----The Coolinator's Lounge----

Chicken McNuggets Contain Disturbing Additives

2010-08-02T19:34:00.000-07:00

In response to reports that the ingredients may pose health risks, McDonald's China claims that additives in its chicken McNuggets are "harmless".

They said that the use of tertiary butylhydroquinone meets Chinese food safety standards. However, "the chemical is toxic to some extent," according to Liu Qingchun, a nutritionist at the General Hospital of Armed Police Forces.

Bloomberg reports:

"McNuggets served in the U.S. also contain tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based product, and dimethylpolysiloxane, an anti-foaming agent used in cosmetics and other goods.

McDonald's Holdings Co. Japan also serves chicken with the additives".

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/24/chicken-mcnuggets-sold-in-china-have-disturbing-additives.aspx

7 Secret Ways We Are Being Poisoned

2010-07-27T17:58:00.000-07:00

Activist Post

The objectivism of the scientific method seems to have been hijacked by corporations who often pay for scientists to support their products, as well as politicians who move through the revolving door between the private and public sector. Even worse is that sometimes the consumer protection agencies themselves are complicit.

The trust placed by consumers in scientific studies and Federal oversight committees has been violated in service to profit so that products are allowed to enter the marketplace with reduced safety standards. The synthetic chemicals we encounter on a daily basis in our food, water, and environment are increasingly shown to be disastrous to our physical and mental well-being. Volumes can be written -- indeed have been written -- by experts in both mainstream and alternative medicine who have documented the sleight of hand used to hoodwink consumers and threaten our health. The categories below are worth deeper investigation as prime examples of what we might face as a species if this chemical bombardment continues.

* GMO foods -- Monsanto started as a chemical company that brought the world poisons like Agent Orange and Roundup. Now they are more well known for their domination of Genetically Modified agriculture, owning nearly 90% of staple GMO crops such as corn, soy, and cotton. In independent studies GMO "frankenfood" has been linked to organ failure, and a recent Russian study has concluded near-total sterility in GMO-soy-fed hamsters by the third generation. Despite these and many other legitimate health concerns, it is unlikely that the Monsanto-controlled FDA will curb the growth of GMO foods, while the USDA's biotechnology risk assessment research arm has a paltry $3 million at its disposal. Of course the industry-funded studies show that the effects GMO on human health are "negligible."

* Food additives -- When most of us think of harmful food additives we think of Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) which is still in many processed foods, but unfortunately MSG appears to be the least of the poisons now found in our food. In 2008 Melamine was found in infant formula and some food products from China; the FDA went on record to say it was OK, despite sickening tens of thousands. Dangerous food additives appear in nearly all processed foods with even the most common food dyes Red 40, Yellow 5 and Yellow 6 being linked to cancer. Most recently 92,000 pounds of frozen chicken was recalled because it contained "blue plastic pieces," while McDonald's Chicken McNuggets have been found to have "silly putty" chemicals in them. In fact, some researchers estimate that today's chicken is so full of chemicals that it only contains 51% actual meat.

* Fluoride -- Not all fluoride is bad; only the type promoted by dentistry and added to our water and food supply. Calcium fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral, while its synthetic counterpart, sodium fluoride (silicofluoride), is an industrial-grade hazardous waste material made during the production of fertilizer. It's past history includes patented use as rat poison and insecticide. There are many blind- and double-blind studies that show sodium fluoride has a cumulative effect on the human body leading to allergies, gastrointestinal disorders, bone weakening, cancer, and neurological problems. In this case, the EPA's Union of scientists issued a white paper condemning fluoridation of drinking water. However, as a hazardous waste, it is extremely expensive to dispose of as such. And here might be a clue as to why this chemical, more toxic than lead and almost on par with arsenic, has been disposed of for our consumption.

* Mercury -- A dangerous heavy metal in its natural quicksilver form, but more so as the neurotoxin, methylmercury, released into the environment by human activity. In both organic and inorganic form, mercury wreaks havoc with the nervous system -- especially the developing nervous system of a fetus. It penetrates all living cells of the human body, and has been documented most as increasing the risk for autism. This calls into question mercury's use in dental fillings, vaccines, and just about anything containing high fructose corn syrup -- a near staple in the American diet . . . including baby food. But the Corn Refiners Association naturally supports this chemical that is "dangerous at any level."

* Aspartame -- The king of artificial sweeteners was allowed to the market in 1981 when the U.S. Commissioner of Food and Drugs, Arthur Hull Hayes, overruled FDA panel suggestions, as well as consumer concerns. Aspartame is a neurotoxin that interacts with natural organisms, as well as synthetic medications, producing a wide range of proven disorders and syndromes. So who installed this commissioner that would rule against scientists and the public? Donald Rumsfeld, CEO of G.D. Searle; the maker of Aspartame. Rumsfeld was on Reagan's transition team, and the day after Reagan took office he appointed the new FDA Commissioner in order to "call in his markers" with one of the most egregious cases of profit-over-safety ever recorded. Aspartame is now nearly ubiquitous, moving beyond sugarless products and into general foods, beverages, pharmaceuticals, and even products for children. It recently has been renamed to the more pleasant sounding AminoSweet.

* Personal care and cleaning products -- Everyday household items and cosmetic products are applied directly to the skin, absorbed through the scalp, and inhaled. The Story of Cosmetics uses an animated video to tell a haunting tale of industrial violations and complicit "public safety" groups . . . and still only tells half of that story. The list of common products and their chemical components is encyclopedic. The sum total of the overwhelming presence of these chemicals has been linked to nearly every allergy, chronic affliction, and disease known to man. Most recently, household cleaning products have been linked to breast cancer and ADHD in children.

* Airborne pollutants -- In a NASA article titled "Airborne Pollutants Know No Borders" they stated that, "Any substance introduced into the atmosphere has the potential to circle the Earth." The jet stream indeed connects all of us. There is one category of airborne pollution that has been conspiracy theory despite a voluminous number of unclassified documents from 1977 Senate hearings: chemical spraying (chemtrails) by both private and commercial aircraft. Recent admissions by public officials strengthen the case. Fallout from these chemical trails has been tested and shows very high levels of barium and aluminum. Interesting to note that Monsanto announced that they recently developed an aluminum-resistant gene to be introduced. Chemtrails might seem like abject paranoia, but there is a current example of chemical spraying that is undeniable: the spraying of Corexit oil dispersant over the Gulf. This process of aerial application can be likened to crop-dusting, which we know has been going on for nearly 100 years. Wars abroad even seem to be affecting global air quality, as military munitions such as depleted uranium have entered the upper atmosphere, spreading around the planet. The observable effects of depleted uranium are not pleasant. Airborne pollutants have been linked to allergies, genetic mutations, and infertility.

This is all leading to scientific, governmental, and medical management of the health and rights of the individual. It is ironic (or coincidental) that when one becomes sick due to the unnatural products listed above, the mainstream medical establishment aims to treat the afflictions with more unnatural chemicals. Furthermore, some of the people at high levels of American government and academia such as John P. Holdren, the current White House Science Czar, have advocated population control via "pollution particles" as far back as 1977 in books such as Ecoscience. Holdren's views of humanity could make one question the intentionality of the poisons in our environment.

http://www.activistpost.com/2010/07/7-secret-ways-we-are-being-poisoned.html

Europe freezes out Goldman Sachs

2010-07-19T18:06:00.000-07:00

European governments are turning their backs on Goldman Sachs, the all-conquering investment bank that has suffered a series of blows to its reputation, capped by the biggest ever fine imposed on a Wall Street firm.

According to data from Dealogic, Greece, Spain, France and Italy have all denied the bank a lead role in their recent sovereign bond sales.

Last Thursday, Goldman agreed to pay a $550m fine to settle US regulators' claims that the bank misled investors in a mortgage-backed security. Goldman admitted that its marketing materials were incomplete, because they failed to state that the same third party that helped choose the assets had taken a bet against them.

But governments have also been shocked at the emergence of past transactions between Goldman and Greece and Italy, where products the bank helped to sell aided both in hiding government debt. Greece, which used Goldman in a bond sale this year, is practically at war with the bank. A sharp contrast with the situation months before, when Goldman bankers dined with the prime minister in a private meeting overlooking the Acropolis. The relationship broke down, though, after news leaked earlier this year that Goldman was about to strike a bond sale deal with China's sovereign fund – which never materialised.

Spain, which used Goldman among its top 10 bookrunners last year, has not done so in 2010, while Italy has not given the bank a leading role since 2007. France has not used Goldman in any lead position over the past three years, and it seems doubtful that it will do so in the near future. "French people would riot in the streets if we chose Goldman," said a person familiar with the French treasury.

The French government has said it will only use banks that cap management and traders' bonuses. This year, Goldman limited the pay and bonus compensation to its London partners at £1m, though other bankers and traders can receive much more, provided they are not partners. Goldman has also been criticised of for taking short positions, or betting on a price fall, against some European sovereign bonds – after taking part in a bond sale, a person involved in sovereign debt sales said. The bank says it has presence in the European sovereign bank market and that it has recently participated in deals in Britain, Portugal and Belgium.

Countries such as Spain and France have also shied away from Goldman because their traditionally conservative treasury departments prefer to steer clear of risky investments. The French treasury, for instance, only issues debt in euros, staying away, like Spain, from the complex foreign exchange or swap deals that brought trouble to Greece and Italy. "The Spanish treasury can't justify in parliament why, if things go wrong, they have a multimillion-euro position in Indian rupees, for example," a sovereign bond banker said.

Governments also stick to plain-vanilla deals, with little complexity, in order to keep their prized AAA rating, reducing their borrowing costs as much as possible, a source familiar with the French Tresor said.

IKB, the failed bank bailed out by the German government, recently considered suing Goldman because of its exposure to the structured products sold by the US bank. Following the settlement between Goldman and the SEC, the US securities regulator, last week, IKB said the German lender was "reviewing the settlement documents".

Germany has only made one syndicated bond sale in the last three years, in 2009, when it appointed Deutsche Bank, Citibank, HSBC and BofA-Merrill Lynch as lead managers.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jul/18/goldman-sachs-europe-sovereign-bond-sales?intcmp=239

Oil “tar balls” far as the eye can see in Destin, Florida, and yet the beaches remain open and kids play in the toxic sludge.

2010-06-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Operative Geithner Rebuffed in Berlin on Mission to Make World Safe for Derivatives

2010-06-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
May 28, 2010

On the most important stop of last week’s desperate mission to make the world safe for derivatives, US Treasury Secretary Geithner has been dealt a decisive rebuff. Geithner’s obvious attempt to sabotage the recent prohibition enacted by the German government against naked credit default swaps (among the most toxic of derivatives) was rejected in Berlin on Thursday by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble.

At their joint press conference, Geithner and Schäuble could hardly hide the atmosphere of tension and hostility, even though both were determined to mask the clash for domestic political reasons. A Handelsblatt blog pointed to the language of mutual dislike, and this newspaper headlined that the transatlantic conflict was escalating. The Washington Post published a photograph on Friday, May 28, 2010 showing the German minister scowling at the feckless featherweight Geithner. Geithner assured the journalists that there was a “broad agreement on regulatory reform,” but in reality there was no such common ground.

Schäuble has now emerged as the strongman Continue reading Wall Street Operative Geithner Rebuffed in Berlin on Mission to Make World Safe for Derivatives

http://tarpley.net/2010/05/29/geithner-rebuffed-in-berlin/

Seize and Liquidate Goldman Sachs

2010-05-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
April 27, 2010

Today’s Senate hearings, carried on CNBC, Bloomberg, and C-SPAN, represent the first major exposure of the American people to the scandalous frauds of the derivatives casino, including synthetic collateralized debt obligations (synthetic CDOs or CDO²). These are things most people have heard very little about. They begin to open up the shocking reality behind such shopworn euphemisms like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and “troubled assets.” Reactionaries in general and Republicans in particular have done everything possible to hide the role of derivatives, which must be considered the main cause of the financial panic of September 2008 which brought down Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG, after felling Bear Stearns in March of the same year. The reactionary legend, repeated yesterday on the Senate floor by financier minion GOP Sen. Gregg of New Hampshire, is that the crisis was caused by poor people taking out subprime mortgages and then defaulting, bringing down the entire Anglo-American banking system and triggering the bailouts. Either that, or too much government spending was too blame.

A mass of kited derivatives blew up in September 2008

This Big Lie has come from such propaganda sources as the Limbaugh Institute of Retarded Reactionary Ranting. But the $1.5 trillion in subprime mortgages were dwarfed by the $15 trillion US residential real estate market, to say nothing of the $1.5 thousand trillion world derivatives bubble. But, starting with Bush-Goldman Sachs Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the talk has been of a “housing correction,” not a derivatives panic. It must be pointed out that derivatives are nothing but wagers, bets placed from a distance on securities which themselves are often not mortgages, but rather other derivatives. The bettor buying a synthetic CDO or CDO² does not own the underlying mortgages or mortgage-backed securities, any more than someone who bets on a racehorse owns part of the horse. Blankfein and others tried to portray derivatives as a service to hedgers and end-users, but it’s clear that the vast majority of derivatives involve neither hedgers nor users, but only bettors on both side of the transaction. It is in any case this mass of kited derivatives which blew up in 2008, bringing on the present world economic depression.

Goldman Sachs executives are babbling cretins

The mystique of Goldman Sachs is based in large part on their reputation as the smartest financiers on Wall Street. After today’s hearings, this mystique has permanently dissipated. The Goldman executives babbled. They sounded dumb. They stalled and stammered and went into contortions to avoid giving straight answers to simple questions. They were mendacious and evasive when they did speak. Financial powers around the world will note carefully the refusal of three out of four Goldman executives on one panel to state that they had a duty to defend the interests of their clients. Who will want to do business with such a gang? Goldman Sachs got $10 billion of taxpayer money in low-interest loans under the Bush-Paulson TARP. Part of that money went to pay for obscene bonuses for Goldman executives like the ones on display today. The argument for bonuses is that they must be paid to retain the highly talented personnel, virtual geniuses, who are indispensable for Wall Street speculative success. But these are no geniuses, they are imbeciles. No more bonuses should be paid by banks saved through public money.

Don’t buy any used cars from Lloyd Blankfein

Sleaziest of all was Goldman’s risk-monger in chief, Lloyd Blankfein, who pretended not to know that derivatives are often kept hidden off balance sheet. The morally insane Blankfein testified that his role was to provide the firm’s clients with “the risk they wanted.” Other GS witnesses represented the firm’s role as “distributing risk.” But it turned out that they were manufacturing risk through the very existence and activities of Goldman Sachs, which had the result of pyramiding the total risk of the US financial system into intergalactic space. It is time to regulate much of that unbearable risk out of existence with appropriate regulatory legislation. In the meantime, no sane person would buy a used car from Blankfein. Nor should they believe his assurance that the “recession” has ended.

But when at the end of the day Blankfein finally suggested to Sen. Tester that synthetic CDOs might be outlawed, we should accept his proposal immediately.

Today’s hearings reveal the Goldman Sachs gunslingers and whiz kids as ignorant gangsters and con artists, notable only for their ability to practice massive fraud with impudence. These sleazy mediocrities do not deserve bonuses paid for by taxpayers. Rather, it is time to shut them down and put them in the dock.

If Goldman Sachs had cared about is clients, it would have urgently warned them to unload their subprime risk by late 2006 or thereabouts. Instead, Goldman was busily increasing its clients’ risk by selling them more toxic CDOs out of its own inventory warehouse.

