Wednesday, July 11, 2012

60 Days In Prison And A $12,180 Fine For Hosting A Home Bible Study In Arizona ...

60 Days In Prison And A $12,180 Fine For Hosting A Home Bible Study In Arizona ...


By:Michael Snyder
Courtesy of infowars.com


The war on home Bible studies and house churches is heating up again. Down in Phoenix, Arizona a man has been sentenced to 60 days in prison and has been fined $12,180 for hosting a Bible study in his home.

Since 2005, Michael Salman and his wife have been hosting gatherings of about 15 or 20 peoplewhere they share food, fellowship and discuss the Bible. Unfortunately, that kind of thing is against the law in Phoenix, Arizona apparently. At one point, nearly a dozen armed police officers raided their home and “evidence” of their “crimes” was gathered. Michael Salman was found guilty of 67 “code violations”, and now he is going to be ripped away from his family and put in prison for two months. In addition, the assistant city prosecutor is asking the court to “revoke his probation and convert it into a 2 1/2 year jail sentence since he continues to hold worship gatherings on his property despite court orders.” This kind of case has the potential to have a huge “chilling effect” on home gatherings of all kinds all over the United States.
You may be thinking that you are glad that this man is being put in prison because you aren’t a Christian and you don’t have any sympathy for Christians.
Well, what if you wanted to hold small gatherings in your home to discuss the U.S. Constitution?
Or what if you wanted to hold small gatherings in your home to play cards or watch football?
The U.S. Constitution guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”, and when the constitutional rights of one person are under attack, it is an attack on all of us.
In America today, we actually do not own our homes and our properties. Instead, we are only allowed to use them in very, very narrowly-defined ways, and if we “rebel” against those rules the control freaks that run things will smack us hard.
A while back I wrote about how control freak bureaucrats all over the country are using “code violations” to force preppers back on to the grid. In some cases, they are even using “code violations” to force preppers completely off of their properties.
They want to run our lives, and if we do not live within the very narrow constraints that they define for us then they will send armed men to raid our homes.
So how did Michael Salman’s problems start?
You can probably guess.
His “neighbors” complained about noise and “traffic congestion“.
So that is how city officials got involved. We have become a nation of informers and tattlers, and this is another perfect example of that.
Michael Salman did have a big cross and a big sign outside his home, and in this situation that was rather foolish. Perhaps if he had kept a lower profile things would have been different. But it still does not excuse what authorities in Phoenix are doing to him.
People should be able to have small gatherings of friends and family in their own homes. If we can’t do that, what do we have left?
And these days, just about everything is illegal in America, so if you want to sick the authorities on your neighbors it is quite easy to do.
What is this nation turning into?
The implications of this story are staggering.
Over the past couple of decades, the number of “house churches” in the United States has absolutely exploded as an increasing number of Americans reject the big, institutional churches for one reason or another.
Now we are seeing a backlash against the home church movement.
Are we going to start to see authorities systematically coming after home Bible studies and house churches all over America?
Sadly, we have already seen quite a few examples of this. The following is one example from California….
A Christian couple from Orange County, Calif., were fined earlier this month for holding Bible studies and for what city officials called “a regular gathering of more than three people” in their homes. They have now been told they face a $500 fine if they continue to hold their home Bible study gatherings.
Fortunately, authorities in that case have backed off at least for now after immense public pressure.
But this is just the beginning. Bible-believing Christians are now considered to be “outside the mainstream” and are being attacked in unprecedented ways.
For example, the head of Personhood USA (Keith Mason) had his home brutally vandalized after he was featured in a recent Newsweek article. When that article was posted on the website of The Daily Beast, someone left a comment that contained his home address. Unfortunately, some very sick individuals decided to “pay a visit” to the home and hurled a boulder that destroyed the glass in his front door. In addition, they took red spray paint and painted cuss words and red coat hangers on his house and on his sidewalk.
The following is how this attack was described in a recent Newsweek article….
Mason says he was awake at the time of the attack. “I was in the basement, catching a movie and having a beer, to just chill,” Mason says. “I heard a loud noise and thought one of our kids had fallen down the stairs.” Mason says he ran upstairs from the basement, then “ran through a bunch of glass” and “saw red.” He describes the scene as “surreal—I didn’t know if it was blood on the glass or what. It turned out to be spray paint. There was red paint all over the side of our house. They spray-painted coat-hangers all over my sidewalk and door. We called 911. The police were there within three minutes.”
The family has moved from the home and they say that they have no plans to return.
This is what America is turning into.
Hate and anger are rising to unprecedented levels and it seems like psychopaths are running around everywhere.
I truly fear for the future of this nation.

