Increasing Police Brutality: Americans Killed by Cops Now Outnumber Americans Killed in Iraq War

what do you do when the law ...becomes the lawless               Our Forefathers knew what to do !  

when America !  r the good People gonna  RISE ?

truther December 28, 2013

The increase in police brutality in this country is a frightening reality. In the last decade alone the number of  people murdered by police has reached 5,000. The number of soldiers killed since the inception of the Iraq war, 4489.

What went wrong? In the 19070’s SWAT teams were estimated to be used just a few hundred times per year, now we are looking at over 40,000 military style “knock and announce” police raids a year.

The police presence in this country is being turned into a military with a clearly defined enemy, anyone who questions the establishment.

If we look at the most recent numbers of non-military US citizens killed by terrorism worldwide, that number is 17. You have a better chance of being killed by a bee sting, or a home repair accident than you do a terrorist. And you are 29 times more likely to be murdered by a cop than a terrorist!

A hard hitting mini film by film maker Charles Shaw, properly titled RELEASE US, highlights the riveting and horrid reality of America’s thin blue line.

From the film:

500 innocent Americans are murdered by police every year (USDOJ). 5,000 since 9/11, equal to the number of US soldiers lost in Iraq.

In 1994 the US Government passed a law authorizing the Pentagon to donate surplus Cold War era military equipment to local police departments.

In the 20 years since, weaponry designed for use on a foreign battlefield, has been handed over for use on American streets…against American citizens.

The “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” replaced the Cold War with billions in funding and dozens of laws geared towards this new “war” against its own citizens.

This militarization of the police force has created what is being called an “epidemic of police brutality” sweeping the nation.

Silicon Valley Frenzy: Big Bucks, Big Data, and Spying

Sunday, December 8, 2013 

That furiously contested federal budget doesn’t all get spent on salaries and food stamps. Much of it is handed to corporate America for an unimaginable variety of products and services. From scrappy startups with big ideas to bureaucratic giants on the decline, they’re all jostling to feed on that big trough.
The government spy-services marketplace, a component of Big Data, is particularly juicy. Investors are clamoring to get in on it, and scores of startups have sprung up to profit from it. The hottest one at the moment is Palantir in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley. It’s in the process of raising another $100 million, of which it already pocketed $57.5 million. In September, it had raised $196 million. In the three months since, its valuation jumped by 50%. To $9 billion!
Palantir’s nosebleed valuation isn’t based on vapors alone; there’s also its place at the big trough of the government. It has 1,200 employees in the US, Australia, Singapore, and Britain. Hot spots in the spying business. Forbes estimates that it will hit $450 million in revenues in 2013. Profits remain elusive. Instead, it has been burning through investor cash, of which it has raised roughly $650 million since its beginning in 2004. Let the good times roll.
One of the early investors that is making a killing, at least on paper: the CIA. Its venture-capital branch IQT plowed $2 million into it in 2005. Why? IQT explains:

Palantir offers a suite of software applications for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing the world’s information. The technology supports many kinds of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial. Palantir’s products are built for real analysis with a focus on security, scalability, ease of use, and collaboration.

By 2009, Palantir hype had already infected the Wall Street Journal, which painted the picture of an omnipotent startup:

Palantir’s software has helped root out terrorist financing networks, revealed new trends in roadside bomb attacks, and uncovered details of Syrian suicide bombing networks in Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the events. It has also foiled a Pakistani suicide bombing plot on Western targets and discovered a spy infiltration of an allied government. It is now being used by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In Afghanistan, Palantir’s software was used “to analyze constantly shifting tribal dynamics and distinguish potential allies from enemies, according to current and former counterterrorism officials familiar with the work,” the Journal reported. In short, the software performed major miracles on a daily basis.
The idea originated in 2003 with PayPal founder Peter Thiel, now Palantir Chairman, and Alexander Karp, now CEO. By 2005, they pitched a prototype to the CIA. The demo used two hypothetical terrorists and followed their activities, travels, money transfers, etc. – a form of surveillance that is now universally applied to everyone. From that point on, Palantir engineers flew to Washington every two weeks with a revised version, based on what CIA analysts had wanted. In September that year, the CIA made its investment.
By 2009, Palantir’s work in Washington had ballooned to more than 50 projects. The Australian government had become a client, and, according to “current and former government officials” at the time, the UK and NSA were “eyeing Palantir.”
Palantir has become an integral part of the US surveillance apparatus. At first, it was focused on the “Customer” – the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense. Since the same technologies might be beneficial to other government and law enforcement agencies, Palantir has branched out. Its data mining software has been adopted by numerous such agencies, including the LA Police Department. “To make sense of all the noise that’s out there,” explained Chief of Police Charlie Beck. A “really important tool for investigations, a really important tool for crime fighting,” he called it.
Palantir has become ubiquitous in California. Last year, it signed a juicy contract with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. Its job: to build a database for information captured by license-plate scanners and digital cameras deployed in 14 counties. Local and state law enforcement agencies along with federal authorities can access that database. In the Bay Area alone, at least 32 agencies use the technology. With this result: If You Drive, You Get Tracked.
Palantir has further branched out. Its software that the CIA has long ago fallen in love with and has helped develop and mold to its liking is already entrenched in the Intelligence Community, the military, law enforcement, and other agencies in the US and overseas. So Palantir is pushing its powerful, no-holds-barred data-mining software into the commercial world. An unnamed executive told the New York Times that by now 60% of Palantir’s sales fall into that category.
Indeed, technologies developed for the Intelligence Community to follow assorted “bad guys” and other characters (like you and me), have, after years of fine-tuning by the smartest minds, made the transition to Corporate America. It’s precisely this hand-in-glove cooperation between government agencies, big investors, and corporate America why the Snowden revelations are proving to be so hair-raisingly embarrassing. But in the end, government surveillance and corporate spying, already inextricably entwined, will only get more efficient and more effective. It’s where ingenuity and money coalesce into a relentless drive to perfect the seamless, borderless surveillance society – one where massive profits are to be made by leading today’s most promising growth industry and Silicon Valley religion, Big Data.
That the NSA surreptitiously tapped into “cloud” services provided by American companies, which collaborate tightly with the NSA on a host of projects, turned into a publicity nightmare. Now companies counter-attack. With very mixed results. Read.... Microsoft Protests NSA Taps (I Hear The Crinkly Sounds Of A Bag Being Pulled Over My Head)

CHINA, THE MOON, AND GEORGE LUCAS

December 26, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell /  http://gizadeathstar.com/2013/12/china-george-lucas/

A few days ago I blogged about Russia’s space and defense chief, Dmitri Rogozin, wanting a Russian lunar base. Prior to that, you’ll recall, I blogged about a Japanese architectural firm’s plans to turn the Moon into a giant solar power base, beaming microwave energy back to Earth(see JAPAN WANTS MICROWAVE SELENOSOLAR POWER PLANTS ON THE MOON). Recall from that article that I offered the opinion that the real goal here was military, and to turn the Moon into a giant weapon:

 ”Readers of my book Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations will recall that I mentioned an unusual project cooked up – pun intended – in 1968 by the insane American military-industrial-intelligence-finance-apocalypse complex. The “project” called for a system of “microwave energy satellites” that would capture the Sun’s energy and beam it back to the Earth. There was just one teensy tiny problem. The microwaves thus beamed to Earth would have to be collected by antennas at sites that would each generate five gigawatts of electricity. Each of these stations would occupy 145 square kilometers of land, and would not allow anything – human or otherwise – to live there. The sites would be constantly cooked in a huge microwave.(See my Covert Wars and Breakaway Civilizations, p. 244). That was the 1968 plan. Now the Japanese plan, you’ll note, is considerably bigger:
“Shimizu, a Japanese architectural and engineering firm, has a solution for the climate crisis: Simply build a band of solar panels 400 kilometers (249 miles) wide (pdf) running all the way around the Moon’s 11,000-kilometer (6,835 mile) equator and beam the carbon-free energy back to Earth in the form of microwaves, which are converted into electricity at ground stations.”

