ARTICLE 1
Psyops: mind control marathon and Boston bombings – By Yuram Abdullah Weiler – Friday Apr 19, 201305:35 AM GMT
US police officers stand on the street in Boston where two bombs exploded on April 15, 2013.
The Boston Marathon Bombing has all the signs of an OP: a psyop, a false-flag operation that is one more grizzly event in the marathon of mind control imposed by the US government on its own citizens to justify its ever-expanding security/police state, and divert attention from the ever-shrinking civil rights held by the people.”
“Mind control is being taken into a theater, shoved into a seat, and hearing the doors lock behind you. Then the play on the stage is all you’re allowed to see. That’s politics. The leaders are the leaders. The army is the army. The enemy is the enemy. The media that report all this are the media.” – Jack True, hypnotherapist, political analyst, and expert on mind control.
Three people were killed in dual bomb blasts that struck the popular “Boston Marathon” annual running event on Monday, 15 April 2013. Among the 144 treated for injuries were eight children; 25 were in serious condition and 17 were critical; 10 had amputated limbs. US Federal authorities were quick to classify the bombing as a terrorist attack but declared the explosive devices themselves were small, crude bombs, without high-grade explosive material. Two hotels in the vicinity were evacuated, subway service was halted, flights over the blast area were restricted by the FAA, and an area near the west wing of the White House was cleared.
Besides the two bombs that went off near the finish line of the race, three other explosive devices may have been involved: one was found at a nearby hotel, and the other two at undisclosed locations. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis stated that one bomb was in police custody while Massachusetts Democratic Representative Bill Keating claimed that two more were also found. A member of the US House Homeland Security Committee, Keating called the bombing a “sophisticated, coordinated, planned attack.”
Later reports, however, indicated that the two bombs that detonated were in fact unsophisticated devices improvised from six-liter pressure cookers, and were filled with nails and metal pellets. Bomb fragments and other debris has been sent to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, in an attempt to find evidence pointing to a suspect but as of two days later, no one was in custody nor had anyone or any group claimed responsibility. Nevertheless, police were immediately put on alert for a “darker-skinned or black male,” possibly with a foreign accent, while a Saudi national with a leg injury was under guard at a hospital. As one media outlet put it, the attack had all the “Middle East terrorist hallmarks.” Three days later, the FBI was circulating photos of two rather ordinary looking alleged suspects who were considered “to be armed and extremely dangerous.”
So of course, al-Qaidais suspected of being behind the bombing, since detailed instructions and photos showing how to make a “pressurized cooker” bomb have appeared in the terrorist organization’s online magazine, “Inspire,” issue No. 1, summer 2010. Investigators even suggest that Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has successfully planted a terrorist cell on US soil, and that possibly five bombers and up to 10 others were involved in the Boston Marathon operation. Based in Yemen, AQAP was allegedly behind the 25 December 2009 bombing attempt of a Northwest Airlines flight by Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Now, according to the US National Counterterrorism Center, AQAP has expanded its scope of operations well beyond US interests in and around the Yemeni capital Sana’a to include targets inside the American homeland. Strangely enough, the media wing of al-Qaida seems to be as much in the dark as the FBI as to which “jihadi” actually carried out the attack.
Examining different issues of “Inspire” sheds light on the extent of US psyops operations. For example, issue no. 7 entitled “The Greatest Operation of All Time,” which celebrates the “Expeditions of Washington and New York,” as the strikes are called in terrorist parlance, was published on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The magazine clearly explains the narrative of September 11, 2001 in perfect congruence with the version promulgated in the Western propaganda:
“The story of 9/11 is the story of jihad. It is the story of a small band of men who were guided by Allah, made the intentions to fight, trained on the battlefields and then culminated their struggle with martyrdom to end up their short, but eventful lives, in meeting their Lord.”
An example of the Western narrative can be found in the 9/11 Commission Report in the chapter entitled “What to do? A Global Strategy,” where the authors write:
“Our enemy is twofold: al Qaeda, a stateless network of terrorists that struck us on 9/11; and a radical ideological movement in the Islamic world, inspired in part by al Qaeda, which has spawned terrorist groups and violence across the globe.”
Elsewhere in Inspire issue no. 7 is an anti-Iranian article entitled “Iran and the Conspiracy Theories.” The article, in this the supposed official “house organ” of al-Qaida, is significant since it attempts to achieve two US propaganda objectives: First, denouncing as conspiracy theorists those who question the published reports of the World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist attacks; and second, vilifying Iran as the only government that dares to question the official US narrative. In it, the author writes:
“The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its President Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al Qaeda was behind 9/11 but rather, the US government. So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?”
The author goes on to answer his own question by accusing Iran of desiring to do to the US what al-Qaida claims to have done: namely, carry out the 9/11 attacks. And since al-Qaida beat Iran to the punch, so to speak, the author claims “it was necessary for the Iranians to discredit 9/11 and what better way to do so [than] conspiracy theories.” The author concludes, “Iran and the Shi’a in general do not want to give al Qaeda credit for the greatest and biggest operation ever committed against America.”
The convergence of US policy objectives and al-Qaida’s positions as stated in their “official” publication should now be clear: they are virtually one in the same as can be seen from the above excerpts. Both the US and al-Qaida are targeting Iran: with the US the pretext is Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program and with al-Qaida it is Iran’s Shi’a Islamic faith. So by maintaining the myth of an enduring al-Qaida threat, the US has an excuse for launching wars against “terrorism” to pursue its hegemonic goals in the Middle East, and an enemy to blame for its appropriately timed internal psyop “terrorist attacks,” which are designed to frighten its citizenry into submission, thus keeping them docile and obedient, and nullifying any spirit of resistance. As al-Qaida itself admits, the US “mainly depends on psychological warfare. That’s because it possesses vast propaganda tools,” and homespun terrorist attacks are but one of them.
Not wasting any time, US legislators are using the Boston bomb attack as an excuse to further undermine civil rights and privacy of Americans by arguing for passage of legislation to permit private companies to disclose cyber information to the US government. Representative Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), author of the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) claims the bill does not allow the government free rein to monitor the internet, but civil rights groups disagree.
The picture should now be coming into focus: Despite trillions of US dollars spent on spreading devastation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and elsewhere to neutralize al-Qaida and arch villain Osama Bin Laden, Americans are required to believe that they are still under constant threat of a terrorist attack, and to reinforce this, the alleged archetype of terror has struck close to home once again – this time with pressure cooker bombs instead of jet planes. Frankly, I find the al-Qaida threat concept extremely hard to accept; I believe the threat is fostered by the US government itself. As Jack True said many years ago, “They are looking for anything that will make people obedient…. It’s a puppet world they’re after.”
In short, I believe the Boston Marathon Bombing has all the signs of an OP: a psyop, a false-flag operation that is one more grizzly event in the marathon of mind control imposed by the US government on its own citizens to justify its ever-expanding security/police state, and divert attention from the ever-shrinking civil rights held by the people.
And that is the goal of false-flag terrorist “OPs” as investigative reporter Jon Rappoport explains:
“To put the eyes and minds and emotions of the people into the black hole of the disaster, and thereby decrease the resistance of the people to control from above…. This is called mind control.”
YW/HSN
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Cynicism is healthy, But USA has enough enemies to want to spread such cynical propaganda.
I suggest that the voters remove all 1% term limitless, political oligarchs, plutocrats, monopolists, and nepotists from government, and vote only 99%ters who will be lobbied to write unused state land distribution, and wealth distribution of the richest based around the maximum sequesterable wealth paradigms (perhaps at a limit of 20 million can be kept by all citizens, anything beyond should be distributed to the poorest to make TERTIARY education free, to make healthcare free, to ensure Neurotech-Celltech-Satellite tech audits to ensure no abuse is occuring against citizens etc..). As for renewable industries like banking, tourism and plantations, all profits should be shared equitably with all citizens – no citizen gets less (ulike crony systems that have 1% of citizens being billionaires and 99% being poor) and citizens must be made to know that these are their righhts and not be made to think this is due to the charitable nature of cults of personalities.
As for mining and other limited resource industries, the distribution (and industry) ends once the resource is finished, or reaches a limit where the citizens’ own usage would be insufficient to require imports.
No need to bother thinking about what the above article says when wealth is distributed. There is more than enough to go around, but voting properly for 99%ters will be the way to do that. Voting 1%ters though is a death sentence and slavery of the 99%.
ARTICLE 2
Mother Torn from Nursing Baby After Arrest For Minor Code Violation – Heather Callaghan – Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund is reporting a story that is quite incredible – start to finish. How far would your lawyer go to make sure your baby was fed during your arrest and raise a storm to get you out? Something we don’t think about – what happens when police arrest a nursing mom with a hungry little baby? Do they let her nurse? Do they care?
Some months ago in Colorado, a very pregnant Renee Abbott received a knock on the door by a sheriff’s deputy alerting her that the Abbotts’ cows were loose and needed immediate rounding because they were in the municipal right of way. So she obeyed and did this by herself resulting in a fall and hospitalization. Their fence looked like it had been deliberately damaged by vandals – which is how the cows got loose. The deputy issued her a ticket for “grazing animals in the municipal right of way” even though it was an accident, not even by their doing.
Months went on, baby was fine, and Ethan and Renee were sitting down to dinner with their kids ages seven and four months on April 7 when Weld County law enforcement officers showed up and arrested Renee for – grazing animals in the municipal right of way. God forbid they accidentally eat the special municipal grass! Throw that mom in jail!
That’s what they did. She was handcuffed and taken away. Ethan was told that Renee would be held without bail until she could appear before a judge in the morning. The chaos of it was enough for Ethan, but aside from that, how was their exclusively breastfed baby going to be fed that evening, night and morning? (I’m assuming this wasn’t the time to suddenly switch to soy GMO chemical synthetic infant formula.)
Time was running out, but he called Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund’s Hotline which connected him to Attorney Elizabeth Rich – one of the coolest attorneys around. She helps peaceful farmers that are raided, harassed, and persecuted like Vernon Hershberger.
She could tell from the crying, there was a hungry baby there and looked up a traditional formula recipe from Sally Fallon Morell’s book Nourishing Traditions. It’s a politically incorrect recipe book with traditional foods (think grassfed, unpasteurized dairy, nutrition dense, fermenting your own meals). How many lawyers would do that for a family?
Next, Rich called the Weld County Sheriff’s office and gave the booking deputy hell! First she “made them conscious” of their shameful behavior dragging a nursing mother into the slammer over a minor code violation. The deputy did not appreciate her tone. According to FTCLDF, she asked about any aggravating circumstances, such as resisting arrest, threats to the officers, or disorderly conduct. There were not. [According to the “Daily Arrest Report” on the Weld County Sheriff’s website (no longer listed), Renee was being held for “failure to appear on a warrant”.
When questioned by Attorney Rich, the booking deputy did not mention this charge. The “warrant” in question, however, was based upon the “grazing animals in the municipal right of way” charge. Finally, they agreed to release her. Ethan picked her up that night and she could feed her son.
What isn’t in the report, is that the family was receiving harassment from the department; up to 30 phone calls in multiple 24-hour periods, deputies watching their farm, delaying and changing court dates when Renee would appear (so don’t think they were avoiding the warrant) and more.
“They have threatened to ‘Detain us for investigation of our (agricultural) activities,'” Ethan says on their Facebook page in late March. Renee and baby apparently felt compelled to leave until the intimidation simmered and when they were back she was arrested. He continues (in late March, reproduced verbatim):
We have court (trial) this next week over the 1st set of tickets for our natural agriculture program. The goverments killing of chicks and turkeys, then charging us for it. They are and have threatened wittnesses – DENIED our right to supeana (sp?) and present evidence…
On April 7th he posted:
PLEASE CALL Weld County Sherriff Dept and tell them that this kind of attacks are not ok: Call 970-356-4015 ask for the Shift Comander.
