Prime PR opportunity for Obama

Tent cities popping up in Michigan now, apparently.

http://www.clickondetroit.com/video/23312315/index.html?taf=det

Instead of shuffling homeless people around so the dear leader doesn’t have to see them, Obama (and secret service and possibly Bernanke?) should head right over to this homeless camp and interview them to better understand the financial problems we’re facing here.

Not only would they regain some humanity, they’d be exalted as bad-asses by the corporate media.

Yea, no shit. lol

(cnn) John Schaufelberger, Burger King’s senior vice president of global product marketing and innovation, stresses the brunch concept is only in its testing phase but admits the company has seen the trend grow in popularity over the years.

Yeah, no shit. lol (possibly nsfw)

Susan G. Komen Buckets for the Cure program exposed: The buckets you buy make no difference

Wednesday, April 28, 2010
by Mike Adams
NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) The whole push behind the new “Buckets for the Cure” pinkwashing campaign by Komen for the Cure is to convince people to buy more fried chicken (which is laced with MSG, by the way) in order to “end breast cancer forever.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/images/K…

)

But NaturalNews has learned that there is no relationship between how many buckets of chicken are purchased by consumers and how much money KFC donates to Komen for the Cure. Consumer purchases of fried chicken don’t raise money for anything!

As is stated directly on the Komen for the Cure promotional website, “Customer purchases of KFC buckets during the promotion will not directly increase the total contribution.” See the small print at the bottom of this screen capture: http://www.naturalnews.com/images/K…

And yet the Komen for the Cure website proudly proclaims, “Each bucket makes a difference. Help make the largest single donation to end breast cancer FOREVER.”

This is an outright lie. Each bucket you buy doesn’t make any difference at all, as is admitted on their own website. This is an organization promoting fried chicken as a cure for breast cancer and using deceptive language to imply that buying fried chicken raises money for ending cancer. But you have to read the small print to learn that’s not really true.

So we have layers of fraud upon fraud happening here:

Fraud #1) Eating fried chicken will cure cancer.

Fraud #2) Buying fried chicken will result in a monetary donation to Komen for the Cure.

Fraud #3) That Komen for the Cure will ever “end breast cancer FOREVER.”

These are all fraudulent marketing claims being made by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure non-profit, which is really a Big Pharma front group that causes breast cancer by irradiating women’s breasts with radiation machines (mammography).

In the United States today, companies that have promoted the health benefits of cherries or walnuts are threatened with arrest and prosecution by the FDA, and yet a cancer industry front group is now openly claiming that fried chicken will cure breast cancer — and they get away with it!

“Each bucket makes a difference,” they say. (http://www.naturalnews.com/images/K…

) And yet, in reality, customer purchases of buckets of chicken “do not increase the total contribution.”

Check out the “street talk” YouTube video by Jonathan Landsman which asks people on the street what they think about this idea of buying fried chicken to cure breast cancer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyvr…

Note that Komen for the Cure remains approved by the BBB and the Chamber of Commerce. And why not? If people eat more fried chicken laced with MSG, and then they end up in the hospital needing medical services, that’s good for the economy, right? What’s a little fraud as long as somebody’s making money?

Fast food is great for the incomes of hospitals, cancer centers and funeral homes, by the way. See my CounterThink cartoon, “Business is Booming” to learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/028587_s…

Psychiatry’s “Bible” Could List New Set of Disorders

Latest version of DSM may trigger ‘epidemics’ of mental illnesses

By Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
April 26, 2010

Nearly 700,000 prescriptions for atypical antipsychotics were dispensed for kids under 13 last year. The changes being proposed for the manual of mental illness — whose sales since 2000 have topped $40 million — would create even more patients for whom psychoactive drugs can be prescribed.

