The Origin of Discontent

Via The Daily Bell

America is collapsing on almost every crucial level.

Our great universities, which were once a fortress of reason, are shamelessly responsible by producing men and women hell-bent on destroying our free nation. In the last decade especially, corruption has become so widespread in America that many citizens accept it as the norm.

This collapse of law and order didn’t occur overnight, even though it is fashionable to think so by blaming it on the Trump administration. It began years ago when educators systematically began to encourage student disrespect toward America by romanticizing globalism. The anarchy that I predicted in the 80s in my nationally acclaimed novel The Fire Within has today become a reality.

Many of the schemes to break down societal order, first tested and perfected in inner-city schools, have spread throughout the public school system, and into our great universities. This has left many parents bewildered and searching for an explanation.

The excuses often echoed by prominent educators and publications like Education Week are almost always the same with parental neglect, stagnant school spending, lack of diversity, and even racism usually getting top listing. Rarely are educators heard sharing the real reasons for the problem. Those credentialed men and women who have the knowledge and the willingness to shed light on what’s happening are not being allowed to speak out publicly. Whatever crucial information that they may have to share is silenced by disagreeable students and the endless blast of denial and propaganda from the mainstream media.

Our great universities, which have the skill to unite the country, are working hand-in-hand with the media to divide it. To circumvent this national trend, many prominent leaders committed to open dialogue and freedom of speech are boldly resisting this trend by attempting to speak out on campuses against the organized movement to silence them and to subvert freedom. What they are facing almost everywhere for their efforts is armed resistance.

The very institutions that once peacefully guarded our freedom and nurtured our independence are encouraging rioting. UCLA-Berkeley is an excellent example. In a Los Angeles Times article, one demonstrator, disturbed by the negative news coverage campus protestors were getting, wisely believed that such continued coverage would turn the public against the student movement. Unfortunately, the demonstrator didn’t seem to realize that this was exactly what the masterminds behind the rebellion wanted.

In order to break down order in a powerful country like America, they needed widespread discontent. The best way to do this was to train students in Alinsky-style protesting and turn one group against the other. As a young man, educated traditionally in the forties and fifties, I wasn’t prepared for the modern classroom. In my day, the schools were orderly, not a fist-fighting, pill-popping jungle.

Although I was sometimes smart enough to spot the mendacity and propaganda that was creeping into the schools during my school years, the schools were generally a safe place for traditional learning. Most students were taught to understand through education and hard work that they could realize their dreams. When I decided to teach in the sixties and seventies, I saw for the first time the raw reality of change, especially in inner-city schools.

Understanding the cause for this rising breakdown of order didn’t come easily for me. It took time – and much reading, thinking and testing to identify. Like so many teachers, I was concerned about the students’ freedom to run wild and to destroy property with immunity.

At first, I blamed the principal, attributing the disorder to his inability to motivate the students – until I realized that the principal was in place, not because of some accident, but because he was exactly the person needed by the system to advance such chaos. This was true, not just where I taught, but at other inner-city public schools as well. Many principles were used like pawns, carefully chosen, to set in motion activities that would accelerate the disintegration of education.

They did this by employing a myriad of activities, like mismatching teachers and subjects, encouraging student power, and supporting academic programs that would handicap learning. (Several examples of the latter included teaching the look-say reading method, the confusing new math system, and even revisionist history.)

To give purpose to the chaos that followed, ruthless teachers who thrived in failing classrooms were hired to advance their political agenda, in lieu of reading, writing, and arithmetic. When I finally stepped through the cloud of deception, carefully created to blur my understanding of the problem, I began to see a very dark force at play.

Quite by accident I came across Dr. Maria Montessori’s book, The Absorbent Mind, which was published many years earlier. This honest, and easy-to-read book immediately clarified the problem for me. Instead of advancing the moral relativity inherent in pragmatism, taught in most government schools, Dr. Montessori advanced a philosophy of education that respected the moral and intellectual growth of each child.

In my novel, The Fire Within, I identified these two diametrically opposing views of education and set them against each other to demonstrate what would happen when they were put into action. After publishing my book, I went on the road in the early 80s to promote it. Through hard-work and design I was booked by many talk shows, locally and nationally.

I believed then, as I do today, that the surest way to societal salvation begins with the right educational philosophy. This can best be achieved through an education system, like the Montessori system, which respects moral development and individual freedom.

