Human Rights Agency Addresses Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, Switzerland
[Activist Post] Editor’s note: Several weeks ago we put out a request for funds to send Activist Post contributor, Janet Phelan, to the Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention in Geneva, Switzerland. Thanks to our generous readers, enough was raised to send her on this important mission. She was indeed able to give a presentation, and will be following up with details about her visit.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
My name is Janet Phelan and I sit on the board of ITHACA, which is a human rights agency. I am grateful for the opportunity to submit these concerns to the Seventh Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention.
I am here today to submit concerns to this Convention that the United States of America is engaged in an offensive biological weapons program. My research indicates that these weapons may be stockpiled at Sierra Army Depot, which is a military base in Northern California, as well as possibly at other locations.
In 2001, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, the United States passed a piece of legislation which in itself constitutes a violation of Articles I, II and IV of the BWC. This piece of legislation, Section 817 of the US PATRIOT Act, The Expansion of the Biological Weapons Statute, gives the United States a “blank check” to stockpile biological weapons and toxins and de facto removes the U.S. from the stipulations contained in the BWC. This is accomplished by the addition of a final caveat to 817, stating that “the prohibition contained in this section shall not apply to any duly authorized United States governmental activity.”
Other NGO’s, including the Sunshine Project, have raised concerns as to what kind of research is going on in the proliferation of BSL-3’s and 4’s—now numbering over 1350 BSL-3’s in the United States. Other than the reports of stockpiles at Sierra Army Depot and the violations of the BWC contained in Section 817, concerns also extend to evidence that the U.S. has covertly set up two separate delivery systems — one involving extensive reconfigurations of city water systems, and the other involving what we call “imposter pharmaceuticals” — the putative “poison pill” which, rather than treating a disease, will cause imminent death to the unsuspecting victim.
Both of these delivery systems have the ability to selectively attack predesignated targets and leave surrounding populations unaffected.
I do not need to remind the Convention that Saddam Hussein was executed for charges including a purported attack on his own people — the gassing of the Kurds. There is a dark red thread running through recorded history of governments initiating pogroms against their own citizens. One needs only to look at the last decade and the dramatic movement away from the democratic ideals upon which the United States was based to realize that the U.S. government has already traveled a long ways from an open, free and democratic society towards the secret and restrictive regimes that have historically initiated attacks upon their own people.
On behalf of all U.S. citizens, and all others residing within her borders, we are seeking your help. The situation is dire and the international community must be alerted to the fact that all of these signals — stockpiles, changes in legislation, and multiple secret delivery systems — point to a future attack within the borders of the U.S. facilitated by the United States government.
We have been limited by time constraints today. I would like to advise the Convention that we have accumulated a considerable amount of evidence, including correspondence with government agencies about Section 817 and other pertinent legislative changes — agencies including the Department of Justice, State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, to name a few. We have also amassed details and documentation concerning delivery systems. We would be happy to supply this documentation to the Convention, if requested.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Submitted December 6, 2011
Geneva, Switzerland
Blurred vision? Eye doctor myths exposed – learn how to exercise your eye muscles for restoring healthy vision and eliminating prescription glasses
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Natural News
December 7, 2011
(NaturalNews) You’re probably familiar with all sorts of mythologies promoted as “truisms” in modern medicine: Flu vaccines prevent the flu (they actually don’t), CT scans are harmless (they aren’t), chemotherapy works to save lives from cancer (it actually causes cancer), and so on. There are all sorts of falsehoods in dentistry, too: Mercury fillings are safe for you! (They aren’t.) Gum health has nothing to do with nutrition! (It does.) Cavities can only be treated by drilling, filling and billing! (Often just a money-making scam.)
But did you also know that there are lies and mythologies promoted by eye doctors, too?
Here’s a real whopper that’s told to almost everyone: The reason you need glasses when you get older is because — get this — your eyeball changes its shape!
The only way your eyeballs change shape is if your skull gets cracked
This “eyeball changes its shape” con is a clever scam because it convinces tens of millions of people to buy high-priced prescription glasses each year, usually from the very same vision centers that promote this total quackery. If you just ponder it for a moment, you’ll quickly realize how ludicrous the explanation really is. How can your eyeball change its shape when your eye SOCKET is made of bone?
Think about it. For your eyeball to get “longer” as they often tell you, your very skull would have to alter its bone structure. And while that most certainly happens in infants and children, the human skull doesn’t keep shifting around when you’re an adult. Unless you’re run over by a truck or something, anyway, in which case blurred vision should be expected.
No, the real problem with the vision of most people is not that “your eyeball is getting longer” (ridiculous!) but rather that your lens muscles are getting flabby and out of shape!
How your lens muscles gets flabby and out of shape
Your iris is a muscle that controls your pupil, which is like the aperture of a camera lens. Its job is to regulate the amount of light entering the eye. The iris is not our concern here because we’re more interested in the muscles that alter the shape of your lens.
Those muscles are part of what’s called the ciliary body of your eye. The ciliary body contains muscles that, in real time, alter the curvature of your eye lens to achieve the proper focus of whatever scene you are observing (http://library.thinkquest.org/25607…). “Proper focus” means altering the curvature of your lens so that the rays of light entering your eye fall on your retina with pinpoint accuracy.
As any photographer well knows, your focus must be altered when viewing something right in front of you (a near object) versus something far away (a far object). In a camera, this change in focus is achieved by altering the distance between two lenses contained in what is commonly called a “camera lens” (it’s actually multiple lenses), but in the human eye, this is achieved by changing the shape of the lens through the contraction or relaxation of the ciliary muscles.