Goldman Sachs: bookies who stack the deck and fix the games

As the philandering Sen. Ensign pointed out, comparing Wall Street to Las Vegas is a slander on the croupiers of Las Vegas, where everyone knows or should know that the game is rigged so that the house always wins. To use the comparison introduced by Sen. McCaskill, Goldman Sachs was operating as the gambling house, or the bookie. At the same time, Goldman was betting for their own account. But much worse was the fact that Goldman was stacking the decks, loading the dice, fixing the games on which the bets were placed, and bribing the umpires.

As Ensign put it in a rare moment of lucidity, the subprime mortgage was bad. But the collapse of subprime would not have had anything like its actual destructive effect on the US economy if it had not been compounded by the mass of synthetic derivatives that were piled on top of subprime.

No national or social purpose served by Goldman Sachs and toxic derivatives bets
The broader issue raised by today’s hearing is: what human purpose is served by the existence of Goldman Sachs, which concocts toxic synthetic CDOs for the purpose of allowing speculators, who are often lied to and duped, to bet for or against them. Goldman Sachs can only be described as a speculative parasite which promotes the activities of other speculative parasites, such as the John Paulson hedge fund at the expense of the public and of its other clients. It was a crime to inject $10 billion of Treasury money into Goldman Sachs. It was another crime for the Fed to lend Goldman untold billions (just how many billions Bernanke still refuses to disclose) to keep them afloat and enable more predatory profits. These crimes must stop, and the public money must be clawed back. Most important, it is time to shut down the derivatives rackets.

Goldman got $12.5 billion from taxpayers for AIG credit default swaps

Useful questions from GOP Sen. Coburn pointed to another kind of derivative: the infamous credit default swap (CDS). These CDS are what brought down AIG, whose London hedge fund had issues $3 trillion in derivatives. When the government bailed out AIG, part of that $180 billion of taxpayer money was used for payouts to the CDS counterparties of AIG, biggest among them Goldman, which got $12.5 billion from the US taxpayer. That was 100 cents on the dollar on a mass of toxic CDS. Coburn wanted to know why Goldman got all their money back, while GM bondholders took a bath as GM went bankrupt. That was, of course, a matter of Goldman’s political clout through GS alum Henry Paulson and Obama Car Czar Steve “The Rat” Rattner, backed up by the historic preponderance of finance capital over industrial capital in this country since Andrew Carnegie sold out to JP Morgan over a century ago.

Derivatives and zombie banks: the toll

Thanks to Goldman Sachs, the other Wall Street zombie banks, and their derivatives, the financial panic of 2008 has turned into a world economic depression of unimaginable proportions. The unemployed and underemployed in the US alone are surely in excess of 20 million. Five to six million home foreclosures are already done or in the pipeline, throwing tens of millions of Americans out of their homes. World trade has been seriously impacted. The budgets of California, New York, Illinois, and many other states are in crisis, with massive layoffs of teachers and other state employees. An entire generation is being destroyed. Now, Greek bonds are trading at junk levels under the attack of speculative predators including Soros, Greenlight Capital, SAC, and the protagonists of today’s hearings – Paulson and Co and Goldman Sachs itself. The attack on Greece and the euro represents the leading edge of the second wave of the depression, which is now arriving in much the same way that the second wave of the 1930s depression was unleashed by the Vienna Kreditanstalt bankruptcy in May of 1931, about 79 years ago and just a year and a half into that depression.

The goal of the Republicans is to portray themselves as stern judges of Wall Street, even as they line up in a unanimous phalanx to protect the finance jackals from any meaningful regulation whatsoever — as seen in yesterday’s vote to block cloture on derivatives re-regulation and reform. The goal of the Democrats is to expose the sociopathic evil of Goldman Sachs and the rest of Wall Street while preening themselves as defenders of the public interest, without however banning credit default swaps, banning synthetic CDOs, and imposing a Wall Street sales tax on all remaining derivatives and asset transactions.

To this degree, today’s hearings are being conducted in bad faith by both major parties. However, the dynamic of the resulting spectacle has the result of educating and mobilizing public opinion against the predatory practices which are the essence of Wall Street, even a year and a half after the banking panic of September 2008 and the monster bailout of zombie banks which soon followed. What is required is a new edition of the anti-banker sentiment set off by the Senate Banking Committee hearings conducted from January 1933 to May 1934 by committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora, which unmasked the corruption of Wall Street. Persons of good will need to get active now to push this process as far as possible while these social dynamics are working. It is time to hit the zombie banks, the hedge funds, and their derivatives as hard as possible, before the second wave of the depression hits. The program necessary to fight the depression and break the strangle-hold of Wall Street on the US economy and political system is given on my web site.

Mitch McConnell on the bailout: “Harry, I think we need to do this, we should try to do this, and we can do this.”

During a break the senators filed out, and the GOP reactionary lockstep once again blocked cloture for a final debate on the Wall Street reform bill, weak as it is. Many activists of the Tea Party naively believe that they have been fighting for a year and a half that they have been fighting to take back the Republican Party. If that is what they believe, today’s second cloture vote proves that they have gotten nowhere in their efforts. Despite their charades, the GOP are the bodyguards of the Wall Street predators. Tea baggers who think they can break the Wall Street grip on the Republicans are pathetic dupes, and they need to wake up, pronto.

When Paulson went to the leaders of Congress to demand a $700 billion bailout for Goldman and his Wall Street cronies, GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was “deeply frightened” by the apocalyptic briefing delivered by Paulson and Bernanke. When Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid started talking about how difficult it would be to get so much money in a hurry, McConnell urged an immediate bailout, saying: “Harry, I think we need to do this, we should try to do this, and we can do this.” (Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail [New York: Viking, 2009], p. 442) The GOP was the original party of the bailout, and they have not repented, as best seen through the continuance of McConnell, one of the key midwives of the bailout, as Republican Senate Majority Leader. This is the same McConnell who went to Wall Street recently to meet with zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas, pledging to block derivatives reforms in exchange for big bucks contributed to the GOP’s campaign coffers. Tea baggers who think the GOP has changed or is moving to their side are sadly deluded.

Today, the market fetishism of the crackpot Austrian school has taken a severe blow. Now that Blankfein‘s public image has been soiled by Goldman’s scurrilous and scatological emails, the time is ripe for the radical reform of derivatives and the zombie banks. This is a matter of national survival.

Now that Goldman Sachs is masquerading as a bank holding company, it is subject to FDIC rules. If Goldman’s derivative hoard is marked to market, it is bankrupt. The FDIC should therefore seize Goldman and liquidate it under chapter 7 of the US Code. Sheila Bair should not wait for Friday.

http://tarpley.net/2010/04/27/seize-and-liquidate-goldman-sachs/

Individuals are now considered mentally ill......

2010-05-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) Psychiatrists have been working on the fourth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and, in it, they hope to add a whole slew of new psychiatric disorders. Unfortunately, many of these disorders are merely differences in personality and behavior among people.

The new edition may include "disorders" like "oppositional defiant disorder", which includes people who have a pattern of "negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures." Some of the "symptoms" of this disorder including losing one's temper, annoying people and being "touchy".

Other "disorders" being considered include personality flaws like antisocial behavior, arrogance, cynicism or narcissism. There are even categories for people who binge eat and children who have temper tantrums.

Children are already over-diagnosed for allegedly being bipolar or having attention-deficit disorder (ADD), which results in their being prescribed dangerous antipsychotic drugs. To categorize even more childhood behaviors as psychiatric disorders will only further increase the number of children who will be needlessly prescribed antipsychotic drugs.

Each new revision of DSM has included controversial new additions, and this newest version is no exception. In fact, the manual has increased considerably in size over the years. What is most disturbing about the current proposed revisions is the blatantly brave, new way in which so-called medical professionals are viewing individual characteristics.

Children who exhibit unique eccentricities in accordance with their unique personalities, in general, would be categorized as having a mental illness. If this criteria had been used in past centuries to diagnose illness, there may have never been people like Mozart or Einstein who ventured outside the norm and came up with new or unique ideas.

A Washington Post article captured the essence of this concept perfectly in the following quote:

"If seven-year-old Mozart tried composing his concertos today, he might be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated into barren normality."

The perception that character differences are somehow a psychic illnesses not only absolves individuals of personal responsibility, but it takes away their unique personhood. It reduces people into subjects that cannot think for themselves, but rather have to be controlled through drugs.

Which brings us to perhaps the biggest thrust behind the DSM revisions: the drug companies. Pharmaceutical companies stand to gain a lot for having virtually every person categorized as mentally ill and in need of drugs.

A more accurate approach to the situation is to assess the psychiatrists and drug lords who are contriving such nonsense as being the true possessors of mental illness. Perhaps these people are the ones that need to be institutionalized

http://www.naturalnews.com/028803_psychiatry_disease.html

Original Source:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/26/AR2010022603369.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Presidential cancer advisors find courage to warn about environmental risks of cancer chemicals

2010-05-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) When a government panel of experts finds the courage to tell the truth about cancer, it's an event so rare that it becomes newsworthy. Late last week, a report from the President's Cancer Panel (PCP) broke ranks with the sick-care cancer establishment and dared to say something that natural health advocates have been warning about for decades: That Americans are "bombarded" with cancer-causing chemicals and radiation, and if we hope to reduce cancer rates, we must eliminate cancer-causing chemicals in foods, medicines, personal care products and our work and home environments.

In a directive to President Obama, the report states, "The panel urges you most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase healthcare costs, cripple our nation's productivity, and devastate American lives."

When I first read that, I just about fell out of my chair. Government-appointed experts are really saying that there are cancer-causing chemicals in our food and water? That simple fact has been vehemently denied by the cancer industry, processed food giants, personal care product companies and of course the fluoride lobby -- all of which insist their chemicals are perfectly safe.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028765_environmental_chemicals_cancer.html

NEW PINBALL MANUFACTURER

2010-05-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

pinballnews.com

The company is MarsaPlay of Almería, Spain who manufacture and distribute a range of coin-op equipment from darts games to jukeboxes. Now though, they have started to build pinball machines and their first is a remake of the 1986 Inder game Canasta '86', using modern technology to bring it into the 21st century.

Called New Canasta (basket), the new game retains the basketball theme and the same basic layout from Inder's original, but includes a number of significant new innovations.

For starters, underneath the playfield you won't find the usual bird's nest of cables to be seen on nearly all electro-mechanical and solid state pinballs. Instead, a number of large printed circuit boards (PCBs) with short ribbon cable interconnects provide all the switch, illumination and solenoid connections.

Incandescent lamps are replaced by LEDs to prolong their life and reduce both the heat and the power consumption, while solenoids have their own protection system to prevent damage to other components in the case of a short circuit.

..........

The new game is clearly designed to be easy to maintain by non-pinball specialists, with a simple playfield layout, contactless switches and LED lighting. It also incorporates a new menu system for testing or setting the game's features and pricing.

Although built in Spain ostensibly for the home market, the playfield artwork is all in English which would suggest MarsaPlay has export sales in mind as well.

http://www.pinballnews.com/news/newcanasta1.html

YouTube censors video interview with Jeffrey Smith about GMOs

2010-05-04T10:39:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) Within hours after posting our video interview with Jeffrey Smith, creator of Seeds of Deception and author of Genetic Roulette, YouTube pulled the video. Attempts to play the video are now met with the following message: "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation."

That is, of course, an outright lie.

This video features myself (the Health Ranger) talking with Jeffrey Smith about the health dangers of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) at the recent Health Freedom Expo. NaturalNews staff filmed the segment, and we used intro music legally licensed from a music production company. There was no violation of the YouTube terms of agreement.

There was, however, some straightforward discussion about the dangers of genetically modified foods. Jeffrey Smith (www.SeedsOfDeception.com) explained in the video how GM foods have been proven in animal studies to damage internal organs, cause infertility problems and increase rates of death among those who consume such foods.

This was all just too much for YouTube to handle, apparently. The truth isn't welcome on YouTube. While the network can host any number of idiotic videos in the form of street fights, traffic accidents, personal video blogs and profanity-filled flame wars, it has no ability to stomach the simple truth that GMOs are dangerous for your health.

The YouTube agenda exposed
Let there be no question about the YouTube agenda. Owned by Google, this video network is playing right into the hands of the big corporate agenda in America -- an agenda that demands consumers be kept in the dark about the dangers of GMOs.

U.S. government representatives, in fact, are right now attempting to force a new global rule at the CODEX meetings taking place this very week. They're trying to outlaw all "no GMOs" labeling and food claims, thereby making it illegal for a food company to tell consumers that its products are non-GMO. (http://www.naturalnews.com/028716_G...)

NaturalNews to launch its own UNCENSORED video network
This YouTube censorship is one of the main reasons why we at NaturalNews have decided to launch our own uncensored video network.

The network is under development and will be launched this June. To learn more about the upcoming NaturalNews video network, read this story: http://www.naturalnews.com/028717_v...

The video interview with Jeffrey Smith will be re-launched on our own video network where the whole world will soon be able to hear what Jeffrey Smith had to say about GMOs that YouTube desperately wants to silence.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028718_YouTube_censorship.html

Fight the Derivatives Cancer with a Wall Street Sales Tax, Plus Bans on Hedge Funds, Credit Default Swaps, and Synthetic CDOs

2010-04-26T06:40:00.000-07:00

The Obama administration has been posturing this week about the life and death issue of Wall Street reform. Obama’s predicament is that of a Wall Street puppet who has been put into the White House thanks among other things to almost $1 million of contributions from the infamous Goldman Sachs – but who now needs to make a show of fighting his own Wall Street patrons for political reasons. Of course, Obama’s health-care reform was largely a bailout of insurance companies, which are themselves a key part of Wall Street. But Obama is now pretending to quarrel with Wall Street to shore up his waning credibility, partly because many House Democrats are desperately seeking anti-banker, economic populist street creds in order to avoid defeat in November. So far, the results have been largely feckless and inadequate.

The urgent problem raised by all this is the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble. The financial crisis which struck the United States and the world in September and October 2008 was in fact a world a derivatives panic. This panic marked the first phase of a world economic depression caused by derivatives speculation. The second phase of this depression, which is now beginning, can also be attributed in large part to derivatives, since derivatives are the main tool being used in the speculative attacks on Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and other nations, building up towards a chaotic collapse of the euro.

Derivatives are the Cause of the World Depression of Our Time
Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.

Asset-Backed Securities
Derivatives can be defined as any financial paper which is based on other financial paper. In other words, they are financial instruments whose value depends upon or is derived from the value of other financial instruments. Any kind of securitization results in the creation of derivatives. If individual mortgages are wrapped up and packaged together as a mortgage-backed security (MBS), that is a derivative. Any asset-backed security (ABS), be it based on car loans, credit card debt, or anything else, also qualifies as a derivative.

Beyond this, there are generally speaking two kinds of derivatives. The first type includes the derivatives which are traded more or less openly on exchanges like the Chicago Board Options Exchange, etc. These include options, futures, and indices, plus all the combinations of these. These are what expire in each quadruple witching hour in the markets. This type of derivative has generally amounted to about $600 trillion of speculation in recent years.

OTC Derivatives
Then there are the so-called over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, otherwise known as structured notes, counterparty derivatives, or designer derivatives. These often take the form of contracts which are kept secret by the counterparties, and which are often not included on the balance sheets of banks and other institutions which enter into these contracts. This type of derivative is currently not reportable to any regulatory agency. This secrecy is a result of the successful effort by Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan to block the modest proposal of Brooksley Born of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to bring the OTC derivatives into the sunlight during the second Clinton administration. Since these derivatives are not reportable at the present time, we must guess at their amount, and the best guess is that OTC derivatives make up almost $1 quadrillion of ultra-toxic speculation.

