June 14, 2014

Department of Homeland Security Gitmo's Immigrant kids

In recent weeks, large numbers of unaccompanied children, most of them from Central America, have been detained in the Rio Grande Valley and shipped to improvised holding centers. Obama has enlisted the Federal Emergency Management Agency to deal with what he calls an urgent humanitarian situation, best exemplified by a warehouse in Arizona currently holding more than 700 children. Other facilities are being prepared for use, including an army base in Oklahoma which will initially take in 600 children but which can hold up to 1,200 minors, according to senior administration officials.

More at the link below:

http://www.newsweek.com/why-are-children-flocking-us-mexico-254371

June 10, 2014

France announces its debt is illegal, hidden and should be torn up!

"The Guardian" has an international commentary on the findings of a French committee.


URL is here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/09/french-public-debt-audit-illegitimate-working-class-internationalim


Debt audits show that austerity is politically motivated to favour social elites. Is a new working-class internationalism in the air?..

France made a decisive contribution to the reinvention of a radical politics for the 21st century. On that day, thecommittee for a citizen's audit (Link is here, but in francais http://www.audit-citoyen.org/) on the public debt issued a 30-page report on French public debt, its origins and evolution in the past decades. The report was written by a group of experts in public finances under the coordination of Michel Husson, one of France's finest critical economists. Its conclusion is straightforward: 60% of French public debt is illegitimate.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in recent years knows how important debt is to contemporary politics. As David Graeber among others has shown, we live in debtocracies, not democracies. Debt, rather than popular will, is the governing principle of our societies, through the devastating austerity policies implemented in the name of debt reduction. Debt was also a triggering cause of the most innovative social movements in recent years, the Occupy movement. If it were shown that public debts were somehow illegitimate, that citizens had a right to demand a moratorium – and even the cancellation of part of these debts – the political implications would be huge. It is hard to think of an event that would transform social life as profoundly and rapidly as the emancipation of societies from the constraints of debt. And yet this is precisely what the French report aims to do.

...

The report on French debt contains several key findings. Primarily, the rise in the state's debt in the past decades cannot be explained by an increase in public spending. The neoliberal argument in favour of austerity policies claims that debt is due to unreasonable public spending levels; that societies in general, and popular classes in particular, live above their means. But this is plain false. In the past 30 years, from 1978 to 2012 more precisely, French public spending has in fact decreased by two GDP points. What, then, explains the rise in public debt? First, a fall in the tax revenues of the state. Massive tax reductions for the wealthy and big corporations have been carried out since 1980. In line with the neoliberal mantra, the purpose of these reductions was to favor investment and employment. Well, unemployment is at its highest today, whereas tax revenues have decreased by five points of GDP.

Hence, the audit on the debt concludes, some 60% of the French public debt is illegitimate.
An illegitimate debt is one that grew in the service of private interests, and not the well being of the people. Therefore the French people have a right to demand a moratorium on the payment of the debt, and the cancellation of at least part of it. There is precedent for this: in 2008 Ecuador declared 70% of its debt illegitimate.

####

Of course, here in the USA, we have spending far beyond anything needed by anyone, (except the parasites who own the contracting DoD companies) for our Continual and Total Surveillance, The militarization of the police, and also the endless wars. (Twenty seven conflicts in Africa are supported by the USA as I type this.) So we are in much worse shape than France.


..

June 10, 2014

Solar Breakthrough from Oz Land:

News
World first: Australian solar plant has generated “supercritical” steam that rivals fossil fuels’
ScienceAlert Staff
Thursday, 05 June 2014
Share on email Share on print

A CSIRO test plant in Australia has broken a world record and proved solar power could efficiently replace fossil fuels.

A solar thermal test plant in Newcastle, Australia, has generated “supercritical” steam at a pressure of 23.5 mpa (3400 psi) and 570°C (1,058°F). CSIRO is claiming it as a world record, and it’s a HUGE step for solar thermal energy.

"It's like breaking the sound barrier; this step change proves solar has the potential to compete with the peak performance capabilities of fossil fuel sources," Dr Alex Wonhas, CSIRO’s Energy Director, told Colin Jeffrey for Gizmag. The Energy Centre uses a field of more than 600 mirrors (known as heliostats) which are all directed at two towers housing solar receivers and turbines, Gizmag reports.

This supercritical steam is used to drive the world’s most advanced power plant turbines, but previously it’s only been possible to produce it by burning fossil fuels such as coal or gas.
"Instead of relying on burning fossil fuels to produce supercritical steam, this breakthrough demonstrates that the power plants of the future could instead be using the free, zero emission energy of the sun to achieve the same result,” Dr Wonhas explained.

####


http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20140506-25618.html
Decent graphics at above link, as well as a video and a bit more text.

