01/05/15 ~ The Raw Story

Monday, 5 January 2015

Psycho Pat Robertson says non-religious children should be beaten until they respect Christian beliefs

In another example demonstrating that Pat Robertson believes in persecuting non-Christians and indoctrinating children, the televangelist openly suggested that parents should beat their kids until they respect Christian beliefs.

During yet another shameful episode of the 700 Club, which runs on Disney-owned channel ABC Family, Robertson received an email from a woman who claimed that her grandson disrespects their Christian faith when they visit their daughter on Christmas and chose not to visit this past year.

"We declined going to our daughter's house on Christmas this year because there is always an argument, hard feelings etc.," viewer Karen wrote.

"One grandchild comes high on marijuana, cursing and challenging our faith. I correct him and have told my daughter to ask him to respect our beliefs, but he keeps it up. Our daughter say she is a Christian but will drink too much and offend her daughter and her husband. Were we wrong to not to attend another Christmas that leaves us upset or someone angry? I have shared my beliefs many times with them and am ridiculed by this grandson and son-in-law."

Robertson's immediate solution? Beat the child until he respects Christianity.

"Somebody take that kid to the woodshed and let him understand the blessings of discipline," Robertson advised before predicting that the kid would end up in prison if a strong male figure didn't start beating him right away.

"He needs a strong male figure. He's going to wind up in a correctional institution, and the next thing you know, he's going to be doing hard time in some prison. And then he would wish he wasn't such a smart, you know, wise guy. Because he'll be disciplined in a way that he'll never forget in some prison... He needs discipline in the worst possible way."

Here's the video via YouTube.

[embedded content]

One solution Pat Robertson conveniently didn't mention is for Karen to stop bringing up religion at her daughter's home. She says she has "shared her beliefs many times with them" and admits that it always causes an argument. Well, there's her problem. Stop trying to force your beliefs upon your daughter's family and the arguments will probably cease. It's not that people are offended by someone just because they practice a certain religion, they just tend to get offended when someone tries to force those beliefs onto them. By doing this, Karen is inviting arguments, hard feelings, and ridicule from family members who don't want to be preached to during a holiday or any other day of the year for that matter.

Robertson's solution is not only cruel, it constitutes child abuse, which is against the law. Beating a child into respecting a religious belief is the very definition of indoctrination and violates the constitutional rights of the abused.

Robertson's call for beating kids into religious submission is similar to a Glenn Beck rant from 2013 when he also advocated for parents to physically abuse their kids until they believe in God. Just two years earlier, fundamentalist Christian parents beat their nine kids in the name of God. One child actually died from the abuse. Telling religious extremists to beat their kids is a very dangerous thing to do, and if any religious parents beat their kids like Robertson is advising, he should be charged as an accessory to child abuse.

"We declined going to our daughter's house on Christmas this year because there is always an argument, hard feelings etc.," viewer Karen wrote.

"One grandchild comes high on marijuana, cursing and challenging our faith. I correct him and have told my daughter to ask him to respect our beliefs, but he keeps it up. Our daughter say she is a Christian but will drink too much and offend her daughter and her husband. Were we wrong to not to attend another Christmas that leaves us upset or someone angry? I have shared my beliefs many times with them and am ridiculed by this grandson and son-in-law."

Robertson's immediate solution? Beat the child until he respects Christianity.

Here's the video via YouTube.

[embedded content]

Frank Serpico

In the opening scene of the 1973 movie "Serpico," I am shot in the face - or to be more accurate, the character of Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino, is shot in the face. Even today it's very difficult for me to watch those scenes, which depict in a very realistic and terrifying way what actually happened to me on Feb. 3, 1971. I had recently been transferred to the Narcotics division of the New York City Police Department, and we were moving in on a drug dealer on the fourth floor of a walk-up tenement in a Hispanic section of Brooklyn. The police officer backing me up instructed me (since I spoke Spanish) to just get the apartment door open "and leave the rest to us."

One officer was standing to my left on the landing no more than eight feet away, with his gun drawn; the other officer was to my right rear on the stairwell, also with his gun drawn. When the door opened, I pushed my way in and snapped the chain. The suspect slammed the door closed on me, wedging in my head and right shoulder and arm. I couldn't move, but I aimed my snub-nose Smith & Wesson revolver at the perp (the movie version unfortunately goes a little Hollywood here, and has Pacino struggling and failing to raise a much-larger 9-millimeter automatic). From behind me no help came. At that moment my anger got the better of me. I made the almost fatal mistake of taking my eye off the perp and screaming to the officer on my left: "What the hell you waiting for? Give me a hand!" I turned back to face a gun blast in my face. I had cocked my weapon and fired back at him almost in the same instant, probably as reflex action, striking him. (He was later captured.)

When I regained consciousness, I was on my back in a pool of blood trying to assess the damage from the gunshot wound in my cheek. Was this a case of small entry, big exit, as often happens with bullets? Was the back of my head missing? I heard a voice saying, "Don' worry, you be all right, you be all right," and when I opened my eyes I saw an old Hispanic man looking down at me like Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan. My "backup" was nowhere in sight. They hadn't even called for assistance - I never heard the famed "Code 1013," meaning "Officer Down." They didn't call an ambulance either, I later learned; the old man did. One patrol car responded to investigate, and realizing I was a narcotics officer rushed me to a nearby hospital (one of the officers who drove me that night said, "If I knew it was him, I would have left him there to bleed to death," I learned later).

The next time I saw my "back-up" officers was when one of them came to the hospital to bring me my watch. I said, "What the hell am I going to do with a watch? What I needed was a back-up. Where were you?" He said, "Fuck you," and left. Both my "back-ups" were later awarded medals for saving my life.

I still don't know exactly what happened on that day. There was never any real investigation. But years later, Patrick Murphy, who was police commissioner at the time, was giving a speech at one of my alma maters, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and I confronted him. I said, "My name is Frank Serpico, and I've been carrying a bullet in my head for over 35 years, and you, Mr. Murphy, are the man I hold responsible. You were the man who was brought as commissioner to take up the cause that I began - rooting out corruption. You could have protected me; instead you put me in harm's way. What have you got to say?" He hung his head, and had no answer.

Even now, I do not know for certain why I was left trapped in that door by my fellow police officers. But the Narcotics division was rotten to the core, with many guys taking money from the very drug dealers they were supposed to bust. I had refused to take bribes and had testified against my fellow officers. Police make up a peculiar subculture in society. More often than not they have their own moral code of behavior, an "us against them" attitude, enforced by a Blue Wall of Silence. It's their version of the Mafia's omerta. Speak out, and you're no longer "one of us." You're one of "them." And as James Fyfe, a nationally recognized expert on the use of force, wrote in his 1993 book about this issue, Above The Law, officers who break the code sometimes won't be helped in emergency situations, as I wasn't.

On the left, Al Pacino plays Serpico in the 1973 movie. On the right, Frank Serpico leaves the Bronx County Courthouse after testifying on police corruption in 1973.

Forty-odd years on, my story probably seems like ancient history to most people, layered over with Hollywood legend. For me it's not, since at the age of 78 I'm still deaf in one ear and I walk with a limp and I carry fragments of the bullet near my brain. I am also, all these years later, still persona non grata in the NYPD. Never mind that, thanks to Sidney Lumet's direction and Al Pacino's brilliant acting, "Serpico" ranks No. 40 on the American Film Institute's list of all-time movie heroes, or that as I travel around the country and the world, police officers often tell me they were inspired to join the force after seeing the movie at an early age.

In the NYPD that means little next to my 40-year-old heresy, as they see it. I still get hate mail from active and retired police officers. A couple of years ago after the death of David Durk - the police officer who was one of my few allies inside the department in my efforts to expose graft - the Internet message board "NYPD Rant" featured some choice messages directed at me. "Join your mentor, Rat scum!" said one. An ex-con recently related to me that a precinct captain had once said to him, "If it wasn't for that fuckin' Serpico, I coulda been a millionaire today." My informer went on to say, "Frank, you don't seem to understand, they had a well-oiled money making machine going and you came along and threw a handful of sand in the gears."

In 1971 I was awarded the Medal of Honor, the NYPD's highest award for bravery in action, but it wasn't for taking on an army of corrupt cops. It was most likely due to the insistence of Police Chief Sid Cooper, a rare good guy who was well aware of the murky side of the NYPD that I'd try to expose. But they handed the medal to me like an afterthought, like tossing me a pack of cigarettes. After all this time, I've never been given a proper certificate with my medal. And although living Medal of Honor winners are typically invited to yearly award ceremonies, I've only been invited once - and it was by Bernard Kerick, who ironically was the only NYPD commissioner to later serve time in prison. A few years ago, after the New York Police Museum refused my guns and other memorabilia, I loaned them to the Italian-American museum right down street from police headquarters, and they invited me to their annual dinner. I didn't know it was planned, but the chief of police from Rome, Italy, was there, and he gave me a plaque. The New York City police officers who were there wouldn't even look at me.

So my personal story didn't end with the movie, or with my retirement from the force in 1972. It continues right up to this day. And the reason I'm speaking out now is that, tragically, too little has really changed since the Knapp Commission, the outside investigative panel formed by then-Mayor John Lindsay after I failed at repeated internal efforts to get the police and district attorney to investigate rampant corruption in the force. Lindsay had acted only because finally, in desperation, I went to the New York Times, which put my story on the front page. Led by Whitman Knapp, a tenacious federal judge, the commission for at least a brief moment in time supplied what has always been needed in policing: outside accountability. As a result many officers were prosecuted and many more lost their jobs. But the commission disbanded in 1972 even though I had hoped (and had so testified) that it would be made permanent.