Water Securitization, Agenda 21 and the Right to Life ...

Water Securitization, Agenda 21 and the Right to Life ...
By:Susanne Posel
Courtesy of infowars.com



There is an estimated 366 million, trillion gallons of water on planet Earth. That number appears to be fixed, according to UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Council of the International Hydrological Program (HIP). The alarmist threat of man-made climate change states that where and how this water manifests itself in hydraulic flux across our biosphere is questionable.

The HIP are a UN program system devoted to researching and finding natural water resources and managing those resources found. While the UN is well aware that the necessity of water as a vital source for life means the retention of power over all life, they are well into their schemes to develop global governance over all sources of fresh, clean water.
The IPCC document HS 15332 Climate Change Impacts: Securitization of Water, Food, Soil, Health, Energy and Migration explains how the UN plans to secure resources to use at their disposal. Through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under-developed countries are forced to sell their resources to the global Elite as “full cost recovery” to the global central bankers. Once thoseresources are under the complete control of the IMF they become assets to be reallocated back to the enslaved nations for a price.
This scheme makes water sources under central privatization cost more and become less accessible to those who desperately need it. Water prices rise while the quality of it diminishes. This forces natives in places like South Africa and India to collect water from polluted streams and rivers, which compromises their health. The cycle in complete when those who had their water stolen from them through coercion die from contaminated water that they were forced to use.
If the alarmist view is taken as fact (regardless of the empirical data to disprove it), then rising sea levels will somehow allow more water to evaporate in the atmosphere, lowering water table levels dramatically. Estimations state that hydro-electric dams, like the Hoover Dam, would cease generating electricity by 2024.
While some areas on Earth, under climate change computer models, are expected to become wetter, some are equally expected to become drier. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) claims that from research flooding worldwide takes an estimated 25,000 lives and is responsible for economic loses that add up to $60 billion annually.
Reworking of highways to elevated areas and moving infrastructure from coastlines are a challenge for alarmist engineers. Relying on policymakers and behavioral shifts are at the core of the alarmist perspective. Cities must evolve from out-of-control consumerism to eco-friendly examples of moderation, just as we see in Transition Towns .
Engineers and planners, working with Agenda 21 policies in mind, are devising “ecosystem-based” responses to protecting the biodiversity of land and animals under the guidelines set forth by the UN. When it comes to land conservation, the UN is explicit as to how they want to ensure its success. Schemes that are devised to meter the output of resources and control how much is used by an individual are being made available to governments through allocation of taxpayer money under the direction of the UN Sustainable Development initiatives and Millennium Development Goals.
Over the past two decades, scientists have been using a cheap method called ocean fertilization that is the dumping of iron dust into the oceans in order to stimulate the growth of CO2 breathing phytonplankton. Under guidelines of UNESCO, ocean fertilization is conducted under the assumption that they are “adding nutrients, or increasing the nutrient supply from deep waters” when really they are polluting the oceans with a toxic metal.
Small scale experiments have confirmed that iron seeding of the oceans does promote the phytonplankton’s growth. Yet, ocean fertilization causes catastrophic effects, such as creating oxygen-depleted dead zones in the world’s oceans. The Royal Society , who supports these seeding oceans efforts, admits that the deduction of CO2 it would facilitate is a negligible 10 parts per million which would not have any real impact on global temperatures.
J. Gary Lawrence, adviser to former President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development said : “Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy- fixated groups and individuals in our society. This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking [Agenda 21]. So we call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.”
Local governments and municipalities are utilizing the capture of rain-water under strict regulation. It is not meant for any individual to capture rain-water for private use. The community as a whole, under Agenda 21 control and distribute water resources to all; as long as there is enough.
Watersheds, controlled by local governments who adhere to Agenda 21 policies would control who gets access to water, how much and how much it will cost the individual.
The UN Environmetal Program (UNEP) in a UN-Water Survey of 130 Countries Status Report have forced reformation through international water laws that apply pressure under the guise of “expanding populations, urbanization and climate change”. While clean drinking water for humans is controlled, improvements designed to ensure freshwater reserves for the ecosystem are first and foremost.
Management and use of water under the international agreement known as Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) was back at the 1992 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. This is a part of the Agenda 21 plan. Cooperation of the UNEP and the UN-Water, an inter-agency mechanism to control freshwater resources, relates UN policies to governments on how to allocate their assets.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP executive director, said: “The sustainable management and use of water – due to its vital role in food security, energy or supporting valuable ecosystem services – underpins the transition to a low-carbon, resource efficient green economy.”
Steiner believes that integrating UN policies for water resource management will facilitate a sustainable approach to water. The needs of the global population, which is expected to rise to 9 billion by 2050, will demand total governance.
The UN blames population growth combined with communities in rural areas increase the necessity of stricter guidelines to avert “climactic and socio=political disasters”.
The UN “suggests” that by 2015 all countries develop financing strategies and action programs that adhere to the IWRM. They want all nations to report to the UNEP concerning water resources management so that the UN can assess their progress and make changes as they see fit.
Simply put, the securitization of water on a global scale, will be run by the UN only. Their target recommendations will then be directed to individual governments to be made into laws. The citizens of those nations will have no choice but to follow the laws of their countries; if they are to get their ration of life-giving water.
Even in industrialized nations, this will mean the difference between access to fresh, clean water and having to use polluted water sources which threaten our health and well-being.