We know of the Japanese -Chinese rivalry over the islands in the Pacific, but perhaps there is a bigger story, one involving long-range plans involving the militarization of the Moon:
A Chinese ‘Death Star’ Moon Base?
The Chinese plan is much more explicit than the Japanese one:

“An English-language outlet of the The China Times Group, the Want China Times cites the Beijing Times, affiliated with the People’s Daily, the source of the original report.

“The shocking headline PLA dreams of turning moon into Death Star, says expert, cites that “experts in China” are trying to determine how the moon “Can be transformed into a deadly weapon. Like the Death Star in Star Wars, the moon could hypothetically be used as a military battle station and ballistic missiles could be launched against any military target on Earth.”

“The article continues that, ‘Various weapons testing sites could also be established on the moon,” citing that the Long March-3B rocket launch is merely the start of “a more ambitious program’ to this ‘Death Star’ end.

“Western media has been largely silent on these claims, in part perhaps because there is some question of the legality of using the moon for such purposes. There are thus more unanswered questions than answers at this time.”

The “Death Star” meme is being openly pushed by China, and they can hardly have missed the military implications of the Japanese proposal; forget about the rockets and such, folks. Why use rockets and h-bombs when microwaves are faster, cheaper, and much more efficient?

So look what we have: in the past few weeks, Japan, China, and Russia have all announced long range plans for the militarization of the Moon. The the question is, are we looking at competition, or something more subtle, a cooperation and the beginning of a campaign to accustom people on planet Earth to the idea that, when they look up at the full moon, they’re looking at something bristling with weapons, and that has perhaps been itself transformed, ala the Japanese proposal, into a giant weapon.

The real question is, Why? Such an expensive monstrosity would be far beyond the needs for any sort of dominance of the Earth, though it would certainly do that. But …well, the entire Moon? The cost alone, from a “global domination point of view”, would be far in excess of what would be needed to do so. Thus the sheer scale of what the Japanese and Chinese are talking about implies much bigger fish to fry(if you’ll pardon the pun).

So my high octane speculation of the day is this: We’re looking at the beginning of some sort of program of social engineering, perhaps even a “crash” one, of accustoming people to the idea of enormously deadly weapons in space, and on the Moon. Big weapons, for a big potential problem. Watch this space and Moon meme, because I think we’re going to be hearing a lot more about it.

See you…er… at the movies….

The Voice of God Weapon Returns

• By Sharon Weinberger
• http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/12/the-voice-of-go/

The Voice of God weapon — a device that projects voices into your head to make you think God is speaking to you — is the military’s equivalent of an urban myth.  Meaning, it’s mentioned periodically at defense workshops (ironically, I first heard about it at the same defense conference where I first met Noah), and typically someone whispers about it actually being used. Now Steven Corman, writing at the COMOPS journal, describes his own encounter with this urban myth:

At a government workshop some time ago I head someone describe a new tool that was described as the “voice of Allah.” This was said to be a device that would operate at a distance and would deliver a message that only a single person could hear. The story was that it was tested in a conflict situation in Iraq and pointed at one insurgent in a group, who whipped around looking in all directions, and began a heated conversation with his compatriots, who did not hear the message. At the time I greeted this story with some skepticism.

Is there any basis to this technology? Well, Holosonic Research Labs and American Technology Corporation both have versions of directed sound, which can allow a single person to hear a message that others around don’t hear. DARPA appears to be working on its own sonic projector. Intriguingly, Strategy Page reports that troops are using the Long Range Acoustic Device as a modified Voice of God weapon:

It appears that some of the troops in Iraq are using "spoken" (as opposed to "screeching") LRAD to mess with enemy fighters. Islamic terrorists tend to be superstitious and, of course, very religious. LRAD can put the "word of God" into their heads. If God, in the form of a voice that only you can hear, tells you to surrender, or run away, what are you gonna do?

And as Corman also notes, CNET recently wrote about an advertisement in New York for A&E’s TV show Paranormal State, which uses some of this technology. Beyond directed sound, it’s long been known that microwaves at certain frequencies can produce an auditory effect that sounds like it’s coming from within someone’s head (and there’s the nagging question of classified microwave work at Brooks Air Force Base, that the Air Force stubbornly refuses to talk about).

That brings us back to the Voice of God/Allah Weapon. Is it real or bogus? In one version — related to me by another defense reporter — it’s not just Allah’s voice — but an entire holographic image projected above (um, who decides what Allah looks like?).

Does it exist? I’m not sure, but it’s funny that when you hear it brought up at defense conferences, no one ever asks the obvious question: does anybody think this thing will actually convince people God is speaking to them? I’m thinking, not.

[Image Copyright (C)
2007 Holosonics] 

MIND CONTROL AND VOICES FROM GOD: TAMERLAN TSARNAYEV, AND HUGE IMPLICATIONS

December 28, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell /    http://gizadeathstar.com/2013/12/tamerlan-tsarnayev-implications/

Sooner or later American, and for that matter, world jurisprudence are going to have to face up to the existence, and use, of technologies of mind manipulation. And the sooner, the better. For those unaware of it, Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, shows the distinct signs of someone whose mind and emotions were manipulated. There is the peculiar fact of his strange “diary”, discovered after the Senator’s murder, in which statements like “RFK must die” were repeated over and over. There is also the strange fact that Sirhan, a relatively mild and meek fellow and certainly not one that exhibited any violent tendencies, cannot remember shooting the Senator at all.
There is, too, the strange behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murderer, Jack Ruby, that I and other JFK assassination researchers have recounted(I did so in LBJ and the Conspiracy to Kill Kennedy). Ruby, for those not aware of it, acted strangely during the murder of Oswald. Police officers who wrestled him away from Oswald recount that Ruby’s hand was tightly clenched on his pistol, repeatedly attempting to pull the trigger long after his gun was no longer pointed at Oswald. Once in his cell, Ruby acted agitated and anxious, almost manic, until he learned Oswald had died, at which his behavior changed dramatically: he calmed completely down, as if a burden had been lifted.  Strange behavior for a man who faced the electric chair. Some suggest that Ruby, too, was a candidate for mind manipulation.
To this list we might add the Batman theater alleged murderer’s strange behavior, the Navy yard shooting, the strange goings on at Sandy Hook, and now, yes, alleged Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnayev(this article courtesy of Ms. P.H.):
Tamerlan Tsarnaev Was Hearing Voices, Afraid Someone Was Controlling His Mind
The key here is the following, and think of Sirhan Sirhan here, or Jack Ruby’s strange behavior:

“In a five-month investigation that spoke to people who knew the Tsarnaevs closely, the Boston Globe found that Tamerlan was paranoid that someone had taken control of his mind.”
“’ He believed in majestic mind control, which is a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist,’ Donald Larking, a 67-year-old who attended a Boston mosque with Tamerlan, told the Globe. ’You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things. Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him.’
“Tamerlan reportedly told his mother that he felt like “there were two people living inside him,” but she refused the advice of one of his friends to seek help.
“’Tamerlan had some form of schizophrenia,’ a family friend speculated. ‘That, combined with smoking marijuana and head trauma from boxing had all made him ill.’”

