Saturday, October 17, 2026
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11 shocking facts about America’s militarized police forces

[Author]by Alex Kane

AlterNet[/Author]

 

The militarization of police is harming civil liberties, impacting children, and transforming neighborhoods into war zones.

The “war on terror” has come home–and it’s wreaking havoc on innocent American lives. The culprit is the militarization of the police.

The weapons used in the “war on terror” that destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq have made their way to local law enforcement. While police forces across the country began a process of militarization complete with SWAT teams and flash-bang grenades when President Reagan intensified the “war on drugs,” the post-9/11 “war on terror” has added fuel to the fire.

Through laws and regulations like a provision in defense budgets that authorize the Pentagon to transfer surplus military gear to police forces, local law enforcement are using weapons found on the battlefields of South Asia and the Middle East.

A recent New York Times article by Matt Apuzzo reported that in the Obama era, “police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” The result is that police agencies around the nation possess military-grade equipment, turning officers who are supposed to fight crime and protect communities into what look like invading forces from an army. And military-style police raids have increased in recent years, with one count putting the number at 80,000 such raids last year.

In June, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought more attention to police militarization when it issued a comprehensive, nearly 100-page (appendix and endnotes included) report titled, War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing. Based on public records requests to more than 260 law enforcement agencies in 26 states, the ACLU concluded that “American policing has become excessively militarized through the use of weapons and tactics designed for the battlefield” and that this militarization “unfairly impacts people of color and undermines individual liberties, and it has been allowed to happen in the absence of any meaningful public discussion.”

The information contained in the ACLU report, and in other investigations into the phenomenon, is sobering. From the killing of innocent people to the lack of debate on the issue, police militarization has turned into a key issue for Americans. It is harming civil liberties, ramping up the “war on drugs,” impacting the most marginalized members of society and transforming neighborhoods into war zones. Here are 11 important–and horrifying–things you should know about the militarization of police.

1. It harms, and sometimes kills, innocent people. When you have heavily armed police officers using flash-bang grenades and armored personnel carriers, innocent people are bound to be hurt. The likelihood of people being killed is raised by the practice of SWAT teams busting down doors with no warning, which leads some people to think it may be a burglary, who could in turn try to defend themselves. The ACLU documented seven cases of civilians dying, and 46 people being injured. That’s only in the cases the civil liberties group looked at, so the number is actually higher.

Take the case of Tarika Wilson, which the ACLU summarizes. The 26-year-old biracial mother lived in Lima, Ohio. Her boyfriend, Anthony Terry, was wanted by the police on suspicion of drug dealing. So on January 4, 2008, a SWAT team busted down Wilson’s door and opened fire. A SWAT officer killed Wilson and injured her one-year-old baby, Sincere Wilson. The killing sparked rage in Lima and accusations of a racist police department, but the officer who shot Wilson, Sgt. Joe Chavalia, was found not guilty on all charges.

2. Children are impacted. As the case of Wilson shows, the police busting down doors care little about whether there’s a child in the home. Another case profiled by the ACLU shows how children are caught up the crossfire–with devastating consequences.

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Battle for humanity almost lost:

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:

 

Much has been written about the poisons and chemicals used in our food system by the food industry and approved by the Federal Drug Administration with the consent, blessing and acknowledge of the state governments. People continue getting sick and dying because of the contaminated food we consume. And the sad part is that the people just don’t do anything, even those who know or suspect about it. But the following article, authored by Mike Adams, editor of Natural News, is full of information that can help us save our life. THIS IS PART 2 AND LAST.

 

Battle for humanity nearly lost: global food supply deliberately engineered to end life, not nourish it

 

by Mike Adams

Natural News

 

Food has become a weapon against humanity

As you can see from these examples, food has become a weapon against humanity. It is the new vector for a stealth world war against humankind — a war which is being quietly waged right this very moment with weapons you would probably find in your own pantry.

World War I was fought primarily in the trenches, with soldiers slinging chunks of lead at each other and using crude chemical weapons like mustard gas.

World War II was fought with a genocidal intention, using more advanced kinetic weapons and chemical weapons engineered by pharmaceutical companies.

Our of World War II and the Nazi era came IG Farben, the chemical-pharma conglomerate which was later split into three companies, one of which is now known as Bayer, the same company that makes children’s aspirin and various chemicals used throughout the food supply. (Check your history. This is factual and true.)

World War III appears to already be underway, and it is being waged as a stealth war via the food supply. The chemicals are very similar to those used in World War I and World War II except that instead of being deployed on the battle field, today’s chemical weapons are deployed via the food supply and often even listen right on ingredients labels.

Toxic ingredients like sodium nitrite and aspartame are formulated to work at sub-acute levels so they don’t cause people to drop dead right away. Instead, they cause the chronic, long-term degenerative collapse of body and mind, leaving behind a wake of global cancer, kidney failure and extreme mental disorders including psychosis. This damage to body and mind, in turn, destroys economies, education systems, scientific advancement, free democracies and even cultural integrity.

The silent food bombing of humanity

What the United States Air Force did to Dresden in World War II via high-elevation bombing runs, the global chemical and food conglomerates are now doing to the world populations via the drive-thru window. But there are no bombs dropping out of the sky and there are no firestorms lighting up the cityscape at night. Instead, the silent, ignorant masses are simply marched to their deaths, one meal at a time, almost like a cargo train full of “useless eaters” clicking and clacking its way to Auschwitz.