And Monday Morning Please call the Weld County Sherriff at 970-356-4015 And tell them to stop Violating the rights of Natural Family Farmers.
A call to the Weld County Commissioners 970-336-7204 or email them jfuller@weldgov.com. A call to our fine state goverment or anyone else that might be interested would be nice to…
This attack has got to STOP! We Stand to loose our farm, our freedom, and everything we Have worked for…
The department apparently demanded he take it down and tried to gather info on the callers. They also appeared to have lost hundreds of dollars worth of poultry due to (possibly separate) charges. Could it be that the department is using bullying tactics because of their new natural farming practice?
You can find updates on their page and support their other page: I Support My Local Farmer. They also have created a petition.
Source:
Colorado Authorities Arrest Nursing Mother for “Grazing Animals in the Municipal Right of Way”
Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
NO the arrest was appropriate though the lack of spiritual training for citizens is at fault rather than the mother. Synchronicity, would mean that the child would become a form of cattle and whenever cattle eat, their spirit would be mixed with the child being fed the same feed. When this happens a very high form of non-eating based cannibalism is introduced into the human population immediately around the child. The mother here may mean well, but is not aware of the implications. We must not be spiritual cannibals, even of the highest order of spiritual application, especially when the life expected and intended to be lived by this obviously middle class person is a ‘normal’ one among normal people who have not had the advantage of such special diets.
If the child is intended to be among similar people who ate and eat similar diets then fine. But probably the community is unsuited and the police were reacting. This is police imposed isolation where self imposed communalisation is untenable for a middle class mother. At the same time, these effects are not taught to the general populace, so the blame cannot fall on the mother nor the mother be fairly punished. Spiritual Courts need to be applied alongside Secular Courts and communities of like minded individuals would add further texture to society though very small groups would be quite isolated and need to be assigned spaces for their dietary proclivities or be made to avoid contact with those dissimilar to them or a liable to be harmed by their very existence and presence.
ARTICLE 3
‘Muslims are evil. Let’s kill them all’: US TV commentator Erik Rush provokes furious reaction with Boston bombing Twitter rants
Rush appeared to imply in a tweet that the culprit was from Saudi Arabia – Richard Hall Author Biography
While public officials were urging caution in the immediate aftermath of the bomb attack on the Boston Marathon, some were quick to apportion blame.
One of those was conservative commentator Erik Rush, who provoked a furious reaction after seemingly advocating the killing of Muslims in response to the attack. Rush is a columnist for Worldnutdaily and has previously been a guest on Fox News and CNN.
With no information about the attackers yet made public, Mr Rush appeared to imply in a tweet that the culprit was from Saudi Arabia.
“@erikrush Everybody do the National Security Ankle Grab! Let’s bring more Saudis in without screening them! C’mon! #bostonmarathon.”
Then when he was asked by another Twitter user whether he was blaming Muslims for the attack, Mr Rush responded: “Yes, they’re evil. Let’s kill them all.”
Mr Rush later claimed he was being sarcastic went he sent the response.
His comments nevertheless provoked a fierce reaction. One user wrote: “Hope people don’t go on the ‘Muslims did it’ bandwagon. Don’t be an idiot and know the facts first.”
Another commented: “Apparently someone at Fox News tweeted ‘Kill All Muslims’ after the explosions. As a Boston resident, and as a human being, I’m disgusted.”
Mr Rush responded to one Twitter user who complained about his comments by saying: “Sarcasm, idiot.”
But in subsequent comments on the social networking site he hit out at “Islamist apologists.”
He wrote: “It’s nice to see all the Islamist apologists standing up for those who would waste them in a heartbeat.”
Mr Rush, a New York-born conservative columnist and frequent guest on Fox News, gained notoriety during the 2008 election campaign when he highlighted controversial comments made by Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright.
He has also written articles critical of Islam. Last year, Mr Rush wrote a comment piece titled ‘Yes, Islam is an enemy’. In it he argued that Islam was incompatible with American society.
“Islam has never played well with others, and this is because it is a worldview with a creed, dogma and religious aspects, rather than a religion per se. All of these militate against its tolerance of divergent societies and cultures,” he wrote.
He went on: “This is truth: Both the political left and Islamists in America have been exploiting the First Amendment and Americans’ generous nature in order to conquer us.”
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Just hurry up before they gain the technology as well. Sweep into the Middle East and distribute the land after victories and mass pogroms against the evil among Muslims. In a decade or few, USA will never be able to do this anymore. Hurry up Barky! Get Asia as well, there are a few countries here that no Galactic council would miss or blame USA for levelling.
ARTICLE 4
Pope Francis says hypocrisy undermines Church’s credibility – by Steve Scherer – ROME | Sun Apr 14, 2013 1:38pm EDT
New Pope praises women, Italian president ignores them
Pope Francis stresses “fundamental importance” of women in Catholic Church
Pope Francis looks on as he leads a solemn mass at Saint Paul’s Basilica in Rome April 14, 2013. REUTERS/Max Rossi
(Reuters) – Pope Francis on Sunday said clergy and Christians must not betray the word of God with their actions or they undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church.
Francis, elected a month ago, inherited a Church struggling to restore credibility after a series of scandals, including the sexual abuse of children by priests.
The pope spoke at the Papal Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, where he celebrated Mass. He also greeted pilgrims and local Church members earlier in St. Peter’s square.
“Inconsistency on the part of pastors and the faithful between what they say and what they do, between word and manner of life, is undermining the Church’s credibility,” the pontiff said in his homily.
“Those who listen to us and observe us must be able to see in our actions what they hear from our lips, and so give glory to God!”
In his first major decision on Saturday, Francis set up an advisory board of cardinals to help him govern the Church and reform its troubled central administration, which was riddled by infighting and alleged corruption under Pope Benedict.
Benedict left a secret report for Francis on the problems in the administration, known as the Curia, which came to light when sensitive documents were stolen from the pope’s desk and leaked by his butler in what became known as the “Vatileaks” scandal.
Since his election as the first non-European pope in nearly 1,300 years, Francis has been laying out a clear moral path for the 1.2-billion-member Church. He has favored humility and simplicity over pomp and grandeur.
Francis has preferred to live in simple quarters in the Vatican instead of moving into the regal papal apartments, and he has said he wants “a poor Church, and for the poor”.
In the Sunday afternoon service at St. Paul’s, Francis said that each Christian can be a saint, which he defined as “middle class holiness”.
“There are the saints of every day, the ‘hidden’ saints, a sort of ‘middle class of holiness’… to which we can all belong.”
The pope celebrated Mass together with the Benedictine monks to whom the basilica and the adjoining monastery are entrusted. St. Paul’s is one of Rome’s four major basilicas and the second largest after St. Peter’s.
(Additional reporting by Gillian Hazell in Rome; Editing by Jon Hemming)
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Church is not about being poor or seeming poor. Church is about making such at least the clergy are 100% clean. And with the wide ranging power and influence the Pope has, no delays can be tolerated for throwing out all Apostolic Delegates, Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops with any knowledge of paedophilia that is hidden. Maybe Ratzinger threw himself out in a way (fired self?) as well, for being complicit. Perhaps for the act of throwing out every other paedo priest, Pope Francis should be allowed to remain in the post until our scyth wielding friend pays that visit. As for being a Church for the poor, a fraction of the costs of all that finery and lifestyle enjoyed by ecclesia among Vatican Staters could raise a handful of 3rd world nations out of poverty in an instance (no reference to Fleetwood Mac there . . . ).
Time is the fire in which the poor (not always financially) burn, while well fed priests relax and mentally masturbate in gilded palaces to no poor person’s benefit as days pass in misery for the poor. Do the necessary alms giving (and I don’t mean tithe – people are dying out there) or be further branded and damned by inaction and indulgence if the Church or any faith dares claim to be guardians of man’s spirit – most of us dare not yet cannot see through the false glamour of any faith save by the concrete actions that are taken or not taken. Pang guan zhe qing.
ARTICLE 5
Iran warns of World War III
General: Country’s army has finger on the trigger
Reza Kahlili, author of the award-winning book “A Time to Betray,” served in CIA Directorate of Operations, as a spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, counterterrorism expert; currently serves on the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an advisory board to Congress and the advisory board of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI). He regularly appears in national and international media as an expert on Iran and counterterrorism in the Middle East.
Iran ratcheted up its vitriol against Israel and the United States over the weekend, warning that an attack on the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities could lead to global war.
The rhetoric eerily matched that currently coming out of North Korea against its perceived enemies.
“Iran will not stand by in the face of such aggression,” Ali Ahani, Iran’s ambassador to France, said Sunday, according to the Islamic regime’s PressTV. “This can entail a chain of violence that may lead to World war III. A potential Israeli attack against Iran with an objective of destroying its scientific and nuclear facilities is sheer madness. Its consequences are disastrous and uncontrollable.”
The deputy chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, Brig. Gen Masoud Jazayeri, warned the United States on Saturday that Iran would continue its nuclear program.
“We would not trade off our rights,” he said, adding that Iran would stand with North Korea in its faceoff with America.
According to Mehr News, Jazayeri blamed the tension on the Korean Peninsula on the U.S. presence in the region.
“Whenever necessary, we would stop the U.S. excessive demands,” he said. “The Islamic Revolution will never leave its past and present friends. The U.S. and its allies will suffer great losses if a war breaks out in this region.”
The commander of the Islamic regime’s ground forces, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Reza Poordastan, in his speech at Friday Prayers, also warned “the enemies” that the country’s army has its finger on the trigger and that any attack on the country will make the “enemy” regret its actions.
All enemy activities at Iran’s borders and in the region are being monitored by the country’s intelligence analysts, and Iran’s armed forces are prepared for any scenario, he said.
The regime’s PressTV ran an op-ed analysis on Saturday with a headline “Iran deals deathblow to U.S. global hegemony.” The analysis, by Finian Cunningham, an Irishman whom the outlet calls “a prominent expert in international affairs,” blames America for much of the world’s problems and warns of its decline.
“Iran, however, presents a greater and more problematic challenge to U.S. global hegemony,” Cunningham wrote. “The U.S. in 2013 is a very different animal from what it was in 1945. Now it resembles more a lumbering giant. Gone is its former economic prowess and its arteries are sclerotic with its internal social decay and malaise. … Iran exerts a controlling influence over the vital drug that keeps the American economic system alive – the world’s supply of oil and gas. Any war with Iran, if the U.S. were so foolish to embark on it, would result in a deathblow to the waning American and global economy.”
Cunningham said the story will not end there: “The attainment of world peace, justice and sustainability does not only necessitate the collapse of American hegemony. We need to overthrow the underlying capitalist economic system that gives rise to such destructive hegemonic powers. Iran represents a deathblow to the American empire, but the people of the world will need to build on the ruins.”
The world powers once again failed at Almaty, Kazakhstan, to get Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program and allow further inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The talks, which lasted two days, were held last week between Iran and the 5-plus-1 powers: the United States, Britain France, Russia, China, plus Germany.
As reported exclusively on WND on March 20 and in a follow-up in The Washington Times the next day, information provided by a high-ranking intelligence officer in the regime’s ministry of defense revealed yet another secret site where Iran is engaged in completing its nuclear bomb program and arming its ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.
The source added that not only does the regime have enough plutonium for several bombs, but it also has enriched uranium to weapons grade.
The new site, 15 miles from another previously secret site exposed in 2009 (the Fordow nuclear facility), is approximately 14 miles long and 7.5 miles wide, consisting of two facilities built deep into a mountain along with a nearby missile facility with over 380 missile garages and silos, surrounded by barbed wire, 45 security towers and several security posts.