Marijuana, head trauma, or mind control, or both?  Well, the technology for projecting voices into someone’s brain certainly exists, and it can not really be a surprise to any reguilar reader here that the Diabolically Apocalyptic Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is working on its own version(again, thanks to Ms. P.H. for finding this gem):
The Voice of God Weapon Returns
Indeed, in Genes, Giants, Monsters, and Men I pointed out that there were patents, taken out almost 20, and in some cases, 30 or more years ago, for methods of “projecting voices” (of God or whomever) or even creating certain moods or emotional states, into people;’s brains using a variety of techniques including microwave transmissions! In other words, if it’s being talked about just now, openly admitted, then it’s been around for a while folks.
Imagine, now, being able to project such possibilities not simply on individuals, but whole populations. Imagine, in conjunction with this, the possibilities I raised a few days ago, of the manipulation of memory on a group basis, and the fact that some people “remember” certain events as happening (i.e., famous people’s deaths), and others do not. Add in a soupcon of internet generated hoaxes of the same, et voila! you have a real social engineering tool of almost unimaginable power and scope(remember all those hundreds of Iraqi
s surrendering en masse during the First Gulf War? Remember that they were saying Allah told them to do it? Ms. P.H., Ms. George Ann Hughes, I, and others have discussed this possibility privately for years).
To be sure, there are people crazy enough and evil enough to shoot at children or bomb public events… but there are also people crazy enough, and evil enough, to design and use the technologies that can manipulate relatively mild mannered people into doing the same.  These are the accessories to the fact, the unindicted co-conspirators, and defense attornies in high profile cases should start taking it seriously, and using their subpoena powers accordingly.

Cowboys ....suck ! hehe

VIDEO: Violent Game of ‘Knockout’ Breaks Out at Brooklyn Mall After Hundreds of Teens Plan Mass Looting on Facebook, Twitter

Dec. 27, 2013  Jason Howerton  

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/27/video-violent-game-of-knockout-breaks-out-at-brooklyn-mall-after-hundreds-of-teens-plan-mass-looting-on-facebook-twitter/

• Related:

• 'Knockout Game',
• Facebook,
• Social Media,
• Twitter,
• Video

Hundreds of rowdy teenagers shut down a Brooklyn mall, trashing stores and reportedly assaulting security guards during day-after Christmas sales on Thursday. The teens reportedly used Facebook and Twitter to plan mass looting, vowing to put the mall “on tilt.”

More than “400 crazed teens grabbed and smashed jars of candy, stole cheap items such as baby balloons and beat up security guards at Kings Plaza Shopping Center in Mill Basin between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., merchants said,” according to the New York Post.

Further, sources also told the Post that a violent game of “knockout” broke out on the upper level of the mall. There were fears that at least of the teens may have had a gun. Watch some of the video footage reportedly showing the wild scene at Kings Plaza (Content warning):

WABC-TV reports that the flash mob may have been started by a shirt one girl was wearing that included a picture and an ugly message about another girl. The girls reportedly responded to a message on Facebook to meet at the mall.

“Videos posted online show the unruly teenagers in the mall, and at least one was taken down by a police officer. Some of the videos appear to have been taken on the second floor, near the Best Buy store,” the report states.

Abu Taleb, a clerk at Candy Plaza 2, told the New York Post he’s never seen anything like the chaotic scene that unfolded at the mall on Thursday. “I’m so scared,” he said. “I know they will come back.”

“I was begging them to stop. There were a lot of kids hundreds of kids… [Security] would chase them out one door and they would come back in another door,” the clerk added.

Screengrab via the Daily Mail

Screengrab via the Daily Mail

Screengrab via the Daily Mail

Clerks at other stores were also terrified and forced to roll down the metal gates protecting their stores as security and police attempted to break up the unruly mob. The mall remained closed for about an hour, according to the Post’s sources.

“People were getting really scared. A tall white guy with a grey bubble coat was wearing a ski mask and a skull cap and he had his hand under his coat like he was holding a gun,” a perfume merchant recalled.

Some of the teens took to social media to brag about the mob violence, including the assault of security guards.

(H/T: Daily Mail)

–

Clean Energy Presents “Perfect Storm” for Utilities

Monday, December 23, 2013 

By Nick Cunningham, OilPrice.com:
A new report from UBS finds that renewable energy and energy storage are together presenting a “perfect storm” for big utilities. The declining cost of solar and energy efficiency threaten to upend centralized electricity generation, putting the utility business model in jeopardy. Grid parity has already been achieved in certain parts of the world where conventional electricity rates are high and renewable resources are plentiful.
Renewable energy is beginning to cut into the bottom line for U.S. utilities. The average price for solar PV modules declined by 80% between 2008 and 2012. Net metering policies and innovative financing schemes like SolarCity’s leasing model are making distributed generation – where consumers generate power on-site – much more financially viable. This leads to a utility “death spiral,” in which utilities begin to lose customers, forcing them to jack up rates to cover lost revenue, which in turn pushes more people away. As of 2011, about three-quarters of U.S. utilities had a BBB credit rating or worse, indicating a striking lack of confidence in their financial future. In 2000, less than 40% of utilities earned such an abysmal grade.
This concept is not new, but UBS’ report suggests the trend is picking up steam, particularly in developed markets with flat electricity demand including parts of the United States, Europe, and Australia. Data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) shows that electricity sales have declined in four of the last five years in the U.S. While some of the drop off is attributable to the financial crisis and subsequent recession, energy efficiency and distributed generation are playing a key role. According to the EIA, “[g]rowing installed capacity of behind-the-meter sources of generation (largely from rooftop solar) is displacing some electricity sales that would otherwise occur.”
The latest UBS report finds that not only is solar PV eating into the utilities’ customer base, but it is also shaving off peak demand. Solar generates the most output during mid-afternoons, when demand is at its highest. With variable costs for renewables essentially nil, they beat out more expensive fossil fuel units. The result is leading to curtailed generation from big power plants along with lower peak electricity prices – a nightmare for utilities.
The unfolding transition to cleaner energy will force utilities to respond in a few ways. Some are fighting incentives that promote clean energy, as seen in the brutal fight in Arizona over its net metering policy. Another approach is for utilities to get into the clean energy game, which many have been doing for some time. The latest example came on December 16 when Warren Buffet’s MidAmerican Energy placed a $1 billion order for wind turbines in Iowa, as “a hedge for our customers going forward in an era of reduced coal generation,” according to MidAmerican’s CEO Bill Fehrman.
Related article: Tasmania Seeking 100% Renewable Energy by 2020
Yet another approach is to scale back generation and embrace the bold new world of distributed generation. In Germany, several utilities have announced power plant closures and are considering transitioning into a model where they offer energy “services,” such as trading and advice to customers, according to The Economist. Germany may be a harbinger of the future – in June 2013 prices actually went negative because of so much green power on the grid at one time. Germany’s two biggest utilities, E.On and RWE, have both seen their net income drop by one-third since 2010.
Earlier this year NRG CEO David Crane warned about the looming decline of the Big Utility, arguing that distributed generation poses a “mortal threat to the existing utility system.” More telling was a January 2013 report from the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities, which concluded that distributed generation presents a “game changer” – strong words from an organization with an interest in preserving the confidence of investors. Add to the pile the latest UBS report, which concludes that utilities will not be able to survive in their current form. By Nick Cunningham, OilPrice.com.
The move by banking regulators to ban proprietary trading at banks could put an end to Wall Street’s dominance in the commodity hedging game. Oil majors will benefit, but not smaller oil and gas producers. Read.... Banks’ Exit From Commodity Trading Good for Big Oil