Depopulating The Third World: UN Sterilization Campaigns In Developing Countries Accelerating...

Depopulating The Third World: UN Sterilization Campaigns In Developing Countries Accelerating...


Courtesy of infowars.com
By: Jurriaan Maessen


The real trick is, in terms of trying to level off at someplace lower than that 9 billion, is to get the birthrates in the developing countries to drop as fast as we can. And that will determine the level at which humans will level off on earth.”


From a MIT lecture by professor Penny Chisholm.

For over half a century demographers at the United Nations have attempted to “convince” people from both developing and developed nations to limit their households to one child. In the decades after WW2 no means were spared in order to get this message across. Radio, television, newspapers were cleverly used to reach people in the remotest areas. By the mid-seventies, all available instruments of propaganda were strategically set in motion, with taxpayer’s money to spare and lots of “human resources” to scale back (as social engineers prefer to call us). The justification that could be given to the Western middle class was wonderfully simple: under the guise of developing the undeveloped, the UN sold its Third World population agenda. Simultaneously the developing nations were propagandized into surrendering their people’s birthright to procreate and multiply- two things our species is prone to do. All those resisting the onslaught of information were characterized as a scourge on the environment. Because the eugenicists have an enemy that is not easily defeated, namely human instinct and dignity, it was crucial to discredit human nature first, making it suspect, while replacing human nature with an artificially created “shadow nature” which readily rejects notions such as life and liberty, embracing covert eugenics and tyranny instead. Although the UN in the west has learned to speak of “sustainable development” when speaking of population control, their language in developing countries has been more crude, more closely resembling the original eugenic tongue on how best to keep their populations in check.
Despite all these efforts the overall human population has increased. The UN began to grow restless and less impressed with its own propaganda efforts. In the West populations may have decreased, in the developing world they increased all the more. More drastic measures began to be proposed for the Third World with the aim of speeding up the population agenda. From the beginning of this century onwards all kinds of horror-stories began dripping in, describing among other things state-sponsored sterilization policies in the Third World.
Uzbekistan
In 2010, the British Independent featured an AP article detailing suspicions that health officials in the Republic of Uzbekistan are widely involved in involuntary sterilization-practices.
The AP-reporter spoke with a 24-year old housewife named Saodat Rakhimbayeva, an extremely brave woman who tells a heart-wrenching tale of state-sponsored eugenics in her home country of Uzbekistan. After giving birth to a premature boy, she had to witness her son dying just three days later.
“Then”, states the article, “came a further devastating blow: She learned that the surgeon had removed part of her uterus during the operation, making her sterile.”
“According to rights groups, victims and health officials, Rakhimbayeva is one of hundreds of Uzbek women who have been surgically sterilized without their knowledge or consent in a program designed to prevent overpopulation from fueling unrest.(…). The order comes from the very top,” said Khaitboy Yakubov, head of the Najot human rights group in Uzbekistan.”
This statement by Yakubov has more significance that he himself probably realizes. By “the very top” he likely refers to the central Uzbek government. As it turns out, the order came from even higher up.
An official communiqué from the embassy of Uzbekistan in New Delhi gives us more insight in a remarkable initiative by the Uzbek state and the different partners with which it collaborates:
“The complex of measures for the “Mother’s and Child’s Screening”, directed to prevent the childbirth with the hereditary diseases, accompanying with intellectual backwardness as well as inspection of pregnant women is carried out in the Republic with the purpose of revealing anomalies of development of a child-bearing. (…). Within the framework of the State Programs the cooperation is continuing with the WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, USAID, JICA, KfW Bank, World Bank, Asian Development Bank (…).”
The United Nations Population Fund concurs. It admits helping Uzbek authorities screen its citizens:
