July 29, 2012

The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies

http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm


1. COINTELPRO Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of a internet forum
2. Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation
3. Eight Traits of the Disinformationalist
4. How to Spot a Spy (Cointelpro Agent)
5. Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression

July 27, 2012

Weekend Economists Ride With Sally into the Sunset July 27-29, 2012

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Weekend Economists salutes Sally Ride, a woman who went where very few had gone before, or since...



Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American physicist and astronaut.

Ride joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983, at the age of 32, became the first American woman to enter low Earth orbit. As of 2012, Ride also remains the youngest American astronaut to be launched into space. In 1987, she left NASA to work at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control. She served on the investigation panels for two space shuttle disasters, Challenger and Columbia, the only person to serve on both...wikipedia

She left Earth for good this week, far too young, IMO. Did her time in space lead to her cancer?



what are the risk factors for pancreatic cancer? Some of the risk factors include:

1. Cigarette smoking:illustration of person smoking Smoking doubles the risk of pancreatic cancer. Smoking is also associated with early age at diagnosis, and, very importantly, the risk of pancreatic cancer drops close to normal in people who quit smoking. Simply put, cigarette smoking is the leading preventable cause of pancreatic cancer. In fact, some scientists have estimated that one in four, or one in five cases of pancreatic cancer are caused by smoking cigarettes.
   
   
2. Age: The risk of developing pancreatic cancer increases with age. Over 80% of the cases develop between the ages of 60 and 80.
   
   
3. Race: Studies in the United States have shown that pancreatic cancer is more common in the African American population than it is in the white population. Some of this increased risk may be due to socioeconomic factors and to cigarette smoking.
   
   
4. Gender: Cancer of the pancreas is more common in men than in women. Men are more likely to smoke than women.
   
   
5. Religious background: Pancreatic cancer is proportionally more common in Ashkenazi Jews than the rest of the population. This may be because of a particular inherited mutation in the breast cancer gene (BRCA2) which runs in some Ashkenazi Jewish families.
   
   
6. Chronic pancreatitis: Long-term inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis) has been linked to cancer of the pancreas.
   
   
7. Diabetes: Diabetes is both a symptom of pancreatic cancer, and long-standing adult-onset diabetes also increases the risk of pancreatic cancer.
   
   
8. Obesity: Obesity significantly increases the risk of pancreatic cancer.
   
   
9. Diet: Diets high in meats, cholesterol fried foods and nitrosamines may increase risk, while diets high in fruits and vegetables reduce risk. Folate may be protective.
   
   
10. Genetics: As mentioned earlier, a number of inherited cancer syndromes increase the risk of pancreatic cancer. These include inherited mutations in the BRCA2, FAMMM, PalB2 or Peutz-Jeghers genes. To learn more about familial pancreatic cancer visit the web site of the National Familial Pancreas Tumor Registry.

If Sally had one defective gene, all that radiation in space could have damaged the other, and that's the beginning of the end.

July 26, 2012

Barrels of used oil dumped in two locations in Washtenaw County

http://annarbor.com/news/crime/barrels-of-of-used-oil-dumped-in-two-locations-in-washtenaw-county/?cmpid=NL_DH_topicbox_headline



Several barrels of used oil were dumped in Pittsfield and Augusta townships Wednesday, authorities said.

In Pittsfield Township, someone opened taps on two 55-gallon drums of grease and oil so that the contents would spill onto the ground, fire officials said in a press release. The first dumping was discovered about 7:30 a.m. Wednesday at Macey Road near Bunton Road in Augusta Township. Five 55-gallon plastic drums of used motor oil were left there, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality responded to the cleanup effort there. Later Wednesday, Pittsfield Township firefighters were dispatched to Munger and Bemis roads where they found two 55-gallon barrels leaking a brown substance they determined to be used grease and motor oil. The Washtenaw County Hazardous Materials team was called to assist with the cleanup. It took an hour and a half to completely clean up the spill. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was handling disposal of the waste.

Police believe the barrels were dumped in Pittsfield Township between 3 and 4:30 p.m.

A witness told investigators she saw an older model Chevrolet pickup truck, possibly a Silverado, maroon or dark red with silver or white colored sides travel past her house going south. She said five minutes later she heard a thump and then saw the truck going fast in the opposite direction. Two men were in the cab, she said. Anyone with any information can call Pittsfield Township police at (734) 822-4911.

