MARA VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD and CARL MESSINEO, - Center for Research on Globilization
Stephan: Here you can see the extent of the American police state and its surveillance of perfectly legal citizen protests. It is my belief that the construction of the national security apparat, ostensibly built to stop terrorism (read Muslim terrorism) actually, whatever its beginnings, is now being expanded and entrenched because long term assessments of the United States by the surveillance state foresee massive social unrest as a result of the grotesque inequality, and what is coming with climate change, the collapse of industrial agriculture, and the failure of anti-biotic medicine.
It is eventually going to become clear to even the dimmest voter that the U.S. is on a parlous downward course into chaos. When this takes hold in the consciousness of the masses a crisis will ensue. The militarization of the the police, the abrogation of our civil rights, and the rise of the police state are all components of how the government, the uber-rich, and the corporations plan to protect their power. Although it is unfashionable to say so, and the corporate media won't touch these trends, I believe this is what is going on.
It is certainly what I would do if I were unconscious and in a position of such power.
This report, based on documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, provides highlights and analysis of how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-funded Fusion Centers used their vast anti-terrorism and anti-crime authority and funds to conduct a sprawling, nationwide and hour-by-hour surveillance effort that targeted even the smallest activity of peaceful protestors in the Occupy Movement in the Fall and Winter of 2011.
It is being released in conjunction with a major story in the New York Times that is based on the 4,000 pages of government documents uncovered by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) during a two-year long investigation.
The newly published documents reveal the actual workings of the Fusion Centers – created ostensibly to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts following the September 11, 2001, attacks – in collecting and providing surveillance information on peaceful protestors.
The new documents roll back the curtain on the Fusion Centers and show the communications, interactions and emails of a massive national web of federal agents, officials, police, and private ‘security” contractors to accumulate and share information, reporting on all manner of peaceful and lawful political activity that took place during the Occupy Movement from protests and rallies to meetings and educational lectures. This […]
No Comments
CHARLOTTE LYTTON, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: Although you won't hear many people say it one of the functions of the American Illness Profit System is to get as many people as possible, from tiny children to aged adults, using prescription pharmaceuticals. Just count the number of TV ads for drugs. It is so very very profitable. As this report spells out,"The U.S., which holds five percent of the world's population, is responsible for 75 percent of global prescription drug use." And it is all too often deadly.
America, we’ve got a problem: More than 100 people die each day in the U.S. because of prescription drugs.
America is in the throes of a prescription drug epidemic. More people die every day from that addiction than gunshot wounds, car accidents, or suicide-with 100 people losing their lives daily as a result of misusing medication.
The National Institute of Drug Abuse has some pretty shocking statistics detailing just how bad America’s addiction has become. For example: the US, which holds 5 percent of the world’s population, is responsible for 75 percent of global prescription drug use; 52 million people over the age of 12 have used this medication for purposes outside of what they are intended for; enough painkillers were prescribed in 2010 to medicate every American adult every four hours for a month; over half of these pills are obtained for free from a friend or family member; there are 5.1 million abusers of painkillers, 2.2 million who illegitimately take tranquilizers, and 1.1 million needlessly popping stimulants.
America, we’ve got a problem.
Painkiller addiction is also a well-known celebrity health hazard, with the likes of Winona Ryder, Jamie Lee Curtis, Matthew Perry, Charlie Sheen, and dozens more attributing their downward spirals to […]
No Comments
MATT SLEDGE and MICHAEL MCULIFF, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: The cretins in the Congress have outdone themselves in wreaking havoc with American civil rights. Click through to see the video of some of their speeches. They are overwhelmingly Republicans, of course. And what is worse most of these people will be voted back into office. So where does the ultimate responsibility lie?
Before heading home this Memorial Day weekend to honor those Americans who fought and died for the principle of liberty, Congress did a number on the basic rights that define that liberty: Guantanamo remains open, Americans are still subject to indefinite detention, our endless wars abroad still have an open-ended legal basis, the NSA will keep spying on us, and the lawyer who said U.S. citizens are legitimate drone targets was just confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship.
The most significant congressional move: the annual defense budget authorization bill that passed the House on Thursday. Or as House Armed Services Chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon modestly called it, the Howard P. “Buck” McKeon National Defense Authorization Act.
The defense bill sets the parameters for the military’s spending in the next fiscal year, and also lays out policies on how that money will be spent. President Barack Obama has been pleading with Congress for years for more maneuvering room to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The House again shot him down.
More broadly, the war on terror still has no end in sight, thanks to the House’s vote against an amendment that would have repealed the post-9/11 law authorizing the use of […]
No Comments
SCOTT KAUFMAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: It seems to me about half the women I know have been told they have non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS). It severely limits what they feel they can eat, and makes giving a dinner party very complicated. This report suggests as I have long suspected that the prevalence of NCGS is largely psychosomatic -- given the great antiquity of the relationship between wheat and humans
The researcher whose work lent scientific credence to claims that those without celiac disease – which causes an immune response in the small intestines in the presence of gluten – still benefit from a gluten-free diet has performed another, more rigorous study that leads him to believe that there is no such thing as non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS).
In 2011, Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University in Australia, published a study that found that gluten proteins cause gastrointestinal distress even in people who don’t suffer from celiac disease. This study helped provided scientific backing to the ‘gluten-free” diet fad, but Gibson believed that the evidence on which the fad was based wasn’t thorough enough, so in 2013 he performed another study.
In the 2013 study, he provided his subjects with three diets: two ‘treatment” diets, one of which was low-gluten, one of which was high-gluten; and a baseline diet. He found that subjects reported similarly increased gastrointestinal distress on both the low- and high-gluten ‘treatment” diets compared to the baseline.
Gibson then performed a second experiment to ensure the suitability of the whey protein in the baseline diet, and discovered that when he repeated the experiment with the baseline diet […]
No Comments
Stephan: Some days doing SR just depresses me, and this is one of those days. But SR's task is to report as factually and accurately as I can discern the actual trends of the day and, I am afraid, this is truth.
A sudden and extreme spike in neonatal mortality in Utah’s rural Uinta Basin is most probably related to the toxic air pollution related to the fossil fuel drilling/fracking frenzy in Eastern Utah. And the local poobahs want to kill the messenger.
Donna Young is a midwife in Vernal, Utah, with 20 years experience managing home births in Idaho and Utah. She lives in the Uinta Basin, the heart of the fossil fuel drilling/fracking frenzy in Eastern Utah. On May 8, 2013, she had her first stillbirth. At the funeral service a few days later, she noted what seemed like an extraordinary number of infant graves with recent dates at the cemetery. She decided to investigate.
She didn’t get any help from local authorities, but eventually information gleaned from obituaries and mortuaries revealed 12 cases of neonatal mortality (most of them stillborn, or death shortly after birth), in 2013. Looking back to 2010 revealed a modest upward trend, but then a huge spike in 2013. This is sparsely populated rural Utah. Vernal is a town of fewer than 10,000 people. But per capita, this is a neonatal mortality six times the national average. It is actually worse than it appears. National infant mortality […]
No Comments
