MIKIVERSE HEADLINE NEWS

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

MILITARY LSD EXPERIMENTS



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I found this clip on someone's facebook page. Very funny. I thought it would be nice to have a break from the serious stuff that I have been posting today.



This a quick American military clip.



60's LSD Propaganda film



LSD Documentary Style Clip

AMERIKKKAN POLICE VIOLENTLY ASSAULT STUDENTS WHO WERE NOT ACTUALLY PROTESTING



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THERE IS SOME GRAPHIC VIOLENCE ON THIS VIDEO.

The actions of the American Police are completely disgraceful and unlawful.



Basically, the governments of the Western World are ordering their police corporations to become more and more violent in their suppression of lawful protest.

The Corporate media, filled with talking heads on massive salaries, refuse to offer anything remotely approaching a balanced coverage.

WE NEED AN INDEPENDANT MEDIA.

This is some coverage from CNN...Note that the host only cares for the journalist, and uses phrases such as 'obeying the police'. Last time I checked Police were neither lawmakers, nor judges.

THE AMERIKKKAN METHOD OF CURTAILING FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Many of you you might have a distorted view of the G20 protests in Pittsburgh, the corporate media either ignores it, or covers it from the corporate-NWO perspective.

Here are some You Tube Videos from people who were there.

WARNING; THERE ARE IMAGES OF GRAPHIC VIOLENCE BY THE POLICE IN THIS VIDEO



This clip illustrates the lengths the politicians will go to to prevent lawful public protest.
Watch for the massive steel barricades protecting areas that are nowhere near the summit itself.
Is it a show for the corporate media?
The same thing happened in Melbourne at the G20 lawful protests.
Also, listen for the comment about the Economic Protest being stifled because they didn't have a 'permit'. This tactic was used for the first time in Sydney at the lawful APEC protest. Interesting that you need permission to do something that is completely lawful.

Of course that is false. You can protest. However, try telling that to a Police member in full riot gear that has been scared into thinking that you and every other lawful protester want to maim, or kill him.

HAVING A COMPLIANT, COMPLICIT MEDIA HELPS TOO-REMEMBER WHAT AN INDEPENDENT MEDIA ACHIEVED IN VIETNAM!!!





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IS ROMAN POLANSKI A PAODOPHILE? IS IT OK TO RAPE/HAVE SEX WITH A 13 YEAR OLD GIRL IF YOU ARE FAMOUS?

The fact that Roman Polanski has been apprehended has opened up a tin of worms, with certain politicians, and film directors offering their support, as well as, it would seem, the New York Times.

Despite any words of support, the fact remains that rape and paedophilia are serious actions, demeaning, dehumanising, that cannot be tolerated in ANY community that venerates equality at any time.

This girl was 13 years old-Roman Polanski was 45 years old.

Think about that.

Was this really the "youthful error" that Bernhard-Henry Levy is quoted as saying?

After all, he was quite content to plea bargain his way down to a guilty plea-from a charge of rape and sodomy.

How would we feel if John the mechanic raped and sodomised a 13 year old girl, plead guilty and then fled the country before sentencing?

How would the press be reacting? How much patience and tolerance would John receive? How many of his peers would be contacted for supportive quotes? How many politicians would stick up for him?

The press would've almost certainly be portraying John as a monster, no politician would be offering support.

Our culture already allows our children to be marketed to by multi-national companies, that have no regard for their lack of intellectual, and cultural savvy-in fact, they have child psychiatrists employed to help them to capitalise on this situation.

And, another thing, what type of people are the so-called cultural leaders that stand up for their apprehended mate, but not for the children that are the victims of the aforementioned marketing, or Palestinian, Iraqi, or Afghani children injured by the effects of warfare, justified or not.

In terms of culture, we applauded Jodie Foster's performance in the movie, 'The Accused', where the grey area, of whether, the so-called 'slutty' behaviour by a drunk woman, equated to sexual consent-it didn't-because we, as a community, do not want it to.

Why? Because we understand that being biologically capable, doesn't make you psychologically capable, and whilst we are happy for a sixteen year-old, seventeen year-old coupling, I can not think of a reason why a forty five year old-thirteen year old coupling can be justified, nor tolerated.

NO.It is time for Roman Polanski to accept the consequences of his actions.



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From the New York Times
September 30, 2009
France Divided Over Polanski Case

By DOREEN CARVAJAL and MICHAEL CIEPLY

PARIS — After two days of widespread expressions of support for jailed filmmaker Roman Polanski, from European political leaders as well as leading cultural figures there and in the United States, the mood was shifting among French politicians Tuesday about whether the government should have rushed to rally around the Oscar-winning director.

Marc Laffineur, the vice-president of the French assembly and a member of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling center-right party, the UMP, took issue with the French culture and foreign minister’s remarks supporting Mr. Polanski, saying “the charge of raping a child 13 years old is not something trivial, whoever the suspect is.”

Within the Green party, Daniel Cohn-Bendit — a French deputy in the European parliament whose popularity is rising — also criticized Sarkozy administration officials for leaping too quickly to Mr. Polanski’s side despite the serious nature of his crime. On the extreme right, the father and daughter politicians Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen also attacked the ministers, saying they were supporting “a criminal pedophile in the name of the rights of the political-artistic class.”

Meanwhile, an international team of lawyers was fighting Tuesday to free Mr. Polanski from a Swiss jail, where he’s being held for possible extradition to the United States. The arrest last weekend of the 76-year-old filmmaker as he arrived at Zurich’s airport to attend a local film festival is quickly exposing deep fault lines between his supporters in the arts, entertainment and politics and his increasingly outspoken critics.

Mr. Polanski a French and Polish citizen,. fled the United States in 1978 just before he was to be sentenced for having sex with a minor — a 13-year-old girl — under a plea agreement in which he avoided other charges including rape and sodomy.

For two days, supporters in the demi-monde of movies and media circulated petitions and took to the airwaves in his defense. Among them was the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who suggested that perhaps the Swiss had more serious criminal matters to attend to than Mr. Polanski, who, he said, “perhaps had committed a youthful error.”

Marie-Louise Fort, a French lawmaker in the Assembly who has sponsored anti-incest legislation, said in an interview that she was shocked that Mr. Polanski was attracting support from the political and artistic elite. “I don’t believe that public opinion is spontaneously supporting Mr. Polanski at all,” she said. “I believe that there is a distinction between the mediagenic class of artists and ordinary citizens that have a vision that is more simple.”

The mood was even more hostile in blogs and e-mails to newspapers and news magazines. Of the 30,000 participants in an online poll by the French daily Le Figaro, more than 70 percent said Mr. Polanski, 76, should face justice. And in the magazine Le Point, more than 400 letter writers were almost universal in their disdain for Mr. Polanski.

That contempt was not only directed at Mr. Polanski, but at the French class of celebrities — nicknamed Les People — who are part of Mr. Polanski’s rarefied Parisian world. Letter writers to Le Point scorned Les People as the “crypto-intelligentsia of our country” who deliver “eloquent phrases that defy common sense.”

Still, many others continued to rally to the Oscar-winning director’s defense.

Film industry leaders like Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese and Costa Gavras signed a petition with about 100 names that expressed “stupefaction” with the arrest of Mr. Polanski at the Zurich airport. But support was not universal; Luc Besson, a prominent French film director and producer, was not on the list, though he describes himself as a Polanski friend.

“This is a man who I love a lot and know a little bit,” Mr. Besson said in a radio interview with RTL Soir. “Our daughters are good friends. But there is one justice, and that should be the same for everyone. I will let justice happen.” He added, , “I don’t have any opinion on this, but I have a daughter, 13 years old. And if she was violated, nothing would be the same, even 30 years later.” Meanwhile, Mr. Polanski remains in custody somewhere in Zurich; officials have not said exactly where. He was, however, visited by French and Polish diplomats, who afterward pronounced that he was being well treated.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Swiss Criminal Court said it would decide “in the next few weeks” on its response to Mr. Polanski’s request for release. Any decision can be appealed, the Swiss Justice Ministry said over the weekend.

Mr. Polanski’s lawyer in Paris, Hervé Temime, said Mr. Polanski was seeking release even if conditions were attached.

Much of the initial criticism of the American and Swiss authorities behind the arrest centered on the question of timing: why was Mr. Polanski arrested now, three decades after his guilty plea, and not on any of the countless other visits he has made to Switzerland over the years (he maintains homes there and in France)?

Defending their actions, American law enforcement officials in Los Angeles have said the arrest was a simple matter of opportunity, and they issued a timeline that showed that they had quietly submitted an Interpol “red notice” — a request for international assistance in arresting a fugitive — concerning Mr. Polanski that was originally distributed in 2002. A spokesman for Interpol in Lyon, France, declined to comment on Tuesday. The red notice on Mr. Polanski apparently was not posted on Interpol’s public Web site, which is used to enlist the help of the public in pursuit of fugitives.

“He just showed up at a time and a place where we knew he would be available,” Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for Stephen L. Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney, said Monday.

