Category: Corruption

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SchwartzReport: McDonald’s McRib — Toxic to the Non-Bone

07 Health, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government

schwartz reportBrings new meaning to counter-intelligence.

McDonald’s McRib Sandwich a Franken Creation of GMOs, Toxic Ingredients, Banned Ingredients

Anthony Gucciardi

Natural Society, 8 January 2013

It’s ‘McRib season’, and thousands across the nation are scrambling to use online websites like the ‘McRib locator‘ to stuff the McDonald’s McRib sandwich down their throats. A sandwich that is not only full of genetically modified ingredients, a medley of toxic fillers and preservatives, but also some ingredients that are actually banned in other nations around the world. But honestly, are you surprised?

The McRib is the result of intensive marketing by McDonald’s. Utilizing the basics of supply and demand through creating scarcity over the McRib by only unleashing the culinary abomination for a fraction of the year that is only known once it is released, McDonald’s fans have been known to ‘hoard’ McRib sandwiches and eat them in extreme excess. It’s even a topic of the popular documentary Super Size Me, where filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (who gorges himself with McDonald’s for 30 days only to find serious health consequences) encounters ‘McRib hunters’ who actually travel the country eating McRib sandwiches.

Related: 3 Fast Food Secret Ingredients

McDonald’s even made McRib fans sign a petition to ‘save the McRib’ online, bringing out a conglomerate of fans to bring back their favorite franken sandwich.

What’s Inside a McDonald’s McRib Sandwich?

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Be afraid, be very afraid.  The McRib is a perfect metaphor for the information environment within which most Americans subsist — barely.  Toxic to the non-bone, no truth here.

See Also:

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Chuck Spinney: Pivotng to China — Criminally Insane, Business as Usual

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Media, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

The attached report by Greg Jaffe in the Washington Post (from 1 August 2012) is an excellent case study of the inside-the-beltway networking by the players in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC).  Jaffe shows these networks build a consensus to keep defense spending high when wars end and a terrifying peace dividend threatens to break out. At the center of Jaffee's report a an influence peddling network orchestrated by an ancient artifact of the Pentagon, a futurist named Andrew Marshall, nicknamed Yoda.

Most of the ideas surrounding the all seeing – all knowing – deep-strike precision guided attack systems portrayed in Andy Marshall's so-called Revolution of Military Affairs (its most recent incarnation is the Air – Sea Battle described by Jaffe below) have been around in various forms for a very long time, dating at least from McNamara's electronic line the Viet Nam war, but some of these ideas have conceptual roots in World War II (e.g., the wide area surveillance and close control command architecture of the British air defense system as well as the “precision” weapons programs developed by the US and Germany during WWII).  In fact, readers with a sense of military history will quickly realize that Marshall's ideas are basically a rehash of America's traditional mechanical conception of attrition warfare, especially those ideas underpinning the critical-node theories of strategic bombardment (begun in the 1930s at the Army Air Corps Tactical School), albeit masked by new fancy sounding acronyms.

Readers with a sense of history will also recall that Obama's pivot to China is hardly a new idea.  It was first floated in the early 90s and promoted  by Senator McCain, among others, in the early maneuvering to keep defense spending high despite the collapse of the Soviet Union. (That maneuvering succeeded, because as the chart below shows, the post-cold war budgets never dropped low the levels of the Eisenhower Administration during the height of the Cold War.)  McCain's maneuvering also led to the law mandating the Quadrennial Defense Review, which to date has produced a series of totally useless reports (as I explained here and here) but nevertheless provided rhetorical justifications for continuing Cold War boondoggles like missile defense, the Virginia class nuclear attack submarine, the Army's future combat system, and that turkey of turkeys, the Joint Strike Fighter.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Pivotng to China — Criminally Insane, Business as Usual”

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Owl: Aaron Swartz — Prosecutors as Persecutors — Call to End All Donations to MIT — Burn MIT to the Ground, Metaphorically Speaking

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Academia, Commerce, Corruption, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Governance, Government, Knowledge, Law Enforcement, Media
Who? Who?
Who? Who?

