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By Alexandra Rosenmann, AlterNet
Hatemonger Stephen Miller will be Trump's senior policy adviser. READ MORE»
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Dear friends,
Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on new brain-computer interface technology being used to create mind-controlled drones, the Pentagon budget report that was covered up after it found $125 billion in administrative waste, broken voting machines which kept large number of voters from having their votes count, and more.
Read also wonderfully inspiring articles on the shooting victim who promoted forgiveness and campaigned to prevent his attacker from being put to death for other hate crimes, a new study showing a reduction in psychological disorder symptoms in 80 percent of its cancer patient participants, the California program improving prison inmates' chances of success once released by connecting them with entrepreneurs, and more. You can also skip to this section now.
Special note: A beautiful, two-minute video of U.S. veterans apologizing to Native Americans for stealing and pillaging their land shows how our times are changing. Read a great article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. revealing that several scientific studies have shown a link between mercury and autism. To understand the risks of root canals, don't miss this mercola.com video. Listen to an incredibly beautiful rendition of the song Amazing Grace. Watch and listen to what some feel is the best version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" by the a capella group Pentatonix.
Quote of the week: "What lies behind us and what lies before us are but small matters compared to what lies within us." ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The world's first race for drones controlled by people's thoughts involved 16 pilots flying drones over a course of just 10 yards in an indoor basketball court. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI (brain-computer interface) instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said [PhD student] Chris Crawford. Mind-controlled technology already is helping paralyzed people move limbs or robotic prosthetics. The technology ... works by using an EEG headset that has been calibrated to identify the electrical activity associated with particular thoughts in each wearer's brain. Programmers write code to translate these ... signals into commands that computers send to the drones. Professor Juan Gilbert, whose computer science students organized the race, [wants] to know how mind-controlled devices could expand and change the way we play, work and live. But as the technology moves toward wider adoption, ethical, legal and privacy questions remain unresolved. The US Defence Department - which uses drones to kill suspected terrorists ... from vast distances - is looking for military brain-control applications. A 2014 Defence Department grant supports the Unmanned Systems Laboratory ... where researchers have developed a system enabling a single person with no prior training to fly multiple drones simultaneously through mind control.
The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations. Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results. The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy ... curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology. The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel. Their report revealed ... that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management. The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people - 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel - to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty.
The final result of the US presidential election is still unclear almost a month after polling day – and the recount in Michigan has now been thrown into chaos because of broken voting machines. As officials began a full recount in the swing state, it emerged that faulty machines mean half of all votes cast in the city of Detroit may be ineligible for recount. A third of voting precincts in Wayne County, that largest of Michigan's counties, could also be disqualified. The problems were discovered after voting clerks were unable to match the number of votes cast on the machines with the number of people who had been registered at polling stations. Officials said at least 87 of Detroit’s decade-old voting machines had failed on Election Day, with many jamming when ballot papers were fed in. In 392 of the city’s 662 voting precincts, the number of votes recorded on machines was not the same as the number of voters registered by polling station staff. According to Michigan state law, voting precincts where polling registers do not match with voting machines cannot be included in a recount. In that situation, the original election result will stand. The potential recount ineligibility of so many areas could hinder Hillary Clinton, who significantly outperformed Mr Trump in both Detroit and Wayne County and whose hopes of winning Michigan rest largely on uncounted ballots being found in Wayne County.
Forbes has seen numerous reports of broken machines causing epic queues and peeving voters. One of the more concerning tales came from New Jersey, where one voter complained not only of machines being broken but claimed an official decided to say "maybe Russians did it". If an official did say those words, whether in seriousness or in jest, it'd have been unwise given fears around Russia's hacking of the election, following the breach of the Democratic National Committee earlier this year. Many took to Twitter to complain about broken machines, including those voting in Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, Columbia and San Francisco. Most complaints have come from New York and Detroit. ProPublica also reported issues across Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio. The Tennessean reported issues ... too. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) [stated] the department has been offering cybersecurity assistance to state, county and local election agencies, and found vulnerabilities during system scans, though wouldn't disclose their nature or provenance. Voting machines have always been vulnerable, said Matt Bernhard ... an expert on the security of electoral systems. "This year isn't that different, other than I'm expecting higher turnout which may stress the infrastructure more," added Bernhard, who yesterday released a reporthighlighting how different areas of the U.S. use poorly-protected machines.