The district attorney’s office circulated a list of the actions it had taken and the inquiries it had made to track and try to apprehend Mr. Polanski as he traveled to at least 10 countries, including what appeared to be a near miss in 2007, when officials relayed a request for information from Israel about a visit he made there. By the time the information arrived, “Polanski had left Israel and was not arrested,” the prosecutors’ advisory said.

While Mr. Polanski has lived a fairly open life, he has avoided visits to Britain, where extradition would be easier. When in Germany directing his latest film, “The Ghost,” Mr. Polanski occasionally avoided the set, directing through a remote communications setup and leading some members of the cast and crew to believe that he was trying to make apprehension more difficult, according to a person briefed on the shoot and speaking on condition of anonymity.

Mr. Polanski was originally been charged with six criminal counts, including rape and sodomy, involving a 13-year-old girl whom he was accused of plying with alcohol and drugs. He eventually pleaded guilty to a single count of having sex with a minor, spent 42 days in state prison under psychiatric evaluation, and fled on the eve of his sentencing in the belief that the judge in the case would not agree to let him off without further jail time.

A documentary film released last year reignited interest in the case, and raised concerns about possible judicial and prosecutorial misconduct. In the film, a prosecutor describes how he had coached the judge, now deceased, concerning Mr. Polanski’s sentencing.

Alan Cowell reported from Paris and Michael Cieply from Los Angeles. David Jolly contributed reporting from Paris.

Monday, September 28, 2009

WIKILEAK STORY ABOUT GERMAN INTERNET CENSORSHIP

by Teractys Merkaba Editor-in-Chief

I found this on wikileaks web page;
http://wikileaks.de/wiki/The_coming_age_of_internet_censorship

Wikileaks is a brilliant source of information and many of you may find it suitable to bookmark it. The issue of censorship is always a contentious issue, yet the issue of internet censorship is incredibly important to those of us who value freedom. The issue of internet censorship whilst usually marketed as a requirement to fight kiddie porn-which we deplore-and downloading music, games and movies, is just as likely to be an attempt to control free speech on the internet, particularly free speech that is critical of the oilvasion in the Middle East, America's involvement in 9/11, Bali and other false flag operations, and other salient opinions in the truth community. Typically, pages such as this, info-wars, UPMART, Truth Movement Australia, 9/11oz, Allied Health and Love for Life are targeted for censorship in such circumstances. Please read and disseminate this important story from wikileaks.

Don't forget to sign our petition to prevent mandatory vaccination in Australia, and remember that I will be giving a talk on inalienable human rights at the Truth Cinema in Nth Fitzroy on October 26th.




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The coming age of internet censorship
From Wikileaks
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June 17, 2009

Today, Germany's lower house passed the first Western national internet censorship law. As every news organization, political newsletter and discussion between friends relocates onto the internet, censorship systems are being rolled out to interpose themselves between every communicator and their audience.
Contents
[hide]

* 1 ERROR 404 – PAGE NOT FOUND
* 2 FIRST STOP, TUNISIA
* 3 “WRITE ‘JI/AN/G ZE/MIN’”
* 4 THE “MYANMAR JUNTA OPTION”
* 5 FILTERS “MADE IN USA”
* 6 IN BAHRAIN, ONE SIMPLE RULE: WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THE EMIR
* 7 TALKING BACK WITH TECHNOLOGY
* 8 HUMOR AS A WEAPON
* 9 Source documents
* 10 See also

By Claire Ulrich (translated from the French, Les censeurs du net)

In Internet history, 1994-2004 was the era of the pioneers. 2004-2007 was the era of the merchants. Now we’re entering the era of the bullies. Everywhere in the world, sites are going dark, arrests are increasing, more people are going to prison. The Web just celebrated its 20th birthday. Nobody used to take it seriously, but those days are gone.

Nacer (all first names of Internet users in this article have been changed) remembers the first computer with Internet access in the national library of Damas, in Syria. A guard who didn’t speak a word of English came and sat next to you while you were at the computer, to keep an eye on this unfamiliar volatile. Those were the good old days. Today, in the comfort of their homes, Syrians surf a censored Web. However, cybercensorship, and collecting data about Internet users, are not practices limited to dictatorships.

Italy is right up there with Beijing and Shanghai, where cybercafés are required by law to check the IDs of every single client. In Kazakhstan at the moment, people are strongly advised not to publish the words “economic crisis” online. The president doesn’t want them to. This is quaint compared to the tests going on in Australia to purge the domestic Web of “pedo-pornographic content.” All governments are anxious about the Hydra that is the Internet, but they all act on their concerns according to their culture. Great Britain is preparing to monitor and archive all electronic communications in the name of the War on Terror. In France, the battle between the government and Internet users is over the downloading of copyrighted material. When the dust settles on the legal battlefields, there remains an unequal power relationship: governments and Internet service providers (ISP) now have the technological means to detect and block access to sites they find objectionable on a countrywide scale. When this happens, it’s called Web “filtering.”
ERROR 404 – PAGE NOT FOUND

Web filtering is most often indicated by the “Page Not Found” message familiar to all Internet users, free or monitored. In computer lingo, it’s called a “404 error.” The 404 page has always been a problem. According to a charming tech legend, in the early days of the Web, at CERN in Switzerland, researchers who were sick of continually having to restart a failing server located in office number 404 named the failure-to-connect error after this unlucky office. Whether the story is true or not, this error page really does have bad karma.

In Oman, in Bahrain, in Dubai, the 404 page works overtime: you are redirected to a message informing you, in English and Arabic, that the site you are looking for is not authorized in the kingdom. In China, the 404 page doesn’t come with an explanation. There’s no point; the sites are censored. American soldiers in Iraq see it when they try to access YouTube while on base, which is prohibited by the US Army. They don’t have that problem in cybercafés in Baghdad. In Algeria and Egypt, it indicates an actual technical problem. The Web isn’t filtered there, though it is closely monitored. You get it in Syria if you try to go to a site that ends in .il, the top-level domain for Israel. But you’ll have no trouble getting to a porn site. And in Tunisia, the 404 page is just fake. You’ll get an Internet Explorer or Firefox page informing you that your connection failed. The only problem is that the Firefox logo displayed when you’re using Internet Explorer (or vice versa) makes it clear that you’ve landed on a phony page. In Tunisia, this gave birth to the expression a “404 bâchee” (canvas-covered) for the censored pages, a reference to the little canvas-back Peugot pickup truck so popular in Africa. Tunisian Internet users exclaim in unison, “And the driver’s name is Ammar!” Ammar, for the first letter of the ATI (Tunisian Internet Agency), an arm of the Tunisian Ministry of the Interior.
FIRST STOP, TUNISIA

On our cruise through Censorland, we must stop over in Tunisia, the first African country to have access to the Internet, that shining gateway to a computerized citizenry and new technologies. Praised by Bill Gates (”I am amazed by Tunisia”), this country is at the forefront of cybercensorship. Back in 2000, when the blogosphere was still deserted, the country led the charge by censoring the forum Takriz.org (”fed up”.org) within its borders. That same year, its first cyber-dissident, Zouhair Yahyaoui, was arrested in a cybercafé and condemned to 18 months in prison for having published on his site, Tunezine, a survey that asked, “Is Tunisia a kingdom, a republic, a zoo, a prison?”

The 10-year marriage of the latest cyber-surveillance technologies and a police state has declined into a sad routine – imprisonment of cyber-dissidents and automatic suppression of foreign press sites if even a paragraph is deemed undesirable. Lofti, a Tunisian who lives in Europe, recalls that he was never able to connect to the site Voila.fr when he was in the country. Why? Because of the AFP dispatches published on the portal? Photos that were too sexy? Asking questions is also frowned upon. Interestingly, the ATI has always, from the beginning, been run by a woman. Khadija Ghariani, an engineer, Ecole nationale supérieure des telecommunications, Paris, class of ‘84; Feriel Béji, who has a doctorate in artificial intelligence; and Lamia Cheffai Sghaier, an electrical engineer, each took turns running the agency. Among dissidents, they’re called Ben Ali’s Angels, a local show with the tagline, “We’re here to make you hate the Internet!” Tunisia is also a master of cyber-humor.
“WRITE ‘JI/AN/G ZE/MIN’”

The other old soldier of cybercensorship is China. Everyone knows that a Great Firewall shields the eyes of the Chinese from millions of sites. Accessing Web content freely is just not an option, but the Chinese don’t complain much; they’re used to it. Writing and conversing online is what they love to do. It’s ‘harmonization” that aggravates them.

Ever since the Communist Party in China decided to “construct” a “harmonious society” in 2007, the Web is not only censored there, it’s “harmonized.” An automatic filter, an invisible hand, suppresses a word here, a name there, any phrases, comments, blogs, or images that are undesirable. So they say, “I’ve been harmonized.” A little lesson learned by e-mail from Edwin, an English-Chinese interpreter who has lived in Wenzhou for a long time: “Take, for example, the name of the former president Jiang Zemin, the one of Tiananmen fame, which has been meticulously erased from the Chinese Web. If you write it on a blog or a forum, sometimes it’s automatically replaced by stars or a blank space, or it could be that you won’t even be able to send the message. It might also be removed after publication. But you just have to be a little creative. “Write ‘Ji/an/g Ze/min’ and you’re good to go.”

