Monday, December 27, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Cambodia's missing 'jungle woman' found in toilet
Sal Lou, who has cared for Rochom P’nhieng for the past three years and says he is her father, said Monday that her health appeared to be improving after she received food, a shower and medical treatment.
“The health officials have allowed my daughter to stay in one room and are giving her medicine. My wife and I have stayed to look after her because we are afraid she will pull out her IV [drip],” Sal Lou said.
Rochom P’nhieng was discovered in the Ratanakkiri forest in January 2007. She has since lived with Sal Lou and his family, who say she is their daughter who went missing in 1989 while herding buffalo.
Now believed to be 29 years old, Rochom P’Nhieng had been living peacefully with the family for three and a half years before abruptly tearing off her clothes and escaping into the forest last month. After she had been missing for 10 days, neighbours discovered her stranded last Friday at the bottom of a local latrine.
Hing Phan Sakunthea, director of Ratanakkiri provincial hospital, said Monday that Rochom P’nhieng did not appear to be suffering any serious after-effects from the time she spent stranded in the toilet.
“I checked, and she has no big problems with her health,” Hing Phan Sakunthea said. “She just has a rash on her back and hands.”
Hing Phan Sakunthea added that a midwife at the hospital would be examining Rochom P’nhieng to see if she had been sexually assaulted prior to being trapped in the latrine, a scenario Sal Lou said he feared may have occurred.
“I suspect that my daughter was raped and then thrown into the bottom of the dugout toilet, but I am not 100 percent sure, so I asked the hospital officials to examine her,” Sal Lou said.
Chhay Thy, a provincial investigator for the local rights group Adhoc, said he had visited Rochom P’nhieng at the hospital on Monday. The rape suspcisions, he added, had arisen in part because of a neighbour who had previously been accused in a rape case.
“The doctors are looking after her and checking up on her health, but they have not yet determined whether she was raped or not,” Chhay Thy said.
Although she has never learned to fluently speak either Khmer or Phnang, the language of the ethnic minority group to which she belongs, Sal Lou says Rochom P’nhieng had been dressing herself normally and helping out around the house prior to absconding into the forest last month.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
Hackers and the Global Cyber War
He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.
He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.
"Greetings, fellow anons," it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed "our weapons of choice" and a stark message: people needed to show their "hatred".
Like most international conflicts, last week's internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.
Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.
Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."
The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.
But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".
At the heart of the conflict is the WikiLeaks founder, the enigmatic figure of Julian Assange – lionised by some as the Ned Kelly of the digital age for his continued defiance of a superpower, condemned by his US detractors as a threat to national security.
Calls for Assange to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage will return this week. The counteroffensive by Operation Payback is likely to escalate.
The targets include the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon – already assaulted once for its decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks-related material – Washington, Scotland Yard and the websites of senior US politicians. There is talk of infecting Facebook, which last week removed a page used by pro-WikiLeaks hackers, with a virus that spreads from profile to profile causing it to crash. No one seems certain where the febrile cyber conflict will lead, only that it has just begun.
London
At 9.15am last Tuesday a thin, white-haired figure left the Frontline Club, the west London establishment dedicated to preserving freedom of speech, and voluntarily surrendered to police. After two weeks of newspaper revelations concerning countries from Korea to Nigeria, and figures such as Silvio Berlusconi and Prince Andrew, a warrant for Assange's arrest had just been received by British police. It was from Swedish prosecutors eager to question him on unrelated allegations of rape.
The response to WikiLeaks' cable release had been savage, particularly in the US. Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, said those who passed the secrets to Assange should be executed. Sarah Palin demanded Assange be hunted in the same way an al-Qaida operative would be pursued. The US attorney general Eric Holder ordered his officials to begin a criminal investigation into Assange with the intention of putting him on trial in the US. News of his arrest, even on unrelated charges, pleased the US authorities. "That sounds like good news to me," said Robert Gates, US secretary of defence.