And today the Blue Wall of Silence endures in towns and cities across America. Whistleblowers in police departments - or as I like to call them, "lamp lighters," after Paul Revere - are still turned into permanent pariahs. The complaint I continue to hear is that when they try to bring injustice to light they are told by government officials: "We can't afford a scandal; it would undermine public confidence in our police." That confidence, I dare say, is already seriously undermined.

Things might have improved in some areas. The days when I served and you could get away with anything, when cops were better at accounting than at law enforcement - keeping meticulous records of the people they were shaking down, stealing drugs and money from dealers on a regular basis - all that no longer exists as systematically as it once did, though it certainly does in some places. Times have changed. It's harder to be a venal cop these days.

But an even more serious problem - police violence - has probably grown worse, and it's out of control for the same reason that graft once was: a lack of accountability.

I tried to be an honest cop in a force full of bribe-takers. But as I found out the hard way, police departments are useless at investigating themselves - and that's exactly the problem facing ordinary people across the country - including perhaps, Ferguson, Missouri, which has been a lightning rod for discontent even though the circumstances under which an African-American youth, Michael Brown, was shot remain unclear.

Today the combination of an excess of deadly force and near-total lack of accountability is more dangerous than ever: Most cops today can pull out their weapons and fire without fear that anything will happen to them, even if they shoot someone wrongfully. All a police officer has to say is that he believes his life was in danger, and he's typically absolved. What do you think that does to their psychology as they patrol the streets - this sense of invulnerability? The famous old saying still applies: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (And we still don't know how many of these incidents occur each year; even though Congress enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act 20 years ago, requiring the Justice Department to produce an annual report on "the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers," the reports were never issued.)

It wasn't any surprise to me that, after Michael Brown was shot dead in Ferguson, officers instinctively lined up behind Darren Wilson, the cop who allegedly killed Brown. Officer Wilson may well have had cause to fire if Brown was attacking him, as some reports suggest, but it is also possible we will never know the full truth - whether, for example, it was really necessary for Wilson to shoot Brown at least six times, killing rather than just wounding him. As they always do, the police unions closed ranks also behind the officer in question. And the district attorney (who is often totally in bed with the police and needs their votes) and city power structure can almost always be counted on to stand behind the unions.

In some ways, matters have gotten even worse. The gulf between the police and the communities they serve has grown wider. Mind you, I don't want to say that police shouldn't protect themselves and have access to the best equipment. Police officers have the right to defend themselves with maximum force, in cases where, say, they are taking on a barricaded felon armed with an assault weapon. But when you are dealing every day with civilians walking the streets, and you bring in armored vehicles and automatic weapons, it's all out of proportion. It makes you feel like you're dealing with some kind of subversive enemy. The automatic weapons and bulletproof vest may protect the officer, but they also insulate him from the very society he's sworn to protect. All that firepower and armor puts an even greater wall between the police and society, and solidifies that "us-versus-them" feeling.

Serpico at his home in Stuyvesant, New York.

And with all due respect to today's police officers doing their jobs, they don't need all that stuff anyway. When I was cop I disarmed a man with three guns who had just killed someone. I was off duty and all I had was my snub-nose Smith & Wesson. I fired a warning shot, the guy ran off and I chased him down. Some police forces still maintain a high threshold for violence: I remember talking with a member of the Italian carabinieri, who are known for being very heavily armed. He took out his Beretta and showed me that it didn't even have a magazine inside. "You know, I got to be careful," he said. "Before I shoot somebody unjustifiably, I'm better off shooting myself." They have standards.

In the NYPD, it used to be you'd fire two shots and then you would assess the situation. You didn't go off like a madman and empty your magazine and reload. Today it seems these police officers just empty their guns and automatic weapons without thinking, in acts of callousness or racism. They act like they're in shooting galleries. Today's uncontrolled firepower, combined with a lack of good training and adequate screening of police academy candidates, has led to a devastating drop in standards. The infamous case of Amadou Diallo in New York - who was shot 41 times in 1999 for no obvious reason - is more typical than you might think. The shooters, of course, were absolved of any wrongdoing, as they almost always are. All a policeman has to say is that "the suspect turned toward me menacingly," and he does not have to worry about prosecution. In a 2010 case recorded on a police camera in Seattle, John Williams, a 50-year-old traditional carver of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations (tribes), was shot four times by police as he walked across the street with a pocketknife and a piece of cedar in his hands. He died at the scene. It's like the Keystone Kops, but without being funny at all.

Many white Americans, indoctrinated by the ridiculous number of buddy-cop films and police-themed TV shows that Hollywood has cranked out over the decades - almost all of them portraying police as heroes - may be surprised by the continuing outbursts of anger, the protests in the street against the police that they see in inner-city environments like Ferguson. But they often don't understand that these minority communities, in many cases, view the police as the enemy. We want to believe that cops are good guys, but let's face it, any kid in the ghetto knows different. The poor and the disenfranchised in society don't believe those movies; they see themselves as the victims, and they often are.

Law enforcement agencies need to eliminate those who use and abuse the power of the law as they see fit. As I said to the Knapp Commission 43 years ago, we must create an atmosphere where the crooked cop fears the honest cop, and not the other way around. An honest cop should be able to speak out against unjust or illegal behavior by fellow officers without fear of ridicule or reprisals. Those that speak out should be rewarded and respected by their superiors, not punished.

We're not there yet.

It still strikes me as odd that I'm seen as a renegade cop and unwelcome by police in the city I grew up in. Because as far back as I can remember, all I wanted to be was a member of the NYPD. Even today, I love the police life. I love the work.

I grew up in Brooklyn, and shined shoes in my father's shop when I was a kid. My uncle was a member of the carabinieri in Italy, and when I was 13 my mother took me to see my only surviving grandparent, her father. So I met her brother the carabinieri, who was in civilian clothes but carried a Beretta sidearm. I just marveled at the respect and dignity with which he did his work, and how people respected him. My father, a World War I POW, also in his early years contemplated being a carabinieri, but he had his shoe-repair trade and became a craftsman. As a young boy I had no idea. All I knew was that I was impressed by my uncle's behavior. This guy could open doors.

It wasn't that I was completely naïve about what bad cops could be. As a boy of 8 or 9, returning home one evening after shining shoes on the parkway, I saw a white police officer savagely beating a frail black woman with his night stick as she lay prostrate on a parkway bench. She didn't utter a sound. All I could hear was the thud as the wood struck her skin and bones. (I was reminded of that 70-year-old incident recently when an Internet video showed a white police officer pummeling a black woman with his gloved fist in broad daylight - have police tactics really changed?)

But I also saw the good side of cops. I saw them standing on the running board of a car they had commandeered to chase a thief. When I was a few years older, and I wounded myself with a self-made zip gun, my mother took me to the hospital and two cops showed up, demanding, "Where's the gun?" I said I had no gun, that I'd just found a shell and when I tried to take the casing off, it exploded. They looked at me skeptically and asked me where I went to school. I said, "St. Francis Prep, and I want to be a cop just like you." They said, "If you don't smarten up you'll never make it that far." But they didn't give me a juvenile citation, as they could have. So I knew there were good cops out there.

I wasn't naive when I entered the force as a rookie patrolman on Sept. 11, 1959, either. I knew that some cops took traffic money, but I had no idea of the institutionalized graft, corruption and nepotism that existed and was condoned until one evening I was handed an envelope by another officer. I had no idea what was in it until I went to my car and found that it contained my share of the "nut," as it was called (a reference to squirrels hiding their nuts; some officers buried the money in jars buried in their backyards). Still, back then I was naive enough to believe that within the system there was someone who was not aware of what was going on and, once informed, would take immediate action to correct it.

I was wrong. The first place I went was to the mayor's department of investigation, where I was told outright I had a choice: 1) Force their hand, meaning I would be found face down in the East River; or 2) Forget about it. The rest you know, especially if you've seen the movie. After refusing to take money myself, but coming under relentless pressure to do so, I went successively to the inspector's office, the mayor's office and the district attorney. They each promised me action and didn't deliver. The lobbying power of the police was too strong. I discovered that I was all but alone in a world of institutionalized graft, where keeping the "pad" - all the money they skimmed - meant that officers spent more time tabulating their piece of the cake more than as guardians of the peace.

Over the years, politicians who wanted to make a difference didn't. They were too beholden to the police unions and the police vote. I wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton in 1994 addressing this very issue, saying that honest cops have never been rewarded, and maybe there ought to be a medal for them. He wrote back, but nothing changed. In New York City, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg professed that things were going to change, but in the end he went right along with his commissioner, Ray Kelly, who was allowed to do whatever he wanted. Kelly had been a sergeant when I was on the force, and he'd known about the corruption, as did Murphy.

As for Barack Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, they're giving speeches now, after Ferguson. But it's 20 years too late. It's the same old problem of political power talking, and it doesn't matter that both the president and his attorney general are African-American. Corruption is color blind. Money and power corrupt, and they are color blind too.

Only a few years ago, a cop who was in the same 81st Precinct I started in, Adrian Schoolcraft, was actually taken to a psych ward and handcuffed to a gurney for six days after he tried to complain about corruption - they wanted him to keep to a quota of summonses, and he wasn't complying. No one would have believed him except he hid a tape recorder in his room, and recorded them making their demands. Now he's like me, an outcast.

