Harvard Study: Gun Control Does Not Reduce Murder Rates

Warner Todd Huston

August 26, 2013

• http://www.mrconservative.com/2013/08/23443-harvard-study-gun-control-does-not-reduce-murder-rates/

Here is something that won’t surprise any Second Amendment supporter: A study found that gun control does not reduce murder rates.
(See also: Los Angeles Colleges Banned From Teaching NRA Courses – Told To Promote Gun Control Instead)
The study was overlooked when it first came out in 2007, but it was recently re-discovered and while the findings may not surprise right-to-protection supporters, the place where the study was undertaken is a bit surprising. The study came from the Harvard Journal of Law, that bastion of extreme, Ivy League liberalism.
The study, written by Don B. Kates and Gary Mauser and titled, “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?,” found some surprising things.
One thing in the study seems to show that more guns means less crime.

The same pattern appears when comparisons of violence to gun ownership are made within nations. Indeed, “data on firearms ownership by constabulary area in England,” like data from the United States, show “a negative correlation,” that is, “where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”11 Many different data sets from various kinds of sources are summarized as follows by the leading text:

[T]here is no consistent significant positive association between gun ownership levels and violence rates: across (1) time within the United States, (2) U.S. cities, (3) counties within Illinois, (4) country‐sized areas like England, U.S. states, (5) regions of the United States, (6) nations, or (7) population subgroups . . . .

(See also: Student Says Gun Free Zone Laws Left Him Defenseless During Mass Stabbing)
This study finds that the number of guns does not correlate to the number of murders. Therefore, it’s easy to realize that banning guns will do nothing to impact murder and suicide rates.
And as gun owners across America reading this right now will be head to say: “Well, duh!”
(See also: What I’d like to tell public school teachers who promote gun control in their classrooms)

US Public Schools Train to Finger Mental Cases 

Home • Tags: journalism, propaganda, public education, public health

An appendage of the world’s foremost advocate of psychiatric treatment, the American Psychiatric Association, is actively promoting a “teacher training program” that will enlist public school staff to identify “troubled thought patterns” of teenage students, NBC news reports.[1] The campaign is being pushed by the American Psychiatric Foundation, the “philanthropic and educational arm of the American Psychiatric Association,” according to APF’s own website.

The rationale for the new program together with the military-style training carried out in the midst of schoolchildren is that the country cannot risk having another tragedy such as the Sandy Hook School massacre or one authorities say came close to transpiring in Decatur, Georgia.

Upon its introduction in 21 states and the District of Columbia, “Typical or Troubled?” will instruct all school staff “from custodians to counselors” to detect and report “warning signs” that can include “persistent sadness, irritability, withdrawal, and even a major change in eating habits.” In other words, the ups and downs that tend to characterize the frequently awkward and uncertain progression toward adulthood termed “adolescence” by the Darwinian-inspired American psychologist G. Stanley Hall over a century ago.[2]

Once a “troubled” candidate is identified their parents are contacted and the child is assigned to a mental health “specialist.” In other words, this alleged public health and safety campaign constitutes what will likely become a major client referral program for the psychopharmaceutical industry that has essentially enlisted government employees to surveil unsuspecting subjects and identify probable treatment candidates.

What is of at least equal concern is the deceptive technique used to thrust this campaign on the public. The American Psychiatric Foundation masquerades as an independent entity that “retains control over all of its public education programs, content, and materials.” Indeed, as APF Executive Director Paul Burke explains to NBC, the philanthropic organization’s policy dictates “’that no supporter or funder has any direct influence over the content of any APF public education program.’”[3]

Yet a quick visit to the APF’s website reveals that it is a front organization for the powerful American Psychiatric Association—even operating from the same Arlington, Virginia office suite. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the APF also has net assets in excess of $52 million, according to the organization’s 2011 Form 990.

Such scrutiny would have been very simple (and an ethical given) for NBC News to point out. But APA’s practitioner membership alongside the pharmaceutical industry that so prevalently advertises on major corporate media outlets like NBC stand to profit handsomely from the anticipated revenue “Typical or Troubled?” and similar campaigns will generate going forward.[4]

The APA has surely taken the observations of master propagandist Edward Bernays to heart and practice. By establishing the ostensibly innocuous APF to initiate presumably do-goodish programs as “Typical or Troubled?” the psychopharmaceutical juggernaut further ingratiates itself in the sordid national landscape of horrific school shooting spectacles and accompanying police state terror.

While public employees are commissioned as mental health surrogates, thereby offering up most of the nation’s children to quasi-medical scrutiny and prospective forced drugging, genuinely demonstrable public health menaces such as genetically modified foods in the cafeteria, electropollution via “WiFi” pervading school campuses, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s many social engineering initiatives are readily espoused and actively promoted. Such developments should make ever clearer the fact that public education entails very little that is truly “educational”, and much that should shame any self-respecting nation.

Notes

[1] Erika Angulo, “To Prevent School Violence, Teachers Learn How to Spot Mental Illness,” NBC News, August 25, 2013.

[2] G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Originally published in 1904.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Janice Lloyd, “Antidepressant Use Skyrockets 400% in Past 20 Years,” USA Today, October 20, 2011.

Thanks to “JZ” for bringing the August 25 NBC news article to MHB readers’ attention.