Yet even as Assange prepared to appear in a London court last week, an unlikely alliance of defenders had begun plotting to turn on the forces circling WikiLeaks. They were beginning to attack Amazon, which had been persuaded to sever links with WikiLeaks by Joe Lieberman, who heads the US Senate's homeland security committee; they also hit every domain name system (DNS) that broke WikiLeaks.org's domain name: Mastercard, Visa and Paypal, which stopped facilitating donations to the site, and the Swiss post office which froze WikiLeaks' bank account.
Operation Payback was hitting back alongside a fledgling offshoot, Operation Avenge Assange, both operating under the Anonymous umbrella. These are a loose alliance of hackers united by a near-obsessive desire for information libertarianism who congregate on the website 4Chan.org.
The cyberwar did not only involve obvious symbols of authority, though. For days, from their darkened chatrooms, the Anonymous ones had been watching a hacker called the Jester who seemed to be co-ordinating a series of attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks. They had noticed the Jester's pro-censorship credentials, deducing he must be receiving help. Speculation mounted that the Jester was a shadowy conduit working at the behest of the US authorities. "We wondered who was really behind his anti-WikiLeaks agenda," said a source.
Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority.
In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended. As Assange was remanded in custody and taken to Wandsworth jail, Anonymous vowed to "punish" the institutions that had axed links with the website under pressure from the US authorities. The websites of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal were brought down; so too the Swedish government's.
One Anonymous hacker said: "I've rambled on and on about the 'oncoming internet war' for years. I'm not saying I know how to win. But I am saying the war is on."
Stockholm
Unsurprisingly, the timing of Assange's arrest and aspects of Sweden's initial handling of the sexual allegations prompted his lawyer Mark Stephens to denounce the moves as politically motivated. A computer hacker himself, Assange, 39, achieved both instant notoriety and adulation when WikiLeaks published batches of damaging US files relating to the Afghan war in July. This fame led him to Stockholm a month later to deliver a lecture entitled: "Truth is the first casualty of war." It was a sellout. One leftwing commentator likened it to "having Mick Jagger in town".
That night – 14 August – Assange stayed with the conference organiser at her flat in Södermalm, a former working class area of the city centre that has become Stockholm's equivalent of London's Islington. Three days later, in keeping with his habit of regularly changing addresses, Assange stayed in Enköping, a town 100 miles from Stockholm, with another woman who had also attended his lecture on the importance of truth in a war zone.
Assange left Sweden on 18 August and the women went together to the police the next day. According to Claes Borgström, their lawyer, the women did not know each other before going to the police. Initially, he said, the women wanted some advice, but the police officer concluded a crime had been committed and contacted the duty public prosecutor.
In court last week Assange was alleged to have had sex with unlawful coercion with a woman who was asleep and to have sexually molested the other by having sex without a condom.
In Sweden, among the country's community of hackers and left-leaning political activists, the timing is viewed as coincidental rather than conspiratorial.
"The Americans are very lucky indeed that Assange screwed around in Sweden, a society which takes rape allegations very seriously,'' said Åsa Linderborg, culture editor of the leftwing Aftonbladet tabloid. Film-maker Bosse Lindquist, whose WikiLeaks investigation will be broadcast on Swedish TV tonight, and who has spent many hours with Assange over the past few months, said Assange's attitude to women did not seem in any way striking.
"If you look at the two prosecutors involved in investigating the rape allegations, they are not types you would imagine bowing to any kind of pressure from, say, the Swedish government or the United States.''
A senior civil servant, who requested anonymity, also dismissed allegations of political plotting against Assange, arguing that Swedish culture is often misunderstood. "Swedes do not have an iconoclastic tradition in which you build people up then demolish their reputations. Even when people are celebrities, we accept that they may have questionable private lives. Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets.''
Linderborg, though, says there is a widespread sense in Sweden that Assange's rise to fame fuelled his libido and ego.
"Plenty of women are attracted by his underdog status and the supposed danger of spending time with him. He has several women on the go at once. One person told me he screws more often than he eats,'' Linderborg said.