On the way to their own deaths, of course, they pay the mandatory tolls to the pharmaceutical giants, hospitals, cancer clinics, doctors and health insurance mandates. Much like victims of Nazi genocide had their gold fillings pulled out of their mouths before they were gassed to death, today’s mainstream consumers are emptied of their bank accounts, assets and insurance policies before finally being discarded by the system.

There are tremendous profits to be made, you see, from first poisoning the masses and then “treating” them for the side effects of that poisoning. This racket is so massive and so deeply embedded into our greed-driven culture that very few people even recognize it’s happening to them. But make no mistake: You are not valued by the system for your humanity, your spirit, your innovation or your imagination. You are only valued for your tax base at first, and then ultimately your “disease management profits” which enrich global corporations while you are poked, prodded, dosed, irradiated and drugged to death while the hospital racks up page after page of medical procedure billings codes which will be covered by Medicare… or Obamacare.

Here’s the way out: grow your own food

Sound too grim to be true? Let’s look at some solutions on the positive side. The way out of all this is to grow your own food or at least buy as much as you can from local farmers and CSAs. Any food acquired through mainstream corporate sources is likely to be intentionally engineered, laced and packaged with incredibly toxic poisons ranging from heavy metals to hormone disrupting packaging containers. But food grown by honest farmers provides genuine nourishment, not death.

In fact, the future of human civilization almost certainly belongs exclusively to those who either grow their own food or make arrangements for others to grow it for them. The factory-made food consumed by the masses is quite truly a poison delivery system that has no purpose other than mass disease, death and profit.

If you wish to avoid being a victim of this system, you must avoid its products. Stop buying packaged processed foods. Utterly avoid all processed meats containing sodium nitrite, including bacon, hot dogs, sausage, ham, deli meats, pepperoni pizza and even beef jerky.

Stop drinking all diet soda, obviously. Aspartame is toxic to biology. All artificial sweeteners have harmful side effects if consumed in sufficient quantity.

Be skeptical of “natural” products which are heavily processed and refined in some way. Ask about countries of origin. Check heavy metals lab results to stay informed.

Except for rare exceptions, stop buying superfoods and supplements made in China, the world’s most polluted food producer. The U.S. natural products industry has practically been taken over by China over the last decade, and much of what you think is safe and organic is actually heavily polluted, either accidentally or deliberately, in mainland China.

Look around you at the evidence right in front of your eyes

Or maybe you think I’m the crazy one in mentioning any of this. If that’s the case, I encourage you to look around you and see the results of what happens to people when they eat yoga mat chemicals, aspartame-laced diet sodas, synthetic food preservatives and cheap vitamins contaminated with heavy metals. Unless you are living in a complete state of denial, you can’t help but notice that humanity has become a race of near-mutants who barely have a shred of health and sanity remaining.

A modern young man growing up today in America and living on processed foods is little more than a shadow of the strong, vibrant young men who worked the farms just three generations ago. Today’s generation of youth is pathetic, weak, academically inept and heavily pampered with their video game consoles, Ritalin drugs and air-conditioned schools with a watered-down curriculum. They’ve been dumbed down, stripped of nutrients and medicated to the point where literal zombies now walk among us.

In fact, the people all around you are over-medicated, over-fed and at the same time wildly malnourished. Their brains and bodies are heavily contaminated with destructive chemicals, heavy metals and synthetic materials. They have lost nearly all high cognitive functions and now survive on lower brain stem function which explains the radical rise in sex crimes, behavioral addictions, substance abuse and violent crime across society today. In a very real sense, the daily consumption of processed food has become a ritual of slow suicide mindlessly repeated everywhere that factory foods have invaded once-sane societies.

While Republicans blame Democrats, and Democrats blame Republicans, the truth is that they are all being systematically poisoned and thereby driven to precisely the kind of insanity we see played out across newspaper headlines and news broadcasts. We are far past the age of reason in the modern western world, and we will not survive this stealth war that releases weapons of dietary mass destruction with each tempting bite of seductive food that’s engineered for death instead of life.

This is far beyond any single issue of labeling GMOs, or buying organic or testing foods for heavy metals. This is about how human civilization is being brought to its knees by the most insidious stealth weapon ever experienced in our collective history: PROCESSED FOOD laced with toxic substances.

Heed these words or you too shall die a victim of this insidious, deliberate war against life, health and sanity.

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Central Americans experience “frightful nightmare en route to U.S.

[Author]by the El Reportero’s wire services

[/Author]

Rapes, robberies, hunger and cold. Central American children traveling through Mexico en route to the United States experience a “frightful nightmare,” according to what a Honduran teenager told Efe, adding that she will “never again” make that journey.

Ana – not her real name – emotionally told of the agonizing journey that, like her, more than 50,000 Central American children have attempted in recent months. And many of them did not survive the trek.

Threatened with death in Honduras, and learning her lesson from the murder of her brother by gangmembers, the 17-year-old worked up her courage to face a journey with “exhausting days of hunger and cold” to get to the United States.

The worst thing, however, came almost at the end of the trip, when she was raped in Mexico by unknown men, a situation she says she “never imagined” would happen and which remains engraved in her memory “forever,” with no chance for her attackers to be brought to justice.

Upon arriving “at a dark shack, hidden among the mountains and where only the voices of men were heard,” the group with which Ana was traveling disappeared and she found herself alone.

“I was very afraid because when I arrived, I sensed something, but I asked God not to let anything bad happen to me. I was nervous and was very afraid. I wanted to shout and say something, but they threatened me,” said Ana, on the verge of tears.