American experts who viewed satellite imagery of the new site are concerned that Iran may be much further along in its nuclear bomb program than perceived and that the images of the site are a clear indication that the regime’s strategy is to put together an “objective force” and not just one or two nuclear bombs. An objective force is defined as the level of military forces needed within a finite time frame and resource level to accomplish approved military objectives, missions or tasks.
Last week, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, in a hasty and unusual press conference, denied the existence of this site, dubbed “Quds,” at which the rogue nation is making great progress in creating nuclear warheads for an array of long-range missiles stored underground nearby. He did not elaborate as to what the site is and what work is being done out of the facilities.
The satellite images clearly show this vast site is visible to the naked eye and that it is a high-priority site with secret work conducted deep within the mountain.
[[[ *** RESPONSE *** ]]]
Hardly. After missile shields that can scuttle any nukes launched from Iran (irradiating the Middle East instead – guess all Muslims in that area will be affected by fallout instead?), USA has the technological capacity for LAND DRONES Robocop style, perhaps run by AI or cyborgs from the worst wounded soldiers who volunteer. Any time USA’s idiot car factories start building 7 million of these robots (a glorified crane on a walker-bot with weapons effectively) a year rather than 7 million idiot cars a year, (thats 1 bot for every 10 Iranians), USA could wipe the entire Islamist presence from Iran and the Middle East (leave some secular citizens to share the Canaanite and Zoroastrian future of the region). Stalling however would ensure that Iran catches up in the AI or robot tech and might do the same to USA. In as a soon as that missile shield is up and car factories are converted to building mobile suit type robots or fully automated versions of the same, Iran and any enemy of the USA is finished. If USA stalls, Iran will wipe out USA instead. The nuke option is useless, though carpet bombing with conventionals would be viable but too destructuve against precious infrastructure that robot drone land invasions could ensure will survive.
Not a single nuke will be useful even to the USA, because a nuke CANNOT outfly or outmaneuver a fighter jet and can be shot down so near the point of launch that nukes are a hazard to the firer (and neighbours) rather than the target. North Korea and Iran had better not try this and stick to terrorist operations that smuggle in components to target sites instead. There is no greater danger to USA than this mode of attack from within. Nuclear missiles though are merely nonsensical and dramatic and can be intercepted long before they reach the target.
With one fighter jet for every nuke Iran or North Korea has, with missile shields as well, there will be no way a nuclear option is viable – the missile would be hit. Even in South Korea (or Israel) alone, US missile or airbase installations could shoot down any nukes with the fatal effect of irradiating the region – especially if North Korea (or Iran) has a self destruct or every nuke to ensure detonation upon a hit on that nuke.
Iran had better be warned. No nuke would likely make past the Middle East which would be irradiated. Iran also would not survive if USA stops building millions of cars and starts building millions of cyborgs or sticks jobless drivers in the same to carve out their own landholdings crusade style).
North Korea Demands End Of Sanctions To Restart Talks (Nuke Asset Removals should be acceptable – and that Guam strike should not be an issue unless an actual war occurs – at most skirmishes around the DMZ can occur – if North Korea lays off the DMZ and dioputed waters no need for those Nuke assets’ presence – Sanctions harm the citizens, no point.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/18/north-korea-demands-sanctions-end-restart-talks_n_3108072.html
ARTICLE 6
The Ultimate North Korean Missile Threat To America: A Nuke Power Grid Attack – SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – APRIL 13 – 4/14/2013 @ 10:00AM |31,140 views
South Korean conservative protesters burn a portrait of North Korea’s new leader Kim Jong-Un and a North Korean flag during an anti-North Korea rally protesting against North Korea launching the long-range missile on April 13, 2012 in Seoul, South Korea. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
It’s way past time for the Obama administration to take North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats seriously. An urgently critical priority must be to counter North Korea’s rapidly-emerging capability to deliver and detonate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) device in the sky over America which could knock out electronic computer circuits and paralyze virtually all activities over a vast region. Last December they successfully demonstrated its capability to launch a small payload into orbit, meaning that may soon be able to target regions in the U.S. and other distant locations. A devastating nuclear EMP device could be small, and North Korea reported that its nuclear test last February involved a miniature device.
How soon might they be ready to do so? No one seems to know. According to an unclassified portion of an assessment report the Defense Intelligence Agency released during a hearing of the House Services Committee last Thursday: “DIA assesses with moderate confidence that North [Korea] currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles… However, the reliability will be low.” Following that hearing, the Pentagon issued a clarifying statement that “it would be inaccurate to suggest that the North Korean regime has fully tested, developed or demonstrated the kinds of nuclear capabilities referenced in the passage”. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, issued another stronger statement. Noting that the DIA finding didn’t represent all 16 intelligence agencies, he said: “North Korea has not yet demonstrated the full range of capabilities necessary for a nuclear armed missile.”
The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed senior administration official acknowledging that while North Korea has demonstrated long-range missile and nuclear technologies, and that their rapid progress over the past years “is concerning to us”, there hasn’t been “any evidence that they’ve actually been able to marry up their nuclear technology with their missile capabilities.”
It is apparent that the White House is making an effort to rein in political tensions with Republicans over the immediacy and degree of threat North Korea presents. DNI Director Clapper played down the urgency in a separate congressional hearing. Dismissing North Korea’s verbal and technological war threats primarily as bluster, he said: “All of the Belligerent rhetoric of late, I think, is designed for both internal and an external audience. But I think first and foremost it’s to show that [Kim Jong-un] is firmly in control of North Korea.”
Victor Cha, a specialist on North Korea at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sees the matter quite differently. “North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear threat is very much a near-term threat. For people to say it’s just bluster, well, the bluster may be harmless, but the steady progression in their program is not harmless.”
In a very recent provocation, intelligence officials in Seoul report that the North has placed two yet- untested mobile mid-range “Musudan” missiles ready for launch from its east coast. Their approximate 2,500 range would cover any target in South Korea and Japan, and might possibly even reach U.S. military bases on the Pacific island of Guam. Although Pyongyang hasn’t announced a launch date, many observers expect that it is quite likely to take place on April 15 to mark the birthday of North Korea’s founder (and Kim Jong-un’s grandfather), Kim Il Sung.
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency has reported military sources observing that the North has been moving multiple missiles around in an apparent bid to confuse outside intelligence gatherers about its intentions. They also obviously wish to have these activities garner international attention. Earlier this month the North told foreign diplomats in Pyongyang that they had until April 10 to consider evacuation, and warned foreigners in South Korea to get out in advance of a possible “thermo-nuclear” war.
Is this just a matter of a wolf cub crying “big bad wolf” a few too many times to be taken seriously? Perhaps not, since the Obama Administration is finally taking some belated responsive actions.
Earlier this month the Defense Department announced plans to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD), a missile system inherited from the Bush Administration, to Guam. This move follows other recent plans to reinstate another Bush administration program that will increase our ground-based interceptor (GBI) force in Alaska and to deploy two destroyers equipped with Aegis missile defense systems which had previously been scuttled.
The re-instituted missile ground-based system plan will put 14 more long-range interceptors in Fort Greely, Alaska by 2017 to supplement the 30 already existing on the West Coast. This could have already happened, along with adding another 10 in Europe by next year. The Bush administration deployed the first GBI in 2004, and had planned to deploy a total of 54 in 2009 before Obama pulled the plug.
The Pentagon has now budgeted $1 billion to expand our West Coast-based missile defense system. As newly-appointed Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel explained: “The United States has missile defense systems in place to protect us from limited ICBM attacks…but North Korea in particular has recently made advances in its capabilities and is engaged in a series of irresponsible and reckless provocations.”
One of those most ominous provocations involved their successful orbital launch of a three-stage missile last December carrying a “package”… possibly serving as a test in preparation for delivering and exploding an EMP device in the atmosphere above a targeted region capable of wiping out the power grid over a large area. That launch coincided with a test described as a “nuclear test of a higher level”. This suggests a technology using highly-enriched uranium, which is easier to miniaturize than the plutonium bombs North Korea previously tested in 2006 and 2009. While such a device wouldn’t be likely to have a particularly high yield, it could create an explosion sufficient to convert its energy into gamma rays and generate a devastating EMP effect.
A May 2011 U.S. Army War College study titled “In the Dark: Military Planning for a Catastrophic Infrastructure Event”, concluded that a nuclear detonation above a U.S. city could wipe out the electrical grid for hundreds, possibly thousands of miles around. The Pentagon believes that North Korean missiles can already reach Alaska and Hawaii, and will soon be able to deliver nuclear warheads to Seattle and San Diego. An orbital launch capability can target locations anywhere.
The Heritage Foundation projects that an EMP attack with a warhead detonated 25 to 30 miles above the U.S. mainland “would fundamentally change the world. Airplanes would fall out of the sky; most cars would be inoperable; electrical devices would fail. Water, sewer and electrical networks would fail simultaneously. Systems of banking, energy, transportation, food production and delivery, water, emergency services, and even cyberspace would collapse.”
It is tempting to dismiss a recent media release featuring 28-year- old Kim Jong-un signing an order to place strategic rocket forces on standby to fire at U.S. targets in front of a map which included Austin, Texas as typical bantam-weight bluster. Ellen Kim, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies thinks otherwise: “After North Korea’s successful December [orbital] launch and third nuclear test, their threats are not completely empty.” And as Adm. James Winnefeld, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters in the Pentagon on March 15, North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile threat has emerged “a little bit faster than we expected”.
With its people starving, weapons their key income-producing export, and close relationships with Iran, that threat takes on a global scale. Yet during a time when North Korea, along with Iran, has upgraded and expanded their proactive missile and atomic warfare resources, the Obama administration has reduced and cancelled defense programs which were under development.
A comparison of 2010 and 2013 budgets submitted by the Energy Department and National Security Agency indicates that 5-year budgets for nuclear and missile program modernization has been cut by $4.4 billion. Casualties include a scale-back of the Airborne Laser program to enable enemy missile interceptions during their early launch phase, along with the elimination of the Multiple Kill Vehicle and Kinetic Energy Interceptor which uses small warheads on a single rocket to handle decoys and offer a better chance of success.
After Kim Jong-un announced that Pyongyang was scrapping the 1953 armistice deal that ended the Korean War and threatened to launch a “preemptive” nuclear strike against the U.S., White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “I can tell you that the United States is fully capable of defending against any North Korean ballistic missile attack.” Carney added: “our recent success in returning to testing of the upgraded version of the GBI, or CE2 missile, will keep us on a good trajectory to improve our defense capability against limited ballistic missile threats such as those from North Korea. But let’s be clear, we are fully capable of dealing with that threat.”
It’s important to note that the operative word here is “returning”. President Obama, who campaigned on gutting America’s missile defense, has kept that promise. He has also delayed funding for ground-based interceptor and radar sites in Poland and the Czech Republic for defense against Iranian missile launchers. He did this after Moscow objected, threatening to target the sites and withdraw from the New Start treaty.
Like North Korea, Iran also has an active ballistic missile program, including the development and testing of missiles with a range of over a thousand kilometers. Still worse, Iran’s nuclear program can be expected to advance a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, already the world’s most volatile region.
A September 2012 report released by the National Research Council noted that even the U.S. is vulnerable to an Iranian nuclear missile strike, recommending that an East Coast intercept site also be added. And when Marine General James Mattis, who heads the U.S. Central Command, recently testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee was asked by Senator Inhofe (R-Ok.), “Are the current diplomatic and economic efforts to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons capability, are they working?”, the answer was blunt. “No Sir”. Mattis later testified that Tehran’s “nuclear industry continues.”
It is unrealistic to imagine we can avoid nuclear calamities including EMP attacks without effective missile defense deterrents. That nuclear threat continues to grow as more and more rogue adversaries gain offensive means. For example, last June the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoun Abbasi Davani, announced plans to triple Iran’s capacity to produce 20% enriched uranium, making it abundantly clear the program is not being designed for peaceful purposes. Power stations only require uranium enriched to about 3% for fuel.