Of course, given the nature of the web, the allegations have triggered a series of attacks on both women's characters with lurid claims of "women who cry rape" and "bitches trying to send an innocent man to prison".
Operation Payback
Those monitoring the chatrooms used by Operation Payback say its hackers have set aside the sexual allegations, instead concentrating their efforts on amassing greater potency for the next phase of the WikLeaks fightback. The weapons deployed last week were "denial of service" attacks in which online computers are harnessed to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.
The initial attacks against the Swiss PostFinance required about 200 computers, according to one Anonymous source. Yet within a day hackers were able to recruit thousands more pro-WikiLeaks footsoldiers. By the time the Visa and Mastercard websites were disrupted last Wednesday, close to 3,000 computers were involved.
Anonymous leaders began distributing software tools to allow anyone with a computer to join Payback. So far more than 9,000 users in the US have downloaded the software; in second place is the UK with 3,000. Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Spain, Poland, Russia and Australia follow with more than 1,000. The 11th country embroiled in the attacks is Sweden, where WikiLeaks's massive underground servers are housed, with 75 downloads.
Sean-Paul Correll, a cyber threat analyst at Panda Security, who has monitored Operation Payback since its conception, said it was impossible to "profile" those involved. "They are anonymous and they are everywhere," he said. "They have day jobs. They are adults and kids. It is just a bunch of people." Middle-class professional members working alongside self-styled anarchists.
Ostensibly, Anonymous is a 24-hour democracy run by whoever happens to be logged on; leaders emerge and disappear depending on the target that is being attacked and the whims of members. Correll said: "This group does not exist with some sort of hierarchy. It exists with a few organisers but these can change at any time. That gives the group great power in that it is impossible to trace and define. At the same time it is also a source of weakness as its actions can be unfocused."
Ideas are floated on internet bulletin boards, whose location moves daily to evade detection. Ultimately a proposal hits a democratic "tipping point" and action is taken.
A major test of Payback's mounting firepower will be Amazon, given the size of its servers. The attempt to attack the site last Thursday was half-hearted, but nevertheless audacious. Now sources estimate they would need between 30,000 and 40,000 computers to hurt Amazon and there is a growing feeling among hacktivists that it could happen. If it does, the retailer could lose millions of dollars during the Christmas season.
So far, though, most of the attacks have been principally designed to register protest rather than destabilise companies financially, opting for their public websites rather than their underlying infrastructure.
Two of the internet's most important social networking sites – Twitter and Facebook – are also becoming targets of elements within Anonymous.
Twitter upset hackers last week by removing the Anonymous account – which had 22,000 followers – amid speculation that it was preventing the term #wikileaks appearing on its trending topics. The Anonymous page on Facebook was removed for violating its conditions, a move that has similarly annoyed a cohort of hackers. Both Facebook and Twitter have won praise in recent years as outlets for free speech, yet both also harbour corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as advertising platforms for other companies.
Their use by Anonymous to direct people planning attacks has, according to many analysts, placed both in a difficult position. Facebook, which still has sites eulogising murderer Raoul Moat and Holocaust deniers, said it drew the line on groups that attack others, a bold move considering the site's WikiLeaks page boasts more than 1.3 million supporters. Any evidence that both sites yielded to US pressure and the gloves would be off. So too for any organisation that yields to American demands over WikiLeaks.
Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, a book which argues the internet has failed to democraticise the world successfully, believes the attacks are already viewed by Washington "as striking at the very heart of the global economy".
Another emerging target in the weeks ahead is the US government itself. For a brief time last Tuesday, senate.gov – the website of every US senator – went down. Cyberguerillas claim it is a possible sign of things to come.
The future
The trajectory of the WikiLeaks controversy is almost impossible to predict. On Tuesday Assange will attend his next bail hearing. Although supporters have stumped up £180,000, it is expected bail will be refused, pending a full hearing of Sweden's extradition request. However his lawyer may also reveal fresh claims of US interference in the saga.
Regardless of the fate of its founder, WikiLeaks will continue releasing declassified cables. At the moment only several hundred of 250,000 cables have been publicised.