-JFT             http://memoryholeblog.com/2013/08/26/us-public-schools-train-to-finger-mental-cases/

See related post:

From Persuasion to Coercion: Psychopharma’s “Priesthood of the Mind”

Secretary of State John Kerry Announces Chemical Weapons Unacceptable on SAME DAY that It’s Revealed America Helped Saddam Use Chemical Weapons

Posted on August 26, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

From the Do-What-We-Say-Not-What-We-Do Department

On the same day that Secretary of State John Kerry announces that we have to bomb Syria because the use of chemical weapons violate international rules, it was revealed that CIA files prove that the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iran.
The irony is stunning …
The U.S. literally defines terrorism as other people doing what we ourselves do.

Obama Presides Over Security Meltdown

Obama Presides Over Security Meltdown

The Game Changer: Syria Will Strike Israel Should U.S. Attack

The Game Changer: Syria Will Strike Israel Should U.S. Attack

Russia dreams of creating an alternative to Suez

Source: RBTH
An ambitious program of railway expansion in Russia’s Far East opens up the prospect of creating rapid new trade routes between Asia and Europe. At least $17bn is to be invested in modernising the ageing Baikal-Amur (BAM) and Trans-Siberian railways. Supporters of the plan say that it will create a total of half a million jobs and boost industry in Siberia and the Far East region, pointing out that there is already a shortage of rail capacity for transporting freight.
Described by former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as “the construction project of the century”, critics recall the building of BAM 50 years ago. When the Soviet Union was dissolved, many mining and industrial projects in the region were cancelled and the line was greatly underused. The controversy over the project is similar to arguments in Britain over the pros and cons of building the high-speed HS2 railway between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.
The Trans-Siberian Railway: history, route and numbers

Click to enlarge the inforaphics
In addition to upgrading tracks to increase freight capacity, the work could greatly shorten the route for delivering goods from Asia to Europe. This may be reason enough to build BAM-2, as the modernisation is being called, and to extend it from the present terminus at Sovetskaya Gavan to Sakhalin Island off the Far East coast. The government is not deterred by the project’s lengthy repayment period, which nobody dares to calculate exactly: it could be 50 years or more before the railway pays for itself.
Andrew Chan Yik Hong, managing director of capital projects and infrastructure for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Malaysia, believes Russian Railways could offer a credible alternative route to sea transportation between countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) region and Europe.
“To do that, first the infrastructure backwardness has to be overcome, long-term and costly investments need to be made in the railways and customs services must be improved,” he says. This overland route, he notes, would go a long way towards eliminating the risks from piracy, unstable regimes and natural disasters that bedevil the sea route.
The idea has support among some Russian businessmen. Ziyavudin Magomedov, owner of the Summa Group, which manages ports in the Far East, the Baltic and Black Sea as well as the Fesco transport group, is vigorously promoting the project. He blames slow processing of goods at customs and port services for making the Russian route to Europe less competitive than other options. A container is held at customs in the Far East port of Vladivostok for 13 days, then takes another four to five days to be processed through the port. In Singapore, by contrast, a container is held at customs for only about two days and moved through port on the same day it is released. Russia is also losing out to its closest rivals, Shanghai in China and the port city of Pusan in South Korea.
Mr. Magomedov believes that less than 1pc of all Asian freight goes to Europe via Russia at present. His company argues that the proportion could be increased fivefold, with each additional percentage point yielding an extra $1bn for the Russian economy.
More than 90 percent of freight is moved around the world by sea. Mikhail Burmistrov, general director of the market research firm Infoline Analitika, is sceptical that rail can become a serious competitor, arguing that larger vessels and containers mean that modern ships can carry far greater loads than trains, while charges for sea transport are much lower.
“Under other economic conditions, the Trans-Siberian Railway made economic sense: in the late Eighties, it carried huge amounts of freight and paid its way. Now everything has changed and it is utopian to talk about railway competing with the sea,” he says.
Daniil Rybalko, transport director with FM Logistic, says that moving freight from Pusan to Vostochny port at the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, to be transported on to the European Union, takes about 36 hours and costs about $500 per container plus the price of rail freight. Transporting by sea from Pusan directly to Hamburg would be cheaper: a total cost of just $700.
Although the idea of railways challenging waterways is not new, it has not been put into practice anywhere. Proposals often have more to do with politics than economics. When a project was announced in Colombia, for instance, observers noted that the country was trying to attract more American investment by raising the specter of Chinese expansion. Allegedly, China had agreed to finance the railway plan.
In Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, the “dry canal” idea as an alternative to the Panama Canal has been dusted off regularly for about 20 years, usually in an attempt to woo voters at election time.

Fukushima in freefall: radioactive water filters taken offline, Tepco in desperation as leaks just won't stop

Fukushima in freefall: radioactive water filters taken offline, Tepco in desperation as leaks just won't stop

John Lennon was right ...there's Nazi in the bathroom just below the stairs (Nobody Told me )    um Operation Paper Clip ..how bout them NAZI in the early space program ? 