Photograph by: Joe Raedle, Getty Images

Boston Dynamics Wins Darpa Contract To Develop LS3 Robot Mule (It’s a Bigger BigDog)

spectrum.ieee.org

This robot mule will be able to navigate rough terrain, carrying 180 kilograms of soldier gear — no driver required

New speed cameras trap motorists from space

Satellites could track motorists from space if trials prove successful Photo: AFP

The cameras, which combine number plate reading technology with a global positioning satellite receiver, are similar to those used in roadworks.

The AA said it believed the new system could cover a network of streets as opposed to a straight line, and was “probably geared up to zones in residential areas.”

The Home Office is testing the cameras at two sites, one in Southwark, London, and the other A374 between Antony and Torpoint in Cornwall.

The `SpeedSpike’ system, which calculates average speed between any two points in the network, has been developed by PIPS Technology Ltd, an American-owned company with a base in Hampshire.

Details of the trials are contained in a House of Commons report. The company said in its evidence that the cameras enabled “number plate capture in all weather conditions, 24 hours a day”. It also referred to the system’s “low cost” and ease of installation.

The system could be used for “main road enforcement for congestion reduction and speed enforcement”, and could help to “eliminate rat-runs” and cut speeds outside schools, it added. It could also reduce the need for speed humps.

The development of speed cameras has raised concerns about expanding state surveillance.

The Home Office said it was unable to comment on the trials because of “commercial confidentiality”.

The AA said it would watch the system “carefully” but it did not believe there was anything sinister. “It is a natural evolution of the technology that is out there,” a spokesman said.

N. Korea accused of sinking S. Korean ship using suicide squad

The bow of the sunken South Korean navy ship Photo: EPA

The attack on the 1,220-ton Cheonan, which sank on March 26 with the loss of 46 of its 104 crew, was carried out in retaliation for a skirmish between warships of the two nations’ navies in November of last year, South Korea claims.

The South Korean government has refused to comment officially on the reports but Defence Minister Kim Tae Young told a parliamentary session that the military believed that the sinking was a deliberate act by North Korea.

Officials in military intelligence say they warned the government earlier this year that North Korea was preparing a suicide-squad submarine attack on a South Korean ship.

“Military intelligence made the report to the Blue House [the presidential office] and to the Defence Ministry immediately after the sinking of the Cheonan that it was clearly the work of North Korea’s military,” a military source said.

“North Korean submarines are all armed with heavy torpedoes with 200kg warheads,” the source said.

Experts who examined the ship, which sank in the Yellow Sea, say that the blast happened outside the vessel’s hull, ruling out the possibility of an accident.

North Korean officials who have defected to South Korea but still have contact with North Korean military sources say they have been told that the attack was carried out on the orders of Mr Kim and involved a unit of 13 specially trained commandos and modified midget submarines.

The submarines were manoeuvred close to their target before being detonated, probably along with their crews. Alternatively, the attackers may have used timed charges.

If North Korea was behind the attack, it would be the bloodiest single incident since an uneasy truce brought the Korean War to an end in 1953.

It also leaves Lee Myung Bak, the South Korean president, with a decision to make on retaliation or ignoring the provocation according to analysts.

“This puts Lee in a very difficult situation, but I do not think that an Israeli-style, targeted response is likely,” said Aidan Foster-Carter, an expert on Korean affairs at Leeds University. “That is because the United States won’t have it and there is the danger that any retaliation will descend into a horrible war.”

Describing the attack as “calibrated and deniable,” South Korea has little choice but to take its complaint to the United Nations, he said, although that is unlikely to have any impact on the North Korean regime and will not assuage public anger in the South.

The reports come a day after two North Korean agents posing as defectors were arrested for plotting to assassinate Hwang Jang-yop, the highest-ranking member of the North Korean Workers’ Party to defect to the South.

Commenting on the sinking of the Cheonan, Mr Hwang said: “It’s obvious that Kim Jong-il did it. We know that he has been preparing for this kind of incident.”

The North has denied involvement in the sinking, saying the government in Seoul is using the incident to whip up support ahead of elections in June.