Still, the Obama administration has abandoned previous demands that Tehran shut down its second enrichment site at Fordo and relinquish its entire stockpile of uranium enriched to 20% (near-bomb grade)…of which they have accumulated an estimated 167 kilos. The U.S. has also offered to soften some sanctions. In addition, the administration is cutting American naval presence in the Gulf region from two aircraft carriers to one, representing budgetary sequester pressures as the reason.
We must clearly understand that an imperative to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East isn’t just primarily about protecting Israel’s right to exist. In particular, the U.S. is hardly immune from a devastating EMP assault which could blast our electronics-dependent society back to the Dark Ages.
The brutal fact remains that America is the world’s only superpower that can prevent this from happening. Under no circumstance can we afford such imminent and escalating threats posed by North Korea, Iran and other rogue nations to continue unchecked.
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North Korea needs more communication with extant Constitutional Monarchs because that is the only way for North Korea to be part of the world without removing the Kims. The Kims though should learn from civilisation issues based around humanitarian considerations of the entiety of their own populace first to be worthy of Kingship.
Meanwhile military drills may not be held which appear threatening – this means South Korea and USA are antagonizing the North Koreans – if North Korea is such a danger, why has Russia had no problems being threatened by North Korea? The issue is the way drills are held and who drills are directed against. Leave the North Koreans alone long enough and be sincere in ensuring that military rule becomes constitutional monarchy not try to unseat the Kims who would self destruct and attack with nukes rather than be unseated. As for nukes, there will likely be no nuke attacks unless North Korea is attacked by any forces. Military drills are a precursor of invasions if anything. So if USA and South Korea lay off the drills, and reasonable portions disputed areas (make sure this is reasonable and not expansionary, the Kims are not stupid and will follow suit if South Korea and USA set an example by not being expansionary).
ARTICLE 7
UNITED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS, AMERICAN MATRIX, AND THE SCIENTIFIC-OCCULT DICTATORSHIP – by Paul McGuire – April 16, 2013
On July 4, 1776 America’s Founding Fathers published in the Declaration of Independence that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
America’s Founding Fathers were unified around the revolutionary truth that we live in a Universe and a world governed by “Nature’s God” and the “Laws of Nature.” That consciousness inspired a new society based on the idea that a Creator created all men equal and gave them unalienable rights such as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Founding Fathers made it very clear that these unalienable rights were not given to men and women by any government, but by their Creator and thus, since government did not grant them, government does not have the power to take them away.
The Founding Fathers very clearly established that these rights are to be protected by a form of government that is only legitimate to the degree that it derives its “just powers” from the “consent of the governed.” These were revolutionary ideas that were heavily influenced by the spiritual truth of the First Great Awakening and the consciousness that moved through the thirteen original colonies. In complete contrast, throughout history most civilizations were built on the idea of the divine right of kings…kings who believed that as god-men they had the right to rule the masses as their subjects. In other words, the masses were slaves who had no freedom or rights and belonged to a “collective” owned by the king. This began before Nimrod in Babylon and continued through the Pharaoh god-kings of Egypt, the god-kings of Greece and Rome, and throughout the histories of Europe, China and other regions of the world. The occult /scientific and religious system behind it stemmed from the “Babylonian Mystery Religion,” which claimed secret knowledge.
This secret knowledge of Babylon was passed on through Egypt and ancient occult societies. 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. Among our Founding Fathers there were powerful members of the Illuminati, the secret occult society which derived from the Rosicrucians. The Illuminati was officially formed in 1776, the same year as America was born. Imbedded within the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights was a secret plan for America designed to transform it into a New Atlantis-type society ruled not by “We the people,” but by a scientific-occult dictatorship.
Since America was formed in 1776, the collective consciousness of America has been overwhelmed by a multi-dimensional data stream that has revealed, in the words of H.G. Wells, “An Open Conspiracy.”
Illuminati servant, MSNBC host, and Tulane political science Professor Melissa Harris-Perry looked into the television camera and told America: “We haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children. We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to their communities.”
In reality Professor Perry did not come out and say something new. She simply spoke the truth about the plan the invisible elite and the scientific dictatorship have already put into effect in America beginning in the 1920s. The reality is your children do not belong to you and your family. They have belonged to the collective for a long time! Most people live in the illusion that this is not so, but in the reality of occult-based and scientific mind control it has been true for decades.
The collective is a Marxist theory which believes concepts like the individual and the family unit are illegitimate and that everything, including your children, is to be under the complete control of an all-powerful authoritarian state like the Big Brother tyranny depicted by novelist George Orwell. However, Marxist theory is simply an ideological clone of the ideas contained in the Illuminati Manifesto which was published around 1776. Russia has understood since the 1920s what Russian scientists have termed a “war in the fourth dimension.” Radical transformation designed to destroy the individual and the family is based on Luciferian pyschotronic weapons which use psychic implants into the human consciousness.
Ayn Rand wrote in a January 1944 article in Reader’s Digest entitled “The Only Path to Tomorrow”:
“The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it.
Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ‘the common good.’
Whatever the imperfections of her life and philosophy, Rand understood that totalitarianism or collectivism can only be achieved by maintaining the illusion of “the common good.” Today that “common good” would be called social justice. Rand writes “No tyrant has ever lasted long by force of arms alone. Men have been enslaved primarily by spiritual weapons. And the greatest of these is the collectivist doctrine that the supremacy of the state over the individual constitutes the common good.”
Ayn Rand, who escaped the Communist Revolution in Russia as a young girl, understood the value of “inalienable rights” expressed in the Declaration of Independence along with importance of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
Ayn Rand wrote “We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that the common good is served by the abolition of individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals…The power of society must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the individual.”
The scientific elite use powerful forms of occult based mind control that cause people actually to want slavery. In 1962 Aldous Huxley gave a speech at the University of Berkeley where he said:
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“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
It must be remembered the Aldous Huxley, a member of the globalist elite, was deeply involved in the promotion of psychedelic drugs and occult religions which he strategically promoted among the Hollywood community in the 1930s. Everything that we see now happening in America is the result of a carefully orchestrated and scientific plan to usher in America as a major power center of the new world order.
http://www.newswithviews.com/McGuire/paul168.htm
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Hence the need for technology and pharma audits or electronic white zones and sticking to organic and non-GMO food. To do these audits and ensure white zones, the 99% must run for candidacy and prevent all : plutocrats, technocrats, oligarch politicians, term limitless posts at all levels, nepotists ; after which the 99% politicians proceed to do expositions and limitations to satellite cellphone tech which is the basis for mind control devices (cellphone-like signals from satellite probably can override human brains now BUT probably are still grid based unless specifically target persons are involved – meaning enmasse for non-targeted individuals, ABOVE the telephone lines, there is still freedom until laws reverse this to include ground based white zones).
As for . . . America is the result of a carefully orchestrated and scientific plan to usher in America as a major power center of the new world order. . . . no way so long as the Russia/China and nominally Central South America, and even African blocs still smarting from caucasian colonialisation exist. Between the multipolar world and USA’s interference and the 99% ready to ensure such politics die at the next election, the next generation will not need to worry about pharma or tech-satellite mind control or ‘Neurotech’. Biowarfare and DNA retroviral issue wise, we need to ensure that test kits are cheap and readily available and tha people have many forensic sources to test and check against many sources and many experts rather than a single government agency that could well be the terrorist arm of unethical governments.
Expositions and devices or methods of detection/countering of the presence and on the nature of such chemicals or tech (am not very tech savvy atm and for chemical issues lack the networks to ensure that food bought from markets or outside are not infected before point of sale – many watchers and blackboxes will be needed for every step of the way to ensure food safety and food source transparenct) and the ways to counter and even detox or nano-mite away individual infected cells the grounded with training against NPPs and NLPs (moi has been working on expositions on this – read my blogs to learn) as well as societal/Orwellian manipulation methods will render all such methods useless and meaningless as well if wealth sequestration limits and unused state land distribution occurs so that t6he only issue will be to prevent overpopulation.
ARTICLE 8
Deadly blast hits Pakistan election rally L At least 16 people killed and dozens wounded after bomb strikes campaign rally of secularist politician in Peshawar. – Last Modified: 17 Apr 2013 06:23
An explosion in Pakistan has killed at least 16 people and wounded dozens more at an election campaign rally being attended by a senior politician, officials say.
Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, a senior leader of the secular Awami National Party (ANP), escaped the blast with only minor bruises on Tuesday in the northwestern city of Peshawar.
A hospital official said doctors were treating some 50 people wounded in the explosion, including dozens who were in critical condition.
Pakistan’s umbrella Taliban faction claimed responsibility for what was the fourth deadly attack on politicians or political parties in three days as the country prepares to hold historic polls on May 11.
Senior Awami National Party (ANP) leader Ghulam Ahmed Bilour, who served as railways minister in the outgoing government, escaped the Peshawar bombing with cuts and bruises.
He was shown on television footage with blood splattered on his trousers after the attack.
Suicide bombing alleged
A spokesman for the main government-run Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar had earlier put the toll at eight with 49 wounded.
Police said it was a suicide attack.
“It was a suicide bombing,” Shafqat Malik, a senior police official, told AFP news agency.
Ghulam, whose brother the late ANP leader Bashir Bilour was assassinated by the Taliban last year, became a target after the Taliban posted a $100,000 ransom for the death of a film-maker behind a controversial anti-Islam film last year.
The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, but apologised for injuring Bilour, saying it had been targeting his nephew, Haroon.
“We apologise to Ghulam Bilour because we announced an amnesty for him,” Ehsanullah Ehsan, Taliban spokesman, told AFP by telephone from an undisclosed location.
“Our target was Haroon Bilour.”
Haroon is the son of slain ANP leader Bashir, the elder brother of Ghulam, who was killed in a suicide attack at a political meeting in Peshawar on December 22.
The Taliban has directly threatened the ANP and its outgoing coalition partners, the Pakistan People’s Party and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which are perceived as secular.
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Good work on killing nepotists, but if only this was not about Islamisation. What did the Pakistanis believe in before Islam was imported there?
ARTICLE 9
Gill Plate Trade
A specialist fish monger at a fish market in Sri Lanka expertly removes each of this oceanic mantas ten gill plates from the head of the animal in half sections.
Manta and mobula rays are large filter feeding animals, whose flesh is considered to be of relatively poor quality by humans all around the world. As a result these animals have not been widely targeted for human consumption through commercial fisheries in the past. However, in recent years this has changed. Manta rays and their close relatives are now rapidly becoming a more desirable product, making them a target for fishermen all over the tropical and temperate oceans of the world.
So what has happened? Why the sudden change of fortunes for these unfortunate rays? The underlying answer to these questions is not a new story, in fact it’s a tale of depressing repetition played out in our oceans and throughout our planet on a regular basis. The difference this time is that the latest targets are the mantas, which are paying the price of becoming the latest commodity in the often senseless and environmentally destructive Chinese Medicinal Trade. The ray’s feathery gill plates, which they use to filter the plankton from the water, have become a product and as a result these harmless animals are paying the price of humanity’s selfish ignorance…
This image shows the complete set of gill plates inside the mouth of a spine-tail mobula ray.
What are Gill Plates?
The gill plates, or branchial filaments, are thin cartilage filaments that enable the manta and mobula rays to filter plankton out of the water column. Every manta or mobula has five pairs of gills, each protected inside a gill slit.
Inside each of the ten gill slits there is one complete feathery gill plate which forms a circle around the periphery of the slit, trapping their planktonic food as it is funnelled through the mobula or manta ray’s mouth and out through these gill plates.
A close up image of the plate filaments shows their feathery structure which aids the filtration of their planktonic food from the water.