Next Shoe to Drop in Broke California’s Lopsided 'Recovery'

Saturday, December 28, 2013 

If you come to San Francisco or Silicon Valley and look around, you’d arrive at the conclusion that California is booming, that companies jump through hoops to hire people, that they douse them with money, stock options, and free lunches. You’d see engineers spend lavishly and drive up rents and home prices to where landlords react with record evictions of the less-lucky. You’d see Google buses bring in people and trigger mini-demonstrations. You’d see entire layers of long-time residents getting pushed out because it has just gotten too expensive. In San Francisco, you’d see throngs of tourists from China and other places, spending money hand over fist. And there are a few other pockets in California where money is no objective.
But in the rest of the state, the picture isn’t that rosy. Total unemployment, officially, is still 8.5%, though that’s far better than the hellish 12.4% in February 2010. Of those unemployed, 28% have been jobless for over a year. Those receiving unemployment benefits – a fraction of the total unemployed – have dropped from 1.5 million to 712,000, whether they found jobs or just fell off the list. But, as the LA Times reported, there are still 400,000 fewer jobs in the state than there were before the crisis. So finding a job, if you aren’t into software, consumer tracking, or life sciences, is tough.  
The unemployment debacle has been expensive. Employers pay payroll-based unemployment insurance into a fund that then covers the 26 weeks of unemployment benefits that the state pays. But during the crisis, unemployment skyrocketed, and by January 2009, California’s unemployment system became one of the first in the nation to go broke.
California itself went broke; in July that year, it issued IOUs instead of checks to pay its bills. To keep state unemployment benefits flowing, the state had to beg the federal government for a bailout. By now, according to Loree Levy, a spokeswoman for the California Employment Development Department (EDD), the state owes the federal government $9.7 billion for state unemployment benefits.
How can California ever pay this back? Jacking up taxes on employers, raising eligibility requirements, and/or chopping benefits. None of them are palatable. None of them will help the economy. And the Legislature has not yet found, or even looked for, a solution.
Meanwhile, taxpayers – not employers – have paid $870 million in interest on this loan to the federal government. In its out-of-money desperation, the Legislature has been borrowing the interest from the State Disability Insurance (SDI) fund, which is funded by workers through payroll deductions. It’s up to taxpayers to put that money back in, explained to the National Employment Law Project. Shuffling money around like this is a common shell game in broke California.
In addition, unemployed Californians who couldn’t find a job within the 26 weeks of state unemployment insurance started receiving federally funded unemployment benefits under temporary programs Congress enshrined into law during the Great Recession, providing at their peak up to 73 weeks of extended benefits, for a total of 99 weeks, or just about two years. Some of those programs have since lapsed. Federal extended benefits in California are down to 37 weeks. Though average compensation is only $305 per week – “only” because California is expensive – it adds up: these programs have pumped another $45 billion in taxpayer money into the California economy.
Alas, Congress pointedly closed up shop for the holidays without extending these programs for the umpteenth time. And on Saturday, benefits for 222,000 long-term unemployed Californians – and about 1.3 million Americans overall – dissipate into the ether, leaving behind a $3.5 billion hole. Governor Jerry Brown warned two weeks ago that this would have “a ripple effect on the broader economy.”
So the state’s EDD sent out notices to the unlucky ones. It’s not like the EDD has its act together. Over Labor Day it was catapulted to national fame when it launched its super-duper software update, which promptly crashed and left claimants unpaid. Six weeks later, the backlog was still over 100,000 unpaid claimants, according to News10.
The cost of this wondrous project soared from $52 million in 2007 to at least $112 million, according to a legislative report last year. Deloitte Consulting was doing the work. It has already been paid at least $46 million. The IT industry has a stellar record at taking taxpayers to the cleaners with software that doesn’t work; see the fiasco of rolling out healthcare.gov.
The EDD is still processing many claims by hand. Claimants with problems – missing payments, for example – have a hard time getting anyone to help them. The Assembly Insurance Committee raked EDD officials over the coals last month. So just because you’re unemployed and eligible for benefits doesn’t mean you’re going to get paid, even if California has the money.
So on Saturday, an 222,000 people will be cut off. Many of them live inland, don’t write code, and don’t have PhDs in the life sciences. They’re living hand to mouth and have been plowing every dime of their benefits back into the economy. But no more. That $3.5 billion will no longer reach California. And then there are the $9.7 billion that California has to extract from taxpayers, employers, or workers to pay back Uncle Sam.
The newly benefit-less unemployed are going to join the other benefit-less unemployed in California, and they’re going to have to redouble their efforts to find a job. It will be tough, with 400,000 fewer jobs to go around.
But in Silicon Valley it’s easy to lose your sense of proportion when it comes to a few billion bucks. It’s a hotspot for Big Data and associated government spy-services, a juicy market. Investors clamor to get in. Scores of startups have sprung up. The hottest one is Palantir. Its valuation jumped 50% in three months – to $9 billion! Its technologies, designed for the CIA to track terrorists, have transitioned to track you and me. Read..... Silicon Valley Frenzy: Big Bucks, Big Data, and Spying

Can M-16′s defeat F-16′s in the coming civil war?

• we got some difficult days ahead   & we got 2 c it thru
• http://intellihub.com/2013/12/28/can-m-16s-defeat-f-16s-in-the-coming-civil-war/

By Dave Hodges | December 28, 2013

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

“It is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog”. This axiom is soon going to be put to the test in the United States

(INTELLIHUB) — Dr. Jim Garrow is a name you are going to be seeing a lot of in the truthful media for the foreseeable future. Garrow is a former deep cover CIA agent who has his hand on the pulse of the crises which are befalling America. What separates Dr. Garrow from many high level sources who are disgusted with the status quo, is that he is on the record and is publicly visible.
While many of the 200+ command level officers fired by Obama are informing many of us in the media about the current state of affairs, they are not on the record. Other than self-preservation, the major reason why these former military commanders are not on the record is because some of them are involved in planning a guerrilla war against the occupation forces commanded by this administration under the auspices of DHS. And this is precisely what Dr. Garrow stated on my December 22, 2013 show which you can listen to here. He also went on to say that a coup attempt is probable and that a prolonged guerrilla civil war is likely. All of  my sources state that the coming civil war will be a guerrilla war.

