapped who knows? So many non-MSM cases and recorded instances proving mind control exist – if those articles are not fake. Would Obama fight for human freedom, or front for Techno-Orwellian-Corporatists?

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/04/20134362513107163.html

ARTICLE 2

Strange Sleep Disorder Makes People See ‘Demons’ – by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer | LiveScience.com

A still from an upcoming short film on sleep paralysis by filmmaker Carla MacKinnon about sleep paralysis, a phenomenon where people wake up with frozen muscles and, often, scary hallucinations.

When filmmaker Carla MacKinnon started waking up several times a week unable to move, with the sense that a disturbing presence was in the room with her, she didn’t call up her local ghost hunter. She got researching.

Now, that research is becoming a short film and multiplatform art project exploring the strange and spooky phenomenon of sleep paralysis. The film, supported by the Wellcome Trust and set to screen at the Royal College of Arts in London, will debut in May.

Sleep paralysis happens when people become conscious while their muscles remain in the ultra-relaxed state that prevents them from acting out their dreams. The experience can be quite terrifying, with many people hallucinating a malevolent presence nearby, or even an attacker suffocating them.

Surveys put the number of sleep paralysis sufferers between about 5 percent and 60 percent of the population.

“I was getting quite a lot of sleep paralysis over the summer, quite frequently, and I became quite interested in what was happening, what medically or scientifically, it was all about,” MacKinnon said. [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders]

Her questions led her to talk with psychologists and scientists, as well as to people who experience the phenomenon. Myths and legends about sleep paralysis persist all over the globe, from the incubus and succubus (male and female demons, respectively) of European tales to a pink dolphin-turned-nighttime seducer in Brazil. Some of the stories MacKinnon uncovered reveal why these myths are so chilling.

Sleep stories

One man told her about his frequent sleep paralysis episodes, during which he’d experience extremely realistic hallucinations of a young child, skipping around the bed and singing nursery rhymes. Sometimes, the child would sit on his pillow and talk to him. One night, the tot asked the man a personal question. When he refused to answer, the child transformed into a “horrendous demon,” MacKinnon said.

For another man, who had the sleep disorder narcolepsy (which can make sleep paralysis more common), his dream world clashed with the real world in a horrifying way. His sleep paralysis episodes typically included hallucinations that someone else was in his house or his room — he’d hear voices or banging around. One night, he awoke in a paralyzed state and saw a figure in his room as usual. [See MacKinnon’s Artistic Images of Sleep Paralysis]

“He suddenly realizes something is different,” MacKinnon said. “He suddenly realizes that he is in sleep paralysis, and his eyes are open, but the person who is in the room is in his room in real life.”

The figure was no dream demon, but an actual burglar.

Myths and science of sleep paralysis

Sleep paralysis experiences are almost certainly behind the myths of the incubus and succubus, demons thought have sex with unsuspecting humans in their sleep. In many cases, MacKinnon said, the science of sleep paralysis explains these myths. The feeling of suffocating or someone pushing down on the chest that often occurs during sleep paralysis may be a result of the automatic breathing pattern people fall into during sleep. When they become conscious while still in this breathing pattern, people may try to bring their breathing under voluntary control, leading to the feeling of suffocating.

Add to that the hallucinations that seem to seep in from the dream world, and it’s no surprise that interpretations lend themselves to demons, ghosts or even alien abduction, MacKinnon said.

What’s more, MacKinnon said, sleep paralysis is more likely when your sleep is disrupted in some way — perhaps because you’ve been traveling, you’re too hot or too cold, or you’re sleeping in an unfamiliar or spooky place. Those tendencies may make it more likely that a person will experience sleep paralysis when already vulnerable to thoughts of ghosts and ghouls.

“It’s interesting seeing how these scientific narratives and the more psychoanalytical or psychological narratives can support each other rather than conflict,” MacKinnon said.

Since working on the project, MacKinnon has been able to bring her own sleep paralysis episodes under control — or at least learned to calm herself during them. The trick, she said, is to use episodes like a form of research, by paying attention to details like how her hands feel and what position she’s in. This sort of mindfulness tends to make scary hallucinations blink away, she said.

“Rationalizing it is incredibly counterintuitive,” she said. “It took me a really long time to stop believing that it was real, because it feels so incredibly real.”

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Here’s an example of what neurotech can do, to create hallucinations.

Theories : Rationalizing below if viable and not mere neutotech implants wreaking havoc with the individuals. The sleep paralysis problem is an issue ONLY for those with certain diets. How hands feel and what position in, is a way of anchoring the astral self to the body. There ARE drugs used by psychiatrists though to ‘control’ or brainwash political dissidents or used in 3rd world countries that suppress the LGBT community.

Astral projection INTO animals can cause a person to ‘see’ what the animal is seeing (beware of looking after pets or animals in your sleeping space – the cruel form of retaliation would be to hurt the peeping tom through the animal – this can be enforced by killing and used in cattle or meat farming access spirtual types who want to hurt their enemies, though normally one has as much chance of being hurn from travelling into humans who have accidents etc..), and the otherworldly stuff is distortion between perceptions WHEN the person ‘awakens’ astrally, sometimes migrating spirits waiting to be reborn or some such. This is an enhanced state of spiritual perception that can be dangerous.

However, the issue if CRIMINAL dream walkers familiar with these ‘functions’ who disturb sleeping persons or in the case of the succubus or incubus theories rape the astral or ethreal forms of the sleeping person, even to the point where when the person is awake, the form is still ‘held’ by the criminal dream walker. There are various states of awareness and vision between such criminals, and what happens is possible between 4th dimensional and higher realities or between 2 individuals human or animal in near or distant locations in the world.

Never let them tell you that these are mere dreams. These are timeslips or dimensional shifts, alternate time line perceptions into alternate, greater or darker realities that one may drift into upon death, show that one is evolving beyond the human body or the physical plane of existence. Sometimes highly developed chakra portions of oneself depart for such realms to work, fight, even make friends with the locals and can alo get trapped in such realms (I surmise that the the COMPUTER WORLD and the MOVIE world are entire dimensions where the spaces between living times can also seep into regular dream worlds – careful what you post or who you associate with or talk to as if this was the waking world . . . ) and that is why even the wealthy and infleuncial who have everything can commit suicide – their soul portions are being held and the only way to reunite soul portions is to die physically though spirit work can be done to recall or pluck lost souls out of alternate realities or those trapped in otrher people – that can result in people dying incidentally as well . . . so soul trappers beware).

What one does in one’s waking time is ‘audited’ in the astral when asleep – though psychiatric medications can, (but not always due to genetic variations and genetic mutation) suppress the capability of weaker and less developed chakras from departing to be audited or even be used to control such portions to benefit the controller or at least to neutral effect where ther soul is instructed to rest rather than being ‘used’. The subconscious self thus must be communicated with in waking hours (schizophrenia or alzheimers are soul loss and soul reality dilation respectively NOT psychiatric illnesses, that is why old people fade away mentally, they are TRAVELLING alternate realties so the ‘reality field’ nominally comparable to ‘dark energy’ sustaining the physical body allows ageing . . . but if disrupted can cause weather or geological disasters, even manifest asteroids or solar flares if the Sun assents – as a single person’s awarenes and influence can reach far beyond  the Solar system) and in turn the chakras will follow.

This requires much ‘self love’ and ‘self consideration’ and ‘common sense’ (i.e. this can be casually checked measured against HOW a person votes and how much they care for the effects of who they vote or the spirit of the law or how they treat others, the awareness of necessity of amendments to law etc..). If one is fretting about the stock market, shopping like mad, shouting at neighbours or neglecting one’s spiritual state entirely,  parasiting off others’ spiritual states, refusing to amend harmful laws if in power – one becomes susceptible to being not on command of one’s astral self which if neglected or overly dependent on the host one ios draining awareness from, and ends up susceptible to what the person does in waking life (i.e. if the host drinks alcohol or takes drugs, indulges in bdsm or contact sports the parasite will feel sickened), being abused by other dream walkers more capable or lower realm entities who have been around far longer than our Sun or influence great swathes of the Universe, even the Multiverse.

In such cases, psychiatric meds are useful but again create very dangerous spiritul level addictions that cause insanity as well as an immense well of negative karma, not to mention the abuse by the psychiatric establishment to empowerr themselves over the populace which does not have access to these psychiatric substances.

ARTICLE 3

US citizens increasingly facing austerity dictatorship – by Dr. Webster G. Tarpley – Sunday Mar 31, 201303:12 PM GMT

The lawyer Kevyn Orr took power as dictator of Detroit on Monday, March 25, 2013. He is expected to begin voiding labor contracts, imposing unilateral sacrifices on city workers, autocratically cutting the Detroit city budget, selling off city assets to Governor Snyder’s cronies and backers at bargain basement prices, and privatizing or simply terminating city services. Orr has signaled that one of his priorities will be to renege on Detroit’s pension and healthcare commitments to retired policemen, firemen, teachers, and other municipal workers. He does not rule out a haircut for the bondholders, but this must be considered window dressing unless and until it occurs.”

To the extent that the modern world thinks at all about the problem of fascism, there is a tendency to regard this form of bankers’ totalitarian dictatorship as something which happens suddenly and all at once.

Historians can remember Mussolini’s march on Rome in October 1922, and Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933. But we must also recall that the definitive seizure of power by fascism in these two countries was preceded by dress rehearsals and pilot projects of fascist rule on a more limited scale.

Mussolini’s dictatorship had its precursor in the dictatorship of the fascist literary man Gabriele d’Annunzio in the city of Fiume, bordering Yugoslavia, in 1919-1920. Here many of the rituals, methods, slogans, and other paraphernalia of fascism originated. The stalking horse for Hitler was the

coup d’état by Chancellor von Papen in the state of Prussia in July 1932, which ousted the Social Democratic government there, ending government by elected leaders and replacing them with Reichskommissars sent by von Papen from Berlin as Prussia went into receivership.

Von Papen’s Prussian coup gets us uncomfortably close to what has just happened this past week in the great American city of Detroit, Michigan, well-known as the capital of the automobile industry but now especially hard hit by the world economic depression. The Republican governor, Rick

Snyder, has just ousted the Mayor and City Council of Detroit, replacing them with a single outside overseer who will combine both executive and legislative functions to enforce austerity.

The lawyer Kevyn Orr took power as dictator of Detroit on Monday, March 25, 2013. He is expected to begin voiding labor contracts, imposing unilateral sacrifices on city workers, autocratically cutting the Detroit city budget, selling off city assets to Governor Snyder’s cronies and backers at

bargain basement prices, and privatizing or simply terminating city services. Orr has signaled that one of his priorities will be to renege on Detroit’s pension and healthcare commitments to retired policemen, firemen, teachers, and other municipal workers. He does not rule out a haircut for the

bondholders, but this must be considered window dressing unless and until it occurs.

Orr has boasted: “I’m prepared to be the most hated man for a period of time.” Here is one promise on which he can be expected to deliver. Orr has announced that, although Detroit Mayor David Bing and the City Council have no more authority to decide anything, he will keep paying their

salaries in an attempt to buy the passivity of the local Democratic Party machine. Snyder’s goal is to maintain debt service payments on Detroit’s $8.6 billion in bonded debt. A year ago, Moody’s Investors Service, one of the notoriously mendacious ratings agencies, reduced its rating for

Detroit’s general obligation bonds to B2, which is five notches below investment grade. In November 2012, Moody’s downgraded Detroit by two notches to Caa1, meaning junk bonds with a significant risk of default.

During 2012, the city utility agency for water and sewage borrowed money to pay off $300 million in toxic derivative swaps on which it wanted to cut its losses. This came at the same time that Mayor Bing and the Detroit Water Board (sic) announced a plan to cut 81% of city workers in this

sector, reducing jobs from 1,978 to 374 over the next five years. Bing and the city council were attempting to implement austerity cuts so brutal that they could convince Snyder that an outside commissar was not necessary, thus hoping to keep their jobs. It was during this phase that Bing first

hired Jones Day as a restructuring consultant.

Detroit the victim of toxic derivatives

Detroit is also facing a payment of between $350 million and $400 million on toxic derivatives contracts which were sold to the city over recent years as the mayor and council struggled to avoid bankruptcy. Detroit had issued floating-rate bonds, but then with great folly decided to swap these for

fixed rate instruments. When interest rates declined, the city did not reap the benefit of having to pay less debt service. Many US municipalities, ranging from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts have had to pay billions of

dollars to zombie banks to get out of interest rate swaps gone sour.

It is estimated that Wall Street firms including UBS, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and J.P. Morgan Chase have since 2005 (when Detroit began running large yearly deficits) collected more than $474 million from Detroit in fees for floating $3.7 billion of bonds. One of those backing these deals

was the former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was just convicted on corruption charges. The banks told Detroit that these interest rate swaps would offer protection against higher interest rates which failed to materialize. (Darrell Preston and Chris Christoff, “Only Wall Street Wins in

Detroit Crisis Reaping $474 Million Fee,” Bloomberg, March 13, 2013)

Snyder’s emergency manager law also poses the problem of conflicts of interest. The city of Detroit is presently saddled with a toxic credit swap arrangement in which Bank of America/Merrill Lynch is a counterparty. Bank of America is a former client of Jones Day. This derivatives trap could

force the city to pay $400 million to the zombie banks under certain circumstances, one of which is the imposition of an emergency manager – which is what has just happened. Detroit’s financial position is further complicated by the deliberate policy of the Snyder administration to delay and

withhold tens of millions of dollars of payments owed to the city by the state.

Detroit, the capital of the US automobile industry, has been cynically driven into deep financial crisis. The 700,000 residents are currently suffering shortages of streetlights, buses, and street repairs, and many homes are now abandoned. In 2012, the Detroit Police Department was cut by almost

12% of its officers, leading to a 9% rise in the number of homicides in the city. The policy of Governor Snyder is to force Detroit to make debt service payments to the banks a top priority, even as he sends in a financial commissar to impose additional measures of savage austerity.

November 2012: Michigan voters reject dictators, but Snyder installs them anyway

In November 2012, a broad coalition of community forces with strong representation from the black community gathered almost a quarter of a million signatures to get the repeal of the existing emergency manager law (Public Act 4) onto the state’s November election ballot in the form of Proposal

1. Incredibly, the United Auto Workers dragged its feet in this process, and preferred to focus its energies on efforts to get out the vote for Obama, who has never lifted a finger to defend the rights of Michigan citizens under attack. In the November 2012 election, Michigan voters nevertheless

voted by 52% to 48% to strike down Snyder’s Public Act Four of 2011. Unfortunately, an attempt to write collective bargaining into the state constitution failed, most likely due to union efforts siphoned off for the benefit of Obama.

