Court allow victims to control Iranian Internethttp://freebeacon.com/national-security/terror-victims-seize-control-of-irans-internet/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am not a fan of the iranian regime. I also believe using the internet as a technical tool for political enforcement is the start of a future fragmented internet based on multiple protocols. not good for bitcoin growth.. Unless someone creates an internet multiverse portal of a parallel bitcoin exchange...
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[...] One involves a Philadelphia veteran who went in for a tooth extraction. Doctors went ahead with the procedure despite his dangerously low blood pressure. On his way home from the operation, he had a stroke and was left paralyzed. Another veteran had annual chest X-rays, but doctors never spotted a growing lesion in his lung. It ultimately killed him. A veteran in South Carolina had to wait nine months for a colonoscopy. By the time he underwent the procedure, cancer was diagnosed at stage three. In that case, the VA admitted that had he been treated earlier, his case might not have been as severe, Mr. Coburn said. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/24/poor-care-va-hospitals-cost-1000-veterans-their-li/#.U6k59SsHhxc.twitter |
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The transgender movement has strong totalitarian overtones that Americans don’t fully understand.[...] It’s About Control, Not RightsThe transgender movement has strong totalitarian overtones that Americans (especially certain senators) don’t fully understand. How else to describe a crusade with such far-reaching consequences for First Amendment rights? The legal destruction of gender distinctions will inevitably dissolve family autonomy, thereby uprooting freedom of association. Free expression becomes “hate speech” if one doesn’t fall into line with the directives of the transgender lobby or its pronoun protocol. Freedom of religion takes a direct hit any way you look at it. Under the guise of “rights,” the transgender movement can serve as convenient cover for consolidating and centralizing power under an ever-expanding State. Once we allow the State to refuse to recognize that children result from the male-female union, we grant the State more power to separate us from our children. As power becomes more centralized in the State, the individuals and institutions of the State, inevitably flawed, end up owning our personal relationships. With weakened mediating institutions—family, churches, private associations—we lose the buffer zones that stand between individuals and an encroaching state. http://thefederalist.com/2014/06/23/how-the-trans-agenda-seeks-to-redefine-everyone/
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...With drone strikes. The United States can use lethal force against a U.S. citizen overseas if that person is part of an enemy organization seeking to attack the U.S., according to a once-secret memo released Monday. The 2011 killing of one such American — al-Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki — was justified because it was carried out under applicable laws of war, the memo said. The Obama administration memo became public under a court order in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times. “The release of this memo represents an overdue but nonetheless crucial step towards transparency,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer. “There are few questions more important than the question of when the government has the authority to kill its own citizens.” In the memo dated July 16, 2010, then-Acting Assistant Attorney General David Barron wrote that “the U.S. citizen in question has gone overseas and become part of the forces of an enemy with which the United States is engaged in an armed conflict.” In addition, the target of the drone strike “is engaged in continual planning and direction of attacks upon U.S. persons from one of the enemy’s overseas bases of operations,” Barron wrote. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2014/06/23/obama-drone-memo-aclu/11265183/
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Time magazine in 2012 listed “The Rise of the Nones” as one of the biggest trends in the United States. It turns out that the fastest-growing religious group in the U.S. is Americans who list their religious affiliation as “none.” A 2007 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 16 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religious group; about half of them could be described as secular unaffiliated. Twenty-five percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 are unaffiliated with any particular religion. If this trend toward nonbelief continues, it’s going to be harder and harder for believers to continue to practice bigotry against atheists. Nonbelievers are their children, their relatives, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.I suspect that "othering" atheists will fall out of fashion as growing familiarity with non-believers eventually breeds acceptance. http://reason.com/blog/2014/06/13/the-least-liked-minority-group-atheists
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Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology. Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology. When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible. At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales. At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all. Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day. We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard. http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you---------------------------------------------------------------- regarding the title: http://youtu.be/nJNM377JlIg |
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Cooper said plenty of presidents dealt with critical speech, particularly in opposition to the Vietnam War and even the Iraq War. He said no president ever responded like this. “We didn’t arrest them (due to their speech). We didn’t try to prevent them from being able to express themselves on campuses, and we didn’t try to prevent them from trying to enter into the public square,” he said. “This administration appears not to appreciate that lesson and says that the groups of people that are not within their particular perspective ought to be considered the very threat … that the real terrorist threat that comes internationally [presents].” Project 21 is a very vocal critic of what it considers administration efforts to cloak liberal policies in the guise of racial equality. Cooper said devoting resources to stop threats based on racial prejudice is a solution in search of a problem. “We’re particularly bothered by mixing together so-called domestic insurrectionists and racists. There is simply no anti-black or anti-minority underground movement in America that is threatening in any way the stability of our government or the stability of local governments. There is just nothing like that. That’s just a complete and total boogeyman,” said Cooper, who believes the Justice Department is