Why the Coming Civil War Will Be a Guerrilla War

There are a total of 1,455,375 active personnel in the US military. The United States has over 200,000 troops stationed in 144 countries. These 200,000 men and women will not likely be a factor in the coming conflict and will prove to be in grave danger in the coming conflict.
I constantly have former military write to my website and proclaim their allegiance to the Constitution and pledge to destroy all enemies both foreign and domestic. I do not doubt their resolve or courage, however, there are not 30 million combat ready veterans who would be ready to fight as they frequently claim. There are only 1.8 million veterans who are under the age of 35, which would be the prime fighting age for any resistance force. This means that in the best case scenario, that any resistance that the occupation forces could muster would consist of about 2.5 million men who have combat training in both our active duty personnel and our veterans. The mere size of the army that the Chinese could muster, in addition to the DHS, the Russians and the Canadians, would dwarf any force that the American people could place on the battlefield. And if the confrontation came following a power grid take down, the odds would be worse.
The only choice that this country would have to resist the coming occupation and genocidal purge would be to make the war a guerrilla war.

The Sides Are Drawn

The coming civil war will consist of the present administration , the DHS, the Chinese, the Russians and the Canadians versus the American military and the American people.
Could a guerrilla war succeed? Is America equipped to fight a guerrilla war?

Four Types of Conflict

Military strategists identify four levels of conflict; (1) nuclear war is the trump card of all conflicts; 2) conventional warfare; (3) guerrilla warfare; and, (4) terrorism.
Terrorism is the least preferred option by any insurgent group. With terrorism, there is absolutely no hope of final victory because territory is never occupied. For that reason, nobody aspires to engage in terrorism if they have a viable alternative and the American people do have a choice given how well armed we are. However, terrorism arising out of a defeated guerrilla force is a distinct possibility as it would represent American guerrilla’s fallback position should they be defeated.
Please allow me to make one point perfectly clear, all of us, in these dire circumstances will be front line participants. Being a sheep will not ensure survival, it will only mean that you will die like a sheep. Most Americans will be targets of the occupation forces as the MIAC Report which labeled Libertarians, Constitutionalists, Second Amendment Supporters, Ron Paul Supporters, veterans and now Christians as domestic terrorists. Does it make a little more sense as to why DHS made these bold proclamations as to who is a  domestic terrorist?
DHS understands and has demonstrated their understanding of these facts and has also prepared for what I just wrote about in the previous paragraph.

Can a Guerrilla War Succeed?

Guerrilla warfare, for most of human history, is not new. Tribal war, which traditionally pits one guerrilla force against another, is the oldest form of warfare. The new “conventional” form of warfare, which pits guerrillas against “conventional” forces, is more recent as it arose in Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago.
The good news for future American freedom fighters is that guerrilla war has been getting more successful since 1945, but unfortunately guerrilla fighters still lose most of the time. An analysis of past conflicts featuring guerrilla war, reveals that only 25% of guerrilla forces, out of 443 such conflicts since 1775, were successful. The government prevailed almost 64% of the time with the remainder of the conflicts ended in a stalemate. Conversely, since the end of WWII, the percentage of success for guerrilla forces has indeed gone up to 39.6%. Yet that still means that government forces have continued to prevail 51% of the time.
When the American people engage in a guerrilla war in the upcoming years, the people have less than a 40% chance of success.
Guerrilla wars are rarely short and as a result do not favor the American culture and our collective psyche of instant gratification. When Americans flip the switch on the wall, we expect the light to come on. Will Americans set aside their entitlements as well as their entrenched soft lifestyle and rise to the occasion? Only time will tell.

Successful Guerrilla War

The Vietnamese culture with an external locus of control predominating the people in which the group is more important than the individual is the perfect mindset for guerrilla fighters. This could prove to be the American rebels biggest challenge because guerrilla warfare is not something that one does like driving over a speed bump. It is a way of life, a very hard way of life filled with misery, extreme sacrifice and unspeakable losses.
Successful guerrilla leaders such as Lawrence of Arabia, Mao, Castro and Giap all concur that there are three phases of any guerrilla war. However, before the phases can unfold there are two preconditions which must be met.
The first condition which is a prerequisite for guerrilla war, is based upon the fact that there has to be a decisive battle for the belief systems of the people as a whole. The globalists have invested billions of dollars in order to dominate the mainstream media. On the other side is the alternative media. Both sides are vying for control of the belief systems of the country.
There are two very distinct ideologies playing out today in the court of public opinion. On one hand, the future rebels are adept at exposing the loss of national sovereignty and civil liberties every chance they get. Conversely, the globalist dominated media is spending billions of dollars to convince the masses that there is no such thing as a conspiracy theory and despite some governmental incompetence, the government loves and protects its people. And the globalists are being somewhat effective. Have you ever noticed that when you are describing a globalist inspired conspiracy such as what happened at Benghazi, and no matter how well documented your position is, that your audience frequently responds with “you must be one of these conspiracy theorists.” Our facts are rarely attacked because they are accurate, but the idea of the existence of any kind of conspiracy is what is challenged. This kind of programming coming from the media is brilliant and effective. Who is winning this war of words? The jury is still out, but the unmistakable conclusion is that the ideological battle lines for the upcoming conflict have clearly been drawn.
The globalists sell the sheep on the notion that we have to control you to protect you (from a threat of our creation), and the other side is saying, “we will take our chances, give us freedom.”
The second precondition which must be met prior to descending into guerrilla war consists of both sides engaging in an arms race. In response to the Obama administration’s threat of seizing our guns for the false flag events of the Aurora Batman massacre and Sandy Hook, Americans went on a gun-buying frenzy which continues to this day. DHS has engaged i,n their own arms buildup as they have purchased 2.2 billion rounds of ammunition to go with 2700 new armored personnel carriers and that is not all. The federal government has invested in 30,000 drones, super soldier robots and intelligence gathering techniques which are mind-blowing.
The architect of the Viet Cong Resistance, Vo Nguyen Giap, once said that the war against the French, and later against the Americans was a “People’s War”. The center of gravity is always the people. This isn’t only the center of gravity of the enemy but also the center of gravity of one’s own forces. The “hearts and minds” of the people decide the victor in any “People’s War”.

Vo Nugyen Giap

Giap further proclaimed that, “The war of liberation of the Vietnamese people proves that, in the face of an enemy as powerful as he is cruel, victory is possible only by uniting the whole people within the bosom of a firm and wide national united front based on the worker-peasant alliance.”(The Military Art of People’s War, p. 97-98).