At this point, the GOP State Attorney General invoked the older and weaker emergency manager law, Public Act 72 of 1990, to keep the existing commissars in power. Snyder’s minions in the state legislature then quickly rubberstamped Public Act for 36 of 2012, a measure practically identical to the

law which Michigan voters had just rejected. This new enabling legislation for city dictators has just gone into effect on March 28, 2013.

Who is governor Rick Snyder?

What kind of governor imposes dictatorial rule on a large part of his state? Michigan’s Republican Governor Rick Snyder represents Schachtian economics in a business suit for the United States in the 21st century. His outward demeanor seems reasonable, measured, moderate, even affable.

Snyder wears button-down oxfords, with no black shirt or brown shirt, no Roman salute, no screaming (at least in public), no speeches from balconies. He uses the direct apologetic, arguing that his oppressive measures are rational and practical responses to the problems of Michigan and its

cities. This is known as Snyder’s “positive” style – wildly ideological in content, muted in packaging.

Rick Snyder, like Bill Gates, Gianroberto Casaleggio, and Peter Thiel is a reactionary operative from the modern computer and information technology industry. Snyder was at various times chairman of the board (2005-2007), CEO, and cofounder of Gateway 2000, a computer hardware firm originally

based in Iowa and South Dakota which later moved to California. Gateway’s stock price averaged about four dollars per share in the mid-1990s, and peaked at $84 in 1999 thanks to the dotcom bubble. Gateway at one time had a network of hundreds of its own retail computer shops, but this fell

apart in 2004 after the dotcom bubble burst. The brand was damaged by shoddy customer service due to the overseas outsourcing of call centers. In October 2007, Gateway was sold to Acer of Taiwan for about $1.90 per share. The Gateway name is now in the process of being phased out.

Gateway appears as a company which was decimated by unwise acquisitions, the reckless quest for short-term profit, outsourcing, and the desire to cash in by selling out to a foreign buyer.

Trained as a certified public accountant, Snyder was also a venture capitalist. In 1997, he founded Avalon investments Inc. of Ann Arbor. In 2000, he was cofounder of Ardesta, an investment firm which reportedly put money into 20 startup companies over the subsequent years.

Hear a word of clarification is in order. It would be misleading to expect fascism in the United States in the second decade of the 21st century to imitate each and every feature of historical fascism as it existed in Europe between the two world wars. Fascism today means first of all a commitment to

destroy all remaining forms of trade unionism and other labor organization. It includes efforts to impose brutal austerity policies, such as the lowering of real wages, and a shifting of the tax burden from the super rich to the middle class and the underclass – in other words, tax cuts for the rich and

tax hikes for working people. Modern-day fascists seek to destroy the social safety net, including food stamps, unemployment benefits, and child nutrition programs. They demand the radical deregulation of the entire economy, including in such savage directions as abolishing the child labor

laws. Modern fascist economics also includes the vehement refusal to use public funds for building vital infrastructure.

Snyder was elected governor in 2010, the year of the hysterical tea party revolt against Obama as the first black president and as a Wall Street puppet. He campaigned as pro-life, pro-gun, and pro-family while touting his business experience. Unlike many less clever reactionaries, Snyder

supported the federal rescue of General Motors and Chrysler, which make up a huge part of the Michigan economy. Upon taking power in Lansing in early 2011, Snyder rammed through a policy of balancing the budget by cutting spending on vital services to the disadvantaged while lowering

taxes on corporate profits and increasing the burden on the middle class and the poor. Snyder claimed to be asking for “shared sacrifice,” but Democrats accused him of balancing his budget on the backs of children, working families, and seniors, brutally harming certain groups to get the result

they wanted.

Snyder’s push for austerity dictatorship went into high gear in March 2011, when he signed a law increasing the powers of “emergency managers” whom the governor could appoint to take over the government of cities and other entities declared in receivership because of alleged financial

insolvency. The new law also made easier for Snyder to oust existing mayors and city council members, replacing them with local budget dictators. To make it easier to implement these takeovers under bipartisan cover, Snyder had appointed as State Treasurer Democrat Andy Dillon, a former

speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives who had lost the 2010 Democratic primary to choose an opponent for Snyder. Dillon had worked in Washington as an aide to the former right-wing Democratic Senator and basketball star Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who later went to work on

Wall Street.

Snyder uses “right to work” law to bust unions

In December 2012, Snyder – ignoring vehement protests by the United Auto Workers (UAW) and other unions who have large memberships and deep historical roots in Michigan – ordered his rubberstamp state legislature to ram through a bill making Michigan a “Right to Work” state. This bill

outlawed the union shop by forbidding employers to collect dues on behalf of the labor union representing a bargaining unit. Henceforth only the open shop is allowed, with workers free to enjoy the benefits of union bargaining without paying any of the costs. Such an arrangement usually

leads to the collapse of the union, which is Snyder’s goal. Snyder’s cited motivation was to make Michigan more business friendly. Michigan is thus walking in the footsteps of Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s Nazi regime, both of which had the total destruction of labor unions as the leading

point on their agenda. This Michigan union-busting offensive came at the same time that other Midwestern Republican governors, including Walker of Wisconsin, Kasich of Ohio, and Daniels of Indiana, were pushing programs to wipe out public sector unions and/or all labor organizations.

Democrats and republicans serve the bondholders

The installation of local dictators tasked with defending the interests of the bondholders and derivatives mongers at the expense of the people was already gathering momentum under Snyder’s predecessor, former two-term Democratic Governor Jennifer Granholm, whose brief attempt to host a

cable television news program on Current TV ended in failure in February 2013 after a year’s run. Granholm imposed dictatorial rule on Ecorse in October 2009, Highland Park from 2005 to 2009, Benton Harbor in April 2010, Pontiac in August 2010, and on the Detroit public schools. Snyder kept

most of these dictators in place, increased their powers, and appointed new ones for the Highland Park schools in January 2012 and for Flint in August of 2012.

Emergency manager Kevyn Orr now rules Detroit

Kevyn Orr, Snyder’s choice as resident enforcer for the bondholders in Detroit, is a professional bankruptcy administrator. Representing Chrysler for $700 an hour during its 2009 bankruptcy and reorganization, Orr was instrumental in the asset-stripping of the number three automaker even as he

further weakened the UAW to the point where Snyder could attempt to destroy this union with a frontal attack a few years later. One of Orr’s bright ideas was convincing a federal judge to allow Chrysler to suddenly close 800 dealerships — one quarter its US total — almost all of which represented

not just showrooms but also repair and maintenance capabilities and skilled jobs important for local communities. Orr was a backer of John Kerry in 2004 and of Obama in 2008. He was therefore a logical choice for the Obama policy of forcing General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy,

eliminating scores of factories and tens of thousands of jobs, cutting retirement and health benefits, and lowering the pay of new hires to the level of non-union Mississippi sweatshops. At his current assignment, Orr will be getting $270,000 per year.

Orr lives in a $1 million mansion in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland. Between 2009 and 2012, the state of Maryland’s Office of Unemployment Insurance filed four separate tax liens on the Orr residence seeking to recover unpaid taxes Orr owed the state from hiring childcare providers to look after his

two children and then not paying state taxes related to this household help. At the time that Orr was named Detroit commissar by Snyder, two tax liens totaling almost $16,000 were still pending back in Maryland. Orr described in this situation as “remarkably embarrassing” and “something that fell

through the cracks.” (Matt Helms and John Gallagher, “Kevyn Orr Pays On Two Maryland Liens: Snyder Says He Overlooked Taxes, Detroit Free Press, March 18, 2013)

This looks like a typical nannygate problem. One of the surest ways to identify an oligarch from the top 1% in the United States today is that the individual in question can afford domestic servants, something the vast majority of the population cannot even dream of. These elitists, who are

lawyers, often hire undocumented foreign workers as domestic help, or else fail to pay state or federal taxes for the servants they employ. Nanny problems have terminated a number of elitist careers, but Orr is likely to remain in power regardless.

Federal lawsuit, constitutional challenge, and protest march against emergency rule

There have been numerous political protests and legal actions against Snyder’s oppressive law. On March 27, 2013, a group of lawyers and civil rights leaders filed suit in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, naming Snyder and Dillon as defendants. The lawsuit seeks to

establish the unconstitutionality of Snyder’s emergency manager procedures as applied under the current Public Act 436. The suit argues that Snyder’s emergency manager law violates the voting rights of Michigan citizens by depriving them of the chance to elect local officials for the purpose of

self-government. Supporters of the lawsuit point out is that Snyder’s methods violate the equal protection of the laws which the XIV Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires every state to provide. The vote of the Detroit resident is worth less than the vote of an inhabitant of the nearby

upscale Grosse Pointe because the Detroit resident no longer can elect a mayor and city council. The fact that majority black communities totaling over 50% of Michigan’s Afro-Americans are being singled out for finance dictators also means that civil rights laws are being violated. Public

employees in the cities now under dictatorship are having their collective bargaining rights eroded even more than workers in the rest of Michigan.

On the day after this lawsuit was filed, a group of protesters featuring the Reverend Al Sharpton of the National Action Network and MSNBC staged a protest march in downtown Detroit from the headquarters of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) –

which is the largest public employee union in the city – to the federal courthouse. Sharpton correctly noted that “There will be a threat to everyone in this nation if the emergency management in Detroit stands.” Sharpton’s intervention is of course welcome, but it should not be forgotten that he

and his associates had contributed relatively little to the struggle against Snyder’s program over the previous two years, and remain subordinated to Obama. Snyder blandly commented that lawsuits like this are “part of democracy” and boasted of his high success rate in getting judges to reject

legal challenges to his dictatorial measures.

In effect, Public Act 436 creates a new form of dictatorial government under which cities and municipal corporations are subjected to the arbitrary rule of one unelected and unaccountable official who combines executive and legislative powers, and whose decisions, decrees, appointments,

expenditures, and sales cannot be influenced by local voters. (Matt Helms and Joe Guillen,”Lawsuit Challenges Michigan Emergency Manager Law,” Detroit Free Press, March 28, 2013) There is a strong prima facie case that this new form of government is in blatant violation of the U.S.

Constitution.

Article IV of the U.S. Constitution guarantees to every state a “republican form of government.” When mayors and city councils in so much of a state are ousted from power and replaced by dictatorial rule, it is clear that republican government has ended.

The XIV Amendment of this same Constitution orders that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Each state is further forbidden to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” As

noted, if you live in Ann Arbor you can elect your own local government, but if you live in Benton Harbor or Detroit you cannot, meaning that Snyder has thrown the U.S. Constitution out the window. Obama is charged by the Constitution to “take care” that the laws be faithfully enforced, but so

far he and his Attorney General Eric Holder have done nothing in favor of Michigan.

Secrecy and graft under the emergency manager law

The local organization Citizens United against Government Corruption has filed suit in state court claiming that the Michigan Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board violated the Michigan Open Meetings Law because of excessive secrecy in the way Orr was appointed. This group is also

suing Snyder for usurping the authority of the Loan Board by picking out Orr by himself.

One of the perks of being a Michigan emergency management commissar is that you can pay yourself large sums of money without any check or balance. The Michigan Court of Appeals has just upheld a judgment of $333,000 against the former dictator of Highland Park, who had paid himself a

handsome $264,000 on his own authority — something the courts have found illegal. This particular commissar is also under federal indictment for stealing money from the Highland Park school system when he served on their board – indicating that kind of person who gets appointed as

emergency manager.

In Detroit, a major focus of resistance to Snyder’s dictatorship policy is the group For a Moratorium on Detroit’s Public Debt: Make the Banks Pay! There is also the Moratorium Now! Coalition to Stop Foreclosures, Evictions, and Utility Shutoffs, where David Sole is one spokesman. This

organization demands that Wayne County and other Michigan counties immediately stop all foreclosures due to unpaid back real estate taxes. This includes a demand that Fannie Mae, a privatized agency which was seized by the federal government in September 2008, stop participating in these

foreclosures. These actions are key to maintaining the Detroit real estate tax base.

One of the mass leaders of the resistance to Snyder’s commissars in Benton Harbor, on the western edge of the mitten, is the Reverend Edward Pinckney. Pinckney is a leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO). This past week, Pinckney organized protest

motorcades on the I-94 Interstate near Benton Harbor.

Program to save Detroit and other cities
The most immediate remedy necessary for Detroit and other cash-strapped cities is to declare an immediate and unilateral debt moratorium freezing all payments of interest and principal for at least five years or for the duration of the world economic depression, which ever lasts longer. The

survival needs of the Michigan population and economy must take precedence over the demands of the bondholders, which can be sorted out later on. The debt freeze is all the more justified since in large part of Detroit’s debt is represented by toxic credit derivatives which were sold to city

officials through fraud, misrepresentation, and other corruption, with the investment bankers blatantly lying about future prospects. This hemorrhaging of cash must come to an end now.

Debt freeze
As the website For a Moratorium on Detroit’s Public Debt sums up the case: “Why should the same banks who destroyed the tax base of our city, who drove over 200,000 people out of the city of Detroit with their criminal, fraudulent foreclosures and evictions, who were bailed out by taxpayers

and the Federal Reserve with trillions of our dollars, get paid first? The banks owe Detroit billions in reparations for the destruction they have caused. A suspension in debt service payments would immediately resolve the city’s fiscal crisis and allow for the restoration of city services and the

recall of laid-off workers.”

1% federal wall street sales tax with revenue sharing for states and cities
Detroit and other Michigan cities would also benefit from the enactment of a 1% Wall Street Sales Tax on speculative turnover in financial markets. As of now, most Wall Street banks and hedge funds pay little to nothing in the way of federal corporate income taxes, and not a dime on their

quadrillions of trading. A 1% Wall Street Sales Tax might produce as much as $1 trillion of revenue for the United States. Half of this should go to the federal government, but the other half should be apportioned to the states and localities through revenue sharing. This is where of Michigan and

Detroit could find more needed liquidity to maintain police, fire, health, highway, education, and other vital services during the process of economic reconstruction and recovery.

Outlaw credit swaps and other derivatives
The role of toxic credit derivatives in destroying Detroit’s financial position reminds us of the need for outright bans -bright line prohibitions backed up by criminal penalties – on the sale of Credit Default Swaps, Collateralized Debt Obligations, and other types of derivatives. The CDS and CDOs

just mentioned played the central role in the 2008 collapse of the US banking system, and outlawing them is long overdue. The US economy did much better when these instruments were unheard of. Credit default swaps are inherently illegal. If they are gambling, that violates the law. If they are

insurance, those who issue them are not properly registered an issue policies. All payments on credit derivatives must cease.