Unfortunately, pragmatism, which basically conflicts with the Montessori system, has a stronghold on today’s education. Ending this stronghold isn’t going to be easy. But if we are to survive as a free and independent society, we must succeed. What is happening today all around us should convince us of the urgency.

Joe David is the author of numerous articles and six books, including The Fire Within and The Infidels. www.bfat.com

Blaming Russia For The Internet "Sewer"

Authored by Robert Parry via ConsortiumNews.com,

As the Russia-gate hysteria spirals down from the implausible to the absurd, almost every bad thing is blamed on the Russians, even how they turned the previously pristine Internet into a "sewer"...

With the U.S. government offering tens of millions of dollars to combat Russian “propaganda and disinformation,” it’s perhaps not surprising that we see “researchers” such as Jonathan Albright of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University making the absurd accusation that the Russians have “basically turned [the Internet] into a sewer.”

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin wall in Moscow, Dec. 6, 2016. (Photo by Robert Parry)

I’ve been operating on the Internet since 1995 and I can assure you that the Internet has always been “a sewer” - in that it has been home to crazy conspiracy theories, ugly personal insults, click-bait tabloid “news,” and pretty much every vile prejudice you can think of. Whatever some Russians may or may not have done in buying $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to its $27 billion in annual revenue) or opening 201 Twitter accounts (out of Twitter’s 328 million monthly users), the Russians are not responsible for the sewage coursing through the Internet.

Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans and pretty much every other segment of the world’s population didn’t need Russian help to turn the Internet into an informational “sewer.” But, of course, fairness and proportionality have no place in today’s Russia-gate frenzy.

After all, your “non-governmental organization” or your scholarly “think tank” is not likely to get a piece of the $160 million that the U.S. government authorized last December to counter primarily Russian “propaganda and disinformation” if you explain that the Russians are at most responsible for a tiny trickle of “sewage” compared to the vast rivers of “sewage” coming from many other sources.

If you put the Russia-gate controversy in context, you also are not likely to have your “research” cited by The Washington Post as Albright did on Thursday because he supposedly found some links at the home-décor/fashion site Pinterest to a few articles that derived from a few of the 470 Facebook accounts and pages that Facebook suspects of having a link to Russia and shut them down. (To put that 470 number into perspective, Facebook has about two billion monthly users.)

Albright’s full quote about the Russians allegedly exploiting various social media platforms on the Internet was: “They’ve gone to every possible medium and basically turned it into a sewer.”

But let’s look at the facts. According to Facebook, the suspected “Russian-linked” accounts purchased $100,000 in ads from 2015 to 2017 (compared to Facebook’s annual revenue of about $27 billion), with only 44 percent of those ads appearing before the 2016 election and many having little or nothing to do with politics, which is curious if the Kremlin’s goal was to help elect Donald Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

Even former Clinton political strategist Mark Penn has acknowledged the absurdity of thinking that such piddling amounts could have any impact on a $2.4 billion presidential campaign, plus all the billions of dollars worth of free-media attention to the conventions, debates, etc. Based on what’s known about the Facebook ads, Penn calculated that “the actual electioneering [in battleground states] amounts to about $6,500.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday, Penn added, “I have 40 years of experience in politics, and this Russian ad buy mostly after the election anyway, simply does not add up to a carefully targeted campaign to move voters. It takes tens of millions of dollars to deliver meaningful messages to the contested portion of the electorate.”

Puppies and Pokemon

And, then there is the curious content. According to The New York Times, one of these “Russian-linked” Facebook groups was dedicated to photos of “adorable puppies.” Of course, the Times tried hard to detect some sinister motive behind the “puppies” page.

The New York Times building in Manhattan. (Photo credit: Robert Parry)

Similarly, CNN went wild over its own “discovery” that one of the “Russian-linked” pages offered Amazon gift cards to people who found “Pokémon Go” sites near scenes where police shot unarmed black men - if you would name the Pokémon after the victims.

“It’s unclear what the people behind the contest hoped to accomplish, though it may have been to remind people living near places where these incidents had taken place of what had happened and to upset or anger them,” CNN mused, adding:

 

“CNN has not found any evidence that any Pokémon Go users attempted to enter the contest, or whether any of the Amazon Gift Cards that were promised were ever awarded — or, indeed, whether the people who designed the contest ever had any intention of awarding the prizes.”