You probably never noticed yourself doing this because you don’t feel your ciliary muscles working, but they achieve this focus for you thousands of times a day, automatically and without any effort on your part.
Some people (like myself) have achieved conscious control over these muscles, and we can consciously choose to alter the focus of our eyes at any moment, regardless of what scene we’re looking at. But for most people, the function is their ciliary muscles is involuntary. (I’m in my 40’s and continue to have perfect vision, never needing contact lenses or glasses. I also boost my vision with nutrition such as astaxanthin, lutein and zeaxanthin supplements.)
How to strengthen your ciliary muscles that control your eye lenses
Like any muscle, the ciliary muscles can become weak. How does a muscle become weak? From lack of exercise, of course. If you want strong legs, you need to walk and run from time to time, right? Well, if you want a strong, functioning ciliary muscle set, you need to alternate your vision between near objects and far objects so that these muscles are challenged to stay strong. This also increases the flexibility (range of motion) of your eye lenses (sort of like yoga for your eyes).
Now here’s the real kicker in all this: Most people in modern society never view anything far away anymore! They don’t live out in the country, in other words, so they’re not looking at something a mile away. No mountains are even visible in most cities, and peoples’ vision is focused entirely on things that are close. So their ciliary muscles are “locked” in a state of constant contraction. This causes these muscles to tighten, just like your leg muscles if you never stretch out from time to time.
This is all made even worse by the television set — or perhaps your computer monitor. Today’s population spends so much time viewing mobile texting devices, cell phones, portable gaming devices and computer monitors that it’s amazing their ciliary muscles have any range of motion at all.
Sooner or later, after a lack of exercise (i.e. focusing on things at various distances), your ciliary muscles get flabby while also losing range of motion and then your eye lenses can’t achieve the focus they’re supposed to. So instead of the light rays striking your retina where they’re supposed to, they may strike a point inside your eyeball a quarter inch in front of your retina instead (as an example, or in other cases it may be some distance behind your retina, which also causes blurred vision). This is where eye doctors get their ridiculous idea that “your eyeballs are too long!”
That’s stupid. Your eyeballs aren’t “too long.” That’s just some mythology dreamed up by vision doctors to sell you more glasses. No, unless you’re a mutant or something, the real problem is that your ciliary muscles are too weak and lack range of motion to alter the curvature of your lenses.
This problem, fortunately, can often be solved with simple exercises.
(By the way, it should also be obvious from this that the very act of wearing contacts or wearing glasses makes your eye problem worse because it allows your ciliary muscles to stop working, relying on the artificial lenses of your glasses to do that work for you. In much the same way that taking insulin makes diabetes worse over the long haul, wearing glasses also makes your vision worse over time…)
How to exercise your eyeballs and help restore healthy vision
So what if there were a way to exercise your eyeballs and restore the strength and range of motion of your ciliary muscles? Would that restore normal vision?
For many people, YES! Not for everyone, of course. There are other causes of poor vision, such as cataracts, neurological damage (aspartame!), cross-linked protein rigidity of the lens itself (poor nutrition) and so on. But in a surprisingly large number of cases, healthy vision can be restored through simple exercises that you can do at home, in just a few minutes a day, using only your eyes and a simple tool.
That simple tool is a pair of pinhole glasses. They’re like exercise machines for your eyes. You simply wear them for a few minutes a day, then walk around and look at stuff. Click here to pick some up from the NaturalNews Store.
How pinhole glasses exercise your ciliary muscles and help restore normal vision
Looking through pinhole glasses, as simple as it sounds, causes the ciliary body of your eyes to engage in adaptive exercise that increases the range of motion of your ciliary muscles which control your lenses. This happens because the pinhole glasses are made with hundreds of tiny holes that change the light entering your eyes from an overpowering mass of light rays to a collection of lower-intensity, distinct light rays that effectively give your eyes a more “organized” pattern on which to focus. There’s probably a more technical explanation for all this, of course, but the practical upshot is that all sorts of people who suffer from vision problems — myopia, hyperopia, presbyopia, astigmatism, computer vision syndrome, and so on — often report instantly improved clarity of vision when wearing these pinhole glasses.
It’s not magic, it’s just physics. If you force your eye lens muscles to adapt by challenging them, they will usually respond with improved function over time (just like building leg strength by walking or jogging).
Even better, many people report ongoing improvements in their vision even after taking off these pinhole glasses. Looking through the pinholes, you see, exercises the muscles that control the shape of your lens, and as those muscles become stronger (over a period of several days and weeks), they become more capable of focusing light in the proper place on your retina. This means no more blurry vision.
It’s the same principle as doing pull-ups to get a stronger upper body, or walking up flights of stairs to build stronger leg muscles. Your eye lenses are controlled by muscles, and like any muscle in your body, those muscles need to be challenged in order to stay strong and fully functional — and to restore their full, healthy range of motion.
Click this link to pick up some pinhole glasses right now from the NaturalNews Store:
http://www.naturalnews.com/NNStore-…
I find it interesting, by the way, that some people would rather have crutches than restore their normal healthy function. Have you ever seen those people zipping around in electric scooters at the grocery store? Many of those people used to be able to walk just fine! But then they started using the scooters as a convenience, and now — after a few months of that — their leg muscles have atrophied to the point where they can’t walk! Prescription glasses do the same thing to your eyes. Once you start using them, your ciliary muscles atrophy to the point where you need those glasses just to see clearly.