Every time I speak out on topics of police corruption and brutality, there are inevitably critics who say that I am out of touch and that I am old enough to be the grandfather of many of the cops who are currently on the force. But I've kept up the struggle, working with lamp lighters to provide them with encouragement and guidance; serving as an expert witness to describe the tactics that police bureaucracies use to wear them down psychologically; testifying in support of independent boards; developing educational guidance to young minority citizens on how to respond to police officers; working with the American Civil Liberties Union to expose the abuses of stun-gun technology in prisons; and lecturing in more high schools, colleges and reform schools than I can remember. A little over a decade ago, when I was a presenter at the Top Cops Award event hosted by TV host John Walsh, several police officers came up to me, hugged me and then whispered in my ear, "I gotta talk to you."

The sum total of all that experience can be encapsulated in a few simple rules for the future:

1. Strengthen the selection process and psychological screening process for police recruits. Police departments are simply a microcosm of the greater society. If your screening standards encourage corrupt and forceful tendencies, you will end up with a larger concentration of these types of individuals;

2. Provide ongoing, examples-based training and simulations. Not only telling but showing police officers how they are expected to behave and react is critical;

3. Require community involvement from police officers so they know the districts and the individuals they are policing. This will encourage empathy and understanding;

4. Enforce the laws against everyone, including police officers. When police officers do wrong, use those individuals as examples of what not to do - so that others know that this behavior will not be tolerated. And tell the police unions and detective endowment associations they need to keep their noses out of the justice system;

5. Support the good guys. Honest cops who tell the truth and behave in exemplary fashion should be honored, promoted and held up as strong positive examples of what it means to be a cop;

6. Last but not least, police cannot police themselves. Develop permanent, independent boards to review incidents of police corruption and brutality - and then fund them well and support them publicly. Only this can change a culture that has existed since the beginnings of the modern police department.

There are glimmers of hope that some of this is starting to happen, even in New York under its new mayor, Bill DeBlasio. Earlier this month DeBlasio's commissioner, Bill Bratton - who'd previously served a term as commissioner in New York as well as police chief in Los Angeles - made a crowd of police brass squirm in discomfort when he showed a hideous video montage of police officers mistreating members of the public and said he would "aggressively seek to get those out of the department who should not be here - the brutal, the corrupt, the racist, the incompetent." I found that very impressive. Let's see if he follows through.

And legislators are starting to act - and perhaps to free themselves of the political power of police. In Wisconsin, after being contacted by Mike Bell - a retired Air Force officer who flew in three wars and whose son was shot to death by police after being pulled over for a DUI - I'd like to believe I helped in a successful campaign to push through the nation's first law setting up outside review panels in cases of deaths in police custody. A New Jersey legislator has now expressed interest in pushing through a similar law.

Like the Knapp Commission in its time, they are just a start. But they are something.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.

Will 2015 be a year of financial crashes, economic chaos and the start of the next great worldwide depression? Over the past couple of years, we have all watched as global financial bubbles have gotten larger and larger. Despite predictions that they could burst at any time, they have just continued to expand. But just like we witnessed in 2001 and 2008, all financial bubbles come to an end at some point, and when they do implode the pain can be extreme. Personally, I am entirely convinced that the financial markets are more primed for a financial collapse now than they have been at any other time since the last crisis happened nearly seven years ago. And I am certainly not alone. At this point, the warning cries have become a deafening roar as a whole host of prominent voices have stepped forward to sound the alarm. The following are 11 predictions of economic disaster in 2015 from top experts all over the globe...

#1 Bill Fleckenstein: "They are trying to make the stock market go up and drag the economy along with it. It's not going to work. There's going to be a big accident. When people realize that it's all a charade, the dollar will tank, the stock market will tank, and hopefully bond markets will tank. Gold will rally in that period of time because it's done what it's done because people have assumed complete infallibility on the part of the central bankers."

#2 John Ficenec: "In the US, Professor Robert Shiller's cyclically adjusted price earnings ratio - or Shiller CAPE - for the S&P 500 is currently at 27.2, some 64pc above the historic average of 16.6. On only three occasions since 1882 has it been higher - in 1929, 2000 and 2007."

#3 Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, one of the most respected economic journalists on the entire planet: "The eurozone will be in deflation by February, forlornly trying to ignite its damp wood by rubbing stones. Real interest rates will ratchet higher. The debt load will continue to rise at a faster pace than nominal GDP across Club Med. The region will sink deeper into a compound interest trap."

#4 The Jerome Levy Forecasting Center, which correctly predicted the bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble in 2007: "Clearly the direction of most of the recent global economic news suggests movement toward a 2015 downturn."

#5 Paul Craig Roberts: "At any time the Western house of cards could collapse. It (the financial system) is a house of cards. There are no economic fundamentals that support stock prices - the Dow Jones. There are no economic fundamentals that support the strong dollar..."

#6 David Tice: "I have the same kind of feel in '98 and '99; also '05 and '06. This is going to end badly. I have every confidence in the world."

#7 Liz Capo McCormick and Susanne Walker: "Get ready for a disastrous year for U.S. government bonds. That's the message forecasters on Wall Street are sending."

#8 Phoenix Capital Research: "Just about everything will be hit as well. Most of the 'recovery' of the last five years has been fueled by cheap borrowed Dollars. Now that the US Dollar has broken out of a multi-year range, you're going to see more and more 'risk assets' (read: projects or investments fueled by borrowed Dollars) blow up. Oil is just the beginning, not a standalone story.

If things really pick up steam, there's over $9 TRILLION worth of potential explosions waiting in the wings. Imagine if the entire economies of both Germany and Japan exploded and you've got a decent idea of the size of the potential impact on the financial system."

#9 Rob Kirby: "What this breakdown in the crude oil price is going to spawn another financial crisis. It will be tied to the junk debt that has been issued to finance the shale oil plays in North America. It is reported to be in the area of half a trillion dollars worth of junk debt that is held largely on the books of large financial institutions in the western world. When these bonds start to fail, they will jeopardize the future of these financial institutions. I do believe that will be the signal for the Fed to come riding to the rescue with QE4. I also think QE4 is likely going to be accompanied by bank bail-ins because we all know all western world countries have adopted bail-in legislation in their most recent budgets. The financial elites are engineering the excuse for their next round of money printing . . . and they will be confiscating money out of savings accounts and pension accounts. That's what I think is coming in the very near future."

#10 John Ing: "The 2008 collapse was just a dress rehearsal compared to what the world is going to face this time around. This time we have governments which are even more highly leveraged than the private sector was.

So this time the collapse will be on a scale that is many magnitudes greater than what the world witnessed in 2008."

#11 Gerald Celente: "What does the word confidence mean? Break it down. In this case confidence = con men and con game. That's all it is. So people will lose confidence in the con men because they have already shown their cards. It's a Ponzi scheme. So the con game is running out and they don't have any more cards to play.

What are they going to do? They can't raise interest rates. We saw what happened in the beginning of December when the equity markets started to unravel. So it will be a loss of confidence in the con game and the con game is soon coming to an end. That is when you are going to see panic on Wall Street and around the world."

If you have been following my website, you know that I have been pointing to 2015 for quite some time now.

For example, in my article entitled "The Seven Year Cycle Of Economic Crashes That Everyone Is Talking About", I discussed the pattern of financial crashes that we have witnessed every seven years that goes all the way back to the Great Depression. The last two major stock market crashes began in 2001 and 2008, and now here we are seven years later.

Will the same pattern hold up once again?

In addition, there are many other economic cycles that seem to indicate that we are due for a major economic downturn. I discussed quite a few of these theories in my article entitled "If Economic Cycle Theorists Are Correct, 2015 To 2020 Will Be Pure Hell For The United States".

But just like in 2000 and 2007, there are a whole host of doubters that are fully convinced that the party can continue indefinitely. Even though our economic fundamentals continue to get worse, our debt levels continue to grow and every objective measurement shows that Wall Street is more reckless and more vulnerable to collapse than ever before, they mock the idea that a financial collapse is imminent.

So let's see what happens in 2015.

I have a feeling that it is going to be an extremely "interesting" year.

Just three years ago, we found out that children in Britain as young as three could be "blacklisted" - labeled "racist" on their permanent file for such evil thought crimes as calling a fellow classmate a "broccoli head."

When my brother was six and I was 12, he called me a "carnival head." I always thought it was because he was being a six-year-old little brother. I never knew until today that it was because he was totally racist... You know, against... uh... theme parks??

Now according to a new government directive from UK's Home Office, teachers including nursery school staff, have been handed a serious "duty" to "prevent people being drawn into terrorism."

[embedded content]

This will include making sure school staff are trained to watch their students closely in order to "identify children at risk of being drawn into terrorism and challenge extremist ideas which can be used to legitimise terrorism and are shared by terrorist groups," The Telegraph reported yesterday. Did I mention this includes nursery schools? I did?

You know...with all those toddlers running around sporting all those terrorist-sympathizing, extremist ideals...

Sounds totally insane, doesn't it? Defies all logic and reason and known research on the basics of child development?

Well it is, but worse than one of Orwell's nightmares, this is also one of those verified slippery slopes.

Back in 2011, when I very first woke up and started my humble little blog at Truthstream, I wrote about toddlers being labeled "racist" for calling fellow classmates names like "broccoli head" or having "homophobic" written in their permanent file for telling a teacher they thought their work was "gay."