So, these dastardly Russians are exploiting “adorable puppies” and want to “remind people” about unarmed victims of police violence, clearly a masterful strategy to undermine American democracy or – according to the original Russia-gate narrative – to elect Donald Trump.

A New York Times article on Wednesday acknowledged another inconvenient truth that unintentionally added more perspective to the Russia-gate hysteria.

It turns out that some of the mainstream media’s favorite “fact-checking” organizations are home to Google ads that look like news items and lead readers to phony sites dressed up to resemble People, Vogue or other legitimate content providers.

“None of the stories were true,” the Times reported. “Yet as recently as late last week, they were being promoted with prominent ads served by Google on PolitiFact and Snopes, fact-checking sites created precisely to dispel such falsehoods.”

There is obvious irony in PolitiFact and Snopes profiting off “fake news” by taking money for these Google ads. But this reality also underscores the larger reality that fabricated news articles – whether peddling lies about Melania Trump or a hot new celebrity or outlandish Russian plots – are driven principally by the profit motive.

The Truth About Fake News

Occasionally, the U.S. mainstream media even acknowledges that fact. For instance, last November, The New York Times, which was then flogging the Russia-linked “fake news” theme, ran a relatively responsible article about a leading “fake news” Web site that the Times tracked down. It turned out to be an entrepreneurial effort by an unemployed Georgian student using a Web site in Tbilisi to make some money by promoting pro-Trump stories, whether true or not.

Hillary Clinton at the Code 2017 conference on May 31, 2017

The owner of the Web site, 22-year-old Beqa Latsabidse, said he had initially tried to push stories favorable to Hillary Clinton but that proved unprofitable so he switched to publishing anti-Clinton and pro-Trump articles, including made-up stories. In other words, the Times found no Russian connection.

The Times article on Wednesday revealed the additional problem of  Google ads placed on mainstream Internet sites leading readers to bogus news sites to get clicks and thus advertising dollars. And, it turns out that PolitiFact and Snopes were at least unwittingly profiting off these entrepreneurial ventures by running their ads. Again, there was no claim here of Russian “links.” It was all about good ole American greed.

But the even larger Internet problem is that many “reputable” news sites, such as AOL, lure readers into clicking on some sensationalistic or misleading headline, which takes readers to a story that is often tabloid trash or an extreme exaggeration of what the headline promised.

This reality about the Internet should be the larger context in which the Russia-gate story plays out, the miniscule nature of this Russian “meddling” even if these “suspected … links to Russia” – as the Times initially described the 470 Facebook pages – turn out to be true.

But there are no lucrative grants going to “researchers” who would put the trickle of alleged Russian “sewage” into the context of the vast flow of Internet “sewage” that is even flowing through the esteemed “fact-checking” sites of PolitiFact and Snopes.

There are also higher newspaper sales and better TV ratings if the mainstream media keeps turning up new angles on Russia-gate, even as some of the old ones fall away as inconsequential or meaningless (such as the Senate Intelligence Committee dismissing earlier controversies over Sen. Jeff Sessions’s brief meeting with the Russian ambassador at the Mayflower Hotel and minor changes in the Republican platform).

Saying ‘False’ Is ‘True’

And, there is the issue of who decides what’s true. PolitiFact continues to defend its false claim that Hillary Clinton was speaking the truth when – in referencing leaked Democratic emails last October – she claimed that the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies “have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (right) talks with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, with John Brennan and other national security aides present. (Photo credit: Office of Director of National Intelligence)

That claim was always untrue because a reference to a consensus of the 17 intelligence agencies suggests a National Intelligence Estimate or similar product that seeks the judgments of the entire intelligence community. No NIE or community-wide study was ever done on this topic.

Only later – in January 2017 – did a small subset of the intelligence community, what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described as “hand-picked” analystsfrom three agencies – the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation – issue an “assessment” blaming the Russians while acknowledging a lack of actual evidence.

In other words, the Jan. 6 “assessment” was comparable to the “stovepiped” intelligence that influenced many of the mistaken judgments of President George W. Bush’s administration. In “stovepiped” intelligence, a selected group of analysts is closeted away and develops judgments without the benefit of other experts who might offer contradictory evidence or question the groupthink.