The vision industry, not surprisingly, makes money off consumer ignorance. It’s not in their interests to teach people how to restore your own healthy vision without needing prescription glasses. This is the same way that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want you to prevent disease because they make more money when you stay sick!
The safest and most affordable way to improve vision for many
Pinhole glasses are a safe and affordable way to take responsibility for your eye health and potentially avoid costly and inconvenient contact lenses or glasses forever. These pinhole glasses cost about the same as a pair of sunglasses at the grocery store, and they’re not medical devices at all, so they need no prescription. They contain no lenses themselves, either.
Safety note: Do not wear pinhole glasses while driving or operating heavy machinery such as an airplane, a military humvee or a wrecking ball crane. These glasses partially obscure vision and should be used solely as exercise devices in a safe environment like your home.
They don’t work for every case of vision impairment, of course, as there are many causes for blurred vision. But they work remarkably well for most people who try them. And there’s no risk in trying, since you can return them to our store if they don’t work for you, so there’s zero risk in finding out if your own vision problem might be partially or fully resolved by simply exercising your eyes.
Pinhole sunglasses are available now at the NaturalNews Store Holiday Specials page:
http://www.naturalnews.com/NNStore-…
We’ve heard countless success stories from people wearing these simple devices. Try them yourself to see how they might help you! And remember, our satisfaction guarantee means there’s no risk in trying these to see how they might help you live with stronger, more flexible eye muscles.
Zero-cost options you can achieve on your own
Another way to approach this is to simply exercise the range of motion of your ciliary muscles by alternating between focusing on close objects versus far away objects (such as the horizon). This is most easily accomplished from inside your home, near a window. Simply look at something on your desk, then look at something outside your window that’s far, far away (ideally, at the horizon). Alternate this process several times, then rest your eyes, and then repeat. Do this daily for a few minutes each day.
With added nutritional support for eye health (lutein, zeaxanthin, astaxanthin and so on), these exercises can, over time, enhance the range of motion of your ciliary muscles and eye lenses. With these exercises, you may discover that you are able to reduce the intensity of your prescription glasses, step by step, until one day you don’t need them at all.
The pinhole glasses may help accelerate this process even more, in much the same way that working out with weights is a faster way to build muscle strength than working out with no weights at all.
The most important point in all this is to realize that blurred vision is not some sort of permanent eye damage but usually just a functional aberration that can often be resolved through training. In much the same way that physical therapy can help people rebuild functional muscle mass in their legs, arms or torso, eye exercises can help rebuild functional strength in your eyes.
It’s the greatest secret of the eyeglasses industry: Many people don’t need eye glasses! Many people don’t need contact lenses! What they need is eye exercise. But don’t expect the for-profit vision industry to tell you about any of that. Like Big Pharma, they only make money when people stay victims and believe they cannot help themselves. Here at NaturalNews, we specialize in teaching people how to restore health by taking responsibility for their own health outcomes, thereby avoiding the outrageous costs (and inhumane suffering) caused by the medical industry.
Articles Related to This Article:
• Building and Maintaining Strong Vision for Life
• Natural Vision Improvement with Greg Marsh CNVT, Part II
• Natural Vision Improvement with Greg Marsh CNVT, Part I
• Using the Power of the Sun to Improve Eyesight and Boost Immunity
• Part I, Restore and Maintain Good Vision and Eye Health Naturally
• Part V, Restore and Maintain Good Vision and Eye Health Naturally
Gingrich ‘Proposed the Death Penalty for Marijuana’
by David Edwards
RawStory
December 12, 2011
Over the weekend, struggling Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson reminded MSNBC viewers that GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich had once to called to punish some drug offenders with death.
“Newt Gingrich, in 1997, proposed the death penalty for marijuana — for possession of marijuana above a certain quantity of marijuana,” Johnson explained. “And yet, he is among 100 million Americans who’ve smoked marijuana.”
“I would love to have a discussion with him on the fact that he smoked pot, and under the wrong set of circumstance he proposed the death penalty for, potentially, something that he had committed. I have troubles with that,” he added.
Johnson, a former New Mexico governor who has advocated for marijuana legalization since 1999, is at least partially correct about Gingrich’s position.
As Speaker of the House, Gingrich introduced the “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.”
The bill would have required a “sentence of death for certain importations of significant quantities of controlled substances.” It would have applied to anyone convicted more than once of carrying 100 doses — or about two ounces — or marijuana across the border. Defendants would have had a window of 18 months to file their one and only appeal.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE…
(hat tip: The Intel Hub)
Hemp Versus the Status Quo
by Rand Clifford
Activist Post
October 17, 2011
Industrial Hemp - Wiki image
The US rose to eminence by producing value, and by a fair percentage of citizens sharing the wealth. The further the nation has been corrupted from the stability of fairness, the faster our rate of decline. Runaway greed, lust for power, and raw crony capitalism have reversed our national trajectory so insidiously that not just we, but even Earth’s biosphere, are in free fall. Is it more than simple coincidence that such comprehensive decline so closely parallels our prohibition of hemp?
Sure, there was a glitch 5 years after hemp was banned as the evil weed with roots in hell. Top government officials still insist, forcefully, that there is no difference between “marijuana” and industrial hemp. With that in mind, please compare marijuana propaganda and hysteria that heralded hemp prohibition and haunts us to this day, with the government’s own film, Hemp for Victory, produced in 1942. We needed hemp to “win” WWII, so under duress, the feds resorted to truth.