fully aware of the reality. “When we see this administration talking as if the real threat is that if you’re a young black male, you’re going to be shot, you’re going to be kidnapped or you’re going to be forced to prison without actually having any charges against you, there’s simply no evidence to show that,” he said. Cooper said Holder could solve this debate by compiling a report showing the real number of racially motivated murders, kidnappings and bombings. He said that report will never come because he believes the real motivation for this committee and this policy is entirely political. “In our organization’s view, this is done, particularly the racial component, to create the false impression to minority communities that it is the Obama administration that is here to help them and another reason why, with all of the economic failings that they have provided to Americans generally and minorities in particular, they should continue to consider giving away their vote to that particular administration,” Cooper said. In addition to the political maneuvering he alleges is behind this committee, Cooper is also deeply frustrated that this effort diverts resources from what he considers more severe and realistic threats. “We are still under a threat watch. We still have all of the security measures that we put in place after 2001. The period of 2001-2008 was a period in which we thwarted more than a few. Some of those have been made public. But many of those still have not made public. But what we’ve seen since the beginning of the Obama administration is that many of these attacks, whether they’re increasing or not, are being more effective. They’re actually happening,” Cooper said. “To shift more resources away from the threat that’s real to this theoretical problem is harmful to the safety of Americans and is more about a political agenda than it is in protecting Americans.” Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/now-thought-crime-is-terror-in-u-s/#vFEjOPCjEW7HFjfq.99 |
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The progressive Clerisy---------------------------- [...] A law student and a recent graduate, spurred on by the advocacy group GetEqual, have filed freedom-of-information requests for his telephone and travel records, in what they describe as an effort at dialogue about what they consider the harmful effects of his views. This description is implausible. If they wanted to talk to him, they could knock on his door. The effort is aimed at intimidation. They want him to shut up. Laycock’s wrong is to have taken the position that there may be cases in which individual religious freedom should trump compliance with law — a view that, during Bill Clinton’s administration, was considered the liberal position in our politics. In particular, he has filed a brief in favor of Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., in the case challenging the federal government’s rule that employers with religious objections must nevertheless comply with the mandate to pay for birth control, and he wrote a blog post in the Washington Post defending, in part, the controversial Arizona legislation, vetoed by the governor of the state, that would have expanded somewhat the protection of the state’s religious freedom laws. (News reports insisted that the changes would have meant that a caterer, for example, could refuse to work the wedding of a same-sex couple; Laycock wrote that this wasn’t what the law said.) Laycock’s approach to the constitutional issue may be right or wrong, but it’s well within the mainstream conversation of legal scholarship. The late Ronald Dworkin, often tagged as the greatest defender of liberal theory in the legal academy, argued last year in his final bookthat Catholic adoption agencies with religious objections to adoption by same-sex couples should have a constitutional right to disobey laws requiring them to violate their convictions. But even when a professor holds opinions off at the far margin, to target him or her for intimidation is an affront to the freedom that makes the academy worth cherishing. [...] In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science. An alliance of upper level bureaucrats and cultural elites, the Clerisy, for for all their concerns about inequality, have thrived, unlike most Americans, in recent years. They also enjoy strong relations with the power structure in Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Wall Street. … Today’s Clerisy attempts to distill today’s distinctly secular “truths”—on issues ranging from the nature of justice, race and gender to the environment—and decide what is acceptable and that which is not. Those who dissent from the accepted point of view can expect their work to be simply ignored, or in some cases vilified. In the Clerical bastion of San Francisco, an actress with heretical views, in this case supporting a Tea Party candidate, who was pilloried, and lost work for her offense. The pattern of intolerance has been particularly notable in the area of climate change, where serious debate would seem prudent not only on the root causes and effects, but also what may present the best solutions. Climate scientists who diverge from the warming party line, even in a matter of degree, are routinely excoriated by the Clerisy as “deniers” of “settled” science even in the face of 15 years of relatively stable temperatures. The media also participates in this defense of orthodoxy. The Los Angeles Times as well as the website Reddit have chosen to exclude contributions from skeptics. The stifling orthodoxy from the technocrats and media elite is benign compared to the inquisitional behavior can be seen in institutions of higher education. It is nothing short of tragic, notes civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, that a 2010 survey of 24,000 college students found that barely a third thought it “safe to hold unpopular views on campus.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/07/watch-what-you-say-the-new-liberal-power-elite-won-t-tolerate-dissent.html#
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An "editathon" is actually a Wikipedia concept that is not unique to this OFR collaboration. Wikipedia is crowd-edited by design, so an "editathon" is often held by experienced editors to help provide training to new editors, as well as to accomplish the basic purpose, to "edit and improve a specific topic or type of content." Although this is a first-of-its-kind event for the National Archives, it is not the first time the Wikipedia community has hooked up with federal employees. In May last year when furloughs were hitting some government workers, the D.C. chapter of Wikimedia held a "Furloughed Feds Workshop", a "training seminar and edit-a-thon for federal employees interested in learning more on how to edit Wikipedia." http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/feds-collaborate-wikipedia-editors-improve-wikipedia-entries-related-government-publications_794261.html |