Analysts now describe the organisation's structure as a "networked enterprise", a phrase that has been used in the past in relation to al-Qaida.
For all the US attempts, it is clear the attacks on WikiLeaks have made minimal impact and are unlikely to affect the availability of the information that WikiLeaks has already leaked.
Meanwhile, Senator Lieberman has indicated that the New York Times and other news organisations using the WikiLeaks cables may be investigated for breaking US espionage laws. At present, who will win the "world's first information war" remains unclear.
Morozov said: "There will be many more people from the CIA and NSA [National Security Agency] hanging out around them."
But the conflict increasingly seems likely to target the real profits of US corporations. Today a 24-year-old from London will ready his weapons for the battle ahead.
New Study Finds Flu Shot Useless
A remarkable study published in the Cochrane Libary found no evidence of benefit for influenza vaccinations and also noted that the vast majority of trials were inadequate.
The authors stated that the only ones showing benefit were industry-funded. They also pointed out that the industry-funded studies were more likely to be published in the most prestigious journals...and one more thing: They found cases of severe harm caused by the vaccines, in spite of inadequate reporting of adverse effects.
The study, "Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults", is damning of the entire pharmaceutical industry and its minions, the drug testing industry and the medical system that relies on them.
In the usual manner of understatement, the authors concluded:
The results of this review seem to discourage the utilisation of vaccination against influenza in healthy adults as a routine public health measure. As healthy adults have a low risk of complications due to respiratory disease, the use of the vaccine may be only advised as an individual protection measure against symptoms in specific cases.
The Study
The authors attempted to find and investigate every study that has evaluated the effects of flu vaccines in healthy adults aged 18-65. To this end, they "searched Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library, 2010, issue 2), MEDLINE (January 1966 to June 2010) and EMBASE (1990 to June 2010)." They included 50 reports. Forty of them were clinical trials adding up to over 70,000 people. Two reported only on harmful effects and were not included in this study.
Studies of all types of influenza vaccines were included: live, attenuated, and killed – or fractions of killed – vaccines.
The primary outcomes they looked for were numbers and seriousness of influenza and influenza-like illnesses. They also looked at the number and seriousness of harms from the vaccines. The authors attempted to collect missing data by writing to the authors. They describe the response as "disappointing". In the end, they included 50 studies and refused to use 92, mostly because of highly significant flaws, such as using inappropriate controls, not being randomly controlled trials, inconsistencies in data presented, lack of study design, unclear definitions, poor reporting, lack of crude data, and lack of placebo.
The authors found that vaccines administered parenterally, that is, outside the digestive tract, usually meaning by injection. reduced influenza-like symptoms by 4%. They found no evidence that vaccination prevents viral transmission! (There goes the whole herd immunity argument!) They also found no evidence that they prevent complications, either.
They attempted to ascertain the degree of complications, and though they did report on some, most of the studies simply did not address the issue or did so inadequately.
Five Myths to Keep in Mind About Flu Vaccines
Myth 1: The Flu Shot is very effective.
Statistically, you are less likely to get the flu if you haven’t had a flu vaccine. A BCTV reporter in Vancouver, commenting on the overload in BC emergency rooms, said that out of 32 people who had received a flu shot, 30 got the flu.
Myth 2: The Flu Shot has a high success rate.
This is a vaccine that only has a 6.25% success rate. This is a pretty big under-achievement, considering that the average reaction to placebo injections of distilled water is 30%.
Myth 3: The Flu Shot is safe.
Hugh Fudenberg MD, who is the world’s leading immunogeneticist, says that if a person had 5 flu vaccinations between 1970 and 1980 he/she is 10 times more likely to get Alzheimer’s Disease than if he/she had only one or two shots. Fudenberg said that this was because of the aluminum and mercury, which almost every flu vaccine contains. The gradual accumulation of aluminum and mercury in the brain leads to cognitive dysfunction.
Myth 4: There are no harmful ingredients in vaccinations.