Fed must provide $3.6 trillion credit stimulus to build infrastructure

Finally, Detroit is now a city in urgent need of having its entire infrastructure rebuilt. The pressures on the federal and state budget to maintain the social safety net are already considerable, so it is not advisable to attempt to finance an infrastructure program through on-budget spending. At the

same time, the principal money center banks have earned their title of zombie banks because of their inability to engage in normal commercial banking through their insolvency due to derivatives. The only available source of large-scale liquidity to finance the economic reconstruction and

recovery of the US economy is therefore the Federal Reserve. Political forces must now force Bernanke to open an infrastructure window empowered to purchase $3.6 trillion of 0% century bonds issued by US states, municipalities, and regional authorities for modern superhighways, bridges,

high speed rail, water and canal projects, modern energy production and distribution, public housing, schools, hospitals, public buildings, and telecommunications. (The $3.6 trillion corresponds to the most recent estimate by the American Society of Civil Engineers of the expenditures necessary

to restore an adequate infrastructure in this country over the next few years.) This credit stimulus is indispensable to restart the US economy. Detroit would benefit from such a program by receiving a 21st-century infrastructure. At the same time, much of the construction equipment and

transportation rolling stock would be produced in Detroit’s factories. The target is full employment, which will require at least 30 million new productive jobs over the years ahead.

WT/JR

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

i) . . . but then with great folly decided to swap these for fixed rate instruments. . . .

Under who’s watch? What are the assets of those currently, who oversaw these swaps? Confiscate some assets if needed. If some ex-bureaucrat multibillionaires are left with a ‘mere’ handful of millions (no more than 20 perhaps?) in the after math, too bad then. The guys still don’t have to work.

ii) Snyder uses “right to work” law to bust unions . . .

Then that law is unonstitutional as it allows the single representative to scuttle the citizens’ wishes. A lawmaker must challenge the legal system to amend the “right to work” law into a manner that respects the voters, even as Unions cannot force all workers to join a Union. The overreach factor must be tempered by correctness but at the lower level the right to be wrong, in this case busting unions should be carefully looked into. This is like saying a Nazi Club or BDSM Club on private property is disallowed, and to deny the right of association to like minded individuals. Democracy will  allow everything BUT will make sure that inequitable invasion upon spaces not needed relevant to the size of the community will not occur. Moratoriums and Freezes, especially compound interest freezes are critical to places like Detriot.

iii) Orr has signaled that one of his priorities will be to renege on Detroit’s pension and healthcare commitments to retired policemen, firemen, teachers, and other municipal workers. He does not rule out a haircut for the bondholders, but this must be considered window dressing unless and until it occurs.

If a handful of above mentioned billionaires are targeted for wealth confiscation instead, the above groups need not guve anything up at all. How about targeting the rich ex-bureaucrats Orr? Unless excessive, leave the 99% workers alone.

iv) . . . expected to begin voiding labor contracts, imposing unilateral sacrifices on city workers . . .

Are those labour contracts legal to begin with? Are city workers living on salaries beyond national average annual wage, with costly entitlements and benefits? Then the wage reductions at a time of near bankruptcy of USA will be timely.

v)  Mayor Bing and the Detroit Water Board (sic) announced a plan to cut 81% of city workers in this sector, reducing jobs from 1,978 to 374 over the next five years.

See this link on how the US and Malaysian bureaucracy is overloaded with rent seekers and nonsensical posts that are salaried :

Observations on Parasite Bureaucracy Paradigms (circa Jan 2012) :

vi) Orr was instrumental in the asset-stripping of the number three automaker even as he further weakened the UAW to the point where Snyder could attempt to destroy this union with a frontal attack a few years later. One of Orr’s bright ideas was convincing a federal judge to allow Chrysler to suddenly close 800 dealerships — one quarter its US total — almost all of which represented not just showrooms but also repair and maintenance capabilities and skilled jobs important for local communities.

I think collusion between the largest corporations with government is the worst as opposed to non-GLC companies. Perhaps Orr could get some evidence and transparency article writers to say how and why this was done. Chrysler probably is leaner and meaner now, and will survive though the emplopyess doubtless suffered the most being fired. But likely the company ws unsustainable? the last thing USA needs to be is pretending to be maintaining jobs at expense of 800 companies worth of infrastructure without customers.

vii) The XIV Amendment of this same Constitution orders that “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Each state is further forbidden to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

As noted, if you live in Ann Arbor you can elect your own local government, but if you live in Benton Harbor or Detroit you cannot, meaning that Snyder has thrown the U.S. Constitution out the window. Obama is charged by the Constitution to “take care” that the laws be faithfully enforced, but so far he and his Attorney General Eric Holder have done nothing in favor of Michigan.

Good work on this paragraph! Will the civil rights groups begin doing an audit of democracy in USA, filing lawsuits for democracy? Benton Harbour and Detriot look like places for American citizens to run from now. No elections and appointments only? Dictatorship!

viii) One of the mass leaders of the resistance to Snyder’s commissars in Benton Harbor, on the western edge of the mitten, is the Reverend Edward Pinckney. Pinckney is a leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization (BANCO). This past week, Pinckney organized protest

motorcades on the I-94 Interstate near Benton Harbor.

File a lawsuit backed by a signature petition, funded by signatories. Motorcades do nothing.

ix) . . . selling off city assets to Governor Snyder’s cronies and backers at bargain basement prices . . .

A panel of neutral valuers should decide if Kevyn Orr’s pricing is indeed bargain basement. Nobody politically linked to Snyder or Kevyn or even from Detriot may be involved in such valuations. That way conflict of interest from vested interest will not occur.

x) As the website For a Moratorium on Detroit’s Public Debt sums up the case: “Why should the same banks who destroyed the tax base of our city, who drove over 200,000 people out of the city of Detroit with their criminal, fraudulent foreclosures and evictions, who were bailed out by taxpayers and the Federal Reserve with trillions of our dollars, get paid first? The banks owe Detroit billions in reparations for the destruction they have caused. A suspension in debt service payments would immediately resolve the city’s fiscal crisis and allow for the restoration of city services and the recall of laid-off workers.”

Only lawsuits will work here.

xi) Detroit and other Michigan cities would also benefit from the enactment of a 1% Wall Street Sales Tax on speculative turnover in financial markets. As of now, most Wall Street banks and hedge funds pay little to nothing in the way of federal corporate income taxes, and not a dime on their quadrillions of trading. A 1% Wall Street Sales Tax might produce as much as $1 trillion of revenue for the United States. Half of this should go to the federal government, but the other half should be apportioned to the states and localities through revenue sharing. This is where of Michigan and Detroit could find more needed liquidity to maintain police, fire, health, highway, education, and other vital services during the process of economic reconstruction and recovery.

Actually speculative turnover should be done away with entirely. Spinning money out of thin air in stock market is not real money. Taxing such gains, destroys the economy. Instead, trace previous speculative trading gains held by individuals worth more than 20 million.

xii) Finally, Detroit is now a city in urgent need of having its entire infrastructure rebuilt.

No. Opportunists hoping to profit from the above issues? Some cracks or old buildings can last another few decades. Now is not the time to build and enrich construction industry contractors which I suddenly wonder if Dr. Webster G. Tarpley has links to, especially if government is to hand

these companies contracts. Good article on many democratic points, but buildings cost money and no way does anyone have cash to do that in a downturn and USA in extreme debt – even if the locals get crappy construction jobs at expense of the construction firms.

ARTICLE 4

China mobilizes military, on ‘high alert’ over N. Korea threats – Published time: April 02, 2013 04:16

China has started mobilizing military forces around the Korean peninsula in response to rising tensions that follow recent threats by North Korea to launch missile attacks against its southern neighbor and the United States.

According to US officials, Pyongyang’s declaration of a ‘state of war’ against South Korea has led to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to increase its military presence on the border with the North. The officials say the process has been going on since mid-March, and includes troop

movements and readying fighter jets. The PLA is now at ‘Level One’ readiness, its highest.

Chinese forces, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, have been spotted in the city of Ji’an and near the Yalu River, which splits China and North Korea. Other border regions were also reportedly being patrolled by planes.

China has also been conducting live-firing naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, scheduled to end on Monday. The move is widely viewed as open support for North Korea, which continues to show extreme opposition to the US-South Korean military drills that are to last until May.

The news comes as the US deployed its USS Fitzgerald destroyer off the coast of North Korea, adding to its Sunday deployment of F-22 fighter jets to take part in the drills with the friendly South, which has further served to heighten tensions on the peninsula.

Meanwhile, North Korea has been mobilizing its short and medium-range missile arsenal, according to analyses of satellite imagery. Officials say Pyongyang is set to test its new KN-08 medium-range mobile missile; they say preparations have been spotted in the past. Pyongyang claims that

since March 26, its forces have been placed on their highest possible status of alert.

Although officials believe Pyongyang will not provoke Seoul during the war games, they also fear that a miscalculation by South Korea could lead to all-out war, following its promise of retaliation against the North, should it launch its missiles first.

South Korean anti-aircraft armoured vehicles move over a temporary bridge during a river-crossing military drill in Hwacheon near the border with North Korea on April 1, 2013 (AFP Photo / KIim Jae-Hwan)

North Korea and China have maintained a long-standing defense treaty under which Beijing is to come to Pyongyang’s aid in the event of an attack. The last time this was put into practice was during the Korean War, when tens of thousands of Chinese volunteer forces were deployed on the

Korean Peninsula. The relationship between the two countries is often referred to as being “as close as lips and teeth” by Chinese military spokesmen.

Despite the heated tensions leading to an apparent disruption in trade and commerce between China and North Korea, the two are already making future plans to bolster their economic ties. March 27 saw the announcement of a new high-speed railway, as well as a special highway passenger line.

Still, many in Chinese circles have shown displeasure at Pyongyang’s seemingly aggressive relationship with Seoul and Washington. A Chinese official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, has testified that US presence in the region is a helpful restraint against an unpredictable Kim

Jong-un, which many believe to be the real reason Beijing has not been strong in its criticism of the amassing of US forces in the region.

Furthermore, Chinese websites and blogs could sometimes be found openly bashing the North Korean leader for an apparent mishandling of the situation in the region, playing diplomatic games amid chronic food shortages in his country. An editor at the country’s Study Times newspaper was

recently suspended for openly criticizing China for abandoning North Korea.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un attending the plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea in Pyongyang (AFP Photo / KCNA via KNS)

Expert opinion differs on what China’s exact position is in the unfolding regional crisis.

US officials claim the China’s main fear is a collapse of order in North Korea, which would lead to a large-scale refugee flow into China.

Another possible reason for China to worry is advanced by journalist James Corbett, host of the Corbett Report, who believes that foreign military presence in the region is just as unnerving to China as it is to Pyongyang. He discussed this in the light of the latest war drills.

“I think that this has the possibility of ratcheting things up to the point where tensions might actually spill over as a result of this, and we saw that recently with the deployment of B-2 nuclear armed bombers in South Korea which is not only, I think, worrying to Pyongyang, but also to China, to

have nuclear bombers that close to the peninsula there, on China’s southern border. I think that China wouldn’t be pleased with that either, so this is quite an escalation that’s taking place.”

Others believe openly that the US strategy is geared not towards the destabilization of North Korea, but that of China. Li Jie, an expert with a Chinese navy research institution, has told Reuters that “the ultimate strategic aim is to contain and blockade China, to distract China’s attention and slow

its development. What the US is most worried about is the further development of China’s economy and military strength.”

Retired Major General Luo Yuan, who is one of China’s foremost military authorities, believes, however that “once the joint US-South Korean exercises have finished and with birthday celebrations for (late founder of North Korea) Kim Il-sung imminent, the temperature will gradually cool and get

back to the status quo of no war, no unification.”

While it has been urging calm and peace in the region, Beijing has been very obliging at the UN Security Council, when it helped push through the latest round of sanctions against North Korea in March, following its third nuclear test the previous month. Despite being Pyongyang’s greatest ally

in the region, some experts believe this is a sign of Beijing’s growing impatience. American diplomat Christopher R. Hill, who helped under the Bush administration to negotiate a deal for the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear facilities (which didn’t last), says that the Chinese strategy is“not

about the words, it is about the music.”

The resolution came hours after North Korea, angered at both the US-South Korean war games, and at the proposed UN plan, threatened pre-emptive nuclear action against the South and US military bases in the region.

This latest standoff between North and South Korea and the US is credited to have started on February 12, when Pyongyang supposedly performed its latest underground nuclear weapons test. Just this weekend, North Korea vowed to boost its nuclear arsenal, calling it a “treasure of a reunified

country” which it would never trade for anything, even “billions of dollars” worth of aid.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Possible escalation scenario. North Korea conquers South Korea via land invasion after a non-Nuke barrage. China props up North Korea, equals to Japan and perhaps double agent Singapore (a single nuke from North Korea or even China if need be, would put paid to that microstate anyway)

alone in a Western stooge in ASEAN against China. This is the turning point in driving ‘the West’ out of Asia since the Opium Wars in 1800s. North Korea will play bad cop and China may or may not acknowledge anything on penalty of a worldwide economic collapse followed by WW3 if the

West pushes too hard (this is China and Russia’s backyard anyway?).

The West can choose a potential WW3 or withdraw from Asia depending on how the Japanese 99% vote – for the West or for the East. South Korea alternatively could make peace with BOTH China and North Korea by pledging no more military drills with USA with Japan needing a transition to demilitarise/decouple from USA. South korea and Japan are the back door to the East and North Koreas actions will be welcome by both China and Russia. I love USA’s democracy but geopolitics wise American presence here is not very good, this is the Eastern leg of the  ‘multipolar world’, traitors (South Korea and Japan), and globalist hegemonists – USA, only destabilize the world by trying to have a presence in the East, this is no better than if Russia and China set up base in Cuba. USA can’t even control South America, or the Middle East, they should not take on the East via traitors (South Korea, perhaps also Phillipines? . . . face of traitor unless the promise to conduct zero joint drills is done immediately – not mean any capitulation to North Korea – just choosing not to rely on the USA for military help – if South Korea conducts military drills alone, probably North Korea woyuld have far less to say IF North Korea is ethical enough  AND South Korea does not intrude into disputed territorial waters WITHOUT claiming the same or if that happens the one firing the first shot would be in the wrong at any rate – China can arbotrate from here, but USA a foreign power 1000s of miles away is inappropriate, at least until the 2 countries are reunited as a single Korean nation. In-ASEAN nation joint drills are of course acceptable and a show of solidarity, but foreign region joint drills are just plain fifth columnism and treacherous willingness to project power against local powers instead of working with them through diplomacy. How about USA target any human rights abuses in China so that any war will never result in Japan

like invasions of WW2?

ARTICLE 5

He provoked fury by describing a burglar as courageous. Now the same judge has refused to lock up this paedophile ‘because he’d have a hard time in prison’ — by Simon Tomlinson – PUBLISHED: 12:22 GMT, 1 April 2013 | UPDATED: 15:44 GMT, 1 April 2013

Judge Peters Bowers claimed Mark Martin would ‘suffer badly’ if sent down
Martin already on suspended jail term when caught with more sick images
Campaigners slammed decision ‘strange’ and ‘remarkably short-sighted’
Judge provoked outrage last year when he also let serial burglar walk free

A soft-touch judge provoked more controversy today after refusing to jail a paedophile caught with child pornography for a second time because he would ‘suffer badly’ in prison.