She could not provide any information about the rapists to the authorities because she did not know any of her attackers.

“I only know that they raped me in Mexico, that they grabbed me. It was terrible,” she said.

After that “frightful” night in Mexico, she managed to cross the Rio Grande and was later picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol, which transferred her to Casa Antigua, Texas, where she felt safe.

From there, she went to Miami, where she now lives with her sister, who also fled to the United States eight years ago, and who was the person who helped her find a “coyote” whom she hired to draw up a plan for her to flee Honduras.

But the fact that she risked her life in this effort could be in vain. Now, like thousands of other undocumented child migrants, Ana is facing deportation. On July 17, she has her first hearing in a Miami court.

“I’m just asking President (Barack) Obama to give me a chance to fulfill my dream,” said Ana, who is aware that her chances of remaining in the United States are slim.

 

U.S. government stops airborne TV broadcasts to Cuba

The United States has discretely cancelled Aero Marti, an airborne broadcasting platform that sent radio and television signals to Cuba and began operating in 2006, sparking controversy over its cost and debated effectiveness.

The program was definitively dismantled in April after having been frozen for 18 months by the budget sequester, according to what the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and TV Marti, confirmed on Tuesday to Efe.

The government in Havana had found a way to block the signal of Aero Marti, which made its broadcasts from an aircraft that flew very close to the limits of Cuban airspace.

From October 2006 until the fall of 2013, the program had cost Washington $35.67 million, according to the report issued by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a division of the State Department tasked with making publicly-funded broadcasts around the world.

The BBG had insisted on the need to end Aero Marti since the submission of the budget bill for fiscal year 2013 due to its ineffectiveness and “the rising cost of fuel.”

In 2013, the program was suspended because of the impossibility of paying for the cost of fuel as a result of the sequester, not to mention the fact that it cost some $80,000 per year to maintain the airplane.

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Huge new study proves organic foods are healthier and more nutricious

[Author]Results immediately attacked by chemical agriculture industry

 

by David Gutiérrez
[/Author]
The most comprehensive analysis ever performed comparing organic foods with those “conventionally” grown with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers has concluded that organic fruits and vegetables are not just less toxic but actually more nutritious than conventional produce.

The difference between organic and conventional produce was so striking, the researchers said, that switching to an all-organic diet might be the nutritional equivalent of adding one or two daily servings of fruits and vegetables to your diet.

“The crucially important thing about this research is that it shatters the myth that how we farm does not affect the quality of the food we eat,” said Helen Browning, chief executive of the Soil Association, who was not involved in the study.

Yet the findings were downplayed in news reports, which quoted prominent nutritionists minimizing the nutritional differences found and ignoring the issue of pesticides completely.

Significant differences

The peer-reviewed study was funded by the European Union and the Sheepdrove Trust, conducted by an international research team and published in the British Journal of Nutrition. The researchers analyzed 343 prior peer-reviewed studies from around the world that had measured differences between organic and conventional fruits, vegetables and grains. It is the largest meta-analysis on the topic ever conducted.

The researchers found that there was a statistically significant difference in the nutritional content of organic and conventional produce, with organic fruits and vegetables containing between 19 percent and 69 percent more antioxidants than their conventional counterparts.

Although no studies have yet been conducted to compare the long-term health differences between those who follow mostly organic versus mostly conventional diets, the researchers note that antioxidants such as those found in higher concentrations in organic foods “have previously been linked to a reduced risk of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and certain cancers.”

The higher antioxidant levels found are equivalent to the amount in “one to two of the five portions of fruits and vegetables recommended to be consumed daily,” the researchers wrote, “and would therefore be significant and meaningful in terms of human nutrition, if information linking these [compounds] to the health benefits associated with increased fruit, vegetable and whole grain consumption is confirmed.”

In addition to the nutritional benefits, the researchers also found that conventional produce and grains were four times more likely to contain pesticide residues than their organic counterparts, and also contained significantly higher concentrations of the toxic heavy metal cadmium. These differences were also statistically significant.

“This study demonstrates that choosing food produced according to organic standards can lead to increased intake of nutritionally desirable antioxidants and reduced exposure to toxic heavy metals,” said lead author Carlo Leifert of Newcastle University. “This constitutes an important addition to the information currently available to consumers which until now has been confusing and in many cases is conflicting.”

Short-sighted nutritionists fight back

Media reports have largely portrayed the study’s findings as controversial and have quoted nutritionists skeptical of the results. The study’s critics have mostly focused on casting doubt on the health benefits of antioxidants, or expressing concern that encouraging people to eat more organic foods would (due to the cost difference) cause them to eat less fruits and vegetables overall.

“Ultimately we all need to eat more fruit and vegetables regardless of whether they are organic or not to form part of a healthy balanced diet, which will help protect health,” said Dr. Alison Tedstone, Chief Nutritionist at Public Health England.

By and large, these critics have ignored the findings that organic foods were also lower in pesticides and heavy metals, even though many pesticides are known to accumulate in the human body and cause serious health problems at even very low concentrations.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

http://www.theguardian.com

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://science.naturalnews.com

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Millions of Americans are installing ‘perfect spying device’ in their own living rooms

[Author]Amazon Fire TV monitors and records your conversations

 

by Mike Adams

Natural News
[/Author]
Amazon.com is building the CIA’s new $600 million data center, reports the Financial Times. At the same time Amazon.com is building this massive cloud computing infrastructure for the CIA, the company is also shipping millions of Fire TV set-top devices to customers who are placing them in their private homes.