So what changed in those 5 years? Certainly not hemp, exactly the same resource extraordinaire that has served humanity for at least 12,000 years. Priorities changed, propaganda changed. And hemp didn’t change when the war ended and hemp reverted to our enemy. You might wonder, whose enemy?
Arguably, hemp is the most useful member of the entire plant kingdom. So how could nature’s premier converter of sunshine and water into value, a superstar of the biosphere and powerful supporter of life on Earth be considered an enemy?
War is our enemy. Nobody wins in war, everybody loses…except the “money changers”. Ever since Jesus ran them out of the Temple with a whip (remember him, the Prince of Peace?), they have relentlessly, progressively embedded as a certain subspecies—psychopaths born without conscience, without any sense of right or wrong, without a soul; beings to whom truth and justice are alien concepts, to be in any way so much as acknowledged only under extreme duress. So yes, all of humanity loses in war, there are no winners. And coincidence has nothing to do with those at the root of hemp prohibition being the same as those who have blessed us with perpetual war.
As in the words of humanity’s Rosthschild malignancy: “We own you. We will take everything.”
Greed is Not Good
Remember “Morning in America” (mourning?) when “greed is good” pealed like church bells? Reaganomics was born that morning. Even after decades of wealth gushing ever upward, hardly any of it ever seems to trickle back down. Imagine that, shucks, the whole concept sounds so…Reagan. Millions of fossil Americans can still get misty at any mention of “Dutch”.
Despite reality (real reality, not Bush, or reality TV kinds), the GOP (repugnantcan party) clings tenaciously to this fiendish canard even as we approach midnight in America. Trickle-down theory…Reaganomics.
Greed is the glue that sticks wealth to wherever it rises. Greed is also the essence that keeps hemp our enemy. Hemp has every potential to spread wealth down through the workers who actually create wealth, potential to energize regional economies—perfect antidote to the plague of globalization, that concentrator of wealth into, as George H. W. Bush described, “…higher, tighter and righter hands.” Same hands now steering humanity toward hell; hands with the stickiest fingers, and the greatest distance from those passé concepts: humanity, and commonwealth—or common good.
War is All Hell
Keeping track of all our current wars gets increasingly difficult, especially with CorpoMedia so focused on future targets, such as Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Russia, China…even, as certain tea-party princesses have said, the “country” of Africa.
After so much of our manufacturing base has been gutted, fully one third of it within the first decade of “America’s century” (four-fifths of that during the Bush/Cheney nightmare); and with so many other good jobs herded offshore, it might seem that war and financialization are becoming our primary industries. Plunder and casino, rape and manipulation, destruction and parasitism, murder and financial malignancy…the future is so bright we’ve gotta wear headlamps.
The farcical War on Terror is a dream come true for the money changers. The war against a ghost that could never surrender because it’s, well, a ghost. Forever war. And the slimiest war mongers of all feverishly masquerade as hardcore fundamentalist Christians. The Prince of Peace would puke.
Almost seems we can’t engage anything without declaring war on it. And talk about (intentionally?) miserable aim. The War on Terror, besides being a lurid excuse for pirating resources, especially oil, and “spreading freedom and democracy”, it cloaks a maniacal assault on our Constitution (with or without “boots on the ground”) to render the US a police state. Such irony might have only one viable competitor….
The War on Drugs
Somehow, it might not seem quite so bad, a government waging war against its own people to eliminate the scourge of drug abuse; but when that same government is the world’s top drug trafficker…rather exceeds the term irony, transcending into the Twilight Zone.
If more people knew how much the Taliban’s eradication of opium poppy production had to do with why we invaded Afghanistan, and have stretched it out to our longest war ever…well, it probably wouldn’t matter.
It’s sensible business, filling our increasingly-privatized prison system with marijuana smokers to capitalize on a huge, reliable slave-labor pool. And after all, as president Calvin Coolidge said:
“The business of America is business.”
Bad business is one thing, but, the worst business…guess that’s why we’re Number One. When you’re the Boss, anything you might say or do is right; hard right, nowadays, as hard as the righteous wing cherry-picking scripture…and through the most twisted, tortuous exegesis, all but actually saying—indeed, platforming: “In the beginning, God created corporations….”
Of course that’s not quite correct. Hemp came way before corporations. Hemp is even older than money—has actually been used as money, the real kind, not faith-based money (fiat). In early America, taxes could be paid in hemp. Nowadays our tax dollars feed the rounding up of marijuana offenders and packing them into work prisons. Yes, our taxes perpetuate the drug war cash cow (that would wither without marijuana), and insure that hemp will not threaten the status quo in this corporate-controlled home of Big Oil.
Wisdom Versus Cleverness
Our star, Sol, the sun…it gives us all the real-time energy we might ever need. The challenge is harvesting that energy as elegantly as with growing hemp. Luckily…or perhaps exactly the opposite for us—and even more unluckily for our progeny—Earth has been very good at fixing solar energy into fossil energy.
Millions of years worth of solar energy mostly sequestered from the biosphere; toxic, biocidal energy, black death safely isolated from Earth’s life processes…. Perhaps fossil energy is some grand test of human wisdom, along the lines of: If you’re clever enough to significantly tap fossil energy, are you wise enough not to disrupt the biosphere with it?