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[...] “I’m thinking of joining the Army,” he told his folks after already having signed up. Bergdahl’s dream was to help Afghan villagers rebuild their lives and learn to defend themselves, his dad told the magazine. “The whole ‘COIN’ thing,” Bob explained, referring to America’s strategy of counter-insurgency. “We were given a fictitious picture, an artificially created picture of what we were doing in Afghanistan,” the dad said. Bowe Bergdahl would detail his disillusionment with the Afghanistan campaign in an email to his parents three days before he went missing. “I am sorry for everything here,” he wrote. “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid.” Bergdahl also complained about fellow soldiers. The battalion commander was a “conceited old fool,” he said, and the only “decent” sergeants, planning to leave the platoon “as soon as they can,” told the privates — Bergdahl then among them — “to do the same.” “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools,” he concluded. “I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.” Bob Bergdahl responded in an email: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!” One night, after finishing a guard-duty shift, Bowe Bergdahl asked his team leader whether there would be a problem if he left camp with his rifle and night-vision goggles — to which the team leader replied “yes.” Bergdahl then returned to his bunker, picked up a knife, water, his diary and a camera, and left camp, according to Rolling Stone. The next morning, he was reported missing, and later that day, a drone and four fighter jets began to search for him. http://nypost.com/2014/05/31/the-bizarre-tale-of-americas-last-known-pow/http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mixed-reaction-to-bergdahls-recovery-by-service-members-who-consider-him-a-deserter/2014/06/01/3713e3ce-e9c5-11e3-b98c-72cef4a00499_story.html  http://youtu.be/XeUqBNtWpig |
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A 19-month-old toddler was critically injured after a police flash bang was tossed into his bed during a police raid at a Habersham County home on Wednesday. “It’s my baby. He’s my only baby. He didn’t deserve any of this,” said Alecia Phonesavanh, the mother of the child. “It landed in his playpen and exploded right in his face,” said Phonesavanh. The child is now being treated at Grady hospital and has a 50 percent chance of survival. “He’s in the burn unit. We got to see him and his whole face is ripped open. He has a big cut on his chest,” said Phonesavanh. “He’s only 19 months old, he didn’t do anything.” The sheriff’s department said they had no idea there were children in the house. “There was no clothes, no toys, nothing to indicate that there was children present in the home. If there had been then we’d have done something different,” said Cornelia police chief Rick Darby. The child’s parents have contacted the GBI but were told no further investigation was needed. http://atlanta.cbslocal.com/2014/05/30/toddler-critically-injured-during-police-raid/http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/swat-throws-grenade-in-playpen/ |
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 The husband of Farzana Parveen, the Pakistani woman stoned to death for refusing to participate in an arranged marriage, told CNN he killed his first wife so he could marry Parveen. Authorities said the first wife was killed six years ago. “I wanted to send a proposal to Farzana, so I killed my wife,” Mohammad Iqbal said Thursday in an interview with CNN. Zulfiqar Hameed, district inspector general for the Punjab police, said Iqbal’s son from the first marriage alerted police to the slaying six years ago. Iqbal was arrested but later released on bail because his son forgave him, Hameed said. The son, Aurengzeb, who is in his 20s, confirmed his father’s statements to CNN. He said his father served a year in jail. Parveen, who was three months pregnant, was beaten to death with bricks Tuesday in the eastern city of Lahore by a group of about 20 people, including her brothers, father and cousin, police said. Police have arrested Parveen’s father and are searching for the other killers in this all-too-common crime. http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/29/world/meast/pakistani-honor-killing/index.html?hpt=hp_c2---------------------------------------------------------- The real war on women... |
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 http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/28/inside-the-ring-directive-outlines-obamas-policy-t/The troubling aspect of the directive outlines presidential authority for the use of military arms and forces, including unarmed drones, in operations against domestic unrest. “This appears to be the latest step in the administration’s decision to use force within the United States against its citizens,” said a defense official opposed to the directive. Directive No. 3025.18, “Defense Support of Civil Authorities,” was issued Dec. 29, 2010, and states that U.S. commanders “are provided emergency authority under this directive.” “Federal military forces shall not be used to quell civil disturbances unless specifically authorized by the president in accordance with applicable law or permitted under emergency authority,” the directive states. “In these circumstances, those federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the president is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances” under two conditions. The conditions include military support needed “to prevent significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property and are necessary to restore governmental function and public order.” A second use is when federal, state and local authorities “are unable or decline to provide adequate protection for federal property or federal governmental functions.” “Federal action, including the use of federal military forces, is authorized when necessary to protect the federal property or functions,” the directive states. Military assistance can include loans of arms, ammunition, vessels and aircraft. The directive states clearly that it is for engaging civilians during times of unrest. A U.S. official said the Obama administration considered but rejected deploying military force under the directive during the recent standoff with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters. Mr. Bundy is engaged in a legal battle with the federal Bureau of Land Management over unpaid grazing fees. Along with a group of protesters, Mr. Bundy in April confronted federal and local authorities in a standoff that ended when the authorities backed down. The Pentagon directive authorizes the secretary of defense to approve the use of unarmed drones in domestic unrest. But it bans the use of missile-firing unmanned aircraft. “Use of armed [unmanned aircraft systems] is not authorized,” the directive says. The directive was signed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn. A copy can be found on the Pentagon website: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/302518p.pdfhttp://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/28/inside-the-ring-directive-outlines-obamas-policy-t/ |
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