CDOs, CDS, and SIVs
OTC derivatives include collateralized debt obligations (CDOs),which often represent the packaging together of large numbers of mortgage backed securities, along with other debt instruments. A CDO can also be concocted out of other CDOs, in which case it qualifies as a synthetic CDO or CDO squared (CDO²). Notice that a synthetic CDO is not really an investment, but rather a form of gambling, in which a speculator in effect places a bet on the performance of some other financial instruments. This fact exposes the big lie inherent in the widespread reactionary myth that the current depression was caused by poor people taking out subprime mortgages on slum properties and then defaulting on these loans, thus bringing down the US and British banking systems. This fantastic story ignores the fact that derivatives were only a wager placed by speculative bettors from afar on mortgage backed securities which included some subprime notes.

Credit default swaps represent bets on whether a given asset or company will go bankrupt or not. As such, they can be used as insurance against such an eventuality, or else they can be used to make money on the insolvency. CDS are therefore a form of insurance, but they are issued by counterparties who have not registered as insurance companies and who have not met the legal and capital requirements which are necessary to function as an insurance company. It ought therefore to be clear that CDS have been totally illegal all along, and have flourished only because of an outrageous failure by state insurance regulators to enforce applicable laws against the privileged class of financiers.

Structured investment vehicles (SIVs) are another type of derivative, commonly used to wrap up masses of CDOs and synthetic CDOs and then to park them off-balance sheet, where they can be hidden from regulatory and public scrutiny.

All Derivatives Illegal under the New Deal, 1936-1982
All kinds of derivatives, be they exchange traded or over-the-counter, were strictly banned and outlawed in the United States between 1936 and 1982 thanks to a wise measure enacted under the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the wake of several attempts by predatory and sociopathic speculators to manipulate the prices of wheat and corn during the First Great Depression, the Commodities Exchange Act of 1936 outlawed the selling of options on agricultural products. This law had the effect of blocking most derivative speculation, until the counterattack of free-market fanatics gathered steam under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, an ideological zealot of the Austrian and Chicago schools. The very existence of derivatives today and their resulting ability to bring on a new world depression are thus directly attributable to the reckless and irresponsible dismantling of the New Deal regulatory regime. It should be added that derivatives were also banned in many states as a result of laws prohibiting gambling or forbidding bucket shops, which were betting parlors in which side bets could be placed on stock market fluctuations.

If Obama wants to pretend to have something in common with Franklin D. Roosevelt, he ought to be proposing measures to ban at least the most poisonous types of derivatives, and to discourage the others. Notice that he does nothing of the kind. Obama’s Cooper Union speech of April 22, 2010 approvingly cites Warren Buffett’s remark that derivatives represent financial weapons of mass destruction. But Obama then says that derivatives nevertheless have an important and legitimate role to play. So which is it? Some years back, French President Jacques Chirac rightly referred to derivatives as “financial AIDS.” What useful purpose can these toxic instruments possibly serve?

Again: in his 1936 re-election speech in Madison Square Garden in New York City, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously noted that the forces of organized money hated him, and that he welcomed their hatred. Obama, in sharp contrast, called on the Wall Street predators to join him in his efforts, compounding this with the monstrous thesis that Wall Street and Main Street are in the same boat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The recent Goldman Sachs scandal has underlined once again that the Wall Street investment houses serve no useful social purpose whatsoever. They exist solely for the purpose of pursuing speculative profits through a process of looting and pillaging the rest of the economy. The Wall Street zombie banks are monopolizing US credit, while Main Street goes broke.

Thanks no doubt to the efforts of certain House Democrats, the reform bill is likely to contain two points which can qualify as positive half measures.

Force Derivatives Out in the Open
The first is the effort to end the secrecy of OTC derivatives by forcing these instruments to be traded on public exchanges or through clearing houses. This is a step in the right direction. But this provision needs to be strengthened by making all derivatives of any type whatsoever reportable to a central regulatory authority. This would include, for example, the derivatives held by hedge funds. In 1998, the Connecticut-based hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management went bankrupt with more than $1 trillion worth of derivatives, blowing a huge hole in the international banking system, and causing Greenspan to rush in with a crony bailout. Nobody has any idea of the amount of derivatives held by hedge funds today. Highly leveraged hedge funds are perfectly capable of causing a worldwide systemic crisis with derivatives, so they must emphatically be made to report their holdings.

This reporting requirement should also include the derivatives held by non-financial corporations, whose shareholders deserve to know if and when management is dabbling in these toxic instruments. Some years back, the Gibson Greeting Card Company took a huge loss on derivatives, so this is no theoretical danger.

In addition, all derivatives must henceforth be clearly listed ON the balance sheets of banks and all other financial institutions. The intolerable practice of hiding derivatives off-balance-sheet must be immediately brought to an end.

The other positive half measure which might survive Obama’s usual quest for a “bipartisan” sellout is the so-called Volcker Rule, which specifies that commercial banks with insured deposits are not allowed to engage in proprietary speculation with their own money. Depending on how this is worded, this may include a long overdue ban on derivatives speculation by commercial banks. Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the chair of the Senate Agriculture committee—who is fighting for her political life against a primary challenge this spring—has been backing a provision that would explicitly prohibit commercial banks from engaging in derivatives speculation. These ideas go in the right direction. But we need to do much more. We need to go back to the full New Deal regulations embodied in the Glass-Steagall Act. This law stated that a financial institution could be either or a commercial bank, or an investment house, or an insurance company, but never more than one of these. In other words, the suicidal folly of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed Glass-Steagall, must be rolled back.

Outlaw Credit Default Swaps
Beyond this, we must urgently address the catastrophic effects and obvious illegality of credit default swaps. More than a year ago, Senator Warner of Virginia asked Fed boss Bernanke about the advisability of creating a “bright line prohibition” against these CDS. Remember that CDS are already illegal, because they always involve an investor masquerading as an insurance company without having fulfilled the legal and capital requirements that would be demanded from a real insurance company. Credit default swaps have cost the US taxpayer almost $200 billion in the case of AIG alone, because of the bankruptcy of the AIG London-based hedge fund which had issued more than $3 trillion of derivatives – a total greater than the gross domestic product of France.

Credit default swaps are also a clear and present danger today, since they are the principal tool being used by wolf packs of banks and hedge funds against Greece and other nations, accelerating the arrival of the dreaded second wave of the world economic depression. Unless credit default swaps are banned now, they will be increasingly used for speculative attacks against the bonded debt of American states like California, New York, Illinois, and all the others. Before long, credit default swaps will be used by international speculators to attack the value and integrity of United States Treasury securities, threatening our country with the calamity of national bankruptcy. If the United States fails to shut down credit default swaps with timely legislation now, credit default swaps will be used to help destroy the United States and human civilization in general.

Ban Synthetic CDOs
The synthetic CDO or CDO² must also be outlawed. These are the toxic instruments which brought down Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers in the great derivatives panic of 2008. What are we waiting for to ban this kind of highly destructive derivative? Such a ban is easy to formulate: “Any collateralized debt obligation which contains other collateralized debt obligations is hereby prohibited.” End of story. This language recalls the approach of the very successful Public Utility Holding Company Act of the New Deal. One layer of CDO is more than enough risk, and it must not be further compounded.

Another ban which is long overdue and which should be included in the current legislation is the outlawing of the Adjustable Rate Mortgage (ARM). The ARM is another catastrophic innovation of recent decades which inherently carries with it an intolerable risk for any homeowner. No American family should be deprived of a roof over their heads because of the unpredictable and volatile fluctuations of interest rates over the life of a mortgage. These ARMs shift an unacceptable risk to the mortgage buyer. Fixed-rate mortgages should be the only legal kind, and any reset or change in interest rates on a residential mortgage should be strictly outlawed. While we are at it, we also need to outlaw the high-interest payday loan, a type of devastating usury to which the poorest and most defenseless parts of our population are now exposed. The outlawing of payday loans should take the form of a de facto federal usury law establishing an upper limit of no more than 10% on any promissory note or credit card. This was the limit traditionally set by state usury laws before the coming of the Volcker 22% prime rate three decades ago, and it should be restored. This simple prohibition of adjustable rate mortgages and payday loans will be far more effective than the proposed creation of an inefficient and unwieldy consumer protection bureaucracy, especially one that is located inside the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has repeatedly struck out when it comes to recognizing systemic risk, when it comes to preventing financial bubbles, and when it comes to protecting ordinary Americans. The Federal Reserve failed in the run-up to the crash of 1929, in the run-up to the banking crisis of 1933, in the run-up to the stock market crash of 1987, in preventing the dot com bubble of 1999-2000, and in regard to the financial derivatives which caused the banking panic of 2008. Locating any consumer protection bureaucracy inside the privately owned Federal Reserve is simply to guarantee that such a bureaucracy will be subject to regulatory capture by Wall Street at the earliest possible moment.

Wall Street Sales Tax of 1% on All Financial Transactions
Derivatives which escape prohibition under these blanket bans on credit default swaps and synthetic CDOs must then be subjected to their fair share of the tax burden. In a time when haircuts, bowling alleys, and restaurants are threatened with new taxation, it is simply inconceivable that the financial turnover of US financial markets should remain immune to all taxation, rather like the French aristocrats of the pre-1789 old regime. Rather than crush the US economy under an ill-advised and oppressive Value Added Tax (VAT) or national sales tax, we must institute a Wall Street sales tax of 1% on all financial transactions and turnover, including derivatives. This is the levy known as the Tobin tax, the Wall Street sales tax, the financial transactions tax, the trading tax, the securities transfer tax, or the Robin Hood tax. A low-ball conservative estimate of US financial turnover (including derivatives) in any given year might be about one quadrillion dollars. In that case, a 1% Wall Street sales tax would yield $10 trillion, $5 trillion of which could be used to confront the federal budget deficit, the costs of entitlements, and the various unfunded liabilities of the federal government. The other $5 trillion would be available for revenue sharing with the states, who could use these funds to deal with their own budget crises, which currently threaten police, firemen, health services, and other indispensable parts of the fabric of civilization itself. One of the main causes for budget deficits of all levels of government in the United States is the glaringly obvious exemption of financial turnover from all taxation, while financial speculators use various tricks to escape paying the corporate income tax. The proceeds from such a Wall Street sales tax would almost certainly decline as speculation became less attractive, but in the meantime they would provide much-needed relief for the public treasury. Needless to say, any idea of paying the proceeds of such a tax to the International Monetary Fund is out of the question. Many other countries are in the process of instituting a Tobin tax on financial turnover, so the inevitable objection that a Wall Street sales tax would represent a crippling competitive disadvantage for US financial markets is increasingly untenable.

Additional Safeguards: Bankruptcy Triage, Reserve Requirement, Hedge Fund Ban
Further safeguards against the derivatives plague are also in order. Current bankruptcy law gives special privileged treatment to derivatives. These poisonous instruments continue to exact their claims even when protection against other creditors has been provided by the federal courts. This abusive and unwarranted favoring of derivatives must be reversed. Derivatives must be made to wait their turn in bankruptcy court, and sent to the end of the line after all other creditors and claims have been satisfied. If bankruptcy triage becomes necessary, it should be at the expense of derivatives.

Another needed measure is the establishment of a reserve requirement for anyone issuing derivatives. We have seen how Goldman Sachs is accused of designing their notorious ABACUS 2007-AC1 CDO, colluding with hedge fund speculator John Paulson to load this CDO with all kinds of super-toxic paper with the intent of designing an instrument which would have the best possible chances of going bankrupt in the short run. A reserve requirement for those issuing derivatives would mean that they would have to buy and hold on their own books for the life of the investment at least 20% of any derivatives they issued. This would represent an additional deterrent against the deliberate concocting of toxic derivatives with the intention of then allowing a speculator to short them with the help of credit default swaps.

A final necessary change involves the grave risk inherent in the existence of hedge funds. Despite their name, the main business of hedge funds is pure predatory speculation. Hedge funds are currently allowed to fly below the radar of the Securities and Exchange Commission, escaping regulation because they have only a limited number of super-rich investors. It is high time that this loophole came to an end. Once a hedge fund is regulated, it is no longer a hedge fund, so the call to regulate hedge funds is for all practical purposes a call for their abolition. Hedge funds should have been subject to regulation no later than the immediate aftermath of the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 1998. The hedge fund loophole in the SEC rules must be closed now.

Seize and Liquidate the Zombie Banks
Obama’s $50 billion resolution fund for bankrupt banks is unnecessary. What we need most of all is to have the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Comptroller of the Currency, and other regulators enforce the applicable laws. Every Friday, Sheila Bair of the FDIC shuts down a number of small town banks because of insolvency. In her interview yesterday on CNBC, Ms. Bair blatantly admitted that she has no intention of enforcing these same public laws against the large Wall Street and other money center banks. She covers this malfeasance and nonfeasance with her opinion that bankruptcy does not work for the big banks. But there is little doubt that, if their massive derivatives holdings were priced according to mark to market rules, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citibank, and Bank of America would all be thoroughly insolvent candidates for Chapter 7 liquidation. Unless and until this is done, these zombie banks will continue to block any real economic recovery in the United States. Ms. Bair’s policies showed the destructive folly of the current administration’s illegal policies, which are all based in the final analysis on the discredited doctrine of Too Big to Fail.

Any Wall Street reform bill should also deal with the public scandal of the ratings agencies – Standard & Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s. These agencies enjoy a quasi-governmental status when it comes to certifying the quality of certain investments. But the failure of these agencies to provide timely warnings during the onset of the derivatives panic was nothing short of spectacular. During that crisis, the ratings agencies were certifying investments as AAA investment-grade until mere hours before they collapsed. Senator Carl Levin’s investigation of the ratings agencies has now unearthed horror stories of corruption and incompetence. The ratings agencies need to be stripped of any special role in relation to the United States government. Senator Levin’s findings merit criminal referrals to the Justice Department for prosecution of these agencies and their executives. In short, the United States government should take this opportunity to shut down these rating agencies, before these corrupt entities join in the looming speculative assault on the US Treasury, which is being prepared by George Soros and the other hedge funds.

Wall Street speculators will certainly howl that the measures outlined here represent a vindictive policy of discrimination against derivatives, which they will attempt to portray as a beneficial innovation serving the public interest. But no serious analysis of the banking panic of 2008 can ignore the obvious role of financial derivatives as one of the principal causes of this disaster. As for the charge of discrimination, it should be clear that the proposals made here generally represent nothing more than ending the privileged special treatment which has been granted to derivatives so far. Derivatives have been exempted from the gambling laws. Derivatives have been given special status in bankruptcy proceedings. Derivatives have been made non-reportable, and carrying them off balance sheet has been allowed. Derivatives have been exempted from the usual laws governing the operations of insurance companies. Hedge funds have been exempted from the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wall Street derivatives banks have been exempted from the usual bankruptcy laws and probably from the antitrust laws as well. Finally, derivatives, like all financial instruments, have been exempted from state sales taxes. This distorted treatment amounts to a systematic pattern of facilitating and fostering derivatives speculation under US laws and regulations. This pattern might be defensible if derivatives represented a public good. But all experience shows that derivatives are just the opposite – they are a public menace which now threatens to destroy our civilization and way of life.

http://tarpley.net/2010/04/25/fight-the-derivatives-cancer-with-a-wall-street-sales-tax-plus-bans-on-hedge-funds-credit-default-swaps-and-synthetic-cdos/

Belo Monte Dam Auction Proceeds Despite Protests Across Brazil

2010-04-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

BRASILIA, Brazil, April 20, 2010 (ENS) - Today's bidding for electricity generated by Brazil's planned Belo Monte Dam in the Amazon rainforest has been marked by protests and legal confusion. A court injunction issued late Monday suspended the dam auction overnight, throwing the bidding process into a state of chaos.

Just moments before the auction was set to begin, a second injunction overturned Monday's suspension, reinstating the auction by the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency, ANEEL. The auction is being conducted electronically from the agency's headquarters in the capital, Brasilia.