The censorship robots don’t understand words with slashes, paraphrases, or the double phonetic meaning of a Chinese character. What are the notorious forbidden words that they track? No one knows but the Party, which chooses them, and the ISPs, which do housework. Occasionally, a pirated list of prohibited words shows up on the Web. The latest one contained 1,041 words (chinadigitaltimes.net/tag/banned-words). These included sex, Tibet, Falun Gong (a forbidden religious movement), Tiananmen, play-boy, fuck, multiple parties, Taiwan independence, police, whore, corruption, torture, public funds, anus, Jesus Christ, riot, insurrection, air disaster, 89, tyranny, North Korea, scrotum, dictatorship, pigeon, timeshare, penitentiary, Voice of America, bra, Geneva finance, shit.

Even China is starting to have trouble managing its 300 million restless Internet users – the population of the United States – and the flood of their insolent comments, which disturb the general harmony. Why else would they have hired the “50 Cent Gang” to harmonize opinions on the Web? This mysterious group was so named because it is made up of innumerable anonymous workers who are said to be paid a half Yuan (0.05 €, the price of a subway ticket) for every pro-government comment left on forums, chat rooms, and blogs. Our man in Wenzhou confirms this by e-mail: “It’s pretty easy to spot them. When someone publishes 50 messages in the afternoon of the same day he created a profile, we assume it’s one of them.” Some of these part-timers who lack imagination even give blatant clues, choosing obvious usernames like “Morning Harmony” and “Harmony of the Geranium.”
THE “MYANMAR JUNTA OPTION”

Not all countries have the conviction, or the inexhaustible labor pool that the Chinese censorship industry has. But there is nonetheless a wide variety of techniques to choose from. Computer complexities aside, the Web can be compared to a telephone exchange. To censor it, the easiest thing to do is still to simply pull out the plug connecting the domestic Web to international traffic. This is the “Myanmar Junta Option,” used during the demonstrations in 2007.

Another method is to throttle the connection speed of individual users. In Iran, President Ahmadinejad has a blog, but only the government and the clergy have high-speed Internet access. The average Iranian has to make do with 256k/second, which makes it unlikely that he’ll be downloading racy films or speeches glorifying atheism, which he couldn’t find anyway. (Just for comparison, a basic ADSL connection in France is 10 times faster.)

Censors can also choose to place the clamp where their domestic Web meets the Worldwide Web, as they do in Saudi Arabia, in order to sift the vice from the virtue at their convenience before allowing content through. Among the techniques considered outdated today is DNS poisoning, which is practiced in Thailand. That explains why, in Bangkok, you can pull up a BBC article online and find yourself on the home page of a local government office.

But for your more modern censors, with money to invest, those days are over. Censorship is selective and flexible, recognizing and suppressing sites or domains with the help of robots that seek out keywords or entire categories of sites. To do this, of course, you need specialized software. Tools that behave like parental control software raised to the millionth power, and produce the same result. And most of these are manufactured in Western countries.
FILTERS “MADE IN USA”

In the United States, three serious companies are on the rise, with steadily increasing sales: Secure Computing, Websense and Blue Coat. Their specialty is the security of business networks and intranets. According to the OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative research project among Harvard, Toronto, Cambridge, and Oxford Universities that studies cybercensorship, these are the three main providers of filtering tools to governments.

There’s nothing illegal about selling computer security tools. The product page of SmartFilter, the leading software product, says “SmartFilter removes all inappropriate content from the workplace and educational environment, limits your liability, manages bandwidth, and ensures protection against security risks.” It’s thanks to them that office workers can’t go to Facebook at work, and that gaming, gambling and pornographic sites can’t be accessed by computers in libraries and schools. But selling these tools to governments of countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, which we know aren’t too concerned about human rights? Secure Computing has always denied these contracts, even going so far as to accuse Iran of “illegally acquiring” their software.

Helmi Noman, a Harvard researcher in charge of the Middle East for the OpenNet Initiative, consistently sees the signs of these filtering specialists during the tests that the organization conducts regularly in all the countries of the world. And if they’re not the culprits, their partners are. These tools are also distributed by the biggest names in the computer industry: Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, McAfee, Dell. Evidently the Emirate of Bahrain has recently done some shopping.
IN BAHRAIN, ONE SIMPLE RULE: WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THE EMIR

In this little Gulf country, described by expatriates as “pretty cool,” the rule was short and simple: don’t talk about the Emir. Since January, Bahrain has switched into high gear. Ahmed is a software engineer in Manama, the capital. He’s lived through old-school censorship and the new kind too. He likes taking risks; one of his pastimes for the last 10 years has been publishing a blog on local news, which regularly causes problems for him. The worst, in 2005, ended in 15 days of jail time because he published a photo of the Emir’s son drinking champagne at the finish line of a Formula 1 race. At times, his blog has been crudely censored, in a way that was easy to get around. Since January, and a decree promising to remove from the Web elements that are “contrary to the culture” (pornography, anti-religious material), the Web throughout the entire kingdom has been paralyzed.

According to Ahmed, up to 40% of sites are inaccessible in Bahrain, including advertising, cooking blogs, Google Translate, and technical engineering sites. It’s reached the point where foreign companies are complaining because they can’t work.

What happened? It’s a classic scenario, one that Helmi Noman has often seen when a government decides to use these tools. Overwhelmed by the power of the filtering software that the government has bought and imposed on them, the ISPs make one mistake after another. However, when it comes to one category of sites in Bahrain, there is no question of an accident on the part of the ISPs or the palace technicians. Ever since January, all Shiite sites and blogs, though hardly pornographic, have disappeared from the Sunni kingdom. Ahmed is a Shiite. He still writes on his blog occasionally, for his foreign readers, and wonders if he’ll be allowed to leave the country the next time he goes to the airport.

From Doha, in Qatar, where he’s giving a lecture, Helmi Noman warns about these false-bottomed filtering tools. “Western societies are selling ISPs not only filtering software, but also decisions about freedom of expression.” The censorship package includes the software plus a database of 20 million sites and updates that can be regularly downloaded, as with antivirus software. SmartFilter places these sites in 91 categories. It’s up to the client to choose the categories he wants to prohibit. “When an ISP buys SmartFilter, he is buying 20 million decisions and 91 categories that could be wrong.”

These “mistakes” are fairly common, according to what Helmi Noman has found. On the day that sites as varied as Orkut (a social network very popular in India and Brazil), Last.fm (online music), LiveJournal (the most popular blog platform in the former Soviet Union), and Twitter (microblogging) were labeled “dating sites” – for what reason we don’t know – it was temporarily impossible to access them from different parts of the globe. In April, 2007, the video site Dailymotion spent several days in Category V4 (pornography). Internet users in Oman, Yemen and Tunisia were the ones who felt that: no Dailymotion for them. The database that feeds the filters can be accessed online (www.trustedsource.org/urlcheck). It’s collaborative. Anyone – a company, an individual, or the league of virtue of any religion – can flag a site and label it according to his own beliefs, from anywhere in the world, anonymously.

Secure Computing isn’t feeling the recession. It was just bought by the antivirus giant, McAfee, for 465 million dollars (around 350 million Euros). The new management is noncommittal in its response to any question about government cyber-surveillance: “The governments that are our clients can use all of the categories [which we provide] to shape the Internet to suit their cultural needs. McAfee has no control over, or any say in the way an organization implements its own filtering strategy.” To be fair, Europe is doing its share too. Siemens offers a catalog of solutions for intercepting and monitoring communications. China is one of their biggest clients.
TALKING BACK WITH TECHNOLOGY

Nobody wants a Web crawling with pedophiles, terrorists and criminals. But the perfectly democratic example of Australia and its costly offensive against online pedophilia (budget: 125 million Australian dollars over four years, about 70 million Euros) got off to an appallingly amateurish start. In March, during the filtering tests, the ultra-secret blacklist of 2,395 blocked pedophile sites was leaked and ended up on the site for such slip-ups, WikiLeaks. Fortunately. The leak revealed that only half of the sites fell into that category. Some unfortunate errors: the sites of a dentist’s office, a dog boarding facility, and a travel agency were also on the list.

To create its blacklist, the Australian government – like others – relied on information from the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British organization based in Cambridge that has been cataloging sites flagged as pedophile since 1995. The IWF is one of 20 such organizations around the world, subsidized mainly by players in the Internet sector. Little by little, without any oversight, or anything to recommend it but its good intentions, it has become the pedophilia police for the authorities. In December, an IWF flag resulted in the censorship in Great Britain of the Wikipedia page for Virgin Killer, an album by the German hard rock group, Scorpions. The cover of this old album, which was never the object of any legal action, shows a nude teenage girl.

