Sick, pernicious propaganda.

It’s so fun brain-damaging children.  Everyone take your vitamin M!

And what’s the best way to protect baby’s teeth? Brushing?

WRONG. It’s FLUORIDE !!! (Vitamin F)

Why does our government want to brain-damage children?

HHS propaganda pamphlet

http://www.nidcr.nih.gov/NR/rdonlyres/50524FAC-060D-421F-87CD-7F896B9806E4/0/HealthyMouthBaby_Eng.pdf

Government Accounting for Idiots

From BSC

” About 650,000 jobs have been saved or created under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, the White House said Friday.” (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_stimulus_jobs)

Are you kidding me?  Are they really putting that out there as a victory?

1) More than 12 MILLION jobs have been lost in the past 18 months.  650k represents only 5% of the total job losses that have been saved.  95% of the 12 million are still unemployed (thats over 11 million people for those of you keeping score at home, if you still have one).

2) So 787 billion for 650k jobs, what kind of a deal do we get for that?  It is costing the US Taxpayers 1.2 million dollars to save 1 job.   Doesn’t seem like a good return on investment does it?  Well its even worse than that… FAR worse.

3) The $787 billion stimulus is really much more than 787 billion.  Always make sure you read the fine print.  As Treasury Sec Timmy Geithner said “it is a revolving line of credit.”  Well guess what, it has been “revolved” over 20 times now by last count (Fed Chariman Benny Bernake doesn’t really know how many, but he guesses its more than 20).  787,000,000,000 * 20 = $15,740,000,000,000.  Thats over 15 TRILLION dollars, conservatively.  That puts costs up to $24 Million dollars PER JOB saved!

If you are wondering why it costs 24 million dollars to save 1 job, its very simple.  The 1 job being saved is the job of a Criminal Elite Corporate Banking Syndicate Member, whose mafia style cabal has infiltrated our government and is now robbing us blind.  Seeing as that is such tough work, I’d say it merits the 24 million dollar salary.

NY Times: Afghan Opium Kingpin On CIA Payroll

But exposé serves as little more than a whitewash because it fails to mention decades-long U.S. agenda to support lucrative Golden Crescent drug trade

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, October 28, 2009

A bombshell article in today’s edition of the New York Times lifts the lid on how the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a suspected kingpin of the country’s booming opium trade, has been on the CIA payroll for the past eight years. However, the article serves as little more than a whitewash because it fails to address the fact that one of the primary reasons behind the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the agenda to reinstate the Golden Crescent drug trade.

“The agency pays (Ahmed Wali) Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home,” reports the Times.

An October 2008 report from the Times reveals how, after security forces discovered a huge tractor-trailer full of heroin outside Kandahar in 2004, “Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs.”

In 2006, following the discovery of another cache of heroin, “United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai.”

The Times article out today also discusses how the CIA uses Karzai as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban. He is also directly implicated in the manufacturing of phony ballots and polling stations that were attributed to the President’s disputed election victory.

“If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck,” the American officer said of Mr. Karzai. “Our assumption is that he’s benefiting from the drug trade.”

Officials quoted by The Times described Karzai as a Mafia-like figure who expanded his influence over the drug trade with the aid of U.S. efforts to eliminate his competitors.

The Afghan opium trade has exploded since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, following a lull after the Taliban had imposed a crackdown. According to the U.N., the drug trade is now worth $65 billion. Afghanistan produces 92 per cent of the world’s opium, with the equivalent of 3,500 tonnes leaving the country each year. Other figures put the number far higher, at around 6,100 tonnes a year.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

The New York Times exposé pins the blame on Karzai, but fails to explain that one of the primary reasons behind the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the United States’ agenda to restore, not eradicate, the drug trade.

Before the invasion, the Taliban collaborated closely with the U.N. to reduce opium production down to just 185 tonnes, a figure at least 2000% below current levels. The notion that the “Taliban benefits from the drug trade” and that the U.S. is trying to stop it, as both Bush and Obama claimed, is the complete opposite of what is actually happening.

As Professor Michel Chossudovsky has highlighted in a series of essays, the explosion of opium production after the invasion was about the CIA’s drive to restore the lucrative Golden Crescent opium trade that was in place during the time when the Agency were funding the Mujahideen rebels to fight the Soviets, and flood the streets of America and Britain with cheap heroin, destroying lives while making obscene profits.

The Times implies that the drug lord Karzai being on the CIA payroll is little more than an embarrassing coincidence, when in reality he is just a middle manager for the U.S. military-industrial complex’s control of the drug trade in Afghanistan which stretches back decades and was only interrupted when the Taliban came to power.