When the bidding was concluded, the tender was awarded to Norte Energia, a consortium led by the utility Cia. Hidro Eletrica do Sao Francisco, CHESF, a subsidiary of the state electricity company, Electrobras. The consortium also includes eight private companies.

The generating capacity of the R$19 billion Belo Monte dam would be the world's third greatest behind China's Three Gorges dam and the Itaipu dam on the Brazil-Paraguay border. ANEEL says energy is expected to start flowing from the Belo Monte dam in 2015.

In Brasilia, Greenpeace and indigenous peoples today blockaded the main entrance of the ANEEL office building to protest the dam.

The most recent round of legal battles over the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River took a new twist on Friday, April 16, when a regional appellate court overturned an April 14 decision by Federal Judge Antonio Carlos de Almeida Campelo to suspend the preliminary license for the dam and cancel the auction.

Sitting in the city of Altamira, which will be partly flooded by the dam's reservoir, Judge de Almeida ruled that the dam project presents a "danger of irreparable harm."

Judge de Almeida's decision is based on the lack of a specific law allowing the use of hydraulic potential on Indian lands as required by the Brazilian Constitution.

"It remains proven unequivocally that the Belo Monte hydroelectric will exploit the hydro energetic potential in areas occupied by indigenous people who will be directly affected by the construction and development of the project," Judge de Almeida wrote in his decision.

Today, as the auction proceeded in Brasilia, indigenous, environmental and social groups organized protests in more than nine cities in eight Brazilian states.

Thousands of people including indigenous people, the Brazilian Movement of Dam-Affected People, the Landless Workers Movement, and environmentalists are engaged in simultaneous protest actions in the state capitals of Fortaleza, Florianopolis, Porto Alegre, Porto Velho, Belo Horizonte, Belem, Campina Grande, and the city of Altamira.

Boatloads of indigenous people are arriving on the proposed dam site located on Pimental Island on the Xingu River's Big Bend to establish a permanent village to block dam construction.

In Belem, 700 local people occupied the offices of Electronorte. And near the town of Altamira, the Landless Workers Movement and the Movement of Dam-Affected People blockaded the TransAmazon Highway.

"The Lula government is clearly pressuring the courts to approve Belo Monte against the rights and interests of indigenous people and the local populations of the Xingu, and it's our lives at stake," said Sheyla Yakarepi Juruna of the Juruna people, who met with judges on Monday urging the President of the Appellate Court for Region 1, Jirair Meguerian, to uphold the injunction.

"Even so, the people affected by this dam are united and determined to stop the project, we will not give up this fight," Juruna said.

The Belo Monte controversy attracted worldwide attention earlier this month when "Avatar" director James Cameron and actors Sigourney Weaver and Joel David Moore visited the Volta Grande area of the Xingu River and joined protests by indigenous and locally affected populations in Brasilia against the dam project.

After that visit, Cameron wrote a letter to Brazilian President Lula in which he said, "I met with 80 leaders representing 13 different Indigenous communities that are directly or indirectly threatened by the dam in the Lower Xingu. These leaders had traveled for up to five days by boat to meet at an Arara village on the Volta Grande, and I was privileged to hear their concerns first hand."

"They deeply fear the impact this dam will have on their lives, and are certain that it will end their way of life. They are prepared to do whatever they can to fight the dam, including lay down their lives if necessary. It was a highly emotional meeting, and I felt compelled, from that moment on, to do what I could to prevent the dam from being built," Cameron wrote.

The Belo Monte dam will inundate over 500 square kilometers of land, and divert nearly the entire flow of the Xingu River through two artificial canals to the dam's powerhouse. This river diversion will leave indigenous and traditional communities along a 100 kilometer (60 mile) stretch of the Volta Grande without water, fish, or a means of river transport. Conservationists and indigenous communities fear that if the dam is built, the rainforests in this region would be completely destroyed.

"The violation of indigenous rights is a matter of national and international concern. Brazil doesn't need the Belo Monte Dam. By investing in energy efficiency Brazil could avoid the need for as many as 14 Belo Monte dams and save billions of dollars in the process. Belo Monte Dam just doesn't make sense," said Aviva Imhof, campaigns director of International Rivers, a nonprofit organization based in California.

Two consortia vied for the rights to build the project: Norte Energia, which includes the state-owned CHESF and eight private companies; and Belo Monte Energia, which includes the state-owned Eletrosul, in addition to five private companies, including mining giant Vale.

To build Belo Monte, the winning consortium would dig two canals that would involve moving more earth than was dug for the Panama Canal to divert water from the river to an artificial reservoir.

Atossa Soltani of Amazon Watch, who accompanied Cameron and the Avatar actors in Brazil, says if the river diversion takes place, the Big Bend or Volta Grande, home to the Paquicamba indigenous territory of the Juruna people and the Arara people, would be dried out, gravely affecting the livelihoods of indigenous and riverine families who depend on the water for subsistence.

In total, some 45,000 people are directly affected by the either flooding or diversion of the river.

International groups, such as Amazon Watch and International Rivers, support their counterparts in Brazilian civil society in pressuring the Brazilian government to suspend Belo Monte, as organizations and individuals around the world called local Brazilian embassies to protest the government's plan to build the project despite widespread violations of indigenous rights.

Financially, the conservationists say the Belo Monte Dam is a risky project, which will generate only 10 to 30 percent of its 11,233 megawatts installed capacity during the dry season, and an annual average of 4,462 MW.

To make the project viable in a context of financial uncertainties and pressure from private investors to lower the auction's price ceiling, the government has had to draw from public pension funds and issue US$4 billion of credit from the public Brazilian National Development Bank.

The conservationists warn that to meet the project's 11,233 MW generating capacity, additional costly dams would need to be built further upstream, "threatening a vast area of tropical rainforests and affecting many of the 24 indigenous groups along the Xingu River."

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-20-01.html

The 10 biggest health care lies in America

2010-04-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) Mainstream health care isn't based on "health" or "caring." It's actually based on an engrained system of medical mythology that's practiced -- and defended -- by those who profit from the continuation of sickness and disease. This system of medical mythology might also simply be called "lies", and today I'm sharing with NaturalNews readers the top ten lies that are still followed and promoted under mainstream health care in America today.

Lie #1) Vaccines make you healthy
Vaccines have emerged as the greatest and most insidious mythology yet fabricated by western medicine. The idea that vaccines protect you from infectious disease is blatantly false in the long term because this year's flu shot actually makes you more susceptible to next year's influenza (http://www.naturalnews.com/028538_s...).

On top of that, even the theoretical short-term effectiveness of vaccines is dwarfed by the far more effective protection offered by vitamin D and other immune-modulating nutrients. (http://www.naturalnews.com/027385_V...)

Lie #2) Pharmaceuticals prevent disease
The big push by Big Pharma is now focused on treating healthy people with drugs as if pharmaceuticals were nutrients that could somehow prevent disease. This is the new push with cholesterol drugs: Give 'em to everyone, whether they have high cholesterol or not!

But pharmaceuticals don't prevent disease, and medications are not vitamins. Your body has no biological need for any pharmaceuticals at all. People who believe they need pharmaceuticals have simply been the victims of "fabricated consent" engineered by Big Pharma's clever advertising and P.R. spin.

Lie #3) Doctors are experts in health
Doctors don't even study health; they study disease. Modern doctors are taught virtually nothing about nutrition, wellness or disease prevention. Expecting a doctor to guide you on health issues is sort of like expecting your accountant to pilot a jet airliner -- it's simply not something he or she has ever been trained in.

That's not to say doctors aren't intelligent people. Most of them have high IQs. But even a genius can't teach you something they know nothing about.

Lie #4) You have no role in your own healing
Doctors, drug companies and health authorities all want you to believe that your health is determined by their interventions. If you believe them, you have virtually no role in your own health or healing -- it's all managed by their drugs, their screening, their surgeries and their interventions.

Lie #5) Disease is a matter of bad luck or bad genes
Western medicine wants you to believe in the mythology of spontaneous disease -- disease that strikes without cause. This is equivalent to saying that disease is some sort of voodoo black magic and that patients have no way to prevent disease through their own diets or lifestyle choices.

It's funny, actually: Western medicine claims to be driven by scientific, rational thinking, and yet the entire industry still fails to acknowledge that chronic disease always has a cause and that most of the time, that cause has everything to do with nutritional deficiencies, exposure to toxic chemicals and a lack of exercise.

Disease is almost never a matter of bad luck or bad genes.

Lie #6) Screening equals prevention
Western medicine doesn't believe in disease prevention. Rather, the industry believes in screening while calling it prevention. But screening isn't prevention by even the wildest stretch of the imagination. In fact, virtually all the popular screening methodologies actually promote diseases.

Mammography, for example, emits so much radiation that it causes breast cancer in tens of thousands of women each year (http://www.naturalnews.com/027558_m...). Imaging dyes used in radiological scans can cause horrific side effects, and psychiatric "disorder" screening is little more than a thinly-disguised patient recruitment scheme disguised as medicine.

Real prevention of disease must involve disease prevention through nutrition, patient education about the causes of disease and lifelong changes in eating habits. Yet western medicine teaches absolutely none of these things. Heck, it doesn't even believe in such ideas.

Lie #7) Health insurance will keep you healthy
This is a favorite lie of those who recently pushed for the Big Pharma-sponsored health care reform that has swept across America. The lie supposes that merely having health insurance will provide some sort of magical protection against disease. But in reality, health insurance doesn't make you healthy! It is only YOU and your choices about foods, exposures to toxic chemicals, pursuit of exercise and time in nature that can make you healthy.

Health insurance is, in effect, a wager that you will get sick. How does gambling on your sickness provide any protection whatsoever for your health? It doesn't. Personally, I'd rather bet on health than sickness, and the way to do that is to invest in nutritional supplements, organic produce, superfoods, physical fitness and non-toxic personal care products.

Lie #8) Hospitals are places of health and healing
If you want to stay healthy or get healthy, a hospital is the very last place you want to find yourself: They are unhappy, unhealthy places that are infested with antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Hospitals usually serve disease-promoting foods and lack health-enhancing sunlight, and potentially deadly mistakes with pharmaceuticals or surgical procedures now appear to be frighteningly common in U.S. hospitals.

Certainly, emergency rooms in hospitals play an important role in urgent care for injuries and accidents -- and emergency room physicians do an amazing job saving lives -- but for people with chronic, degenerative disease, a hospital is a very dangerous place to be. Unless you really need immediate critical care, try to avoid hospitals.

Lie #9) Conventional medicine is "advanced" state-of-the-art medicine
Even though doctors and health authorities try to pass off western medicine as being "advanced" or "modern," the whole system is actually pathetically outdated and stuck in the germ theory of disease. Western medicine has yet to even acknowledge the role of nutrition in preventing disease -- something that has been scientifically documented for at least the last several decades. Western medicine fails to acknowledge mind-body medicine and hilariously believes the mind plays virtually no role in healing.

Neither does western medicine acknowledge the bio energy field of living systems, nor that organ transplants carry memories, nor that living food is qualitatively different from dead food. Seriously: Conventional doctors still believe that dead food is exactly the same as living food! (And the USDA food pyramid still makes no distinction between the two...)

"Modern" medicine isn't so modern, it turns out. It is, in fact, hopelessly outdated and desperately needs to upgrade its approach to health and wellness if it hopes to survive the next hundred years.

Lie #10) More research is needed to find "cures"
This lie is especially hilarious because western medicine does not believe in any "cure" for any disease. They aren't even looking for cures! This lie has been repeated since the 1960's, when cancer scientists claimed they were only a few years away from curing cancer. Today, four decades later, can you think of a single major disease that western medicine has cured? There aren't any.

That's because drug companies make money from sick people, not cured people. A patient cured is a patient lost. It is far more profitable to keep patients sick and pretend to "manage" their disease through a lifetime of pharmaceuticals. So when drug companies and disease non-profits claim to be searching for a "cure," what they're really doing is taking your money to fund more drug research to patent more medications that don't actually cure anything.

Remember this the next time you're asked to donate to some search for "the cure." The cures already exist in nutrition, herbal remedies and naturopathic medicine, but Big Pharma and the conventional medicine cartel isn't interested in real cures -- they only want to promote the idea of a cure while pumping patients full of drugs that don't cure anything.

Beyond the ten lies
When it comes to western health care, there are more than 10 lies, of course, but these big 10 lies are perhaps the most relevant to your own health decisions. By avoiding being suckered in by these lies, you can take charge of your own health and avoid the health care scam by staying healthy!

Staying healthy isn't as difficult as you think, and it doesn't require health insurance or disease screening. It only requires making informed, intelligent decisions about what to eat, what to put on your skin and how to get more sunshine and physical exercise. Once you do these basic things, you'll find that you are no longer held victim by a western medicine health care system based on lies and outdated medical mythology.

It's time for a revolution in medicine... a revolution that finally advances past the mental roadblock of a system of medical mythology stuck in the 1940's. Don't get me wrong, 1940's medicine was great in the 1940's. But this is no longer the 1940's, and the germ theory of disease is hopelessly outdated when it comes to the primary diseases that are striking the population today. Yet the profiteers of our dishonest, outmoded health care system are doing everything in their power to keep us all stranded in the past, a past based on treating the body like a chemical battleground and attacking every disease with a patented pharmaceutical.

That whole approach to health care is so far outdated that it's hilarious it can still be pushed with a straight face. No wonder doctors only spend an average of two minutes with patients these days. That's the limit of how long they can hold their faces without breaking out in laughter at how stupid this whole "treat the symptoms and forget the causes" approach to health care really is. Even they know it! That's why most doctors actually eat superfoods and take vitamins themselves, even if they never dare suggest it to patients.

True fact: It is illegal in every U.S. state for a doctor to recommend any vitamin, nutrient or food for the prevention or treatment of any disease. Doing so can cause a doctor to have his medical license permanently revoked. How crazy and outdated is that?

Right off the Presses! Rush Rush Rally Racing

2010-04-19T07:59:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone!

I just discovered on The Dreamcast Junkyard blog spot that the brand new, independently developed, Sega Dreamcast game - Rush Rush Rally Racing has completely sold out on Play-Asia.com. The only copies that are left for purchase there are the deluxe limited edition sets.

http://the-dreamcast-junkyard.blogspot.com/2010/04/rush-rush-rally-racing-regular-edition.html

I couldn't help feeling that this is very reminiscent of another independently developed Sega Dreamcast game from 2009 called Wind & Water Puzzle battles. This game also sold out at Play-Asia.com on it's first print. What this means to me and I assume many others as well is that there is a very healthy Sega Dreamcast fan base out around the world that refuses to allow the little white wonder to go quietly into the night. It truly moves me that there are so many great people out there that share the same amount of respect for older consoles and independent developers. I for one am sick and tired of seeing newer games that are all flash and cut scenes but contain little to no entertainment value.

As I stated in my previous posts about Retro-Gaming, I believe wholeheartedly that gamers young and old are rebelling against the status quo, the social norm, and the established paradigm. I feel that more and more gamers will break free from this expensive and wasteful treadmill and go on to spend their cash and time on games that are actually fun and require some kind of skill to beat.

RedSpotGames link:

http://www.redspotgames.com/shop/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=16

Play-Asia Link:

http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-14-71-4-49-en.html

Health insurance companies invest billions in fast food chains

2010-04-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) Did you ever wonder how health insurance companies drum up future business? It's easy: Just invest in companies whose products cause chronic degenerative disease, driving people towards more health care needs and therefore more health insurance.

And that's exactly what the health insurance industry is doing. A new article published in the American Journal of Public Health reveals that U.S. and Canadian health insurance giants own nearly $2 billion worth of stock in fast food giants like McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Taco Bell and others.