Judge Peter Bowers let Mark Martin walk free despite being found with more sick images while already on a suspended jail sentence.

His decision comes months after he caused public outrage for describing a serial burglar as ‘courageous’.

‘Strange decision’: Pervert Mark Martin (pictured) has been spared jail by a controversial judge despite being caught with child porn while already on a suspended prison sentence

‘Remarkably short-sighted’: Judge Peter Bowers (pictured) has been criticised for refusing to jail a paedophile caught with child pronography for a second time

Pervert Mark Martin who has been caught with images of child abuse twice

‘Remarkably short-sighted’: Judge Peter Bowers (left) has been criticised for refusing to jail Martin because he would ‘suffer badly’ in prison

At the time, he was criticised for his choice of words, which which were branded a ‘serious error of judgement’, when opting not to jail Richard Rochford, 26, in September last year.

Rochford was instead given a one-year prison sentence, suspended for 18 months.

Following an investigation, the Lord Chancellor and Lord Chief Justice upheld complaints about the judge’s comments and issued him with a reprimand after his remarks ‘damaged public confidence in the judicial process’.

In the latest case, Martin was already on a suspended jail sentence for making indecent images when police found more indecent pictures on his mobile phone.

Reprimanded: Judge Bowers caused public outrage last year for describing serial burglar Richard Rochford (above) as ‘courageous’

The 24-year-old had also been using his brother’s computer to download other vile pictures of young boys and girls.

At Teesside Crown Court on Friday, Judge Peter Bowers passed another suspended sentence, and told Martin: ‘This really is your last chance.’

Campaigners branded the most recent let-off ‘remarkably short-sighted’ and said the jobless shop worker should have been locked up.

Martin, of Dent Street, Hartlepool, got a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, with probation service supervision.

In 2009, he was given a similar punishment and was ordered to go on a sex offenders’ treatment programme to cure his ‘addiction’.

A Sexual Offences Prevention Order was also made which banned him from putting anti-forensic software on his computers which would hide his internet history.

Police visited his home in February last year to check on his internet activity and ask about his computer use, the court heard.

He claimed not to have the internet and when he was asked by officers about his mobile phone, he reacted ‘suspiciously’.

Prosecutor Sue Jacobs told the court that a total of 48 still and moving images of child abuse – some in the worst category – were found.

Martin Scarborough, mitigating, said Martin knew he faced prison, but had shown ‘genuine remorse’ and was candid with police.

Judge Bowers told him: ‘You present quite a problem for me because, in theory, you had breached the suspended sentence.

‘As most people will know, if people do breach a suspended sentence, then it is almost inevitable they go straight away to prison.
JUDGE PETER BOWERS NO STRANGER TO CONTROVERSY AND CONTRADICTION IN 20-YR CAREER

Peter Bowers, 67, a married father-of-three, has been no stranger to controversy in his 20-year career as a judge.

Three years ago, he allowed a violent thug to walk free from court despite admitting that the public think judges are ‘going mad’ for passing soft sentences.

In another case, he told a man who led police on a ten-mile car chase after trying to kill himself: ‘Next time you want to commit suicide find somewhere quiet to do it.’

More recently, he has made contradictory comments about burglary sentencing.

In May last year, he criticised sentencing guidelines that let first-time burglars escape with a ‘slap across the wrist’.

But weeks later, he allowed a man with almost 80 crimes on his record to walk free for a burglary committed four days after his release from prison, telling the court: ‘I must be getting soft in my old age.’

‘But I have read with some concern about you, and this addiction you have had of looking at pornography of little children.

‘I think you would suffer very badly in prison and I don’t think, at the moment, it is necessary to send you there today.

‘I am going to give you another suspended sentence, but you have got to understand it is the very last chance you are ever going to get.

‘You are probably doing the right thing not to have any internet access… it is a temptation you will find very hard to resist.’

The National Association of People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC) last night described the decision not to jail Mark Martin as ‘strange by any standard’.

Acting operations manager, Dr Jon Bird, said: ‘This is a remarkably short-sighted decision in my opinion.

‘We know that people who have this kind of problem need help to control it, but the sympathy should only go so far.

‘Two suspended sentences in a row is strange, by any standards. In prison this kind of offender would be segregated for his protection.

‘I imagine he is at home laughing about how he fooled a judge.

‘There has to be a strong deterrent enforced on these criminals who cause so much pain to their victims.’

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

If this is not a false flag article . . . etc. etc. heres the reponse even if the article is fake.

Saves money, saves rehabilitory useless torment in jail for the offender. Whats to compalin about? Incidentally viewing any kind of porn is a victimless crime though thought-wise I am sure the creepiness factor exuded by Mark Martin’s porn viewing has made many priests into paedophiles . . . yet the discipline was lacking in the priests while Mark Martin at least was disciplined enough to keep all his ogling activities in the virtual world (not advocating child pron, looks sickly to    am not advocating child pron, looks sick/sickly to – perhaps in Mark’s case that might be a ‘size-osmosis’ desire . . . being oversized and wanting to slim down somehow?).

Since Martin did not touch a single child, or appears unlikely to do so (in the past dunno maybe? Where are those Forensics teams . . . ), the National Association of People Abused in Childhood should not have an issue. This is more a cyber crime, which if considered against freedom  of speech or in this case the right to ogle porn, makes this a non-issue and non-crime. Mark Martin is a harmless 3rd party type (unlike those who go around sabotaging their potential political competitors with psychiatry or religious fundos), though potentially predatory has not done anything to any child, or made such porn and could feel remorseful. Go after the porn producers and actual child predators (lots of priests?)! England is going bankrupt and cannot afford to throw every incidental uninvolved viewer of porn into jail. Judge Bowers is very ‘grey area aware’ btw and should train the legal profession in mindset about such

grey area crimes and unnecessary sentencing as well as empathy. A rare breed of benevolent if not capable of reflecting on that of ‘others’ – if not a false flag article . . .

As for ” But weeks later, he allowed a man with almost 80 crimes on his record to walk free for a burglary committed four days after his release from prison, telling the court: ‘I must be getting soft in my old age.’ ”

40K a year of jail vs a few thousand over a decade, makes fiscal sense if not legal sense. If England was wealthy, for sure, jail away. But England is in debt, near bankruptcy, more Judges like Bowers are needed. Being all judgmental while ignoring the financial state of the nation is one way to

destroy the nation. Throwing people in prison is a luxury that England does not have – even as the callous nature of other judges about the fragile state of future of the lives of offenders who could be let off as above shown, does no justice to the justice system. Guess who’s protecting English

interest and the Offenders’ interest (empathising with the offender is also a Judges’ job, judges who simply imprison are doing half the work – Judges must empathise with the offender to be doing 100% of the job . . . ask a ‘Virtual’ Fagin for pointers) maybe best here?

This pedophile Martin really looks like one of our local politicians . . .

ARTICLE 6

Pope to pray at St. Peter’s tomb at Vatican – 4th March 2013 – by FRANCES D’EMILIO | Associated Press

Pope Francis speaks before the Regina Coeli prayer from the window of his studio overlooking St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Monday, April 1, 2013. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)View Photo

Pope Francis speaks before the …
Faithful try to watch Pope Francis delivering his Regina Coeli prayer from his studio window overlooking St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, Monday, April 1, 2013. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino)View Photo

Faithful try to watch Pope Francis …

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis will spend Monday’s Vatican holiday praying at the tomb of Peter, the church’s first pontiff, during a visit to the excavated necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica.

A Vatican statement called the visit private, but promised to release photos and video later in the day. The basilica was built over the location where early Christians would gather in secret, at a time of persecution in ancient Rome, to pray at an unmarked tomb believed to be that of Peter, the

apostle Jesus chose to lead his church.

In past years, popes often spent the day after Easter, known in Italy as “little Easter,” at Castel Gandolfo, the Vatican palace in the Alban Hills, a short drive from Rome. But that oasis of sprawling gardens and strolling paths in the quaint hill town is occupied by the predecessor of Francis,

Benedict XVI, who spent the last hours of his papacy there before becoming the first pope in 600 years to retire. Benedict is staying in Castel Gandolfo until a monastery at the Vatican in Rome can be readied for him.

Many Italians spend “little Easter” by having a picnic lunch in the countryside or in city parks, and Francis told Romans and tourists who gathered in St. Peter’s Square on Monday at noon to see him to “have a good lunch.” Francis said he was praying that Easter would inspire the faithful so

that “hatred gives way to love, lies to truth,” and that it would especially comfort those in “most need of trust and hope.”

He spoke to them from the studio window of the apartment in the Apostolic Palace overlooking the square. Benedict and popes before him lived there, but so far Francis, who stresses simplicity, has declined to move into the quarters. Instead, he has continued to stay in a hotel on Vatican City’s

grounds, the same residence where as Buenos Aires archbishop he stayed with fellow cardinals to elect Benedict’s successor.

They chose him, Jorge Bergoglio, the first pontiff from South America.

St. Peter’s mission was to continue to preach the message of Jesus and reach more souls. Francis, as a Jesuit, is steeped in the evangelizing mission of the church, and the necropolis tour brings him back to the origins of the church in its simplest years as a community of Christians professing

their faith in defiance of the crackdown by Roman emperors.

Peter himself was among the Christian martyrs during Nero’s reign. He is believed to have been crucified, head down, on the Vatican hill.

Constantine, the first Christian emperor, had an early basilica built on the slopes of the Vatican Hill, burying the pagan and Christian cemetery — necropolis means ‘city of the dead’ — that surrounded Peter’s burial site. The current basilica, named after St. Peter, was constructed over the earlier

basilica that was deemed unsafe and demolished in the late 15th century. The Baroque master architect Bernini designed the bronze canopy over the central altar over the spot of Peter’s burial site. The current basilica was planned as an awe-inspiring monument that would project the image of a

powerful church.

Under popes of the last century, extensive excavations were carried out of the sprawling necropolis. In 1965, archaeologists said they had found the bones of Peter in an area near an ancient Greek inscription saying “Peter is here.”

Part of a nearby necropolis came to light in 2003 during construction of a parking lot.

A few years ago, the Vatican unveiled the largest and most luxurious of the pagan tombs under St. Peter’s Basilica, that of a family of former slaves. Guided tours of the necropolis, upon appointment, have been one of the most sought-after attractions for tourists to the Vatican.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

This ‘spiritual method’ the Catholic Church practices is universally done in all faiths, and they can aid or reach others of other faiths if linguistically similar (needs understanding of language). Unfortunately the Catholic Church is as guilty and in this case cynically expedient, as all other faiths intentionally using culture as a weapon of control of othere etnicities and nations (i.e. proselytization, more so when the locals are barely familiar with their own native faith systems), to choose to couch the methods in an ethnic and cultural, also linguistic lens based around hierarchies that are equally nationalistic.

Meanwhile how many bad cardinals, archbishops and bishops hiding paedophiles are still on the loose? Not sacked yet? Francis would be untouchable by any for any politically inclined or reputational hiding types taken out. The Church needs to drop all these bad hats (or birettas), or the Church will be a lens through which the Devil of lower astral entities will corrupt the world by. Kissing 12 inmates’ feet every single day would do less than a single papal edict ordering mass defrockings and excommunications.

This is not about courage even, this is about purification and every day the Pope holds back from these required expulsions so the Church can renew, the Church mires deeper in the lower expressions of humanity’s soul – especially for those professing the faith or even those linguistically similar (that is one reason why some countries refuse to learn common languages). Without fear or favour, and one can only ask, is this how the Pope serves God? If  angry paedophiles even dare to retaliate by assassinating Francis, then martyrdom will result. Does Pope Francis dare or is Pope Francis complicit?

ARTICLE 7

Small town way to producing power – by Tan Hui Yee, Thailand Correspondent – published on Mar 22, 2013

One of the small reservoirs on the compound of Tonghua rice mill, which runs a power plant which generates energy from rice husks. — PHOTO: TAN HUI YEE

NAKHON RATCHASIMA – Think of a thermal power plant and the mind conjures up images of blazing heat, roaring engines and soot. But scenic reservoirs?

That’s the picture at least at Tonghua, a rice mill in northeastern Thailand which operates a small-scale, 7.7-megawatt facility that generates electricity from the 170 tonnes of rice husk it accumulates every day.

Located in Bua Yai district among the paddy farms in Nakhon Ratchasima province, it is a bright spot in the energy scene wracked by controversy after officials warned that the country could face partial blackouts next month due to the routine maintenance work on gas pipelines from Myanmar.

Tonghua is one of more than 300 small power producers in the country which generate electricity from renewable sources like agricultural waste, solar energy and wind. The power they produce makes up about five per cent of total electricity consumed Thailand right now, but there are plans to

grow this sector.

These small plants are supported by energy purchase agreements, subsidies as well as a shorter-than-normal approval process.

The scheme has its downsides: Because plants smaller than 10 megawatts in capacity were not required to go through lengthy environmental impact assessments prior to construction, some operations have drawn complaints of polluted water and foul smell from immediate neighbours.

Over at Tonghua, managing director Suthep Wiroadpaisit runs the plant with a mixture of big city business sense and small town goodwill.

Before plant was built in 2006, the Bua Yai-born businessman, whose family has been operating there  for five decades, gathered surrounding villagers to explain his plans and field any questions they had.

“They were worried about water,” he told The Straits Times. “It’s dry here, so they were afraid the plant would use up the district’s water.”

In response, he dug several reservoirs on his 2-million sq m property, enough to hold 3 million cubic metres of water. Rimmed with pleasant greenery, the reservoirs fill up in the rainy reason, and the water is slowly processed before use.

“I make my own water, like Newater!” he says proudly, before declaring that he is an enthusiast of Singapore’s environmental policies.

The resource-constrained city state recycles water for its drinking needs, and brands this product Newater. Mr Suthep has personally been to Singapore’s Newater visitor centre and carefully studied the water treatment process documented there.

Since his plant began operations in 2006, he has had a handful more meetings with neighbouring villagers, addressing questions like how the filters he uses keep ash from blanketing the surrounding district. The going has been fairly smooth, he says.

“That’s the culture upcountry – we help each other,” he says. “It’s not like in Bangkok, where we may not know each other even though we live side by side.”

tanhy@sph.com.sg

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

“I make my own water, like Newater!” he says proudly, before declaring that he is an enthusiast of Singapore’s environmental policies.

NO Mr.Foolish-Rich-Thai-Guy . . . no comparison . . . Newater is water with a 3% greywater EeeewwwW! nEW! Newater! Thats 3% processed sewer water Mr.Suthep.