“In Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, UNFPA worked to strengthen national capacities to collect, analyze and disseminate gender disaggregated data on population, development and reproductive health and to integrate population variables and gender concerns into development and environmental planning.”
Now what this really mean? A Japanese International Corporation Agency, profiling Uzbekistan’s disability policies, states the following in regards to the Uzbek national screening program (page 11):
“By 2001, 124.000 of new-borns had been examined, 2.800 children in at-risk groups had been identified; and 160 had been registered in health clinics. For genetic reasons, 1.381 pregnancies were terminated.”
Furthermore, an Uzbek government-website acknowledges receiving generous funding for its eugenic programs and restates the UN-funded mission:
“Up-to-date medical technologies help detect possible defects in the development of a fetus at an early stage of pregnancy. To preclude birth of children with genetic disease accompanied by mental abnormalities and to detect fetus abnormality (…).”
Another Uzbek government website gave a description of the ultimate goal of the “Mother and Child screening” program as follows:
“(…) reducing the birth of disabled children.”
In the same publication, the above-mentioned “screening” of possible “intellectual backwardness” serves to “prevent childbirth with hereditary diseases”.
Interestingly the link to that webpage is now dead. However they can not erase away the fact that these practises constitute eugenics in its purest form. And transnational organizations like the UN, World Bank and the German KfW Bank are directly and fanatically involved in the funding of these “screening”-programs conducted by Uzbek health authorities.
The UN itself admits in its own publications to its “long-standing partnership and track-record working in Uzbekistan.”:
“The UN’s mandate in supporting the implementation and monitoring of the MDGs (UN Millennium Development Goals) at the country level is a substantial comparative advantage in assisting the Government (of Uzbekistan) to enhance living standards, and achieve higher levels of human development. As a credible and trusted partner of the Government, we provide policy advice, technical assistance and programmatic support, drawing on best global practices.”
An important item of the UN’s “programmatic support” is their ideas on population-screening and control, making sure that Uzbek women:
“… have access, as and when they require, to what we call reproductive health.- family planning, contraception, and medical care during pregnancy, at delivery and afterwards.”
In a publication by USAID, the largest US aid institution paid for by US tax dollars, reference was made to the contributions of the United Nations Population Fund:
“UNFPA provided IUD’s, injectables and pills. Health facilities hold at least 3 different methods, though their quantities are not sufficient.”
In regards to USAID’s own contributions, which include training local Uzbek health officials, the document lists a training-course:
“The two week-training included theory and extensive practise. Each participant passing the course received a set of instruments for minilaporotomy. During training courses 39 clients were sterilized. 88 clients have been sterilized by trained providers to date.”
Another USAID-document from 1993 recommends some actions to be taken in regards to Central European nations, such as Uzbekistan (page 10):
“New contraceptive technologies should be offered, with training in their application and in the counseling of clients on the choices available to them. Policy change will be required in some countries to permit sterilization to be included among available options for both women and men. To assure the commitment of health sector leadership, study tours in the united States would be useful, as would inclusion of the heads of medical training institutions in the redesign of medical and nursing curricula to integrate family planning into health care.”
Remember the reports from the Uzbek woman reporting involuntary sterilization practices by Uzbek doctors. It seems it is being done with US taxpayer dollars, and with additional donations from the World Bank, German development bank, the United Nations Population Fund- and let’s not leave out another important contributor, the World Health Organization. The WHO reports on their own website:
“Uzbekistan and WHO: A close relationship exists between WHO and the Ministry of Health (MOH).”
Listed under “Opportunities”, the WHO mentions that:
“Uzbekistan now receives substantial funding for health programmes with contributions from many key partners.”
