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I'm using CoolPreviews 3.2 for Firefox 4.0 I'm sure I've seen tooltip thumbnail prereaders before, though.
Different procedures for different people
I was asked for a copy of the ID card I had lost. ( And he still had to 'jump through the hoops.'
Let us break the silence!
As we stood at “Do Talwar” with our banners and placards raising our voices against irresponsible statements from politicians, insensitive and unethical reporting by media and increased unchecked incidents of violence against women in the city, it was strange to see people passing by in their cars or on foot, turning around to look at us as if we were the weird ones. There was a bevy of media people gathered around us, most of them trying to understand what the fuss was all about, many of them probably on the lookout for a politician or two. They spotted a couple of celebrities amongst the protesters and headed for them and when one of the policemen decided to make a statement, the focus of the media switched to him instead of to the protest itself.
One of the television guys actually tried to get all the women in one place so that he could film just us. I asked him why he wanted just the women. There were a lot of men there too. He said “because this is a woman’s issue.” How is violence a women’s issue? How is crime a women’s issue? How is a protest against irresponsible reporting a women’s issue? How is totally senseless statements that are aimed at the survivor as opposed to the perpetrator a women’s issue? How is revealing the name, car registration number and other details of the survivor a women’s issue?When will people begin to understand that any issue that affects any citizen of this country, actually affects us all and all of us need to raise our voice against injustice, against violence, against corruption, against inadequate health and social services, against insufficient funds spent on education, against unethical and irresponsible behaviour. If we don’t, then we have only ourselves to blame.
Protect your privacy – don’t abandon the medium!
We need to use privacy settings on mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc and to be selective in what we share and with whom. The false sense of security that online “you could be a dog” and no-one is aware of it, is a myth. Your identity is available. You just need to be sure it isn’t stolen and that your online content is not misused.
Under Surveillance – a comic which highlights privacy issues
Learning Corporate Finance – The e-education portal for the lost, confused and totally insane
When my friend Jawwad first asked me to review his latest pet project – an e-education portal for teaching corporate finance, I immediately asked him if I had done something to offend him.
You should only venture out here if you are looking for a truly traumatic experience; or punishment; or both. I accidently opened the Interest rate options piece and it was quite obvious to me why some of my banking friends have had such traumatic childhoods. Jawwad included.
‘Islamophobia’ is not a phobia
... another troubling aspect of this neologism is the fact that it invokes the psychiatric concept of "phobia". Phobias fall under the category of anxiety disorders and describe pathological fears; while many know the term from the infamous expression "arachnophobia" (pathological fear of spiders), many different types of phobias have been observed in patients. The standard manual of the American Psychiatric Association is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR) and refers to "Specific Phobia" as a:
"Marked and persistent fear that is excessive or unreasonable, cued by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situation (e.g., flying, heights, animals, receiving an injection, seeing blood)."There are additional criteria that characterize a phobia, but I find the following one extremely interesting: "The person recognizes that the fear is excessive or unreasonable for discussing the term."
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This is quite important since not every fear is automatically a "phobia"; the psychiatric term "phobia" is reserved for cases when the fear is excessive or unreasonable. If the patient does not recognize the fear as excessive or unreasonable, it becomes very difficult to actually prove that the fear is indeed excessive and unreasonable and thus the term "phobia" is not applicable. When neologisms with the word "phobia" are formed, this requirement should be considered. I myself use the term "porkophobia" to describe my own ridiculous and unreasonable dislike of pig products that by far exceeds any religious prescriptions. My understanding is that most people who are accused of having "Islamophobia" do not really think that their fears are excessive and unreasonable. Therefore, anti-Muslim fears, hostility or prejudice do not really constitute a "phobia" in the psychiatric sense and thus the use of the neologism "Islamophobia" may need to be re-evaluated.
( But what if one wanted to install a phobia ? Isn't the word a subliminal hypnotic suggestion ?
Suggestion by misdirection of attention accounts for the success of many types of therapy )
Report of the APA Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Techniques of Persuasion and Control
Cults and large group awareness trainings have generated considerable controversy because of their widespread use of deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control. These techniques can compromise individual freedom, and their use has resulted in serious harm to thousands of individuals and families. This report reviews the literature on this subject, proposes a new way of conceptualizing influence techniques, explores the ethical ramifications of deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control, and makes recommendations addressing the problems described in the report.
Must read: Mikey Weinstein on religious indoctrination in the military
"These people should be court-martialed"
When a Christian group shot a video inside the Pentagon that featured uniformed senior military officers talking about their evangelical faith, Mikey Weinstein went on the attack. Himself a former Air Force lawyer and Air Force Academy grad, Weinstein, who is Jewish, is the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He founded the MRFF earlier this year to oppose the spread of religious intimidation in a military increasingly dominated by evangelical Christians.