So, in many ways, Clinton’s statement was the opposite of true both when she said it in 2016 and later in 2017 when she repeated it in direct reference to the Jan. 6 assessment. If PolitiFact really cared about facts, it would have corrected its earlier claim that Clinton was telling the truth, but the fact-checking organization wouldn’t budge — even after The New York Times and The Associated Press ran corrections.

In this context, PolitiFact showed its contempt even for conclusive evidence – testimony from former DNI Clapper (corroborated by former CIA Director John Brennan) that the 17-agency claim was false. Instead, PolitiFact was determined to protect Clinton’s false statement from being described for what it was: false.

Of course, maybe PolitiFact is suffering from the arrogance of its elite status as an arbiter of truth with its position on Google’s First Draft coalition, a collection of mainstream news outlets and fact-checkers which gets to decide what information is true and what is not true — for algorithms that then will exclude or downplay what’s deemed “false.”

So, if PolitiFact says something is true – even if it’s false – it becomes “true.” Thus, it’s perhaps not entirely ironic that PolitiFact would collect money from Google ads placed on its site by advertisers of fake news.

Apple's New "FaceID" Could Be A Powerful Mass Spying Tool

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite.  But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.

FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.

That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous. 

It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.

But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.

While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day.

Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.

According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government abuse. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s security and privacy implications.

But this type of sleazy “Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.

Over the last decade the government has increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet communications going into and out of the United States for surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has called cybersignatures. And last year Reuters revealed that Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired

Mass facial recognition scans are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.

What Country Is This? Forced Blood Draws, Cavity Searches, And Colonoscopies

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”

- Herman Schwartz, The Nation

Our freedoms - especially the Fourth Amendment - are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, shoot, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

Such is life in America today that Americans are being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are - our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) - in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans are being forced to accept that we have no control over our bodies, our lives and our property, especially when it comes to interactions with the government.

Consider, for example, what happened to Utah nurse Alex Wubbels after a police detective demanded to take blood from a badly injured, unconscious patient without a warrant.

Wubbels refused, citing hospital policy that requires police to either have a warrant or permission from the patient in order to draw blood. The detective had neither. Irate, the detective threatened to have Wubbels arrested if she didn’t comply. Backed up by her supervisors, Wubbels respectfully stood her ground only to be roughly grabbed, shoved out of the hospital, handcuffed and forced into an unmarked car while hospital police looked on and failed to intervene (take a look at the police body camera footage, which has gone viral, and see for yourself).

Michael Chorosky didn’t have an advocate like Wubbels to stand guard over his Fourth Amendment rights. Chorosky was surrounded by police, strapped to a gurney and then had his blood forcibly drawn after refusing to submit to a breathalyzer test. “What country is this? What country is this?” cried Chorosky during the forced blood draw.

What country is this indeed?

Unfortunately, forced blood draws are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the indignities and abuses being heaped on Americans in the so-called name of “national security.”

Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies and forced roadside strip searches are also becoming par for the course in an age in which police are taught to have no respect for the citizenry’s bodily integrity whether or not a person has done anything wrong.

For example, 21-year-old Charnesia Corley was allegedly being pulled over by Texas police in 2015 for “rolling” through a stop sign. Claiming they smelled marijuana, police handcuffed Corley, forced her to strip off her pants, threw her to the ground, forced her legs apart and then probed her vagina. The cavity search lasted 11 minutes. This practice is referred to as “rape by cop.”

David Eckert was forced to undergo an anal cavity search, three enemas, and a colonoscopy after allegedly failing to yield to a stop sign at a Wal-Mart parking lot. Cops justified the searches on the grounds that they suspected Eckert was carrying drugs because his “posture [was] erect” and “he kept his legs together.” No drugs were found.

During a routine traffic stop, Leila Tarantino was subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic, while her two children—ages 1 and 4—waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.

Thirty-eight-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window. Insisting that he smelled marijuana, the trooper proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman’s anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves. No marijuana was found.

Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers were charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers was accused of conducting searches of men’s anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums.

It’s gotten so bad that you don’t even have to be suspected of possessing drugs to be subjected to a strip search.

Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Florence v. Burlison, any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.

As technology advances, police searches are becoming more invasive on a cellular level, as well, with passive alcohol sensors, DNA collection roadblocks, iris scans and facial recognition software—to name just a few methods—used to assault our bodily integrity.