The Fishery
These plates, once dried, are the most valuable parts of the mobulid rays and drive the commercial fishery of these rays around the world, with particularly large fisheries present in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Although the plates comprise just a tiny percentage of a manta or mobula’s mass, they sell for significantly more than the rest of the body parts put together.
Once removed from the manta and mobula rays, the gill plates are laid out to dry in the sun for several days.
While plates are used from both mobula and manta rays, the gill plates from mantas (usually oceanic manta rays; M. birostris) fetch the highest prices, followed by the larger species of mobulas (generally M. tarapacana and then M. japanica), with the price reducing as the size of the plates decreases.
The demand for gill plates is so high that in certain countries, such as Sri Lanka, fisherman who used to avoid catching mobulid rays, due to their propensity to destroy and entangle fishing nets, are now driven to fill their boat’s holds with mobulid rays when returning to harbour.
This demand, coupled with the dwindling supplies of more desirable fish catches (such as sharks, tunas and billfishes) now gives the fishermen even greater incentives to actively target mobulid rays in order to maintain their livelihood.
Chinese Medicine
This pile of manta and mobula gill plates, representing many hundreds of individual rays, was on display outside just one retail shop in mainland China.
A bag of dried mobula gill plates on sale at a retail market in China advertises the plates’ supposed medicinal properties.
The international trade in mobulid gill plates which is being driven by the current demand in the Chinese Medicine trade appears to be a relatively new phenomenon, with demand significantly increasing in the last couple of decades. Those selling or promoting the use of this product claim the plates can treat health issues ranging from asthma, to skin rashes, to chicken pox and even cancer. Some of the practitioners also maintain that gill plates reduce toxins, boost the immune system and aid in the detoxification of the bloodstream.
However, reviews of available literature, along with interviews of well respected practitioners have revealed that there is no evidence to support any of these claims, with some practitioners even admitting that gill plates are not effective and that many other alternatives are available. Gill plates are often consumed in a soup (locally called “Peng Yu Sai”) which is made from a few main ingredients (gill plates, ginseng and dried pipefish) and are not considered “prestigious”, like shark fins, but are solely regarded as an ingredient in a medicinal product.
Gill plate soup ‘Peng Yu Sai’ consists mainly of pieces of gill plate, some ginseng and a few pipefishes.
It appears that the increasing demand which has arisen in the last few decades is due to product marketing by Chinese retailers who have seen an opportunity, created by a relatively available commodity, to market a new product into the traditional medicine industry, falsely “reviving” this remedy which in reality does not even exist in the traditional literature. It appears as though one of the marketing strategies plays on consumers fears over the increasing prevalence of modern disease outbreaks such as Bird Flu, Swine Flu and SARS.
A handful of gill plates is the only body part of the entire manta ray which is worth anything of real value. The rest of the carcass is sold for virtually nothing and often processed for animal feed.
The sales pitch suggests that as these fishes are able to filter particles from the water with their gill plates, if consumed, these plates will therefore aid in the detoxification and purification of the consumer’s body by filtering these diseases or toxins from the human body. Most consumers are unaware that the product comes from manta and mobula rays, indeed most consumers are not even aware of what a manta or mobula ray is and therefore they have no idea of the impact their choices are having on these increasingly vulnerable species.
In order to maintain this supply of gill plates, large numbers of manta and mobula rays are being landed at fish markets around the world. This is having dire effects on the populations of mobulid rays and reports have already been published on decreases, or complete crashes, of ray populations around the world. It also appears that the giant oceanic manta ray (M. birostris) is likely to be the most heavily affected by this unsustainable and senseless fishery.
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Not senseless but organic pharma instead of synthetic pharma. However the harvesting methods need to be limited with quotas and rays fed to raise populations until a level able to meet demand without diminishing populations, and not harvested only when at the end of viable harvesting age (which could be 40 years for full lifespans if harvesting is to be done AFTER natural death).
ARTICLE 10
US torture of prisoners is ‘indisputable’, independent report finds
Report on US rendition programme by non-partisan thinktank finds highest officials were responsible for torture
Ian Cobain – guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 April 2013 16.36 BST
The report found that dissidents were transferred to Libya in 2004 not to combat terrorism, but to buy favour with the Gaddafi regime. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
An independent examination of the US rendition programme after 9/11 has concluded that it is “indisputable” that America tortured prisoners, and that the country’s highest officials were responsible.
A 580-page report published on Tuesday by the Constitution Project, a non-partisan Washington-based thinktank, concludes that the programme was unjustified and counterproductive, damaging to the country’s reputation, and has placed US military personnel at risk of mistreatment if they are themselves taken prisoner.
In findings similar to those of a report published two months ago by the New York NGO Open Society Justice Initiative, the study concludes that the US rendition programme enjoyed widespread international co-operation, with the UK, Canada, Italy, Germany and Sweden identified as prominent supporters alongside Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Jordan.
The authors also conclude that the UK-Libyan rendition operations that resulted in the abduction of two dissidents who were taken to Tripoli along with their families in 2004 were intended not to combat international terrorism, but to “gain favour” with the Gaddafi regime.
“Apparently someone (almost certainly at the CIA) thought that since the United States was sending people all around the world in our secret rendition programme to combat terrorism aimed at the United States, it would be a good idea to take advantage of the system to transfer some people to Libya in an effort to gain favour with that country’s rulers,” the report says. “We and the British government thought we were buying favour with Gaddafi’s secret service.”
Although some of the victims of those renditions are now in positions of some influence in post-revolutionary Libya, “the worst of the potential consequences of the earlier US actions appears to have been averted,” the report says. In interviews, “the leaders of the revolt that overthrew Gaddafi expressed surprisingly little bitterness or even anger toward America. (Their attitude towards Britain is a different story.)”
The report also concludes that the CIA operated secret prisons within three European countries: Poland and Lithuania, which have acknowledged their existence, and Romania, which continues to deny that such a facility existed.
The study was embarked upon following the decision by the US president, Barack Obama, on entering the White House in 2009 that there would be no official inquiry into the rendition programme, on the grounds that it would be politically unproductive to “look backwards” rather than forwards.
The Constitution Project enjoyed no access to classified material – unlike the Senate’s Intelligence Committee, whose 6,000-page report remains secret – but is nevertheless the most detailed attempt yet to produce a public reckoning of the impact of the rendition programme.
The panel of authors was chaired by Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman who served as an under-secretary at the department of homeland security during the George W Bush administration. Other members include Thomas Pickering, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, a retired lieutenant general from the US army, a former president of the American Bar Association, and a retired army brigadier who taught interrogation techniques.
In one of their most damning conclusions, the panel says: “In the course of the nation’s many previous conflicts, there is little doubt that some US personnel committed brutal acts against captives, as have armies and governments throughout history. But there is no evidence there had ever before been the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 11 September, directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”
The report calls for the revision of the US army’s field manual on interrogation, to prohibit interrogation lasting 40 hours, and to introduce unambiguous bans of the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation.
In an appendix, the authors dismiss arguments – which have frequently followed party lines in the US – that the mistreatment of detainees after 9/11 fell short of torture, citing cases in which comparable treatment was prosecuted as torture by the US in the past.
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Indict and charge. Then sack. Lots of 2nd liners are waiting for those jobs anyway.
Half the Education Leaves Half the Picture As Guesswork And Results in Bad Relations For Police, USA Has Time Limit Before fundo-Islamism Becomes Unmanageable, Words Correct Actions Non-Existent, Iran Needs To Think Deeper, North Korea’s Win-Win Way Out, Tech And Human Rights, Good Work : Nepotism Inadvertently Destroyed By Islamists, Fisheries Harvesting Paradigms, USA Needs To Drop People Blackening USA’s Reputation,
ARTICLE 11
Daily Mail ‘actively’ considering online charge – by Katherine Rushton, Media, Telecoms and Technology Editor – 6:23PM BST 16 Apr 2013
The Daily Mail is “actively” considering charging readers to access its website, the chairman of Daily Mail & General Trust has said. LORD ROTHERMERE.
Viscount Rothermere, whose family owns around a fifth of Daily Mail & General Trust, said that it would start experimenting with different pay models
Viscount Rothermere, whose family owns 21pc of the newspaper group, said that it would start experimenting with different pay models, potentially charging readers for access to certain top-tier content. “In due course I think that we will start experimenting with a ‘freemium’ model. We’re actively thinking about it,” he said.
The Daily Mail has already started charging users for its Mail Plus interactive app, but Viscount Rothermere told a media conference in London that the group was looking at how it could take that a step further.
“I can’t put a time frame on it…we’re having a look-see how that develops. At the moment we’ve got no hard and fast plans to do anything…but we have started to look at premium content and we are trying to understand how we might find a mechanism to start charging for that,” he said.
Viscount Rothermere said the company could start investing in different types of content to help justify a new tariff. “Premium content is what people pay for and you’ll find out pretty quickly what people will pay for. It could be that we buy sports rights. It could be good journalism. I don’t know yet – it’s a task in hand.”
However, he cautioned that the newspaper group was unlikely to start charging for more basic content, as doing so would slow the growth of its website overseas. “We would ideally like to double our size and compete with the likes of Yahoo news in a global space. It’s going to be very difficult to do that charging,” he said.
The Daily Mail’s MailOnline website achieved 127m hits in January, helping to drive a 51pc jump in advertising at the group’s news websites. It is now expanding aggressively in America, to help it reach its target of more than £100m in annual digital revenues within the next three to five years.
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What is the time period before material release on the site becomes repostable? If all media online becomes pay only, people will revert to reading or sharing ‘yesterday’s physical paper’ to save money.
So if Dailymail starts a trend, I suppose that only the free blogs will get to benefit.
ARTICLE 12
DJ killed man at party after ‘boy banter’ escalated into row, court hears – Press Association – guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 April 2013 17.00 BST
Thomas Evans is accused of punching Anthony Thompson to the ground after party in Tooting, south London
Anthony Thompson died of brain damage after his head struck the floor, the Old Bailey heard. Photograph: Chris Young/PA
A DJ killed a man who woke up at a party to find a penis had been drawn on his face, the Old Bailey has heard. The joke is said to have turned sour when the “boy banter” got out of hand and partygoer Anthony Thompson, 26, was punched to the ground outside. Thompson’s head struck the floor and he died from brain damage, jurors were told.
Thomas Evans, 32, of Morden, south London, denies manslaughter, claiming self-defence. Vanessa Barrows, who hosted the 10-hour party at her flat in Tooting, south London, in February last year, told the court that everyone at the party had been enjoying themselves.
She said Thompson had fallen asleep in an armchair when morning approached and some condoms had fallen out of his pocket. She added: “I got my lipstick out and drew a penis on his face. It was done for a laugh.” Barrows said that when Thompson woke up, he had seen the funny side of it. She also nodded off and woke to find a row going on. She said: “It was just silly boy banter between Anthony and Tom.”
After people started to leave, she heard scuffling outside and found Thompson on the ground when she got downstairs.
Peter Clement, prosecuting, said that when Thompson woke up he seemed to take the drawing on his face in “good spirits”. As the banter continued, Thompson was heard to say in bravado: “I can knock any one of you blokes out.” Evans replied: “You couldn’t knock me out.”
Clement said: “That set off a chain of events.” The case continues.
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Perhaps fist fighting and street brawling should be given as a class in schools. How delicate these guys appear? In the movies we see people repeatedly slamming themselves all over the place or heads being slammed repeatedly on the floor and walls or whatever.
Just a simple fall? Maybe the WWE training regime should be given to all kids at nurseries or in school as a mandatory subject – teach them how to fall, or how to get hit and still survive. There is no point raising and training persons for years and going to class for years at high cost at universities – if a simple fall could kill a person just like that. Individuals are not easy to invest in to have die just like that, this is not considering the emotional and spiritual investment as well. This is extreme waste. Perhaps those have not had such training should be made to wear a padded suit at all times.