Cleverness is plentiful—the human brain is magnificent…except for the wisdom deficiency, which so dependably invites disaster. Cleverness often breeds destruction; wisdom involves nurture, greater awareness and esteem for what gave us life and keeps life going, and utmost respect for the future. Wisdom versus cleverness influences being born into heaven, or hell.
Wisdom feeds the creation of value. Cleverness too often engenders a world controlled by parasites who create no value, but instead, employ every form of violence, murder, destruction and manipulation to usurp value from those who create value. Hemp is a paragon of wisdom—of fitting perfectly into and furthering Earth’s living energy systems. Hemp could shield the wisdom in humanity from the parasitical cleverness driving us down the road of perpetual war, toward utter biospheric collapse.
Where will we, and the rest of Earth’s species live after human cleverness collapses our biosphere?
For at least 12,000 years, humanity’s wisdom embraced hemp as an indispensable ally. For 74 years (except for those few years of Hemp For Victory!), cleverness in this nation now become the greatest parasite the world has ever seen has kept hemp our enemy. But wisdom hangs on in the more than 30 countries treating hemp as the supreme natural resource it has always been. Those countries feed the annual $450 million retail hemp business in this country—business living exclusively on imported raw materials.
Nothing compares with hemp in terms of powering good jobs that cannot be offshored—millions of acres of hemp, an agricultural revolution creating an expanding spectrum of gainful employment. Nothing could touch hemp in terms of impacting the near total dominance of corporations in virtually every aspect of modern America.
Hemp offers many thousands of superior products that perpetuate living systems, instead of killing them as the fossil-energy empire is doing—a whole new industry of vast scope, creating value, virtually independent of the corporate fossil empire. Only hemp has such fantastic potential to wrest power from the parasites and spread it among their victims. Hemp could turn Power to the People from a trampled cliché, into glory!
If you believe that marijuana realistically had anything to do with the prohibition of industrial hemp farming in this world’s most powerful parasite…please try to not judge me too harshly. I’m simply advocating wisdom.
For further reading about hemp, and its prohibition, please go here.
Rand Clifford’s novel Castling, the classic “Story of the Power of Hemp”, and the sequel, Timing, are published by StarChief Press. The novels, Priest Lake Cathedral, and Voices of Vires will be available soon.
(hat tip: Activist Post)
We Can Print You: Biotech Organ Printing
by Terrence Aym
Before It’s News
December 15, 2011
Need a new kidney? They’re on special today. Or how about a heart? We can print you out a new one in a jiffy. Science fiction? Not really. Biotechnology is moving so fast the mainstream media can barely keep up with it despite their far flung networks.
Labs across the world are competing to create new life, patent new lifeforms, improve human biology and even redesign old-fashioned human beings.
CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE…
In less than 24 hours Congress could vote to change the internet forever
by Madison Ruppert
End the Lie
December 14, 2011
Tomorrow the House Judiciary Committee is going to vote on H.R.3261, the Stop Online Privacy Act, or SOPA for short. As I have previously outlined, this legislation would destroy the internet as we know it and severely impinge on free speech and the spread of information.
If this passes committee, which all indications say it likely will, it could be voted on by the whole of the House of Representatives at any time.
Individuals and corporations both large and small are stepping up to fight back against the draconian SOPA legislation and the Senate’s sister legislation, the PROTECT IP Act.
However, there is a significant lobby that is pushing back against the tide of freedom and liberty in an attempt to severely restrict the internet.
As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) pointed out in a Congressional hearing, SOPA will restrict non-infringing online content right along with the infringing content the bill is supposedly aimed at combating.
“By contemplating an order that effectively bars others from gaining access to both infringing and non-infringing content, the proposed statute goes beyond appropriate First Amendment free speech protections,” the ACLU said.
The wildly restrictive SOPA legislation would essentially make it impossible for some of the largest websites on the internet to operate in any way that is remotely familiar to the climate we have known.
Any social media website that allows users to freely post content could be shut down at any time if any infringing content is posted on the site.
This means that all of YouTube, all of Twitter, all of Facebook, all free blog hosts, etc. could be forced to close down if a single individual posts infringing content.
This is China-style internet censorship on steroids; it is so astoundingly oppressive that there has been a blatant disinformation war waged against those who seek to keep the internet free.
However, little bits of truth sneak out here and there, with Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and former Senator, letting out a shocking admission which gives a glimpse into the minds of those who support the destruction of one of the last vestiges of true freedom in America.
“When the Chinese told Google that they had to block sites or they couldn’t do [business] in their country, they managed to figure out how to block sites,” Dodd said.
A similar sentiment was echoed by Senator Joe Lieberman last year when he was promoting his so-called “internet kill switch” legislation.
“Right now, China – the government – can disconnect parts of its internet in a case of war. We need to have that here too,” Lieberman said at the time.
Dodd leveraged the emotionally charged example of how internet service providers (ISPs) already block content like child pornography as proof that the notion of blocking websites is not unprecedented.
While this is true, Dodd is either knowingly misrepresenting the legislation or he is simply ignorant as to what it actually allows.
While no sane person advocates the spread of child pornography, extending the example to legislation which could force a site to shut down if a copyright holder reported anything ranging from a picture copied without paying licensing fees to a teenage girl singing along to Katy Perry is patently ridiculous.
In a recent interview at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers conference, Dodd further proved himself to have little to no understanding of the legislation he is promoting or even the most basic of logical faculties.
“How do you justify a search engine providing for someone to go and steal something?” Dodd asked. “A guy that drives the getaway car didn’t rob the bank necessarily, but they got you to the bank and they got you out of it, so they are accessories in my view.”