Flu vaccines consist primarily of 3 categories of ingredients. First there are viruses and cultured bacteria. The second ingredient is the way in which they can be cultivated. This includes aborted human fetal cells, chick embryos, pig blood, monkey kidney tissue, cowpox pus, and calf serum, and all of these foreign proteins get injected straight into your bloodstream. A bit repulsive just thinking about it, isn’t it? The flu shot also contains neutralizers, stabilizers, carrying agents and preservatives such as mercury, aluminum, and formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is something that is used for embalming the dead and is known to cause cancer. There is no amount of formaldehyde considered safe when injected into a living organism.
Myth 5: The Flu Shot works.
The flu shot could actually weaken your immune system and make you more likely to catch this virus. It is has absolutely no value and should probably be avoided for your own safety. Not only is it loaded with toxic chemicals, but many people actually get the flu shortly after getting the shot, because it weakens their immune system instead of making it stronger like it is claimed to do.
Dr. Viera Scheibner, arguably one of the world's most respected scientists and scholars on vaccine medical data stated from her research and writings on vaccine science and history:: "Ever since the turn of the (last) century, medical journals published dozens and dozens of articles demonstrating that injecting vaccines (can) cause anaphylaxis, meaning harmful, inappropriate immunological responses, which is also called sensitization. (This) increase(s) susceptibility to the disease which the vaccine is supposed to prevent, and to a host of related and other unrelated infections."
"We see it in vaccinated children within days, within two or three weeks. (Most of them) develop runny noses, ear infections, pneumonitis, (and) bronchiolitis. It is only a matter of degrees, which indicates immuno-suppression, (not immunity). It indicates the opposite. So I never use the word immunization because that is false advertising. It implies that vaccines immunize, which they don't. The correct term is either vaccination or sensitization."
In addition, "Vaccines (can) damage internal organs, particularly the pancreas," so everyone vaccinated, including for seasonal flu, is vulnerable to contracting severe "autoimmune diseases like diabetes," Addison's Disease, Arthritis, Asthma, Guillian-Barre Syndrome, Hepatitis, Lou Gehrig's Disease, Lupus, Multiple Sclerosis, Osteoporosis, Polio, and dozens of others.
Some can kill. Others produce a lifetime of disability and pain because autoimmune disease happens when the "body attacks itself," or more accurately "is attacked" by an unhealthy lifestyle, stress, and various harmful ingestible substances; that is, toxins in drugs, food, air, water, and other liquids. According to immunologist, Dr. Jesse Stoff, human health is compromised four ways:
-- by poor nutrition;
-- man-made environmental toxins;
-- disease-causing organisms and their toxins; and
-- immune system trauma from factors like x-ray radiation and stress.
Other factors include a lack of sleep and exercise, smoking, heavy alcohol consumption, and various excesses that throw the body out of balance, making it susceptible to a host of debilitating illnesses.
Conclusions
The Cochrane study found very little evidence to support even a small improvement in time off work. Even that finding needs to be put into the context of industry influence. The authors wrote:
This review includes 15 out of 36 trials funded by industry (four had no funding declaration). An earlier systematic review of 274 influenza vaccine studies published up to 2007 found industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies independently from methodological quality and size. Studies funded from public sources were significantly less likely to report conclusions favorable to the vaccines. The review showed that reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin but there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions and spurious notoriety of the studies. The content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding.
"...industry funded studies were published in more prestigious journals and cited more than other studies..."
"...reliable evidence on influenza vaccines is thin..."
"...there is evidence of widespread manipulation of conclusions..."
Most assuredly, the "content and conclusions of this review should be interpreted in light of this finding"!
Even without taking into account the shoddiness of the studies in general, the authors were still hard put to find any benefit of any sort for influenza vaccinations in healthy people. At best, they found a small decrease in number of days off work. They did not find that the vaccinations had any benefit whatsoever in complications or mortality.
In spite of the limited reporting on adverse effects, the authors did find some, including 1.6 Guillain-Barré cases per million.