German Nazi Hunters Get 40 More, Americans Let Nazis Continue Take-Over

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

(Before It's News)

After Germany’s month-long Nazi-hunt, 40 suspected Auschwitz-Birkenau guards were located and face possible legal prosecution for participating in the WW2 holocaust, the final solution and ultimate hate crime, while the United States continues allowing Nazis and their youngers to roam freely and succeed in covertly reaching their agenda.
In Germany, the 40 more Nazis, former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp guards, were tracked down by Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes.
Charges will be recommended against many of them after the investigation, chief prosecutor Kurt Schrimm told AP on Monday.
An investigation of 50 other people never held accountable for their war crimes is near complete and may result in charges against many of them.
Nazi-hunt Campaign Success
The Nazi hunt, called “Operation Last Chance,” launched last month and offered the German public 25,000 euro ($33,000USD) for any information about surviving suspects complicit in World War II hate crimes.
Two thousand posters, one type depicting an ominous photograph of Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Nazi-run death camp, with text:
Late, but not too late.” 
Millions of innocents were murdered by Nazi war criminals. Some of the perpetrators are free and alive.
Help us to bring them before a court.”
After war criminal Ivan Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 for crimes at a concentration camp, found guilty of complicity in some 30,000 Jewish deaths in German-occupied Poland during World War II, he has bee cited as an example and reason for people to catch remaining war criminals.
“This conviction paves the way for additional prosecutions of individuals who served in death camps, as well as the members of the Einsatzgruppen [mobile killing units],” stated Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter and Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center dismisses anyone questioning the value of bringing elderly war criminals “to justice,” listing five points for the apprehensive observer to take into consideration, two being: 
“The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers,” and “old age should not afford immunity to murderers.”
American Nazis freely, covertly control government through the Nazi-CIA, ‘The CIA Within The CIA’
12,000 of the most notorious Nazi war criminals were brought to the United States during Operation Paperclip. Many of those Nazis rapidly partnered with America’s secret service agency to form the Central Intelligence Agency.
From Vampire of Macondo Chapeter 8, Nazis in the Gulf:
In 1945, the U.S. government began bringing what would eventually be more than 12,000 key Nazi scientists and doctors to the U.S. in Operation Paperclip. Some of those who’d escaped conviction in Europe quickly merged with US intelligence, forming the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.[1] Thus began the CIA/Military/Nazi partnership, now a major arm of the petrochemical-military-industrial-complex.[2]
The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence and the CIA offered convicted war criminal Nazi scientists and doctors[3] immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top-secret government projects on military and CIA aerodynamics and chemical warfare in the U.S., the same two fields that would be used 62 years later on people of the Gulf coast.
Those Nazi doctor and scientist criminals included some of the same “doctors who’d conducted medical atrocities on concentration camp inmates, such as: experiments with plague vaccines, experiments that force-fed chemically altered seawater to starved Dachau concentration camp inmates…”[4]
“While official American policy after the war was to prosecute war criminals for the atrocities committed under Adolf Hitler, many sectors of the U.S. government – in particular, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – concealed incriminating evidence in order to bring these individuals into the U.S.,” wrote Andy Worthington. “The CIA’s latest huge non-consensual human experimentation involving kidnapping and torturing ‘detainee’ subjects follows a long history of the agency’s leadership in such experimentation, such as through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that commissions ‘advanced research’ for DoD.”
After decades of suppressing the Nazi’s in American history, more evidence regarding the extent of the Nazi taekover of America was presented two years ago. From Vampire of Macondo:
The New York Times obtained a document that clarified even better the need to stop the machine. It was a 600-page Justice Department report,[5] without many redactions, about the CIA’s link to Nazis.[6] The Justice Department had tried to keep the report secret for four years.[7] On November 14, 2010, the Times was first to report about it in its article, Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says. The Times called the report the most damning aspect of the Central Intelligence Agency’s link to Nazis brought into the U.S. The strong Nazi history and its present influence in the United States have been suppressed.
“Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes,” the New York Times report stated. “But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.”
The report names some of the most infamous Nazi scientists and doctor responsible for the Jewish holocaust and then brought to the US: Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, Arthur L. Rudolph, and Otto Von Bolschwing, “an associate of Adolph Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans ‘to purge Germany of the Jews’ and who later worked for the C.I.A.”
The New York Times report reveals that the “Justice Department itself sometimes concealed what American officials knew about Nazis in this country.”
Despite the long suppression of the Nazi influence on Americans and the Obama administration’s attempts to keep the report from the public, due to determination by the late Mark Richard, a senior Justice Department lawyer, this major part of US history was revealed in newspapers.
In 1999, Richard convinced Attorney General Janet Reno to begin a detailed look at the US Nazi history, assigned career prosecutor, Judith Feigin, to the job and he edited the final version in 2006. He “urged senior officials to make it public but was rebuffed,” colleagues said.[8]
“When Mr. Richard became ill with cancer, he told a gathering of friends and family that the report’s publication was one of three things he hoped to see before he died,” the colleagues said. He died in June 2009, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. spoke at his funeral.
“I spoke to him the week before he died, and he was still trying to get it released,” Ms. Feigin said. “It broke his heart.”
After Mr. Richard’s death, David Sobel, a Washington lawyer, and the National Security Archive sued for the report’s release under the Freedom of Information Act.
Thanks to Mr. Richard, Ms Feigin, Mr. Sobel and Eric Lichtblau’s New York Times reporting, roots of the most sordid U.S. policies and practices today, such as non-consensual human experimentation, torture and eugenics can finally be seen by those willing to look at the Nazi-CIA partnership revealed in the report.

“If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell,” sociologist, social critic, humanist and individualist C. Wright Mills famously stated.
Nazi’s in America learned to become far more covert, throught heir dress, public discussions and actions. Today, they covertly achieve their agenda.
One repercussion of media feeding propaganda to a brainwashed populace, however, is that with few exceptions, that citizenry cannot or will not look behind the wizard’s curtain to solve crimes, – precisely as criminal cabals prefer and pay for; the reasons that the U.S. media bows to them.
Thus today, it is no other than the Nazi-CIA partnership that is suspected of being behind the coup in the United States today, a quiet, covert and successful coup.
As one German Nazi descendant told Deborah Dupre in 2001, “The Nazis lost the battle but we have won the war.”