“Heroin is a multibillion dollar business supported by powerful interests, which requires a steady and secure commodity flow. One of the “hidden” objectives of the war was precisely to restore the CIA sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over the drug routes,” writes Chossudovsky.

“As revealed in the Iran-Contra and Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) scandals, CIA covert operations in support of the Afghan Mujahideen had been funded through the laundering of drug money. “Dirty money” was recycled –through a number of banking institutions (in the Middle East) as well as through anonymous CIA shell companies–, into “covert money,” used to finance various insurgent groups during the Soviet-Afghan war, and its aftermath.”

Within two years of the CIA’s covert operation in Afghanistan, “CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests.”

This is the history of the Afghan opium trade that the Times won’t tell you, and in failing to do so today’s article serves only to whitewash the true scale of the agenda behind the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan.

Masonic/Satanic symbolism in MTV Christmas ad

Harvard MD/Reuters: H1N1 death rate similar to seasonal flu

Reuters
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The death rate from the pandemic H1N1 swine flu is likely lower than earlier estimates, an expert in infectious diseases said on Wednesday.

New estimates suggest that the death rate compares to a moderate year of seasonal influenza, said Dr Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University.

“It’s mildest in kids. That’s one of the really good pieces of news in this pandemic,” Lipsitch told a meeting of flu experts being held by the U.S. Institute of Medicine.

“Barring any changes in the virus, I think we can say we are in a category 1 pandemic. This has not become clear until fairly recently.”

The Pandemic Severity Index set by the U.S. government has five categories of pandemic, with a category 1 being comparable to a seasonal flu epidemic.

Seasonal flu has a death rate of less than 0.1 percent — but still manages to kill 250,000 to 500,000 people globally every year.

A category 5 pandemic would compare to the 1918 flu pandemic, which had an estimated death rate of 2 percent or more, and would kill tens of million of people.

Lipsitch took information from around the world on how many people had reported they had influenza-like illness, which may or may not actually be influenza; government reports of actual hospitalizations and confirmed deaths.

He came up with a range of mortality from swine flu, from 0.007 percent to 0.045 percent.

Either way, having new information about how many people were infected and did not become severely ill or die makes the pandemic look very mild, he said.

“The news is certainly better than it was in May and even better than it was at the beginning of August,” Lipsitch said.

H1N1 swine flu was declared a pandemic in June after flashing around the world in six weeks. Experts all said a true death rate would not be clear for weeks because it is impossible to test every patient and because people with mild cases may never be diagnosed.

This lack of information made the epidemics in various countries and cities look worse at first than they actually were, Lipsitch said. People sick enough to be hospitalized are almost always tested first.

“Yes, there’s been hype, but I don’t think it’s been an outrageous amount of hype,” Lipsitch said.

Seasonal flu is usually far worse among the elderly, who make up 90 percent of the deaths every year. In contrast, this flu is attacking younger adults and older children, but they are not dying of it at the same rate as the elderly, Lipsitch said.

(Editing by Eric Beech)

Max Keiser on Bankers’ Bonuses – March 2009

Arm yourselves now [updated]

The machines are just about ready for their true mission…

… and it’s not lounge singing (Titan is a robotic suit, not a robot, by the way). Hundreds of different types of robots are already deployed in active combat in the middle east. There are armed airborne drones, some with wheels and treads, even 4 legged models:

The one thing they’re lacking though is an agile, bipedal model that is effective against urban guerilla fighters- not just against personnel and vehicles in open spaces, but against populations in door-to-door sweeps of buildings; against a guerilla “insurgency” in an urban setting.

Once this technolgy goes into mass production, it will be deployed not only against Arab nations, but against all of us. The elite plans for their New World Order utopia do not include the sprawling masses of useless eaters. The lower classes of humans are obsolete and the elite have no intention of sharing their life-extension technology that is right around the corner.

This is why agencies like DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have blank-check budgets to develop autonomous killing machines.

Take heed, fleshies. They will be here soon.  I urge you to procure survival supplies and armaments immediately.

When crocodiles roamed the Arctic

New Scientist – 18 June 2008

WHEN Ernest Shackleton and his men marched towards the South Pole in December 1908, they came across something entirely unexpected. After scaling the vast Beardmore glacier on the edge of the polar plateau, they found seams of coal amid the snow and ice. They also found impressions of leaves in sandstone boulders nearby and even fossilised wood from a coniferous tree.

The conclusion was extraordinary but inescapable: Antarctica was once warm and forested, conditions that could hardly be more different to the far-below-freezing midsummer weather that forced Shackleton’s team to turn back before reaching the pole. How was this possible?