July 23, 2012

A People's History Of The United States - (The 20th Century) By Howard Zinn

THE COMPLETE AUDIO BOOK--AT LINK

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22922.htm

July 20, 2012

Weekend Economists Repent! The End Is Here! July 20-22, 2012

Another week has flown by, with marvel upon madness upon misery upon murder....it's been a week to forget, if possible.

Utopia has been suggested as our focus this weekend. I don't know much about Utopia.

I do know, that when the American people shut down the Vietnam war and ousted crooked President Nixon, I personally thought Utopia was at hand for this great nation. We were living up to the best hopes of our Founders. Little did anyone suspect that the few weeks, between Nixon's resignation on August 8th, 1974, and the fall of Saigon on 30 April, 1975, would be the closest America ever came to Utopia for many a generation, and that's assuming that someday in the future our long declining "democracy" reverses from becoming merely a Mockracy of its stated dream....

It's been all downhill since then. The Elites and the Reactionaries and the Forces of Evil Fascism redoubled their efforts, and with the help of a couple of demented old men, a slick Willie, Little Boots, and the Oreo Man, the Predator Drone Himself, we are as far from Utopia as one can get, outside of Dante's Nine Circles of Hell.

Malt does more than Milton can, in these circumstances. So pour yourself something alcoholic and relax while we post the 4 M's of the day, week, year, and contemplate the "Best of All Possible Worlds".

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I'm not sure, but I think this band is called Utopia.

July 19, 2012

Pres. Could Seize Radio, Internet, under New Exec. Order

http://www.progressive.org/pres_could_seize_radio_internet_new_exec_order.html

President Obama continues to plan for emergencies in a way that aggrandizes the power of the Executive Branch. Back in March, in a creepy executive order, entitled “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” Obama authorized the President and cabinet officials to take over crucial aspects of the national economy—not only during emergencies but also in peacetime. Then, just 10 days ago, on July 6, Obama issued another executive order, entitled, “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions.”

The order says this is pursuant to section 706 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S. C. 6066), which states, in part:



Obama’s executive order authorizes the heads of Homeland Security and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to make recommendations to the President on how he might enforce that 1934 law. It also empowers the head of Homeland Security to make sure, “in conditions of crisis or emergency,” that the executive branch maintains “priority communications requirements through the use of commercial, government, and privately owned communications resources.”

Does this mean the President can grab hold of the radio dial and the Internet?

MORE

July 19, 2012

Portugal Decriminalized All Drugs 11 Years Ago And The Results Are Staggering

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/portugal-drug-policy-decriminalization-works-2012-7#ixzz212KKSi00

On July 1st, 2001, Portugal decriminalized every imaginable drug, from marijuana, to cocaine, to heroin. Some thought Lisbon would become a drug tourist haven, others predicted usage rates among youths to surge.

Eleven years later, it turns out they were both wrong.

Over a decade has passed since Portugal changed its philosophy from labeling drug users as criminals to labeling them as people affected by a disease. This time lapse has allowed statistics to develop and in time, has made Portugal an example to follow...Portugal's move to decriminalize does not mean people can carry around, use, and sell drugs free from police interference. That would be legalization. Rather, all drugs are "decriminalized," meaning drug possession, distribution, and use is still illegal. While distribution and trafficking is still a criminal offense, possession and use is moved out of criminal courts and into a special court where each offender's unique situation is judged by legal experts, psychologists, and social workers. Treatment and further action is decided in these courts, where addicts and drug use is treated as a public health service rather than referring it to the justice system (like the U.S.), reports Fox News.

The resulting effect: a drastic reduction in addicts, with Portuguese officials and reports highlighting that this number, at 100,000 before the new policy was enacted, has been halved in the following ten years. Portugal's drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states, according to the same report.

One more outcome: a lot less sick people. Drug related diseases including STDs and overdoses have been reduced even more than usage rates, which experts believe is the result of the government offering treatment with no threat of legal ramifications to addicts...MORE

July 15, 2012

A lot of people had their fingers in that pie

Goldman Sachs, the Pasok and the New Democrats, the 1% tax dodgers....and the German banks.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/richard-parker-greece_n_1524951.html

And then, I found this:

Greek lessons: Real democracy needed to take on debt-bondage

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50247

It is a truism to say that democracy began with the Greeks ― less so to say that it originated in popular rebellion against debt and debt-bondage. Yet, with the Greek people ensnared once more in the vice-like grip of rich debt-holders, it may be useful to recall that fact. For the only hope today of reclaiming democracy in Greece (and elsewhere) resides in the prospect of a mass uprising against modern debt-bondage that extends the rule of the people into the economic sphere.