However, following the skirmish with South Korea in November, in which a North Korean ship was set on fire and three sailors killed, The National Defence Commission, North Korea’s most powerful military body, threatened a “holy retaliatory war”.

An American Phenomenon: The Widespread Psychiatric Drugging of Infants and Toddlers

The use of powerful antipsychotics with privately insured children, aged 2 through 5 in the US, doubled between 1999 and 2007, according to a study of data on more than one million children with private health insurance in the January, 2010, “Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.”

The number of children in this age group diagnosed with bipolar disorder also doubled over the last decade, Reuters reported.

Of antipsychotic-treated children in the 2007 study sample, the most common diagnoses were pervasive developmental disorder or mental retardation (28.2%), ADHD (23.7%), and disruptive behavior disorder (12.9%).

The study reported that fewer than half of drug treated children received a mental health assessment (40.8%), a psychotherapy visit (41.4%), or a visit with a psychiatrist (42.6%) during the year of antipsychotic use.

“Antipsychotics, which are being widely and irresponsibly prescribed for American children–mostly as chemical restraints–are shown to be causing irreparable harm,” warned Vera Hassner Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, in a February 26, 2010 InfoMail.

“These drugs have measurable severe hazardous effects on vital biological systems, including: cardiovascular adverse effects that result in shortening lives; metabolic adverse effects that induce diabetes and the metabolic syndrome,” she wrote. “Long-term use of antipsychotics has been shown to result in metabolic syndrome in 40% to 50% of patients.”

The lead researcher on the study above, Columbia University psychiatry professor Mark Olfson, told Reuters that about 1.5% of all privately insured children between the ages of 2 and 5, or one in 70, received some type of psychiatric drug in 2007, be it an antipsychotic, a mood stabilizer, a stimulant or an antidepressant.

Psychiatric drugs bathe the brains of growing children with agents that threaten the normal development of the brain, according to Dr Peter Breggin, founder of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology (ICSPP), and author of about 20 books, including “Medication Madness.”

The drugs themselves are causing severe disorders in millions of children in the US, he warns. “Substances like antidepressants, stimulants, mood stabilizers, and antipsychotic drugs  cause severe, and potentially permanent, biochemical imbalances.”

American Phenomenon

A number of presentations at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in May 2009, addressed the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, including one titled, “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder: A Critical Look at an American Phenomenon,” at which Dr Peter Parry, a consultant child & adolescent psychiatrist, and senior lecturer at Flinders University in Australia, presented a survey on, “Australian and New Zealand’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists’ Views on Bipolar Disorder Prevalence and on Rates of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder in the USA.”

Dr Parry and his colleagues conducted a survey of child and adolescent psychiatrists in Australia and New Zealand. Of the 199 psychiatrists who responded to the survey, 90.5% thought pediatric bipolar disorder was overdiagnosed in the US.

In an October 1, 2009 article titled, “Medicating Our Children,” Dr Parry reports that since “the mid-1990s in the USA, some researchers have claimed that Paediatric Bipolar Disorder (PBD) frequently starts prior to puberty.”

One of PBD’s main proponents, Harvard University’s Professor Joseph Biederman, stating onset “is squarely in the preschooler age group,” he notes.

Parry explains that “PBD has been created by moving the diagnostic goalposts away from traditional concepts of bipolar disorder.”

“In children,” he says, “episodes were redefined to last hours instead of days or weeks and, instead of manic elation, severe anger in children sufficed as mania.”

“Unlike diagnoses like ADHD or depression, or simply accepting a child has serious emotional and behavioural problems in reaction to various stressors, PBD implies a lifelong severe mental illness requiring of strong psychiatric medication,” Parry warns.

“In the USA,” he says, “the public is furthermore exposed to direct pharmaceutical advertising that can feed the natural desire parents of distressed and aggressive children have for a quick solution by suggesting a simple medication fix.”

“The medicating of America’s children has become intensely controversial, highlighted by the tragic case of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old Boston girl diagnosed at 28 months old with ADHD and PBD,” he points out.