ARTICLE 13
Playboy denied licence to open beach club in India’s party state of Goa
Brand associated with ‘bunnies’ and centrespreads rebuffed by legislators despite claims IPL’s cheerleaders show more flesh
Associated Press in Panaji – guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 April 2013 18.41 BST
Playboy bunnies in Macau
Bunny how? India will have to wait for the brand’s famous waitresses to arrive, after Goa refused a licence for the country’s first Playboy Club. Photograph: Kin Cheung/AP
The government of Goa has refused permission for promoters to open the India’s first Playboy club at the upmarket Candolim beach.
Women’s groups and conservative politicians had attacked the proposed 22,000-square-foot club, with Michael Lobo, a legislator from the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party saying it was tantamount to promoting prostitution.
After a month of heated debate, the government barred the club from opening in one of India’s most famous party locations on technical grounds.
The chief minister, Manohar Parrikar, told the state assembly on Monday that licences to run so-called beach shacks – even ones as large as the proposed Playboy club – could not be granted to companies, only individuals. “We cannot give them a licence to operate a beach shack,” Parrikar said.
Mumbai-based PB Lifestyle announced last year it had obtained an exclusive licence to open Playboy clubs, hotels, bars and cafes and sell Playboy-branded merchandise in India. It said it would start with a club in Goa and then expand to the southern city of Hyderabad.
PB Lifestyle’s chief executive, Sanjay Gupta, did not immediately respond to a message left at his office.
He said last year he was working to recast Playboy into an aspirational lifestyle brand that wouldn’t spark a backlash in the conservative country, distancing itself from nudity and toning down the traditional, body-hugging bunny costumes.
Goa’s decision does not bar the opening of a conventional Playboy club in in the state, just the beach shack, but
Lobo has called on the government to prevent Playboy from setting shop in any form in the state.
“It is not just a question of permitting Playboy in Candolim. It should be banned across Goa, because Goa should be veered away from international chains which promote vulgarity,” he said.
Agnelo Fernandes, a state Congress party politician, on whose property the beach club was to be located, called the government’s decision “unfortunate”. He has been acting as a de facto spokesman for the project during the controversy.
“It would have been great for Goa to have an international lifestyle brand. There is no question of vulgarity. Our bunny costumes which we had designed were more sober than the ones worn by the cheerleaders at the IPL (Indian Premier League),” Fernandes said, referring to the razzmatazz laden cricket league.
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To each their own? In appropriate districts the club should be legal. The legality of prostitution is to protech freedom of choice and freedom of association though the fundos and moralists need to get a grip and the governments need to be more secular and assign appropriate districts for RLDs. This is an eye candy club that is live. Whats the issue? Would the government prefer to isolate communities to their private computers instead of allowing them to associate and congregate in real live venies? This is like those riot laws where a group of 5 people could be hauled up simply for suspicion of rioting. Whats wrong with Playboy Club except for the extreme pricing? India isn’t taking steps backward now are they?
“It is not just a question of permitting Playboy in Candolim. It should be banned across Goa, because Goa should be veered away from international chains which promote vulgarity,” he said.
If the demographic who wants Playboy is large enough to warrant a Club premises in any state, they should not be prevented. To each their own. Who needs this nonsense prohibition? India conversely could franchise the Kama Sutra across every state with a playboy type club as well.
ARTICLE 14
The Primary American Meme: Be Afraid. – by Robert De Filippis – OpEdNews Op Eds 4/15/2013 at 12:01:06
A meme ( rhymes with “cream”) is a unit of culture, an idea. It is usually linguistic in nature and is easily transmitted from one mind to another. Memes are like viruses , in that they self-replicate and grow in a host. They do not require facts. They just require repetition. They are being planted and nurtured by the media every day. But there are certain memes that are designed to create fear. Every time you listen to some news sources, you’ll get a major dose of this kind. The tell-tale sign of embedded meme; the infected person repeats its words verbatim.
Here’s some examples: “Obama is the worst president ever”, “Obama is destroying America”, “Obama is a Muslim”, “Obama is a socialist”, “Obama is a racist”.
Once infected with a meme, all it takes is occasional innuendo to keep it alive. It also takes gullible people who get their information from one source. We like to hear what appeals to our biases. So when a meme confirms what we already believe, we delight in hearing it. Confirmation always feels good.
By this time, I’m sure that some readers have stopped reading. They’re the ones with the worst infections. Memes infect our minds as well as our public discourse. These infections are ultimately like any other, without treatment they can be fatal. No, our bodies don’t die. Our critical thinking processes do. In other words, once infected with a meme, one’s independent thinking is compromised. When that happens the infected mind becomes vulnerable to all kinds of other nutty ideas.
At this point, if you are still reading, you will probably accuse me of being a bleeding heart liberal or some other equally horrible thing. I don’t take offense because I know that’s just the fever from the infection talking.
The good news is that there is a treatment. It takes some effort but it is guaranteed to work. First, you find a non-partisan fact checking website and apply the information you find there in large quantities. (I almost said apply “apply liberally” but stopped myself)
Eventually, you will be able to start thinking for yourself again. It’s at that point when you can see that “Obama is not the worst or the best president ever”, “Obama is not destroying America, the financial industry bandits are busy at work doing that”, “Obama is a Christian, and it doesn’t make any difference anyway”, “Obama is not a socialist or any more a racist than anyone else in this country. He is a corporatist, as have been the last several presidents”. (look up “corporatism” on http://www.wikipedia.com. You’re welcome.)
Now that you have cured the infection, you will probably want to check the motives of the “Typhoid Mary’s” who create the fear-based memes that infect our national discourse. And what you will find is they do this for personal gain and don’t give a hoot about the damage they’re doing to our country. They profit from creating wedges that continually drive us further and further from any kind of civil dialogue.
Without civil dialogue between and among well-meaning people, we will never see better days. Unfortunately, these folks make millions by destroying society but we all know that money is more important than society. You don’t think so? It must, because we keep buying their toxic products.
Finally, if an infection reaches irreversible destruction of critical thinking, only a new meme can wipe out an old meme. Then fear-mongering memes become particularly difficult to completely eradicate. Regardless of that fact, I’m going to give it a try on at least one.
Did you know that the people who operate the Liberal Christian website “Sojourners” actually wrote letters to Limbaugh, Beck and other Fox contributors, asking them to stop lying? This action implies a new meme for you; “Some Liberals are moral.”
This meme is designed to contradict the one that says, “Only Conservatives are moral.” I’ll bet this meme will never make it on the Drudge Report.
Robert De Filippis
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i) Unfortunately, these folks make millions by destroying society but we all know that money is more important than society. You don’t think so? It must, because we keep buying their toxic products.
No. Wealth distribution and land distribution is more important than money or society. Toxic products are instead a symptom.
ii) Finally, if an infection reaches irreversible destruction of critical thinking, only a new meme can wipe out an old meme. Then fear-mongering memes become particularly difficult to completely eradicate. Regardless of that fact, I’m going to give it a try on at least one.
Use truth and logic? Stop teaching people to think in a roundabout manner. This is a harmful artical and inculpative intent to boot if I am not reading wrongly. Use truth and logic backed with facts. Thats all. No need to tell people to ‘try’ or ‘critical mass’ or what not. Whats true is true applies not what’s what which is subject to the author’s whims.
iii) Ends with “Only Conservatives are moral.”
Moralist fundo posing as disingenuous liberal? Carefully navigate away from the site if so dear readers . . . as said before I could be wrong, but the shades or grey here look rather dark . . .
Vote for 99%ters (non-plutocrat, non-term limitless, non-nepotistic, non-racist) who will write wealth distribution laws targetting the wealthies but leacing them 20 million (thats fifty 401Ks btw), unused state land distribution laws, perhaps a Gaddafi style series of reservoirs for the drier areas if not piped desalinated water from the ocean if not land locked . . . all problems end. No need to do any thinking at all. As your MP or Congressman or Governor if they think unused state land distribution can be ratified (this is a loaded question, the country belongs to all citizens so all unused national land (barring irreplaceable geological or irreplaceable scenic or nature reserves with unique wildlife), is the collective property OF THE PEOPLE – **NOT** the property of THE STATE.
Any MP or Congressman who says the state’s land does not belong to the citizens is a Redcoat enslaver of the 99% – with wealth distribution (to the tune of allowable sequestration of 20 million perhaps as the maximum limit with anything else being redistributed ti the poorest) is more difficult being private property (which should remain untouched to a spiritual auditor’s decision panel we know some people amass that for emotional reasons, but others merely are greedy and won’t feel anything if these valuable are to be reshared with fellow citizens), but then again for all their billions only those with REAL GOODS assets can truly be said to be that rich, the rest are holding fiat and unpaid labour based on unpaid or even unpayable debts . . . 99% of blogs on the internet will become redundant after the 99% take over the political system and the above are applied – 90% of humanity ‘s problems would end with the above applied.
ARTICLE 15
Morsi, Egypt Army Close Ranks against Abuse Charges – by Naharnet Newsdesk 13 April 2013, 05:46
Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi and the military have closed ranks to deny charges that soldiers had killed and tortured protesters, following leaks of an inquiry report implicating officers.
Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, who is also army chief, denied in a televised statement aired Friday that the military had committed abuses, after talks with Morsi, who named the fact-finding inquiry last year.
“I swear, by God, the armed forces did not kill nor order killings; it did not act treacherously, nor did it order treachery,” said Sissi, standing next to Morsi.
Morsi in turn praised the armed forces for “protecting Egypt when it started its march on January 25,” referring to the 2011 uprising that overthrew president Hosni Mubarak and ushered in interim military rule.
The Egyptian press and Britain’s Guardian newspaper have published leaks from the report by the fact-finding panel, named shortly after Morsi took office in June, implicating the military in killings, torture and disappearances.
According to a Guardian report, the inquiry found that army officers ordered doctors to treat wounded demonstrators without anesthesia after they clashed with soldiers during protests against military rule in 2012.
The inquiry also reportedly documented cases of soldiers committing killings and torture during the 18-day uprising that overthrew Mubarak in early 2011, after he had deployed the military to try to quash the unrest.
In early January, the committee submitted its report to Morsi, who referred it to a “revolutionary prosecution” he created to investigate crimes during the revolt and under military rule.
It was not immediately clear whether the leaked sections were from drafts or the final report.
The U.S. State Department urged Morsi to release the report, which he had ordered at a time of tensions with the military in 2012.
“For the sake of transparency, we do believe it should be made public, and we urge the government of Egypt to credibly and independently investigate all claims of violence and wrongdoing and promptly bring the perpetrators to justice,” said deputy spokesman Patrick Ventrell.
He stressed that U.S. officials have not yet seen the report.
The New York-based lobby group Human Rights Watch stressed that “releasing the fact-finding report would be the Egyptian government’s first acknowledgment of two years’ worth of police and military abuses.”
Despite reports in January that the inquiry would be published shortly, the document has been shrouded in secrecy, prompting some to accuse the government of suppressing the findings.
A presidential aide told AFP that the report detailed “16 new incidents, which have been assigned to 16 prosecutors to investigate.”
The presidency’s responsibility over the inquiry ended when he referred the findings to the prosecution.
“The presidency created the committee and assisted its work, but now it’s in the prosecution’s hands,” the aide added.
On Thursday, Morsi promoted three army commanders in a show of support for the military during the meeting with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which took charge after Mubarak’s overthrow and before Morsi’s election.
“I declare this to the entire world, I greatly appreciate the role of the military,” said Morsi, flanked by generals, in the televised statement after the meeting.
Morsi took office with his powers circumscribed by the military, then led by Mubarak’s former Defense Minister Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi.