India
According to a report out of India earlier this year, several victims of forced sterilization by state officials have come forward, providing bone-chilling evidence of widespread sterilization practices in Madhya Pradesh, a huge province in India’s heartland. An item carried by India Today, under the header “conned into sterilization” features no less than 8 victims of Indian government officials, who routinely round up citizens and sterilize them just to meet the state’s family planning targets. As it turns out, it’s not just the state’s targets they are meeting. Every time some chicken-necked eugenicist grabs a surgical knife, it is the desires of the UN and World Health Organization he’s satisfying.
The victims interviewed include a 98-year old man and an 80-year old man, both of whom were forced to undergo vasectomy. Government officials threatened the men with withholding their social benefits if they refused.
“While these men got to live the life they wanted till a ripe old age, 24-year old Jamuna Kori of Sidhi district was not so lucky. One day, he was just picked up from a road by two men, sterilised and left on the highway again.”
The article, written by correspondent Rahul Singh, also features a woman who was drugged into submission:
“They gave me something to drink and I fell unconscious. When I woke up I realized they had operated on me. I want an inquiry”.
The video also shows several mentally challenged individuals, who were not even threatened but just directly operated upon.
The clip also features a 25 year old man who took his 2 year old son for an anti-rabies vaccine after the boy was bitten by a dog. The doctors told the man they would only treat his son if the father would undergo sterilization. The Telegraph carried an article recently about this case, in which the young father said:
“My son’s life was more important. I was told private hospitals charge 900 Rupees (£11) for each injection,” he told The Indian Express.”
“In 2010”, states a 2011 article out of New Delhi, “Madhya Pradesh achieved a record sterilization target of 645,000, luring villagers with freebies such as mobile phones, two-wheelers and gold coins to undergo sterilization.”
But now, in 2012, it seems the eugenicists in the UN are loosing patience as now they just order people picked up from the road to have them drugged and sterilized.
In an ad put out by the UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund) for the job of family planning consultant (7 vacancies) the candidates are being informed about the reasons for more hands:
“Given that the presence of the private sector is marginal, there is major client load on the public health system. Hence, if sterilization services in Madhya Pradesh have to pick up, public health system has to gear itself and other options of public–private partnership, wherever feasible, will have to be explored.”
Another piece of evidence that the sterilisation-efforts contributed to the state is actually being coordinated by the UNFPA:
“It is proposed to have a dedicated technical person in the office of divisional joint director, as divisional family planning consultant, supported by UNFPA. The consultant would be physically located in the office of divisional joint director health services and will work under direct administrative and technical control of joint director health services.”
In fact, these practices are being conducted worldwide- always with the help of the same old modus operandi: the World Bank and their UN partners constrict sovereign nations to the point of them accepting trading-“privileges”. In order to safeguard a seat around the transnational table, these nations- often struggling with widespread poverty- accept every and any condition by the lender of last resort (IMF, World Bank). These conditions are far from secret. They are actually right out in the open. This latest Indian horror story is further evidence of the fact that not the Indian state is the initiator of these forced sterilization policies, as the article by Rahul Singh argues. It is the UNFPA rather, the enforcement arm of the eugenicists, which both sets the standards, provides the technology, recruits the medical personnel, and- on a global level- enforces these sterilization policies through binding treaties and other supranational strangleholds.
In the context of the 2011 UN’s World Population Day several developing nations were quick to pledge allegiance to the eugenic deity. In the east-Indian state of Bihar, officials put out the announcementthat:
“The Bihar government will soon formulate a new population control policy. The policy will be framed in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF).”