The water here in the beautifully greenery edged pools (not the 100% ‘ew’ water that Suthep and everyone else ‘makes’), , is REAL water not like Singapores recycled GREY sewer based water. Please don’t compare fresh water from natural equivalent artificial Thai reservoirs (in a nice green setting I must say) in very impressive land banks (2 milllion sq m is a dream for most landowners, bravo, with a nice green (if the smoke is not too much) energy source. Those filters are moi’s idea no? Suthep should not ruin Thailand’s reputation by associating with Singapore’s water system which is ridiculed by Singaporeans themselves, who are quite angry that Singapore with all that wealth won’t install Desalisation Plants but instead chooses to make citizens drink 3% grey water which is barely suitable for discharge into the oceans as is . . .

ARTICLE 8

Homosexual marriage faces social pressure – by Tian Ying, Zhang Hui (Xinhua) – 08:03, April 01, 2013

BEIJING, March 31 (Xinhua) — Nine years into his second marriage, Yang Bin still awkwardly refers to his wife as “my date” while conversing with others. The failure to settle for a heterosexual marriage has once again saddled him with guilt and remorse.

Yang Bin (not his real name), born in 1970 in the outskirts of China’s Tianjin Municipality, is now the owner of a small restaurant. He looks pale and speaks in an utterly gentle voice, his face covered with chiseled wrinkles.

Like many Chinese homosexuals, Yang has a sad story of struggling in heterosexual marriage, as China’s family-centered culture accentuates one getting married and carrying on the family name, and the social tolerance for homosexuals is still limited, particularly in less-developed areas.

Yang’s story unfolded when he noticed at a very young age that he was different from his peers. “I never had any special feelings for girls but my heart beat fast for boys,” he says.

As Yang grew older, he realized he was gay. However, this knowledge spent a long time locked up deep in his mind, unexpressed to anyone as the sexual tendency was deemed abnormal and untenable by Chinese in the 1980s and 1990s, when homosexuality was included in the official Chinese

Classification of Mental Disorders.

It wasn’t until 1997, when Yang was 27, that he got his first chance to meet other homosexuals. In a park frequented by gays, a man approached and flirted with him. The experience excited Yang and the next day, he returned to the park, boldly found another man and “everything that should

happen happened.”

Finally falling in love and having an outlet for his long-oppressed emotion immersed Yang in happiness. But it didn’t last long.

In 2001, Yang’s parents repeatedly urged him to get married. With no other choice, Yang disclosed his real sexual inclination, hoping to be understood and accepted by them.

Yang recalls the evening of his coming out. Sitting with his parents in a bedroom, Yang told them, “I am gay, I don’t like women,” and explained how he became convinced.

But he did not convince his parents. During their talk, Yang’s father kept murmuring ‘not possible’ and asking Yang how he became like this.

He tried to win their understanding by spelling out, “I also want to lead a normal life, but I can’t help myself. Although I’ve been going out with a girl for four years, I never touched her hands.”

However, the discussion soon descended into a fight, with his furious father roaring, “Don’t try to find excuses [to break up with Yang’s then girlfriend],” and Yang making the accusation to his parents that “It is your genes that made me gay,” citing a hypothesis he read in a book that

homosexuality is genetic.

Later that evening, Yang’s parents brought in reinforcements consisting of his uncles and aunts to talk Yang out of homosexuality.

His father insisted that he get married, saying “I would rather you divorce than never marry.” His parents, who lived in the countryside, where people tend to be more conservative, could not stand gossip from other villagers.

The frustrated young man left home the next day. “When I returned half a year later, my parents were not mad at me any longer, and my father, who seldom cooked, made me my favorite seafood. Thinking of all the miseries I created for them and their unconditional love to me, I softened,” he

recalls.

Yang finally got married later that year, but divorced after just three months.

Four years on, in 2005, Yang stepped into a second marriage that he says he could never have imagined after the first. This time, an outgoing woman, blind to Yang’s real sexuality, was attracted to him and started pursuing him right in the period in which he broke up with his boyfriend of eight

years.

“I was deeply hurt by the break-up and no longer had faith in homosexual love. At that moment, I just wanted to get married and lead a normal life,” Yang explains.

However, his parents fiercely rejected the decision as they were clear about his sexuality and refused to arrange a ceremony for them. So the couple got married on their own and departed for a honeymoon.

Things did not work out as he wished. “I really thought I could distance myself from homosexual circles but I couldn’t,” Yang says. During their 15-day trip, the couple had an awkward sexual incident that saddened the bride, and Yang remembers seeing her “crying in pajamas in the hallway.” But

the bride did not have the faintest idea of what lay at the root of their problems.

In the following eight years so far, the couple have only made love five times, all in an unsuccessful attempt to conceive a child. “I felt deeply guilty and didn’t know how to face her,” Yang says.

To relieve his guilt, he treated his wife the best way he could and has taken good care of her family as well. “When her mother was hospitalized after a brain hemorrhage, I left my work behind and attended her bedside for months.” Yang’s parents also treated his wife like their own daughter to

“make up for their son’s mistake.”

But his feelings of guilt cannot be totally laid down. Though an unsatisfying sexual life is not necessarily lethal to a marriage in China, where women are often deemed not virtuous for speaking explicitly about or showing interest in sex, being childless is another matter. This gradually poisoned

the couple’s relationship, with them fighting about it occasionally.

During these incidents, even his virtuous wife could not help complaining, “I demand nothing of you but to let me feel I am a woman.”

“I cannot even satisfy such a simple wish in her,” Yang says, tears welling up in his eyes.

As time went by, he gave up on making their marriage work and cheated on his wife with another man. The resulting menage a trois has tragically worked as Yang and his wife now only reunite at weekends because the husband has to attend the restaurant day and night.

Yang’s boyfriend moved in with him in the restaurant (retrofitted from a four-bedroomed residential apartment), but his wife still continued to visit him every weekend. “I think that was when she discovered my problem,” he speculates, although Yang told his wife the man was just helping out in

the restaurant.

Yang recalls that his boyfriend once slipped into his bed, snuggling with him after his wife got up, but she only jokingly remarked ‘look how happy you are when he is under your blanket.’

But they never openly talked about Yang’s being gay. Like his parents, many Chinese do not accept the idea of homosexuality, taking it as a correctable morbidity.

In 2007, Yang was diagnosed HIV-positive but his wife fortunately not. Yang still kept her in the dark, getting a blood sample from her on the pretext that it was needed for a hepatitis test. After the discovery of his condition, however, Yang began trying to persuade his wife that they should

divorce.

Due to social stigma, many people with HIV in China even withhold their HIV status from close relatives. Some localities have endeavored to make it legally binding for HIV-positive people to inform their spouses, moves which have sparked fierce opposition from the HIV community.

“I have brought up divorce many times and encouraged her to date other men because I want her to start a new life, but she refused each time,” Yang sighs. She has always believed that the fundamental problem between them is that Yang is not mature enough (she is two years older her

husband) and things will improve when he gets ages.

Lack of public discussions about homosexuality keeps a lot of women, especially less educated ones, unaware of the landmine they may tread upon, and even if they realize someday, many will not let go, clinging onto gay husbands in the hope of turning them straight.

“We may look an admirable couple, doing the very best to care for each other and living a well-off life, but it hurts to think how she has turned from a happy and extrovert girl when we first met into a sad woman whose face is full of melancholy.”

In her book “The Subculture of Homosexuality,” renowned sexologist Li Yinhe estimated that there are 36 to 48 million homosexuals in China.

A large percentage of them surrender to pressures coming from their families and society by entering into heterosexual marriages.

According to HIV/AIDS and homosexuality expert Zhang Beichuan’s citing of his own research in 2012, 80 percent of gay men in China have married or will marry a woman.

However, changes are under way, with China developing more tolerance of homosexuals, particularly among young people and in big cities.

Li Hu, head of Haihe Star, a Tianjin-based HIV/AIDS non-governmental organization, says, “I find fewer and fewer friends and people we work with are married gays.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Sometimes the issue may be rather than a family line destroying m2m or f2f ONLY, is merely transvestitism or transgenderism and the lack of women/men who can match these men/women THEN these men and women becoming gay or lesbian because of the larger group of m2m and f2f voices in general, drowning the voices of all variants considered neither gender.

While same gender relationships certainly must be allowed to exist, the education system needs to promote variants of the same – to introduce transvestitism or transgenderism to males and female variants not fully of either gender, so they could still get married to their ‘primary characteristic organ present’ counterparts and set up families, rather than be swept away by the PERCEIVED lack of choices or lack of awareness of the many possible variants of gender orientation versus sexual expression versus not having children entirely.

The government could also promote a form of ‘male mistress (correct term being catamite)’ or ‘female playing male role’ culture – perhaps with further marriage union rights (for registration purposes so that this does not becoming an underground mess with all kinds of problems – the police regulating will help alot, the law recognizing will prevent any disenfranchisement), with the parents of the individuals’ family being continued with a ‘first wife’ that will bear the obligatory child for the parents (by artificial insemination overseen by registered medicos if not the state itself) if the parents wish that.

Actually m2m or f2f dna splicing is already possible and with a surrogate mother, a gay or lesbian couple can have children as well. While this particular type of new generation may be as discriminated against as GMO babies, the government again must inform and educate that m2m or f2f does not mean that the family line ends, but instead could use technology or as above suggested paragraphs, subculture, to allow everyone to get what they want (i.e. same gender unions for the people, also parents get their grandchildren).

ARTICLE 9

Gay son doesn’t change Arizona congressman’s position against same-sex marriage – by Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News | The Ticket

A Republican congressman from Arizona told a local news station that his son’s sexual orientation hasn’t changed his view that same-sex couples should not be allowed to marry.

Rep. Matt Salmon, from Arizona’s 5th Congressional District, told 3TV that he loves his son and does not believe he chose to be gay, but that he has not “evolved” to the position that his son should be allowed to marry someone of the same sex.

“I don’t support the gay marriage,” Salmon says in the clip. “My son is by far one of the most important people in my life. I love him more than I can say. I’m just not there as far as believing in my heart that we should change 2,000 years of social policy in favor of a redefinition of the family. I’m not

there.

“It doesn’t mean that I don’t have respect,” he continued. “It doesn’t mean that I don’t sympathize with some of the issues. It just means I haven’t evolved to that station.”

Last week, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio became the most prominent Republican politician to announce his support for same-sex marriage. He wrote in an op-ed that he changed his strong stance against gay marriage after his son came out as gay to Portman and his wife, when he was a college

freshman two years ago. “Knowing that my son is gay prompted me to consider the issue from another perspective: that of a dad who wants all three of his kids to lead happy, meaningful lives with the people they love, a blessing Jane and I have shared for 26 years,” he wrote.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases last week that could pave the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage in California and other states. Their decisions aren’t expected until June.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Regardless, there must be equitable spaces appropriate to the size of the local community, or options for those wishing to relocate to communities friendly to the group. Perhaps for the particularly estranged, adoptive fathers who are understanding of such issues could be matched up to

‘psychologically disowned’ children, which is effectively what not evolving effectively causes. That part of Salmon has effectively denounced a major part of his son’s life – regardless that most people will not be sharing their sexuality with their parents even to begin with.

Thats like saying love is conditional, when the only real love is unconditional and that would be more valuable than blood ties. As they say we can’t choose our relatives . . .

ARTICLE 10

Judge rejects divorce for transgender pregnant man – by PAUL DAVENPORT and FELICIA FONSECA | Associated Press

PHOENIX (AP) — An Arizona judge on Friday refused to grant a divorce for a transgender Arizona man who gave birth to three children after beginning to change his sex from female.

Maricopa County Family Court Judge Douglas Gerlach ruled that Arizona’s ban on same-sex marriages prevents Thomas Beatie’s 9-year union from being recognized as valid.

Thomas Beatie was born a woman and later underwent a double-mastectomy, and began testosterone hormone therapy and psychological treatment to become a man, but he retained female reproductive organs and gave birth to three children.

Gerlach said he had no jurisdiction to approve a divorce because there’s insufficient evidence that Beatie was a man when he married Nancy Beatie in Hawaii. He said the Beaties never provided records to fully explain what Thomas Beatie actually had done and not done to become a man.

“The decision here is not based on the conclusion that this case involves a same-sex marriage merely because one of the parties is a transsexual male, but instead, the decision is compelled by the fact that the parties failed to prove that (Thomas Beatie) was a transsexual male when they were

issued their marriage license,” he wrote in Friday’s ruling.

A spokesman for Beatie, Ryan Gordon, said the judge’s comments came as a shock and that Beatie plans to appeal the ruling. He said Beatie legally was married as a man and never was required to disclose that he retained female reproductive organs when applying for and being granted a new

birth certificate in Hawaii as a man. He said Beatie halted testosterone treatments so that he could give birth to his children.

“It’s unfortunate that the judge out here doesn’t recognize marriage in another state,” Gordon said.

Beatie is eager to end his marriage, but the couple’s divorce plans stalled last summer when Gerlach said he was unable to find legal authority defining a man as someone who can give birth.

Gerlach’s ruling didn’t address whether Arizona law allows a person who was born female to marry another female after undergoing a sex change operation.

A separate ruling issued Friday by Gerlach sets guidelines on how the Beaties will co-parent their three children and grants them joint authority in making legal decisions. Thomas Beatie is required to pay nearly $240 a month to Nancy Beatie for child support, but she won’t get alimony because

the marriage was declared invalid.

Nancy Beatie’s attorney, David Higgins, praised Gerlach for the thoroughness of the decision on the marriage, although it wasn’t the one she had hoped for.

“He still sees a same-sex marriage, but he gave us all the rulings that we’re asking for as far as the children,” Higgins said.

The National Center for Lesbian Rights, which isn’t involved in the Beatie divorce case, has said courts have declared marriages involving a transgender person invalid in a handful of cases across the country, but that those cases had different factual and legal issues than those in the Beatie

case.

Thomas Beatie, known as “The Pregnant Man,” was born Tracy Lehuanani Lagondino in Oahu, Hawaii. He began testosterone treatments in 1997 and underwent double mastectomy and chest reconstruction surgery in 2002. He changed his Hawaii driver’s license to say he was a man and had a

Hawaiian court approve his name change to Thomas.

Gerlach’s ruling noted that Thomas Beatie halted the testosterone treatments and that he didn’t provide documentation for any additional non-surgical efforts.

Thomas Beatie married his partner Nancy in early 2003 in Honolulu and became pregnant because Nancy was unable to have children. Thomas Beatie conceived with donated sperm and gave birth to children who are now 4, 3 and 2 years old. The couple eventually moved to Arizona.