Four years later, Alfred Wegener put forward his theory of continental drift which, it was later realised, could explain the balmy climate: Antarctica had been warmer because it was once much closer to the equator. Even today, some schoolchildren are taught that continental drift accounts for all the evidence for a warmer Antarctica.

However, the fossil trees Shackleton’s team discovered grew around 250 million years ago, when Antarctica was barely closer to the equator than it is today. What’s more, the continent reached its current position roughly 100 million years ago, and an ever-growing list of fossil finds date from 100 to 40 million years ago. During this time, when dinosaurs roamed the almost subtropical forests of an ice-free Antarctic, conditions on the other side of the planet were even more remarkable: the Arctic Ocean was a gigantic freshwater lake infested with crocodile-like reptiles.

As the modern world warms, there has been a surge of interest in this “hothouse” period. What sustained such high temperatures for tens of millions of years? If the poles were so warm, what were the tropics like? Recent findings provide a fascinating insight into our past – and perhaps also a glimpse of our future.

Icehouse phase

The Earth’s climate is currently in an “icehouse” phase: the polar ice sheets are not as extensive as they were during ice ages, when the sea level fell by as much as 120 metres, but some ice has remained even between ice ages. Before about 34 million years ago, though, the planet went through a prolonged hothouse phase with no ice at all. Sea level was more than 70 metres higher than today, covering vast swathes of what is now dry land. For instance, an inland ocean divided North America in two. This period lasted from the middle of the Cretaceous era until well into the Eocene – about 100 million to 50 million years ago.

One of the earliest signs that the poles were ice-free and warm 100 million years ago was the discovery at the turn of the 20th century of fossil breadfruit trees from the Cretaceous in Greenland; today such trees are at home in places like Hawaii. Since then, even more extraordinary finds have been made.

The most evocative image of a warm Arctic has emerged from the work of John Tarduno of the University of Rochester, New York. For more than a decade, Tarduno has been hunting for fossils on Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian Arctic, just west of Greenland. The island was already well within the Arctic Circle 90 million years ago.

His team has found bones and even partial skeletons of a crocodile-like creature called a champsosaur from this period. The champsosaur was a fish-eating reptile up to 2.4 metres long that probably looked much like the gharials of India. Because these reptiles would have relied on their environment to stay warm, conditions in the far north must have been far hotter than today. “These fossils speak volumes,” says palaeoclimatologist Paul Wilson of the University of Southampton in the UK.

Warmth-loving reptile

Last year, Tarduno’s team reported that most champsosaur remains are of juveniles, meaning the animals not only lived but bred in the Arctic. As hatchlings and juveniles could not have survived if winter temperatures came anywhere close to freezing, this means it was not only warm, but warm all year round.

Modern crocodiles are found no further north than the lower Yangtze and North Carolina. If the champsosaurs’ temperature requirements were similar, the Axel Heiberg locality must have had mean annual temperatures of at least 14 °C, and the average temperature during the coldest month could not have fallen below 5.5 °C. The region would not even have had ice in winter.

The champsosaur was not the only warmth-loving reptile to live inside the Arctic Circle. Tarduno’s team has found an abundance of fossils of four kinds of turtles at Axel Heiberg Island, again pointing to a mean annual temperature of at least 14 °C.

Most recently, the team has found fossils of a family of turtles called Macrobaenidae on Axel Heiberg Island (the details have yet to be published). These turtles originally lived in Asia, but from the late Cretaceous onwards appeared in North America too. Because turtles are very sensitive to climate, the researchers think they could have survived the migration only if they moved along a route in the far north that was warm all year round. More significantly, these turtles – like the champsosaurs – were freshwater creatures. “They would have required a non-marine connection,” says team member Donald Brinkman of the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. “If the Arctic was a big freshwater lake, that would have made it possible.”

Biggest lake

Fresh water in the Arctic Ocean? As far-fetched as it seems, there is now strong evidence that as recently as 50 million years ago, at the start of the middle Eocene, at least the surface of the Arctic Ocean was fresh. This picture has emerged only recently because it is extremely hard to access the records of the ocean’s history, says Kathryn Moran of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, a member of a 2004 expedition to drill sediment cores from the Arctic seabed.

Drill ships have to stay exactly above their chosen site to prevent the drill from snapping, yet in the Arctic drifting chunks of sea ice up to several kilometres wide make normal drilling operations impossible. “They can easily knock a ship off location,” says Moran. “So what we had to do was break that ice.” The task fell to two icebreakers. “The ships are really big and powerful, and they basically had to learn how to dance together,” says Moran.