“Using fear is the key to motivating the people to fight”.                             General Giap

Giap tells us that fear of the oppressor is a strong ally. Tell your neighbors about DHS and their 2.2 billion rounds of ammunition and their 2700 armored personnel carriers. Speak about the Civilian Inmate Labor Program. Let people know they can be snatched off the street without due process under the NDAA. Talk to your friends about the detention camps and the Wackenhut buses that will take you there along with the trains containing shackles. Ask your neighbors how we can pay off $238 trillion dollars in unfunded mandates?  Make your friends see that a currency collapse is imminent.
It is time to scare the excrement out our fellow countrymen because these threats are real and they are life-threatening for the majority. Fact-based fear and repetition of the message are our best friends in terms of driving the public to our side. Subsequently, when Phase Two of the guerrilla war commences, we have the support of the people. However, don’t waste time on the hard core sheep among us. We do not need a majority to wage a successful guerrilla war.
Giap and his colleagues were brilliant at couching their words in such a way as to demonize his enemies, thus drawing closer support from the people. Notice his use of the term “The People’s War.” The “people” already resent the elite because they know that they are not and never will be part of the elite.
Average people understand that the golden rule is based upon those who have the gold, get to make the rules. Giap was a master at turning envy into resentment and then into hatred. People emote before they act. Consequently, we in the alternative media need to continue to appeal to the emotions of the people.
Remember, the use of the term “people” builds a sense of collective identity that is needed in every successful revolution. Therefore, fellow patriots, every word coming out of your mouth must speak of these problems in the collective. It is us vs. them, not black vs. white, gay vs. straight, citizen vs. illegal. The latter conflicts are the creation of the globalists to distract us while they continue to enslave us. This is class warfare and you need to pound the message into people’s head that the leaders of the major corporations pay no tax and you work until June of each year paying off your debt to this criminal government.
If you are talking to your friends about baseball, the weather and your child’s report card, do not fail to drop in a zinger about the globalists.   

Winning the Minds of the People 

The late Colonel David Hackworth, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran, once told PBS that he knew very early on, that if the US was going to win the Vietnam War, they had to win the people. The French made the mistake of ignoring the people and the Americans committed the same mistake. The Viet Minh and later the Viet Cong won the hearts and the minds of the people and thus, won each guerrilla conflict.
Hackworth related the following metaphor in his PBS interview, “The guerrilla is the fish and the people are the water. If you want to kill the fish, you remove the water. If you want to kill the guerrilla, you remove the people, because they find all kinds of assistance, medical help, they put out the booby-traps, they provide the intelligence and they provide the trail-watchers. They are the sea in which the guerrilla swims.”

Defeating a Superior Force?

Most people wrongly assume that American civil war will fail because the other side will have the most devastating weapons and greater numbers of military personnel. However, this fact did not prove to be the decisive factor in Vietnam. The third factor necessary to successfully engaging in a civil war will consist of the resolve of the rebel force.
Over two centuries ago, Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu, spoke about the importance of placing an inferior military force on “death’s ground”.  The term, death’s ground, simply means that surrender is not an option as it equates to sure death. If an insurgent group feels that it has no choice but to win or die, they will become a formidable fighting force regardless of the discrepancies in military prowess. Therefore, it is incumbent for all of us to keep pointing out how the other side is already preparing for genocide through the use of catastrophic false flag events, mass roundups and indiscriminate executions. The motto of any rebel force must be that for every ten the enemy sends to our shores, we must endeavor to send nine home in a body bag for in the end, any insurgent group will achieve final victory through attrition. The civil war must become too expensive for the oppressing force to absorb.

How Long Would a Successful Civil War Last?

There is not a hard and fast answer to the question as to how long would the American people would have to resist until the opposition makes a risk-reward decision to discontinue the oppression. The Russians, the DHS and the Canadians could be worn down in a few years. The Russians demonstrated their culture’s lack of resolve in Afghanistan. The Canadians are almost as soft as the American people are today. The DHS will emotionally crumble in a few years. However, any formidable military force from an Asian culture will likely have staying power.
The French dominated Vietnam for ages. However, when the Vietnamese people were invaded by the brutal forces of Japan in 1941, the people were placed on death’s ground. When Japan was defeated in 1945, the French returned to claim their former colony. However, Giap and the Viet Minh, the predecessor to the Viet Cong, refused to capitulate and the Giap forces defeated the French in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Are you keeping score, to this point? The Vietnamese people had been fighting nonstop for 13 years.
After the defeat of the French, French Indochina was partitioned by the UN into North and South Vietnam and it was done in such a way to guarantee the continuance of the hostilities and a civil war between North and South ensued. Eventually, the United States sent ground troops to Vietnam in 1964. The war continued until 1975. Yes, that is correct, in order to achieve final independence, the Vietnamese people endured 34 years of war. The Vietnamese used to have a saying, “Born in the North, to die in the South”.
The Chinese and the North Koreans will have the same resolve. However, the military planners in this country have plans for dealing with the Chinese very early on in this coming conflict based upon this principle and this will be revealed in the next part of this series.

America Will Fight

You say that you do not have the stomach for such a conflict? It is too late! War has already been declared on you when this administration passed the NDAA which gave Obama the authority to snatch Americans off of the street without due process for indefinite detention or worse. War has already been declared on you when Obama enacted Executive Order 13603 which allows the government to conscript its citizens in work brigades irrespective of health and age. War has already been declared on you when DHS reached agreements with the major league sports franchises and the malls to allow their facilities to be used as detention camps. War was declared upon the American people when an illegal alien, who was bred by communists, to bring totalitarianism to America was allowed to occupy the White House.
Personally, I do not wish for this scenario to unfold. Therefore, how can I be sure America will rise to the occasion and fight? When Americans witness their friends, family and neighbors being eliminated with extreme prejudice, Americans will come to realize that we have been placed on death’s ground and we will have no choice but to fight to the death.

When Will the Civil War Commence?

The script for civil war is actually very easy to predict. First, there will be a series of false flag attacks which will give the administration the authority to declare martial law. This will be followed by the “inviting” of Russians, Chinese and Canadians to help administer the martial law in the name of protecting America from domestic terrorists (Constitutionalists, Libertarians, Bible believing Christians, pro Second Amendment supporters, etc.).
Gun confiscations will soon commence under these conditions. Artificially contrived food and water shortages will be used to subjugate the people and lure the population into various detention centers. The price for possessing a weapon or possessing more than three days of food and water will be immediate termination. Dissident opposition, such as members of the alternative media and all others opposed  to the new regime will be executed by the martial law forces based upon the threat matrix scores being compiled by the NSA surveillance spy grid. How many times have you been to this website, or websites like this? It does not take much to make you an enemy of the state.
The next part of this series will look at the course of events which will likely occur after this administration “burns down its own metaphorical Reichstag”. Also, the ancillary figures which will factor into the coming of the Second American Civil War will be examined.