_____________

References

[1]The Office of Special Investigations: “Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust,” Dec. 2006, cited in “Secret Justice Department Report Details How the U.S. Helped Former Nazis,” New York Times:http://documents.nytimes.com/confidential-report-provides-new-evidence-of-notorious-nazi-cases

[2]Eric Lichtblau, Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says, New York Times, 14 Nov. 2010

[3]Ibid.

[4]Ibid.

[5]Vera Hassner Sharav, “Human Experiments: A Chronology of Human Research, AHRP”: http://tinyurl.com/7yjdrxy

[6]Ibid.

[7]Lichtblau, op. cit., also see Yeaden, Hawkins, The Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of a Century, Also see Sharav, Chronology, op. cit.

[8]See: Yeaden, Hawkins op. cit. Also see Sharav, Chronology, op. cit.

Sources:
Russia Today,
Vampire of Macondo
Photo Credit: theatlanteanconspiracy.com

Human Rights news reporter Deborah Dupré is author of “Vampire of Macondo, Life, crimes and curses in south Louisiana that Powerful Forces Don’t want you to know,” 450 pages packed with US mainstream media-censored stories about the BP-wrecked Macondo Prospect in the Gulf of Mexico that continues catastrophic human and environmental devastation.
“In ‘Vampire of Macondo’, author Deborah Dupre has captured incredible factual detail and has explained the true magnitude of this horrendous Gulf Oil Spill tragedy. Including the Cover ups, Collusion, Human Consequences and the effects on the Environment. A must read for anyone that wants to know the REAL story!” – Ron Tully (TullyNews.Info)
Follow Dupré on Twitter @DeborahDupre. For interviews, email info@DeborahDupre.com.

Also see:
‘CIA Within CIA’ Behind Today’s American Coup? NWO’s Shadowy Government 
KKK Leaving Threatening Notices On Southern Door Steps

PBS documentary on concussions leaves ESPN black and blue

A partnership ends with hints of pressure from the NFL.

by John Timmer - Aug 26 2013, 6:00pm EST

• Life Sciences
• Science Policy and Education

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/08/pbs-documentary-on-concussions-leaves-espn-black-and-blue/

The potential for repeated brain injuries was perhaps best exemplified by the Parkinson's symptoms suffered very publicly by the boxer Muhammad Ali. But, within the academic world, a growing body of literature has indicated that repeated concussions may carry significant risks, both for young athletes and seasoned professionals. (Although not every study has shown a significant effect on all aspects of cognitive function.)
Of course, professional sports are big business, which raises some difficult questions. Do leagues that make many of their players very wealthy owe them anything beyond that? Are fans and businesses that expect hard-hitting action complicit in the long term damage that results?
Awkward questions about the implications of the growing body of research have now spilled over into journalism. The sports network ESPN, which has covered the issue of athletic concussions in the past, was set to partner with PBS' Frontline program to produce a documentary called League of Denial. Then, late last week, the Frontline site released a notice saying that ESPN had suddenly pulled out of the project. Shortly after, The New York Times reported that this pull back was a product of pressure from the National Football League, which (probably rightly) feared that a documentary with that title would not put it in a positive light.
The NFL quickly issued a denial, while ESPN claimed that it simply asked that its name be removed from a project that it had little editorial control over. (In light of the public spat, ESPN's ombudsman analyzed the situation at length.)
The documentary will go on regardless of ESPN's involvement, and researchers will continue to work to define the parameters that lead to long term damage then (hopefully) craft those into advice on how athletes of various ages can preserve their brains. Having a major sports broadcaster amplify the message might have helped raise awareness of this issue. A public controversy like this, however, might serve equally well.

Large Torrent Site to be Blocked by Russia’s SOPA

• Andy
• August 26, 2013
• OpenSharing,
  Rutor

On August 1 following intense pressure from international rightsholders, Russia introduced its brand new anti-piracy law. The legislation is a little like the United States’ DMCA but with provisions for sites to be blocked in the event of non-compliance. Now, just short of its first full month of operation, the first large torrent site to fall foul of the law has been announced.
It’s been an interesting first month for Russia’s new anti-piracy plan.
After a tentative start with only a handful of rightsholders filing complaints, it quickly became clear that in order for the system to work effectively, movie and TV companies would have to be a little better organized.
Thursday last week it was revealed that out of a total of 19 submitted complaints just 11 had been accepted after administrative faults were found with the others.
In the coming months, in which the law will almost certainly be amended to protect other copyright works including music and lyrics, it is expected that copyright holders will become more adept at supplying the required paperwork.
But despite the early hiccups, the law is already showing its teeth.
According to the Roskomnadzor communications agency, a large file-sharing site will soon be censored by locals ISPs after failing to respond appropriately to copyright complaints.
Rutor.org, a public torrent site running its own tracker, operates out of Sweden but is targeted at Russia. According to Alexa the site is the 32nd most-visited site in Russia. Around 9% of the site’s traffic comes from Ukraine where it is the country’s 60th most-popular site.
Rutor stands accused of making available movie and TV show content without obtaining permission from rightsholders. Its domain will shortly be added to Russia’s national blocklist meaning that it will be rendered inaccessible to users of the Runet not running a proxy or VPN service.
Another site has seen its luck change. OpenSharing.org indexes primarily Russian content but actually operates out of neighboring Ukraine. It is less popular with Russians than Rutor and is the country’s 894th most-popular domain. After being marked for blocking last week, it has now complied and will be removed from the blocklist.
Other sites that face being blocked include torrent sites turbofilm.tv and fast-torrent.ru, plus streaming portals online.stepashka.com, seasonvar.ru, smotruonline.ru, intv.ru and kinozal.tv. Roskomnadzor reports today that four of the sites have complied and will be removed from the blacklist.
Under the new law blocks are carried out against a site’s IP address so there’s a possibility that unconnected domains could also be censored if they share the same IP. Rutor’s IP is not currently in use by any other site.
In a cruel twist, Rutor.org was one of the driving forces behind the successful 100K+ signature petition to have Russia’s anti-piracy law withdrawn. That petition will now be reviewed by the government.