I have one myself, and it’s a terrific piece of hardware for delivering prime video content. In fact, in terms of its usability and specs, it’s far superior to Roku or Netflix-capable devices. Fire TV is, hands down, the best set-top video delivery device on the market today.

But there’s something about it that always struck me as odd: it has no power button. There’s no power button on the remote, and there’s no power button on the box. It turns out there’s no way to power the device off except for unplugging it.

This is highly unusual and apparently done by design. “It is not necessary to turn off Amazon Fire TV when you are finished using it,” says the Amazon.com website. “Your Amazon Fire TV is designed to go into sleep mode after 30 minutes, while continuing to automatically receive important software updates.”

Note carefully that this does not say your Fire TV device WILL go into sleep mode after 30 minutes; only that it is “designed” to go into sleep mode after 30 minutes. As lawyers well know, this is a huge difference.

Fire TV devices linked to your identity

So far, you might not be convinced this is anything to write home about, but there’s much more to this story. What we know so far is that Amazon.com is building the CIA’s new cloud computing data center, and we also know the company’s Fire TV devices have no way to be turned off and are being placed in the living rooms of private homes.

What starts to make this really interesting is when you realize these devices are linked to your identity before they’re shipped to you.

Ever notice that when you power on your Fire TV device, it already knows who you are? Your entire library of video purchases on Amazon.com is already available, and those purchases are of course linked to your credit card, which is linked to your social security number, which is linked to your identity.

In other words, Amazon.com knows the identity of the owner of every Fire TV box currently sitting in living rooms across America. This mean it can connect everything that happens around that box (including audio monitoring) to your personal identity.

Fire TV devices listen to your voice and upload audio to Amazon servers

Here’s the next piece of this puzzle that may give you pause: There is a built-in microphone on the Fire TV remote.

When you click the search button, your voice is recorded and uploaded to Amazon.com servers where it is analyzed by Amazon cloud computing applications — the same kind of thing Amazon is building for the CIA — in order to return search matches to your local TV screen.

Now, I fully realize that most Americans are too gullible and naive to believe their audio recordings get uploaded to Amazon.com servers, so I’m going to quote CNET.com here which published an article earlier this year entitled: “How to delete your Fire TV voice recordings – Amazon stores your recordings on its servers to improve accuracy of voice searches. Here’s how you can delete that data.”

As this article openly states, “To improve the service and the voice results, however, Amazon records and stores the voice samples associated with your account to its servers.”

It goes on to warn readers that “there is no way to opt-out of Amazon’s voice storage.”

And there you have it: the Fire TV device was engineered from the start to record your voice, upload it to Amazon’s servers — now being expanded to the CIA — and link those voice recordings to your identity.

Nothing written in this article so far should be debatable in the least: it’s all fact, openly admitted by the company itself. Then again, the average Netizen is so clueless about reality that you’ll probably see people denying the fact that Fire TV set-top boxes have microphones and the ability to upload voice recordings to Amazon.com. Some will call that a “conspiracy theory” even though it’s part of the published specification of the device.

But there’s even more to this story that does legitimately qualify as a debatable topic. Let’s explore…

The perfect spy devices for monitoring private

conversations in your home

How hard would it be for Fire TV devices to monitor and upload your conversations 24/7?

Think about it: Fire TV devices already have the hardware, software and bandwidth to record audio and upload it to Amazon.com. That’s part of the spec and functionality of the system. The devices have no power off button to discourage people from turning them off.

The devices are already linked to your personal identity via your credit card on file with Amazon, and this is the same company that’s now building a massive storage and data center for the CIA, which for some reason now needs massive data storage capacity and the ability to process that data using buildings full of servers.

An article published by MHP Books reveals that Amazon may already be working with the NSA to provide surveillance data on U.S. citizens.

Another article entitled, “Snowden slams Amazon for leaking customer data to the NSA” reveals how former NSA contractor Edward Snowden harshly criticized Amazon.com for allowing intelligence agencies to read everything you browse on Amazon.com, including book titles, movies and more. This is happening due to Amazon.com’s failure to implement proper encryption protocols, Snowden explains.

Corporations spying on their own customers is a conspiracy FACT

You can fully expect that many people who are still living in the pre-Snowden era will immediately decry this article as a “conspiracy theory.” But doing so only paints a dunce label on their foreheads, because thanks to Snowden, we already know as a matter of record that nearly all the large data companies routinely spy on their own customers and hand over that data to the NSA. Welcome to 1984, three decades later.

Perhaps in 2004, the idea that all your phone calls, emails, credit card transactions, banking activities, web surfing habits and social media posts were monitored by the NSA could be considered kooky and weird. But today, ten years later, all this (and more) is known to be historical fact.

If you don’t believe me, listen to the words of former high-level NSA architect William Binney who now warns that “the ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control,” according to a headline in The Guardian.

In fact, the mantra “Unplug” might be the perfect word for the greatest wisdom of our time. If you don’t want to be spied on, unplug from the grid: don’t shop at Amazon.com, don’t run search queries on Google, don’t use email, don’t use credit cards and don’t install spy devices in your own living room.

By simply unplugging these devices, you deny them the stream of electrons they need to spy on you. That’s their Achilles Heel: they all need electricity, and YOU control the electricity.

Personally, I love using Fire TV, but I now unplug it when I’m not watching something. This not only protects my privacy from Amazon snoops, it also seems to make the device function a lot better by rebooting it each time.

If you have a Fire TV device, unplug it when you’re not using it. You’ll save a small amount of electricity, but more importantly you might also save your privacy from the prying eyes at Amazon, the NSA and the CIA, all of which are aggressively expanding their monitoring and surveillance of Americans.