Dave Hodges is an award winning psychology, statistics and research professor, a college basketball coach, a mental health counselor, a political activist and writer who has published dozens of editorials and articles in several publications such as FREEDOMS PHOENIX, NEWS WITH VIEWS and THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC. Check out TheCommonSenseShow.com

A Cruel Christmas Gift: Jobless Benefits Cut Off for 1.3 Million Americans

By Kate Randall and Barry Grey

Global Research, December 28, 2013

World Socialist Web Site

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy

 

Extended unemployment benefits will end today for 1.3 million Americans, just three days after Christmas. The cruel cutoff of income for the long-term jobless and their families exemplifies the contempt of the Obama administration and the entire political establishment for the working class. The move threatens millions of unemployed workers and their families with poverty.
Never before in the post-war history of the United States has the government cut off extended unemployment benefits while jobless levels remained as high as they presently stand.
In the course of 2014, another 3.6 million workers will exhaust their state unemployment benefits and be left with nothing. Taking into account family members who rely on these benefits as their sole source of cash income, some 5 percent of the US population will face destitution as a result of the cutoff of these funds.
A renewal of the extended benefits was left out of the budget deal reached in Congress earlier this month, with the approval of the White House and congressional Democrats. The total cost of extended unemployment benefits would be $25 billion in 2014, less than 1 percent of overall federal spending.
The same Congress that allowed the jobless benefits to expire voted December 19 to authorize nearly $633 billion in military spending for 2014, money that will go toward funding the war in Afghanistan, overwhelmingly opposed by the American people, and Washington’s preparations for even more bloody military interventions.
Having deliberately excluded an extension of the federal benefit program from their negotiations with the Republicans on the two-year budget, Obama and the congressional Democrats are hypocritically posturing as supporters of extended benefits. They have submitted a bill to restart the program and called for a vote shortly after the New Year.
The administration-backed bill, if passed, will merely extend the program for three months. And any extension undoubtedly will, like previous extensions passed since the beginning of the recession, include further restrictions on eligibility and duration of benefits, stripping increasing numbers of unemployed workers of cash assistance. Moreover, cuts in other social programs will likely be mandated to offset the cost of any extension of jobless pay.
More than four years after the official end of the recession, the United States is a nation plagued by growing poverty and widening social inequality. But for the financial oligarchy, things have never been better.
The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday carried a front-page article with the celebratory headline “Big Rally Pumps Up Wall Street Bonuses.” With the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 24 percent this year, the newspaper explained, annual compensation for investment bankers is expected to rise 6 percent and stock traders are projected to earn 12 percent more this year than last.
For the vast majority of Americans, conditions continue to deteriorate. A recent study by the US Conference of Mayors found that 83 percent of the 25 cities it surveyed reported an increase in emergency food requests, while 64 percent saw an increase in the number of homeless families. The answer of the ruling elite to these conditions has been to slice even more deeply into what little remains of the social safety net in the US.
On November 1, the federal government began implementing $11 billion in cuts over three years to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps. These cuts, the first in the program’s history, reduced benefits to less than $1.40 per person per meal and eliminated the equivalent of two days of food every month for 47.7 million people. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are currently negotiating the terms of further cuts in the food stamp program.
The budget deal reached this month keeps in place the vast majority of the “sequester” cuts, slashing hundreds of billions of dollars across a wide range of government departments and social programs, affecting tens of millions of working people and their families. It also increases the proportion of their salaries new federal employees will pay into their pension fund, setting the stage for deeper attacks modeled on the looting of Detroit workers’ pensions in that city’s bankruptcy.
The growth of poverty alongside ever more obscene levels of wealth for a tiny financial elite is not simply the result of impersonal economic tendencies. It is the intended outcome of policies carried out by the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve Board in behalf of the American corporate-financial aristocracy.
Just days after Congress passed the budget allowing long-term jobless benefits to expire, the Federal Reserve announced it would continue to keep its benchmark interest rate at near-zero at least into 2015. At the same time, it pledged to continue pumping tens of billions of dollars into the financial markets every month, although at a somewhat reduced level, for months to come.
Wall Street celebrated this guarantee of virtually free credit to the banks and finance houses by sending share values to new record heights.
The ruthless assault on the working class and the funneling of public funds to the banks and corporations are two sides of the same ruling class strategy, whose aim is an even more massive redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top. Nothing is off limits in the rapacious drive of the capitalist class to grab every bit of social wealth it can. Every social gain of the past century is in its crosshairs: public education, medical care for seniors and the poor, pensions, restraints on child labor, health and safety rules, environmental regulations, workers’ compensation, public museums and libraries.
What is unfolding is nothing short of a social counterrevolution.
The one “reform” touted by the Obama White House—the Affordable Care Act—is already being exposed as a scheme to reduce and ration medical services for the vast majority of Americans, while boosting the profits of the insurance companies and corporations.
The fight-back by the working class requires a political and revolutionary mobilization aimed at taking political power and instituting a program based on the interests of working people, not the insatiable drive of the ruling elite for ever-greater wealth.
Workers can secure their social rights to jobs, education, medical care, pensions, housing and access to culture only by challenging the entire framework of the capitalist system and its two big business parties. A mass political working class movement, armed with a socialist program, must be developed to reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.

HOW THEY FAKED THE WORLD'S GREATEST WAR PHOTO

Posted by George Freund on December 26, 2013

In a way this is the story of Time Catalysts as well. It is a timely snippet of history reserved for the aficienados of mind control and programming because none of the details surrounding the picture were true, and none of the details concerning the photographer were real. Yet he was developed as one of the greatest war photographers of all time. The masters of illusion control the debate. They set the stage even today with the moving pictures on the telescreen. We, as partakers of the venom, accept the illusion as fact and succumb to the effect. What has fallen in this image is not the soldier. He did truly fall but not in the manner stated. It has always been alleged he was shot in the Spanish Civil War. Though he was a Republican, he was not shot. The photos were taken during maneuvers miles from the actual fighting. The title of the picture was The Falling Soldier. The photographer was Robert Capa, but that is a long story because there was no Robert Capa. His persona was a creation that was eventually adopted by the man who may very well have acquired the image from his deceased former love flame killed in the war in a Stalinist purge.



Gerda Taro nee Gerta Pohorylle

The story is deep and complex and starts as a love story. Two star crossed idealists born Jewish in a rising spectre of intolerance come together with a passion for politics and photography. They traverse the road of the left in resistance to the right rabidly sweeping Europe. They form union in Paris the eternal city of love and romance. Who could blame them. The female half of the equation was born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart, Germany in 1910. She fell out of favour with the Nazis and fled after an arrest. In 1935 she met the other real person Endre Friedman born a Hungarian Jew. They fell in love and formed a photographic union. In order to better market their pictures they created the persona of Robert Capa an American.



Robert Capa nee Endre Friedman

An epic struggle was on the horizon. The war drums were beating in Spain. The age old battle between the left and the right was in progress. Europe was the prize. Who should win? All the great thinkers, writers and artists were united in the cause of a socialist paradise. The likes of Orwell, Hemingway, Waugh, Yeats, and Eliot were the calibre of intellectual flocking to the cause. Some were for the Nationalists. Some were for the Republicans who were socialist by philosophy. The movie greats, too, were united in the fight. The all time movie epoch Casablanca was based on the anti fascist struggle. In fact Ingrid Bergman fell to the charms of the great Robert Capa. How could we not be motivated to the struggle? There was one mistake made by these great pillars of wisdom. We exist in a quantum universe. All were right and all were wrong, and they killed for it. Both the left and the right are part of the same body politic Satan masquerading as an angel of light. That is why the Christ of the great celebration left us with one final Commandment to love one another. It was the simplest way to offer protection to a very complex universe.