Cheap MP3 Site Shuts Down, Keeps Users’ Cash, Blames Russian SOPA

• Andy
• August 26, 2013
• LegalSounds,
  sopa

A thorn in the side of the western music industry, there are dozens of Russia-based online stores that sell music for a fraction of the regular mainstream price. At less than 10 cents per track it’s easy to see how these domains have gained traction but during the past few days things have become particularly expensive for users of one such site. Citing problems caused by Russia’s new anti-piracy law, LegalSounds.com has just closed down – and taken all their members’ money with them.
There’s no shortage of ways to obtain music online for free, but surprisingly there are plenty of people who will pay hard cash to obtain MP3s, even though they aren’t buying them from official sources.
For well over a decade there have been big sites, mainly hosted in Russia or Ukraine, that allow their users to download music for a fraction of the prices quoted by outlets such as iTunes. Historically the sites claimed protection under licensing from the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS) but that has always been a controversial assertion. Few if any pay money to western labels.
One of the most famous, AllofMP3.com, generated dozens of news headlines around 2005 and even became a political issue when the United States suggested that Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization would be threatened by the site’s existence.
On August 22 2012 and after 19 years of waiting, Russia became the 156th member of the WTO but despite complaints from the U.S., dozens of similar sites continue to operate in Russia and across the border in Ukraine.
Although many have come under pressure from payment providers, most still seem able to take money, even from giants Visa and Mastercard. Previously sites have chosen to charge a few cents per track (around $1.00 per album) but more recently the trend is to offer unlimited music for a set price. Others allow users to charge their accounts with payments of around $25.00 each in order to spend those balances over time.
One of the sites offering this model was LegalSounds. Online since 2005 and launched with a campaign that announced “The end of peer-to-peer networks is near!”, the site offered MP3s for around $0.09 each. But while this may have worked well for a while, the party is now over.

“We are terribly sorry, but due to recent changes in Russian Federation legislation (Anti-Piracy Law, which came into force August 1), we can’t continue offering you our service,” LegalSounds announced in a brief statement.
“Thanks for all of you, who supported legalsounds.com through these years. We hope to come back with something new.”
It’s far from clear why LegalSounds felt an urgent need to close down. Thus far no application has been made to the Russian authorities to have content removed from other MP3 sites under the new legislation (it only covers movies and TV shows) and there is currently no indication that other sites intend to follow.
In the meantime and for the customers hit by the closure, the outlook isn’t good. LegalSounds’ Facebook page appears to have been abandoned, leaving behind only furious ex-customers who seem to have lost all the money they had in their accounts. While there are threats ranging from class action to murder, few users of the site appear to have read LegalSounds’ terms and conditions.
“Only payments made from credit cards are refundable. The entire amount of transaction is subject to be refunded. Partial refunding is not allowed. Refund can’t be provided when customer used part of the balance,” the ToS on the now-dead site used to read.
Whether this closure will have a chilling effect on the cheap MP3 market remains to be seen. That will largely depend on whether other sites follow suit.

It Is Illegal To Feed The Homeless In Cities All Over The United States

It Is Illegal To Feed The Homeless In Cities All Over The United States        

Public School Is One Of The Most Dangerous Places You Could Possibly Put Your Children

By Michael Snyder, on August 26th, 2013

 

Would you willingly send your kids into a war zone?  No way.  Would you willingly send your children into a federal prison?  Of course not.  So why would you send them to a public school?  In America today, kids are being killed on the way to school, at school and on the way home from school.  Mass shootings are becoming increasingly common, the influence of gangs in our schools is on the rise and sometimes the biggest threat of danger comes from the teachers and the security officials that are supposed to be there to “protect” our children.  But violence is not the only thing for parents to be concerned about when it comes to our public schools.  The truth is that public schools in the United States have become government indoctrination centers, and many teachers are constantly looking for opportunities to inject as much propaganda as they possibly can into classroom instruction.  After a dozen years of this, many students leave high school virtually brainwashed and nearly incapable of thinking for themselves.  This is one of the reasons why so many high school students seem like they are dumb as a rock.  Our young people spend most of their young lives in prison camps where they are constantly being told what to think instead of being trained how to think.  Why would anyone want to subject their children to that?
When it comes to their children, safety is the number one priority for most parents.  They expect that their children will be kept safe going to school, while they are at school, and coming home from school.
Unfortunately, school is becoming an increasingly dangerous place to be for our children.  And I am not just talking about the mass shootings that have happened in recent years.
For example, 260 school children have been killed in the city of Chicago alone over the past three years, and now things are about to get even worse.  The following is an excerpt from a recent article about the impact that budget cuts and school closings are having on school safety in Chicago…