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Researcher who worked on social media experiment was funded by DoD

[Author]Researcher who worked on social media experiment was funded by DoD

 

by Steve Watson[/Author]

 

Facebook’s controversial “emotional study”, which subjected over half a million unwitting users of the social network to a psychological conditioning experiment, has direct ties to research funded by the Department of Defense concerning the likelihood of civil unrest.

The Facebook scandal hit the headlines this week, as it was revealed that the company participated with a federally funded UCSF study into how emotions can be swayed on social media by controlling the content of personal feeds and deciding whether to show negative or positive material.

While that fact in itself is disturbing, it seems that the rabbit hole goes even deeper.

Bloggers and online sleuths have since highlighted that the research appears to be at least in part connected to a Pentagon-led project called the Minerva Initiative.

Researcher and London Guardian writer Nafeez Ahmed has noted that the project provides “funding to universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.”

In other words, the DoD wants to master how to predict, prevent, manipulate, control, and even instigate mass civil unrest. It wishes to do this by developing “operational tools” related to “social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces.”

The initiative seeks to provide authoritative knowledge on “social movement mobilisation and contagions”. Social networks including Facebook and Twitter are highlighted as key indicators in the research.

It has been noted that within the official credits for the controversial study recently conducted by Facebook, Cornell University’s Jeffrey T. Hancock is listed as an author. Hancock is also listed on the Pentagon’s Minerva initiative website, where it is noted that he received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”.

The section of the website devoted to that study includes a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.

This is not the only connection Cornell University has to the Pentagon civil unrest study. There is a second project listed on the funding page of the Minerva website entitled “Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions”.

The US government in conjunction with the military has long been concerned with studying the potential for civil unrest and how it can control, facilitate and combat it. The U.S. Army War College, in conjunction with numerous think tanks have somewhat obsessively studied the subject for years.

In recent years, the rise of social media, and its potential use for growing and organising protest movements, has spurred a new urgency within government and the military to adapt to and co-opt such tools.

The so-called “spring” revolutions of recent years have been heavily centered around the use of social media, with many even suggesting that Western government and military forces have, at least in part, controlled and even initiated unrest in other parts of the world for strategic purposes by employing social media.

Reports have recently emerged of the Military setting up fake Twitter-like social networks in countries such as Cuba, in order to manipulate and sway popular opinion there. The Military also developed so called ‘sock puppet’ software to create fake online identities and spread propaganda at home and abroad.

The government has also heavily invested in companies that monitor social media and track how opinions and information spreads on such networks.

Facebook was and is deeply connected to the NSA’s PRISM program. Via leaked information, and by the NSA’s own admission, it has been noted that Facebook not only knew about, but also cooperated with the mass spying program. The NSA even masqueraded as Facebook via fake servers, using them as a launching pad to grab information from hard drives, in order to infect millions of computers around the world with malware as part of the mass surveillance program.

The trend is clear – the government and the military have set about fully co-opting social media and turning it into a tool for social control and manipulation, and Facebook has cooperated in the process.  Infowars.com

 

In another big brother control of the population news:

SWAT teams avoid transparency by registering as private corporations

 

by Steve Straehley

 

Federal funding, along with giveaways of surplus equipment from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have caused local police departments to become more militarized. Nowhere is this clearer than in the overuse of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams by law enforcement in day-to-day policing. Now, some agencies are trying to make SWAT operations more opaque by registering them as private corporations.

In Massachusetts, many SWAT teams are run by law enforcement councils (LEC). These groups get their funding from police agencies in their region and are run by a board of directors that’s usually composed of chiefs from participating departments. But although they’re funded by tax dollars, and their personnel are members of public law-enforcement agencies, some of these LECs hide behind corporate identities when public records requests are made.

Those LECs have incorporated under the 501(c)(3) section of the tax code and claim that they’re exempt from public records requests, according to Radley Balko of The Washington Post. The status of these SWAT teams, which number about 240 of the state’s 351 such groups, came to light when the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attempted to obtain public records for a report about the militarization of American police agencies. The LECs simply refused to deal with the requests, saying they weren’t obligated to provide records.

The ACLU has responded by filing suit against one LEC, the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council (NEMLEC). “NEMLEC can’t have it both ways,” ACLU of Massachusetts staff attorney Jessie Rossman said in a statement. “Either it is a public entity subject to public records laws, or what it is doing is illegal.”

But keeping records out of the public eye is a good way for LECs to deal with incidents such as one in which Eurie Stamp, a 68-year-old grandfather of 12, was shot and killed by a SWAT team that came to a Framingham, Massachusetts, house to arrest his girlfriend’s son. The suspect was arrested outside the house, but police stormed in anyway, and Stamp died after an officer’s gun went off.

The ACLU study showed that SWAT teams are twice as likely to enter a home during a drug sweep as they are for other deployments. In addition, half of all SWAT deployments come against black or Latino subjects. Only 20 percent come against white subjects; the race of the remainder of the subjects is unknown.

Another salient point from the ACLU report was the increasing use of military-style equipment by SWAT teams. Many teams, even those connected with small cities, are obtaining from federal surplus or purchasing items such as assault rifles, battle dress uniforms and even armored personnel carriers, such as the one used by Ohio State University to monitor football game day activities.