Across virtually all the ancient world, to fall into irretrievable debt was to enter into bondage to the rich. For millennia, the poor typically had no collateral for loans beyond their bodies and their labour. The result in ancient Greece, as Aristotle acknowledged, was that “the poor ... were enslaved by the rich”. Beginning more than 2600 years ago, a succession of upheavals by the Athenian poor ― the demos ― broke the power of the aristocracy and began a drawn out democratic revolution. Squeezed by debts and the spread of debt-bondage, the common people rendered their aristocratic society effectively ungovernable.

In 594 BC, in an effort to restore stability, huge concessions were made to the demos: all debts were cancelled and debt-bondage abolished. For the first time, poor men acquired meaningful rights to political participation. And they used those rights to systematically curtail the unaccountable power of aristocrats, accomplished by elevating the popular assembly and its direct democracy above all other institutions. So interconnected were the principles of democracy and economic justice for the demos that Aristotle identified “the rule of the poor” as the essence of a democratic state.

“In democracies,” he explained in Book IV of Politics, “the poor have more sovereign power than the rich”.

For this reason, struggles by the rich to increase their social and economic power invariably took the form of struggles against democracy.

Class divisions

Notwithstanding enormous differences in social and historical context, a similar battle is wracking Greece today. To be sure, the ancient landed aristocracy has been replaced by a capitalist “financial aristocracy”.Yet, war between the modern aristocracy of debt-holders and the forces of democracy once again grips Greek society.

From the earliest days of the recent “debt crisis” ― caused, let us recall, by the global bank bailouts and the recessions that followed the financial crash of 2008 ― international financial institutions have been on a collision course with democracy. Time and time again, the interests of global banks have over-ridden the will of the people. Consider just the following events of early November last year:

On November 3, European Union leaders browbeat and humiliated Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou for having pledged to hold a popular referendum on a proposed austerity deal. The confidence of financial markets being unable to abide consultation of the Greek people, Papandreou was quickly forced from office.
One week later, the former head of the Bank of Greece and former vice-president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Lucas Papedemos, never having been elected to any public office, was installed as Greek PM.
Two days after that, an unelected prime minister was appointed in Italy, in the form of former Goldman Sachs executive, Mario Monti. Defending this end-run around basic liberal-democratic procedure, the November 14 Financial Times said the country's president explained that “Italy could not afford elections at a time of market crisis”.

Speaking of elections, the people of Spain found themselves in the midst of one at the very time Greece and Italy were receiving non-elected prime ministers. Yet, as one perceptive journalist reported, the public displayed a distinct lack of interest.

“If scarcely anyone is taking any interest in the election,” Stephen Burgen wrote in the November 12 Guardian, “it's because the result is seen as largely irrelevant: it's the markets that rule.”

The rule of markets

Since then, the recognition that “it's the markets that rule” has grown, and with it the decline of even the most elementary forms of democracy. Nowhere has the assault on democracy been more brazen than in the negotiations leading to the most recent “bailout” of Greece ― which, is really just another bailout of Europe's banks. As the price of paying back the banks while impoverishing its people, the Greek government has been forced to accept nothing less than outright colonisation by the ECB and the International Monetary Fund.

In fact, the “bailout” agreement says:



Whatever semblance of democracy is possible in a capitalist society has now been shunted aside in Greece. The country's elected institutions now function as little more than fig leafs for the power of global capital. And its people are being subjected to modern forms of debt-bondage in which the bodies of poor and working-class people are sacrificed to debt payment. Under the bailout package, for instance, the Greek minimum wage will be slashed by 22% (and more for young workers); 150,000 public services jobs will be eliminated; pensions will be savaged. Living standards, which had already contracted on average by 30%, will be pushed down a further 15%. An economy that has been in recession for five years (and has shrunk by more than one-fifth) will be pushed into a further downward spiral. More than 60,000 small and medium-sized businesses will collapse, and a quarter-of-a-million private sector jobs will evaporate. Youth unemployment will soar above 50%. Homelessness and street begging, already rising alarmingly, will worsen.