The Web has no central government, no universal law, no Red Cross, no seat at the UN. Every Internet user must deal with the legal whims of his country on his own. In case of trouble, he might have recourse to a few organizations that defend freedom of expression. A worthy cause, but a luxury in time of recession. Once again, the response comes in the form of technology, and it’s Internet users the world over who come to the rescue. In Iran, photographer Hamed Saber developed, by himself, a little tool that bypasses the block on the photo site Flickr, which he then made available to the community. The Berkman Center at Harvard just launched Herdict.org, a site where anyone can flag a site that is inaccessible from a given country, so that they will have real-time data on the Web’s blind spots.
HUMOR AS A WEAPON

Because they are tech savvy, Edwin in China and Ahmed in the Emirates can read and write whatever they want to, while remaining under the censors’ radar. They use “proxy anonymizers,” the unattractive name for encryption tools that allow you to discreetly borrow the address of a computer somewhere else in the world just long enough to launch yourself onto the open seas of the uncensored Web. They are called Ultrareach, Psiphon, TOR, Dynaweb, Anonymizer, and they can all be downloaded.

One of the most popular and activist of these is TOR. In 2001, the US Navy released one of its tools for encrypting communications to the public domain. Robert Dingledine, then a student at MIT, has the long hair and little round glasses of freeware activists. It was he who decided to adapt the tool to the Web and distribute it for free. TOR, managed in the United States by a nonprofit organization, has been downloaded millions of times. “We don’t know where they’re downloading from, we don’t keep any data. But we estimate that at any given moment of the day, around the world, between 300,000 and half a million people use one of our connection addresses and encryption to remain anonymous.” Encrypting communications on the Web is not illegal anywhere. But the sites where you can download the “anonymizers” are often prohibited.

In Thailand, using a proxy can land you in prison. The software gets around nonetheless, on USB keys or disks, competing these days with virtual private networks (VPN), encrypted gateways that are used, for example, by multinationals for secure online communication with their foreign branches. The solution is so simple that Edwin, in Wenzhou concludes, “If we really wanted to fight cybercensorship, all we’d have to do is invest a few million dollars in a massive VPN and distribute the links and keywords for free to Internet users. End of story.”

A Thai organization, Freedom Against Censorship (FACT), is already doing that on a small scale, to give Thai Internet users a breath of fresh air. Fifty-thousand sites were shut down during the country’s various political upheavals, thanks to a legislative Trojan horse: the crime of lèse majesté (offense) against King Bhumibol. This misdeed is no joke (three to 15 years of prison) and foreigners can also be prosecuted for it. An Australian writer and a BBC journalist have had a taste of Thai prisons in the king’s name.

The free Web has many enemies, but new legions of allies are rising, and giving ministries of information pause. They are the young people, for whom life without YouTube or Facebook is inconceivable. The Web 2.0, that of social networks and photo, video and music sharing, is continually tripping up the censors, whose blunders are much too visible and very unpopular. On these gargantuan sites, where millions of people, files and links are interconnected, it’s not easy to isolate a single video, or profile, or conversation. Had the Turkish government been able to, it would have blocked only one video that was “insulting” to the national icon, Ataturk, rather than the entire YouTube site, and thus spared itself the wrath of the under 30s. In Tunis, when Facebook was completely blocked in September of 2008, it roused the population for the first time. It was unheard of; even the press talked about it.

The last weapon in the Internet users’ arsenal is humor, and it can be devastating. Ridicule always kills a policy’s credibility. In China, since February, a tough “antivulgarity” campaign for a Web without crude language or photos forced ISPs to ask public forgiveness for the “indecent content” they had provided and to sanitize thousands of sites and social networks.

It took only a few days to prepare a response. It came in the form of a little online video of a fluffy alpaca, with an exuberant children’s chorus singing about the wonders of a mythical Chinese animal, the “Grass Mud Horse” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx1aenJK08). In Chinese, “alpaca” also means, almost to the tone, “screw your mother.” So does “grass mud horse.” “He Xie” (harmony, and therefore censorship) is phonetically very close to “river crab.” Here is the alpaca song: The “grass mud horse” (screw your mother) lives in the Ma Le desert (your mother’s twat). This creature fights the “river crabs” (harmony/censorship) in order to save the “prairies” (homonym of “freedom of expression”). It was a very crude and joyful protest. But since then, harmony reigns once more, over the living as well as the dead. Any reference to the children who died in the Sichuan earthquake last year is immediately harmonized.

Thanks to Claire Ulrich and Le Monde for covering this material. Copyright, other than the translation itself, remains with the aforementioned.

New York Times Article on Possible Iranian Invasion

By Teractys Merkaba, Editor-in-Chief

The United States is looking more and more likely to invade Iran after U.S President Barack Obama turned up the political rhetoric on Iran by demanding that Iranian areas be opened up to American inspection.

Barack Obama has mentioned his desire to invade Iran during the 2008 U.S Presidential campaign.

This demand to open up Iran to U.N weapon inspectors was the same methodology used by both Bill Clinton and George W Bush before the failing neoliberalist oilvasion of Iraq began in 2003. This was despite overwhelming evidence that Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Weapons of Mass Destruction were never found and George W Bush was forced to later admit that there had never been any in existence.

Sign the "Stop Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination (Aust - Federal)" petition now!

From the New York Times
September 27, 2009
U.S. to Demand Inspection of New Iran Plant ‘Within Weeks’
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to tell Iran this week that it must open a newly revealed nuclear enrichment site to international inspectors “within weeks,” according to senior administration officials. The administration will also tell Tehran that inspectors must have full access to the key personnel who put together the clandestine plant and to the documents surrounding its construction, the officials said Saturday.

The demands, following the revelation Friday of the secret facility at a military base near the holy city of Qum, set the stage for the next chapter of a diplomatic drama that has toughened the West’s posture and heightened tensions with Iran. The first direct negotiations between the United States and Iran in 30 years are scheduled to open in Geneva on Thursday.

American and European officials say they will also press Iran to open what they suspect are nuclear-related sites to international inspectors, and to turn over notebooks and computers that they think may document efforts to design weapons.

President Obama has repeatedly said that Iran must show significant cooperation by the end of the year, establishing what officials say is effectively a three-month deadline. Interviews with American and European officials, however, suggest differences of opinion about how much time Iran should be given to show full compliance.

On Saturday, Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the International Atomic Energy Agency would be invited to visit the site near Qum that American intelligence agencies estimate was designed to house 3,000 centrifuges, enough to produce about one bomb’s worth of material a year. But he did not say when, nor did he say whether Iran would meet any of the other American and European demands.

Mr. Salehi, who spoke on Iranian state television, added that Mr. Obama’s dramatic release of the information about the site at a global economic summit meeting was a “plot” meant to “unite the whole world against us.”

Iranian officials have long maintained that their nuclear program is designed to produce energy, not weapons, and they said the facility near Qum is for peaceful purposes. They have not explained why it was located inside a heavily guarded base of the Revolutionary Guards.

From the White House to Europe, senior officials were pushing to exploit the disclosure of the covert facility as a turning point in negotiations to try to get Iran to halt its nuclear program.

“This is the most important development in the three and a half years since the U.S. has offered negotiations with Iran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a Harvard professor who served as the Bush administration’s chief strategist on Iran. Mr. Burns said Mr. Obama “now has much greater leverage to organize an international coalition to confront” the country’s leaders with sanctions should the negotiating effort fail.

David A. Kay, a nuclear specialist who led the fruitless American search for unconventional weapons in Iraq, said the discovery “reopens the whole question of the military’s involvement in the Iranian nuclear program.”

For now, the most urgent issue, current and former officials agree, is gaining immediate access to the hidden tunnel complex that Iran now acknowledges is a uranium enrichment plant still under construction. Quick access to the facility is considered crucial because of fears that Iran would move incriminating equipment or documents.

It is still unclear what kind of incentives the United States and its allies might offer Iran if it completely opened, and ultimately dismantled, its nuclear program. On Saturday, Mr. Obama, in his weekly radio address, said he remained committed to building a relationship with Tehran.

“My offer of a serious, meaningful dialogue to resolve this issue remains open,” he said. “But Iran must now cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency, and take action to demonstrate its peaceful intentions.”

Now that the clandestine site has been revealed, however, American and European officials say they see an opportunity to press for broader disclosures. Iran will be told that to avoid sanctions, it must adhere to an I.A.E.A. agreement that would allow inspectors to go virtually anywhere in the country to follow suspicions of nuclear work.

Iran would also have to turn over documents that the agency has sought for more than three years, including some that intelligence agencies obtained that they say appear to suggest work was done on the design of warheads and technologies for detonating a nuclear core.

The negotiators would also insist, officials say, that Iran abide by I.A.E.A. rules, which Iran agreed to and then renounced, requiring it to announce in advance any plans to build nuclear facilities. Iran says it will adhere only to an older rule, requiring notification when a plant is about to become operational.

For several years, Iran has deflected I.A.E.A requests to interview key scientists, presumably including those who ran the highly secret Projects 110 and 111. American intelligence officials, after piercing Iran’s computer networks in 2007, said they believe that those projects are at the center of nuclear design work. Iran has denied that the projects exist and has denounced as fabrications the documents the United States has shared with the agency, and with other nations.

Administration officials acknowledge that it is unlikely that Iran will accede to all of their demands. But they say this is their best chance to move the seven-year standoff over Iran’s nuclear program sharply in their favor.

In interviews and public comments, the administration’s tone has clearly changed in recent days, becoming tougher and more confrontational.