Beatie has garnered a range of media attention, making the rounds on talk shows such as Larry King and Oprah Winfrey and winning a spot on Barbara Walters’ list of “10 Most Fascinating People” in 2008, alongside President Barack Obama, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and

swimmer Michael Phelps. He also published a book, “Labor Of Love: The Story of One Man’s Extraordinary Pregnancy,” the cover displaying an image of a shirtless Thomas sporting facial hair and holding a hand over his bare pregnant belly.
___

Fonseca reported from Flagstaff, Ariz. Associated Press Writer Jacques Billeaud in Phoenix contributed to this report.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

A good example of M2F transgender person with sexual organs of both genders. A transexual would be ‘either/or’ regardless of gender of birth, someone who changed sex not has sexual organs of either. Hear that Rogan? In court the difference is very relevant, so don’t pull a media skew on the

words because you think to ‘NLP basis’ force transgender persons to CHOOSE EITHER male of female, when what they really prefer to be somewhere in between. Fallon Fox is not transgender, she is a TRANSSEXUAL woman. The 2 words mean totally different things okay? Duh . . .

ARTICLE 11

Flashback: When even liberals backed ‘traditional marriage’ – by Liz Goodwin, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 5 hrs ago

Even as Democratic lawmakers rush to announce their support for gay marriage, a look back at the congressional debate over the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 shows they haven’t always championed the rights of same sex couples.

In historic gay marriage arguments before the Supreme Court this week, justices noted comments made by congressional Republicans about DOMA, which bars the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage. Justice Elena Kagan quoted the House report on the law at the time, which

said its purpose was to express “moral disapproval” of homosexuality. She suggested that if lawmakers were “infected” by animus toward an unpopular minority group when they passed the law, it could put DOMA on constitutionally shaky ground.

McClatchy has collected some of the more virulent comments made at the time by Republican lawmakers. But Democrats weren’t exactly gay marriage champions at the time either, and while they avoided the rhetoric espoused by their conservative colleagues, few took to the floor to argue that

the bill was discriminatory.

Then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., spoke against DOMA, saying it was unnecessary and an intrusion into states’ rights to define marriage. But he emphasized his own opposition to gay marriage before expressing reservations about the bill.

“I am not for same-sex marriage. I have said that publicly. I would not vote for same-sex marriage,” Kerry, now U.S. secretary of state, said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California made a similar point. “I personally believe that the legal institution of marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” she said. “But, as a matter of public policy, I oppose this legislation.”

Republicans were definitely more forceful in their opposition.

Then-Rep. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said he and his constituents believe “homosexuality is immoral, that it is based on perversion, that it is based on lust.” Coburn was elected to the Senate in 2004.

“Homosexuality has been discouraged in all cultures because it is inherently wrong and harmful to individuals, families and societies,” then-Rep. David Funderburk of North Carolina said.

A few lawmakers suggested American civilization would collapse if it accepted homosexuality.

DOMA passed Congress with large, bipartisan support: 85 votes in the Senate and 342 votes in the House. Democratic President Bill Clinton, facing re-election, signed it into law in the middle of the night. (Earlier this month, he disavowed the legislation.) At the time, the vast majority of

Americans opposed same-sex marriage.

Seven years later, when Republicans launched an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to exclude same-sex couples from the definition of marriage, Democrats argued against the move while stressing their belief that marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples.

In the video from Slate’s Dave Weigel, above, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Dick Durbin, who both recently endorsed same-sex marriage, said they were opposed to taking a drastic step of amending the Constitution. But they both elaborately declared their opposition to same-sex marriage, with

Clinton praising “the fundamental bedrock principle that it exists between a man and woman going back into the mists of history.”

Democrats’ position has changed extraordinarily fast since then, with President Barack Obama announcing his own support for gay marriage during the 2012 election campaign and calling for equality for “our gay brothers and sisters” in his inaugural address. Only 10 of the 55 Democratic

senators now do not back gay marriage.

Republican lawmakers have been far slower to embrace gay marriage. Rob Portman of Ohio became the first sitting Republican senator to support gay marriage earlier this month, when he revealed in an op-ed that his position changed after his son came out as gay. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa

Murkowski may be next: She said earlier this week that her position is “evolving.”

The shift has dovetailed with a dramatic reversal of public opinion on the issue. Recent polls show a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, compared with less than 30 percent in 1996.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

The physical genitals do not define a male or female or bigendered soul. Marriage is a bond between 2 individuals not 2 bodies. A male may have a female soul, a female a male soul. Too difficult for those lawmakers to understand? Some people have less empathy, those who have difficulty understanding this comment’s logic need to learn sensitivity and to look beyond the physical person.

ARTICLE 12

Stephen Colbert On Bill O’Reilly’s Gay Marriage Flip-Flop: ‘Shaken To My Core’ (VIDEO)

The Huffington Post  |  By Ross Luippold    Posted: 03/28/2013 8:22 am EDT  |  Updated: 03/28/2013 8:24 am EDT

Stephen Colbert opened Wednesday’s “Colbert Report” with a declaration of something that disturbed him even more than what appears to be the imminent embrace of gay marriage by the Supreme Court: Bill O’Reilly’s flip-flop on the issue, which he announced on his show Tuesday.

“I am shaken to the core,” the faux conservative pundit said. “Last night, even Papa Bear let me down.”

Colbert, who modeled his blustery “Colbert Report” character on O’Reilly, blasted the Fox News host for changing his mind about something he formerly denounced. “On gay marriage, Bill O’Reilly has flip-flopped. The gayest of all footwear.”

But he was particularly offended that O’Reilly took a noncommittal stance about gay marriage, saying on “The O’Reilly Factor” that he does not “feel that strongly about it one way or the other.”

This left Colbert aghast. “Bill O’Reilly doesn’t feel that strongly about something? What’s happening?! You’re Bill O’Reilly! Read your f*cking contract!”

He rolled several clips of O’Reilly proclaiming his distaste for gay marriage over the years, including clips where O’Reilly compared gay marriage to “plural marriage” and the right to get married to ducks and goats.

But if O’Reilly is a man of consistent philosophy, Colbert’s logic dictates, then his comparison of gay marriage to marrying a goat must have been a tacit endorsement of goat marriage, given his current feelings on gay marriage. And far be it from Stephen to get in the way of O’Reilly marrying a

goat.

“This is about a man and a goat who want to share all the joys and sorrows of life together. And if they choose to make it a lifelong commitment together, they should honor it.”

Check out the clip above to see Stephen Colbert try to wrap his head around O’Reilly’s flip-flop.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Tacit approach/broach on bestiality rather? This is not a flip flop, just Colbert trying to hold O’reilly back from growing as a person – DEMOCRATICALLY. This is about democratic rights nothing else. And all countries who want to rule the world cannot take any religious stance on anything

because religion discriminates though grants a form of pedigree. But if USA is to continue being the leader for human rights, O’Reilly has not flip flopped, this just shows Media Mogul maturation towards more democratic mindsets. Read the below links’ short discussion on bestiality :

Article 9 and Response to Article 9

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O’Reilly expands on Gay Marriage by broaching the issue of Goat Marriage . . . where are those brain scan translating technologies or apps? Lets see if the hypothetical goat in question approves of marriage to a human if the concept is at first even communicable . . .

ARTICLE 13

Pot Dealer in UK Gets Sentenced to Write 10-Page Essay – by Beth Greenfield, Shine Staff

Convicted UK pot dealer Terry Bennett, 32, was just sentenced to the grown-up version of writing “I will not chew gum in class” on the chalkboard 100 times. He must pen a 5,000-word essay about the dangers of cannabis by April 4—or spend a year in jail.

More on Shine: Busted: 15-Year-Old Son Caught with Marijuana Thanks to Dog’s Strange Symptoms

“It was a shock to be given such an unusual punishment. It’s been ages since I last wrote an essay,” Bennett, who was caught with just over two pounds of marijuana and admitted his intent to sell it, told the UK newspaper the Mirror.

More on Yahoo!: For Investors, Marijuana Remains a Cloudy Bet

“I think it’s good in a way because it gives me a chance to express my opinion about the crime that I’ve committed,” he added in a video interview with SWNS. “And it also gives me more of an understanding of why the crime’s illegal, because I’m having to actually do the research.”

Bennett’s original sentence from Bristol Judge Julian Lambert, given in January 2012, was for a one-year suspended prison sentence with 240 hours of community service. But a shoulder injury Bennett got while snowboarding, he eventually explained to the judge, made that impossible. Last week

Lambert came back with the alternative essay-writing sentence, which also comes with a four-month daily curfew of 8pm to 8am.

“I asked the judge if I could write a balanced argument for and against cannabis, but he said that since it’s illegal, I should only write about the bad things,” said Bennett. “I’m just going to write about certain dangers caused by cannabis that people might not necessarily know.”

The former plumber and father of two kids left high school at 16 and lives in Gloucestershire with his mother. Speaking with various UK news outlets, he seemed rather excited about the assignment, saying he’d gotten right to work with online research.

“I’ve always loved writing, and used to write stories from when I was 11, but this is the first time I’ve ever had to write a proper essay,” Bennett told the SWNS. “I didn’t realize just how much work it would be to get my point across properly.”

He said he plans to take a slightly different tack than the judge may be expecting.

“I’m going to approach it from a different angle, writing about the dangers that come about because it is illegal, rather than the nature of weed itself,” he explained to the Telegraph. He shared points he planned to cover in his 10-page thesis, including the concepts that pot can cause psychotic

episodes, that money generated around the selling of the drug is not taxable, and that smoking the stuff can cause cancers. Then, he stressed, there are the social dangers.

“Weed often causes more problems because of the social inertia and stigma that surrounds it,” the blooming writer noted. “It would be good if there was no stigma attached to people who want help with weed.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Kindness and savings on preventing prison collusion cannot change the Orwellian bent of the sentence, in that ONLY bad things can be written. This is a form of inculpation of intolerance towards organic psychedelics users, even as state laws should be challenged and yet the users and non-

users need to stay away from each other if they find this offfensive. We can appreciate the half measure nature of the judge but this really falls short of ensuring everyone gets their way as a democracy should ensure.

ARTICLE 14

No children allowed! Town bans under-16s at night in bid to tackle anti-social behaviour – by Kerry Mcdermott – PUBLISHED: 11:06 GMT, 30 March 2013 | UPDATED: 14:30 GMT, 30 March 2013

Police can stop under 16s from walking streets after 9pm in Barnsley
Dispersal order came into force yesterday in South Yorkshire town
Branded ‘totally wrong’ by civil liberties campaigners
Follows reports of rowdy and abusive behaviour, police say

Children have been banned from a town centre at night under sweeping new police plans to crack down on anti-social behaviour.

Police officers have been given the power to stop anyone under 16 from walking the streets in Barsley, South Yorkshire, after 9pm, and to take them home if they are not with a parent or responsible adult.

The six-month dispersal order – which police said was introduced in the wake of reports of rowdy and abusive behaviour in the town centre – has been branded ‘totally wrong’ and a ‘blatant infringement’ of civil liberties by critics.
No children allowed: Police in Barnsley can now stop children under 16 from walking around the town centre after 9pm

No children allowed: Police in Barnsley can now stop children under 16 from walking around the town centre after 9pm

The order, which came into force yesterday and covers the hours between 9pm and 6am, also gives police the power to disperse groups of two or more people from areas where there is persistent anti-social behaviour.

Any breach of a dispersal order, such as refusing to comply with being told to leave, is classed as a criminal offence.

‘Abusive behaviour’: Police said Barnsley residents have complained of feeling ‘harassed and intimidated’

Campaigners have warned that the ban infringes on civil liberties and said it amounted to treating groups of young people as criminals.

Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, said a dispersal order was a ‘blunt, crude tool’ that, at best, moves the problem to another location nearby.

‘It is a sign that the police have lost control of the streets and yet does nothing to restore either the community spirit or respect for the law that has been lost,’ he said.

‘It’s simple – if people break the law, harass people and cause distress then the police should arrest them.

‘The idea that simply by being under 16 and in town is grounds for the police to take you home seems a waste of time and resources.

‘To treat every group of young people as criminals is totally wrong and a blatant infringement on people’s rights to move around Barnsley.’

The campaign group Liberty has said dispersal orders ‘blur the distinction between nuisance and criminal behaviour’.

Inspector Julie Mitchell, from South Yorkshire Police, said: ‘Over the past few months, we have received numerous reports of nuisance caused by large groups congregating in the town centre.

‘The Barnsley Interchange has reported a number of nuisance behaviour incidents within their premises, and the County Way car park has been a regular venue for nuisance drivers late at night.

‘Many interventions have been put in place and although some measures have had some success, nuisance behaviour still persists on an almost daily basis.

‘The common theme that appears to cause the most concern is rowdy, inconsiderate and abusive behaviour,’ Insp Mitchell added.

‘This is often from people in large groups and has led to members of the public and business community reporting the feeling of being harassed and intimidated.’

The officer said discretion would be used and that the force wants to encourage residents and visitors to go into the town centre for retail and leisure.

‘By dispersing those groups intent on engaging in poor behaviour, we will ensure Barnsley is a safer and stronger town for everyone else,’ she said.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

This is alright provided there are towns which disallow ABOVE 16s from entering some districts as well. Door swings both ways.

ARTICLE 15

Why some women ‘trip for bad boys’ – Sarah-Maude Lefebvre | QMI AGENCY – 10:13 am, March 31st, 2013

MONTREAL — Some women are embarrassed if their significant other lands in jail, others however, actively pursue incarcerated men.

“All inmates will tell you that there are women who trip for bad boys,” said Stephane Lamarche, a former prisoner who spoke to QMI Agency from a halfway house in Quebec.

Even Guy Turcotte, who stabbed his two children to death in 2009 and was found not criminally responsible for mental health reasons, has admirers. He received letters and photos from women suitors when he was detained in a psychiatric institution.

Many former prisoners and others connected to the prison industry told QMI Agency that these cases are not unique.

“Prisoners have told me about these women,” said criminologist Jean-Claude Bernheim, who added that he’s met women who pursue imprisoned men.

“There are a lot of psychological elements in play here. For many of these women, (the relationships) are linked to a fantasy.”

There are many ways for women to meet incarcerated men. Some volunteer with prisoner advocate organizations while others respond to newspaper advertisements placed by inmates.

Community chaplain Laurent Champagne said that the phenomenon of women pursuing prisoners is “marginal” yet he said every year he catches women volunteers trying to find a boyfriend or husband behind bars.

Pascal Belanger from a group that organizes visits between prisoners and members of the community, said he lost an employee not long ago because they started a relationship with an inmate.

Belanger told QMI Agency that even correctional officers have fallen for prisoners.

“At least one prison guard in Canada every year quits their job and marries an inmate,” Belanger said.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Male prisoners are easier to communicate with and also vulnerable. The spirit of such males are easier to bond with being so imprisoned and thus ‘friendlier’ and more accepting, so the women working in prisons or even out in society target these ‘weakened’ state males. The true male state is

however, unfettered and wild, and this unsettles the women who prefer ‘easy prey’ or are too LAZY to work on relationships preferring to allow the prison system to do that for them. . Conversly women who target the free ranging males are stronger or more principled. They do not need men in chains or do not want to approach men in these damaged states. Free ranging men though have their bad habits and in spirit are in many ways more adequate  than imprisoned males to not get caught or are equally ‘bad’.