What began as a harrowing account of child abuse suffered by a former professional English soccer player last month has lifted the lid on what could be one of the worst pedophile scandals Britain has ever known. Andy Woodward, 43, who played in the lower divisions of English soccer, told the Guardian newspaper ... how his life had been ruined because he had been molested as a boy by a youth team coach. His frank revelations of the sexual abuse he endured three decades ago prompted more than 20 other former professionals to come forward with their own distressing stories of suffering at the hands of sexual predators in the sport. In a sign of how widespread the abuse might have been, British police said on Thursday that about 350 victims had come forward to report sexual abuse within soccer clubs and indicated the number was likely to rise. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) charity said that a helpline dedicated to the soccer abuse scandal had received 860 calls in its first week. The charity's staff had made 60 referrals to police or social services in the first three days, triple the number made in the wake of a similar scheme set up for victims of [Jimmy] Savile. The NSPCC has not ruled out suggestions the abuse is still ongoing. "It would be naive to assume that all of the concerns that are being disclosed and being talked about are in the past," said Jon Brown, the NSPCC lead on tackling sexual abuse. "There are many parallels between Savile and what we are seeing and hearing."
Over the course of about six decades, more than 1,000 members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were accused of sexually abusing Australian children, according to a new report. Victims were ordered to keep quiet. Not one of the alleged perpetrators were reported to the police. Now, a royal commission in Australia has found the church demonstrated a “serious failure” to protect children from the risk of sexual abuse. A 107-page-long report released Monday detailed a number of ancient policies that exhibited what the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse referred to as a “serious lack of understanding of the nature of child sexual abuse.” The church’s responses to sexual abuse allegations, and its desire to handle them internally, often mirror those of the Catholic church or of some Orthodox Jewish communities. But unlike the priests of the Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have no paid clergy. Alleged perpetrators are mostly regular congregants, who are shielded from official prosecution by the church’s code of moral conduct. The church’s rules, which are based on a strict interpretation of the Bible, call for separation from other members of society. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ responses to abuse allegations are not limited to Australia. The religion’s parent organization, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, for 25 years has instructed its elders to keep cases of child sexual abuse secret from law enforcement and members of their own congregations.
One of the most notorious scenes in cinema history, the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider butter rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, is making headlines once again. In a recently resurfaced video interview ... Bertolucci confirms that Schneider, who died in 2011, did not know the details of the rape scene ahead of time, and that the graphic nature of the scene was improvised on set. "I had been, in a way, horrible to Maria because I didn't tell her what was going on," [said] Bertolucci. Nothing in the resurfaced video is news as the director has been very vocal about his filming of the scene and how it affected Maria Schneider in multiple interviews over the years. Schneider said in a 2007 Daily Mail interview [that], "Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. I wanted to be recognized as an actress and the whole scandal and aftermath of the film turned me a little crazy and I had a breakdown." Schneider added, "I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci." It's also well known that Schneider, who struggled with drug addiction and mental health issues, has blamed the infamous film for the downhill trajectory of her life. She went on to star in renowned films including Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, but said she was unable to get past the notoriety that came with starring in Bertolucci's film.
As part of her research for The Red Pill, American film maker Cassie Jaye spent hundreds of hours with the internet’s most notorious Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) over a two-and-a-half year period. She also interviewed some of their fiercest critics. Jaye began the process as a feminist, but she ended up not only sympathising with the MRAs, but fundamentally questioning the “aggressive” ethos of modern feminism. For her efforts, she says she has been smeared, threatened ... and even saw her funding dry up. But then something incredible happened: a Kickstarter fund ... raised a staggering $211,260, ensuring the movie’s cinematic release. The title The Red Pill refers to a scene in the Matrix, when Keanu Reeves’ character takes the red pill to see “the truth” – MRAs claim they see the “truth” about women and a world they feel is systematically stacked against men and boys. “When I started this project, my perception of MRAs was definitely negative,” she tells me. “I thought ... it would be a peek inside this mysterious, misogynistic community. But when I started to really listen to them, I started to empathise with a lot of their issues. Our cultural conditioning is that women have been oppressed and men are the oppressors. But I saw that wasn’t so. “Within the feminist community, there is a level of dismissiveness and a lack of compassion. There is a feeling ‘they have been the oppressors, and now it’s our turn’. “Above all, Red Pill is not about attacking women: it is about supporting men. And that can only be a good thing”.