Upon reading Dodd’s statement – which amounts to what might pass for an analogy in a special needs kindergarten classroom – I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
If we apply the bank robbery analogy to the SOPA legislation, it would not be that you’re going after the driver of the getaway car, but instead you’d be going after the company that manufactured the car, the company that produced the gasoline that powered the car, the manufacturer of the tires on the car, etc.
This would be like going after a gun manufacturer after someone uses one of their guns to commit a robbery.
It would also be like going after the manufacturer of a burlap sack that a bank robber used to load money into before running out of the bank.
What Dodd and others are promoting is not just penalizing the thieves – those actually responsible for the crime – but instead penalizing those who were exploited by the thieves in the course of the robbery.
In any normal law enforcement situation I do not think that any remotely lucid person would go after a General Motors plant for producing a car which was used by a robber to flee the scene of a crime or the gas station that the robber used to fill up the car before driving to the robbery.
It is beyond me how anyone in the world could accept such wholly nonsensical reasoning (if you could even call it that) as justification for pushing through such dangerous legislation.
This insane logic – if you can even bastardize the concept of logic enough to extend the definition to what these buffoons are engaging in – is also mirrored in much of the mainstream media.
Take the case of Scott Cleland, a contributor for Forbes who, unsurprisingly, has a clear conflict of interest due to the fact that he is President of Precursor LLC, which is what he describes as, “a Fortune 500 research consultancy focused on the future of Internet competition, privacy, security, property rights, innovation and algorithmic markets.”
Whoops! Cleland, if you want to seem even remotely credible, you might not want to advertise the fact that you run a company that would directly benefit from the SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act, or PIPA.
While I am no Google cheerleader, their position on SOPA/PIPA is admirable, and one which Cleland seems hell bent on attacking at all costs, as you can see in his article and other “popular posts” of his on Forbes which all deal with Google.
Cleland claims that the House Manger’s Amendment to SOPA “fixed the major legitimate problems with the original bill,” because of course Cleland is the arbiter of what a legitimate problem is and what an illegitimate problem is when it comes to this legislation.
After all, you’re too imbecilic to actually do your own research and come to your own conclusions, you must have Cleland spoon feed the truth to you, right?
Despite Cleland’s unqualified assertions, which apparently we’re supposed to swallow without question due to his alleged expertise, the ACLU says that the changes in the amendment “don’t go far enough.”
“It will still be likely that ISPs and even search engines will end up removing perfectly legal content – content that is protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution – from the Internet,” the ACLU wrote.
Cleland points to the widespread bipartisan support for SOPA/PIPA along with the support lent by outside organizations as if that bestowed any legitimacy on the legislation whatsoever.
There is also “strong bipartisan support in the House and Senate” for legislation which strips American citizens of their most fundamental rights, turns the United States into a battlefield, and allows for anyone and everyone to be held indefinitely in what is commonly known as a FEMA camp or any other facility, foreign or domestic, without charge or trial on suspicion of being a terrorist or being linked to terrorism.
Let’s not forget that they supported the section which allows Americans to be shipped off to any foreign country and handed over to any foreign entity for any number of horrors to be committed without so much as a shred of evidence.
Our government is no longer legitimate and pointing to widespread support of legislation in Washington is not something that can be leveraged to promote a bill as a positive measure, at least not to any thinking person that has read the Constitution and realizes the gravity of the situations with which we are currently dealing.
Cleland attempts to delegitimize and marginalize the major corporations and individuals opposing SOPA/PIPA, like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, Craigslist, Flickr, PayPal, Reddit, AOL, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Tumblr and others, by claiming that they “are becoming increasingly isolated politically.”
This list includes many of the founders themselves, people who obviously value intellectual property as without this concept their businesses would have been stolen out from under them immediately.
Cleland then points to some carefully cherry-picked aspects of the Manager’s Amendment which are, in fact, far from the iron-clad restrictions he makes them out to be.
He attempts to shut down those who point out that companies would be forced to police user content by pointing to the clause in the Manager’s Amendment which reads in part, “no duty to monitor … activity on the network or the service…” although he fails to point out that they could still be held liable regardless.
While there might be “no duty” there is the inferred duty as your website will still be held responsible for content posted by users.
On page 20 of the PDF, we clearly read, “To ensure compliance with orders issued under this section, the Attorney General may bring an action for injunctive relief – (i) against any entity served under paragraph (1) that knowingly and willfully fails to comply with the requirements of this subsection to compel such entity to comply with such requirements,” so if you do not police your users and comply with any and all demands made by the federal government, you can have “an action for injunctive relief” brought against you.
He then attempts to counter those who point out that SOPA/PIPA allow a run-around of due process by claiming “most of the bill’s framework is about requiring the traditional DOJ prosecutor approach of needing to seek a Federal Court injunction from a judge to expressly protect due process.”
Once again, Cleland is either betraying his abject ignorance or proving himself to be a bold faced liar who is self-servingly deceiving the gullible and lazy.
Ken Paulson, the President of the American Society of News Editors, or ASNE, made this very clear in a letter written today to the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith and the Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr.
“Navigating the balance between copyright and free speech demands precision, and in seeking to protect the interest of copyright holders, the First Amendment requires Congress to adopt the least restrictive intrusion on speech available,” Paulson wrote.