Egypt’s first civilian leader sacked Tantawi after an August militant attack killed 16 soldiers at a border post, seizing on discontent within the military to purge commanders whose loyalties were in doubt, an aide said at the time.
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I hope the USA knows how to proceed from here. Let the Arab Spring become an EGYPTIAN SPRING. Amon-Ra for the lazier monotheists, the Kemetic Pantheon (Neters) for the more diligent traditionalist polytheists among ethnic Egyptians not bred out by Arabs. Some DNA tests could determine which Egyptians are of the Pharoanic lines etc. and should be placed above Arabs in cultural consideration and lineage specifically. Egypt was not torn apart so they could fundamentalise into Islam! This is Pharoanic EGYPT, not Islamist Arabia. Any Muslims will of course be free to practise Islam, but only the native Egyptian religion can be a state religion in Egypt!
mini-ARTICLE 15.5
Ban on Eminent Domain Abuse Heads to Ballot in Columbia – by Nick Sibilla
Homeowners of five decades no longer under threat of eminent domain in Hadley Township. The city council for Columbia, Mo., voted unanimously on Monday to put on the ballot a charter amendment that prohibits eminent domain abuse. Come April 2013, citizens will have the opportunity to bolster their private property rights by voting to approve the amendment.
As noted previously, Missouri has very broad definitions of blight and abysmal property rights protections, earning a “D” from the Castle Coalition. In fact, as the Columbian Missourian points out, in February, the council once approved a resolution that “declared 60 percent of Columbia as blighted or having conditions that lead to blight.” But after a public backlash, the council was forced to rescind the blight resolution in May.
Related Article
After years of living under the threat of eminent domain, homeowners in Richmond Heights could finally celebrate a Thanksgiving in peace. A suburb of St. Louis, Mo., Richmond Heights had tried to use eminent domain, not once, not twice, but three different times over the past decade to force homeowners in Hadley Township to sell their homes to benefit a private developer. But after the city decided to scale back their “redevelopment” plans for the neighborhood when many homeowners banded together to protest, these relieved homeowners could rejoice.
Take the Baileys. JoAnn and Arthur Bailey have lived in their house on Banneker Avenue for 48 years. They even hung
an anti-eminent domain sign on their door to protest the city’s plans. But for the first time in years, “I finally took the sign down, and I cleaned the door,” JoAnn said to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Now great-grandparents, JoAnn said that every year her children tell her, “‘Mom, this is probably the last Thanksgiving we’ll have here.’ But they come back every year and we’re still here.”
Also joining the Baileys in their eminent domain reprieve is Alice McGee, a 92-year-old homeowner. According to her family, during Thanksgiving, “she was shouting with joy that she wouldn’t be forced out. ‘I’m telling you I told the children, ‘God sure heard my prayer…I’m comfortable here. And I don’t want to leave my home.’”
As the Castle Coalition noted back in July, Alice had lived in her home in Hadley Township for almost five decades: “Her message to the city and its private developer is clear: I won’t sell, saying, ‘I keep praying to God for you to leave us alone. I want to live there until God takes me.’”
Their story illustrates the immense amount of perseverance and resilience required to fight city hall—and win. Throughout the years-long fight, these homeowners remained vigilant in their fight to keep the homes they rightfully owned from being taken by the government and handed over to a private developer.
ARTICLE 16
Doctors driven to bankruptcy – by Parija Kavilanz @CNNMoney April 8, 2013: 11:20 AM ET
Dr. Morgan Moor, an internist, narrowly escaped filing for bankruptcy in 2011.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
As many doctors struggle to keep their practices financially sound, some are buckling under money woes and being pushed into bankruptcy.
It’s a trend that’s accelerated in recent years, industry experts say, with potentially serious consequences for doctors and patients. Some physicians are still able to keep practicing after bankruptcy, but for others, it’s a career-ending event. And when a practice shuts its doors, patients can find it harder to get the health care they need nearby.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings by physician practices have spiked recently, noted Bobby Guy, co-chair of the American Bankruptcy Institute’s health care committee, who tracks bankruptcy trends tied to distressed businesses. Guy said there were at least eight filings in recent weeks, which he said was “very unusual.”
Five years ago, Plantation, Fla.-based bankruptcy attorney David Langley didn’t have a single doctor as a client. Since then he’s handled at least six bankruptcy cases involving doctors. Two current clients — an orthopedic surgeon and an OB/GYN — also are in bankruptcy.
None of his physician clients had malpractice lawsuits that landed them in dire financial straits. All are “top-notch doctors,” he said.
The weak economy has taken a toll on doctors’ revenue, as consumers cut back on office visits and lucrative elective procedures, said Guy, a bankruptcy attorney in Nashville with Frost Brown Todd LLC.
Doctors also blame shrinking insurance reimbursements, changing regulations, and the rising costs of malpractice insurance, drugs and other business necessities for making it harder to keep their practices afloat.
Related Story: Doctors going broke
Oncologist Dr. Dennis Morgan had a profitable solo practice in Enfield, Conn., for years. Revenues began to fall, he said, when reimbursements for treatment and drugs to oncologists started shrinking. He made cutbacks, but he began having trouble meeting expenses, and his business debt grew. Critical chemotherapy drug and medical supplies providers “eventually cut me off,” Morgan said.
In June 2011, his practice, in a medically underserved area, filed for bankruptcy. It had hundreds of chemotherapy patients at the time.
For the next two years, his role became “that of a captain of a sinking ship managing the allocation of life boats until rescue arrived,” he said. He redirected patients to other doctors and area hospitals. Early last year, he stopped practicing medicine.
Having a cancer practice close can be “debilitating” to a community, said Morgan. “If you have to travel one or two hours to get treatment and you have no one to go with you, it becomes a matter of getting care or not getting care,” he said.
Related Story: Doctors: Why we can’t stay afloat
Primary care doctors face similar challenges. Langley recounts one client, a solo practitioner in an underserved area of Broward County, Fla., whose patients were mostly on Medicare or lacked insurance.
As the economy worsened in the wake of the recession, fewer patients could afford to come in. Cash payments and reimbursements dropped. To come up with money to keep the practice going, she took a second job at a hospital. Still, her debt ballooned. She fell behind on state tax payments.
Two years ago, Florida tax officials showed up at her door to shut the clinic down. She quickly called Langley and he was able to file an emergency bankruptcy for her online while the officials were still in the waiting room. He gave them the bankruptcy case number, and they left without closing the clinic. Langley eventually helped the doctor restructure her debt and the clinic is still open, he said.
Dr. Morgan Moor was on the brink of bankruptcy in 2011. An internist with a solo practice in Brentwood, Tenn., Moor said the recession badly hurt her once-thriving practice. By 2010, she had lost almost half of her active patients, her annual revenue had dropped nearly 30%, and she had to lay off half her employees.
“We were told that bankruptcy was our only option,” she said. So she hired Guy. Luckily, Moor said, she was able to restructure her debt and her business without filing.
Every day since has been a struggle, though. “Every payroll, I wonder if we will be able to keep doing this,” she said. “I try not to think about it because it paralyzes me with fear.” To top of page
–Join the discussion: #bankruptdoctors.
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Orwellian corporate sabotage for corporatocracy. Private hospital conglomerates destroy their one man show competitors in collusion with medical suppliers. One man show doctors need to buy supplies through their associations in bulk, or they will never survive. I personally have no sympathy for the 70% private doctors who are not there for real healing. Those deserve to be hit by these corps and private hospitals. The other 30% who are at least neutral should be extended the same preferential prices. Sadly the medical association is often either headed by term limitless, 70% bad docs or profiteers forming quasi political blocs and profiteering off such situations and destroying small practicioners.
Most of the population do not like people with personalities unsuited for such work as well, so unless docs really feel for the health of others, and are full of love for others that is not contrived or inculpated by MSM or social propaganda, they should not do medicine in the first place. Finally medical degrees are too costly and should be made free so that a populace with large numbers of healers can consult and watch each other in cases of abuse or druggings.
ARTICLE 17
Food Policies Leave People Hungry – by Yifat Susskind – Global Research, June 11, 2008
The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) 10 June 2008
Last week the U.N. convened world leaders in Rome to hammer out solutions to the food crisis.
Once again policy leaders are forgetting that food is about people. Over the past few months, 30 countries have been wracked by food riots. The government of Haiti has been toppled. Rice reserves in the Philippines are now under armed guard.
And U.S. corporate agribusinesses have a starring role in this disaster. Farmers in poor countries have gone broke by the millions because they can’t compete with the artificially low prices of U.S. food imports.
Take Mexico, for example. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the U.S. demanded that Mexico open up its markets to cheap U.S. corn. Since NAFTA took effect, U.S. corn exports to Mexico have tripled, flooding the Mexican market and causing domestic corn prices to drop by more than 70 percent. As a result, most of the country’s 15 million corn farmers have gone from being poor — but getting by — to watching their children go hungry. Mexican President Felipe Calderon explains the food crisis in his country as a direct outcome of U.S. food policy.
The same story is repeated in nearly every country where the food crisis is raging. Millions of rural families from Colombia to Cameroon have been forced to go from growing their own food to buying imported staple items, putting them at the mercy of global markets. In the past year, the cost of basics like corn, rice and wheat has doubled and tripled. Farming families whose livelihoods were destroyed by U.S. agribusiness can no longer afford to buy food from these same companies.
That injustice — not any absolute “food shortage” — is at the heart of today’s crisis.
Meanwhile, U.S. agribusiness is making a killing. Last month Cargill announced that its third-quarter profits were up 86 percent. They’ve already raked in over $1 billion this year, in about the same amount of time that another 100 million people were pushed into extreme poverty (surviving on less than $1 a day) because of rising food costs.
Clearly, our global food system is broken. So what would fix it?
It seems that small-holder, sustainable agriculture — precisely the type of farming that’s been devastated by agribusiness — has the best potential to resolve the global food crisis. That, in a nutshell, is the conclusion of a four-year United Nations study by 400 experts on agriculture and development released in April.
But if local, sustainable agriculture is the way to go, there’s another, overlooked dimension to solving the food crisis: The majority of the world’s small-scale farmers are women. In the poorest countries, where the food crisis is at its worst, women grow and produce 80 percent of all food.
That means that policies aiming to resolve the food crisis need to also weed out the widespread discrimination that bars women farmers from owning land and from accessing credit, seeds, tools and training. Agricultural subsidies were originally conceived to protect small-scale farmers from poverty. We still need to do that — and on a global scale. Today, subsidies can play a positive role in building the capacity of women farmers to grow food sustainably.
It’s high time to put the human rights and productive capacity of small farmers at the center of agriculture policy. The Rome summit presented us with an opportunity to rethink food policy. Unfortunately the outcome continues the same misguided polices of free trade instead of investing in local food production. It’s time to realize that the world’s small farmers and especially women — are our best hope for feeding people and protecting the planet.
Yifat Susskind is communications director for MADRE: Rights, Resources and Results for Women Worldwide.
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Redistribute unused state land to the tune of 1/4 to 1 acre each family for subsistence cultivation. Immediately homelessness ends. By the first crop, the stavation would end. The distributed land also would end homelessness and allow the people to build their own homes insteadof paying fortunes to live in pigeon coops and rabbit hutches. Medicine could even be grown via plants (which is better than synthetic pharma) and education could be conducted under a tree instead of a millions worth institution. Don’t say that education cannot be done without buildings FIRST. The government enriches the contractors and suppliers of such structures which use up energy on the grid and creates heat sinks yhat cause climate change etc.. ANY lecturer can hold classes under any tree. Who needs to pay the gatekeeper building contractors, the gatekeeper accredtations boards (bridge trolls more like) and salaries of the panellists sitting on such boards, and who needs to navigate red tape of profiteering education Ministries? So think 99% citizens, the country you live in is RICH, but the politicians will not distribute unused state land or place limits to wealth sequestration, collude with big business.