Seth Ellingsworth of West Richland, Washington, says he got sick in an instant last year, when he briefly inhaled a strange odor at his job at the nearby Hanford Nuclear Site. Seventy years ago, the Hanford Site produced plutonium for America's nuclear arsenal. Today, it's run by the Department of Energy through its contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions. The contractor is managing a $110 billion cleanup of 56 million gallons of chemical and nuclear waste, stored in 177 underground tanks. But the tanks are leaking, and the vapors they emit contain toxic and radioactive chemicals. Some nuclear experts have called Hanford "the most toxic place in America" and "an underground Chernobyl waiting to happen." The DOE has acknowledged in nearly 20 studies conducted over the past 24 years that there is a safety risk to workers at Hanford. But critics say the DOE ... continues to put workers at risk. Neuropsychologist Brian Campbell says he has evaluated 29 people at Hanford with both respiratory and cognitive symptoms, including "some of the worst cases of dementia that I've seen in young people." Dr. Campbell said the DOE doesn't want to acknowledge the injuries. Workers told us that "over and over," the Department of Energy and the contractor on site told them the readings for harmful materials were safe. Former workers also said that in the past they were almost never allowed to opt for protective gear, like the supplied air tanks recommended by many experts.
Note: A Newsweek article describes the Hanford site as an " American Fukushima" that will require 50 more years and $110 billion to adequately clean up. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing nuclear power news articles from reliable major media sources.
The Iraqi army, backed by US-led airstrikes, is trying to capture east Mosul at the same time as the Syrian army and its Shia paramilitary allies are fighting their way into east Aleppo. An estimated 300 civilians have been killed in Aleppo by government artillery and bombing in the last fortnight, and in Mosul there are reportedly some 600 civilian dead over a month. Despite these similarities, the reporting by the international media of these two sieges is radically different. In Mosul, civilian loss of life is blamed on Isis, with its indiscriminate use of mortars and suicide bombers, while the Iraqi army and their air support are largely given a free pass. Contrast this with Western media descriptions of the inhuman savagery of President Assad’s forces indiscriminately slaughtering civilians. One factor making the sieges of east Aleppo and east Mosul so similar, and different, from past sieges in the Middle East ... is that there are no independent foreign journalists present. They are not there for the very good reason that Isis imprisons and beheads foreigners while Jabhat al-Nusra, until recently the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, is only a shade less bloodthirsty. Unsurprisingly, foreign journalists covering developments in east Aleppo and rebel-held areas of Syria overwhelmingly do so from Lebanon or Turkey. But, strangely enough, the same media organisations continue to put their trust in the veracity of information coming out of areas under the control of these same potential kidnappers and hostage takers.
A web of truthiness, post-truths and half-truths is replacing a once-shared goal of knowing the actual truth. Ever since Eddie Bernays changed his occupation from “advertising man” to “public relations expert” a century ago, the distortion and manipulation of the truth through covert campaigns has been a mainstay of public life. We make light of it by calling it “spin” instead of covert information warfare, but covert warfare it is, and the prize is the capture of friends and enemies alike in webs of disinformation. Words - stories, narratives - have been weaponized and collateral damage is extensive. The Russians excelled in the use of stolen material ... to affect the recent campaign. They have done the same with neighbor countries to undermine clarity about their intentions and actions. There is a NATO group, for example, that does nothing but peruse Russian propaganda to understand it, but it was discovered that ... they unconsciously absorbed false material as if it was true, because that’s what the mind does, it treats data as data, even when it knows the data is a fiction. So the NATO group has to be debriefed in order to recalibrate their maps of the real to ... well, to the real. But who debriefs the debriefers? Who debriefs us? The inability to discriminate between plausible and crazy plus the impossibility of knowing what’s real in this perpetual fog of information warfare causes anxiety and fear, which people counter with narratives to comfort the afflicted soul. Then it’s called “truth.”
Key Articles From Years Past
Older healthy women who consume two or more diet drinks per day are at higher risk for heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascular problems, according to a new study. These women were ... 50 percent more likely to die from a disease associated with heart problems than women who rarely - or never - drank artificially flavored beverages. The study of 59,614 post-menopausal women ... is, thus far, the largest study conducted on heart health and diet beverage consumption. Over the last decade, an increased awareness of the dangers of refined sugar has led the popularity of diet beverages. Between 1999 and 2010, diet drink consumption increased from 17.8 percent to 21.2 percent for women and 13.9 percent to 19.0 percent for males, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Currently about 1 in 5 Americans drink some type of diet beverage each day. However, other research suggests one's intentions to avoid refined sugar from beverages may still result in many of the same health problems. Studies have found diet drinks can elevate one's risk for metabolic syndrome, which is associated with weight gain and an increased risk for diabetes. And other researchers believe artificial sweeteners may activate reward centers in the brain, which causes people to overeat.
Note: There has been a huge cover-up around the dangers of aspartame, the sugar substitute used in most diet drinks. Find loads of solid evidence about this on this webpage. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and health.