It go without saying (but apparently I have to say it now, thanks a lot technocrats) that these are tiny kids who literally have no idea what even half the stuff they are regurgitating means, but who are now receiving a record that will follow them throughout their years and could negatively impact their ability to get a job or gain entrance to college later in life thanks to what basically amounts to thought crime rules. By the time that article came out in 2011, over 34,000 nursery, primary and secondary-level students had already been labeled "bigots" by the system under Britain's anti-bullying rules.

It was only later I learned that even further back in 2006, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair had declared that the government had ways of "clamping down" on anti-social behaviors - "Tony Blair has said it is possible to identify problem children who could grow up to be a potential 'menace to society' even before they are born," The Guardian reported.

In this era of big data, people still don't fully realize that the whole politically correct, technocractic system is driving us all to a place where our words and even our thoughts can be used against us, and where we are all guilty until proven innocent forever more. The bar on this just keeps continually getting raised. Police these days are using algorithms to assign the public individualized, color-coded threat scores which are based, in-part, on making remarks deemed "offensive" on social media so they can form opinions about someone before they even see them.

Consider who it is that determines what an "extremist" or "offensive" thought is in the first place. In America for example, some of those extremist thoughts (according to our lovely terrorist threat fusion centers, anyway) include being considered a Constitutionalist or putting a bumper sticker on your car that says you'd vote third party for one.

But really, what doesn't offend somebody these days? People seem more offended by everything than ever.

So here is that original article I wrote back in 2011 which now stands as conclusive proof of the slippery slope were now sliding down and that we are literally living in the time pre-George Orwell's 1984 (which apparently was much more than just an instruction manual).

Britain's Baby Blacklist: Small Children Added to Government Database for Name-Calling

by Melissa Melton | Originally published Sept. 15, 2011

The British government is keeping a database which brands their children racist and homophobic on a record that could follow them for life. Children as young as three-years-old have been cited for calling classmates names such as "broccoli head." The kids on the list used others words such as "gay" and "lesbian." In fact, one kid got blacklisted for using the word "gay" to describe a school assignment. I know even as I type this that what I am writing sounds entirely ludicrous. However, if I call it a stupid bag of moldy cat crap like I see it, were I in Britain, I would be added to this database, too.

The Daily Mail report also added that these records can literally follow these children for the rest of their lives. If a future employer were to ask for school records as part of the employment interview process, these childhood incidents could potentially keep preschoolers from achieving gainful employment as adults. Let us just forget the fact that, according to the study of development psychology, most children do not start to develop the ability to reason with logic until they are about seven or eight. Let us forget the fact that operational thinking skills are not gained by the average human until we are 11 or 12. Let us completely ignore the fact that there exists a person somewhere whose job it is to compile this database and keep track of its contents, which has to be one of the lamest jobs to have in the history of all time.

Instead, let's look at the bigger picture. This is just a box of fail sliding down the slippery slope to You're Doing It Wrong Land. Here's the thing: If we are going to implement such policies on little kids who do not have the slightest concept of time and effect, then we should have to do it EVERYWHERE. Children watch TV, they listen to music on the radio, they play video games, and they experience everything else that comes out of any mouths near their ears and goes straight into their brains. Kids are inundated with information absolutely everywhere all the time these days. If they repeat what they hear, then can the connection not be made that those who said it first should also be blacklisted? Three-year-olds do not make up concepts like "lesbian" all by themselves like a big bang in their brain cracks. Obviously they got it from somewhere.

Running with that (because if they can, they will), it is easy to see how it will only be fair to create lists for television show and movie screenwriters, lyricists, all reality TV stars, commercial writers, advertising executives and anyone who speaks on a radio where other people's ears, such as those of innocent three-year-olds, can detect it. Keep going, and you'll get to a scary place where people who happen to open their mouths in public are now eligible for addition to .

Go a little further, and we all live in a world that looks a lot like kindergarten naptime in a library. Hope you all have a deep interest in learning sign language.

This situation tows the same line as the fact that our DEA and CIA are helping Al Qaeda grow drugs in other countries, have been interviewed about it and admitted it on national news channels, and then say things like quote, "We'll deal with the distribution later." Then the drugs get over here in America and 70% of people in US prisons (a country which puts more people in jail than any other country in the whole entire world) are there for...you guessed it...DRUGS! We help grow it, then when you get it, you go to jail. Well, we have to keep the big business that is our nation's corrections complex churning.

Bottom line, Britain's baby blacklist attacks a child's ability for critical thinking before it is even developed. I guess we should all grab our Newspeak textbooks, put our matching blue Orwellian jumpsuits on, and fall in line to stop thinking for ourselves.

Well, I would, but that's just gay you broccoli heads.

DPRK Permanent Mission to the UN

Today the U.S. and other Western countries are increasingly cracking down on the human rights of the peoples of their countries, including on their socio-economic and cultural rights as well as on political freedom and rights.

In the U.S., whose population accounts for 5% of the world's population, prisoners there account for 25% of the total number of prisoners in the world. Today, when the world is rushing to scale a new peak of human civilization, medieval torture and other kinds of human rights violations are being committed in the prison camps of the U.S.

Racial discrimination in the U.S., a self-proclaimed model country in the field of human rights, is cutting a wide swath with official and open sanction.

The chain of murders of innocent young black people committed by white policemen recently threw the whole world into a state of consternation.

Many working people, denied the rights to an existence and work, are wandering the streets as unemployed in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Extreme selfishness, misanthropy and such crimes as murder, robbery, rape, prostitution, racial discrimination, and discrimination and maltreatment of American Indians and immigrants are prevalent in American society, and people live in constant fear and misery.

Under the signboard of "defending human rights" the U.S. launches aggressive wars, enslaving peoples of other countries and openly interfering in their internal affairs, and thus violates their human rights. These aggressive wars not only trample upon their sovereignty but also claim the lives of their peoples, threaten their right to existence and restrict their socio-economic and cultural progress. Typical examples are the armed aggression against Grenada, the air campaign against the former Yugoslavia and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The U.S. has set up secret prison camps in various parts of the world, abducting people and torturing them in these camps. In the prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay 160 persons still languish.

The drone attacks committed by the U.S. are claiming many lives in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries.

The indiscriminate phone tapping and e-mail theft by the U.S. which have been exposed recently are illegal acts of espionage and, at the same time, a brazen-faced violation of human rights. Up to now the U.S. has set up phone-tapping facilities in over 80 places across the world, and wiretapped the telephone conversations of not only presidents and other high-ranking officials of their allies but also ordinary citizens by enlisting the National Security Agency and other intelligence organs.

Picking a quarrel using the "human rights issue" with the countries that are following the road of independence, the U.S. and other Western countries are interfering in their internal affairs, toppling their legitimate governments and suppressing human rights in these countries. These days the U.S. and other Western countries are egging on international organizations to kick up a fuss about the "human rights issue" in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. This, in essence, is a serious act of aggression aimed at overthrowing its system and government. This is aggravating the situation on the Korean peninsula and the region surrounding it.

Many countries in the world still suffer from internal conflict and unrest, their peoples' right to life is seriously threatened. One of the major reasons for this is that the U.S. and other Western countries are aggravating the situation and attempting to fish in troubled waters capitalizing on the conflict and unrest. Many countries are experiencing economic difficulties and their peoples' right to existence is being seriously threatened because of the economic sanctions and blockade imposed by the U.S. and other Western countries.

The human rights issue is becoming more serious and complicated as the days go by owing to the U.S.'s high-handedness, arbitrariness and double standards. These days dialogue and collaboration for the promotion of genuine human rights on an international scale have disappeared, and high-handedness, arbitrariness and double standards produced by the political interests of some countries are cutting a wide swath. Disregarding the principles of mutual respect, trust and benefit and noninterference in the internal affairs of others, they are unilaterally demanding "cooperation" and "collaboration" in the field of human rights so as to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.

It is a matter of course that cooperation and collaboration among countries are needed to resolve the human rights issue. However, this cooperation and collaboration must be subject to the commonly recognized principles of international law and must not be used as a precondition for interference in others' internal affairs.

The U.S. and other Western countries are making this issue more complicated by bringing it not only to the UN and other international political organizations but to international economic and trade organizations. International economic and trade organizations are discussing the human rights issue, which is irrelevant to economic and trade issues, and this causes sharp antagonism among countries. This is a stark reality today.

The fact that the U.S. releases a "human rights report" every year and adopts federal laws against other sovereign states shows how far its high-handedness, arbitrariness and double standards have gone. It has made public such a report again this year, in which it claimed that China, Russia, Cuba, Iran and some other countries violated the human rights of their people and that no other country now makes efforts to defend human rights as the U.S. does.

The international community laments the present reality in which the greatest human rights violator itself behaves as the "human rights judge."

The Injection of Botox to reduce facial lines and wrinkles has long been assumed to be purely cosmetic in nature. Hollywood's rush to it has normalized the procedure and even given it an air of frivolity.

New research, however, has revealed an unintentional and rather dramatic consequence: Botox injections in the forehead rearrange the brain's sensory map of the hands. The scary part is that clients typically come back for regular injections, because the paralysis the toxin induces lasts only two to three months. The unanswered question is whether repeated treatments over a period of years results in permanent changes to one's brain.

Botox is the brand name for botulinum toxin - a, one of the most lethal poisons known. The neurotoxin is produced by the bacterium Clostridium, a spore commonly found in plants, soil, water, and animals. The clinical syndrome of botulism, which is often lethal, typically occurs from either a wound infection or eating undercooked or improperly canned food. The toxin paralyzes muscles by blocking the release of acetylcholine, the principal neurotransmitter at the nerve - muscle junction.