Most of Chicago’s cuts have taken place in the predominantly poor, African-American and Latino south and west sides, which is also where the majority of the city’s record 506 murders occurred last year.
The city has created 600 “safe passage” routes manned by adults and meant to try to ensure the safety of students crossing gang territories. But in recent weeks at least two people have been killed on those paths. One incident saw four injured and one dead after a shooting in front of a church. Another saw a 54-year-old man shot on the safe passage route that leads to Drake Elementary in Bronzeville.
Lillian Allen, a mother of two students at Drake, said the violence was “nerve-racking”.
Meanwhile, Annie Stoball will on Monday walk her nine-year-old granddaughter Kayla four blocks to her first day at Chicago’s Gresham Elementary, traversing the territory of two different gangs. She felt much safer taking Kayla across the street to Morgan Elementary.
The grandmother said: “This is dangerous. We’re going right into the heart of the gangs.”

In recent years, the number of gang members in the city of Chicago has absolutely exploded.  It is estimated that there are now approximately 100,000 gang members living in the city, and not even the “safe passage” routes for school children are safe now…

The eyes of the city were on Chicago Public Schools “Safe Passage” routes Monday morning as a 28-year-old man was shot along one of the routes and a 14-year-old boy was shot to death near another one, the day before school starts.

The 14-year-old boy was shot and killed within a block of a welcoming elementary school, Melody Stem School , 3937 W. Wilcox. It’s at least the third fatal shooting along or near a Safe Passage route since mid-August.

In other areas of the country, gang activity is not a major problem yet, but concern about school violence is still a huge issue.

The state of Connecticut has one of the highest per capita incomes in the entire country, but the mass shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School less than a year ago has caused schools all over the state to adopt extreme security measures…

In Enfield, each of the town’s 14 public and parochial schools will have an armed guard at the door when they open for the year Sept. 3. Enfield Police Chief Carl Sferrazza said he believes armed guards are the best deterrent for an “active shooter” like Adam Lanza in Newtown.

“These people are homicidal and suicidal individuals. Their intent and their planning is all geared toward killing as many people as they possibly can,” Sferrazza said.

All Glastonbury schools also will have guards at the doors when school starts Aug. 29. The high school and Smith Middle School already had guards stationed there, and the town added seven additional guards at a cost of $315,000 for the school year.
Other school districts have chosen to add cameras, door buzzers, card-swipe entry systems or other, less drastic, security measures.

But sometimes it is actually the “security officials” that end up brutalizing the kids.  The following are just a couple of examples of the kinds of things that happen in public schools in America every single day…
*A security thug at one school in California actually fractured the arm of one 16-year-old girl because she left some crumbs on the floor after cleaning up some cake that she had spilled.
*In Allentown, Pennsylvania a 14-year-old girl was tasered in the groin area by a school security thug even though she had put up her hands in the air to surrender to him.
And if your kid does something to be considered a “security threat”, he or she could be taken out of school in handcuffs and hauled off to prison or to a mental institution.  The following examples are from one of my previous articles…
#1 At an elementary school in Baltimore recently, three nine-year-old girls and an eight-year-old boy were arrested for fighting and marched out of their elementary school in handcuffs.  The police department defended handcuffing those kids….

“It’s our policy, regardless of the age, when a suspect is arrested by police, they’re handcuffed. And the reason is just not for the suspect’s safety but also for officers’ safety,” Det. Jeremy Silbert of the Baltimore City Police Department said.

#2 In New Haven, Connecticut a 10-year-old boy was actually arrested by police for giving another student “a wedgie” on a school bus.
#3 Just last year, a 5-year-old boy at a public school in Stockton, California was arrested by police and handcuffed with zip ties because he was committing “battery on a police officer“.
Really?
How much damage can a 5-year-old kid really do to a police officer?
The boy was ultimately sent to a hospital and forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
#4 A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was “throwing objects, hitting administration personnel and screaming uncontrollably” so police handcuffed the 40 pound little girl and shipped her off to a mental institution for evaluation.
#5 In San Mateo, California a few months ago a 7-year-old special education student was blasted in the face with pepper spray because he would not quit climbing on the furniture.  Police were then able to subdue the boy and he was “committed for a psychiatric evaluation”.
#6 Down in Florida, an 11-year-old student was arrested by police, thrown in jail and charged with a third-degree felony for bringing a plastic butter knife to school.
#7 In Texas, a 12-year-old girl was recently arrested by police for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck.  She was formally charged with a misdemeanor.
#8 A 13-year-old boy at a public school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class.  The police marched him out of school and hauled him over to a juvenile detention center.
#9 Back in 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York wrote “I love my friends Abby and Faith” on her desk.  The police were called out and she was marched out of her school in handcuffs in front of all her friends.
#10 A teenage couple down in Houston, Texas poured milk on each other during a squabble while they were breaking up a while back.  Instead of being sent to see the principal, they were arrested by police and sent to court.
Of course these days virtually no place is safe for young children.  If you take your eyes off of them for even a moment they could be taken by predators.