Following up on the excellent post, Mongoose: Moti Nissani on Who Killed Aaron Swartz? it is now clear MIT refuses to cut any kind of deal, and the prosecutor went nuclear on what should have been a matchbook case.  Now it emerges that the prosecutor going after Swartz went after another young man involved with computers who also died, allegedly from suicide, as supposedly did Swartz. “Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been blamed for contributing to Swartz's suicide. Back in 2008, young hacker Jonathan James killed himself in the midst of a federal investigation led by the same prosecutor.  James, the first juvenile put into confinement for a federal cybercrime case, was found dead two weeks after the Secret Service raided his house as part of its investigation of the TJX hacker case led by Heymann — the largest personal identity hack in history. He was thought to be “JJ,” the unindicted co-conspirator named in the criminal complaints filed with the US District Court in Massachusetts. In his suicide note, James wrote that he was killing himself in response to the federal investigation and their attempts to tie him to a crime which he did not commit.”

So one scenario is, as mentioned by Nissani, that the government directly killed – by hanging – Swartz. But in light of this newly emergent pattern, perhaps it indicates another scenario equally sinister but more simple: that Heymann mercilessly and severely harasses his victims to death by suicide. No need to send in wet boys (a DOJ slang term for on-the-payroll DOJ  killers specifically) to murder someone, just drive them insane or to self-destruction. The outcome is the same as someone putting a bullet in one's head.  It's about prosecuting by persecuting. A capsule definition of what comprises much of what is called the US legal system.  See this link for more:

Internet Activist's Prosecutor Linked To Another Hacker's Death

It seems like outrage at the official US government persecution-leading-to death of Aaron Swartz is picking up steam. Check out this excellent list of recent links from the Naked Capitalism site:

Berners-Lee Calls Prosecution of Aaron Swartz ‘Travesty’ Bloomberg. Notice how slanted the story is. Calls what he did “hacking” when was not, see here.
How the Legal System Failed Aaron Swartz—And Us New Yorker
TOWARDS LEARNING FROM LOSING AARON SWARTZ Center for Internet and Society
‘Aaron was killed by the government’ – Robert Swartz on his son’s death RT
On humanity, a big failure in Aaron Swartz case Boston Globe. Makes it clear MIT refused to cut a deal. I hope tech donors never give a dime to MIT again.

Continue reading “Owl: Aaron Swartz — Prosecutors as Persecutors — Call to End All Donations to MIT — Burn MIT to the Ground, Metaphorically Speaking”

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Mini-Me: NRA President Hints at Impeachment Over Gun Control Legislation

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement
Who? Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Keene to Newsmax: Obama Presidency ‘At Risk' If He Acts Alone on Gun Ban

National Rifle Association President David Keene tells Newsmax that President Obama could be violating the Constitution if he circumvents Congress and imposes gun control by executive order — and his presidency will be “at risk” if he proceeds.

Keene also says gun control advocates will ultimately fail in their efforts to ban assault weapons, despite Obama’s “rabid advisers” who will push the ban.

And he asserts that the administration is asking the “wrong questions” in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings and is instead seeking to politicize the tragedy.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: NRA President Hints at Impeachment Over Gun Control Legislation”

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SchwartzReport: Criminalization of Preganancy Among Poor — Mental Institutionalization, Criminal Proceedings, and Forced Medical Procedures on Rise in Radical Right States

01 Poverty, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement

schwartz reportThis story should horrify, and outrage you. I read it early this morning, in my first pass for today's SR. It upset me so much that I had to just stop and sit, and meditate for some moments. And it worried me that I knew nothing about this. That's how deeply buried this part of the war on women has been.

As you can see, this is where personhood amendments take us.

Notice that this is 75 per cent a Red value state issue. For this reason I see it as also part of the Great Schism trend. Not only on the basis of values, but because the Blue value states are tiring of financially supporting the lunacies of the Red value states.

Study finds widespread ‘criminalisation of pregnancy' in US institutions

Study cites misinterpretation of Roe v Wade in array of cases where women were denied rights based on pregnancy status

NEW YORK — Hundreds of women have been arrested, convicted, jailed, detained in mental institutions or forced to endure medical procedures as a result of the “criminalisation of pregnancy” over the last four decades, a new report has found.