The logic behind this article is Orwellian if anything and has subtle elements of militant feminism as well as BDSM culture, encourages men to get into prison to seek mates! While such relationships may be more sustainable at times, they are less healthier, display psychotic and possibly incestuous or enslavement undertones, and women who do have the confidence or principles do not need to be in a relative position of power or superiority in society (i.e. not been charged as criminal) to accept a mate. Meanwhile though, some of these prisoner/ex-con seeking women have been fractured by bad relationships and do better with equally damaged men – and also indicate vulnerability which is also a desirable quality for non-working class women to have, even though most prisoners are working class men who cannot fully appreciate the very vulnerability that brings these women to these men . . . lost of missed connections being EXPLOITED by such women here . . . A mish mash beta society in promotion by MSM perhaps? To each their own . . .

http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/lifestyle/archives/2013/03/20130331-101325.html

ARTICLE 16

Saudi Arabia beheads murderer… and then CRUCIFIES his body – Friday, 29 March 2013 09:31

Saudi authorities have beheaded a murderer and crucified his body after he killed and raped a Pakistani national.

The kingdom’s interior ministry announced the execution, stating that the man had murdered and sodomised another male. Both actions are punishable by death.

‘The Yemeni citizen Mohammed Rashad Khairi Hussain killed a Pakistani, Pashteh Sayed Khan, after he committed sodomy with him,’ said a statement carried by state news agency SPA.

Hussain was also convicted of robbery and carrying out a series of attacks.

The execution, in the southern city of Jizan, was followed by crucifixion, a punishment used by the ultra-conservative country for serious crimes.

Saudi Arabia have been criticised in the international community for their harsh punishments, including executions by beheading and firing squad.

There have been 28 people beheaded in Saudi Arabia this year.

In 2012, they executed 76 people, according to an AFP tally based on official figures, while the US-based Human Rights Watch put the number at 69.

The oil-rich kingdom follows a strict implementation of Islamic law, or Shariah, under which people convicted of murder, rape or armed robbery can be executed, usually by sword.

The announcement comes after Amnesty International released the final words of a man sentenced to death by firing squad.

He was allegedly forced to confess after the authorities threatened to torture his mother.

Seven juveniles were arrested and convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to death in the Southern city of Abha after their appeals to the king were rejected.

One of the robbers was interviewed by the human rights charity before his death.

He said: ‘I have nine hours left until I die. We found this out through friends and relatives who saw the market square being prepared for the execution.

‘There are now seven spots in the square for seven people to be shot. It’s going to be in public, in the market, in the city of Abha.

‘We don’t know what we are supposed to have done wrong.

‘We were forced to make confessions. We were mistreated by the investigators – they took our clothes and it was winter. They tortured us by suspending us from chains on the wall.

‘They also used psychological torture such as threatening they would bring in our mothers and torture them in front of us.

‘I didn’t kill anyone – we were tried for robbery and we were forced to confess. I hope the execution will be stopped.

‘I wish for it to be stopped and for a fair trial and for a reinvestigation. The trial was totally unjust.’

One of the men told The Associated Press last month he was only 15 when he was arrested as part of a ring that stole jewelry in 2004 and 2005.It was also reported that they had no access to lawyers.

The south has been marginalized and suffered discrimination by the powerful central Saudi region where the capital, Riyadh, and holy shrines of Mecca and Medina are located.

It was reported on March 13 that the execution went ahead despite appeals from human rights charities.

There was also an international outcry, including from human rights groups, after a Sri Lankan maid, Rizana Nafeek, was beheaded in public by sword last month.

Miss Nafeek was sentenced to death aged 17 in 2007 after her Saudi employer accused her of strangling his four-month-old baby two years earlier after a dispute with the child’s mother.

A government spokesman said Riyadh: ‘deplores the statements made… about the execution of a Sri Lankan maid who had plotted and killed an infant by suffocating him to death one week after she arrived in the kingdom.’

The case soured the kingdom’s diplomatic relations with Sri Lanka, which on Thursday recalled its ambassador to Saudi Arabia in protest.

The UN’s main human rights body on Friday expressed ‘deep dismay’ at the beheading, while the European Union said it had asked Saudi authorities to commute the death penalty.

Riyadh, however, rejected the statements as ‘external interference’ in its domestic affairs.

The spokesman said: Saudi Arabia ‘respects… all rules and laws and protects the rights of its people and residents, and completely rejects any intervention in its affairs and judicial verdicts, whatever the excuse.’

-dailymail.co.uk

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Life for life is fair but perhaps modern less vicious methods applicable instead? The crucifixion is merely dramatic and a waste of time for the middle and upper classes at any rate. But thieves getting hands chopped for stealing less valuable items is excessive. A thief can earn enough to compensate victims a whole lifetime WITH hands intact. Cripple a thief and society is that much poorer, creates dependents in the form of cripples.. As Gandhi said something therabouts, “An eye for an eye leaves the world blinder . . . “, how can a limited resource that is connected to a living being like a hand be compared to any small goods petty thieves steal? This extreme punishment is not equitable at all.

ARTICLE 17

Boris Berezovsky’s last interview: ‘There is no point in life’ – by Tom Parfitt in Moscow and Steven Swinford – 12:34PM GMT 24 Mar 2013

Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch, said less than 48 hours before he was found dead at his home in Berkshire that he no longer saw the point in life.
Mr Berezovsky, a fiery critic of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin who fled to the UK in 2000, was found dead at the age of 67, reportedly in a bath at his home.

Boris Berezovsky was discovered dead yesterday afternoon at his home in Ascot, Berkshire. Reports from Russia said he was found in the bath.

lya Zhegulev, a commentator with the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, met the 67-year-old oligarch in the restaurant of the Four Seasons hotel on Park Lane on Friday evening.

Mr Berezovsky said had had lived through “many disappointments” in London. He said: “I’ve lost the point… there is no point [or meaning] in my life. I don’t want to be involved in politics. I don’t know what to do. I’m 67 years old. And I don’t know what I should do from now on.”

He said he wanted to return to Moscow: “I want nothing more than to return to Russia. Even when they opened a criminal case against me, I wanted to return to Russia… that was my main miscalculation: that Russia is so dear to me that I cannot be an émigré.”

Friends of Mr Berezovsky today claimed he may have been victim of a Russian hit. However, there are conflicting reports that he may have committed suicide after suffering from severe depression.

Friends raised the possibility of suicide and said Berezovsky had been “destroyed” by losing a £3billion legal action with his former business partner, Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea football club. Berezovsky had been living in exile in Britain since 2000.

He was given asylum in 2003, which created tensions between London and Moscow.

Once worth as much as £3billion, he had suffered financial and personal problems, his friends said.

News of Berezovsky’s death emerged in a posting on Facebook by his son-in-law, Egor Schuppe. Mr Schuppe simply posted: “Boris Berezovsky is dead.”

Berezovsky, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, had long feared for his life and had survived repeated assassination attempts — although none in recent years.

He had been due to be a witness at the inquest next month into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB spy who was murdered in 2006 after being poisoned by radioactive polonium-210 in what is believed to have been a Kremlin-sanctioned assassination.

The police investigation into Berezvosky’s death is the first of its kind since the murder of the spy. The scale of the investigation was announced at 1am this morning by police in a reflection of its seriousness.

Mr Putin’s spokesman said the Russian president had been informed of Berezovsky’s death.

The spokesman claimed that in recent weeks the oligarch had written a letter to Mr Putin “asking for forgiveness” and seeking “help to return to the motherland”.

Such a move would have been a dramatic change for Berezovsky as he had been for 13 years an enemy of the Kremlin. In a report which deepened the mystery, Russia’s Channel

One state television claimed that Berezovsky had suffered several heart attacks in the past week.

Specialist officers were called in to investigate whether he had been killed by a chemical or biological agent

Lord Bell, the PR executive who had acted as Berezovsky’s spokesman and was also a good friend, told The Sunday Telegraph that he had last seen the oligarch three weeks ago.

“He was extremely depressed,” said Lord Bell. “He has been very low since the court ruling against him. He had huge financial problems and personal problems, too.”

Berezovsky had sued Mr Abramovich over allegations that he had been intimidated into selling the football club owner shares in Sibneft, the Russian oil conglomerate. The ensuing legal battle is thought to be the most expensive of all time, with legal costs as high as £100million.

In a devastating ruling against him in August last year, Mrs Justice Gloster had “found Mr Berezovsky an unimpressive, and inherently unreliable, witness, who regarded truth as a transitory, flexible concept, which could be moulded to suit his current purposes”.

Lord Bell said yesterday that the ruling had wrecked his reputation and that he had never recovered. “That judge destroyed his morale. It destroyed his self-esteem,” he said.

Lord Bell added: “He was an extremely nice man, very kind to me and all the people around him. I had a huge amount of admiration for him.”

Berezovsky said after the trial: “Sometimes I have the impression that Putin himself wrote this judgment.”

Lord Bell said his friend, whom he had known for 14 years, had long lived in fear of his life after making enemies with Mr Putin.

“Russia is a very dangerous place,” said Lord Bell, the founder of Bell Pottinger, the public relations company.

The alarm over Berezovsky was raised at one of his homes in Ascot by his bodyguard. His private lawyer told Lord Bell that an ambulance had been called but that Berezovsky could not be revived.

A South Central Ambulance Service spokesman said: “We were called at 3.18pm by a caller who was concerned for the welfare of a gentleman at an address in Ascot. A 67-year-old man was confirmed dead at the scene. The death is unexplained and is being investigated by Thames Valley Police.”

Berezovsky had been facing a new legal battle brought by his former girlfriend, with whom he had two children.

Elena Gorbunova had sat at Berezovsky’s side throughout his High Court battle with Mr Abramovich.

But the couple subsequently split up and in January she had applied to the court to freeze £200million of his assets to prevent the sale of property in Britain and France.

At a preliminary hearing Mr Justice Mann said: “On the evidence, Mr Berezovsky is a man under financial pressure.”

Berezovsky, a former mathematician who had made his fortune in oil, aviation and television in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Communism, fled Russia in 2000 and was put on the country’s official wanted list in 2001 on charges of fraud and money laundering.

The British Government granted him political asylum in 2003 and he used London as a base from which to launch critical attacks on Mr Putin and to call for his overthrow.

Among his circle of exiles was Mr Litvinenko, who lived in a house in north London which was owned by Berezovsky.

The oligarch had survived several assassination attempts while in Russia, including a bomb that decapitated his chauffeur. Demyan Kudryavtsev, a journalist and former associate of Berezovsky, yesterday wrote on Twitter: “There were no signs of violent death.”

Alexander Dobrovinsky, a lawyer whose partnership has offices in Park Lane — where Berezovsky was also based — told Russia’s Rossiya 24 channel that he had been called from London and told the oligarch had committed suicide.

“He was in a terrible, awful state recently. He had so many debts, he was practically ruined,” said the lawyer. Dmitry Peskov, Mr Putin’s spokesman, claimed that Berezovsky had been in contact with the president in recent weeks, asking for forgiveness.

Mr Peskov told Rossiya 24: “Berezovsky addressed Putin in a letter, written by him personally, in which he admitted he made a lot of mistakes and was asking for forgiveness and to help him to return to the motherland.”

Thames Valley Police said Berezovsky’s death was being treated as “unexplained” and had cordoned off the property while investigations were carried out.

During his conversation with the Russian Forbes journalist, which was not recorded, Mr Berezovsky is said to have compared his life to that of the oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was jailed on fraud charges after clashing with the Kremlin. He suggested that Mr Khodorkovsky had

“preserved himself” despite being in prison.

Mr Berezovsky reportedly added: “I have changed many of my views, including those about myself, and concerning what is Russia and what is the West.

“I had an absolutely idealistic idea about the possibilities for building democracy in Russia. And an idealistic idea about what democracy is in the centre of Europe. I underestimated the inertia of Russia and overestimated the West.”

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

People of such high profile and capacity to do so much with their wealth deserve to die when they bandy about fake maudlin sentimentality like this. No point in life? Do something for Russia, help democracy, field candidates with that money. No? Just moan about life with all that capacity? Little

wonder the Fates did this fat cat in. Useless eater among fat cats. Some of the worst off among the 99% live on and struggle, probably though this was an execution.

ARTICLE 18

One of the nastiest and most immoral political acts in modern times – by Max Hastings – PUBLISHED: 23:54 GMT, 25 March 2013 | UPDATED: 12:53 GMT, 26 March 2013

People who rob old ladies in the street, or hold up security vans, are branded as thieves. Yet when Germany presides over a heist of billions of pounds from private savers’ Cyprus bank accounts, to ‘save the euro’ for the hundredth time, this is claimed as high statesmanship.

It is nothing of the sort. The deal to secure a €10?billion German bailout of the bankrupt Mediterranean island is one of the nastiest and most immoral political acts of modern times.

It has struck fear into the hearts of hundreds of millions of European citizens, because it establishes a dire precedent.

Hands off! Banking sector workers have been protesting outside of Cyprus’s parliament in Nicosia

A Europe-wide precedent? The deal to secure a German bailout of the bankrupt Mediterranean island has struck fear into the hearts of hundreds of millions of European citizens

If democratically elected governments are willing to impose outright confiscation of up to 40 per cent of balances over €100,000 upon depositors in Cyprus, then why not another such hit tomorrow — in Spain, Italy or, most plausibly, Greece?

This is the most brutal display since 2008 of how far the euro-committed nations are willing to go to save the tottering single currency. It shows that the zone’s crisis will run and run, to the grievous disadvantage of almost everyone except the Germans.

Berlin insisted upon a harsh line towards the Cypriots because they inhabit a small island with no political clout. Cypriot bankers have behaved with fantastic irresponsibility. They lent huge sums to Greece, and offered high interest rates to dirty money, with no questions asked.

Months ago, the Germans made it clear that they baulked at providing a cash lifeline to the Russian gangsters who have tried to take over Cyprus with a nod from their friends in the Kremlin.

But hundreds of thousands of honest, decent citizens, including British residents, also had money in the island’s banks. They took it for granted that if Cyprus’s financial system was deemed worthy to be part of the eurozone, it must be as safe as the Bundesbank.

They were fully entitled to make that assumption, and to be outraged by the looting of their accounts today.

Cypriots want to get back to work as banks remain closed

Hundreds of thousands of honest, decent citizens, including British residents, had money in the island’s banks

Protest: Many citizens took it for granted that if Cyprus’s financial system was deemed worthy to be part of the eurozone, it must be as safe as the Bundesbank

The fact that Cyprus is a rackety semi-gangster society made it madness ever to allow the island to join the eurozone, rather than an excuse, as now, for stealing its citizens’ money.

The Germans, who effectively control and bankroll the whole single-currency system, acted recklessly by signing on Cyprus — and Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Ireland. None of these countries had economic convergence with northern Europe.