“SOPA fails this test.” He continues, “It allows individual copyright owners to effect the most onerous restriction on speech – the prior restraint – with little evidence and virtually no due process, utilizing vague and overbroad definitions in the process. While it is directed at ‘rogue’ websites engaged in widespread privacy, the law carries the real potential to go well beyond that narrow target.”
I think we all know that when a door is left open in legislation like this, it is exploited to the greatest extent possible.
“Without endorsing them, we not that more narrowly tailored alternatives have already been proposed,” Paulson writes, hinting at the OPEN Act which Ars Technica called “a useful starting point for a sensible conversation that could actually lead to acceptable compromises.”
Continuing on the subject of SOPA/PIPA alternatives, Paulson wrote, “Their existence calls into question the constitutionality of SOPA and suggests that this Committee must reject H.R. 3261 and continue to examine other, less restrictive alternatives that strike the right balance between preventing privacy and protecting free expression.”
“Again, we support your ultimate goal of eradicating online content piracy. We simply feel that this particular formulation is not precise enough to protect legitimate free speech rights,” Paulson wrote.
I wholeheartedly agree, and this false sense of, “Either you’re with us or you’re with the pirates,” mentality that Cleland and others are fallaciously promulgating must be shown to be what it is: pure fiction.
You don’t have to give the federal government, and their corporate cronies, free reign to control the flow of information on the internet in order to control privacy, but this is exactly what they are trying to say.
The most hilariously imbecilic aspect of Cleland’s attempt to demonize opposition to SOPA/PIPA is when he says, “it [the SOPA/PIPA opposition] accuses those same committees [House Judiciary Committee and others at the federal level], whose oath is to protect the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the motive of encouraging [sic] the U.S. to “censor the web” like China and Iran do.”
Really, Cleland? Yet again, he proves himself to either be living under a rock, a liar or very possibly delusional.
Every single Senator (93% in total) who voted for S.1867 betrayed the oath of office and directly attacked the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The same can be said for every single member of the House of Representatives (74% in total) who voted in favor of H.R.1540.
To put it simply, Cleland is shilling for the fascist establishment that is currently turning the United States into a society so restrictive that North Korea would be green with envy.
If you care about freedom and the future of the United States you must take a stand now, before SOPA leaves committee and thus would be able to be passed at any moment.
Even if you have already inundated your Representatives with calls and emails already, do not stop. Call your friends and family and tell them to join the groundswell of American people and corporations who are fighting back against this draconian legislation.
Whatever you do, do not give up; continue to make it clear that you will not stand for this, or any other of the many attacks on the Constitution we are now witnessing like the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) fiscal year 2012.
Flood your so-called Representatives with calls, emails, letters, and if possible show up in person and make your voice heard.
Unless the majority of the United States starts taking an active role in fighting back against the tyrannical fascistic government that is stripping away everything which America used to stand for, we can only expect an even darker future to unfold.
Related posts:
- Google preaches Congress on Wikileaks-style embargo for the Web
- Senate bill upgrades illegal Internet streaming to a felony
- Super Congress? Congress may be forming a new legislative body
- Save the internet and boycott these companies
- Super Congress: the final nail in the coffin of representative democracy and freedom as we know it
Short URL: http://EndtheLie.com/?p=31358
The Federal Reserve Cartel: Part V: The Solution
The Intel Hub
Dean Henderson
December 14, 2011
(Excerpted from Chapter 19: The Eight Families: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf…)
Thomas Jefferson opined of the Rothschild-led Eight Families central banking cartel which came to control the United States, “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day, but a series of oppressions begun at a distinguished period, unalterable through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery”.
Two centuries and a few decades later this same cabal of trillionaire money changers – mysteriously immune from their own calls for “broad sacrifice” – utilizes the debt lever to ring concessions from the people of Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and now the United States.
In their never-ending quest to subjugate the planet, the bankers’ IMF enforcer – chronic harasser of Third World governments – has turned its sites on the developed world. To further advance their dizzying concentration of economic power, the whining banksters take a giant wrecking ball to the global middle class as they prepare to eat their young.
No one can argue that the US deficit is not a problem. Much of it accrues paying interest on the $14 trillion debt. Stooped-over Congressional cartel shills with names like Cantor and Boehner argue for slashing entire government departments to satiate the bloodthirsty bond-holders. Liberals argue for higher taxes on the rich and massive Pentagon cuts.
I agree with these latter proposals. The super-rich paid 90% under Eisenhower and 72% under Nixon. Both were Republicans. They now pay 33%. Most corporations and many elites utilize offshore tax havens and pay nothing.
The argument for progressive taxation is that those who benefit more from government should pay more. Cartel apologists propagate the fiction that the poor soak up middle-class tax dollars, sowing division between the poor and middle class. Meanwhile, the Eight Families financial octopus feeds mightily at the public trough be it the SEC (rich investors), the FCC (Gulfstream jet fliers), the USDA (the richest farmers get the biggest checks), Medicaid (insurance fraud, Big Pharma gouging) or the Pentagon (Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Blackwater).
Still, $14 trillion is an insurmountable debt. Increasing taxes on the super-rich combined with a global American military withdrawal from its current role as Hessianized mercenary force for the City of London banksters, while welcome, will not be enough to deal with this monster debt, what Jefferson termed, this “deliberate, systematic plan of reducing us to slavery”.
The belt-way dialogue on the deficit remains locked in a tiny intellectual box created by the corporate media and their Federal Reserve cartel owners. But there is another way.