On Monday, Weinstein held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce that he was asking the Department of Defense's inspector general to look into the video, and determine whether the people who appeared in it -- Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack J. Catton Jr.; Army Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks, the former public affairs director of the Army; and Undersecretary of the Army Pete Geren -- had violated military regulations. He also filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the government to find out who, if anyone, had approved the video shoot.
.....
The Christian Embassy is now saying it had permission to film this inside the Pentagon. Were you surprised to hear that?
Not at all. They're damned if they do, they're damned if they don't. If they said they didn't have permission, they would have been blown away. Having permission, to me, just shows the complicity. We have a systemic problem. You sound like you're too young to remember Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor," but the premise of that movie was that there was a CIA within the CIA. We have a virulently dominionist, fundamentalist evangelical Christian element within the Pentagon. They would prefer this to be the "Pentecostalgon," not the Pentagon. That's what they would prefer. They're trying to turn the Pentagon into a frickin' faith-based initiative, and that is not what our military is about.
( Or not what it putatively is about. We're talking about a 'defense' force that assaults people in their homes on the other side of the planet while supposedly authorized by Congress - good luck finding that - and unabashedly perverts foreign media with spin. Not bad for a nation that has no Constitutional authorization for standing armies ! )
Right Wing Officers Still Pushing Illegal Mandatory Religious Indoctrination For US Military
( Right Wing ? Or NeoCon fascists doing their usual use of religion as programming. )US Air Force Academy leaders continue to violate First Amendment
Lt. General Gould,My name is Joe Wilson and I am a member of the Board of Directors of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF). I am also a retired Ambassador, former senior director at the National Security Council and a former political adviser to CINCEUR, working for several years with Jim Jamerson who was the DCINC at the time. I have lectured at the USAF Academy twice, once when your predecessor, Lt. Gen. Regni invited a troika of falsely self-proclaimed “former Islamic terrorists” to speak at the Academy. It was known at the time of their invitation that the three were not “former Islamic terrorists” at all but rather were fundamentalist Christian proselytizers. I write to you today to reiterate MRFFs insistence that the Academy immediately rescind its invitation to yet another invitee, former USMC Lt. Clebe McClary, another Christian fundamentalist proselytizer. McClary is set to serve as the featured speaker at the USAF Academy’s National Prayer Luncheon scheduled for Feb. 10, 2011.I have traveled the world extensively for decades, and served in several Muslim nations in my career, as a diplomat, businessman and lecturer. I just returned from Yemen this past weekend for example. I can tell you without any reservation or hesitation that the unadulterated, fundamentalist brand of Christianity which Mr. McClary intertwines with his well documented speech presentations:1) is inflammatory and undermines our Muslim allies;
2) emboldens those who would seek to harm us from the Islamic world; and,
3) is dangerously divisive and demoralizing to our American armed forces members, many of whom are practicing Christians themselves.Irrespective of his exemplary war record, Mr. McClary espouses a zealous and militant brand of fundamentalist Christian supremacy that is not spiritual in nature but rather incites hatred of those whose religious views are different from his. Under the guise of “motivational” presentations to gullible military audiences, he undermines American national security efforts to shape the battlefield and stem the growth of religiously motivated enemies inflaming passions rather than by engaging in a peaceful way those whose spiritual views may not mirror those of the fundamentalist Christian right. The United States fights for the Constitution and for our own defense, not for some individual’s interpretation of the Judeo-Christian bible.It is time, Lt. Gen. Gould, that the Air Force confront the subversive brand of Christian evangelical proselytizing that has become pervasive at the Academy. You should not be aiding and abetting a movement that is profoundly subversive of everything our constitutional republic holds dear. You should be fighting back in defense of the country that you have served. I urge you to disinvite McClary and replace him with anyone else from a field that must number in the literal hundreds of thousands of willing others who would not be the agents of divisiveness, disillusionment, discouragement and fundamentalist religious hatred that is extant with this professional fundamentalist Christian proselytizer. Surely you can do better. The nation depends on it.
Sincerely,
Ambassador (ret.) Joseph Wilson
( Recognize the name ? That's the man sent on the fool's errand to find out if Iraq was setting up a buy of ore to use in the manufacture of WMD...instead of fertilizer...of something lying around all over Iraq : yellowcake.
Why else should you know him ? He's the husband of the CIA's manager of the nuclear threat desk for the Brewster Jennings covert intelligence network 'blown' courtesy Dick Cheney's aide 'Scooter' Libby. That's their story, anyway.