In an interview to be broadcast Sunday on ABC, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the hidden facility was “part of a pattern of deception and lies on the part of the Iranians from the very beginning with respect to their nuclear program.”

But he deflected a question that has been circulating inside the government: Is the Qum facility one of a kind, or just one of several hidden facilities that were intended to give Iran a covert means of enriching uranium, far from the inspectors who regularly visit a far larger enrichment facility, also once kept secret, at Natanz.

“My personal opinion is that the Iranians have the intention of having nuclear weapons,” Mr. Gates concluded, though he said it was still an open question “whether they have made a formal decision” to manufacture weapons.

In recent years, Tehran has slowly and systematically cut back on the access of atomic sleuths. Early in 2006, for instance, it unilaterally began redirecting the international inspectors from dozens of sites, programs and personnel all over the Islamic republic to a single point: Natanz, where Iran is enriching uranium.

Pierre Goldschmidt, a former I.A.E.A. official who is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the revelation of the secret enrichment plant drove home the urgent need for enhanced legal authority for tough inspections. “It’s proof that, without additional verification authority, the agency cannot find undeclared nuclear activities,” he said.

Beneath the dry language of reports issued every three months by the international agency lies the story of an intense cat-and-mouse game in which inspectors seek documents or interviews with key scientists.

The I.A.E.A.’s agenda of inspection is already huge, as is its record of failing to get the Iranians to address the most serious clues and charges, inconsistencies and suspicions.

The departing chief of the agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, recently argued that the case for urgent action against Iran was “hyped,” even as he acknowledged that the country has refused, for two years, to answer his inspectors’ questions about evidence suggesting that the country has worked on weapons design.

In May 2008, the atomic agency in Vienna issued an uncharacteristically blunt demand for more information from Tehran and, even more uncharacteristically, disclosed the existence of 18 secretly obtained documents suggesting Iran’s high level of interest in atom bombs.

But the wording of the public portion of the 2007 United States National Intelligence Estimate had already frozen the effort to force Iran to reveal more. Its conclusion that weapons design work was halted in 2003 was a surprise that ended talk of sanctions.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the report an exoneration.

In fact, the classified portion of the intelligence estimate listed more than a dozen suspect locations, though officials last week would not say whether the list included the site that was revealed Friday. It is also unclear if Washington and its allies believe they have enough evidence to justify demanding access to those sites.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York. Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting from Washington.


Jane Burgmeister interview on Swine Flu Vaccinations

Interesting interview with a former Austrian Medical editor who tried to lift the lid on an interesting medical blunder involving Avian Bird Flu. Must watch.

Sign the "Stop Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination (Aust - Federal)" petition now!



Don't forget to do the mikiverse mandatory vaccination survey, just to the right of your screen.

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

YOUR CHANCE TO HELP PREVENT MANDATORY VACCINATIONS

SPECIAL REPORT by Tetractys Merkaba, Editor-in-Chief.

Sign the "Stop Mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination (Aust - Federal)" petition now!

Michael Bending of the Australian Vaccination Network has launched an on-line petition to help prevent mandatory Swine Flu Vaccination shots from becoming mandatory in Australia.

Vaccinations are linked with Autism and other preventable diseases.

As of 11.00 this morning, 1460 concerned Australian's have signed this very important petition, but it very important that this petition goes VIRAL.

Please send it to your on-line friends, and even though it is only available to Australians, your overseas friends can send it to their Australian friends.

This is the prepared petition, that will be sent to every member of the Australian Parliament, including Australian Prime-Minister, Kevin Rudd;

"Dear Member of Parliament,

I wish to express my concern to you with regard to mass vaccination of the Australian public for swine flu, using a vaccine with no long term studies yet potential for dangerous side effects.

There is much talk amongst politicians, medical associations and the media with regards to making this swine flu vaccine mandatory. I do not consent to mandatory vaccination and I wish to point out that my right to do so is protected under informed consent laws relative to each Australian States criminal Acts.

I am very informed as to the risk benefit ratio and the risks far out weigh the perceived benefits.

To put things into perspective, malaria kills 3,000 people every day, and it's considered "a health problem"... But of course, there are no fancy vaccines for malaria that can rake in billions of dollars for drug companies in a short amount of time. For example; Chinese scientists have already found the cure for malaria yet it is not a drug that can be patented by big corporate money. http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/600026/n/The-Last-Bite

But getting back to the H1N1 issue, one Australian news source, for example, states that even a mild swine flu epidemic could lead to the deaths of 1.4 million people and would reduce economic growth by nearly $5 trillion dollars ( http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,25392380-2,00.html ).

This sounds like the outlandish cries of the pandemic bird-flu, when President Bush said two million Americans would die as a result of the bird flu! Where is the Bird Flu now?

As of August 28th 2009 (update 63) ( http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_08_28/en/index.html ), there have been 2185 deaths world wide from H1N1. Compared to seasonal flu, this does not constitute a pandemic let alone justify mandatory mass vaccination with a vaccine that will have dangerous side effects and little proof of efficacy.

Approximately 36 thousand Americans die from seasonal flu every year, 200 thousand are hospitalised. Between 250 - 500 thousand people die from seasonal flu world wide, also resulting in three to five million cases of severe illness. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs211/en The world wide 2185 deaths from H1N1 virus, does not constitute a pandemic yet alone grounds to begin mandatory vaccination of the Australian public.

Just a couple of months ago, scientists concluded that the 1918 flu pandemic that killed between 50-100 million people worldwide in a matter of 18 months -- which all these worst case scenarios are built upon -- was NOT due to the flu itself! http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSTRE5146PD20090205?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&sp=true

Tami Flu, used against seasonal flu, does not work effectively and is not a safe drug. In fact it is not even a vaccine, it is an anti-viral and meant to be administered once someone is infected. It is not a vaccine or a preventative but rather a treatment. Serious side effects include convulsions, delirium or delusions, and 12 deaths in children and teens as a result of neuropsychiatric problems and brain infections Japan actually banned Tami flu for children in 2007. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-11-19-tamiflu_x.htm

In 2007, the FDA in the USA finally began investigating some 1,800 adverse event reports related to the drug. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-11-25-tamiflu-brain_N.htm

In fact the Tami Flu anti viral injection has been found to be almost useless http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/397/27< The risk and dangers compared to perceived benefits of Tami flu are great.

Recently a confidential letter from the United Kingdom Health Protection Agency was sent to about 600 neurologists alerting them to watch for an increase in Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) as a result of the swine flu vaccination. GBS can be fatal as it attacks the nerve lining, causing paralysis and suffocation – as those affected are unable to breath.

The UK Daily Mail reported on the July 29 letter and pointed to a similar U.S. swine flu vaccination used in 1976 when:

* "More people died from the vaccination than from swine flu (25 deaths);
* 500 cases of GBS were detected;
* the vaccine may have increased the risk of contracting GBS by eight times;
* the vaccine was withdrawn after just 10 weeks when the link with GBS became clear;
* The U.S. government was forced to pay out 1.3 million dollars to those affected."

So, instead of giving warnings to the people who'll be vaccinated, secret letters were sent to neurologists to keep track of the number of human guinea pigs who contract the dreadful GBS without knowing the risk.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1206807/Swine-flu-jab-link-killer-nerve-disease-Leaked-letter-reveals-concern-neurologists-25-deaths-America.html#ixzz0OqsdiuaX

The dangers of using live attenuated viruses in vaccinations can also lead to an out break in flu, just exactly the opposite of what the vaccine was made for. It can actually spread the virus rather than cure it.


The vaccine time below helps illustrates my points.

Vaccine history

• In the USA in 1960, two virologists discovered that both polio vaccines were contaminated with the SV 40 virus which causes cancer in animals as well as changes in human cell tissue cultures. Millions of children had been injected with these vaccines. (Med Jnl of Australia 17/3/1973 p555)

• In 1871-2, England, with 98% of the population aged between 2 and 50 vaccinated against smallpox, it experienced its worst ever smallpox outbreak with 45,000 deaths. During the same period in Germany, with a vaccination rate of 96%, there were over 125,000 deaths from smallpox. ( http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/020119hadwin/020119hadwin.toc.html )
The Hadwen Documents

• In Germany, compulsory mass vaccination against diphtheria commenced in 1940 and by 1945 diphtheria cases were up from 40,000 to 250,000. (Don't Get Stuck, Hannah Allen)

• In 1967, Ghana was declared measles free by the World Health Organisation after 96% of its population was vaccinated. In 1972, Ghana experienced one of its worst measles outbreaks with its highest ever mortality rate. (Dr H Albonico, MMR Vaccine Campaign in Switzerland, March 1990)

• In 1977, Dr Jonas Salk who developed the first polio vaccine, testified along with other scientists, that mass inoculation against polio was the cause of most polio cases throughout the USA since 1961. (Science 4/4/77 "Abstracts" )

• In the UK between 1970 and 1990, over 200,000 cases of whooping cough occurred in fully vaccinated children. (Community Disease Surveillance Centre, UK)

• In the 1970's a tuberculosis vaccine trial in India involving 260,000 people revealed that more cases of TB occurred in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. (The Lancet 12/1/80 p73)

In 1976 mass vaccination of Swine flu begain in the USA. Within a few months, claims totaling $1.3 billion had been filed by victims who had suffered paralysis from the vaccine. The vaccine was also blamed for 25 deaths. However, several hundred people developed crippling Guillain-Barré Syndrome after they were injected with the swine flu vaccine. Even healthy 20-year-olds ended up as paraplegics. And the swine flu pandemic itself? It never materialized. ( http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/04/29/Swine-Flu.aspx )

• In 1978, a survey of 30 States in the US revealed that more than half of the children who contracted measles had been adequately vaccinated. (The People's Doctor, Dr R Mendelsohn)

• The February 1981 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 90% of obstetricians and 66% of pediatricians refused to take the rubella vaccine.