Another Indian state, Karnataka, had President Gladys Almeida “observe World Population Day” at which event she told local government employees:
“There is a need to create an awareness on the need for population control.”
Another individual present said:
“as the population increases, nature takes its own method to control it.”
Another compliant nation, Pakistan, had their Federal Minister for Population Welfare Firdous Aashiq Awan announce that:
“The government is taking serious measures to control population growth in the country.”
The government in Islmabad even recruits religious leaders (a trick stolen from the UN) in order to sell population control to the masses:
“(…) religious leaders are being empowered. For the first time, ‘Imam Masjid’ is being made a partner in population Welfare programmes. He would act as a social mobilizer, she (Awan) added.”
These pledges of allegiance to the UN and their set goals of reducing human numbers are not exclusively made by developing countries. Developed countries have accustomed themselves with the same line of reasoning. The only difference is that, as of yet, the language has been more “friendly”, masking the true purpose of the scientific dictatorship implemented.
China
Via news outlet the Global Times, the Chinese State in 2010 lamented the “issue of unauthorized births” in light of the UN’s stated goal of “efficient population control.”
The UN’s World population Day, July 11, was originally set up in 1989 by the Governing Council of the United Nations Development Programma to “raise awareness of global population issues.”
“The theme of this year’s (2010) 21st World Population Day”, mentions the article, “is “Everyone Counts”, and the activities in China will focus on the 2010 population census and emphasize the right to life.”
“In China”, the article goes on to say, “the issue of unauthorized births is at the forefront of its efforts to control the growth of its population as it undermines the country’s family planning policy, or “one-child policy”, which was implemented in 1980.”
“According to Chinese statistics, the national population reached 1.3 billion at the end of 2008, with 6.7 million born that year. Unauthorized births accounted for a large percentage of those births.”
“Since the family planning policy was implemented, local governments strictly controlled the births of each family, and allowed each couple to have one child, but with a more flexible policy in China’s ethnic minority areas. However, not all couples obeyed the rules (…).”
Besides the horrible “obeyed the rules”, the bone chilling term “unauthorized births” is used several times in the article to describe families exceeding their allowance of babies they decide to put on this earth. As we know, having more than one baby provokes direct interference from the Chinese State, which can tax, fine, threaten and even terminate the new life considered by the all-powerful state to be a burden on the environment. The article also mentions the existence of a “household contract responsibility system”- created nationwide to make sure the population control policies would be strictly carried out. Such a slave-state is exactly what the UN envisions for their desired world government. Although the UN itself tempers the tongue when it comes to their stated goal of reducing the world’s population, the Chinese authorities know exactly what goals the UN expects them to pursue:
“It (the UN) also aims to stress the importance of efficient population control by means of collecting and analyzing the latest data so as to make an impact on decision-making and improve people’s lives.”
statement written for World Population Day by the Secretary-General of the UN reads as follows:
“On this World Population Day, I call on decision-makers everywhere to make each and every person count. Only by considering the needs of all women and men,girls and boys,can we achieve the Millennium Development Goals and advance the shared values of the United Nations.”
These shared values were described in detail by UN’s Agenda 21:
“(…) a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced: a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
The stifling silence that envelops this subject in developed nations, will only make it easier for the UN to go ahead with their population policies in developing ones. And to anyone in the West who thinks strict population policies in the Third World are sad but necessary, I would like to point out that under a global government, or “global governance” as the UN prefers to say, developed and developing nations alike are subject to its decrees. So every time we wave these facts away like an irritating fly, be assured it will come back to haunt us.