Interesting time to destroy a network - when promoting war under false pretenses : WMD threat. Not that there is anything particularly notable about that except the extent of the satisfying panic. )
Military Religious Freedom Foundation May 2006
Air Force Times - 1997
GOING TO THE CHAPEL / NON-CHRISTIAN RECRUITS COMPLAIN OF BIAS AND INSENSITIVITYMARCH 3, 1997
It was Friday, Aug. 30, and Amy Talit was in her second day of basic military training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio when her training instructor began handing out dormitory duties. The instructor, Staff Sgt. David Isabelle, needed chapel guides -- airmen whose job it would be to know when various religious services were being held and to direct the recruits to them.
"Who's Protestant?'' Talit, 19, recalls him asking. Hands went up. "Who's Catholic?" Another show of hands.
He picked the chapel guides, then began to assign airmen to cleaning duties.
Talit, 19, raised a hand to get the instructor's attention. "Sir, Airman Talit reports as ordered, sir,'' she said. "Sir, I'm Jewish.''
In that brief exchange, Talit stumbled onto an unwritten and unofficial reality at Lackland. It can be an uncomfortable place for non-Christians.
Non-Christians, and particularly Jews, have been waging a decades-long battle to institutionalize religious tolerance at Lackland. Those most involved say they frequently make progress, only to see backsliding when commanders change or when their pressure is reduced.
The problem, they say, is a mixture of a handful of cases of overt anti-Semitism or other religious discrimination combined with a more prevalent and intractable problem of simple insensitivity.
For commanders, it seems to be a struggle to balance respect for individual religious beliefs with the basic-training goals of conformity, team building and putting duty before self-interest.
What is clear is that often in the earliest days of basic training, the only airmen for whom arrangements are made for religious services are Protestants and Roman Catholics. Sometimes, even Catholics end up at Protestant services.
The problem is known at the command's highest levels.
Here's the source of many of those wild YouTube links
shared America's true reason for attacking Libya becomes clear with new central bank · last Thursday
Mack David shared Dennis Kucinich wants Obama impeached over his Libya missile strikes · about 2 weeks ago
Mack David shared Lion, tiger and bear form unlikely band of 'brothers' (Slideshow) · about 3 weeks ago
Mack David shared Head of the Whistleblowing Airline Employees Association Goes Missing · about a month ago
U.S. Sends New Elite Forces to Afghanistan As Drawdown Looms
more than 100 additional Rangers had arrived in Afghanistan recently to begin targeted operations against militants in eastern and southern Afghanistan. The Rangers, highly-trained soldiers from the Pentagon’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command, are being used to raid suspected insurgent safe houses and hunt down specific Taliban* leaders.
The new deployment comes at a critical moment for the increasingly unpopular war. The Obama administration deployed 30,000 new U.S. forces to Afghanistan in 2009 as part of the surge and wants to begin bringing some of them home this July. Senior military officials are working to lessen the impact of the looming drawdown by keeping as many elite troops there as possible.Although it is rarely discussed in Washington, the Afghan conflict has morphed into a shadow war that pits small teams of so-called “hunter-killers” from the Rangers, the Army’s Operational Detachment-Delta, the Navy’s Seal Team Six, and other secretive U.S. units against plain-clothed militants from the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other Islamist fighting organizations.
( For those unclear of the hypocrisy of counterintelligence - neat trick when you are the invader fighting the Resistance - in Iraq the Baath party was the only group experienced in bureaucracy. Naturally, 'nation building' a country which effectively lost a major part of itself - to justified alarm in Turkey ; Kurdistan - required that they could not be utilized in government....it might work !
In Afghanistan, it's the U.S.-trained groups loosely referred to by the name of the Saudi religious cult of indoctrinated and armed violent extremists who are anti Muslim fanatics once led by Bush's banker, Osama bin Laden. See Charlie Wilson's War : where they fought against Soviets afraid of....Islamic extremists. Whoops.
Taleban denotes missionary-taught scholars of a text they cannot read in their native tongues who consider those who do not observe their pseudo-Islamic extremism fit only for killing.
The multicultural mercenaries formed the only modern government Afghanistan ever had.
I knew there would be a day that post in the left column would need attention - O$ama Who?
So Black Ops are killing the closest Afghanistan has to experienced civil servants so as to prop up their chosen puppet. Well, until it's time to dump him too...which can't be long now. )
HAARP-EISCAT and Earth(quakes) in but 15 seconds...
Words like Haarp, Eiscat, SuperDarn, ionospheric heating, ELF, chorus, earthquakes, wave structure of matter, resonance and ground penetration are parts of this story. Sounds weird? Well, it is.
It relates to a fairly new field of physics concerned with the behaviour of the ionosphere. Still little is known about it with reasonable certainty. Radio-reception depends on it, the precision of the GPS you use to find a location also.
Scientific experiments are going on trying to unravel its secrets.
After the massive earthquake in Japan on March 11th, 2011, out of nowhere the rumour spread via YouTube, that it was caused by 'Haarp', the Gakona (Alaska) based, nearly mythic "ionospheric heater" that is said to be able to change the weather, change your mind and could even be used as a secretive radiation weapon with the power of an atom-bomb.