• In 1979, Sweden abandoned the whooping cough vaccine due to its ineffectiveness. Out of 5,140 cases in 1978, it was found that 84% had been vaccinated three times! (BMJ 283:696-697, 1981)

• In the USA, the cost of a single DPT shot had risen from 11 cents in 1982 to $11.40 in 1987. The manufacturers of the vaccine were putting aside $8 per shot to cover legal costs and damages they were paying out to parents of brain damaged children and children who died after vaccination. (The Vine, Issue 7, January 1994, Nambour, Qld)

Please do not introduce mandatory vaccination upon the Australian people.


Yours sincerely "

PLEASE HELP GET THE MESSAGE OUT ON THIS MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

MIKIVERSE EDITOR TO GIVE IMPORTANT HUMAN RIGHTS TALK ON INALIENABLE HUMAN RIGHTS



Tetractys Merkaba has been confirmed as a guest speaker at the important local truth group, the 'truth cinema'.

TRUTH CINEMA, conceived originally by Kelly Jones in 2008, and presently run by local artist and political organiser, Chris Andrews, runs a fortnightly group that focuses on screening important documentaries and will commence offering talks by relevant people on September 30th, when Patrice Saint examines the influence of Ancient Egyptian culture on Christianity. If you enjoyed the popular documentary 'Zeitgeist'-especially part one, then you would not want to miss this talk.



Documentaries screened thus far, include the important Australian made "Fool Me Twice", chronicling the Bali inside job, as well as "Food Matters", "The Matrix of Power-Redux", "Eye of the Pheonix" and "Zeitgeist".

Upcoming documentaries include "The Flouride Deception", "The World According To Monsanto", and Indigenous Australian Mark McMurtrie talking about Human Rights.



Tetractys, has been confirmed to speak on October 28th, where he will talk about our inalienable human rights, why they are important, and why they still exist.

Tickets for this event are only $5, which goes towards the hire of the cinema.

Please contact the mikiverse for more details.

Citizen Electoral Council Calls For Population Rise-5o MILLION BY 2049

Populate or Perish: Australia needs 50 million people plus!

Treasury’s recent upward revision of Australia’s projected population estimate for 2049 of 35 million, due to a rising birthrate and rapid growth in migration, still falls well short of what Australia needs, and what infrastructure visionaries such as Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, or more recently Prof. Lance Endersbee, have demonstrated is possible.

Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, architect of Sydney’s underground railway, Sydney Harbour Bridge and the shamefully still shelved Bradfield Scheme, was calling for a 1991 population target of 40 million back in 1941. Emeritus Prof. Lance Endersbee, former Dean of Engineering at Monash University and a veteran of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and Tasmanian hydro scheme, stated in 2006 that “The top end of Australia could carry 50 million people alone.”

Standing in the way is the Government’s economic rationalist monetary policies, reaffirmed by Treasurer Wayne Swan at the recent launch of a new institute for population ageing research when he committed the government to “spending restraint”: “New policies will have to be funded by reprioritising within existing resources, rather than expanding the total quantum of government spending—doing more with less,” he said.

“Such comments reveal the true impotence of our current political leadership in this country,” CEC leader Craig Isherwood said today. “Dr Bradfield would be turning in his grave, as he himself said, ‘To populate and develop Australia we must spend money to make money.’

“The major infrastructure projects and expanded immigration policies that occurred in Australia during the fifties is the only answer to achieve real economic health for future generations. What’s needed is the political will and courage, as demonstrated by Ben Chifley and his approval of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. Such vision saw Australia’s population increase 25% in that decade and there is no reason it can’t happen again.

“The courage though is to defy the current short sighted economic monetarist dogma and implement our own credit-based system to finance the projects,” Mr Isherwood continued. “We need greater regulatory control of our banking system along with a government controlled national bank, able to issue credit at long term low interest to fund such infrastructure projects. Such a bank could be in the form of government agencies, like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation along with the Tennessee Valley Authority which Franklin D. Roosevelt established in the U.S., which lifted that country out of the Great Depression to become the industrial powerhouse of the world.” (To read more about the measures employed by FDR click here to purchase the LaRouche Special Report, Economics: The End of A Delusion)

“Such growth in the real physical economy, rather than the current speculative ‘growth’ observed in the paper economy, will see real investment returns flowing back into our ailing health and social welfare sectors, which this country desperately needs.

“People need jobs, and major water projects provide a much needed boost to our machine tool industries through their construction, as well as the longer term benefits of opening up more of Australia for more expansive and intensive agricultural development and general rural sector growth.”

Mr Isherwood concluded, “Lyndon LaRouche has forecast the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy and the global monetarist system, unless there is a major policy shift within the Obama administration. If the Rudd government truly wants to take the lead in global economic reform on the world stage, it must invest in some real nation building infrastructure and establish the institutions to generate the credit required to do so.”

Monday, September 21, 2009

by Tetractys Merkaba, editor in chief
This is an interesting article that I found this morning. It is a disturbing article because it dares to ask the question 'Do some types of human beings, or groups, deserve to be equal?' This type of behaviour is symptomatic of the media, who are always trying to raise controversy, in an effort to get you to emotionally commit to their product. Hence the employment of a question, instead of a statement. The trick here is to recognise that there is no need for such a question to be asked, simply because ALL HUMAN BEINGS HAVE INALIENABLE RIGHTS.

Do today's pirates have inalienable human rights?


Last Updated: Thursday, February 5, 2009 | 11:36 AM ET By Thomas Rose, CBC News

There is some good news on the pirate front of late — hijackings off the coast of Somalia are down slightly since late December when at least a dozen countries began deploying their navies in the nearby waters. The International Maritime Bureau, the world's premiere anti-piracy watchdog, attributes the slight drop to the recent effort by members of the international community to confront the buccaneers head on. On the other hand, the IMB also reports that 2008 was the worst year on record for sea piracy with an 11 per cent increase over 2007. But that increase only tells part of the story: in 2008, 49 vessels were hijacked (including for the first time a huge supertanker), another 46 were fired upon, 889 crew members were taken hostage and 32 were reported killed or missing. The average ransom demand was in the area of $2 million. Most of this activity occurred in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Somalia and to the north in the vital Gulf of Aden, the gateway for supertankers transporting the bulk of the world's oil supplies from Saudi Arabia. It is in these waters that the European Union and the U.S. are now deploying special, heavily armed armadas of their own to help other nations including Canada, which dispatched the frigate HMCS Ville de Quebec there for a six-month tour last fall. One might be tempted to think that these vital shipping lanes are about to become a whole lot safer. Think again.

A drop in the ocean


In its weekly piracy report, the IMB notes that in the first two weeks of 2009, there were more than a dozen pirate sightings, not only off Somalia but also in shipping lanes across the globe, from Togo to Brazil to Haiti and Vietnam. Water covers almost three-quarters of the globe and it is home at any given time to roughly 5,000 large ships, which together carry 80 per cent of the world's traded cargo. Clearly the international navy assembling in the Arabian Sea, as welcome as it is, will be unable to police all of these vital waterways. Faced with this assembled firepower, pirates simply move to another region. In the fight against this scourge, the UN has taken the unusual step of authorizing warships to enter Somalia's territorial waters and use "all necessary force" against the pirates. The authorization is conditional, however. Not only does it run out in April but it is also contingent upon the wishes of Somalia's transitional government, a tenuous proposition at best. But some kind of action is crucial as international piracy is costing ship owners in excess of $5 billion a year in losses, ransoms and rising insurance premiums, a cost that is passed along to all consumers.

Looking to the past


Two hundred years ago, the world's trading lanes had also fallen prey to the systematic plunder of pirates. Initially, states responded by paying ransom, as is being done today. In 1815, when the United States led the world in crushing the pirates off the Barbary Coast, retribution was swift and final. They either went down with their ships, were executed on the spot or they were taken back to England or Jamaica for trial where they were usually hanged and left dangling on posts along piers as a deterrent to others.
This action had a long precedent. As far back as the dawn of the Roman Empire, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis (enemies of the human race). For more than 2,000 years, pirates have been considered non-citizens, without rights and subject to universal jurisdiction, meaning that they are subject to the legal sanctions of any state that captures them. This understanding of piracy as an international criminal act that every state is obliged to prosecute is echoed in the UN conventions on the law of the sea as well as in a host of other global treaties, including the convention against the taking of hostages and the European convention on the prevention of terrorism.

What can be done?