One of Gerda's masterpieces

Gerta adopted a new name as well Gerda Taro from the Japanese artist Taro Okamoto. In times of great social upheavel another identity may be a safe habor. The eve of a rapidly approaching world war was such a time. Our lovers went to Spain and covered the war as photographers on the Republican side. The great deceiver Satan loosed his tentacles. Socialism like fascism has little use of the great faiths and their teachings. Gerda fell to the affections of others others in the cause the likes of Hemingway and Orwell. Endre fully enveloped in the role of Robert proposed marriage. He was rebuffed. Gerda started her own company. She passionately photographed the war. Robert withdrew to Paris like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca perhaps in despair. Only this time there was no Captain Renault played by Claude Rains to round up the usual suspects while our lovers fled. Gerda followed the Republicans after their retreat at the Battle of Brunete. Unknown to all the idealists were conducting a Stalinist purge of those not left enough. Gerda fell in under the treads of a Republican tank. She died later in hospital. There were stories she fell off a running board of the vehicle she was riding on. There were witnesses the tank drove into the car. Willy Brandt the future Chancellor of Germany was one of the witnesses and knew of the purge. Robert gained possession of her photographs. There is a body of opinion The Falling Soldier was hers. Much of Robert's work was lost in Mexico only recently coming back to view. Gerda's negatives were included.



The picture was published as Robert's. It was said to be the anarchist militiaman Federico Borrell García. The difficulty lies in the fact they do not look alike. Garcia died at Cerro Muriano where the picture is alleged to have been taken. However, the location is really Espejo 30 miles distant. José Manuel Susperregui of the University of País Vasco published a book on the photo and determined the real location. The Barcelona newspaper El Periódico de Catalunya found the lay of the land as well. Richard Whelan, in This Is War! Robert Capa at Work posited the opinion that the photo was staged. From other negatives there were a series of photos the 6th and 7th showing another man falling. The published one was the 5th in the sequence. Other photographs of the man show him alive and well. It has been said they were snapped after the 'event' which may have been maneuvers. Robert was lost in the Viet Nam War on May 25, 1954 after he stepped on a land mine.



So you see there is nothing new under the sun. There are people in the shadow factory that play the game of Plato's Cave very well. They deceive us at crucial junctures to advance an ideology of both the left or the right. The truth that sets us free is their mortal enemy. Today many years later photographs and actors adorn the stage in Plato's Cave to manipulate our thoughts with false paradigms in the age old attempt at setting the world in the hands of evil. One of the latest was, of course, the Sandy Hook shooting. An actor was presented as a bereaved father. A dead victim mistakenly was photographed with the President another man who assumed an identity of an imaginary figure. They have come a long way. We have let them by not being critical. We are slaves to our emotions and the projections of Plato's Cave. I guess that's just LIFE until we change the channel. I believe the truth will set us free. All you have to do is embrace it.



They still fake everything. They are releasing Sandy Hook images on this first anniversary. Something noticeably absent is the blood on the floors. There is no point of impact in the falling soldier's body. There is no blood either. Nothing has changed with faking except maybe the audacity of the fakers.

Data brokers won’t even tell the government how it uses, sells your data

They do disclose consumer types like "credit reliant" and "resilient renter."

by Casey Johnston - Dec 21 2013, http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/12/data-brokers-wont-even-tell-the-government-how-it-uses-sells-your-data/

• Media Innovation
• Regulation

  A chart of the various ways that data brokers characterize their subjects.

Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation [PDF]

A Senate committee released a report this week that goes to great lengths to determine all of the things that data brokers, the companies that trade in consumer data, don’t want to talk about. The 35-page report describes some of the companies’ strategies for collecting and organizing data, but significant portions of the report discuss what the companies are unwilling to talk about: namely, where they get a lot of their data and where that data is going.
Companies covered in the report include well-known firms, like Datalogix and Acxiom, as well as credit reporting companies that also trade in consumer data, like Experian and TransUnion. In the report, the committee sets out to answer four questions: what data is collected, how specific it is, how it’s collected, and how it’s used. While the first two questions turned out to be reasonably easy to answer, the companies all but stonewalled the committee on substantial answers to the latter two.
The report harkens back repeatedly to the good old days of data collection, when many of the same companies queried used demographic information like zip codes to help marketers figure out where to send catalogs or area codes to figure out which towns to telemarket to. These days, our many interactions with the Internet—particularly financial ones—have resulted in an onslaught of data for these data brokers to not only collect, but to resell to interested parties.
Datalogix claimed to the committee that it has data on “almost every US household,” while Acxiom’s databases cover 700 million people worldwide. Types of data collected include consumer purchase and transaction information, available methods of payment, types of cars consumers buy, health conditions, and social media usage. Equifax specified that it knew such specific details as whether people have bought a particular kind of shampoo or soft drink in the last six months, how many whiskey drinks a person has had in the last month, or how many miles they’ve traveled in the last four weeks.
What the companies would not specify in full were their sources for consumer data. Three companies, Acxiom, Experian, and Epsilon, would not reveal the sources of their data, citing confidentiality clauses as the reason.
The other data brokers said that their data comes from free government and public databases, along with purchase or license data from “retailers,” “financial institutions,” and “other data brokers,” which were otherwise described as “third-party partners.”
The report mentions that companies acquire social media data specifically for inclusion in their databases. However, this information is difficult to connect to a profile without access to much of the metadata logged by the sites providing those services. Those sites even discourage trying to source that information outside their official avenues; as the report states, Facebook once asked data broker Rapleaf to dispose of data it had obtained by crawling the website. On the other hand, it’s well-known that companies like Facebook and Google re-sell “anonymized” data fed to their services by customers to third parties like these data brokers.
Acxiom also gets data from websites that collect data in exchange for coupons, discounts, or health insurance quotes. Beyond that, Acxiom only stated cryptically that “there are over 250,000 websites who state in their privacy policy that they share data with other companies for marketing and/or risk mitigation purposes.”
What the companies did reveal was how they package this information internally. Subjects are often scored by data brokers in order to be sold in segments to certain companies on parameters like their ability to be socially influenced or whether they are “frequent ‘text posters.’”

Opt out? Yeah, right...

The report had little to say about how consumers can protect themselves from having data collected on them. A brief section on opt-outs stated that a few of the data brokers offered such an option to customers.
But earlier sections indicate that, without a broad-stroke opt-out, a single data broker opt-out would be widely ineffective. For one, the case of Facebook forcing Rapleaf to delete data scraped from Facebook notes that Facebook couldn’t force companies that had bought the data from Rapleaf to delete it. Furthermore, the data source section indicates that data brokers frequently buy or license data from one another. In theory, this would effectively allow them to serve as each other’s backups in the case of an opt out. If a consumer requests deletion from one, the broker can comply and then re-request what it has already shared to its fellow brokers.
The report makes no legislative recommendations, but it encourages policymakers to be conscious of the data brokers’ activity, reminding them that consumers have no legal protection against either data collection or a legal right to know what information is being shuttled back and forth between brokers. As for consumers, the report has little to offer in the way of coping strategies. “They should expect that data brokers will draw on this data without their permission to construct detailed profiles on them reflecting judgments about their characteristics and predicted behaviors,” it concludes.