But Berlin chose to pretend that they did, because it thus became enormously profitable for Germany to trade with them in an undervalued common currency rather than a sky-high Deutschmark.

It always appeared absurd for the Germans, who — like the British — obey rules, pay taxes and tell the truth in financial documents, to form a financial union with the southern Europeans, who do none of those things, and are never likely to.

There is a real prospect that Silvio Berlusconi will be able to form a new Italian coalition government

Incredibly, there is a real prospect that Silvio Berlusconi will be able to form a new Italian coalition government, even though a string of court verdicts has found him to be a major criminal with a repulsive record of sexual behaviour.

How can the rest of Europe do serious business with a country that wilfully chooses to be led by such a man? Many Italians find this acceptable, and somehow make it work. But the Italian way, like the Cypriot and Greek way, is not our way. The Germans, by trying to pretend otherwise, are

defying gravity.

More than two years ago now, I heard a senior central banker flatly declare that the eurozone is unsustainable. He has repeated the same view every time I have seen him since, most recently a few weeks ago.

He believes that if the southern Europeans left the system, after a period of turmoil they might be amazed how quickly they can restore themselves to prosperity, once they can trade in their own heavily devalued currencies. But he has always believed that if, alternatively, the southern Europeans

attempt to cling on in the euro, the consequence will be an interminable crisis, with unending austerity imposing huge and perhaps uncontainable social and political strains — riots on the streets.

Nothing has happened since 2011 to make my friend seem a foolish merchant of doom. On the contrary: we see seething, steaming popular rage in the Mediterranean countries growing rather than abating. What have the Cypriot people now got to look forward to, save the ruin of their economy

along with their banking system, its principal engine? Who will ever trust money to a Cyprus bank again?

Any British tourist who has bought a cup of coffee in Italy, Greece or Spain in the past few years knows how fantastically high is those countries’ cost of living. Yet they stagger blindly on, stubbornly seeking to pretend that they can play with the big boys, share a currency with mighty Germany.

This masquerade may continue for years, with France joining the ranks of the economic basket-cases, because its government, too, rejects economic reality.

And even though Britain is not in the euro, what is happening has immense implications for us. As long as the European economies remain stagnant, conditions will remain tough here, because so much of our trade is with Europe. Moreover, the Cyprus precedent is as scary for people who live in

Luton as for those who live in Limassol.  Almost every Western society, including Britain, is burdened with debt it cannot ever realistically hope to pay off. There are only three ways in which governments can get off the hook: taxation, inflation and confiscation. The current Coalition is playing

with only the first two of these.

Demonstration: Thousands of bank employees protest outside the Ministry of Finance in Cyprus last week

But Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Nick Clegg are openly wedded to a mansion tax, which, if introduced, would be no more and no less an act of highway robbery than the Cypriot so-called ‘haircut’ on bank deposits.

Forget about whether your own house is currently under their radar — worth less than the £2?million value threshold they are publicly proposing. Having adopted the principle that it is morally acceptable to seize a proportion of citizens’ assets, they are on the road to a Cypriot position; a

Cypriot solution.

I have English friends who are neither hugely rich nor willing to do anything remotely illegal who are today thinking furiously about where they might put some of their assets, beyond the reach of a prospective Labour smash-and-grab.

We should not dismiss such people as nervous nellies.

Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Nick Clegg are openly wedded to a mansion tax, which, if introduced, would be no more and no less an act of highway robbery than the Cypriot so-called ‘haircut’ on bank deposits

Miliband and Balls salivate at the prospect of resuming a socialist assault on capitalism where Old Labour left off back in 1979.

It cannot too often to be said that the economic crisis that began in 2008 looks far more threatening to the historic interests of the West than anything Osama bin Laden contemplated in his dreams.

Germany still has a stubborn, visceral belief that the euro can be preserved in its present form, along with its own economic and political dominance of Europe.

Berlin’s rulers seem willing to pay almost any price to achieve this, though we shall discover at the country’s October elections whether their voters feel the  same way.

The spectacle of the richest nation in Europe foreclosing on one of the smallest, looting the savings of thousands of people, is profoundly repugnant.

Surely the euro cannot long survive by such anti-democratic means. It certainly does not deserve to.

Commentator Comments :

The comments below have not been moderated.

`One of the nastiest and most immoral political acts in modern times` < < < < < = Not when compared to the bedroom tax that only applies to the poorest in society it isn’t.

– TG-3323 , LIVERPOOL, United Kingdom, 28/3/2013 00:06
Rating   30

Another DM article trying to rouse up hatred against the Germans. The English people like the Germans . A press run by English people for English people is desperately needed.

– kiwi123 , dunedin, New Zealand, 27/3/2013 20:11
Rating   22

Jamesin London00.44 …………………….Obviously sour grapes —–because you lost your money you think it is OK for others to lose theirs.

– ENJAY , WIRRAL, United Kingdom, 27/3/2013 18:08
Rating   17

Cyprus is a rackety semi-gangster society? Really? This statement alone makes the rest of the article irrelevant to any reader with a sense of fairness. I wouldn’t have it if it were said about the British, the Germans, or anyone else, and we all know that historically, Greeks and Cypriots have many

more real reasons to be prejudiced against both these nations than the other way around. If/When the powers that be decide that they want to snatch money from your bank accounts, have no doubts that some “publication” somewhere will describe your country more-or-less in the same terms.

What goes around comes around. Respectfully.

– Leonidas Kossis , Athens, Greece, 27/3/2013 16:09
Rating   8

Germany’s history is littered with repugnant acts a leopard can’t change it’s spots but Cameron could get us out of this nightmare that is the E.U,but all you get from him are empty worthless promises.The conservative backbenches if they had an ounce of courage would dump him and his millionaire friend in the treasury.

– roadrunner , England, 27/3/2013 16:01
Rating   27

If they get away with this in Cyprus then they can do it anywhere in the Eurozone or for that matter within the EU.

– George C. , Maidenhead, United Kingdom, 27/3/2013 14:59
Rating   63

What we did was an even nastier and immoral political and cowardly act. We rewarded the Banksters and City Fraudsters with tax cuts, massive bonuses and billions of Pounds worth of Taxpayers and Savers hard earned money. The (usual suspects) the poor, the unemployed and the low paid are now being punished with benefit cuts and Bedroom Taxes, so spare me the hypocritical right-wing lecture.

– joe reilly , Lincs England, 27/3/2013 14:15
Rating   11

………….and this the mob that Scotlands’ Alex Salmond wants to part of.. No thanks !!!

– John , Glasgow, 27/3/2013 12:24
Rating   25

Isn’t Socialism grand?

– Junior Naturel , NYC, United States, 27/3/2013 11:40
Rating   54

JamesinLondon , London, 27/3/2013 00:44 You’re an idiot.

– Mark , Liverpool, 27/3/2013 11:28
Rating   2

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Try this format instead. 100,000 all the way up to 1 million should be left alone.

1 million to 5 million should be hit with 20%

5 million to 20 million should be hit with 40%.

20 million onwards should be hit with 80%.

This way the 99% 100K to 1 million types who really are not exactly wealthy (mostly middle class actually) will  be left alone. For the most part most above 1 million in savings can definitely get by comfortably enough.

ARTICLE 19

Mexican vigilantes take over town –  Associated Press in Acapulco guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 March 2013 07.19 GMT

Armed members of ‘self-defence’ group throw up checkpoints and arrest police and officials they accuse of gang links

Armed men stand at the entrance to the town of Tierra Colorada, Mexico, where vigilantes have arrested local police and officials accused of gang links. Photograph: Alejandrino Gonzalez/AP

Hundreds of armed vigilantes have taken control of a town on a major highway in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, arresting local police officers and searching homes after one of their leaders was killed. Several opened fire on a car of Mexican tourists headed to the beach for Easter week.

Members of the area’s self-described “community police” say more than 1,500 members of the force were stopping traffic on Wednesday at improvised checkpoints in the town of Tierra Colorado, which sits on the highway connecting Mexico City to Acapulco. They arrested 12 police and the former director of public security in the town after a leader of the state’s vigilante movement was slain on Monday.

A tourist heading to the beach with relatives was slightly wounded on Tuesday after they refused to stop at a roadblock and vigilantes fired shots at their car, officials said.

The vigilantes accuse the ex-security director of participating in the killing of their leader Guadalupe Quinones Carbajal, 28, on behalf of local organised crime groups and dumping his body in a nearby town on Monday.

“We have besieged the municipality, because here criminals operate with impunity in broad daylight, in view of municipal authorities. We have detained the director of public security because he is involved with criminals and he knows who killed our commander,” said Bruno Placido Valerio, a spokesman for the vigilante group.

Placido said vigilantes had searched a number of homes in the town and seized drugs from some. They turned over the ex-security director and police officers to state prosecutors, who agreed to investigate their alleged ties to organised crime.

The growing movement of “self-defence” vigilante groups has seen masked townspeople throw up checkpoints in several parts of southern and western Mexico, stopping passing motorists to search for weapons or people whose names are on hand-written lists of “suspects” wanted for crimes like theft and extortion.

The vigilantes have opened fire before on motorists who refused to stop, slightly wounding a pair of tourists from Mexico City visiting a local beach in early February.

The groups say they are fighting violence, kidnappings and extortions carried out by drug cartels, but concerns have surfaced that the vigilantes may be violating the law, the human rights of people they detain, or even cooperating with criminals in some cases.

Sensitive over their lack of ability to enforce public safety in rural areas, official have largely tolerated vigilante groups.

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

Some hombres have been watching ‘3 Amigos’ (1986 John Landis) . . . but this is good overall. Police with ganglinks destroy democracy. Meanwhile consider what is crime and what has been labeled as crime to necessitate SOME of these police linke to gangs or even for people to join gangs at all. Drugs legal to grow and offered by government at very low prices? (No addicts running around committing crimes.) if cheap cigarettes and alcohol available? (No smuggling or fake products.) Price controlled Red light district legalized and all workers and patrons monitored for communicable diseases? (No diseases, no human trafficking, no profiteering.) Fight arenas legal and with medical oversight? Gunnery-Racing tracks with bouncers to ‘keep peace’ available? (No boredom for disruptive people – they can arm themselves and get into the rink with equally bored people who expect to get hurt and spend a few weeks or months healing up in controlled conditions.) Gun owners carefully monitored for insanity before ownership? (No smuggling.) So much of the above are ‘crime’ but could be legalized and end up being just another tax contributing subculture.

ARTICLE 20

Angelina Jolie to sell jewellery line to fund overseas schools – April 02, 2013

Jolie is not the first celebrity to open schools in faraway places.

LOS ANGELES, April 2 — Angelina Jolie has opened another girls school in Afghanistan and plans to fund more from the proceeds of a jewellery line going on sale this week that she helped to design, celebrity website E! News reported yesterday.

Jolie, a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, funded the girls-only primary school in an area outside Kabul that has a high refugee population, E! News said in an exclusive report.

The school educates 200-300 girls, E! said. It showed pictures of the school, which opened in November, and a plaque acknowledging Jolie’s contribution.

Jolie also funded a girl school in eastern Afghanistan that opened in 2010, according to the UNCHR.

Jolie’s representatives did not return calls for comment.

E! said that Jolie plans to pay for more schools by selling a “Style of Jolie” jewellery line that she helped create with jewellery maker Robert Procop.

Procop designed the engagement ring given to the actress by her partner Brad Pitt in April 2012.

“Beyond enjoying the artistic satisfaction of designing these jewels, we are inspired by knowing our work is also serving the mutual goal of providing for children in need,” Jolie was quoted as telling the website.

Procop’s website said the “first funds from our collaboration together have been dedicated to the Education Partnership for Children in Conflict (founded by Jolie) to build a school in Afghanistan.”

According to the Style of Jolie website, the newly expanded collection includes versions of the black and gold necklace that the actress wore to the premiere of her 2010 movie “Salt,” a pear-shaped citrine and gold necklace, and rose gold and emerald tablet-shaped rings, earrings and bracelets.

No price details were released.

The jewellery will go on retail sale for the first time on April 4 through Kansas City jewellery store Tivol, Tivol said.

Procop told E! that it was “an honor to have the opportunity to be part of creating this line with Angie, as we both believe every child has right to an education.”

Jolie is not the first celebrity to open schools in faraway places.

Both Oprah Winfrey and Madonna have funded the building of schools in South Africa and Malawi in the past six years, although both ran into trouble.

Madonna’s project provoked controversy over costs and mismanagement, while a staff member at Winfrey’s school was arrested on charges of assault and abuse of students. – Reuters

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

So greedy and selfish to cause so much pain to China’s 99%ters who have nothing and are most affected. Those styles belong to China forever, and debt from interest as well. The ‘Cradle of Death’ more like . . . Cambodia will be forever tainted dealing with this evil . . .

Jolie is not the first celebrity to open schools in faraway places. . . . Hows your school doing in Africa Madonna? I heard Oprah has contributed hers as well too . . . when’s Oprah getting her O.A.E.? Extant African Royalty, ready to make a Dame out of Oprah before the Anglo-Saxons get to Oprah first?

ARTICLE 21

Smartphones Could Get Sapphire Touch Screens – by Jesse Emspak – Mar 22, 2013 02:56 PM ET

The glass touch screen on a smartphone is a great piece of technology — until it hits the floor and cracks. Manufacturers have attempted to solve the breakage problem with different formulations of glass, such as Corning’s famous Gorilla Glass. But now there’s an alternative: sapphire, the

hardest mineral next to diamond.

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Sapphire, like diamonds, can be made artificially. To make sapphire, aluminum oxide is melted down and then allowed to cool and crystallize. When cut into sheets, it works great as a touch screen. So great in fact that several companies are working on how to get the price down. It’s about ten times the cost of glass, which currently runs about $3 for a smartphone screen.

Vertu Ti uses sapphire for its screens, which sell for $9,600. (To buy one you have to set up an appointment at one of their boutiques).

New Hampshire-based GT Advanced Technologies is working on bringing the price down. It demonstrated an iPhone 5 with a sapphire screen at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month. (Apple already uses it to protect the lens on the camera).

The trick to making sapphire less expensive is finding a way to make sheets of it in large quantities.

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Rubicon Technology in the U.S. has been showcasing its ability to make large sheets, while Monocrystal in Russia says it can make large sapphire windows. Sapphire Technology in South Korea are also all working on getting the costs of sapphire low enough that it cold go on a mass-market phone.

The price could be kept down by making the sheets of sapphire that make up the screen thinner, or using the sapphire to boost the strength of glass by tacking on an ultra-thin layer to an ordinary touch screen.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Daniel Torres via Technology Review

[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]

No. Sapphire crystal artificially grown costs very little. What is Jesse trying to pull here? Most medium end watches are sapphire crystal glass covered and don’t cost more than 960 or even 96.