So profits made by health insurance companies are reinvested in industries that make people sick and diseased, bringing them back to buy more health insurance down the road. It's a pretty clever business model for an industry that seems focused on the almighty dollar and obviously has no concern whatsoever for the actual health status of its customers. If anything, these health insurance companies hope you get sicker!

Corporate conspiracy to keep you sick and diseased
These unholy alliances among corporate giants that conspire to keep you sick are more common than you think. In addition to health insurance companies owning billions of dollars worth of shares in fast food companies, pharmaceutical companies now own major shares of popular vitamin companies -- the ones that produce the cheap, useless chemical vitamin supplements sold at places like Wal-Mart and Walgreens.

Investors in the mainstream media are some of the same companies that own medical imaging equipment manufactures that produce mammography machines and CT scans, too. And did you know that the American Dental Association owns patents on materials used in mercury fillings, which is one of the reasons why the ADA continues to push for installing toxic mercury into the mouths of children? (http://pnwf.org/Dentistry_Mercury_C...)

This ownership of fast food companies by the health insurance corporate giants demonstrates a deeply disturbing fact about the entire sick-care industry: It really is about profits rather than health. If they can make an extra buck feeding you the very junk foods that are causing cancer, heart disease, diabetes and strokes, they will absolutely jump on that profit bandwagon no matter what the cost in human lives, pain and suffering.

The bigger picture: What are YOU invested in?
There's an even bigger story to all this, by the way. While it seems altogether contradictory that health insurance companies would invest in fast food chains, the disturbing truth is that many institutional investors hold billions of dollars worth of shares in pharmaceutical companies. Your very own mutual funds may hold large positions in Big Pharma. Even your employer may be investing your pension funds in vaccine-pushing corporations.

Right now might be a good time, in fact, to review whatever investments you might have and make sure you're not inadvertently investing in the types of corporations whose actions you oppose.

Personally, I don't have a single dime invested in any drug company, oil company, junk food company or fast food chain. I prefer to focus on "green" investments that support the things I believe in: Renewable energy, nutrition companies, etc. Did you know that Cyanotech, the Hawaii company that makes spirulina, is a public company? You can actually own stock in Cyanotech (I don't, but only because I don't want a conflict of interest when I write about them). Vitacost.com is also a public company, as are many companies in the natural products space.

If you own mutual fund shares, you might be surprised to find out where your money is being invested. You actually have to research it a bit to find out where these mutual funds redirect your money. Most of them invest in Big Pharma in one way or another.

Remember that every dollar pumped into the pharmaceutical industry is another dollar that will be used to further expand the medical enslavement of the population through vaccines, medications, chemotherapy and other dangerous chemical treatments. The best way to protect the health of future generations is to starve Big Pharma of investment dollars and revenue by refusing to buy their products or stock shares.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028602_health_insurance_fast_food.html

Race for Fish Killing Millions of Marine Turtles

2010-04-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

ARLINGTON, Virginia, April 8, 2010 (ENS) - Millions of sea turtles are thought to have died over the past 20 years because they were caught accidentally in fishing nets or snagged on longlines, according to the first ever global study of unintended capture on marine turtle populations.

Unintended capture of non-target species, called bycatch, happens when fisheries use gear such as longlines with thousands of baited hooks, or nets that kill animals other than those they are intended to catch.

As a result, six of the world's seven species of marine turtles now are categorized as Vulnerable, Endangered, or Critically Endangered on the authoritative Red List of Threatened Species complied by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, IUCN.

They are loggerheads, leatherbacks, hawksbills, olive ridleys, Kemp's Ridleys and green sea turtles. The conservation status of the seventh marine turtle species, the flatback, endemic to Australia, is currently unclear due to lack of data.

These ancient species, believed to have become distinct from all other turtles at least 110 million years ago, are now being wiped out by irresponsible fishing practices, the study shows.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/apr2010/2010-04-08-01.html

Psychiatrists say that being angry is a mental illness

2010-04-09T13:28:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) Proposed updates to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) are prompting many to question whether or not the psychiatric profession itself has gone crazy. The latest additions to the alleged "mentally ill" could include hoarders, people who get angry every now and again, lazy people, and even those who get outraged over things like sex and violence on television.

Since its first publication back in 1952, the DSM has grown exponentially larger with each subsequent edition. Many people are lambasting the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for trying to establish virtually all behavior as some sort of mental disorder that should be treated with psychiatric drugs.

"For this latest revision they've set up a special task force to decide if behaviors like bitterness, extreme shopping or overuse of the internet should be included," explained Professor Christopher Lane to a reporter from the the U.K.'s Daily Mail. "The science underlying all this is very shaky to non-existent."

Dr. David Kupfer, chairman of the APA's special task force, has come out in defense of the additions. He claims that each one is grounded in science, despite the fact that no biological markers can definitely identify any of the additions as actual disorders. In order to identify things like excessive shopping and extreme laziness as mental disorders, the team will simply call them as such and provide a description of the each one's symptoms.

If the additions themselves are not loony enough, the APA is actually recommending the inclusion of what it calls "risk syndromes", or early warning signs that could lead to one of its supposed mental disorders. By catching these "risk syndromes" early, doctors can begin prescribing medication for conditions that people do not even have.

The entire DSM charade is a ploy to characterize an ever-increasing segment of the population as being "sick" and in need of pharmaceutical drugs. There can be no variations in personality and individual characteristics; if a person does not live, think, and react in prescribed fashion, then he or she is sick and in need of treatment, according to the APA.

The latest DSM draft, which is set to be published in 2013, has already been posted on the internet for public viewing. Since being posted, there has been widespread outcry against many of the proposed additions. It remains to be seen what will be included in the final edition and whether or not people will continue to take the DSM and the APA seriously.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028529_psychiatry_mental_illness.html

GM crops cause liver and kidney damage

2010-03-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) A report published in the International Journal of Microbiology has verified once again that Monsanto's genetically modified (GM) crops are causing severe health problems. A legal challenge issued against Monsanto forced the multi-national agriculture giant to release raw data revealing that animals fed its patented GM corn suffered liver and kidney damage within just three months.

Adding to the mounting evidence that GM crops are dangerous all around, this information provides a damning indictment against Monsanto which continually insists that its GM products are safe. Not only are GM crops proving disastrous for the environment, but study after study, including those conducted by Monsanto itself, is showing that GM foods are detrimental to health.

Monsanto's data indicated that the company had conducted tests on three varieties of its GM corn, two of which contain the dangerous Bt protein, and one designed specifically to resist Monsanto's Roundup herbicide. All three are widely grown in the United States while only one is currently grown in Europe.

Dr. Gilles-Eric Seralini, a French researcher from the University of Caen, was tasked with examining the data and providing a review. While stopping short of declaring GM crops to be toxic, he did emphasize that chronic negative effects were apparent and that there were "statistically significant" indications of kidney and liver damage.

The specific effects observed in test rats included a buildup of hormones in the blood, indicating that their liver and kidneys were not functioning properly. One variety of the corn led to elevated blood sugar levels and increased triglyceride levels in female rats given it.

Dr. Seralini concluded that, because GM crops are foreign substances that have never been a part of a normal diet, there is no telling what the long-term effects of consumption will be on people. In animals, significant disruption of normal bodily function has been observed even in the short term.

Genetically manipulated food crops are not fit for human consumption and should not be classified as food. No legitimate study has ever proven them to be safe or nutritious. The burden of proof is on the producers of such crops to verify their safety and, to date, all data has revealed that they are unsafe. Claims that GM foods will end world hunger are baseless, propagated only by those that have a financial interest in converting the world's food supply to their own patented varieties in order to control it.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028388_GM_crops_kidney_damage.html

Tobin Tax, Wall Street Sales Tax, Robin Hood Tax - Britain and Europe Demand that Bankers Pay for the Depression They Have Created!

2010-03-17T06:48:00.000-07:00

The Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax is rapidly gathering momentum worldwide, thanks above all to a bid by British Labour Party MPs to save themselves from all but certain defeat at the hands of the Tories by playing this great economic populist card, which they have dubbed the Robin Hood Tax. If the Labour Party left succeeds with this gambit, it will tend to transform the situation in the US as well, with desperate House and Senate Democrats following the Labour Party example and embracing the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax as a means of getting some populist credibility and viability for November. The Republicans, by contrast, will be forced to line up in defense of their Wall Street backers, stripping away all their demagogic Tea Party camouflage. The Obama-Summers-Geithner gang will also be put into a bind: will they oppose a measure demanded by their own Congressional Democrats? I have been campaigning for the Tobin tax for a number of years, and it is an idea whose time has now come.

If a sales tax on financial transactions (Tobin tax, trading tax, securities transfer tax, Robin Hood tax) can bring New Labour back from the dead, it can also defeat Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Wall Street, and the reactionary Republicans here in the US, while forcing Obama to go along. It is time to make this a world-wide campaign to force the bankers to pay for the world economic depression they have created.

For weeks, British public opinion polls have been unanimous in finding that Gordon Brown and the Labour Party were doomed to succumb before the triumphal march of the reactionary Tories of David Cameron. But in the past month or two, the situation has begun to change, with at least one poll showing the Tories only ahead by a couple of percentage points, meaning that a Conservative Party victory is now in doubt, and a hung parliament with no clear majority for anyone a real possibility. E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post is trying to portray Gordon Brown as a new version of “Giv’em Hell” Harry Truman. But we should remember that Gordon Brown is the politician who inaugurated the financial bailout fad on a world scale in 2007 when he pumped British taxpayer money into the bankrupt hulk of Northern Rock, followed by the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Bank, and the rest of the bankrupt City of London. So far, Gordon Brown has only flirted with the Robin Hood tax from a distance. So it is not likely that the turnaround has anything to do with Gordon Brown, although widespread fear of draconian cuts in the social safety net under the Tories is playing a major role.

Actor Bill Nighy Dramatizes the Robin Hood Tax
But the real reason may well be growing enthusiasm for the Robin Hood Tax, a version of the Tobin tax or sales tax on derivatives and financial transactions of all sorts — stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, commodity speculation, and other financial transactions. The effort for the Robin Hood tax has been started by the British Trades Union Congress or TUC, the equivalent of the US AFL-CIO. A number of well-known charities like Oxfam and elements of the Labour Party left have also joined in. The result is a website located at http://robinhoodtax.org.uk which features the famous British actor William Nighy (pronounced Nye) in the role of a greedy City of London finance oligarch who is forced to admit the essential equity and fairness of the Robin Hood Tax, along with the significant sum which a minimal levy could contribute to the public treasury without increasing the tax burden on ordinary Britons. This website is now the focal point for a large mobilization of the British public, backed up internationally by a coalition of political parties and trade unions.

European Parliament for the Tobin Tax, 536 to 80
The Tobin tax campaign also has a European dimension: on March 11, the European Parliament in Brussels approved a resolution demanding a Tobin tax across the European Union by a lopsided vote of 536 to 80 votes. This measure was supported by the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats, the leftists, and the moderate conservatives, with only the British Tories and a few of their reactionary satellites voting in the negative. The European Commission is thus directed to come up with a plan for implementing such a tax. (In a related development, the European Commission has also announced that it will seek a worldwide ban or severe restriction on certain forms of credit default swaps, one of the most virulently toxic derivatives yet invented, and one which has cost the American taxpayer upwards of $200 billion in the case of the AIG bailout alone. This can be regarded as payback for the bear raid of economic warfare against Greek government bonds launched by hedge funds grouped around George Soros, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and other US institutions as a means of relieving pressure on the dollar by getting the euro to collapse faster than the battered US greenback.)

Many of the political forces in Britain which have been aghast at Gordon Brown’s policy of financial bailouts and subservience to the short-term needs of the City of London derivatives speculators are now regrouping around the Robin Hood Tax. This includes significant parts of the Liberal Democratic Party as well as Labour, along with not a few Conservatives. As Polly Toynbee comments in the London Guardian:

“So far Labour has failed to find the words to express public outrage at the financiers’ billowing wealth while the Treasury is drained. Only weeks since launching, the campaign for a Robin Hood tax on all financial transactions has gathered extraordinary support. It hasn’t been hard, so profound is the untapped public anger at the bankers. This week the European parliament voted for it overwhelmingly – 536 to 80 – supported by the social democrats and the majority conservative EPP grouping: opponents were the ECP rump rightwingers the Tories belong to. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel support it. Vince Cable will put it into the Lib Dem manifesto. Gordon Brown supports it but, as ever, he wants US support, which is unlikely. Backed here by some 100 organisations from Oxfam to the Salvation Army, Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University came to London this week to promote the tax, urging the EU to go it alone.

Rarely has a campaign gathered such momentum in so short a time: 140,000 have joined and more gather by the day, besieging MPs (RobinHoodtax.org.uk). In this budget, campaigners want a sterling transaction tax, to come in at once. Imposing just 0.005% on every sterling deal is within Britain’s sole control, raising £4bn. If the EU agrees a wider financial transactions tax, it would bring Britain another £4bn – one estimate is £100bn across Europe, to be used at home, in foreign aid and on climate change.” [1]

Westminster Hall Meeting of Labour, Liberal Dems, Tories
An informal meeting of members of the British Parliament was held last week at Westminster Hall, close by the House of Commons, and was attended by MPs from three parties — Labour, Liberal Democrats, and Conservatives. Also present was a representative of the Treasury, the ministry controlled by Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling, another paladin of the bailout who is nevertheless scrambling to keep his post. The Treasury rep told the MPs that the Robin Hood Tax was being seriously considered.[2]

80% of Britons Want the Robin Hood Tax
A resolution in favor of the Robin Hood Tax has been signed so far by 119 Members of the House of Commons and counting. This statement reads as follows:

“That this House supports the Robin Hood tax campaign which calls for the introduction of a financial transaction tax; notes that by taking an average of 0.05 per cent. from speculative banking transactions, hundreds of billions of pounds could be raised every year to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad; believes that banks, which had a large role in causing the economic crisis, should do more than just pay back the bailouts or insure against future crises; further believes that a Robin Hood tax would be an effective and popular response, with a recent poll finding that 80 per cent. of respondents supported the introduction of a Robin Hood tax; commends the work of all those organisations backing this campaign who have mobilised their supporters to increase the pressure for such change; believes that this tax is an idea that has come of age; and urges the Government to do all possible to ensure that the Robin Hood tax becomes a reality.” [3]

Some Obvious Problems In Sherwood Forest

The proposal for a Robin Hood tax in Britain and similar proposals being raised in Germany and elsewhere have a number of obvious flaws. First, the size of the tax is insufficient, both in absolute terms as well as in regard to the inevitable wear and tear of haggling and the political process. The Robin Hood tax website talks about a tax of 0.05% — just one 20th of 1%. That would be on the low side if it were the final outcome of this political battle. But it is not the final product — it is merely the starting position. By going so low to begin with, the Robin Hood supporters are leaving themselves nothing to bargain with along the way, and they are in grave danger of ending up with an infinitesimal tax asymptotically converging on absolute zero — or maybe with nothing at all. It is far better to start with 1%, a figure that seems reasonable to any normal person when they recall that ordinary people in the United States pay between 6% and 11% sales tax in most states, sometimes even on their grocery bills. Even the AFL-CIO, certainly no bastion of radicalism, is a demanding a Tobin tax of one mill or 1/10 of a cent, twice as much as the Robin Hood proposal. Again, 1% is the best starting point. But many Americans, once they realize that bankers and hedge funds do not pay any sales tax at all, insist that the existing state sales tax which they pay on shoes and clothing for their children simply be applied to financial turnover, resulting in a charge of between 6% and 11%. So perhaps we should indeed listen to the vox populi.