For a long time we have known that the brain is plastic, meaning that it circuits and microscopic anatomy are malleable. They can physically change in response to a number of factors. For example, in violinists the brain map devoted to the non-bowing fingers is much larger than the same finger region in non-violinists. In newly-blind individuals learning braille, the cortical area devoted to the "reading finger" greatly expands into the suddenly unused visual cortex.

The brain maps of the hand and face territories lie next to one another in the sensory cortex. After hand amputations, tactile inputs from the face routinely widen and shift into the territory newly deprived of sensory input from the hand. Likewise, patients with facial paralysis due to Bell's palsy or stroke have enhanced metabolic activity in the hand region of the sensory cortex. The principle is well established that the cortical representation of one body part widens in response to injury affecting another body part.

Based on this knowledge one would expect hand maps to increase after a patient's face is paralyzed by Botox injections. And yet exactly the opposite happens. This suggests that the cortical reorganization to a limited Botox facial paralysis is intrinsically different from that observed after functional loss from amputations, facial nerve injury, or stroke.

The tentative explanation for this surprising observation is that the limited paralysis caused by Botox deprives the brain of sensory inputs normally generated by forehead movement. Even more unexpected is that both hands suffer a loss of cortical brain activity following a relatively small loss of facial movements.

The current studies did not investigate whether cortical remapping was limited only to the hands, or whether other body parts also suffered. But it is a question that all who elect this procedure should ponder. If This topic strikes a note, drop me a line.

Comment: If you are concerned about wrinkles, try the ketogenic diet.

"In short, let fat be thy medicine and medicine be thy fat!

You will think that with all of this information we would see ketogenic diets recommended right and left by our health care providers, but alas, that is not the case. Mainstream nutritionists recommend carbohydrates AKA sugar as the main staple of our diets. The problem with this (and there are several of them) is that in the presence of a high carb diet we are unable to produce ketones from the metabolism of fats, thus, depriving ours bodies from much healing ketone production. The fact that we live in a world which uses glucose as a primary fuel means that we eat a very non healing food in more ways than one.

I have been doing the low carb diet for about a week and a half now and I must say, I am really starting to feel amazing!!! The first few days my head hurt, I felt lethargic, and my legs felt so heavy. But after I got past that, I have so much energy. I don't get tired anymore around 3pm. The best part is, I am not constantly thinking and obsessing about food. I feel a real sense of inner calm. My skin looks better, my hair looks better too. I have been having bacon and eggs for breakfast, a pork chop or other piece of meat for lunch, and usually some pork and sometimes some green beans for dinner. I have also lost some weight! Woo hoo!!! -.

We have been on a ketogenic diet for nearly three million years and it has made us human. It was the lifestyle in which our brains got nurtured and evolved. But not anymore, unless we all make an effort to reclaim this lost wisdom. Nowadays the human brain is not only shrinking, but brain atrophy is the norm as we age and get plagued with diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, senile dementia and so forth.
In the mean time new research is starting to elucidate the key role of our mitochondria in the regulation of the cell cycle - the vital process by which a single celled fertilized egg develops into a mature organism, as well as the process by which hair, skin, blood cells, and some internal organs are renewed."

The Ketogenic Diet - An Overview

See also:

On Saturday, MP Majid al-Ghraoui said that an American aircraft dropped a load of weapons and equipment into the hands of the ISIS group militants in southeast of Tikrit, located in Salahuddin province.

MP Majid al-Ghraoui, the member of the Security and Defense Committee in the Parliament, said: "The information that has reached us in the security and defense committee indicates that an American aircraft dropped a load of weapons and equipment to the ISIS group militants at the area of al-Dour in the province of Salahuddin."

He added, "The committee will set a meeting within the next few days to follow up on that incident," pointing out that, "This incident is continuously happening and has also occurred in some other regions."

"The U.S. is trying to obtain more benefits and privileges from the government to set military bases in Iraq," Ghraoui said.

Noteworthy, the security committee in Salahuddin Provincial Council announced today that unidentified air crafts dropped weapons and gear to the ISIS group elements in southeast of Tikrit.

Comment: ISIS is the creation of the U.S. government, and now they aren't even hiding the fact that they are arming the terrorist organization. This is at the same time that Obama and other liars in the government are loudly proclaiming ISIS as the evil terrorist organization that needs to be stopped. Do people pay attention?!?!? They have created the very terrorist organization that they claim to be fighting against, merely so that they can engage in regime change in various countries like Syria and also keep the public terrified at the enemy "out there", instead of looking at the enemy at their front door.

(The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

This is what happens when you put Materialists in charge of human life. They destroy themselves and everything around them. It's their only option, because their understanding is Zero.

They're trying to make thought and imagination and passion into material objects. Since that's an absurdity, they do the only thing they can do: try to control those "objects."

In this way, they become the perfect voluntary dupes for men who want control of the whole planet.

There is a whole brand of mind control that is little more than torture.

In other words, by inflicting duress, applying coercion, making threats, causing pain and disorientation, an "expert" can make a victim do and say many things. That's no secret. There are obviously drugs and hypnotic techniques that will soften up a person and/or put him into tremendous confusion, where he is pliable. And microwaves create pain.

Example: One of the foremost lunatic practitioners of torture was world-famous Canadian psychiatrist, Ewen Cameron, who carried out experiments on unwitting patients in the 1950s.

Cameron, during his career, was President of the Canadian, US, and World Psychiatric Associations, the American Psychopathological Association, and the Society of Biological Psychiatry. There was no one in his profession more highly decorated.

Partially funded by a CIA front, Cameron's method was called psychic driving.

After horrendous electric shocks, very heavy drugs were given to place patients in days of prolonged sleep. Cameron then subjected them to audio tapes he made, in which he repeated phrases thousands of times, in order to produce "new personalities" for them.

This is murderous coercion. There is nothing sophisticated about it. And it assumes that a human being is merely a sum of physical parts, pieces of a puzzle that can be rearranged at will by "those in charge."

A 2012 lawsuit filed by veterans' groups, against the CIA and the DOD, refers to Cameron's methods. The suit also states that two researchers, Dr. Louis West and Dr. Jose Delgado, working together under the early CIA MKULTRA subproject 95, utilized two protocols: brain implants ("stimoceivers") and RHIC-EDOM to program the minds of victims. RHIC-EDOM stands for Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control-Electronic Dissolution of Memory.

Translation: bury memory, and insert new data. But here again, burying memory, the first phase, is achieved through force. The force of subjecting the brain to massive electromagnetic disruption.

Later and more sophisticated means of mind control can utilize loops, during which a person's own brainwaves are fed back to him, along with suggestions.

But different people have different degrees of consciousness about their own thoughts and feelings.

No system exists which would make every person believe a thought planted in his brain is his own thought.

There is another gap. Just because certain naturally occurring brain waves can be read and recorded, this does not mean that feeding back those waves will result in "perfect reception" and integration by every person.

The third gap can be enormous, depending on the person. Voluntary thought in its basic form isn't a product of the brain at all. The brain REFLECTS thought that is created by the person.

People who are aware of this wouldn't fooled by brainwaves fed to them with suggestions.

As I've written before, the entire obsession with the brain is misplaced. If this organ is viewed as the fountainhead of all thought, then there is no such thing as freedom. Why? Because the brain, like every material object, is made up of tiny particles or waves that move according to physical laws - in which case the brain is just "another object" where the particles aggregate and mix and match.

There is absolutely nothing inherent in sub-atomic particles that would lead to a notion of free will.

The existence of freedom (choice) directly implies a non-material space. And a non-material individual who is inhabiting a physical form.

Mind control is most successful when inflicted on people who ALREADY have trouble making the distinction between what they think and believe, and what other people around them think and believe.

Ongoing research to take real-time pictures of brain activity is likely to focus on two major targets: people who hold very strong individualistic beliefs and those who are intensely creative.

The aim here is to introduce new brain activity that will cumulatively erode "the determination to believe" and the commitment to create. Why? Because those are distinct threats to a controlled status quo.

This research direction parallels a social propaganda campaign to eliminate the whole concept of "will power." That phrase has become passe. It is now viewed by many people as a negative and essentially meaningless notion. In its place? Genetic determinism. DNA rules all. A person is what a person is because of his genes, and that's the beginning and end of the story.

Never mind the fact that research along these lines has turned up precious little to explain human behavior. It's a propagated myth of "science." And it's promoted for its social impact: "you can't change what you are."

It has always been true, since the dawn of time, that one person can force another person to take certain actions. But this is no mystery.

These days, with the use, say, of acoustic weapons or other forms of wave-disruption broadcasting, criminals can make people sick, make them feel pain or anger or fatigue - but this is really on the level of an electromagnetic "fist" to the head. Is it dangerous? Of course. But so is a concussion or a heavy blow to the gut or a bullet to the leg.

The people at the CIA, the Pentagon, DARPA, and other agencies, who are trying to change thought and behavior, are much crazier than they appear to be. They assume that the process of thought is so directly a product of the brain that they can make Thought A turn into Thought B with the flip of a switch. They have many surprises in store for them.

The major problem for humanity, vis-a-vis mind control, is the large number of people who already are only dimly aware of what they're thinking and feeling. They can be manipulated with relative ease. But that is no surprise.

Nor is it a shock when people who are members of a cult do something horrendous to others or themselves. They've been subjected to social conditioning every day. They've bought the package. They've sworn allegiance to a leader. It takes relatively little to push them over the edge.