America’s founders could scarcely have imagined a world in which we needed protection against widespread government breaches of our privacy, including on a cellular level.

Yet that’s exactly what we so desperately need.

Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the indignities being heaped upon us by the architects and agents of the American police state—whether or not we’ve done anything wrong—are just a foretaste of what is to come.

Millennials Seek "Generic Father Figure" For Backyard BBQ On Craigslist

A group of millennials in Spokane, Washington are seeking a “generic father figure” to help them host a barbecue on Father"s Day weekend.  In the Craigslist post which has explicably since gone viral, college student Dane Anderson and his “boys” are offering free food and booze to any enterprising area dad who’s willing to come to their party next Saturday and man the grill for a few hours.

Anderson, who was interviewed by local NBC affiliate KHQ, says he created the post because he and his roommates, who range in age from 21 to 26, live too far away from their own dads.

For any interested dads, duties include:

• Grilling hamburgers and hotdogs (whilst drinking beer)


• Bringing your own grill (though this is subject to change. We will provide all of the meat)


• Refer to all attendees as "Big Guy", "Chief", "Sport", "Champ" etc. (whilst drinking beer)


• Talk about dad things, like lawnmowers, building your own deck, Jimmy Buffet, etc. Funny anecdotes are highly encouraged. All whilst drinking beer.

The "boys" are looking for dads with a minimum of 18 years" experience as a father, a minimum of 10 years" grilling experience and "an appreciation of a nice, cold beer on a hot summer day." For what it"s worth, Anderson & Co. say they know how to grill, but that “none of us are prepared to fill the role of BBQ dad.”

Oh, and since we are talking about millennials broke college students, Anderson says he and his roommates can’t afford to pay their stand-in “dad", though they’re offering compensation in the form of "all the food and cold beer your heart desires.”

Anderson told KHQ that the ad has yielded a handful of responses. But at least one interested dad didn’t pan out.

"There was one guy stan who sent us a message but then he stopped replying,” Anderson told KHQ. Now that the media has helped transform Anderson"s post into a viral sensation, he and his roommates might try and recruit as many as three dads to help with the festivities.

“We’re just looking for a dad to come and crack a cold one with the boys,” Dane said. The nature of Anderson"s relationship with his own father – and whether or not he plans to call and wish him a happy father’s day – remains unclear.

Intelligence Agencies Admit 23,000 Jihadis Live In Britain; 3,000 Pose "Imminent Threat"

After failing to thwart two terror attacks that have occurred in the U.K. so far this year – both of which were carried out by suspected jihadis who were known to U.K. authorities – intelligence agencies have identified 23,000 potential jihadis living in Britain, according to a report published in the Times of London on Saturday. 

The report emerged after U.K. Prime Minster Theresa May downgraded the terror threat to “severe,” after raising it “critical” on Tuesday in the aftermath of the attacks.

Of this "pool" of potential terrorists, 3,000 are suspected of posing an “imminent threat” and are being investigated accordingly, the Times reports. Meanwhile, the other 20,000 have been involved with past investigations and have been categorized as posing a “residual risk.”

Both suspected Manchester attacker Salman Abedi and Westminster killer Khalid Masood were in a pool of “former subjects of interest” and were no longer the subject of surveillance efforts, the Times reported. Abedi, a 23-year-old whose parents immigrated to the U.K. from Libya, killed 22 kids, in addition to himself, on Monday when he detonated a bomb just as attendees of a concert by American singer Ariana Grande were rushing for the exits following her performance.

The report comes amid intensifying criticism of the intelligence agencies, who have been accused of doing an inadequate job identifying former “subjects of interest” who have returned to extremism. 

The notion that there are 23,000 potential jihadis in the U.K. is “horrifying,” said Anthony Glees, head of security and intelligence at the University of Buckingham.

“We should double the size of MI5, as we did in World War II, and expand the number of intelligence-led police by the thousands.”

Meanwhile, thousands of soldiers will remain deployed on Britain’s streets through Monday, the Times reported.

We leave it to Nigel Farage to sum up a nation"s concerns...