June 10, 2014

A real scientist has to battle Corporate America:

https://www.facebook.com/GMOFreeUSA/photos/a.468695639837571.108816.402058139834655/759946790712453/?type=1&theater

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/10/140210fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all



From the article in The New Yorker:
In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

Hayes continued studying atrazine on his own, and soon he became convinced that Syngenta representatives were following him to conferences around the world. He worried that the company was orchestrating a campaign to destroy his reputation. He complained that whenever he gave public talks there was a stranger in the back of the room, taking notes. On a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2003, he stayed at a different hotel each night. He was still in touch with a few Syngenta scientists and, after noticing that they knew many details about his work and his schedule, he suspected that they were reading his e-mails. To confuse them, he asked a student to write misleading e-mails from his office computer while he was travelling. He sent backup copies of his data and notes to his parents in sealed boxes. In an e-mail to one Syngenta scientist, he wrote that he had “risked my reputation, my name . . . some say even my life, for what I thought (and now know) is right.” A few scientists had previously done experiments that anticipated Hayes’s work, but no one had observed such extreme effects. In another e-mail to Syngenta, he acknowledged that it might appear that he was suffering from a “Napoleon complex” or “delusions of grandeur.”

For years, despite his achievements, Hayes had felt like an interloper. In academic settings, it seemed to him that his colleagues were operating according to a frivolous code of manners: they spoke so formally, fashioning themselves as detached authorities, and rarely admitted what they didn’t know. He had grown up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a neighborhood where fewer than forty per cent of residents finish high school. Until sixth grade, when he was accepted into a program for the gifted, in a different neighborhood, he had never had a conversation with a white person his age. He and his friends used to tell one another how “white people do this, and white people do that,” pretending that they knew. After he switched schools and took advanced courses, the black kids made fun of him, saying, “Oh, he thinks he’s white.”

SNIP



Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”

May 29, 2014

You state:

If it came out that this was the case then we would be thanking Snowden for alerting us and giving us a voice in the debate.

That is exactly Snowden's point. The NSA has the ability to untangle their meta data and re-assemble the phone conversation you or I had last week with with the Anti_Monsanto protesters. This can be done at any point in time.

So today, while talking to the protesters is legal, if in five years that is not the case, that evidence could blacklist you or me or do harm that is much much worse that a mere blacklisting.

I am old enough to remember how many lives were ruined when their legal involvement with the Communist Party in the Thirties and Forties pushed them onto a blacklist for much of the Fifties sand sixties.

This is off Juan Cole's website:



Everything you wanted to Know About NSA Surveillance *but were afraid to ask (Stray)

gmoke 06/29/2013 at 8:13 pm with 1 replies

Jay Leno interviewing Shia LeBoeuf about his new movie, "Eagle Eye" on the Tonight Show 9/17/08:

Shia LeBoeuf: I remember we had an FBI consultant on the picture telling me that they can use your ADT security box microphone to get your stuff that is going on in your house. Or OnStar, they can shut your car down. And he told me that one in five phone calls that you make are recorded and logged and I laughed at him. And then he played back a phone conversation I had two years prior to joining the picture, the FBI consultant...

Leno: They had a record of you from..

Shia: Two years prior to me joining the picture...

Leno: That seems creepy.

Shia: Extremely creepy.

link to dailykos.com

The FBI consultant on the picture, Thomas Knowles, denies this happened.
############################################################
However, here's another part of the surveillance state story from historian Rick Pearlstein (link to thenation.com):

"We have been here before.

"In the fall of 1975, when a Senate select committee chaired by Frank Church and a House committee chaired by Otis Pike were investigating abuses of power by the CIA and FBI, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, the loaded pistol from New York (she had introduced a resolution to impeach Richard Nixon on her first day in office in 1971) dared turned her own House Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights to a new subject: the National Security Agency, and two twin government surveillance projects she had learned about codenamed “SHAMROCK” and “MINARET.” They had monitored both the phone calls and telegrams of American citizens for decades.

"At the time, even political junkies did not know what the NSA was. “With a reputed budget of some $1.2 billion and a manpower roster far greater than the CIA,” the Associated Press explained, it had been “established in 1952 with a charter that is still classified as top secret.” (Is it still? I’d be interested to know.) President Ford had persuaded Frank Church not to hold hearings on the matter. (Ford had something in common with Obama: hypocrisy. “In all my public and private acts as your president, I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end,” he’d said in his inaugural address, the one where he proclaimed, “Our long national nightmare is over.”) So Abzug proceeded on her own. At first, when she subpoenaed the executives responsible for going along with the programs the White House tried to prevent their testimony by claiming the private companies were “an agent of the United States.” When they did appear, they admitted their companies had voluntarily been turning over their full records of phone and telegram traffic to the government at the end of every single day, by courier, for over forty years, full stop. The NSA said the programs had been discontinued. Abzug claimed they still survived, just under different names. And at that, Church changed his mind: the contempt for the law here was so flagrant, he decided, he would initiate NSA hearings, too."