The question that must be asked is: How can influenza vaccinations be justified when there is virtually no benefit—not even the oft-cited dubious herd-immunity—and cases of severe harm are documented, in spite of disgustingly limited reporting of adverse effects?
It is long past time to end the travesty of jabbing adults and children without a shred of evidence showing real benefit in spite of trying to find it, and with evidence of crippling harm, in spite of trying to mask it.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Scientists call for rationing in developed world
From the Telegraph. It's better to be living in the underdeveloped world these days, They have more money, the prices are better, and their infrastructure is new. I am shocked at the condition of the roadshere in Toronto, I've seen better roads in the Philippines.
Cancun climate change summit: scientists call for rationing in developed world
Global warming is now such a serious threat to mankind that climate change experts are calling for Second World War-style rationing in rich countries to bring down carbon emissions.
In a series of papers published by the Royal Society, physicists and chemists from some of world’s most respected scientific institutions, including Oxford University and the Met Office, agreed that current plans to tackle global warming are not enough.
As the world meets in Cancun, Mexico for the latest round of United Nations talks on climate change, the influential academics called for much tougher measures to cut carbon emissions.
In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years.
This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars.
Prof Anderson admitted it “would not be easy” to persuade people to reduce their consumption of goods
He said politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during the last “time of crisis” in the 1930s and 40s.
This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has travelled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.
“The Second World War and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider if we are to address the scale of the problem we face,” he said.
The last round of talks in Copenhagen last year ended in a weak political accord to keep temperature rise below the dangerous tipping point of 2C(3.6F).
This time 194 countries are meeting again to try and make the deal legally binding and agree targets on cutting emissions.
At the moment efforts are focused on trying to get countries to cut emissions by 50 per cent by 2050 relative to 1990 levels.
Message from the Hactivists Anonymous
"Hello World. We are Anonymous. What you do or do not know about us is irrelevant. We have decided to write to you, the media, and all citizens of the free world at large to inform you of the message, our intentions, potential targets, and our ongoing peaceful campaign for freedom."The message is simple: freedom of speech. Anonymous is peacefully campaigning for freedom of speech everywhere in all forms. Freedom of speech for: the internet, for journalism and journalists, and citizens of the world at large. Regardless of what you think or have to say; Anonymous is campaigning for you."
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Fall
Meanwhile, the economic downturn has been incredibly hard on the finances of state and local governments across the United States. Unlike the federal government, state and local governments cannot use the Federal Reserve to play games with their exploding debt burdens. Facing horrific budget deficits, many communities have begun adopting "austerity measures" in an attempt to slow the flow of red ink. All over the nation, deep budget cuts are slashing police departments, fire departments and other basic social services, but it seems like no matter what many of these communities try the debt just keeps growing.
So when you combine economic hopelessness with drastic budget cuts, what you get are hordes of communities from coast to coast that are becoming just like Detroit. In the city of Detroit today, there are over 33,000 abandoned houses, 44 schools have been permanently closed down, the mayor wants to bulldoze one-fourth of the city and you can literally buy a house for one dollar in the worst areas. Many Americans thought that it was funny to make fun of Detroit, but little did they know that what happened there would soon start happening everywhere.
The following are 24 signs that all of America is becoming a rotting, post-industrial, post-apocalyptic wasteland just like Detroit....
#1 The second most dangerous city in the United States - Camden, New Jersey - is about to lay off about half its police.
#2 In the city of Camden, about the only "industries" that are truly thriving are drug-dealing and prostitution. It is estimated that there are literally dozens of open-air drug markets in Camden.
#3 The city of Newark, New Jersey laid off 13 percent of its police force just last week.
#4 Of 315 municipalities the New Jersey State Policemen's union recently surveyed, more than half indicated that they were planning to lay off police officers.
#5 At least 1000 people now live in the 200 miles of flood tunnels that exist under the city of Las Vegas.
#6 All over America, asphalt roads are being ground up and are being replaced with gravel because it is cheaper to maintain. The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt road into gravel over the past year, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.