The SSRI antidepressants (Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc.) are themselves a form of mind control. They elicit, in some people, suicide and homicide. But this isn't a precise process of switching off one thought and inserting another. This is the creation of a wholesale brain storm, in which neurotransmitters go haywire and scramble the brain and the nervous system. The person is literally being tortured, and he responds with violence.

The bottom-line issue in all these heinous methods is freedom of the individual. Freedom to think his thoughts, act on the basis of his chosen goals. Mind control advocates and researchers deny such freedom exists. For them, it's just a matter of replacing one piece of equipment for another in what they believe humans are: biological machines.

It's the end-game of philosophic Materialism, a bankrupt and contradictory system.

See that. Know that. Understand it.

Human beings are not machines.

Human beings are not material objects.

The brain is not the source of consciousness or thought.

And because this is true, it opens up an endless vista of possibility for human thought, creation, power.

No one disputes that Jeffrey Sterling told Senate Intelligence Committee staffers about a CIA operation that had provided flawed nuclear weapon blueprints to Iran in 2000, dubbed Operation , which Risen's book later exposed and brought to light as dumb and dangerous.

The trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, set to begin in mid-January, is shaping up as a major battle in the U.S. government's siege against whistleblowing. With its use of the Espionage Act to intimidate and prosecute people for leaks in "national security" realms, the Obama administration is determined to keep hiding important facts that the public has a vital right to know.

After fleeting coverage of Sterling's indictment four years ago, news media have done little to illuminate his case - while occasionally reporting on the refusal of reporter James Risen to testify about whether Sterling was a source for his 2006 book

Risen's unwavering stand for the confidentiality of sources is admirable. At the same time, Sterling - who faces 10 felony counts that include seven under the Espionage Act - is no less deserving of support.

Revelations from brave whistleblowers are essential for the informed consent of the governed. With its hostilities, the Obama Justice Department is waging legalistic war on our democratic rights to know substantially more about government actions than official stories. That's why the imminent courtroom clash in the case of is so important.

Sterling is accused of telling Risen about a CIA operation that had provided flawed nuclear weapon blueprints to Iran in 2000. The charges are unproven.

But no one disputes that Sterling told Senate Intelligence Committee staffers about the CIA action, dubbed Operation , which Risen's book later exposed and brought to light as dumb and dangerous. While ostensibly aiming to prevent nuclear proliferation, the CIA risked advancing it.

When he informed staff of the Senate oversight committee about Operation , Sterling was going through channels to be a whistleblower. Presumably he knew that doing so would anger the CIA hierarchy. A dozen years later, as the government gears up for a courtroom showdown, it's payback time in the security-state corral.

The relentless prosecution of Sterling targets potential whistleblowers with a key implicit message: Do not reveal any "national security" secrets that make the U.S. government look seriously incompetent, vicious, mendacious or dangerous. Don't even think about it.

With so much at stake, the new petition "Blowing the Whistle on Government Recklessness Is a Public Service, Not a Crime" has gained more than 30,000 signers in recent weeks, urging the government to drop all charges against Sterling. The initial sponsors include ExposeFacts, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Government Accountability Project, The Nation, The Progressive / Center for Media and Democracy, Reporters Without Borders and RootsAction.org. (A disclaimer: I work for ExposeFacts and RootsAction.)

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has concisely summarized the context of the government's efforts in the Sterling prosecution. "Sterling's ordeal comes from a strategy to frighten potential whistleblowers, whether he was the source of this leak or not," Ellsberg said in an interview for an article that journalist Marcy Wheeler and I wrote for The Nation. "The aim is to punish troublemakers with harassment, threats, indictments, years in court and likely prison - even if they've only gone through official channels to register accusations about their superiors and agency. That is, by the way, a practical warning to would-be whistleblowers who would prefer to 'follow the rules.' But in any case, whoever were the actual sources to the press of information about criminal violations of the Fourth Amendment, in the NSA case, or of reckless incompetence, in the CIA case, they did a great public service."

Such a great public service deserves our praise and active support.

A member of the grand jury that declined to indict former police officer Darren Wilson over the August 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown is back in court, this time to try and win the right to speak publically about those proceedings.

On Monday this week, attorneys for an individual named only as "Grand Juror Doe" filed a lawsuit alleging that St. Louis County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch mischaracterized the case against Wilson, a former officer with the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, and presented evidence to the jury in a manner inconsistent with how such investigations are normally conducted.

"From Plaintiff's perspective, the presentation of evidence to the grand jury investigating Wilson differed markedly and in significant ways from how evidence was presented in the hundreds of matters presented to the grand jury earlier in its term," the complaint reads in part.

The grand jury decided on November 24 not to charge Wilson with any crimes related to the August 9 incident in which he admittedly fired several shots at Brown, an unarmed black teen, fatally injuring him. The killing prompted nationwide protests throughout the summer that were rekindled in the autumn when Wilson, who has since resigned from the force, was cleared by the jury.

Grand jurors are typically barred for life from discussing cases, but attorneys for the plaintiff argue that their client should be allowed to speak in the name of transparency about what happened last year when McCulloch presented the jury with thousands of pages worth of evidence while they weighed Wilson's fate.

"The Supreme Court has said that grand jury secrecy must be weighed against the juror's First Amendment rights on a case-by-case basis," Tony Rothert, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri and a representative for the plaintiff, told KSDK-TV on Monday. "The rules of secrecy must yield because this is a highly unusual circumstance. The First Amendment prevents the state from imposing a life-time gag order in cases where the prosecuting attorney has purported to be transparent."

According to the complaint, "From Plaintiff's perspective, the investigation of Wilson had a stronger focus on the victim than in other cases presented to the grand jury," and that "the presentation of the law to which the grand jurors were to apply the facts was made in a muddled and untimely manner compared to the presentation of the law in other cases presented to the grand jury."

"In Plaintiff's view, the current information available about the grand jurors' views is not entirely accurate - especially the implication that all grand jurors believed that there was no support for any charges. Moreover, the public characterization of the grand jurors' view of witnesses and evidence does not accord with Plaintiff's own," the lawsuit says. "Plaintiff also wishes to express opinions about: whether the release of records has truly provided transparency; Plaintiff's impression that evidence was presented differently than in other cases, with the insinuation that Brown, not Wilson, was the wrongdoer; and questions about whether the grand jury was clearly counseled on the law."

State law sees to it that grand jurors are prohibited under penalty from disclosing any evidence given or the names of witnesses, St. Louis Public Radio's Chris McDaniel wrote early Monday, but lawyers at the ACLU say US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri should authorize an injunction so the juror can speak.

McCulloch, the prosecutor, has spoken publicly about the grand jury proceedings in the wake of the November decision, and released a trove of documents presented to the jurors ahead of their deliberation. The ACLU says such efforts fall short of fully explaining how the process actually adhered, however, and that more information must be made known.

"From Plaintiff's perspective, although the release of a large number of records provides an appearance of transparency, with heavy redactions and the absence of context, those records do not fully portray the proceedings before the grand jury," the complaint reads in part.

"Plaintiff would like to speak about the experience of being a grand juror, including expressing Plaintiff's opinions about the evidence and the investigation, and believes Plaintiff's experience could contribute to the current public dialogue concerning race relations."

Elsewhere in the US, meanwhile, a judge in Staten Island, New York said Monday that he'll host a hearing later this month to decide if evidence presented to a grand jury there relating to a similar incident should be made public. At hand in there is what to do with the evidence shown to a grand jury last year in the case surrounding a New York Police Department officer, Daniel Pantaleo, and a man killed by the cop, Erin Garner, after being placed in a chokehold. Last month, a secret grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo, prompting further anti-police brutality demonstrations across the country.

In addition to some snow and heavy rain, bitterly cold temperatures have begun moving into parts of the U.S. and will be staying put for at least part of this week.

Snow is possible across a 2,000-mile stretch of the U.S. and meteorologist Megan Glaros of CBS station WBBM says that millions of people will deal with brutally cold weather - with wind chills as low as 50 degrees below zero for part of the northern Plains.

Here are some questions and answers about the weather:

Q: What's The Forecast?

A: The Midwest will see the tail end of a storm that could leave as many as 6 inches of snow in Chicago by early Tuesday. The National Weather Service has issued a wind chill advisory until noon Monday for the Chicago area, due to wind chills of 15 to 30 below overnight, CBS Chicago reported.

After that, Arctic temperatures like those seen in North Dakota and Minnesota will rush in. Parts of those states were expecting wind chills of between 25-50 degrees below zero through Monday morning.

It'll be a similar story in New York, where rain showers will give way to cold air. By Thursday, "New York City will be lucky if it hits 20″ for a high and could see lows near 10 degrees, according to Michael Musher with the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center.

In Boston, strong wind is ushering in the cold - and gusts will top out between 40-50 mph this afternoon resulting in some isolated pockets of tree/powerline damage in the region, WBZ-TV meterologist Danielle Niles reports.

Atlanta will see temperatures dip to about 15 degrees Monday and Tuesday.

In the West, a stream of Pacific moisture will drop as much as 6 inches of rain in the Seattle area and could mean substantial snowfall in the Cascades. But in San Francisco - a region that desperately needs rain - skies will be sunny.

Q: What's Causing The Temperature Drop?

A: The jet stream is dipping, meaning cold air from Canada and other northern areas is plummeting into the eastern two-thirds of the United States.

Q: Is It A Polar Vortex?

A: The phrase took on a life of its own last year, and it was blamed for everything from ice storms to the inability of the New York Giants to score touchdowns. But the National Weather Service is skittish about going anywhere near it this time around.