UK authorities have identified 23,000 potential jihadist extremists. The problem is much worse than we first thought. pic.twitter.com/Qu2Ap210kl

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) May 26, 2017

Daily Dose of This Plant Could Reverse Age-Related Decline in the Brain

The findings of a Yahoo News/Marist poll show that people over the age of 69 generally don’t have positive views of marijuana. While the majority of younger Americans increasingly view marijuana as a legitimate medication and relatively acceptable recreational substance, the older crowd has been slower to adopt these views. In a twist of irony, a recent study shows that a daily dose of cannabis could reverse age-related brain decline in older people.

In the study, using mice, researcher Andreas Zimmer of the University of Bonn in Germany gave low doses of THC, the main psychoactive compound in marijuana, to young, mature, and aged mice. The young mice performed slightly worse on memory and learning tests – no one was shocked by that result. The rodents took longer to find a safe platform hidden in a water maze, and had a more difficult time recognizing another mouse they’d previously “met.” [1]

Before receiving THC, the mature and aged mice performed worse on the tests than the younger mice did. Once they received the compound, however, the elderly mice’s performance improved so much that their test scores matched those of their younger counterparts.

Zimmer says:

“The effects were very robust, very profound.”

The changes were also visible in the mice’s brains. The researchers noticed that the critters’ hippocampus – the area of the brain that is critical for learning and memory – had grown more synaptic spines, the points of contact for communication between neurons. Furthermore, radical changes were seen in the gene expression pattern in the hippocampi of the aged mice treated with THC, rendering their brains completely different from those of the young, untreated mice.

Zimmer explains:

“That is something we absolutely did not expect: the old animals [that received] THC looked most similar to the young, untreated control mice.”

The researchers have a theory as to why marijuana rejuvenates aging mice brains. Marijuana stimulates the endocannabinoid system, a biochemical pathway that slows with age in mice, humans, and other animals. But there is no guarantee that these results can be replicated in humans. [2]

Source: Collective Evolution

David Nutt, the former government drugs adviser and professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, says:

“The key question now is does the same apply to humans? Clearly this needs to be tested, but it will not be possible in the UK due to the ridiculous restrictions on cannabis research occasioned by its being a schedule 1 drug.”

Related: 4 Studies Proving That Marijuana Can Treat Brain Cancer

Michael Bloomfield, a clinical lecturer in psychiatry at University College London, notes:

“What is particularly exciting about this research is that it opens up a whole new chemical system, the endocannabinoid system, as a potential target for new avenues of research, which could include illnesses like dementia. However, we are still in very early days and further research is needed.”

Source: Herb.co

Cannabis hasn’t been intensely studied for medical purposes for very long, and it’s going to be tricky teasing out details, like how much of a dose is considered ideal. According to Bloomfield, THC sometimes has the opposite of the desired effect on people, depending on the dose, the patient’s age, and how often it is administered.

“This means that the possibility of doctors potentially prescribing cannabis, THC or similar compounds for memory problems in older people is still a long way off.”

So, it will likely be years before doctors are able to accurately prescribe marijuana for aging brains, but it’s an exciting possibility that could make the Golden Years much happier for senior citizens.

Andreas Bilkei-Gorzo, a researcher at the University of Bonn, is hopeful that marijuana can help people squeeze more years out of their life. [3]

“If we can rejuvenate the brain so that everybody gets five to 10 more years without needing extra care then that is more than we could have imagined.”

The study is published in the journal Nature.

Sources:

[1] Scientific American

[2] The Guardian

[3] Daily Caller

Collective Evolution

Herb.co

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About Julie Fidler:
	Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog.

The Transformation Of Our Nation Into A Surveillance State Is Almost Complete

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

The headlines are awash with the recent tensions with North Korea, and most are focused intently upon this act of the play that has been running hot for several years, now.  Akin to the proverbial frog in cold water, however, we are not paying as much attention to the surveillance state that is continuing to wrap its tentacles around us.  Eurasia is our ally, Eastasia is our enemy…and nobody notices that the chocolate ration has been diminished.  While everyone focuses on what is reported in the headline news, everybody misses what is happening right before their eyes.

Point of Sale is the new jail, the ubiquitous surveillance system that records your every purchase and stores it in a personal database…an algorithm…in the government storage facility in Utah.  Look above that register.  It doesn’t matter whether you have a debit or credit purchase or not.  Paying cash?  Your anonymity only lasts until your image is captured in the little black dome camera right above your head…right next to the register.  The sale is recorded, as well as your image.