Pentagon Cyber Chief Downplays NSA Email Snooping; Says Attack is 'Coming Our Way'...

Pentagon Cyber Chief Downplays NSA Email Snooping; Says Attack is 'Coming Our Way'...


Courtesy of rt.com

The Pentagon official at the top of the US Defense Department’s cyber program says that an attack on the United States’ computer systems is not just on the way but that America is now more vulnerable than ever.
National Security Agency Director Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the Pentagon’s Cyber Command unit, tells reporters this week that the US is coming close to being hit with a computer attack that could devastate the country. Speaking before a crowd this week, Alexander warns, "The conflict is growing [and] the probability for crisis is mounting.”
"While we have the time, we should think about and enact those things that we need to ensure our security in this area. Do it now, before a crisis,” insists Alexander.
“What I’m concerned about is the transition from disruptive to destructive attacks,” he adds. “And I think that’s coming. We have to be ready for that.”
The US Congress is currently tasking itself with finding a way to fight cyberterrorism, but the inability to fully find a way to balance security with civil liberties has raised objections across the country. Alexander dismissed these concerns during this week’s address, however, insisting that the NSA does not "hold data on American citizens” and equated the US government’s association with major Internet entities as one that is relatively hands-off.
"Like the police force, like the fire department, they don't see around buildings waiting for a fire to come on, you call them when it happens. In cyberspace, I see very much the same thing in our partnership with industry,” he alleges.
“We can protect civil liberties and privacy, and cybersecurity,” says Alexander, who insists his agency is “not talking about giving our personal e-mails to the government.”
Meanwhile, only last month the NSA sent a letter to two leading congressmen refusing to reveal the number of Americans that they have spied on through provisions made in 2008 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a legislation that allows the government to go through correspondence that they believe is being sent overseas. In explaining themselves to the two lawmakers that asked for an answer, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), the NSA said that that informing Americans about any spying they may have been subjected to would be damaging to personal privacy.
RT has also reported that, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, the government is given practically an open invitation to access private information such as that contained in emails tens of thousands of times a year.
Elsewhere, recent reports have alleged that the United States has all the while been behind massive computer attacks waged not at its own citizens through spy programs but instead at Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. By way of both Stuxnet and Flame, a worm and malware, respectively, Obama administrations officials speaking with the New York Times have confirmed that the technology behind the cybercrimes was engineered on behalf of the American government and authorized by US President Barack Obama.
Speaking of attacks aimed at America, however, Alexander explains this week, "I do think that's coming our way. You can see this statistically; the number of attacks is growing."

Monsanto Rider: New Bill Could Make Biotech Companies Immune to Courts...

Monsanto Rider: New Bill Could Make Biotech Companies Immune to Courts...
Courtesy of rt.com




If passed, an amendment in the Agricultural Appropriations Bill will not just allow, but require the secretary of agriculture to grant permits for planting or cultivating GM crops – even if a federal court has given an injunction against it.


Basically, all Monsanto and other biotech companies have to do is ask and the industry gets its way. Issues like crop contamination, damage to farmers or consumers, courts orders or USDA studies all go out the window and the biotech industry cashes in.
Organizations like Food Democracy Now are in a panic, calling all to petition against the bill, which they say“fundamentally undermines the concept of judicial review and would strip judges of their constitutional mandate to protect consumer rights and the environment, while opening up the floodgates for the planting of new untested genetically engineered crops, endangering farmers, consumers and the environment.”
Representative Peter DeFazio has been trying to push through an amendment that would kill the havoc-wreaking rider. He has the support of organizations like Organic Consumers Associations, Center for Food Safety and others. Their warnings have been circulating the web, gathering attention and support – but will they be enough to sway the House?
"Ceding broad and unprecedented powers to industry, the rider poses a direct threat to the authority of US courts, jettisons the US Department of Agriculture's (USDA) established oversight powers on key agriculture issues and puts the nation's farmers and food supply at risk, " claimed the Center for Food Safety in a recent statement.
But how has such a rider even made it on to the Agricultural Appropriations Bill? According to Tom Philpot of Mother Jones, agricultural sub-committee chair Jack Kingston is responsible for inserting this pro-industry provision, which, many argue, has nothing to do with agricultural appropriations. Interestingly enough, Kingston was also voted “legislator of the year for 2011-2012″ by none other than the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto and DuPont.
The media is speculating that the House of Representatives will vote on the bill on July 23rd, after allegedly delaying the issue twice earlier this month. But one thing is certain – if passed, this one line in a 90-page document will mean Frankenfood for consumers, losses for farmers and huge profits for biotech companies that don’t appear to care much for anything else.