How long this can continue is anyone's guess. Since the economic crisis emerged in 2008-09, Greece has seen waves of general strikes, mass demonstrations, and fighting with riot police. Anger and frustration may well boil over. In the view of one trade unionist, quoted in a February 13 Guardian article: “People are literally hungry and the number of homeless is growing every day ... soon they won't take any more. There'll be a popular revolt.”

Democracy and economic justice

If it is to have any chance of success, such a revolt will have to reclaim the ancient connection between democracy and economic justice. It will have to revive the meaning of democracy as “the rule of the poor” ― all of the poor exercising real sovereign power in popular assemblies. And such a project of radical democracy will have to break decisively with liberalism through the deepening and extension of popular power and control into the economic sphere.

Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote in her 1995 book Democracy Against Capitalism that liberal capitalism “leaves untouched vast areas of our daily lives ― in the workplace, in the distribution of labour and resources ― which are not subject to democratic accountability but are governed by the powers of property and the laws of the market”.

Those powers of property and the market have now shown their utter incompatibility with any kind of genuine democracy. It thus falls to the radical left to reclaim the project of democracy and to once again link it to popular struggles against new forms of debt-bondage. Not only does this mean learning from the ancient example of “the great democracy of Athens,” as Marxist historian CLR James urged. It also requires attending to the new practices of assembly-style democracy that have emerged at the highest moments of recent struggles from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street. All of this means building a radical left uncompromisingly committed to deepening the project of direct democracy as an indispensable part of all popular movements against austerity and injustice.

July 14, 2012

Weekend Economists Waiting for FDR July 13-15, 2012

Well, I am back from Euchre, and I won! I had great cards, good partners, and incredible luck. So, down to business...

The Progressive, Liberal (Sane) portion of the American voting population thought they had a Moses, a Saviour, an FDR last time around....only to find that their candidate not only had clay feet, but also resembles a clay pigeon.

But FDR was the real thing: an aristocrat with the ability to observe the poor, sympathize with them, and MAKE THEIR LIVES IMMEASURABLY BETTER. "THAT MAN", his peers called him, for they shuddered at the mention of his name, "a traitor to his class" they cried, but he loved his country, ALL his country, far better than any President since.



This is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, a presidential memorial dedicated to the memory of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to the era he represents. For the memorial's designer, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, the memorial site represents the capstone of a distinguished career, partly because the landscape architect had fond memories of Roosevelt, and partly because of the sheer difficulty of the task.

Dedicated on May 2, 1997 by President Bill Clinton, the monument, spread over 7.5 acres (3.0 ha), traces 12 years of the history of the United States through a sequence of four outdoor rooms, one for each of FDR's terms of office. Sculptures inspired by photographs depict the 32nd president alongside his dog Fala. Other sculptures depict scenes from the Great Depression, such as listening to a fireside chat on the radio and waiting in a bread line, a bronze sculpture by George Segal. A bronze statue of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt standing before the United Nations emblem honors her dedication to the UN. It is the only presidential memorial to depict a First Lady.

Considering Roosevelt's disability, the memorial's designers intended to create a memorial that would be accessible to those with various physical impairments. Among other features, the memorial includes an area with tactile reliefs with braille writing for people who are blind. However, the memorial faced serious criticism from disabled activists. Vision-impaired visitors complained that the braille dots were improperly spaced and that some of the braille and reliefs were mounted eight feet off of the ground, placing it above the reach of most people...wikipedia

FDR had told his friend Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: "If they are to put up any memorial to me, I should like it to be placed in the center of that green plot in front of the Archives Building. I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this desk." In accordance with FDR's wishes, a small, simple memorial to him was placed on the lawn near the corner of 9th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. This small memorial predates the larger one by some 30 years.

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July 11, 2012

JP Morgan was wildly short gold in 1999...

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-07-10/gordon-brown-sold-britain%E2%80%99s-gold-artificially-low-prices-bail-out-large-ameri

(The American bank with a huge short gold position in 1999 – in addition to Goldman and JP Morgan – was Citi.)

...Many other governmental sources have confirmed gold manipulation as well...

...And raiding so-called “allocated” gold accounts is another form of manipulation.

MUST BE READ TO BE BELIEVED...AND YET, IT'S STILL UNBELIEVABLE