For instance, just check out what just happened at a Best Buy down in Florida…

A Florida man tried to kill a 9-year-old girl in a Best Buy bathroom, jamming a plastic bag over her head and stuffing her face in a toilet before employees intervened, authorities said.
Another customer heard the girl screaming and crying inside the women’s restroom at the Jacksonville store and notified store staff. An employee looked under the stall and discovered a horrific scene.
James Tadros, 29, had kicked and beaten the girl bloody and was forcing her head inside the toilet, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

But physical violence is not the only threat that parents need to be concerned about.  If you allow your children to go to public schools or if you allow them to get into the “wrong crowd”, there is a very high probability that they could be sexually corrupted or sexually violated.  The following examples are from one of my previous articles entitled “21 Signs That U.S. Public Schools Have Become Training Centers For Sexual Deviancy“…
#1 There is a raging epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases among our young people.  According to the latest figures released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, there are 20 million new sexually-transmitted infections in the United States every single year, and Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 account for approximately 50 percent of those new sexually-transmitted infections.
#2 Many of our teens are catching diseases that they can’t even pronounce correctly.  There were more than 1.4 million cases of chlamydia reported in the United States in 2011.  An astounding 33 percent of those cases involved Americans that were younger than 20 years of age.
#3 At this point, one out of every four teen girls in the U.S. has at least one sexually transmitted disease.  How high does that number have to go before we admit that there is a problem?
#4 Apparently, all of the propaganda about “safe sex” is not really working very well.  According to one survey, 24 percent of all U.S. teens that have an STD say that they still have unprotected sex.
#5 When you take morality out of public life, the results are predictable.  In the United States today, approximately 47 percent of all high school students have had sex.
#6 Many of our young people seem to not understand the value of waiting until marriage to become a mother.  Amazingly, one out of every five teen girls in the U.S. actually wants to be a teenage mother.
#7 When I was growing up, I don’t remember a single girl being pregnant at my high school.  But today all of that has changed.  A couple of years ago it was being reported that 86 teen girls at one high school in Memphis, Tennessee were either pregnant or had recently given birth.
#8 If you can believe it, the United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate on the entire planet.  In fact, the United States has a teen pregnancy rate that is more than twice as high as Canada, more than three times as high as France and more than seven times as high as Japan.
#9 Increasingly, oral sex is being promoted to our young people as a “safer” form of sex.  According to shocking research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately two-thirds of all Americans in the 15 to 24 year old age bracket have engaged in oral sex.
#10 Sex “education” has become much more about “indoctrination” in recent years.  One recent example of this trend was detailed in the New York Times…

IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?
That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control.

#11 Sexual “experimentation” among our teens is reaching heights never seen before.  According to one recent study, sexual contact between teen girls in the United States is now at the highest level ever recorded.
#12 In America today, sex in public school hallways has become a common occurrence.  In a recent article about Detroit, I shared a quote from one of my readers that actually attended one of the “best” public schools in Detroit…

The school was a new seven story building just a couple of years old. The bathrooms would often lack toilet paper & soap beyond the second floor (the main floor), the bathroom sinks would often not work. The water fountains on north side of the building on from the third floor & up did not work. The elevators would constantly break down. I even got stuck on the elevator before. I almost tripped down a half a flight of stairs because the elastic seal (it was the metal bar at the front of a treader of I don’t know the name of it.) the stairs was not properly installed.
Students would often have sex on the stairs & throughout the school. Parents actually called the school many times & reported kids having sex on the stairs because all of them had glass windows 270 degrees.

#13 Would you feel okay about your teenage girl sharing a bathroom with boys?  In the state of Massachusetts, boys will now be able to freely use girls restrooms and girls locker rooms if it makes them feel more “comfortable”.
#14 One of the results of our “culture of sex” has been an explosion in the number of babies being born outside of marriage.  For women under the age of 30 living in the United States today, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.
#15 Being a single parent is incredibly hard, but more U.S. children are being raised by just one parent than ever before.  At this point, more than one out of every four children in the United States is being raised by a single parent.
#16 Thanks to our “sexual revolution”, men and women are having a harder time than ever relating to each other in a meaningful way.  Our young people are being taught that marriage is a “burden” and that they should delay it for as long as possible.  Today, an all-time low 44.2 percent of all Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are married.
#17 There is an epidemic of sex between teachers and students in the United States.  In fact, for some teachers one student is just simply not enough.  For example, a 33-year-old art teacher down in Arizona was charged with having sex with four of her male students.
#18 A former high school English teacher down in Texas has that teacher beat.  She has been accused of having sex with five different male students.  The most disturbing part of her story is that she is a mother of three children and her husband is serving this country in the U.S. Army.
#19 But a high school teacher down in Georgia has both of them beat.  She was recently charged with having sex with seven of her students.
#20 Sometimes even teachers that have been convicted of having sex with a student cannot stop themselves.  For example, there was one case where a probation officer found a student that a teacher had been convicted of having sex with previously hiding in her closet…

Lisa Lavoie, the former Holyoke teacher who plead guilty after having a relationship with a student, has been charged with violating her probation after the student she had a relationship with was found hiding in her closet.
Back in February 2009, Lavoie ran off with one of her students, who was 15-year-old at the time. Lavoie was a teacher at the Donahue School on Whiting Farms Road in Holyoke.
The pair was found several days later in a motel room in West Virginia. Lavoie pleaded guilty to three counts of statutory rape and one count of enticement of a child in January 2011. She was sentenced to five years probation.