#7 The number of Americans on food stamps has hit yet another new all-time record. 42.9 million Americans are now enrolled and federal authorities fully expect that number to continue to skyrocket.
#8 The city of San Jose, California recently laid off 49 firefighters.
#9 Over the past year, approximately 100 of New York's state parks and historic sites have had to cut services and reduce hours.
#10 In 2009 alone, approximately 4 million more Americans joined the ranks of the poor.
#11 The state of Arizona recently decided to stop paying for many types of organ transplants for people enrolled in its Medicaid program.
#12 Many of the police in Arizona that patrol communities near the border with Mexico say that they are "outmanned" and "outgunned" and now live in fear of being taken out by drug cartel assassins.
#13 Gang violence in America is getting totally out of control. According to authorities, there are now over 1 million members of criminal gangs operating inside the country, and those gangs are responsible for up to 80% of the violent crimes committed in the U.S. each year.
#14 Oakland, California Police Chief Anthony Batts has announced that due to severe budget cuts there are a number of crimes that his department will simply not be able to respond to any longer. The crimes that the Oakland police will no longer be responding to include grand theft, burglary, car wrecks, identity theft and vandalism.
#15 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.
#16 The state of Illinois is so far behind on its bills that not even schools and essential social services are getting their money on time.
#17 The sheriff's department in Ashtabula County, Ohio has been slashed from 112 to 49 deputies, and there is now just one vehicle remaining to patrol all 720 square miles of the county.
#18 As our local communities degenerate economically, it appears that they are falling apart morally as well. There are approximately 400,00 registered sex offenders in the United States as you read this.
#19 In a desperate attempt to save money, the city of Colorado Springs turned off a third of its streetlights and put its police helicopters up for auction.
#20 According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.
#21 According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 25 percent of America's nearly 600,000 bridges need significant repairs or are burdened with more traffic than they were designed to carry.
#22 In Georgia, the county of Clayton recently eliminated its entire public bus system in order to save 8 million dollars.
#23 Things have gotten so bad in Stockton, California that the police union put up a billboard with the following message: "Welcome to the 2nd most dangerous city in California. Stop laying off cops."
#24 Major cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and Sacramento have instituted "rolling brownouts" in which various city fire stations are shut down on a rotating basis. So if you live in one of those cities and you have a fire, you had better hope that your local fire station is not scheduled for a "brownout" that day.
As I have documented in article after article, the "American Dream" is rapidly becoming the American Nightmare. We were once a nation that was endlessly expanding, endlessly growing and endlessly becoming more powerful, but now just the opposite is happening.
All of this didn't happen overnight. Back in 1982, Billy Joel could see what was starting to happen and he released a song entitled "Allentown" which captured the depression that many residents of once great steel cities were experiencing. The song started out with these two lines....
Well we're living here in Allentown
And they're closing all the factories down
Well, the United States has lost over 42,000 factories since 2001 and now all of America is turning into "Allentown".
Unfortunately, things are going to get even worse. Thousands more factories and millions more jobs will be sent overseas. The debt loads of our state and local governments will continue to skyrocket. The truth is that city after city after city is going to start looking like something out of a third world country.
From here.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Fertilised eggs get microscopic bar codes
Image via WikipediaCreepy. From here.Researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona have come up with an ingenious solution for keeping track of embryos and egg cells during in vitro fertilisation procedures: microscopic bar codes.
These mouse eggs were tagged by injecting microscopic silicon bar codes into their perivitelline space, the gap between the cell membrane and an outer membrane called the zona pellucida, which binds sperm cells during fertilisation.
The bar codes, which carry unique binary identification numbers, are biologically inert: they do not affect the rate of embryo development and are shed before the embryos implant into the wall of the uterus. The technique aims to simplify individual embryo identification, streamlining in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer procedures.
The Government of Catalonia's Department of Health has granted permission for the technique to be developed using human eggs and embryos from fertility clinics in Spain.
The research, published in the journal Human Reproduction, may go some way to avoiding mix ups at fertility clinics.