A second objection revolves around the vagueness of the Robin Hood tax in regard to the economic development of the Third World, the developing nations. There is grave danger here that the money obtained will be siphoned off by institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other international lending agencies and used for subterfuges such as paying off predatory imperialist banks who are holding defaulted loans from the less developed countries, while calling the result debt relief for poor countries. In addition, while emergency food aid and other forms of famine, epidemic, and natural disaster relief are indispensable, an extra dimension must also be added in the form of serious capital investments in modern high-technology infrastructure and industry, without which South Asia, Africa, and the poorer parts of Latin America will be condemned to endless poverty and aid dependency. It would be better to specify specific infrastructure projects such as a comprehensive fast rail network for the entire African continent, featuring Cape to Cairo, Dakar to Djibouti, Maghreb, East African, and West African lines. This could be paired with a Tennessee Valley Authority for the combined Nile and Congo River basins to provide irrigation, flood control, hydroelectric power, canal transport, malaria eradication and other benefits. The resulting rail and water systems would benefit every country in Africa, without exception.

A third problem is the constant reference to the discredited climate change/global warming hypothesis, an invention of the financial oligarchs themselves (think of George Soros and the radical environmentalist Hank Paulson). Given the political situation in Europe especially, it is perhaps understandable why these references are included. If dealing with climate change turns out to mean modern nuclear reactors and modern fast rail as a means of reducing the dependency on fossil fuels, then fine. But if it means anti-economical “green jobs” and speculative cap and trade carbon offset markets as demanded by so many in Copenhagen, then we are dealing with a cruel hoax. As a general rule, the more green jobs a country has, the poorer that country will become, since green jobs are inherently anti-economical and require endless subsidies. The entire logic of the global warming argument is to abort and deny the economic development of the Third World, and this is why Third World nations along with China and India took the lead in the Copenhagen talks in blocking the Malthusian carbon dictatorship which the US and the British were striving to impose on the world.

We have just tried to identify the points of disagreement, and give some suggestion as to how they might be resolved. But one thing is certain for all persons of good will: Wall Street and the city of London, not working people, must pay for the depression which they have created.

German and British Unions: Tobin Tax Would Provide $150 Billion
The German and British trade union federations estimate that a European Robin Hood Tax could raise £100 billion (about $150 billion) per year. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber and DGB President Michael Sommer have called on Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel to push through a European tax on financial transactions. Barber and Sommer go on to say:

“…two markets, Frankfurt and London, account for 99% of all EU trading turnover, even though sellers and purchasers are by no means solely citizens of Germany and Great Britain. The German campaign[4] – the Tax Against Poverty[5] – started 17 October 2009 with an open letter to the German government, asking for the introduction of a Financial Transaction Tax. The open letter has so far been signed by more than 50 German organisations. The campaign unites bishops and bankers, trade unionists and developmental activists, Attac and academics and many more…. The British campaign – the Robin Hood Tax – was launched on 10 February 2010 with support from a broad range of more than 50 British organisations – trade unions, development and climate campaigners, churches and others, including economists and financial experts. Opinion polling for the Robin Hood Tax campaign shows overwhelming support for a Financial Transactions Tax…. We believe that a European Financial Transactions Tax could show leadership to the world. There is no question that the EU – as an independent economic entity – would be in a position to introduce such a tax without any problems or hiccups in trade with the USA. The bank levy discussed by the G7 Finance Ministers in Canada last month, is no alternative for a FTT, it would only pay for the costs of bailing out the banks, leaving the rest of the economic damage done by the crisis unremedied. Only a FTT puts a dampener on speculation; only a FTT makes financial markets transparent; and only a FTT brings permanent revenue. We urge you to go further and to initiate a European Financial Transactions Tax.”[6]

An EU summit in Brussels on March 26 may take up this demand. The Tobin tax is also supported by the International Metalworkers’ Federation, to which the United Auto Workers, United Steelworkers, International Association of Machinists, Communications Workers of America, Boilermakers, and IG Metall in Germany also belong.

Reactionaries Howl, Demand Tax Immunity for Speculation
The reactionaries at the United States Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC have been howling with rage at the idea that the immunity to taxation currently enjoyed by banks and hedge funds may be lifted, and that they may have to pay some part of their fair share. The favorite argument of the enemies of the Tobin tax is that any tax on financial turnover amounts to vindictive discrimination against bankers as the villains of the hour. The reality is that virtually all other cash flows in the society are already taxed, while financial flows are not. The current situation therefore amounts to a public subsidy for speculation, which has proven once again over the last two years that it is a singularly pernicious and destructive threat to the public good. Once this strawman argument knocked down, the reactionaries are reduced to whining that the Tobin tax is somehow old-fashioned, meaning pre-globalization. The US Chamber of Commerce complains that a Tobin tax would turn the clock back to the bygone days of “disco balls, parachute pants and paper trades.”[7] With many American states, counties, and municipalities near bankruptcy, and right-wing politicians and media demanding austerity and sacrifice from the public along with mass firings and pay cuts for teachers, policemen, firemen, state workers, and other public employees, the simple fact is that Wall Street and its apologists have no cogent arguments whenever it can be made to stand up — once the proposal for a Tobin tax has been introduced.

Sachs, Kuttner, Jesse Jackson, Archbishop Of Canterbury Pro-Tobin
Economists like Jeffrey Sachs and Robert Kuttner are calling for a Tobin tax. They have been joined by Jesse Jackson, who is well aware that Obama’s pro-Wall Street policies have done nothing to alleviate unemployment in the black community. The French government is calling for a Tobin tax, although their proposal exacerbates some of the flaws mentioned above. Most recently, a call for the Robin Hood tax has been issued by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England and a very important figure inside the British ruling elite. Williams and the writer Richard Curtis wrote the in London Sunday Times that a Tobin tax

“…might help to heal the breach that has opened up between banks and society at large by making the financial industry part of the solution, not just the source of the problem. There is a chance to introduce a tax that will recognise both the massive expansion of financial services in recent years and the fact that taxation has not kept pace with this — but also a tax that will generate substantial resources to deal with the urgent global needs that cannot wait for some miraculous turnaround in the economy. The plan is to tax certain transactions between financial institutions….” [8]

This campaign now represents the best available means of striking at the overweening power of the Wall Street and City of London financiers. If the Robin Hood tax reaches critical mass in Britain this spring during the general election campaign, it will automatically be placed squarely in the center of the US agenda for the November congressional elections. Democrats, now threatened with grievous losses, will flock in droves to the idea of a Wall Street sales tax. Republican demagogues will be unmasked, and forced to show their true Wall Street colors. Obama will be presented with a fait accompli which will directly challenge his loyalty to his Wall Street backers. We will not have many more chances to turn the entire US political situation around, so it is imperative to seize on this one and make the most of it, and fast. We urge all persons of good will to mobilize without stint in the framework of this growing international campaign.

http://tarpley.net/2010/03/16/tobin-tax-wall-street-sales-tax/

Russia may ban chicken imports from U.S. due to chlorine chemical used in processing

2010-03-16T14:07:00.001-07:00

(NaturalNews) Beginning on January 1, 2010, Russia has officially banned imported poultry products from countries that use chlorine in their processing methods. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will no longer allow chicken imports from the U.S. because the chlorine baths used to sanitize chickens do not meet Russian food safety standards.

Since it comes from Russia, many may dismiss the ban as being politically charged with no scientific validity. However many nations around the world, including all within the European Union, have banned poultry imports from chlorine-using countries because of the dangers posed by the chemical. These countries use different methods to disinfect meat, including air chilling and electrolyzed water treatments, which do not expose the meat to harmful chemicals.

Putin expressed that Russia is working to become poultry self-sufficient by the year 2015 but, until then, will import only from nations that do not use chlorine in meat processing. Each year, the import quota will be dropped until, eventually, all chicken will be domestically raised in Russia.

When the issue first surfaced back in 2008, the U.S. Poultry & Egg Export Council tried to persuade Russia that the chlorine treatment methods used on chicken are both safe and effective. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the hypochlorus chemical used, which is an active form of chlorine, is an effective antimicrobial.

Rather than reconsider the safety of its own treatment methods, U.S. regulators tried to use rhetoric to convince Russia to accept U.S. imports and failed miserably. Russia refused to hear any of it, ending $825 million worth of U.S. chicken imports into its country.

The truth about chlorine chicken baths is that not only are they not truly effective but they expose people to a steady stream of toxic chlorine every time they consume chicken. Chlorine is known to increase cancer risk and cause other serious problems including respiratory illness and heart disease. Like other environmental halogens, chlorine contributes to thyroid dysfunction as well.

The levels of chlorine used in chicken baths, which average somewhere between 20 and 50 parts per million (ppm), do not always kill all the pathogens present. According to a European Consumers' Organization study conducted in 2007, 83 percent of U.S. chicken that had been treated in chlorine baths still contained harmful pathogens. The bath essentially becomes a pathogen cesspool that contaminates all the other chickens that are submerged in it.

It is no wonder that Russia, the E.U., and a growing list of nations around the world are refusing chlorinated U.S. chicken.

Gender-Bender Chemicals are Turning Boys Into Girls

2010-03-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) The government of Denmark has released a 326-page report affirming that endocrine disrupting chemicals are probably continuing to the birth of fewer males and the "feminization" of existing ones.

The report centers on chemicals like PVC, flame retardants, phthalates, dioxins, PCBs and bisphenol-A, all of which mimic the action of estrogen in the body. The researchers concluded that due to the prevalence of these chemicals, children could easily be exposed to high enough levels to place them at "critical risk" of harm.

The chemicals have been blamed for falling sperm counts among men worldwide, and their full effects remain unknown. A study by researchers at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands, found that male children who had been exposed to PCBs and dioxins while in the womb were more likely to dress up in female clothes and play with dolls than boys who had not been. Other research has documented a connection between prenatal phthalate exposure and "feminization" of male genitals, including smaller penises.

Evidence is increasingly emerging that estrogen mimics might also be responsible for a puzzling phenomenon: fewer boys are being born than ever before. Typically, 106 male children are born for every 100 females in most populations. In recent years, however, this distribution has been shifting in favor of females, with endocrine disruptors a likely culprit.

For example, a Canadian Inuit community living on Lake Huron and surrounded by chemical factories produces two girls for every boy born. Similar phenomena have been observed in contaminated communities in Brazil, Israel, Italy, Taiwan and the Arctic Circle, as well as among workers in Russian pesticide factories.

Many hormone-mimicking chemicals build up in the body and resist environmental degradation, meaning that they are now widely distributed across the planet.

"There is very little, if anything, individuals can do to prevent contamination of themselves and their families," the environmental group WWF said.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028368_feminization_chemicals.html

WHO Says Cell Phone Use Linked to Brain Tumors

2010-03-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

(NaturalNews) A large multinational research effort overseen by the World Health Organization has concluded that heavy mobile phone use significantly increases the risk of brain and salivary gland tumors.

The Interphone studies surveyed 12,800 people in 13 countries between 2000 and 2004. Although the final findings have not yet been released, they have been accepted for publication in a scientific journal and will see print before the end of 2009.

The conclusions are particularly surprising given that the industry-funded effort has been widely criticized for designing its studies to minimize the apparent risks of cell phone use.

The studies examined the relationship between cell phone use and the risk of three different types of brain tumor and one tumor of the salivary gland. They concluded that "use of mobile phones for a period of 10 years or more" was associated with a "significantly increased risk" of the tumors.

Six of eight studies found up to a 39 percent increase in the risk of glioma, the most common type of brain tumor. Gliomas can be either benign or malignant. The risk of acoustic neurinoma, a benign tumor of the nerve between the brain and the ear, was found to increase up to 3.9 times in two of seven studies, but problems with participants' memories interfered with these findings. Another study found a 50 percent increase in the risk of salivary gland tumors.

Some researchers have suggested that the Interphone study probably understates the risks of cell phone use, due to flaws in its methodology. The study has been criticized for including people who made as little as one call per week yet excluding children and young adults (considered the most at-risk population), non-cellular cordless phones (which also emit radiation), several kinds of tumors, and participants who either died before the study concluded or became too sick to answer questions.

Some of the Interphone studies found that short-term cell phone use decreased the risk of cancer, further suggesting research flaws.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028379_cell_phones_brain_tumors.html

Why the old 1978 BattleStar Galactica is better than the new one....

2010-03-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

Just a few years back I was still in college. While it was an enlightening experience it was also tedious. That’s why whenever I was granted a day off from the powers that be I made the best of it.

On more than one holiday away from the dusty old lecture hall I remember waking up and turning on the TV in an attempt to catch a glimpse of day time programming. I was giddy in anticipation to see shows like The Price is right, McGuyver, Knight Rider, Live action Hulk / Spiderman, and Press Your Luck. No whammy!!!! I vividly remember it was 10:00am and I was flipping through the stations when all of a sudden I stopped at the SciFi channel. I starred motionlessly at the monitor expecting some obscure direct-to-DVD SciFi Channel produced movie that was already being dumped into bargain bins across the USA.

As the commercials faded from sight I saw a trio in futuristic garb and scenes reminiscent of the Star War’s imperial fleet. The three people were having a very serious discussion on what seemed to be a bridge of a spaceship. As I took a closer look these men were none other then Lorne Green, Richard Hatch, and Dirk Benedict. At this point I sunk back and observed quietly. I noticed that the acting wasn’t cheesy or over the top. It was very professional; the veteran actor Lorne Green was impressive as Commander Adama. He showed traits of a true leader calm, decisive, and compassionate, Dirk Benedict was the carefree ladies man with the heart of gold and Richard Hatch was the stoic son of the great commander. The sets were intricate, the battle scenes were interesting, and the whole entire show was very positive all around. Something you don’t see too much now a day. It wasn’t just mindless action and explosions, there was meaning behind each episode and a whole army of personalities and emotions all going on at once. I was immediately hooked. Now I'm not a novice when it comes to Science Fiction series. I’ve been a fan of the original Star Wars movies, Farscape, and Star Trek: The next generation. Battlestar mixed all these elements perfectly. The story, the people, the effects, everything was unique and flowed well.

Shortly after I discovered that a new of BattleStar Galactica series was on so I gave it a shot and was immediately disappointed. The show was too dark, depressing, everyone was paranoid and nervous. It was like 24 with Jack Bower but in space. It was a let down. The final nail in its coffin was the grotesque CGI effects. The Cylons weren’t even live action; they were computer generated shadows of their former selves. Now I’m not saying the actors in the Cylon costumes were always on top of their game. There was many an episode where Cylons miss their marks or blatantly stumbled on something because of poor visibility but they were real nonetheless. When you saw a bunch of men in chrome plated plastic lumbering towards you with black toy guns you ran! In the case of the “new” Battlestar Galactica you just laughed. You laughed until you cried and then you turned it off.

After being depressed from watching what they have done to the series I asked myself an important question, What do fans of good television do now that most stations are stuffed with utter garbage? Well, I came to only one solution, purchase DVD box sets of everything meaningful that you can remember before it’s out of print forever!

I will leave you now with a quote from Dirk Benedict regarding his opinion of the “new” Battlestar Galactica series.

Benedict was sharply critical of the revived series, and the changes to the story and characters. A May 2004 article in Dreamwatch magazine, entitled "Starbuck: Lost in Castration",[10] revealed his disdain for the re-imagined series, its dark tone and its moral relativism. Benedict said,

"'Re-imagining', they call it. 'Un-imagining' is more accurate. To take what once was and twist it into what never was intended. So that a television show based on hope, spiritual faith, and family is unimagined and regurgitated as a show of despair, sexual violence and family dysfunction."

Man Made Global Warming / Climate Change isn't real……coming to terms.….

2010-03-11T08:22:00.000-08:00

Man Made Global Warming / Climate Change is not real……coming to terms.….