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Exhibition features powerful 70’s Latino poster art

[Author]Compiled by the

El Reportero’s staff[/Author]

 

Serigrafía, a traveling exhibition featuring 30 influential silkscreen prints created by the best of California’s Latino/a printmaking community,

The exhibition features poster art from the 1970s to the present, including works of Bay Area artists Juan R. Fuentes, Jos Sances, Favianna Rodríguez, Esther Hernández, Yolanda López and other California artists.

Emerging in concert with the civil rights movement and activism for political and social justice for marginalized groups, these prints confront political, economic, social, and cultural issues on both a personal and a global level.

The art, which explores such subjects as the United States embargo on Cuba, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, was conceived to provoke, protest, and praise.

From the iconic Sun Maid by Esther Hernández, who combined the familiar Sun Maid girl with the calavera (the satirically costumed skeletons) to bring awareness about the use of pesticides, fungicides, and other toxic chemicals in raisin production, to works by emerging printmakers like Gilda Posada, whose print Libertad was created to show the relationship between liberation movements for human rights in Palestine and in Mexico, this exhibition is varied in subject matter but rooted in a long heritage of California printmaking.

Many graphic artists called on the iconography of their pre-Columbian past, such as in Xavier Villamontes’ Boycott Grapes, which depicts a powerful Aztec warrior crushing handfuls of grapes that drip with the blood of exploited and injured farmworkers. When strikes, marches, and legislation failed to improve conditions in the fields, through posters like this one, the United Farms Workers Union (UFWA) asked the public to boycott grapes, wine, and lettuce in order to pressure growers.

Will be on view in the San Francisco Main Library’s Jewett Gallery, July 26 – Sept. 7, 2014. Opening discussion with curators Juan R. Fuentes and Jos Sances.

Related events:

Voice on Ink/Voz en Tinta, poetry event with San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murgía August 7, 6:30 p.m., Main Library, Latino Hispanic Community Room.

 

SF Symphony performs annual free outdoor concerts at the Stern Grove Festival

The annual San Francisco Symphony free outdoor concerts return to the Stern Grove Festival Sunday, July 6 and San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza Sunday, July 27 as part of the Orchestra’s Summer & the Symphony concert series,

These annual free community concerts are a perfect opportunity to bring a picnic lunch and spend a Sunday afternoon listening to the San Francisco Symphony with friends and family, enjoying great music in the beautiful settings of two of San Francisco’s most treasured outdoor spaces.

On Sunday, July 6 at 2 pm, the Orchestra returns to the Stern Grove Festival for its annual free concert in the Sigmund Stern Grove, a beautiful outdoor amphitheater located at 19th Avenue and Sloat Boulevard in San Francisco. Guest soloist, Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone, performs with the SFS improvising on Ravel’s well-known classical pieces Bolero and Pavane pour une infant défunte. The concert includes musically diverse styles from the jazz of Leonard Bernstein and Henry Mancini, to Richard Rodgers’ Broadway sound, to music by American composers Morton Gould, Raymond Scott, and Howard Hanson.

On Sunday, July 27 at 2 pm, the SF Symphony performs at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza following the Orchestra’s wildly successful 100th Anniversary Celebration there in the fall of 2011. Violinist Benjamin Beilman takes center stage in Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Opus 64 and the Orchestra performs additional short classical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Mozart. Food and beverage vendors from Off the Grid, booths and free giveaways add to the festivities.

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Latin Mixx conference to honor Johnny Ventura, Jellybean Benítez

[Author]by the El Reportero’s news services
[/Author]
Dominican singer Johnny Ventura and famous disc jockey John “Jellybean” Benitez, who has worked with artists like Madonna, will be honored on Thursday at the 9th Latin Mixx Conference in New York.

The 74-year-old Ventura will receive a lifetime achievement award for introducing the native merengue sound of the Dominican Republic to countries around the world, conference founder Kevin Montano told Efe.

This is only the second time the organization has bestowed this honor, Montano said.

Benitez will be given the Icon Award by the Latin Mixx Conference.

Panamanian singer-songwriter Ruben Blades received the award last year.

Nearly 300 disc jockeys who work in radio, online and in clubs are attending the conference, which started on Wednesday, in New York.

The event was created “to recognize what Latino DJs have done all year,” Montano said.

Prizes are handed out in 14 categories, including awards for the best DJs on the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest and South, the biggest honors at the even.

Montano, a former teacher, said he created the prizes to honor his cousin, Jason “Threat” Campbell, the first Dominican DJ on popular New York City station Hot 97.

Campbell was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2001, Montano said.

“I felt it was necessary to keep his name and work alive. I created the conference to raise the name of the Latino DJ to another level,” Montano said.

 

Spanish sculptor Xavier Máscaro presents exhibit in Mexico

Spanish sculptor Xavier Máscaro, who says he is “fascinated by Mexican culture,” is exhibiting his work for the first time in Mexico.

The 18 pieces on display in Mexico City were inspired by the country’s pre-Columbian civilization and seek to create “a bridge between the past and the future,” Máscaro said.

Art lovers can buy any of the pieces, which are being shown at the Galería Hispánica Contemporánea in Mexico City’s Roma district.

The sculptures are made from aluminum, which Máscaro recently began incorporating into his work.

“One thing that attracts me to sculpture is the fact that you can evoke a presence and speak of absence,” Máscaro told Efe.

The artist said sculptures allowed him to sense “that link to people who disappeared long ago,” but with whom he shared “something in common despite the passage of time and the space that separates us.”

“Goddess,” a tricolor aluminum sculpture measuring more than 1.5 meters (nearly five feet), is the main piece in the show.