Curious as I am and interested in HAM-radio I couldn't resist the temptation to look a bit further into this matter. To find ever more intriguing details amongst the clutter of faculties in sciences involved with the ionosphere. This clutter being of interest. Then it appears to me, that the left hand in this new field of physics often isn't aware, knowing, or worse: understanding, what the right hand is doing until a next scientific congress or seminar a year or so later. To my opinion a most dangerous aspect exposed by this 'thriller' because of admitted lack of understanding of all ramifications of deliberately changing the delicate natural processes above our planet. Could it be true that such 'heaters', changing plasmas above our heads, contribute to earthquakes? Let's follow some of my more peculiar findings about this subject...
And U No Hu in Comments HAARP Rings ( actually cones) finally explained
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVanCVunm0k
Before It's News
The Japanese Economy Is In Much Bigger Trouble Than Most People Think
The tsunami that struck Japan on March 11th swept up to 6 miles inland, destroying virtually everything in the way. Thousands upon thousands of Japanese were killed and entire cities were wiped off the map. Yes, Japan is a resilient nation, but exactly how does a nation that is already drowning in debt replace dozens of cities and towns that are suddenly gone? The truth is that thousands of square miles have been more completely destroyed than if they had been bombed by a foreign military force. The loss of homes, cars, businesses and personal wealth is almost unimaginable. It is going to take many years to rebuild the roads, bridges, rail systems, ports, power lines and water systems that were lost. Nobody is quite sure when the rolling blackouts are going to end, and nobody is quite sure when all of the damaged manufacturing facilities are going to be fully brought back online.
On top of everything else, the nuclear crisis at Fukushima never seems to end. In fact, it seems to get worse with each passing day.According to the Los Angeles Times, it has now been announced that seawater off the coast of Japan near the Fukushima facility was recently found to contain 7.5 million times the legal limit of radioactive iodine....
The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.Do you think anyone is going to want any Japanese seafood after this?
In fact, at this point one must really question the long-term prospects for the seafood industry in that entire region of Asia. There are going to be tens of millions of people (myself included) that will no longer want anything to do with any seafood that comes from that part of the world.
Sadly, some nuclear experts now claim that it could take years to bring the reactors at Fukushima fully back under control.
At the end of this crisis, how large of an area around Fukushima will be uninhabitable?
A 20 km radius?
A 30 km radius?
A 40 km radius?
More?
Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but it never was a large nation to begin with. Now that the tsunami and the nuclear crisis at Fukushima have made the amount of usable land significantly smaller, what is that going to mean for the future of the Japanese economy?
- Ron Paul:“Big Event” Signaling Economic Collapse
- Yes, We Are Going Bankrupt
- Clunk Clunk Bang
- Use the Dollar or Else
- The Mogambo Guru, "A World of Deficit Spending Without Any Changes"
- The Oil Price in Early-2008 and Early-2011
- Wages Not Keeping Up With The Pace Of Inflation
- Stock Market Crash Warning -- Three Storm Fronts Converge
- Ron Paul: Gold, Commodity Prices Big Event Signaling Economic Collapse
- Impeach Bernanke!
Apple and Intel Cease Use of Conflict Minerals
When the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act passed through the American Congress and won President Obama's signature last July, one section buried in the bill (revealing the brilliance or madness of how America churns legislation) issued regulations to prevent the purchase of conflict minerals, effective this month. The enforcement of this prevision has been left to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which in 2012 will require companies to audit their mineral supplies to verify that any purchases were not made from vendors that have any affiliation with the conflict in eastern Congo.
Article continues: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/04/apple-intel-cease-conflict-minerals/Marshall Maher writes:
So, this is not the best of news. I spent a few weeks in the DRC documenting mining in the south (Katanga). This is the only livelihoods these people have and most of it (90 percent) is done by artisanal miners not working for the bad mining companies. This operation is run by Chinese, Indian and Lebanese traders (mostly Chinese). This won’t affect them one bit. It will put a lot of Congolese out of work though – and that is only going to drive them toward joining militias or crime. I don’t think this development is going to accomplish what people think it will. Let’s hope.US lawmakers tell Obama, dump Pakistan and go with India
"After 10 years of hearing the same sales pitch I tend to doubt it. I doubt that our money is buying anything that's deep or durable," New York Congressman Gary Ackerman said at a hearing. "I doubt the leaders in the Afghan government and the Pakistani government are going to do anything except pursue their own narrow, venal self interests. I doubt the ISI will ever stop working with us during the day and going to see their not-so-secret friends in the Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e Mohammed and other terrorist groups at night."
Pot calling kettle black. Is there any way to just spray paint a message that the US is not only an unreliable partner - but a murderous deceiver ? Surely it would be simpler.
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