Not many of my millions of readers know this but Global Warming which is now referred to as Climate Change is a fraud. It’s nothing more than a corporate run mass movement to dupe the environmentalists into focusing all their energy on CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) emissions. CO2 is a beneficial gas used by plants in their growth process. It is also released when hydrocarbon fuels are burnt to create energy. It’s non-toxic and does not effect the warming of the climate. Organisms (including the 6 billion humans on the planet) exhale carbon dioxide during the end phase of their respiratory cycle. Oxygen comes in, gets diffused into the bloodstream, and the waste product is Carbon Dioxide. We exhale it while plants breathe it in; this completes a normal and beneficial gas cycle which has taken place for millions of years. Understandably though since the industrial revolutions Human beings have been using more and more energy to produce their goods and services, this is not a bad thing. The only thing that is unfortunate is that the human race is held hostage by a very small group of oil and coal cartels which wish to halt human progress and technological advances to maintain their grip on the throats of the people. This iron grip has been challenged in many cases around the globe. One example of progress is the sovereign nation state of Brazil. The population of Brazil uses a mix of alcohol and ethanol to power their machinery. This is renewable, clean, and if grown organically will also be sustainable for decades to come.

Now, the reason why they focus the Greenie’s so fanatically on CO2 is that it’s an irrelevant gas in terms of industry. Many of the gasses and substances used by profit based manufacturing corporations to produce their goods are mostly toxic and some of which heavily regulated. Many of their factories need technologically advanced scrubber systems installed in their smoke stacks to prevent harmful heavy metals and synthetic chemicals from being spewed out into the surrounding atmosphere which have the potential to sit at ground level and affect the health of the local population. These harmful chemicals also have the ability to come down in the form of rain water which can harm fish, forests, and wildlife.

A list of potentially hazardous materials and practices that the Global Warming / Climate Change groups do not address:

Sulfur or sulphur pollution
Nitrogen pollution
Adhesives fumes
Volatile Organic Compounds
Cadmium pollution
Mercury pollution
Arsenic pollution
Lead Pollution
Depleted Uranium pollution
Plastics pollution
Electronic Waste pollution
Diesel Fumes
Gasoline Fumes
Chromium pollution
Polybrominated diphenyls ethers
Polybrominated biphenyls
Xylene pollution
Bisphenyl-A contamination
Melamine contamination
Factory Farming - Unsustainable agriculture - (Battery cages, Synthetic Fertilizers, Pesticides, and Herbicides)
Phthalates
Chlorinated solvents
Chlorofluorocarbons

Progressive plans that Global Warming / Climate change advocates choose to consistently ignore:

Renewable energies – (Vegetable oil based fuels, Alcohol fuels, Hydrogen Fuel , Magnetic energy, tidal power, individual household solar and wind power, geothermal)

1. Sustainable agriculture – organic agriculture – traditional agriculture

2. Stricter regulations on the use of hazardous materials for production based goods

3. Substitutes for synthetic hazardous materials used in production based manufacturing

4. Banning of cheap harmful chemicals in industrial and food products

5. Better quality assurance from manufacturers abroad

6. Environmental restoration

Since the whole Global Warming / Climate change movement is privatized, it means that they are pushing an agenda. The most ironic part about this is that instead of multinational corporations attempting to bribe statesmen with lobbyists they instead fool the whole population with “End of the world” hysteria, playing upon their frail emotions, and then demanding for what Wall Street wants. There is a weakness in their strategy which reaches far beyond political and scientific. It’s common sense. If people open their eyes and research the leaders of this so-called movement, find out who really funds them, and what their goals are then anyone who has even the slightest critical thinking abilities can uncover this ruse.

Their corporate goals:

1.Establish a Carbon Tax on the people (Not big business). The revenue obtained by this tax will be given directly to private interests either industrial or financial.

2. Austerity for the people (Higher costing commodities, No hot baths, No vacations, No heating or cooling of homes, no raising of living standards, one child policy, eminent domain)

3.Create a speculative carbon based derivative market

4. Deindustrialization (More jobs lost)

5. Special privileges for the few at the expense of the many (Loosening of regulations on REAL hazardous materials and lowering pollution standards)

Let us not forget that Al Gore’s role in FREE TRADE (Destruction of the USA production base). Many of you reading this may know someone that’s unemployed or are unemployed yourself. One of the reasons for this is because of Mr. Al Gore and his FREE TRADE policies that were supposed to make us rich. Does anyone really believe this shill for corporate interests? No. The answer is blatant and obvious.

This is my view on the hoax. What do you think?

AVP Review!

2010-03-09T07:47:00.000-08:00

The new Aliens Vs Predator game has been surrounded by controversy since the first screen shots were released. The game was fanatically hailed by AVP veterans as the second coming that would entertain us with up to date visuals while also resurrecting the forgotten series. People wondered if Rebellion still had what it took to birth an acceptable successor to the beloved franchise. Did they do it?

Everyone seems to say “NO” and it’s a big “NO”. Gamespot callously gave the game a 5.5/10 and I believe IGN grudgingly gave it a 7/10. The rest of the video game reviewers gave it similar reviews, mostly around the 5-6 / 10 ranges.

Why did these reviewers rate this game so low?

I have no idea. I love the game. I find that the mix of melee and long range combat brings me back to a simpler time when I used to come home from a long day of drudgery and load up Legends of Might and Magic. If you’re not familiar with that game it’s somewhat alike to the AVP combat system in the sense that you had to switch between long and close range combat.

Now, what really makes AVP special from my analysis is the way that the three species are portrayed. Rebellion seems to have really recreated the movements, points of view, and audio from the previous movies. The Aliens have the ability to climb on walls and whip their tails around, the Predators have been given their trademark abilities of cloaking, heat vision, and the athletic fortitude to leap from one tall structure to another, and the marines have a very nice arsenal of futuristic weapons copied right from the previous films.

This whole package is put together nicely with a 3 part (1 part for each species) single player campaign, multiplayer, and a “Ranked” multiplayer mode in which you can battle for XP to unlock different skins for each of your species. New Masks for the Predators, new people you can be for the marines, and a wide variety of different heads you can select when the using the aliens.

I understand that I’m handling this game with kid gloves but I have to admit that it’s a very well made game. The only issues that need to be addressed are these.

1. Multiplayer needs more maps.

2. Free Patches and add on, no nickel and dime-ing us.

3. Fix the Marine rifle butt attack to actually stun the aggressor 100% of the time as long as you get a direct hit. Sometimes you pistol whip an enemy and it does absolutely nothing.

4. There seems to be an animation when the alien attacks in focus mode with his tail, even if the alien is killed before he gets the tail attack off the winner of the battle still gets hit with the tail and dies. Even though the dead alien is not rewarded any points for the kill, which is a good thing its still irritating to get killed and having to respawn.

5. Fix the delayed animation of the predator when he throws or shoots a weapon.

In conclusion I would have to say buy it. If you are like me and need a NON-WWII shooter to keep you occupied then this is a wonderful game to add to your FPS collection. I just hope the servers really take off in the next few months with updates and patches to make this game even more enjoyable then it is today.

Twelve New England towns demand 9/11 reinvestigation

2010-03-04T07:48:00.000-08:00

A new movement to reinvestigate the 9/11 attacks is gaining pace in the US. With major public support, 12 towns are set to decide whether to ask the federal government for a new independent probe.

New York is dubbed as the Empire State for its wealth and resources and is rightfully regarded as America’s most famous city, a beacon of fashion, finance and fast paced action.

New Hampshire is the Granite State of so-called self sufficiency. Less flash and cash, most famous for hosting the first U.S. presidential primary.

New York and New Hampshire are more than 200 miles apart, but for all that distance, the two US locations intersect on one issue: the 9/11 attacks. While it was in Manhattan where three buildings fell, the people of Keene, New Hampshire are pushing for a new probe to find out why.

At 81 years old, Gerhard Bedding devotes nearly all his time to the Vote for Answers campaign. Though the movement for a new 9/11 investigation began in the Big Apple, it’s seeing more success in New Hampshire.

“This is so central to the future of this country. There is no future, as far as I’m concerned, if we do not get to the bottom of this, because we steep in lies upon lies, and soon we do not know what is what anymore,” Bedding said. “I do believe truth matters.”

Apparently, so do thousands of others. Twelve towns are making a new 9/11 inquiry a ballot box issue this spring. Voters heading to the polls will vote on a non-binding resolution that supporters hope eventually sparks momentum and legislative power nationwide.

Hundreds of citizens are expressing a desire to find out “the real truth” and are attending meetings where local experts, such as physicist John Wyndam, present alternative 9/11 theories, specifically surrounding the collapse of World Trade Center Seven and the Twin Towers.

“Basically it is impossible for the top 12 stories to have crushed the lower structure without acceleration. Physically impossible and yet that is what you observe,” claimed Wyndam.

While most elected officials have ignored cries for a 9/11 probe, former Keene mayor Mike Blastos is an exception.

“The two biggest tragedies I can recall other than world wars concerning America was Kennedy’s assassination and the attack on 9/11. And they both remain completely unanswered,” Blastos said.

The 9/11 commission, like the Warren Commission, left millions of Americans doubtful over the official government’s version. Bedding withholds accusations, but demands answers.

“I do not like to speculate who did what, or who let something happening. That should be found out. Building 7 was not even mentioned in the original report. But I do know that a building that has not been hit by an airplane, such as Building 7, does not come down like perfectly controlled demolition.”

New Hampshire was the first colony to declare independence from England in 1776. Only time will tell if the first sovereign US state will be where the push for a new 9/11 investigation could prevail.

http://rt.com/Politics/2010-03-04/twelve-new-england-towns.html?fullstory

Doctors Warn About Dangers of Genetically Modified Food

2010-03-02T11:10:00.000-08:00

(NaturalNews) The American Academy of Environmental Medicine has warned that the public should avoid genetically modified (GM) foods, stating, "There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation."

A large number of studies and incidents have implicated GM foods in a wide variety of health problems, including accelerated aging, immune dysfunction, insulin disorders, organ damage and reproductive disruption.

For example, female rats fed a diet of GM soy experienced a drastically higher infant death rate, and their surviving infants were smaller and less fertile than the offspring of rats fed on a non-GM soy diet. Male rats fed the GM soy had their testicles change from pink to blue, and the GM soy was also observed to damage the DNA of sperm and embryos. Fertility problems such as abortion, infertility, premature delivery, prolapsed uteri, infant death, and even delivery of unformed infants (bags of water) have been observed in farm animals fed GM cottonseed and corn.

Animals consuming crops that have been genetically modified to produce the pesticide Bt (approved for human consumption in the United States) have died by the thousands, while animals grazing on a non-GM version of the same crops remained unharmed. Upon autopsies, researchers have found black patches in the animals' livers and intestines, internal bleeding and other signs of Bt poisoning. Farm workers in India have begun developing allergic reactions upon handling Bt corn, similar to the effects experienced by people exposed to Bt spraying.

In addition to these risks, GM soy and corn contain significantly higher concentrations of allergens than unmodified varieties. Evidence also suggests that the genetic abnormalities of GM foods may transfer to bacteria in the human gut, thereby exposing people to their detrimental effects long after a food has been consumed.

Yet in spite of all this evidence and the prevalence of GM crops in the U.S. food supply not a single clinical trial of any GM crop has ever been published.

"The experiments simply haven't been done and we now have become the guinea pigs," said Canadian geneticist David Suzuki. "Anyone that says, 'Oh, we know that this is perfectly safe,' I say is either unbelievably stupid or deliberately lying."

Sources for this story include: www.sentienttimes.com.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028245_GM_food_side_effects.html

Herbicide Chemical in Drinking Water Could Pose Much Greater Danger to Health Than Previously Thought

2010-03-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

(NaturalNews) Contamination of drinking water by a common herbicide poses a greater health threat than previously believed, according to a report issued by the nonprofit environmental organization Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) monitors average yearly levels of the popular herbicide atrazine in drinking water supplies, based on four tests per year. But the NRDC notes that levels of the toxin in drinking water regularly spike after heavy rains or during the spring when it is being widely applied, and that the four yearly testings may miss these events. The organization's researchers found several such spikes in its own testing of water supplies in towns in agricultural regions of the South and Midwest.

"Our biggest concern is early-life-stage development," said Jennifer Sass of the NRDC. "If there's a disruption during that time, it becomes hard-wired into the system. These endocrine disrupters act in the body at extremely low levels. These spikes matter."

Because atrazine is compatible with no-till farming, it is popular among farmers seeking to acquire a "green" label by reducing their carbon footprint. It is known to disrupt the hormonal system, and may cause cancers and menstrual problems in adults. It is considered especially dangerous to the developing reproductive systems of fetuses and children. The chemical has been shown to kill aquatic microorganisms and suppress the immune systems of larger animals, and it can cause limb or reproductive deformities in amphibians at levels as low as 0.1 parts per billion.

The EPA has set a threshold of 3 billion parts per billion for permissible atrazine levels, which the NRDC says would be too high even without periodic spikes. The NRDC analysis of 139 different municipal water systems found that 54 of them had a one-time spike higher than 3 parts per billion at some point in 2003 or 2004.

Home or municipal carbon filters can remove atrazine from water, but many municipal treatment plants do not use such procedures.

Sources for this story include: www.washingtonpost.com.

I just had a very angry post on a wonderful website...

2010-03-02T07:36:00.000-08:00

Just a few minutes ago on a very chic website

http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/2010/03/sonys-ps3-apocalyps3-bug-is-front-page-news/

I had an outburst which smecked of truth. Truth about gamers and people in general. As the radio commentator said just yesterday, many of the populations in first world nations are drunk, literally DRUNK on entertainment and will pay ANY amount of money to distract themselves from the dark, damp, miserable reality that envelopes them on a daily basis. Why? you may ask.....because they don't get it. They don't understand the prison that has been placed around them, around their minds, and around their souls. They have the power to stand up to the establishment but are either too weak or too cowardly to change their futures.

You have the power. Don't buy things you don't need, don't buy things that are junk, stand up...fight...resist....fight...resist...never back down...never surrender....never be pushed emotionally into a situation...always think logically...and long term....never compromise your principles and never give up.....

"TheCoolinator said:
March 2nd, 2010 on 3:32 pm

This further proves my point that this whole Seventh Generation of gaming consoles is a complete failure and utter junk being marketed to gamers. This is what they think OF YOU. ALL OF YOU OUT THERE. This is what the greedy, sociopathic, lunatics at these company think of YOU. They think (and are some what correct) that YOU will literally buy ANYTHING on the dam shelves as long as it gives you a taste of oblivion from your failed and useless lives. SAD SAD SAD SAD SAD…..I’ve stood by my boycott of consoles since the Dreamcast died. I will continue it until I see something that’s worth my devalued and fiat US Federal Reserve notes.

First we had the XBOX360 red ring of death escapade, then we had the Wii non-stop garbage – non HD software (except for Sega’s games) and irritating motion controls, NOW we have PS3 in a PR / software meltdown over there big hunk of over priced waste of precious resources.

All of you who throw your hard earned money at these thieves are perpetuating a broken and parasitic system.

Hmph!!!!!11!!!!1!!one one one exclamation."

TheCoolinator's Home Arcade!!!

2010-02-21T19:12:00.000-08:00

New YouTube video Imminent!

2010-02-16T07:25:00.000-08:00

Greetings all,

I was hanging around YouTube yesterday and I noticed that my most recent video is almost a month and a half old. Now, I have to be honest in the sense that I really wasn’t feeling the whole YouTube career because how can I compete with the large amount exciting content on the web. All I do is drone on and on about things I’ve spoken about on more then a dozen occasions. Some of which I’m thinking of deleting off my page entirely but I’ve been getting a handful of people that seem to appreciate what I’m doing and I’ve decided to step it up a notch and actually do what I was doing in the beginning which was coming to the table with a subject for the day. I realized that when I didn’t have a specific subject or purpose I would always retreat into my same old topics which I feel strongly about while neglecting new information of the day.