International law is unequivocal in treating pirates much in the same way it now treats terrorists, as enemies of humankind. Remarkably, after centuries of dealing with the problem, the question of what to do with the individual pirates themselves remains an open question. Making matters worse is the fact that more and more of today's pirates are Islamic, operating with an agenda often more complex than merely securing ransom. This agenda has helped push the threat of piracy farther and farther along the globe's waterways, according to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a Maryland-based think-tank. States may be reluctant to prosecute for fear of violent reprisal, or they may not wish to undermine vital economic interests. Either way it has created an almost embarrassing situation in which certain countries, Germany and England among them, have actually set some pirates free. What's more, it now appears that pirates, like any other arrested individual, may now have inalienable rights as human beings, which can pose problems for modern democracies. British warships patrolling the waters off Somalia have been advised not to detain pirates. To do so might mean sending them back to Somalia, which could expose them to the possibility of torture or worse (a violation of their basic human rights); while bringing them to England for prosecution might mean they could claim asylum (on the basis of the persecution they might expect to receive in their homeland). The situation is not likely to improve then until prosecuting nations and the UN adopt some rules allowing for pirates to face the law under internationally accepted conditions. One solution would be for the UN Security Council to pass a resolution setting up an ad hoc criminal tribunal, much as it did after the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda. That would relieve any one state from shouldering the burden of hosting a trial on its own, with all the attendant appeals and incarcerations. Putting in place such a court, the world could then go about the business of establishing a more permanent mechanism to deal with this scourge and exactly which rights these modern-day marauders actually have.

Saturday, September 19, 2009

IMF TO SELL OFF SOME OF ITS GOLD-BUT WHO WILL BUY IT?

IMF approves sale of some of its gold
Saturday September 19, 2009, 7:54 am

The International Monetary Fund has approved the sale of a limited amount of its gold to help provide loans to poor countries and shore up its finances.

The fund's executive board said it decided on Friday to sell 403.3 tonnes in a way that does not disrupt the sale of gold in commodity markets.

The head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, expressed satisfaction with the board's decision. He said it would enable the fund to step up lending to poor countries and put the fund's finances on a sound, long-term footing.

The IMF says it is ready to sell the gold to its member nations if any are interested or on the open market in phases over a period of time.

SWINE FLU "VACCINATION" COMING TO AUSTRALIA-WILL IT BECOME MANDATORY?

AUSTRALIA TO INTRODUCE SWINE FLU "VACCINATIONS"-BUT ARE THEY REALLY A PROTECTION AGAINST THE VIRUS?

Tetractys Merkaba, Editor in Chief.

 COMMUNITY Concern is mounting that the so-called swine flu vaccinations may leave people worse off than if they had've contracted the virus itself. People from all round the world, ranging from Dr.Laibow at Natural Solutions Foundation, the highly selling English tabloid, The Mail, respected American independent news site infowars.com, independent  political commentators the world over, and independent Australian News Source, The Mikiverse have been concerned at the potential harm that may be unleashed by unleashing this so-called virus into the community.

Some questions for you to consider;

WILL this vaccination have the same effect as the U.S Vaccination against Swine Flu in 1976?

WHY IS THE U.N PUSHING SO STRONGLY FOR COUNTRIES TO INTRODUCE THIS VACCINATION?

DOES AUSTRALIA need a flu vaccination to begin at the end of the first month of Spring?

WILL AUSTRALIA follow GREECE'S lead and make vaccinations MANDATORY?

IS THIS-AS SOME MORE EXTREMIST PEOPLE SUGGEST-A PART OF SOME EUGENICS PLOT TO REDUCE THE WORLD POPULATION?

IF SO, IS THERE A CONNECTION TO CODEX ALIMENTARIUS?

Here are some Australian articles about the coming vaccination program; Make sure that you and your loved ones are fully informed.

H1N1 immunisation to begin in two weeks

Swine flu vaccine production lags

AAP September 18, 2009, 5:58 pm

Australia's biggest-ever immunisation program to combat the deadly swine flu virus will begin in less than two weeks.

Free doses of the vaccine will be initially available for all adults from September 30, to protect them from a pandemic that has killed 172 Australians and 3,500 people worldwide.

Doses for children aged 10 and over are expected to be available by mid-October.

The nation's 7,500 general practices will start receiving deliveries of the Panvax vaccine from next week.

The government has bought 21 million doses and state and territory health authorities have already been given four million samples.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved the one-shot protection vaccine, which Melbourne-based pharmaceutical firm CSL had been developing since May.

The $100 million program to develop a swine flu vaccine in Australia has produced a vaccine which its maker says will have a 95 per cent success rate in adults.

People with diabetes, asthma, obesity, weak immune systems and pregnant women will initially be given priority, along with doctors and nurses.

It is designed to immunise people from developing potentially-fatal lung inflammation and pneumonia if they catch swine flu.

So far, 36,000 swine flu cases have been confirmed in Australia.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon on Friday said the vaccine was Australia's best defence against the pandemic.

"I encourage people to now take the opportunity to protect themselves and their families against the pandemic flu by getting vaccinated," she told reporters in Canberra on Friday.

"The government from day one has been determined to combat this disease in a sensible, clear and direct way.

"We're in the fortunate position, given advice from CSL, that there is only one dose required for adults, which means we will be able to vaccine anybody in the community who wants to be vaccinated."

Chief medical officer Jim Bishop said vaccination would give a high level of protection for the next flu season "and beyond".

"The evidence that we've got, so far, shows it's extremely good," he said.

Prof Bishop said, however, it was possible there would be a larger wave of swine flu between now and the next flu season.

"We would be concerned there would be outbreaks during the year, through the summer," he said.

"We think it's important, in a timely way, for patients to protect themselves now."

Australian Medical Association federal vice-president Steve Hambleton said a more aggressive strain of swine flu in the northern hemisphere may be resistant to Tamiflu, which helps people who are already sick.

"We're not out of the woods with this particular pandemic," the Brisbane-based GP told AAP on Friday.

"We need to vaccinate the population rapidly to provide maximum protection."

The flu vaccine would be unlikely to cause side effects but Dr Hambleton said doctors needed to be educated about wastage and sterilisation procedures.

One vaccine vials contains 18 doses, which means multiple patients will need to be immunised at one time.

Australia's biggest medical insurers agreed three weeks ago to indemnify doctors offering swine flu injections.

For now, the biggest obstacle will be getting supplies to rural and regional areas of Australia, Ms Roxon said.

Contractual details of the government's $100 million payment to CSL, to develop the vaccine, are to remain confidential.

"It is not appropriate for us to be itemising the exact cost given the commercial interest that are also at stake," the health minister said.

CSL's general manager of bio-therapies, Mary Sontrop, said the vaccine would have similar side effects to the regular seasonal flu vaccine.

"The most commonly reported side effects were injection site tenderness, headache and injection site pain," she said.

Australia will join with the US, UK, Brazil, France, Italy, Norway, Sweden and New Zealand in committing vaccines to the World Health Organisation.

Vaccines will go to the Pacific Islands countries, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and possibly South East Asian countries, Ms Roxon said.

HERE IS THE FOREIGN OWNED TABLOID, THE HERALD SUN'S ARTICLE;

Swine flu shots to start

  • From:Herald Sun 
  • September 19, 2009 12:00AM

  • SWINE flu vaccinations are to start in less than two weeks after final approval from the nation's drug safety authority.

    Free doses of the single-shot vaccine -- developed at Melbourne's CSL laboratories -- will be available from hospitals and GPs from September 30.

    Frontline health workers, pregnant women and the chronically ill will be the first vaccinated.

    It will be the biggest single immunisation program in Australian history.

    The Therapeutic Goods Administration on Friday ruled one dose of CSL's Panvax vaccine for the H1N1 virus was safe and effective for preventing swine flu infections among adults.

    The TGA is still to decide whether the vaccination program will be extended to children under 10.

    The Herald Sun reported last month that the Rudd Government had ordered 21 million doses of the vaccine -- enough for every Australian.

    Victoria has had almost 3000 confirmed of cases of swine flu. Nationwide, 172 people have died and thousands more have gone to hospitable.


    THIS STORY IS FROM THE AGE IN MELBOURNE AND IS THE ONLY AUSTRALIAN STORY SO FAR TO CONTAIN ANY DETAILS ABOUT POTENTIAL PROBLEMS; TAKEN, IF MEMORY SERVES FROM AN ARTICLE FROM THE DAILY MAIL IN THE U.K, WHICH HAS BEEN PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE PURPOSES OF SHARING INFORMATION. 

    Swine flu shots available for all

    Mark Metherell 
    September 19, 2009 - 12:00AM

    ALL Australians who need or want a swine flu vaccination will get the jab in the biggest vaccination campaign undertaken in Australia.

    Thanks to an initial underestimate of the strength of the vaccine, the Federal Government has extended vaccinations to all adults and teens after trials showed only one shot, not two as originally expected, is required to give immunity.

    The go-ahead comes after the Therapeutic Goods Administration cleared the new product for safety and efficacy on a single-shot basis. Children aged nine and under are expected to get the go-ahead a little after the September 30 launch date, once separate trials are concluded.