Now the biometrics are becoming advanced enough to be able to measure the spacing between your eyes, the shapes of the ears, and other idiosyncrasies that are peculiar to each individual.  But these differences do not matter, as long as they can be catalogued.   All the states pretty much have Real ID, now, with driver’s licenses all linked into a central database and passed through the fusion centers and police departments at local, state, and national level.  1984 is now.

Here is an excerpt from the Passports page of the State Department of January 12, 2016:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Friday that Real ID-compliant identification, such as a passport or a driver’s license from a Real ID-compliant state, will not be required to fly domestically until 2018.

Yes, this is serious.  Laws are not in place yet to prevent you from disguising yourself or altering your appearance.  Yet.  They do make it a crime to alter your appearance in the commission of a crime.  The question becomes when do they make it a crime to vary from their THX-1138 program for us and keep them from recording you?  Probably very soon.

In previous articles, it was mentioned that it is a rollercoaster with the administrations and the amount they can push the peoples’ perceptions of what is intolerable.  As many of you have pointed out, the political party doesn’t matter…the surveillance state inches forward in increments: steadily and without respite.  We are in a “slow” phase right now.  President Trump is “in,” and the people are riding the crest of their “newfound freedoms,” right?  Not so fast.  Bush Jr. was certainly better than Clinton; however, his actions enabled the Warner Defense Act of 2006 and the abrogation of Constitutional rights in that 100-mile buffer zone around the Continental United States.  The Patriot Act had already been in place, and many refinements were made to alter limitations on presidential actions concerning disclosure on actions overt and covert initiated by the Commander-in-Chief.

Obama came in and took the driver’s seat, and took away so many more of our individual rights and protections that the staggering populace is just now beginning to realize exactly what he did.  Those actions have not been negated, and may even be promulgated.  Most of the limaceous public is unaware, because the handouts and entitlements keep them stultified and obedient to whatever politician throws them the free Gaines Burgers.

The surveillance state is almost ubiquitous, and it has been made so through the efforts of our own complacencies.

Let us return to the point of sale.  It isn’t simply for “inventory.”  The main reason these corporations claim to store your demographics is for “marketing purposes,” but all of them are (at a minimum) “back-doored” by the NSA and other agencies who are scanning your information.  They also have that cellular telephone to work with…the one that transmits a “pulse” every 4 seconds and stores information…metadata for large groups of people or geographic peculiarities…and personal information.

The happy cell phone is off and in your blazer, but it has sent a pulse out with your GPS location…in front of Cabela’s.  When you go in and buy the ammo?  The camera records your image and there’s a tie-in with the real-time purchase on your receipt.  You’re known.  Your vehicle is known, your itinerary for the day is known.  It is also recorded.

All your shopping habits, everywhere you drive, where you shop for gas, and stop for a coffee break.  All the cameras are recording.  In addition, our fellow citizens, the “Muppets” are always communicating with you and photographing things with their little cameras.  All of your activities, all of your banking, your entire life’s actions are all right there for them to paint a picture of you…and catalogue you for a later date…information stored and ready at their fingertips to access.

Edward Snowden spilled the beans concerning the surveillance that is becoming even more out of control.  The satellites are being fine-tuned and honed, and it is occurring all over the world.  Whole generations are being taught to conform now, while they are in their youth…in the schools, that are merely cages where children are taught only what they need to be functional.  Children are made into obedient little beasts of conformity that can be controlled later…later, by those with power and money who were schooled to think creatively and to actually think, instead of regurgitating useless bits of information.

The funding for all of these actions come right from our taxes.  We pay our jailers to create larger, more ingenious prisons to control us.  Eventually come the chains for the ankles, and the abattoir materializes.  There is less of a gap between total surveillance and “Soylent Green” than most people realize.  For a good read, check out an older article written by Brandon Smith entitled Low-Tech Solutions for High-Tech Tyranny.  It’s a good “starter piece” for your consideration if you have not thought of these things.  Pick up Citizen Four, a documentary about Edward Snowden.

This stuff is happening now.  Just because we are rid of Obama does not mean we are rid of the Globalist agenda and the transformation of our nation into a complete surveillance state.  It is almost in place.  Almost.  The important thing is to know about it and not be lulled into a false sense of security that all is well, when it is not.  It hasn’t happened yet, but “yet” can mean that it happens tomorrow.  It is going to depend on us: seeing it for what it is, and refusing to go “gently into that good night.”

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