Dance they did, and in 2004 the team collected a core of sediment that had been deposited over tens of millions of years on the Lomonosov ridge, just 250 kilometres from the North Pole. One study of the core revealed that a freshwater fern called Azolla grew abundantly in the Arctic Ocean for 800,000 years about 50 million years ago (Nature, vol 441, p 606). At the time the Arctic Ocean was largely isolated from other oceans, and fresh water from rivers would have floated on top of denser salt water. “It might have been, at least in the surface waters, one of the biggest lakes on the planet,” says Moran.

Surprisingly warm

The waters of this mega-lake were a surprisingly warm 10 °C, but that’s nothing to the temperatures reached a few million years earlier during the hottest part of the Eocene, when the ocean was salty. According to another study of the core the surface water 55 million years ago was around 18 °C, peaking at an incredible 23 °C – more than warm enough for a pleasant swim at the North Pole!

What about the Antarctic? Here too gathering evidence is far from easy. Ice cores from Antarctica’s kilometres-thick ice sheets are no help, for even the oldest ice is a mere million years old. It’s the land beneath the ice that holds the secrets. “We don’t want the Antarctic ice sheet to disappear, for there is 67 metres of sea level stored there, but gosh, it would be lovely, from a palaeoclimate perspective, to know what’s under all that ice,” says Wilson. “In particular, because Antarctica has certainly been in a polar position back through the Cretaceous.”

Fossil hunters on the mainland are limited to a few exposed sites. But on the Antarctic Peninsula, a finger of land that juts north towards South America, enough rock is exposed to give explorers a glimpse not just of Antarctica’s ancient flora and fauna, but of the nature of the seas around it.

About 150 to 100 million years ago, the peninsula was a mountain range similar to the Andes, and its rivers drained into a massive basin, now called the James Ross basin. Over millions of years, the basin filled up with sediment and later the rocks it formed were uplifted. Today these rocks lie exposed on islands off the Antarctic Peninsula and contain a treasure trove of fossils from the Cretaceous, including silvery slivers of shells of ocean-dwelling ammonites and gastropods. In the late Antarctic summer, these fragments glint as they catch the sun which barely rises above the horizon. “It looks like the surface is covered in jewels,” says palaeoclimatologist Jane Francis of the University of Leeds, UK, a veteran of 12 expeditions to the poles.

Ferns and cycads

Besides ammonites and gastropods, Francis and her colleagues have found abundant fossils of sea urchins and lobsters that lived on the sea floor, shark teeth, and even massive marine reptiles with rib bones about half a metre long. Oxygen isotopes in the shell fragments show that the waters around Antarctica 100 million years ago were a balmy 15 °C, compared with -2 to 0 °C today.

Dinosaur bones, which must have been washed down off the peninsula into the sea, have also been found in the marine sediments (see “Dinosaurs at the poles”). Plant fossils unearthed by Francis and her students show that 100 million years ago the peninsula was lush with ferns and cycads, along with conifers resembling the monkey puzzle tree. Analysis of the shape and size of fossil leaves has led Francis to conclude that the peninsula was very warm during the mid-Cretaceous, with a mean annual temperature of about 17 to 19 °C, similar to that of South Africa today. “That’s almost sub-tropical,” says Francis.

Growth rings in one fossil tree trunk suggest trees thrived despite complete darkness in mid-winter. “In tree-ring terms, the tree was very happy, it wasn’t growing in any kind of stress, there’s no sign of frost rings and there’s no sign of drought,” Francis says.

Her team has also found fossil flowers dating back to about 85 million years ago. These include flowers resembling those of Siparunaceae, tropical vines found in the Amazon, as well as those of the Australian eucalyptus and Winteraceae trees such as the Tasmanian mountain pepper.

Sweltering greenhouse

It’s abundantly clear that both the Arctic and the Antarctic were ice-free and warm from about 100 million to 40 million years ago. But until a decade ago, climate scientists struggled to explain how the Earth could have become so warm at the poles. Their models suggested it could only have happened if levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were very high – turning the Earth into a sweltering greenhouse – but this would also have made the tropics extremely hot. Isotope ratios in marine shells, however, suggested that tropical waters were not much hotter than they are today.

As it turns out, the models were right and the shell studies were flawed. Recent and more careful studies by Wilson and colleagues (Geology, vol 30, p 299) suggest that tropical seas were indeed hotter during the hothouse phase, with the surface waters being as warm as 34 °C compared with 29 °C today, says Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago, a climate researcher and contributor to the RealClimate blog.