Inspiring Articles
In the nine years Mark Stroman has been on death row in Texas, he says he has watched 208 people walk past him on the way to be executed. This week it is his turn. Following 11 September, 2001, Stroman attacked three people, killing two of them. He was targeting anyone he considered an "Arab", calling it revenge for 9/11. "What Mark Stroman did was a hate crime, and hate crimes come from ignorance," said Rais Bhuiyan, 37, the only man to survive the shooting[s]. "His execution will not eradicate hate crimes from this world, we will just simply lose another human life." [Bhuiyan] needed many operations, has lost the sight in his right eye and still carries shotgun pellets in his face, but is now campaigning hard to prevent his attacker from being put to death. "This campaign is all about passion, forgiveness, tolerance and healing. We should not stay in the past," he said. "If I can forgive my offender who tried to take my life, we can all work together to forgive each other and move forward and take a new narrative on the 10th anniversary of 11 September." He had been in touch with Stroman, who he would like to see as "a spokesperson, an educator, teaching a lot of people as ignorant as him what is wrong". Stroman says he has asked himself the question a thousand times - would he be able to forgive the man who shot him in the face? He said he would find it very hard. "I tried to kill this man, and this man is now trying to save my life. This man is inspiring to me."
On a summer morning in 2013, Octavian Mihai entered a softly lit room. He swallowed a capsule of psilocybin, an ingredient found in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Then he put on an eye mask and headphones and lay down on a couch. Mr. Mihai, who had just finished treatment for Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, was participating in a study looking at whether the drug can reduce anxiety and depression in cancer patients. Throughout that eight-hour session, a psychiatrist and a social worker ... stayed by his side. The results from that study, and a similar small, controlled trial, were striking. About 80 percent of cancer patients showed clinically significant reductions in both psychological disorders, a response sustained some seven months after the single dose. Side effects were minimal. In both trials, the intensity of the mystical experience described by patients correlated with the degree to which their depression and anxiety decreased. Although cancer patients will not have access to therapeutically administered psilocybin anytime soon, the findings add vigor to applications to expand research in a multicenter trial with hundreds of participants. Psilocybin trials are underway in the United States and Europe for alcoholism, tobacco addiction and treatment-resistant depression. Other hallucinogens are also being studied for clinical application. This week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a large-scale trial investigating MDMA, the illegal party drug better known as Ecstasy, for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Nearly 50 Bay Area executives and professionals packed into a gymnasium last week at the state prison in Solano County and lined up, toe to toe, with a row of convicted criminals. For most entrepreneurs, it was a ... a place they had never been. But it was all too familiar for Kenyatta Leal, [who] left San Quentin in 2013 after 19 years behind bars. He was among the first to graduate from the Last Mile Program - a prison initiative [run by Defy Ventures, which is] intended to turn offenders into entrepreneurs. In one exercise, inmates and volunteers were given a prompt and told to step forward or backward depending on whether it applied to them. “I have been incarcerated,” read Brian Moll, Defy Ventures’ executive director for the Bay Area. Every inmate stepped forward. So did a handful of entrepreneurs. One by one, the professionals fell back - all but Leal, who stood alone in his beige suit. “No. No way,” said Oakland native Leonard Halfin, 46, who has been incarcerated for 25 years on a second-degree-murder charge. “I can’t believe that. I would have never thought he was one of us.” This, said Defy founder and chief executive Catherine Hoke, is the most important takeaway: It allows felons to realize that they have potential. Hoke’s hope is that participating in programs like Defy’s will help inmates formulate plans and sharpen professional skills that can help them become successful.
Note: Watch a great, short video on this impressive program. Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articleswhich will inspire you to make a difference.
Dr. Hadiyah-Nicole Green is one of fewer than 100 black female physicists in the country, and the recent winner of $1.1 million grant to further develop a technology she’s pioneered that uses laser-activated nanoparticles to treat cancer. Green, who lost her parents young, was raised by her aunt and uncle. While still at school, her aunt died from cancer, and three months later her uncle was diagnosed with cancer, too. Green went on to earn her degree in physics at Alabama A&M University, being crowned Homecoming Queen while she was at it, before going on full scholarship to University of Alabama in Birmingham to earn her Masters and Ph.D. There Green would become the first to work out how to deliver nanoparticles into cancer cells exclusively, so that a laser could be used to remove them, and then successfully carry out her treatment on living animals. As she takes on her growing responsibilities, Green still makes time to speak at schools, Boys & Girls Clubs and other youth events. “Young black girls don’t see those role models (scientists) as often as they see Beyonce or Nicki Minaj,” says Green. “It’s important to know that our brains are capable of more.”
Note: Explore a treasure trove of concise summaries of incredibly inspiring news articles which will inspire you to make a difference.
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