So, it seems that almost all communications have been monitored from the 1930s on, except for maybe a few minutes in the late 1970s when things got a little too hot and before Reagan's morning in America reinstalled the wiretaps.

May 16, 2014

Finally a defense of Seralini's Gm Food study to set the record straight.

As many people concerned about GM seeds, crops and foods are aware, Seralini, a French scientist at the Univ of Cannes, was able to do a lengthy study that did several things no prior study on Gm foods had done - it involved feeding rats Gm food, and then waiting to determine the results of the Gm food on the animals' health. A much longer time frame was used than the ones employed by Monsanto to let us know that Gm foods are safe. Rather than just feeding the rats and waiting a few weeks to see how many rats lived vs died, died, this study actually allowed the animals to stay alive for months of study. At the end of the research period, it was found that the organs inside the rats were disintegrating or else filled with tumors.

Of course the implications of this were profound.

Now remember that Seralini himself did not say that this was the study to end all studies He knew this was a preliminary study but he also realized that his findings might offer encouragement to other scientists who are doubting that Gm foods ar e safe. Those scientists could design studies to examine similar situations.

http://www.gmoseralini.org/the-dirty-details-behind-the-attacks-on-seralinis-notorious-gmo-rat-study/
From the article:
(regarding the 24/7 Main$ream Media coverage of the "failure of Seralini's study) This publicized display was the air and sea attack to soften the defense of the anti-GMO ideology island. Then the actual landing attack against that island’s science was embarked by setting up former Monsanto scientist Richard E. Goodman in a newly created biotech editorial position at the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT).

That’s the journal where Seralini’s study “Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize” had been originally peer reviewed and posted. With Goodman steering the landing craft, the editor-in-chief of FCT, Wallace Hayes, removed Seralini’s paper from the journal.

Hayes admitted the study was not fraudulent or inaccurate, but explained that it was inconclusive. Honest defending scientists jumped on that one, explaining that peer reviewed published studies are often inconclusive, recommending “further studies”.

Debunking GMO Scientists’ Criticisms as Liberally Reported by the MSM

** Wrong rats used: They were the same rats Monsanto had used in a 90 day trial. The Sprague-Dawley (SD) strain has a life expectancy of 24 to 36 months. Just right for a two year study that’s intended to replicate the life span of a human.

** SD Rats Tend to Have Spontaneous Tumors: True, around 30% of SD rats get cancer symptoms without test induced provocations. Again, this mimics human statistics on cancer. More SD rats fed well under maximum regulatory amounts of Roundup along with the Roundup Ready corn developed tumors than the control rats within four to seven months of the study. The exposed rats also died earlier than the non-exposed control rats.

** Too few Rats: The short Monsanto study used 20 rats for each group. But, they only checked urine and serum samples of 10 in each group. The Seralini study used 10 for each grouping, but they tested urine and serum samples from all 10.

** Insufficient Amount of Rats for Proving Carcinogenicity: The title of the study tells us that proving carcinogenicity was not Seralini’s intent, it was a long term toxicity study. Tumors were incidental, but are required to be reported without drawing conclusions in toxicity studies. Seralini reported without conclusions about cancer. The rats who were exposed showed signs of liver, kidney, and pancreatic damage.

May 12, 2014

Seven Years for Occupy Protester Cecily McMillan

http://www.alternet.org/occupy-wall-street/why-occupy-protester-cecily-mcmillans-guilty-verdict-travesty

The verdict in the biggest Occupy related criminal case in New York City, that of Cecily McMillan, came down Monday afternoon. As disturbing as it is that she was found guilty of felony assault against Officer Grantley Bovell, the circumstances of her trial reflect an even more disturbing reality – that of normalized police violence, disproportionately punitive sentences (McMillan faces seven years in prison), and a criminal penal system based on anything but justice. While this is nothing new for the over-policed communities of New York City, what happened to McMillan reveals just how powerful and unrestrained a massive police force can be in fighting back against the very people with whom it is charged to protect.

Snip

When the police moved in to the park that night, in formation and with batons, to arrest a massive number of nonviolent protesters, the chaos was terrifying. Bovell claimed that McMillan elbowed him in the face as he attempted to arrest her, and McMillan and her defense team claim that Bovell grabbed her right breast from behind, causing her to instinctively react.

But the jury didn't hear anything about the police violence that took place in Zuccotti Park that night. They didn't hear about what happened there on November 15, 2011, when the park was first cleared. The violence experienced by Occupy protesters throughout its entirety was excluded from the courtroom. The narrative that the jury did hear was tightly controlled by what the judge allowed – and Judge Ronald Zweibel consistently ruled that any larger context of what was happening around McMillan at the time of the arrest (let alone Bovell's own history of violence) was irrelevant to the scope of the trial.