But the answer is yes and no. Yes, because as Musher noted, the cold air is coming from near the North Pole. But also no, because the low-pressure system isn't going to sink into the U.S. this year, just the temperatures that precede it.

Meteorologists say it's simply winter.

Q: How Can People Prepare?

A: Bundle up. For much of the country, this is the first true taste of winter weather. Musher suggests dressing properly and remembering that below-freezing temperatures can cause hypothermia.

But there don't seem to be any huge winter storms poised to strike, meaning travel in most places won't be more difficult than it usually is this time of year.

Q: What's Next?

A: Temperatures are expected to be lower than normal for several days. They could rise a bit by the end of the week. But remember: It's only January.

[embedded content]

Iceland is expected to withdraw its application to become a member of the European Union, the reported Monday, citing the country's prime minister.

"Participating in EU talks isn't really valid anymore. Both due to changes in the European Union and because it's not in line with the policies of the ruling government to accept everything that the last government was willing to accept. Because of that, we're back at square one," Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson was cited as saying by the magazine.

Iceland's government is now set to make a second attempt at revoking the country's EU application. The country's ruling coalition first decided to submit a bill to stop EU accession early last year, sparking major protests in the capital, Reykjavik.

In an interview with the Icelandic newspaper on Monday, Birgir Armannsson, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Iceland's parliament, stated that "it is not unexpected that the prime minister is likely to present a new parliamentary resolution to revoke the membership application."

Iceland applied to join the European Union in 2009 and began formal negotiations the following year. After the 2013 elections, the country's new center-right government decided to end accession talks with the EU. Iceland is currently a member of the European Economic Area, the European Free Trade Association, and a part of the Schengen Area.

Children who take mind-altering medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) and Adderall (amphetamine and dextroamphetamine) for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been shown in a new peer-reviewed study to perform worse in school than if they weren't taking the substances at all.

Researchers from Princeton University, Cornell University and the University of Toronto found that the administration of these drugs to children, which is supposedly to help them remain calm and focus in class, actually leaves students at a deficit when it comes to paying attention and learning in a formal academic setting.

These shocking findings, which were published recently in the , reveal that increasing the use of stimulants isn't helping children any more than loading them up with anti-psychotic medications helps them think more rationally. Once again, pharmaceutical drugs are shown to harm the normal thought process and inhibit natural human cognition.

Back in 1997, some rules changed in the Canadian province of Quebec that made it easier for people to access prescription drugs. In the 10 years following this change, the number of children taking stimulants in Quebec more than doubled, with an astounding 44 percent of Canada's ADHD prescriptions now going to the province.

This massive increase made for an easier time studying the outcomes of ADHD drugs in children, the results of which are sure to surprise many parents. Based on the researchers' work, children on ADHD drugs fared slightly worse than other children and were far more likely not to finish school without having to first repeat a grade, suggesting added learning impairment.

"We find little evidence of improvement in either the medium or the long run" from the use of ADHD drugs in children, wrote the authors. "Our results... suggest that expanding medication in a community setting had little positive benefit and may have had harmful effects given the average way these drugs are used in the community."

ADHD drugs aren't safe, can cause permanent health damage

The obvious irony here is that many a parent has been hoodwinked into drugging his or her child into a state of statue-like docility with promises that doing so would lessen classroom outbursts and improve learning capacity. To the contrary, the effects of these mind-altering medications is proving to be disastrous, potentially causing long-term brain damage in the process.

Psychologist L. Alan Sroufe addressed this in a 2012 opinion piece for , warning that the long-term use of ADHD medications in children inflicts more harm than good.

"Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs," wrote Sroufe. "[W]hen given to children over long periods of time, [ADHD drugs] neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth."

In his piece, Sroufe, who admittedly has been treating "troubled" children for more than 40 years, expresses doubt that ADHD even exists and requires drug treatment. The "father" of ADHD, Leon Eisenberg, actually admitted to this on his death bed as well.

"To date, no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems, the very things we would most want to improve," added Sroufe. "Putting children on drugs does nothing to change the conditions that derail their development in the first place."

The Syrian Arab Republic, together with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia are among the many co-sponsors of this UN Anti-Nazi Resolution, adopted by a majority vote of 133 by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 2014. There were 51 abstentions. Only 4 nations opposed this resolution: the United States, Ukraine, Palau and Canada. Excerpts from the Resolution state:

"1. Reaffirms the relevant provisions of the Durban Declaration and of the outcome document of the Durban Review Conference, in which States condemned the persistence and resurgence of neo-Nazism, neo-Fascism and violent nationalist ideologies based on racial and national prejudice and stated that those phenomena could never be justified in any instance or in any circumstances.

4. Expresses deep concern about the glorification, in any form, of the Nazi movement, neo-Nazism and former members of the Waffen SS organization, including by erecting monuments and memorials and holding public demonstrations in the name of the glorification of the Nazi past, the Nazi movement and neo-Nazism, as well as by declaring or attempting to declare such members and those who fought against the anti-Hitler coalition and collaborated with the Nazi movement participants in national liberation movements;

6. Emphasizes the recommendation of the Special Rapporteur that 'any commemorative celebration of the Nazi regime, its allies and related organizations, whether official or unofficial, should be prohibited by States, and stresses in this regard that it is important that States take measures, in accordance with international human rights law, to counteract any celebration of the Nazi SS organization and all its integral parts, including the Waffen SS.

7. Expresses concern about recurring attempts to desecrate or demolish monuments erected in remembrance of those who fought against Nazism during the Second World War, as well as to unlawfully exhume or remove the remains of such persons, and in this regard urges States to fully comply with their relevant obligations, inter alia, under article 34 of the Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949;

11. Welcomes the call of the Special Rapporteur for the active preservation of those Holocaust sites that served as Nazi death camps, concentration and forced labour camps and prisons, as well as his encouragement of States to take measures, including legislative, law enforcement and educational measures, to put an end to all forms of Holocaust denial."

PRIOR U.S. ACCOMMODATION WITH NAZISM

On October 27, 2014, the front page of The New York Times reported: "In Cold War, U.S. spy Agencies used 1,000 nazis." What the headline fails to say is that the U.S. employed and protected men whom they knew were among the most barbaric nazi war criminals. "When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston, named Aleksandre Lileikis, the CIA tried to intervene. The agency's own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked 'under the control of the Gestapo during the war,' his CIA file noted... U.S. agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-nazi police officials and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war crimes"

"In 1968 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized the FBI to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, 'a potential threat to national security.' In Maryland, army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary warfare for a possible invasion of Russia. In all, the American military, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war, according to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University who was on a government-appointed team that de-classified war-crime records."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hated the Nazis, and to provide assistance to the anti-nazi struggle in Europe, he often had to circumvent highly placed pro-nazi and anti-semitic State Department officials, who not too covertly wanted Hitler to win World War II and destroy Soviet communism. Roosevelt's great skill succeeded in arranging for U.S. Lend-Lease policies to aid the anti-nazi struggles of the Soviet Union and Great Britain, and it was his original, fierce determination to put on trial for treason the major U.S. corporations which he knew were engaging in business with the Nazis throughout World War II.

FDR died early in his fourth term as President, and subsequent U.S. Presidents did not suffer such anguish colluding with Nazis or nazi collaborators throughout the entire Cold War, as this October 27, 2014 New York Times article reports. Indeed, today, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs very recently supervised and micromanaged the destabilization and overthrow of Ukraine's anti-nazi President, Viktor Yanukovich, and installed a new Ukranian government permeated with neo-nazis and nazi sympathizers.

In one of his first official acts, Ukraine's new U.S. puppet President Poroshenko made October 14 the Ukranian National Day of Celebration commemorating the day in 1943 that Stepan Bandera's nazi army was established. During World War II, Bandera's OUN prepared two assassination attempts against United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fact ignored by both Poroshenko and his U.S. supporters. Poroshenko's shameful action is a desecration of the memory of the more than 300,000 heroic Ukranians murdered by the Nazis during the second battle of Kharkov, in May 1942, a battle which, though ending in defeat for the anti-nazi Ukranians, succeeded in slowing and weakening the invading nazi army, thereby contributing, ultimately, to the great Soviet victory at Stalingrad, the turning point in World War II.

There were 51 abstentions voted on Resolution 69/160, largely, and alarmingly, by European countries which had been ravaged by the nazi slaughter during World War II. These abstentions (however they were parsed in "explanation of vote") suggest that Nazism is no longer abhorrent in parts of these countries, whether as a result of failure of historic memory, particularly in the younger generation, or more likely as a result of the current economic crisis, exacerbated by the noxious austerity measures being imposed upon most countries of the European Union, policies decimating the standard of living throughout Europe and leaving these destitute citizens prey to resurgent nazi propaganda today, as were the 25 million starving Germans in 1923.

Although throughout the past decade, the United States had consistently opposed the anti-nazi resolution, this year, Ukraine, though previously abstaining, for the first time actually opposed the anti-nazi resolution, an ominous development, as on December 14, 2014 the U.S. Congress approved sending lethal weapons to Kiev, including anti-tank weapons, ammunition and troop-operated surveillance drones, anti-mortar radar systems, etc. as part of $350 million worth of weapons, raising the terrifying spectre that the U.S. is actually militarily supporting a pro-nazi resurgence in Ukraine.