Vote for politicans from the 99%, no plutocrats, no nepotists and no term limitlessness – no extreme salaries perhaps at the level of no more than 10 times the National Average Annual Wage, 3 times if the country is poor or developing. These politicians we have now from EU to ASEAN to South America are not applying themselves and causing the problem, not solving the provlem and meanwhile they get the massive salaries they award themselves. If the country is in debt, has debt from public spending, then there is no reason for that country to give any salary above national average annual wage! MOST of the countries in the world are in such debt yet we have microstates like Singapore being paid 10 times what USA’s politicians are paid. So understand what is going on simply by comparing politician salary and national average wage.
mini-ARTICLE 17.5
Close vote seen on background checks on gun buyers – by DINA CAPPIELLO | Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The sponsors of a Senate proposal to expand background checks for gun buyers says a vote is likely this week and it’s too close to call.
There was a hopeful sign Sunday: Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has a B+ rating from the National Rifle Association, says he’s leaning toward supporting it.
The proposal is from Republican Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and they say it’s shaping up as a close call.
The plan would require background checks for people buying guns at gun shows and online. Background checks currently apply only to transactions handled by the country’s 55,000 licensed gun dealers.
Toomey says a vote could come as early as Wednesday.
They appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” McCain was on CNN.
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This is good for keeping tags on law abiding citizens, but could encourage criminal gunrunners and illegal gun manufacturers for as many people who now cannot get a gun legally.
ARTICLE 18
Marijuana Majority: Americans Now Back Legalization: Op-Ed – by Jeff Nesbit | LiveScience.com – 21st April 2012
Jeff Nesbit was the director of public affairs for two prominent federal science agencies and is a regular contributor to U.S. News & World Report, where this article first ran before appearing in LiveScience’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
It’s 4/20 time again this week. For those who aren’t part of the Millennial generation, 4/20 is unofficial “Weed Day” in America —a counterculture phenomenon that has drawn up to 10,000 marijuana legalization activists at college campuses in the U.S. in some years.
In years past, Weed Day counterculture “holiday” celebrations have taken place on 4/20 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, in several Canadian cities or at college campuses in Boulder, Colo., and elsewhere. Weed Day has also migrated to other parts of the world. [Cannabis: Facts About Marijuana & Effects of Marijuana]
Where did the concept of 4/20 as a way to celebrate marijuana smoking originate? That’s a bit more difficult to discern, though a reporter for The Huffington Post once tracked it down to a flyer at a Grateful Dead concert in 1990 that referred to “420ing” (smoking pot) on April 20 of that year that, in various stages, led to successive celebrations on April 20.
HuffPost also tracked it back even further, to San Rafael, Calif., high-school friends known as “the Waldos” who coined the term “4/20” in the 1970s as the designated time of the day to smoke pot after school. By fits and starts, 4/20 as either a time of day for pot smoking or a counterculture day of rebellion then traveled mostly by word of mouth.
This year, Weed Day enthusiasts hoping to see the tide turn (both politically and socially) on the legalization of marijuana front have more to celebrate than in years past.
A national survey by the Pew Research Center earlier this month found that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans would now support regulating marijuana use the way that most states and federal authorities regulate alcohol use. [5 Wacky Things That Are Good for Your Health]
In fact, Pew found, the number of Baby Boomers who would support decriminalizing marijuana has gone up year after year during the 40 years it’s been asking about the question —and is now more than double what it was in the early 1990s.
Meanwhile, recent studies have confirmed what social scientists have been saying for years about the theory that marijuana is a “gateway drug” that leads to hard drug use —namely, that the “gateway drug theory” for marijuana simply doesn’t hold up scientifically.
If anything, these new studies found, other things like alcohol or cigarette use are better predictors than marijuana use of eventual prescription drug abuse or addiction to harder drugs like heroin and cocaine.
A Yale study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health late last year, for instance, found that alcohol or cigarette use was twice as likely to predict prescription opiate drug abuse as marijuana use. Prescription drug overdoses are far more prevalent now in America than either cocaine or heroin overdoses.
The Yale study pulled data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health and found that, of the 12 percent who self-identified that they’d abused prescription drugs, 57 percent said that they’d previously used alcohol, 56 percent said they’d previously smoked cigarettes —and just 37 percent said they’d previously used marijuana.
A study published in The Journal of School Health focusing on the “gateway drug theory” for marijuana also found that alcohol, rather than marijuana, was the most commonly used substance for first-time drug users. Yet, alcohol has never been thought of as a gateway drug to cocaine, heroin or prescription opiate abuse.
In fact, social scientists and psychologists now argue rather conclusively that none of these are actually “gateway drugs” that lead someone down the path to addiction to harder or more addictive drugs.
Socio-economic considerations, environmental factors or genetics are much more likely to determine whether someone is more prone to abuse addictive substances, studies have shown repeatedly.
It’s been a long, slow decline for the “gateway drug theory” in the public’s mind, though. Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to look at the issues around medical marijuana use more than a decade ago. In a pivotal report in 1999, the NAS reported that “in fact, most drug users begin with alcohol and nicotine before marijuana —usually before they are of legal age.”
The NAS didn’t mince its words in that 1999 report to Congress. “In the sense that marijuana use typically precedes rather than follows initiation of other illicit drug use, it is indeed a ‘gateway’ drug,’” it said. “But because underage smoking and alcohol use typically precede marijuana use, marijuana is not the most common, and is rarely the first, ‘gateway’ to illicit drug use. There is no conclusive evidence that the drug effects of marijuana are causally linked to the subsequent abuse of other illicit drugs.”
None of these studies, however, slowed down the “gateway drug theory” in the public’s mind —until recently. Whether through a combination of “Weed Day” demonstrations on 4/20 or the success of medical marijuana initiatives in states around the U.S., most Americans are in a different place on marijuana now and would likely support it being regulated like alcohol consumption.
Yet, as longtime advocates of marijuana legalization know all too well, public and scientific support for their positions don’t necessarily translate into political action on such an issue. It may, in fact, be years before we finally see the official death of the gateway drug theory, and the rise of acceptable government action on the legalization of marijuana.
This article first appeared as Growing Numbers of Americans Support Legalizing Pot Use in the column At the Edge by Jeff Nesbit on U.S. News & World Report. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
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This is not about majority but about principles. If a minority is right, the law should still support them (much like LGBT is a minority in society but has rights to associate and even marriage protected from haters even as Jews can order kosher meals on some airlines despite being a minority). To mention majority as a raison d’etre for a law is always dangerous when democratic principles are concerned. If the majority support a law that is wrong, they still are wrong and that is where the learned state of judges come in – if not at least AFTER explaining why and how of minority-majority vs principles-correctness based around principles and logic or Voltarian freedoms (not just of speech but the life that free speech describes) than forcing through legislation in absentia of discussion with the public which sadly is often the case and even sadder is generally not paid attention to by the majority of the public! The more a society is able to accomodate a minority or even super minority, the more civilised, discerning and all encompassing a society and nation is. This is a true form of soft power that is applicable internally even as other coarser and more communal nations will never understand such things.
Voltarian concepts of freedom doubtless preclude all fringe substances that can be grown and processed at home for legal use simply because no person is harmed. The only issue is not profiteering off others which can be done via price controls so that those growing and processing would get no more than a nursery or gardening service would – which is the scope and labour level of growing such organic psychedelics.
ARTICLE 19
What ‘decriminalise’ really means is: we’re giving junkies a drug den next door to you – by Peter Hitchens – PUBLISHED: 00:04 GMT, 21 April 2013 | UPDATED: 10:50 GMT, 21 April 2013
It will not be long before your home town has special places where drug abusers can poke or snort poison into their bodies. These will be legal and paid for by you and me.
It is a stupid idea, of course. People who take such drugs are selfish parasites in need of deterrence, not patients in need of treatment.
The nicer we are to them, the more of them there will be, as we have proved conclusively over the past four decades.
Brighton has unveiled plans to introduce ‘drug consumption’ rooms in the city
But it is getting harder every day to express this opinion, and soon it will be more or less impossible. The British liberal establishment have decided to surrender to the powerful and well-funded lobby that wants to ‘decriminalise’ drugs.
They use this clumsy word because international treaties prevent us from actually legalising them. Instead, we just reduce the penalties to nothing (or don’t enforce them) and make them legal in all but name.
Before they can get away with this loathsome scheme, they have to brainwash the public into accepting it.
That is why the unpopular newspapers and the BBC have been giving favourable coverage to a plan for ‘drug consumption rooms’ in Brighton. It is also why Portugal’s abandonment of serious drug laws is constantly presented in a kindly light by the establishment media.
Many of you will have been brainwashed yourselves. Do you know how many supposedly ‘conservative’ newspapers endorsed the decriminalisation of cannabis years ago?
It is amazing how many otherwise sensible people have already been fooled into accepting the dud arguments for relaxing the law against cannabis, one of the most dangerous drugs in existence.
Your children, too, will have been brainwashed at school – where they will have absorbed the moronic argument that because alcohol and tobacco are legal, it is wrong to have laws against dope.
Whenever I have the chance to debate this subject properly, I almost always defeat the drug liberalisers.
But that’s the problem. The debate has been shut down, because the liberals control it. Only one side is allowed to be heard. TV and radio won’t let me talk about this.
My recent book, showing that the supposed ‘war on drugs’ was abandoned 40 years ago, and that claims of stern ‘prohibition’ are propaganda drivel, was simply not reviewed by most national papers or on the broadcast programmes that discuss such things.
It is not yet too late to stop this process, but a great deal of vigilance will be needed to do so. Otherwise you may wake up one day soon and find a building near you is being openly used by junkies to inject themselves, with police approval.
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Not really. Human Rights mean a right to access what is effectively a form of euthanasia for those feeling existentially incomplete or who cannot find purpose in living. Drugs are just that and for that purpose, the users are euthanising themselves albeit with alot of pleasure in the process over a period of time. Who are we to stop them or sell them out to drug dealers and other criminal elements that would cause these users to become criminals? Being a civilised society, these controlled conditions will ensure they get to stay out of everyone’s way. What drug den? They will do their stuff in controlled conditions and won’t have a chance to wander around or enter people’s houses while stoned etc..
This article is demogoguery. Unlike ‘dens’ where movement is allowed while stoned, these ‘drug consumption’ rooms would likely be a locked in type while any user is stoned.
ARTICLE 20
The Englishand the culture of entitlement off the backs of the 99%.
ARTICLE 21
Bluecoat and Redcoat reminders. Wastage of Yahoo MSM space for what agenda?
mini-Article 21
PAP: To remain dominant without being dominating – Published on Apr 19, 2013 8:28 AM
THE People’s Action Party (PAP) wants to remain a dominant party anchored in society – without dominating in all areas, said Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
It can do this as an open political party, he said, that galvanises a diversity of views and ideas, including critical opinions.
“I believe we can play a dominant role, retain a dominant position without wanting to completely dominate,” DPM Tharman said in an interview with The Straits Times.
“It’s in Singapore’s interest that you do have a dominant party, but it’s got to be one that’s open to diversity, welcoming of a responsible opposition.”
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Hey hey . . . you there, disrespectful term limitless nepotists, no dominant persons will be tolerated in any democracy of EQUALS. 2 terms as MP, much less PM, then GTFO. 1 term preferably if to be respected as a citizen who does not even try to be dominant much less dominating. NO DOMS. Equals only. Play dom with your private harems and sex partners, but no tolerance will be given such dominating behaviour or presence of dominants in secular society especially in government towards citizen civilians. Sense of entitlement in MP continuation of Singapore’s forced military conscriptions without abstention options is intolerable enough. Do not even dare to think to be dominant much less dominating. Vote 99%ters with term limits that are not nepotists Singaporeans!
malaysiandemocracy1 