The sculpture is accompanied by small masks of the same material and reflects “an enormous range of meanings,” the artist said.

Máscaro, who started his art career at 13, said he had always been attracted to iron even though he had produced works from other materials, including bronze, glass and ceramics.

The artist, who was born in 1965 in Paris and studied in Spain, said he felt “the need to work with other materials” in the past four or five years and was now using aluminum.

“I think combining iron with aluminum allows me to play with light and space, with volumes on different scales, alternating lightness and heaviness,” Máscaro said.

The exhibition, “Xavier Máscaro: Obra Reciente,” runs until Oct. 11.

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Battle for humanity almost lost:

[Author]NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:[/Author]

 

Much has been written about the poisons and chemicals used in our food system by the food industry and approved by the Federal Drug Administration with the consent, blessing and acknowledge of the state governments. People continue getting sick and dying because of the contaminated food we consume. And the sad part is that the people just don’t do anything, even those who know or suspect about it. But the following article, authored by Mike Adams, editor of Natural News, is full of information that can help us save our life.

Global food supply deliberately engineered to end life, not nourish it

 

by Mike Adams

Natural News

 

After having now analyzed over 1,000 foods, superfoods, vitamins, junk foods and popular beverages for heavy metals and other substances at the Natural News Forensic Food Labs, I have arrived at a conclusion so alarming and urgent that it can only be stated bluntly.

Based on what I am seeing via atomic spectroscopy analysis of all the dietary substances people are consuming on a daily basis, I must now announce that the battle for humanity is nearly lost. The food supply appears to be intentionally designed to end human life rather than nourish it.

Life-destroying toxins intentionally engineered into the food supply

My lab has uncovered scientific proof that substances are intentionally formulated into dietary products to drive consumers mentally insane while causing widespread infertility, organ damage and a loss of any ability to engage in rational, conscious thinking. These toxic substances are being found across the entire food supply including in conventional foods, organic foods, “natural” products and dietary supplements.

This goes far beyond the mere contamination of foods with heavy metals — a subject which is grave all by itself. Rather, this is about the intentional formulation of toxic substances into products consumed by the masses on a regular basis.

The result is what you see unfolding around you right now: mass insanity, incredible escalations of criminality among political operatives, clinical insanity among an increasing number of mainstream media writers and reporters, widespread infertility in young couples, skyrocketing rates of kidney failure and dialysis patients, plus a near total loss of rational thinking among the voting masses.

The effects of this are devastating to human civilization: the collapse of a capable workforce, the rise of the masses dependent on government for survival, the collapse of free democracies due to the cognitive retardation of the voting masses, an exploding prison population and the rise of for-profit corporate prison systems, and even the near complete collapse of any ability of the news-consuming public to parse and comprehend even the most basic information such as national debt figures.

The long-term effects of this widespread food poisoning phenomenon will be the utter downfall of modern human civilization for numerous reasons ranging from economic non-sustainability to environmental destruction and the global rise of political violence as we are seeing right now in Kiev.

As more and more lab results have been documented here at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, it has become increasingly apparent to me that humanity cannot survive the mass engineered poisoning of the food supply.

You are, of course, being expertly distracted from all this with Powerball jackpots, tabloid celebrity news, staged political drama and of course the all-time favorite distraction of every crumbling empire: violent sports.

What we’re finding in foods, vitamins and supplements

What I’ve published so far just barely scratches the surface of what we are finding. Here’s an overview of some of the incredibly shocking findings we have now documented:

• The now-infamous “yoga mat chemical” used by Subway in their breads is also widely used across the fast-food industry. McDonald’s, Chik-Fil-A, Wendy’s, Arby’s and many other restaurants also use the chemical azodicarbonamide which is linked to cancer. Importantly, this is not a contaminant. This is an ingredient which is intentionally added to the recipes in order for the chemical to be consumed by the masses.

• There is no logical reason why chemicals like azodicarbonamide need to be added to recipes of fast food breads and buns. The chemical serves no necessary functional or nutritive purpose. It seems to exists solely for the purpose of delivering the chemical to hundreds of millions of consumers by blending it into popular fast foods. The sandwiches in which this chemical is found are merely delivery mechanisms for toxic substances that harm human biology.

• Many mainstream, popular vitamin brands are intentionally spiked with such high levels of copper that if taken on a daily basis, they will cause mental insanity and psychosis. Some of these vitamin brands are routinely advertised on television to the mainstream masses, encouraging them to consume the vitamins, many of which are manufactured by companies owned in full or part by pharmaceutical interests.

• A popular dietary herb designed to improve brain performance actually contains very high levels of lead in most products we tested (which were sourced from China). Lead is a toxic heavy metal that damages brain function. In this way, people who are suffering from early dementia or Alzheimer’s are actually accelerated toward brain destruction via certain herbal supplements which appear designed to deliver toxic heavy metals to the brain. It was truly shocking to me to discover that “brain herbs” contain so much lead that they contribute to brain damage.

• At the same time, we found that the very same “brain herb,” when grown in the USA, contains virtually no heavy metals. This is proof that the herb does not “naturally” absorb heavy metals as if by magic. Interestingly, the highest levels of brain-damaging metals are consistently found in herbs imported from China. I’m openly asking this question: Is there a covert heavy metals war being waged against America by China? After all, poisoning the population with heavy metals is a very effective way to collapse a nation by destroying the sanity and health of its people. (More on this topic later…)

• Popular children’s vitamins sold in nearly every grocery store and pharmacy across America are especially formulated to be incredibly toxic to developing neurology. The number of synthetic, toxic chemicals added to nearly every popular brand of children’s vitamins is truly staggering, and many of them seem to be selected for their ability to target and disrupt neurological function. From a purely scientific point of view, these “vitamins” would honestly have to be called “poison pills,” yet parents are encouraged to feed them to their children every single day as part of a modern-day health ritual that actually causes long-term harm.