In the trial, physical evidence was considered suspect but the testimony of the police was cast as infallible. Despite photographs of her bruised body, including her right breast, the prosecution cast doubt upon McMillan's allegations of being injured by the police – all while Officer Bovell repeatedly identified the wrong eye when testifying as to how McMillan injured him. And not only was Officer Bovell's documented history of violent behavior deemed irrelevant by the judge, but so were the allegations of his violent behavior that very same night.

May 9, 2014

"Ubuntu, How can one of us be happy, if

the others are sad?"


http://www.livelifehappy.com/an-anthropologist-proposed-a-game-to-the-kids-in-an-african-tribe/


https://www.facebook.com/DeepLifeQuotes/posts/416870538363777

An anthropologist proposed a game to the kids in an African tribe. He put a basket full of fruit near a tree and told the kids that who ever got there first won the sweet fruits. When he told them to run they all took each others hands and ran together, then sat together enjoying their treats. When he asked them why they had run like that as one could have had all the fruits for himself they said: UBUNTU. UBUNTU in the Xhosa culture means: “I am because we are.”

May 5, 2014

Why stopping Corporate Personhood is not the way to go:

We need to go further and deeper.

Half of the rights that are utilized by the Big Corporations lie outside the parameters of Corporate Personhood.

This is the second of my OP's regarding the Community Rights movement. I see this movement as the only way to save this nation from the One Big Money Party, the controlled "elections," and the "Puppet Masters at the Top"

Paul discusses how we have to stop battling the "regulatory" fight in the courts and instead, we must get involved in the ordinance-passing activities that could indeed stop the Corporate Beast in its tracks.

Already one hundred and fifty communities are sponsoring measures, or have succeeded in passing local ordinances, that are involved with Community Rights.

Among the successful ordinances are two in Pennsylvania. One Community in PA was about to watch as a huge 14,000 pig, industrial "pig farm" came in and destroyed the soil, air and water of the community. This "farm" would have come about as Corporate privileges and rights have a tight hold over the state legislators and the governor.

The community, had it simply relied on their "elected officials" to solve the problem, well, they would have been told that since large pig farms are not an illegal activity, the community must accept it. Instead after a great deal of work, they put together an ordinance that the local voters voted in, and now Corporate Pig Farms above a certain size are outlawed.

The second successful Community Rights ordinance was passed in the City of Pittsburgh, where the Big Energy firms were about to drill at three fracking sites. The Pittsburgh ordinance now bans fracking.

Elsewhere, the Community Rights movement is currently attempting the passage of such measures as those needed to stop nuclear waste from passing, via railroad trains, through a community. Or from having Gm seeds and crops being planted.


Pls Note: This discussion was held back in 2012, a while before the most recent SCOTUS decision about money and free speech was heard.

It is also well worth it to visit:
paulcienfeugos.com

April 28, 2014

No, actually we in the public were told at the time that they

Were helping us avoid having other nations fall to the sway of the Godless commies.

That is what we were told, but it had little to do with the real reason the CIA was involved where it was involved.

In truth, when we became involved through our CIA overthrow of the democratically elected President in Iran, 1953, it was on account of OIL.

When we got involved in Vietnam in early sixties through to Spring 1975, it was on account of OIL.

When we got involved in Central America in 1980's, it was on account of the need to keep American corporate interests happy with total control of the peasantry in those nations.

Panama was an actual vengeance game, played out on the part of the head of the Bush Crime family to deliver retribution to the Noriega for Noriega's screwing over said American Crime Family.

Note that in Vietnam, in addition to OIL interests, the CIA saw to it that marijuana and hashish and opium and heroin flooded the streets of the USA, brought back in the coffins of dead US Americans.

Iraq I and II was again about OIL.

Afghanistan is a nation we now know has over five hundred billions of dollars of minerals, which our American companies want for their Corporate Interests. That will come later, but right now, heroin is flooding the streets of America, just as it did back in the 1960's and 1970's.
Rachel says what her handlers tell her to say. On the one hand you can indeed make out a case for our CIA being a bunch of bumbling idiots, but anyone connected to their internal workings has become rich and powerful beyond belief. I can guarantee the fact that George Walker Bush never had to worry about a check he wrote bouncing, nor did Cheney.

We have lost our own democracy on account of this agency. So please don't put out there that it is powerless. Like Bill Casey stated in his first remarks as newly installed CIA head, to a group of CIA new recruits, early 1980's:
(Paraphrasing) "It is our job over the next twenty years, to see to it that everything the American public believes is false."