Unfortunately, our young people don’t have much of a chance with role models such as Miley Cyrus running around.
The fabric of society is coming apart at the seams, and our public schools have become cesspools of corruption, sex and violence.
So in light of everything that you have just read, can you think of any good reason why parents should send their children to public schools?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…

NEW TECHNIQUE FOR MOLECULAR IMAGING

NEW TECHNIQUE FOR MOLECULAR IMAGING

Ed Snowden Covered His Tracks Well; How Many Other NSA Staffers Did The Same?

from the gone-baby-gone dept

As we've seen, the NSA's story on "abuses" keeps changing. First there were no abuses at all, then there were a whole lot of abuses (but all unintentional) and now we know that there also were a bunch of intentional abuses. But here's the thing: these are only the abuses that the NSA caught. And, even then it's sketchy. As Marcy Wheeler has detailed, many of the "unintentional abuses" look like they were merely classified that way, when, in reality, they may have been intentional. Thanks to the magic of the NSA's special dictionary, they redefine abuses that exceed legal authority but are "performing the mission that the NSA wants them to perform" not as "abuses" but as "mistakes."

Either way, that only counts the abuses and "mistakes" that the NSA's audits discover. As we pointed out, it appears the NSA still has no idea what Ed Snowden took, which calls into question how good these so-called "audits" are. The latest reports coming out reveal that Snowden carefully bypassed or deleted the logs concerning his downloading actions:

The U.S. government's efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden's sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden viewed or downloaded.

The government's forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden's apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.

Remember when Snowden claimed that, from his desk, he could run searches on anyone, and various NSA defenders like Rep. Mike Rogers scoffed at the idea and called him a liar? They claimed that any such searches would turn up in the audits. But, of course, if you can delete the log files, then those audits are meaningless.

And, if Snowden could do it, it's very, very likely that he's not the only one employed by the NSA or contracting for the NSA who knows how to cover their digital trail. And that leads to a very obvious question: sure, the NSA knows about thousands of unintentional violations and a bunch of intentional violations -- but what about all the violations it has no idea about because someone was able to bypass or delete the log files? Given that NSA employees almost certainly know that searches are audited, you'd have to imagine that nearly everyone who decided to willfully violate the law to, say, spy on a love interest (hello: LOVINT) or, perhaps, a personal enemy, would also seek ways to do so without leaving an incriminating log file. Snowden's efforts show that's possible -- meaning that it's likely others knew that as well.

And, given that it appears that top NSA brass may have been taken by surprise by this rather basic revelation (no audits are perfect, and smart folks like ones the NSA employs often know how to get around such things), it seems quite likely that the number of intentional NSA violations is much, much, much higher than is being reported, in part because the NSA itself still hasn't been able to figure out what happened.

1,000 Sys Admins Can Copy Any NSA Document Without Anyone Knowing About It; Think Only Snowden Did?

1,000 Sys Admins Can Copy Any NSA Document Without Anyone Knowing About It; Think Only Snowden Did?

Thirty Years Of NSA 'Oversight' And The Only Change Is Better Snooping Technology

Thirty Years Of NSA 'Oversight' And The Only Change Is Better Snooping Technology

still don't think we are entering the NAZI AMERICA ?              

Church Group Members Threatened With Arrest for Handing Out Biscuits, Coffee to the Homeless

By ALEXIS SHAW | Good Morning America – Mon, Aug 26, 2013

• Good Morning America - Church Group Members Threatened With Arrest for Handing Out Biscuits, Coffee to the Homeless (ABC News)

A North Carolina church group said they were prevented from handing out food to the homeless after police threatened them with arrest, according to their website.

For the past six years, volunteers from Love Wins Ministries frequented Moore Square in Raleigh, N.C., on Saturdays and Sundays to give out hot coffee and a breakfast sandwich to those in need, according to the church group's website.
But when volunteers went down to their usual weekend spot to dole out the 100 sausage biscuits and the gallons of coffee they had brought to feed the crowds who had gathered Saturday morning, they were also greeted by officers with the Raleigh Police Department, according to a statement on the church group's website.
"An officer said, quite bluntly, that if we attempted to distribute food, we would be arrested," the Rev. Hugh Hollowell wrote on the group's website. "We asked the officers for permission to disperse the biscuits to the over 70 people who had lined up, waiting to eat. They said no. I had to face those who were waiting and tell them that I could not feed them, or I would be arrested."
The Raleigh police were there to enforce a city ordinance that bans the distribution of food in any of the city's parks, ABC Raleigh, N.C., station WTVD-TV reported.
While the group said it was aware they could not use the park itself, they had set up on the sidewalk for the past six years without issue, their website said.
"No representative from the Raleigh Police Department was willing to tell us which ordinance we were breaking, or why, after six years and countless friendly and cooperative encounters with the Department, they are now preventing us from feeding hungry people," Hollowell wrote.
In addition, the group learned it would need to apply for a permit to use the park, which costs $800 a day, their website said.
No arrests were made in connection with the food distribution, Raleigh Police Department spokesman Jim Sughrue told WTVD-TV.
"People were simply informed the ordinance prohibits the kinds of actions some groups have been engaged in at the park," he said.
Despite the off-putting encounter, Hollowell wrote that the group plans to find a venue in downtown Raleigh to carry out their mission.
In the meantime, they are seeking out owners of private buildings or parking lots to allow them to continue to bring biscuits to the hungry, the website said.
Love Wins Ministries did not immediately return ABC News' requests for comment.