    But the population-wide availability has come under fire from an infectious-disease expert, Peter Collignon, who has warned that a rapid roll-out on such a scale raised the risk of lethal side-effects, as had occurred in the US in 1976 with an earlier swine flu vaccine that was released in a rush to 40 million Americans.

    ''In my view, we are making a decision based on fear out of proportion to the risk shown by the evidence we have on swine flu,'' Professor Collignon of the Australian National University told The Age yesterday.

    In a letter published in the British Medical Journal this week, Professor Collignon forecast there would ''probably be'' one or two additional episodes of the paralysing Guillain-Barre syndrome per million vaccine recipients. The death rate from swine flu has been about six per million, according to latest NSW Health statistics, which was about the same as that for seasonal flu, Professor Collignon said.

    The 21 million doses of the vaccine were ordered by the Government on the basis that it would be able to get reasonable coverage if half the population had two doses each.

    ''As there is enough vaccine for all adults, I encourage people to protect themselves and their families against the pandemic flu by getting vaccinated,'' Health Minister Nicola Roxon said yesterday. She said that while swine flu was mild in most people, it had severe effects in some and had claimed 172 lives in Australia.

    The vaccination program, to be administered by GPs and public health facilities, will give priority to vulnerable patients with chronic conditions such as asthma, cancer, heart disease and diabetes; health workers; children in special schools; indigenous people; obese individuals; pregnant women; and parents of children aged up to six months. The vaccine is free but some patients may have to pay a gap charge if their GP does not bulk-bill.

    Australia has agreed to an appeal from US President Barack Obama to commit up to 10 per cent of its swine flu vaccine to the World Health Organisation for vaccination of priority patients. Australia's contribution will go to Pacific island countries, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and possibly SouthEast Asian countries.

    Ms Roxon said the trials had indicated the vaccine was similar to seasonal flu vaccine with a high safety and low adverse-events profile.

    Although the manufacturer CSL says the vaccine is ''well tolerated'' in adults, the clinical trials show the vaccine triggered side-effects including headache, myalgia, fever and nausea in more than 60 per cent of trial participants. She declined to say how much the Government was paying CSL for the vaccine, saying it was commercial-in-confidence, but acknowledged the cost was over $100 million.

    This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/national/swine-flu-shots-available-for-all-20090918-fven.html


    THIS STORY IS FROM AAP;

    Swine flu vaccine production lags 

    AAP September 19, 2009, 7.18 am


    Production of swine flu vaccines will fall "substantially" short of the amount needed to protect the global population, the World Health Organisation says, as the pandemic death toll rises.

    "Current supplies of pandemic vaccine are inadequate for a world population in which virtually everyone is susceptible to infection by a new and readily contagious virus," WHO director-general Margaret Chan said in a statement on Friday.

    Despite new evidence that only one dose of the vaccines being tested will be enough for most people, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said output next year will be "substantially less" than annual production forecast of 4.9 billion doses.

    About 25 pharmaceutical laboratories working on vaccines have indicated that weekly production is lower than 94 million doses, he said.

    In May, the WHO had forecast a weekly output of 94.3 million doses if full scale vaccine production was launched.

    But pharmaceutical companies have in recent weeks slashed their production expectations due to poorer than expected yields from the so-called "seed virus" strains developed by WHO-approved laboratories.

    Amid growing fears poorer nations will not get enough vaccines, the United States led nine countries that on Thursday pledged to make 10 per cent of their swine flu vaccine supply available to other nations in need.

    The UN health agency's chief applauded the move by the United States, Australia, Brazil, Britain, France, Italy, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland.

    "Given that current demand outstrips supply, these donations, together with the doses pledged by manufacturers, will help increase supplies of pandemic vaccines to populations that would otherwise not have access," said Chan.

    Swine flu cases are expected to increase as the Northern Hemisphere enters its winter season. Britain has already reported a new surge in caseload.

    The WHO also said on Friday the global flu death toll had reached 3,486, up 281 from a week ago.

    The UN agency said the Americas region still has the highest death toll, at 2,625. The Asia-Pacific reported 620 fatalities, while Europe recorded at least 140 deaths. In the Middle East, 61 people succumbed to the virus while in Africa, 40 people have died from it.

    The WHO also said flu activity was "above the seasonal baseline" in the United States and it had reached epidemic levels in France and Japan.

    Transmission is rife in central and south America and Asia, it added, while in temperate regions of the Southern Hemisphere, such as Australia and South Africa, flu activity is declining.

    Experts have previously predicted about one third of the world's population of more than 6.5 billion people could be affected by A(H1N1). But they stress that so far most victims are suffering only mild symptoms.


    THIS IS FROM THE AUSTRALIAN VACCINATION NETWORK

    AH1N1 (2009) Swine Flu Vaccine
    Australian campaign to start September 30th, 2009


    Saturday, September  19th, 2009 - For Immediate Release:

    The AMA and Insurers ask for delays in swine flu vaccination
    - Why is the government rushing this campaign?

    Australian Minister for Health, Nicola Roxon, has announced that the nation's campaign to vaccinate 21 million Australians against the AH1N1 2009 strain of influenza is due to begin on Saturday, September 30th - less than 2 weeks from today. Since the Southern Hemisphere has already passed through the 2009 flu season, one has to wonder why the government is rushing this campaign?

    The Australian Government's hasty vaccination policy demonstrates that it is not immune to panic. It is potentially making the same mistake that the US did in 1976 when 40 million Americans were vaccinated against swine flu after a total of 5 cases were confirmed nationwide. This campaign killed 25 people and caused 4,000 serious adverse reactions - many of them Guillain-Barre paralysis (GBS), a serious neurological disorder. The UK has already warned its neurologists to look out for GBS in recipients of the current AH1N1 vaccine. 

    Nicola Roxon's knee-jerk reaction in rushing this vaccine through despite warnings by insurance companies, the Australian Medical Association and consumer safety groups like the AVN, could lead to far more deaths and hospitalisations from the vaccine than we would ever see from the swine flu which, from all the available information, may be milder than normal seasonal flu.

    The Australian Vaccination Network asks the government to reconsider this campaign for the following reasons:

    1- The vaccine, which does not even have a name yet (I will refer to it as AH1N1 vaccine), is produced by CSL Pty Ltd (click here to read the manufacturer's information). It contains 24.5 mcg of Thiomersal per dose. Thiomersal is a toxic mercury-based preservative which has been banned from over the counter medications and products for decades and childhood vaccines in Australia, the US and the UK for many years. Mercury has been linked  with an increased risk of autism (now affecting 1:67 children; 1:38 boys), behavioural disorders and brain damage in both children and adults - it has no place in any product which is supposed to increase or protect health.

    2- AH1N1 vaccine, which is laden with toxic mercury, is targeting those who are the most vulnerable to permanent brain damage from exposure to this banned poison - the unborn, children and those who are already immune-compromised. This policy borders on madness and one has to wonder where the funds are going to come from to pay compensation claims for those who are killed or injured by these shots?

    3- For purely economic reasons, AH1N1 vaccine is being distributed in multi-dose vials, greatly increasing the risk of transmission of infection from person to person. As a result, insurance companies and the government have refused to indemnify doctors who administer this vaccine.

    4. The AMA's President, Andrew Pesce, has asked the Federal Government to "seriously consider" delaying the rollout of this vaccine, "due to inadequate testing and a higher risk of infection from multi-dose vials." This request seems to have been ignored.

    5- The vaccine is not tested for effectiveness. According to the manufacturer, there have been no controlled clinical studies demonstrating a decrease in influenza disease after vaccination with either the normal seasonal flu vaccine, AFLURIA, or the AH1N1 vaccine. 

    6- There are great safety concerns regarding this vaccine. Even though it is going to be administered to millions, it has only been tested for a few short weeks in less than 2,000 individuals. Even in such a small trial group, severe allergic reactions including life-threatening anaphylactic shock, have been reported.

    7- The bias in the manufacturer's pre-licensure studies is evident due to the fact that there was no placebo used. In testing this vaccine, those who were given what they were told was a placebo (by medical definition, a totally inert substance), were in fact being dosed with a solution containing toxic mercury. The TGA does not perform safety or effectiveness tests on any vaccines themselves, relying on manufacturers to test prior to licensing. They should not have allowed this unscientific methodology. The TGA is not government funded and relies solely on pharmaceutical licensing fees. 

    8- When AH1N1 vaccine had the Thiomersal (mercury) preservative removed (Study 2 below) and was tested on a small group of elderly people in the UK, the number of reactions, though still considerable, was cut by 50% and more for some conditions.


      
    About Australian Vaccination Network, Inc.
    The AVN is a non-profit, volunteer-run charitable association. Since 1994, the AVN has provided information and support to the general community who are trying to make informed choices about vaccination and health. Their lobbying in Federal Parliament has ensured that compulsory vaccination for children has not come to pass and they are the major reporters of vaccine adverse reactions to ADRAC (The Adverse Drug Reactions Advisory Committee).
     
    For more information visit www.avn.org.au or ph 02 6687 1699
    Fax: 02 6687 2032  Mobile: 0414 872 032