Despite this advance, climate modellers face a new problem. While pumping up atmospheric levels of CO₂ in the models creates ice-free poles and warmer tropical waters, the land in the tropics becomes unbearably hot. “The temperatures are so high that unless land plants behave differently from modern types, you would be beyond their temperature tolerance,” says Pierrehumbert. “We are talking of temperatures on land of an average of 40 °C, and with seasonal fluctuations they might even go up to 50 °C. It would kill off just about anything on land.” Today, annual mean temperatures rarely exceed 30°C.

As outlandish as these simulations seem, the models might yet again prove to be right. Researchers such as Matthew Huber of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, have only recently begun to look for evidence of plant dieback in the tropics at this time. No one had thought to look before.

Too cold

There is yet another serious problem for climate modellers. The one place the models suggest did get cold during the hothouse episode is the interior of continents at high latitudes – regions like Siberia. This doesn’t fit with the evidence.

In rocks from the late Cretaceous in Siberia, Robert Spicer of the Open University in Milton Keynes in the UK and his colleagues have found plenty of evidence for ferns and flowering plants, and even possibly the pollen of palm trees (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol 267, p 228). Their analysis suggests that at that time Siberia’s mean annual temperature was about 13 °C, rarely touching freezing even in the winter months. “All the climate models give you very, very cold continental interiors [at high latitudes] in the winter time, so cold that you would certainly freeze palm trees and kill them off,” Pierrehumbert says.

One answer to this puzzle is to keep pumping up the CO₂ levels. Models predict that the interiors of continents at high latitudes would not have frozen during the winter if CO₂ levels were higher – but this means the tropics would have got even hotter.

Huber has suggested a possible answer to this dilemma: what if much more heat from the tropics was somehow carried to the poles, keeping the tropics from boiling over. He and Ryan Sriver, also at Purdue, think they have found one possible mechanism.

Hurricane-ridden

They studied conditions in tropical waters before and after the passage of present-day cyclones. They found that cyclones mix up the upper layers of oceans, moving heat downward. They argue that ocean currents then transport this heat towards the poles, reducing the temperature gradient between the tropics and the polar regions ( Nature, vol 447, p 577). Many researchers think the intensity, frequency and duration of tropical cyclones increase with higher temperatures. If so, the amount of heat transported to the poles by cyclones would increase greatly as temperatures rise. In a hurricane-ridden hothouse Earth, this could have kept the tropics below 35 °C, while the poles simmered in subtropical heat.

However, Pierrehumbert thinks that the cyclonic heat-pump idea needs more work, and that explaining the warm interiors of continents remains a challenge. “This is now the most mysterious and toughest looking part of the problem,” he says.

Others might beg to differ. A few lines of evidence point to something seemingly impossible: ice sheets during the warmest phase of the Cretaceous. “Nobody can imagine that we had these high temperatures and at the same time we had some large glaciers in the Antarctica,” says André Bornemann of the University of Leipzig in Germany. Indeed, models cannot replicate these conditions.

One recent study by Bornemann’s team suggests that for a 200,000-year period around 91 million years ago, there were ice sheets at least half the size of the ones that blanket Antarctica today. The evidence comes from oxygen isotope ratios in shells from the Atlantic seabed ( Science, vol 319, p 189).

However, a similar study by Wilson’s team found no evidence of glaciation ( Geology, vol 35, p 615), so this issue is far from settled. But if ice sheets can grow suddenly even during hothouse periods, Wilson point out, it means the climate can change more suddenly and dramatically than anyone thought. “That really demands being understood.”

High volcanic activity

Despite these vexing issues, there is a growing consensus that the hothouse climates were due to high levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere. But where did it come from?

Among other things, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere depends on the balance between volcanic activity and the weathering of rocks. High volcanic activity during the Cretaceous might have kept the level of CO₂ high, says Wilson. Later on, volcanic activity may have fallen and weathering increased as the Himalayas began to form, pushing Earth into an icehouse phase.

However, while CO₂ levels up to a million years ago can be directly measured from bubbles of air trapped in ice sheets, it’s much harder working out what they were 100 million years ago. Researchers have to rely on proxies such as the number of pores in fossil leaves, and there are still big uncertainties. Pinning down these numbers is critical, for this would tell us just how sensitive the climate is to rises in CO₂.

Some models suggest CO₂ levels were 16 times as high as pre-industrial levels during the Cretaceous and Eocene hothouses, while others suggest eight times. Despite the uncertainties, eight times fits in far better with the proxy data, suggesting that the climate is highly sensitive to rises in CO₂.

This does not bode well for us, given the amounts of CO₂ we are dumping into the atmosphere. CO₂ levels look set to double from pre-industrial levels and if we keep failing to curb emissions, they could quadruple within 200 years. “Then we are half way towards the CO₂ levels that turned the world into the Cretaceous hothouse,” says Pierrehumbert.