In the first study of its kind, to be published on Tuesday, researchers from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) identified 413 criminal and civil cases across 44 states involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women's liberty between 1973 and 2005. NAWP said that it is aware of a further 250 cases since 2005. Both figures are likely to be underestimates, it said.

The report, which will appear in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, found that women were denied a wide range of basic human rights, including the right to life, liberty, equal protection and due process of law “based solely on their pregnancy status”.

It found a wide range of cases in which pregnant women were arrested and detained not only if they ended a pregnancy or expressed an intention to end a pregnancy, but also after suffering unintentional pregnancy loss.

The cases of detention and forced medical intervention varied widely and included one in which a judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her having an abortion.

Another involved a woman in Oregon who refused a doctor's recommendation for additional testing for gestational diabetes. She was held in a locked psychiatric ward. Another case involved a court in Washington DC, which ordered a critically ill woman to undergo caesarian section over her objections. Neither she nor the baby survived.

Read full article.

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Mini-Me: The Prosecution of Aaron Swartz: Sharing Knowledge Is a Greater Crime Than Bringing Down the Economy

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government
Who? Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

The Prosecution of Aaron Swartz: Sharing Knowledge Is a Greater Crime Than Bringing Down the Economy

Ali Hayat

Huffington Post, 13 January 2013

Aaron Swartz is no longer among us though the contributions he made to promote free flow of information and knowledge sharing will continue to benefit our present and future generations. He was charged with 13 felony counts for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR and accused of intending to distribute these articles through file-sharing sites.

The manner in which Aaron had been prosecuted offers a sharp contrast to the manner in which our legal system dealt with corporate America after the 2008 financial crisis, where there were no prosecutions of top corporate figures. Sadly, the contrast highlights that trying to disseminate knowledge, quite literally by making academic journal articles available online, is a greater crime than bringing down the United States economy through “corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking.”

Driven by a desire to make knowledge accessible Aaron has been attributed to author the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” Some key excerpts are as follow:

Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable … Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world … It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy … It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

Aaron's untimely death has left us without a great mind and even more importantly a compassionate activist. While Aaron is irreplaceable, we must aspire to freely disseminate the moral imperative he advocated, in the very spirit that he himself would have done.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: The Prosecution of Aaron Swartz: Sharing Knowledge Is a Greater Crime Than Bringing Down the Economy”

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Mongoose: Moti Nissani on Who Killed Aaron Swartz?

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption
Mongoose
Mongoose

For contextual orientation.

Who Killed Aaron Swartz?

Moti Nissani

Veterans Today, 13 January 2014

”How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”—Bob Marley

On January 11, 2013, according to indoctrination organs of the criminal Syndicate calling itself the US government (a Syndicate comprised, for the most part, of big bankers, generals, spooks and, below them, their puppets in the White House and gubernatorial mansions, Congress and state legislatures, and almost the entire judiciary), Aaron Swartz, aged 26, killed himself.

Many on the internet have already traced Aaron’s tragic and untimely death directly to the Syndicate.  I wish to add my voice to this growing chorus, placing this recent event in a somewhat larger context of historical scholarship.

In relating this story, the Syndicate’s propaganda organs conveniently forgot four crucial points:

  1. The Syndicate had excellent reasons to wish Aaron dead.
  2. As in most cases of covert Syndicate assassinations (e.g., Fred Hampton, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway), Aaron’s death was preceded by a vicious, totally unjustified, campaign of surveillance, harassment, vilification, and intimidation.
  3.  The Central Institute of Assassinations (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Intimidations (FBI) can and do kill people while making the murder look like suicide.
  4. In America, England, and most other countries, painstaking research by people like Kevin Barett, Jim Douglass, Jim Fetzer, Jim Garrison, David Helvarg, and William F. Pepper discloses an unmistakable pattern: influential friends of the people (and hence, enemies of the Syndicate) tend to die before they reach old age, often under bizarre circumstances.  This pattern has an obvious corollary: when friends of the Syndicate die prematurely, we can reasonably assume, with a high degree of probability, that the Syndicate killed them.

Let me expound on these four points, one at a time.

Full article below the line.

Continue reading “Mongoose: Moti Nissani on Who Killed Aaron Swartz?”

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