THE ASSAULT ON TRUTH: THE "PRAGUE DECLARATION"

In its explananation of vote, Ukraine "condemned Hitler and Stalin alike as international criminals." This despicable allegation of a false equivalence, which has no basis in reality, is tantamount to Holocaust denial. It is based upon the ideological "normalization" of Nazism in one of the most dangerous and pernicious doctrines now being promulgated throughout Europe, the "Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism," a doctrine of intellectual cowardice and moral depravity, falsifying reality and historic fact. It attempts to obscure the historically unique horrors and atrocities of Nazism by subsuming them in the general category of "totalitarian," thereby erasing the racist and genocidal character of the nazi scourge. This is the beginning of the effort at "normalization" and ultimately the legitimization of nazism. This cancerous assault on truth, contaminating European thought since the collapse of the Soviet Union, is a new propaganda weapon for the intellectually feeble, which calls for: "adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes."

Among the supporters of the Prague Declaration are Margaret Thatcher and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The Prague Declaration is refuted, intellectually, historically and morally by many of the most illustrious scholars, historians and members of the European Parliament, notably in:

THE SEVENTY YEARS DECLARATION 0f 20 January 2013, signed by more than 80 of the most distinguished members of the European Parliament from countries throughout Europe, and which states:

"On the Anniversary of the Final Solution conference at Wannsee,"

"Remember:

"The horror and brutality of the genocidal campaign of total annihilation of European Jewry conducted by the Nazis and their collaborators

That the mass killing of European Jewry preceded that formal adoption of the Final Solution plan by half a year, and began on the Eastern Front in 1941 upon the initiation of Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union,

That millions of non-Jews suffered in numerous ways under the Nazis...

"Recognize:

The Nazi campaign of annihilation of the Jewish people was philosophically, qualitatively and practically profoundly distinct and different to other forms of oppression

"Reject:

Attempts to obfuscate the Holocaust by diminishing its uniqueness and deeming it to be equal, similar or equivalent to Communism as suggested by the 2008 Prague Declaration,

Attempts to have European history school books rewritten to reflect the notion of 'Double Genocide' ('equality' or 'sameness' of nazism and communism)

As unacceptable the glorification of nazi allies and of Holocaust perpetrators and collaborators, including the Waffen SS in Estonia and Latvia and the Lithuanian Activist Front in Lithuania

Attempts to legalise or sanitize the public display of the swastika by racist and fascist groups."

Among the great parliamentarians supporting the Seventy Years Declaration is the brilliant Lithuanian statesman, Justas Paleckis, whose own son was brutally persecuted by the current Lithuanian government for questioning Lithuanian government dogma, much as Galileo was persecuted for questioning the false dogma of the Catholic Church

Numerous other distinguished European intellectuals respond with repugnance to the intellectual vulgarity of the Prague Doctrine. The Declaration on Unequal Regimes: Contra Prague, June 22, 2010 states:

"We Disassociate From and Reject:

1. The language of the Prague Declaration that promotes the 'Double Genocide' model and Holocaust Obfuscation, by calls inter alia to: 'recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy, proclaim substantial similarities between Nazism and Communism,

6. Unacceptable expenditure of state (and EU) treasure and political capital on the revision of history in an effort to obfuscate and minimize the Holocaust, legally and mechanically equating it with other crimes, inter alia by the capricious and ad-hoc redefinition and semantic inflation of the notion of 'genocide.'"

On October, 2009, the UK Chair of the All-Party Group against Antisemitism, John Mann, MP, described the Prague Declaration as "a sinister document,"; Lithuanian politician Leonidas Donskis states: "The Holocaust should not be equated with other tragedies." Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center describes the Prague Declaration as "the main manifesto of the false equivalency movement," stating it is supported by right-wing parties in countries in Eastern Europe.

"UK parliamentarian Denis Macshane MP 'delivered a letter to the Lithuanian ambassador in London, signed by Lord Janner of Braunstone QC and academics opposed to the Prague Declaration, accusing the Lithuanian government of using 'embassy-sponsored events' to manipulate the debate: 'We find these events consistent with Lithuania's nationalistic rewriting of history, and with its efforts to limit the freedom of debate on "Double Genocide" and the Prague Declaration.'"

NAZISM

Nazism is explicitly both racist and genocidal. Governments may be totalitarian without being racist, nor genocidal. Any attempt to equate the two, or describe Nazism as merely totalitarian, is a fatal attack on truth and history. In one of the great documents following World War II, "The Plot Against the Peace," by Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn, the unique character of Nazism is described: "It was against the Slav peoples, the traditional enemy of Pan-Germanism, that the policy of genocide was most extensively applied. 'It will be one of the chief tasks of German statesmanship,' Hitler had told Hermann Rauschning, 'for all time to prevent, by every means in our power, the further increase of the Slav races. Natural instincts bid all living beings not merely conquest their enemies, but also destroy them. In former days, it was the victor's prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples."

"Following the liberation of Lublin in the summer of 1944, a group of some thirty foreign correspondents visited the Maidenak Death Camp. Among the correspondents was the American newspaperman, W. H. Lawrence. On August 27, 1944, Lawrence sent a dispatch to the New York Times which opened with these words: "I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth - the German concentration camp at Maidenak, which was a veritable River Rouge for the production of death, in which it is estimated that nearly 1,500,000 persons from nearly every country in Europe were killed in the last three years..This is a place that must be seen to be believed...'"

"Here there were thousands of war prisoners....who died at a terrible rate from hunger and disease. Here there were fields where thousands and tens of thousands of persons were burned on funeral pyres...Here there were types of 'murder vans' as well as solidly built casements where victims were asphyxiated by 'cyclone gas.' Here bodies were burned in the most primitive method of ancient India; a row of logs and a row of corpses, then another row of logs and another row of corpses, but also in simply constructed furnaces like giant cauldrons, as well as in perfected furnaces for blitz cremation. Here people were shot in ditches or killed with a blow of an iron rod which broke their necks. Here people were drowned in artificial ponds or hanged on gallows of different types, from a simple gibbet with a crossbar to an up-to-date portable scaffold furnished with pulleys and a flywheel. This was a regular death factory where the size of the daily slaughterings were regulated by two factors; by the number of people entering the camp and by the amount of labor needed for the never-ending construction work." (Sayers and Kahn).

"The enslavement of millions of men, women and children was only one aspect of the Pan-German plan which the German General Staff methodically followed in its European conquests. The General Staff employed a wide variety of measures aimed at the ultimate subjugation of some 500,000,000 people in Europe and Soviet Russia by some 80,000,000 German rulers.... Immediately after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the German High Command arranged in their military schools and institutions special courses of lectures emphasizing the necessity of exterminating masses of the Russian people." "The testimony of both Soviet and French war prisoners, who were victims and witnesses to the nazi barbarities in the Yanovska concentration camp in Lvov, describing nazi crimes: "In this camp war prisoners were exterminated without any pretext, often for a bet. Wepke, a Gestapo Kommissar, boasted to other camp executioners that he would cut a boy into two parts with one blow of a hatchet. They did not believe him, so he caught a ten-year old boy in the street, forced him to his knees, made him put his palms together and hide his face in them, made a trial stroke, adjusted the boy's head and with a single blow of the hatched slashed the boy in two. The Hitlerites congratulated Wemke warmly and shook him by the hand.. Children were used by the Nazis as living targets."

The "Holodomor," a famine that occurred in 1932, is currently cited by right-wing Ukranians as evidence that Stalin was trying to exterminate them, and they call this a "man-made" famine. They forget that 1932 was one of the worst years of the great depression, with starvation rampant throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia. In the United States, President Hoover slaughtered a massive number of starving American veterans camped in Washington, attempting to get the "Bonus" they were promised in payment for their military service. The shacks they were living in were incinerated, and Generals such as MacArthur and Eisenhower were involved in the eviction and extermination of these impoverished veterans. This global famine was also "man-made." It was the great crisis of capitalism. And there were capitalists who made fortunes out of that crisis.

In "explanation of vote," the United States representative states she is "concerned about the overt political motives that had driven the main sponsor of the current resolution. That government had employed those phrases in the current crisis in Ukraine." Nowhere in this resolution was Ukraine mentioned or singled out. This was not a country-specific resolution. In previous years the U.S. delegation cited "freedom of speech" as their reason for opposing the resolution. Whatever their reasons, and however contorted the "reasoning," the U.S. continues to condone the resurgence of Nazism. And it cannot be ignored that among the co-sponsors of the Anti-Nazi resolution is the Government of Syria.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.

The Raw Story

A non-profit news blog, focused on providing independent journalism.

Kiev orders crackdown on Russian TV channels

What I did after police killed my son

Emerging solar plants scorch birds in mid-air

Monday, 5 January 2015

Psycho Pat Robertson says non-religious children should be beaten until they respect Christian beliefs

Pat Robertson says non-religious children should be beaten until they respect Christian beliefs

The real life Serpico: The police are still out of control

Top experts predict global economic disaster in 2015

UK schoolteachers urged to report terrorist toddlers

North Korea rebuttal at UN - U.S. the biggest violator of human rights in the world

Neurological consequences of Botox injections

Iraqi MP says U.S. aircraft dropped load of weapons and equipment to ISIS militants

Mind control: Dr. Ewen Cameron and 'psychic driving'

Jeffery Sterling and the U.S. war against government whistleblowers

Ferguson grand juror sues prosecutor to speak out

Snow forecast across 2,000 miles of U.S

Iceland's Prime Minister expected to withdraw EU application

Children who take ADHD medication perform worse in school

The UN anti-Nazi resolution and the history of U.S. Nazism accommodation and acceptance

Search

Recent Posts

Popular