• At our atomic spectroscopy lab, we have confirmed trace levels of aluminum in regular atmospheric air, confirming the fact that all agricultural soils are being inundated with aluminum which is literally falling out of the sky. This is not merely aluminum in our laboratory air, as many labs contain aluminum floors or furniture, causing an unusually high aluminum concentration in laboratory air. Rather, parts per billion concentrations of aluminum have been measured in regular atmospheric air sampled far from any building or laboratory. The result of this phenomenon is that aluminum levels are rising in nearly all soil-grown crops from which everyday food is derived. While aluminum is far less harmful than lead, cadmium or mercury, the repeated accumulation of aluminum is believed to be tied to degenerative brain disorders across the population.

• As Natural News readers already know, GM corn is engineered to grow a deadly toxin inside each and every grain of corn. This deadly toxin is then consumed by all the people who unknowingly eat genetically engineered crops via breakfast cereals, corn tortillas, corn snack chips, etc. This mass poisoning of the population is clearly intentional, as it is deliberately engineered into the crops which are grown for the sole purpose of human and animal consumption. This mass poisoning is not accidental, in other words, and in fact the technology is promoted under the justification that it will “feed the world.” Indeed it will feed the world… poison. PART 2 WILL CONTINUE ON NEXT EDITION: “Food has become a weapon against humanity.”

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What are machines thinking? Forget it. What are humans thinking?

[Author]by Jon Rappoport

www.nomorefakenews.com[/Author]

 

“…one scenario is that the machines will seek to turn humans into cyborgs. This is nearly happening now, replacing faulty limbs with artificial parts.”

“The concern I’m raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species.”

“[Machines] might view us the same way we view harmful insects.”

“Del Monte believes machines will become self-conscious and have the capabilities to protect themselves.”

These aren’t quotes from some absurdist satirical play designed to expose human stupidity.

They’re quotes tendered by physicist, Louis Del Monte, the author of The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, from an interview with Dylan Love at Business Insider.

The key to Del Monte’s approach is quote number one: machines might decide to turn humans into cyborgs and it’s already happening in the area of artificial limbs.

What? Excuse me, but humans are deciding to put those limbs on other humans. Machines aren’t.

And even in some hospital of the future, if you had AI androids “making all the surgical decisions,” they wouldn’t actually be choosing anything. They’d be programmed by humans.

Why is this so hard for technocrats to understand? Because they infuse themselves with a mystical vision about artificial intelligence.

They confuse operational capability with consciousness.

Machines “viewing” humans? There is no viewing.

Machines don’t think. They never have, and they never will. They perform according to specs.

They can be programmed to select, from a number of options, the option that fulfills the prime directives humans have given them. And that process of selection is carried out according to patterns originally installed by humans.

There is no mystery here. No mystical leap across a barrier between non-conscious and conscious.

But somewhere up the line, humans can be propagandized to believe machines are alive and have rights.

Technocracy abounds with a titanic amount of sheer bullshit. It’s founded on severe apathy and degrading cynicism about what humans are. So machines become the new gods.

The “cheese-melt” theory of collectivism feeds directly into the worship of machines:

“Individuals are weak and helpless. Therefore, they have to melt down into a collective glob, in order to survive. And from that collective point of view, machines loom up as the most powerful entities in the world. Bow, pray to the Artificial Intelligence.”

Again, humans invented those machines in the first place. But that’s scrubbed from the equation. It’s “old news.” Hardly worth a mention.

God or life or consciousness isn’t going to pop up out of the head of a super-computer in 2045, the designated year for the so-called Singularity—when machine intelligence supposedly outstrips our own.

In 2045, or 2056, or 3000, do you know what’s going to happen? Nothing. Machines will still be machines, doing what they always do. Yes, a mile-wide computer in the desert may be able to perform more operations than a toaster in a motel in Cincinnati, but the level of consciousness in both machines is identical.

In a significant way, the whole machines-will-be-alive business is a smokescreen, utilized to conceal an agenda. That agenda is the overall planning and regulating of global civilization, framed as a problem that needs to be solved.

The specious propaganda (you can find it described and satirized in hundreds of science fiction stories and novels) goes this way:

“If we had, at our fingertips, the total sum of human knowledge, and if we could calculate with it at lightning speed, we’d find the optimum pattern for human society. We’d find the answer to the age-old question: how can we live in peace with each other?”

Sheer nonsense. Such calculations, as always, depend on values and ideals, first principles. All solutions flows from those values.

And machines don’t “discover” values. First principles are prior assumptions made by humans.

People have been arguing and fighting wars over those principles for centuries.

For example: individual freedom vs. ultimate government authority.

A machine is going to “discover” which side of the argument is right? A computer is going to do a billion calculations in 30 seconds and “arrive” at the answer?

That’s on the order of asking an army tank to consult the universe and then tell you whether you should marry the farmer’s daughter or take vows of celibacy as a priest.

These technocrats are merely collectivist wolves in intellectuals’ clothing, who will predispose their machines to ding-ding-ding like Vegas slots on the payoff called Fascism.

(Jon Rappoport is the author of three explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed, Exit From The Matrix, And Power Outside The Matrix).

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