It is a myth that most of that $14 trillion debt is owed to the Chinese or other “governments”. The vast majority – around $10 trillion – is owed to the Eight Families Federal Reserve crowd.
In a June 9, 2011 article for Marketwatch, Unicredit’s Chief US Economist Harm Bandholz stated that the Federal Reserve is the largest holder of US debt with around 14% of the total. This does not include debt held by Rothschild-controlled central banks ofother nations – including China, Japan and the GCC oil fiefdoms.
Through the recent QE2 program, the Fed purchased another $600 billion in Treasury bonds. They claimed it was a last ditch attempt to save the global economy from deflation. Instead, the banksters who got the interest free taxpayer-backed money pushed us further towards deflation by refusing to lend their welfare bonanza to potential homeowners or small business.
Conversely and inherent in the printing of zero-interest money, they created inflation – speculating in oil, food and gold futures and rolling this increased US debt on the roulette tables at their various wholly-owned global stock exchanges. Is it any wonder the financial parasite class is now clamoring for QE3?
What follows is a ten-step proposal which President Obama and the Congress could enact to lift the $14 trillion debt from the backs of future generations of Americans. These should be done concurrently as part of a single sweeping financial reform bill. Modeled after last week’s release of strategic petroleum reserves by twenty-seven nations, this measure should be enacted in tandem with as many willing nations as possible. The same Rothschild-led cabal controls the central banks of most every nation and there is power in numbers. If these measures are enacted separately or by only one nation, the Eight Families cartel will use their financial clout to target and destroy the US:
1) Introduce a Treasury Department-administered infrastructure investment fund, which workers should be strongly encouraged to opt into using accrued funds from their private 401K plans. This is important because the banker’s stock market casino willcrash due to the next nine steps and workers must be shielded from this event. This fund can be used to rebuild America’s infrastructure, with American workers acting as lenders and receiving a fair rate of interest in return.
2) The US needs to withdraw from the Bank of International Settlements, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF and all Eight Families-controlled multilateral lending facilities. We would save billions funding these banker welfare schemes while freeing ourselves from rules which prevent our financial emancipation.
3) De-link the dollar from all currency baskets and IMF special drawing rights. Ban trade in dollars on all global exchanges. This will create a demand for dollars and strengthen our badly devalued currency. Impose currency controls by fixing the dollar at 1:1euro, Chinese yuan, Canadian dollar and Swiss franc; 100:1 Japanese yen. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad fixed the nation’s currency – the ringit. It was the only currency in the region that did not crash when Rothschild front-man George Soros took aim at the region.
4) Nationalize the Federal Reserve. According to a London barrister I have been in contact with, under the Federal Reserve Act there is a provision that allows for the US government to buy back the Fed’s charter for $4 billion. We should pay this fee, revoke the Fed charter and launch a new US dollar issued by the Treasury Department. With the dollar fixed, the vampires cannot crash it.
5) Cancel the $10 trillion debt to the Illuminati bankers. Debt obligations to foreign governments and small bond-holders should be honored at par.
6) Arrest the perpetrators. Prosecute to the fullest extent of the law all fraudulent transactions involving the Fed cartel. Send the FBI to the New York Fed. Seize all documents. Confiscate the world’s largest gold reserves which are stored there. These were stolen from various governments including from our own Ft. Knox reserves.
7) Forget just repealing the Bush tax cuts on the rich. The top tax rate on people who make more than $1 million/ year should be raised to 75%. People making more than $500,000/year should pay 50%. All tax brackets below $75,000/year should see tax cuts. If you get more from government you need to pay for it, instead of soaking the middle-class and blaming it on the poor.
8 )Slash Pentagon spending. Shut down all US military bases on foreign soil, including those in Europe, Japan and South Korea. Withdraw ALL troops from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. Use the savings to pay off government and small bond-holders.
9) Outlaw offshore banking by US citizens and corporations. Bring your money home and pay taxes on it or surrender your US passport/corporate charter. The dramatic increase in tax revenue would be enough to pay off the remaining debt to sovereign governments and small bond-holders, while keeping our obligations to the Social Security trust fund.
10) Introduce single-payer health care and price controls on prescription drugs. The current corporate for-profit health care bonanza depends upon sickness and ill health for its hefty profits. In 2006 Canada government spent $3,678 per person for free single-payer coverage for all its citizens. The US government spent $6,714 per person covering the insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital and AMA cartels. The savings attained from eliminating insurance/pharmaceutical/hospital chain/doctor-perpetrated Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security fraud will save the US Treasury billions. It is the only solution to skyrocketing and unsustainable health care costs.
Using this methodology the US could wipe out both its deficit and its debt within a year. These measures should be planned in secret and introduced swiftly and in rapid succession. Social security and Medicare will be saved. The middle class will see their tax rates go down, while their retirement fund finances the rebuilding of a 21st Century America. Manufacturing jobs will come home, since the Chinese yuan will have seen a dramatic appreciation. Our national security will be enhanced by withdrawing from the role of global policeman.
If we keep thinking inside the banker-manufactured beltway box, our children have no future. They will live in a Third World country which produces nothing, lorded over by debt-collector parasites known as the “financial services industry”.
The wealth-destroying Eight Families banker elite are the perpetrators of the US debt crime. Should a woman who is raped serve the sentence of her rapist? That’s absurd. Then why should Americans or any other nation pay a fraudulent debt foisted upon them by con-men? It is time for Obama and the Congress to get a backbone and force the criminal Federal Reserve cartel to make the “broad sacrifices”.