So, I will be making a new video hopefully in the next few days and you are all invited to watch and grade me on my performance.

Once again my YouTube page is TheCoolinator1 and if you send me a message or comment I would be happy to reply.

Pinball mishap then resolution!

2010-02-15T05:57:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately I will not be getting the Speak Easy Pinball Machine anymore because the distributor that I was attempting to do business with seemed to be very unorganized, sluggish, and so overwhelmed with other things that he was unable to complete the transaction.

Sucks for him…..

On a good note however, I found another distributor that has already taken my money and will be delivering my reconditioned pinball machine TX-Sector on Thursday of this week. It was a little bit more cash but it has a lot more action going on in the play field. Bumpers, drop downs, ramps, and much, much, more then Speak Easy had to offer. So either way my Pinball machine journey has come to an end. Thanks you all for your support!

Heres another pictures of the Machine. Can't Wait until it gets here!

McCain Bill Poses Threat to DSHEA and Health Freedom

2010-02-12T07:25:00.000-08:00

Articles from http://vitaminlawyerhealthfreedom.blogspot.com/2010/02/mccain-bill-poses-threat-to-dshea-and.html

Update: Action Item to Protest McCain Bill

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/1128/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26714---------

I re-post in full today's media release from the Natural Products Association regarding new threats to health freedom. It was Constitutionalist Dr. Ron Paul (R-Texas) who described the FDA's behavior as "an abuse of power..." and now failed presidential candidate McCain, a "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) lets us know where he stands: on the side of the power abusers. The "Accepted Dietary Ingredient List" is especially troubling since such a code provision moves us away from our Common Law Right to access the foods we choose to a Civil Law (Codex Alimentarius) regulation of what we may choose. Under the Common Law what is not explicitly forbidden is allowed; under the Code, whatever is not permitted is forbidden. This "lawyer's distinction" is of the greatest significance in preserving our Liberty.We will post an Action Item at Heatlh Freedom USA opposing the McCain bill when it is formally introduced. See: http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/?p=4608The terms of this bill further the Globalist Eugenicide Agenda in that it seeks to treat dietary supplements, which are foods and therefore ought to be deemed safe if used as directed, as though they were toxins (while, of course, the agency treats the real dangers - GMOs, food additives, dangerous drugs, vaccines and industrial toxins as though they were perfectly safe). rf

February 3, 2010:

New Legislation Poses Threat to DSHEA At a press conference held earlier today, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) announced that he would be introducing legislation that would amend the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) to give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) additional powers over retailers and suppliers in the dietary supplements industry. The Natural Products Association is reviewing McCain's bill, which is cosponsored by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), and offers this initial analysis regarding the impact of the legislation on the industry. NPA will work aggressively to address this threat to the industry. The association will continue to keep its members informed and let them know how they can help protect their businesses.

http://vitaminlawyerhealthfreedom.blogspot.com/2010/02/mccain-bill-poses-threat-to-dshea-and.html

McCain Anti-DSHEA Bill Is Death To Your Health Freedom
Natural Solutions Foundation Emergency Health Freedom Action eAlertDr. Rima Laibow, MDHealthFreedomUSA.org2-6-10

http://www.rense.com/general89/rima.htm

McCain's Fascist, Globalist Attacks SupplementsSenator McCain Files New Bill That Attacks Your Access to Supplements and Repeals Key Sections of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act 02-04-10

http://www.rense.com/general89/mcc.htm

State Department Admits: Detroit Christmas Bomber Was Deliberately Allowed to Keep US Entry Visa, Board His Flight

2010-02-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

PATSY's

Webster G. Tarpley

TARPLEY.net

February 10, 2010

The Detroit Christmas bomber was deliberately and intentionally allowed to keep his US entry visa as the result of a national security override issued by an as yet unknown US intelligence or law-enforcement agency with the goal of blocking the State Department’s planned revocation of that visa. This is the result of hearings held on January 27 before the House Homeland Security Committee, and in particular of the testimony of Patrick F. Kennedy, Undersecretary of State for Management. The rickety US government official version of the December 25 Detroit underwear bomber incident, which has been jerry-built over the past month and a half, has now totally collapsed, and key elements of the terrorism-spawning rogue network inside US agencies and departments are unusually vulnerable to a determined campaign of exposure.

These developments decisively confirm the analysis offered by the present writer in a Dec. 28, 2009 television interview on Russia Today.1 On that occasion, my estimate was that Mutallab was a protected patsy being used by rogue elements of the US intelligence community for the deliberate and intentional creation of a high profile incident with the goal of obtaining a large-scale political effect. On January 4, Richard Wolffe reported on the MSNBC Countdown program that the Obama White House was investigating whether the Detroit Christmas incident had been “intentionally” created by an intelligence network with an “alternative agenda.”2 It was in this report that Wolffe posed the alternative of “cock-up or conspiracy.”3 Unfortunately, Obama opted for the screw-up version on January 5.

Based on what was already known a few days after this incident, it was clear that normal screening and surveillance procedures had been scrapped and aborted in order to allow the youthful patsy Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria to board his flight from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Detroit. Mutallab’s father, a rich, well known, and reputable Nigerian banker had gone to the US Embassy in his country and formally warned a State Department official as well as a CIA representative that his son was in Yemen and in all probability consorting with terrorists. Under normal circumstances, this report alone would have been more than enough to get Mutallab’s US visa revoked in the same way he had already been denied entry to Great Britain. He also would normally have been placed on the no-fly list, thus setting up two insuperable obstacles to getting on his Detroit bound flight and winging off to produce an incident which caused several weeks of public hysteria in this country, completely with demands for body scanners in airports. In addition, the US intelligence community had reports that a Nigerian was training with the purported “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” in Yemen. Obama had called a December 22 meeting with top CIA, FBI, and DHS officials because of reports of a terrorist attack looming during the Christmas holiday.

The January 27 hearings of the House Homeland Security Committee were also addressed by Michael Leiter, the AWOL Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, along with Jane Holl Lute, the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, who was sent in place of HHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, who boycotted the hearings. But the important testimony came from Kennedy, whose responsibilities include Consular Services, and therefore visas. In his opening statement, Kennedy offered a tortured circumlocution to describe what had happened. Attempting to head off the question of why the State Department had not revoke Mutallab’s visa, Kennedy stated:

“We will use revocation authority prior to interagency consultation in circumstances where we believe there is an immediate threat. Revocation is an important tool in our border security arsenal. At the same time, expeditious coordination with our national security partners is not to be underestimated. There have been numerous cases where our unilateral and uncoordinated revocation would have disrupted important investigations that were underway by one of our national security partners. They had the individual under investigation and our revocation action would have disclosed the U.S. Government’s interest in the individual and ended our colleagues’ ability to quietly pursue the case and identify terrorists’ plans and co-conspirators.” 4

Undersecretary Kennedy: An Agency Objected to Revoking Visa

Classic Use of National Security Override to Protect A Patsy

Demand to Know Who Let Mutallab Keep His Visa

Not Body Scanners, But Mole Detectors at CIA and FBI

For the full article:

http://tarpley.net/2010/02/11/state-department-admits-detroit-christmas-bomber-was-deliberately-allowed-to-keep-us-entry-visa-board-his-flight/#more-1240

Sugary soft drinks linked to pancreatic cancer

2010-02-09T11:55:00.000-08:00

(NaturalNews) A 14-year study of 60,000 people in Singapore found that those who consume two or more sweetened soft drinks per week have an 87 percent higher risk of pancreatic cancer.Published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, the study was led by Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota who said, "The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth."Nearly 38,000 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the United States each year, and over 34,000 die from the disease each year. This research points to what may be the common culprit of all those preventable deaths: Sugary soft drink consumption.

Poison in a can

NaturalNews has warned readers for years about the dangers of consuming soft drinks. The sweetener used in most beverages -- high-fructose corn syrup -- is linked to both diabetes and obesity. The phosphoric acid found in soft drinks is highly acidic, stripping minerals from bones and promoting osteoporosis. At the same time, soft drinks can cause kidney stones, too.For those who consume diet sodas, the health risks may be even worse: Aspartame causes neurological side effects that include blindness, headaches and impaired cognitive function.The beverage industry, of course, denies any links between soda consumption and negative health effects. It wants consumers to naively believe that liquid sugar, phosphoric acid and pressurized carbon dioxide are all good for you!But experience tells us otherwise: Look at the people you know who consume the most soft drinks and ask yourself this simple question: Are they the healthiest people I know? Probably not.Most likely, if they've been drinking sodas for many years, they're suffering from obesity, diabetes, kidney stones and perhaps even pancreatic cancer.

http://www.naturalnews.com/028129_pancreatic_cancer_sodas.html

TheCoolinator makes a choice!

2010-02-09T11:41:00.000-08:00

Breaking News!

My arduous Pinball journey is finally coming to a close. Today I got in contact with a Pinball distributor in Minnesota and he’s selling me a wonderful little Pinball Machine for a very reasonable price. So reasonable I must say that it’s more than a thousand dollars less then his competitors. It will be completely reconditioned and delivered to my door in the next few weeks. Here is a sneak peak of what it looks like.

Pretty, ain't she? and I absolutely love the 1920-30's theme.

Hope it's my first of many, Now I just need to find out where to put it.

My new obsession!

2010-01-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

Hello all,

Coolinator coming to you live from corporate slave land. I just wanted to tell my vast fan base out there that I have gotten pinball fever. No, I didn’t catch it from a street walking strumpet nor did I get it from a dirty hand rail. I caught it from Pinball Hall of Fame: William’s collection for the PS2 and I must say that this is the most impressive pinball video game I have ever played. To make matters even worse I’m also afflicted with the Arcade Machine bug as well! I’ve been doing tons of research on these wonderful little wooden boxes of yesteryear and I must say am having a wonderful time. Too bad I don’t have any space to put them because I would definitely toss some cash into the wind for my own pinball table and a new arcade cabinet or two.

I am no stranger to arcade machines because just by chance my family used to be neighbors with an arcade distributor and we purchased our own arcade machine. It’s Crystal Castles from Atari, a wonderful classic played with one button (jump) and a track ball. It’s old and dusty and I lost the keys for it but it still works just as it did when it came off the assembly line.

Here are some favorites I’ve been drooling over. If you have any Arcade Machine / Pinball stories please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below telling us your story.

Monsanto's GMO Corn Linked To Organ Failure, Study Reveals

2010-01-16T12:26:00.000-08:00

In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto's GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.

According to the study, which was summarized by Rady Ananda at Food Freedom, "Three varieties of Monsanto's GM corn - Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 - were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities."

Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however.

In the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote:

"Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity....These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown."

Monsanto has immediately responded to the study, stating that the research is "based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for these products."

The IJBS study's author Gilles-Eric Séralini responded to the Monsanto statement on the blog, Food Freedom, "Our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose. This is a very serious mistake, dramatic for public health. This is the major conclusion revealed by our work, the only careful reanalysis of Monsanto crude statistical data."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/12/monsantos-gmo-corn-linked_n_420365.html

George W. Obama - Even the Village Voice is attacking the two-faced corporate puppet Obama

2010-01-14T14:08:00.000-08:00

Before President Obama, it was grimly accurate to write, as I often did in the Voice, that George W. Bush came into the presidency with no discernible background in constitutional civil liberties or any acquaintance with the Constitution itself. Accordingly, he turned the "war on terror" over to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—ardent believers that the Constitution presents grave obstacles in a time of global jihad.

But now, Bush's successor—who actually taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago—is continuing much of the Bush-Cheney parallel government and, in some cases, is going much further in disregarding our laws and the international treaties we've signed.

On January 22, 2009, the apostle of "change we can believe in" proclaimed: "Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of my presidency." But four months into his first year in command, Obama instructed his attorney general, Eric Holder, to present in a case, Jewel v. National Security Agency, a claim of presidential "sovereign immunity" that not even Dick Cheney had the arrant chutzpah to propose.

Five customers of AT&T had tried to go to court and charge that the government's omnipresent spy, the NSA, had been given by AT&T private information from their phone bills and e-mails. In a first, the Obama administration countered—says Kevin Bankston of Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing these citizens stripped of their privacy—that "the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violated federal surveillance statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the Wiretap Act."

It is one thing, as the Bush regime did, to spy on us without going to court for a warrant, but to maintain that the executive branch can never even be charged with wholly disregarding our rule of law is, as a number of lawyers said, "breathtaking."

On the other hand, to his credit, Obama's very first executive orders in January included the ending of the CIA "renditions"—kidnapping terrorism suspects off the streets in Europe and elsewhere and sending them for interrogation to countries known to torture prisoners. However, in August, the administration admitted that the CIA would continue to send such manacled suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation.

Why send them to a foreign prison if they're not going to be tortured to extract information for the CIA? Oh, the U.S. would get "guarantees" from these nations that the prisoners would not be tortured. That's the same old cozening song that Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush used to sing robotically.

For the rest of the article please click on the link below

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-12/columns/george-w-obama/

Meet Mikey Hicks, 8: U.S. has him on watch list

2010-01-14T14:05:00.000-08:00

"Meet Mikey Hicks," said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. "It’s not a myth."

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name "was on the list," she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

"Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal," Mrs. Hicks recounted. "A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34855425/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/from/ET

Full-body scanners used on air passengers may damage human DNA

2010-01-14T13:59:00.000-08:00

(NaturalNews) In researching the biological effects of the millimeter wave scanners used for whole body imaging at airports, NaturalNews has learned that the energy emitted by the machines may damage human DNA.

Millimeter wave machines represent one of two primary technologies currently being used for the "digital strip searches" being conducted at airports around the world. "The Transportation Security Administration utilizes two technologies to capture naked images of air travelers - backscatter x-ray technology and millimeter wave technology," reports the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a non-profit currently suing the U.S. government to stop these electronic strip searches. (http://epic.org/privacy/airtravel/b)

In order to generate the nude image of the human body, these machines emit terahertz photons -- high-frequency energy "particles" that can pass through clothing and body tissue.

The manufacturers of such machines claim they are perfectly safe and present no health risks, but a study conducted by Boian S. Alexandrov (and colleagues) at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico showed that these terahertz waves could "...unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication."

http://www.naturalnews.com/027913_full-body_scanners_DNA.html

McCain and company want to take the rights from U.S. Citizens under the guise of "FIGHTING TERROR" - Fake wars, now fake courts!

2010-01-11T06:34:00.000-08:00

TheCoolinator - Hello everyone, I just wanted to show you all an example of how the powers at be are trying their hardest to create a seperate court system away from the normal rule of law. They wish to try "ENEMY COMBATANTS - I.E. YOU" in Kangaroo courts where you have no rights. I would like everyone to do research on Nazi Show Trials and Soviet Show trials after reading this article. Do not allow them to take away the rights of others because if that happens then your rights maybe the next to go.

Wrong to Give Bomb Suspect Civilian Rights, Says McCain

WASHINGTON—The Nigerian man who attempted to blow up a commercial jet outside Detroit on Christmas Day should be tried as an enemy combatant in a military court, a leading Republican Senator said on Sunday.

Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 election, said it would be a mistake to try Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, in a civilian court where he would "get lawyered up" and be afforded the right to withhold damaging information.

"To have a person be able to get lawyered up when we need that information very badly, I think betrays or contradicts the president's view that we are at war," McCain told CNN's State of the Union with John King.

"That person should be tried as an enemy combatant," McCain said. "He's a terrorist."

The U.S. civilian justice system affords some protections not afforded by some military courts.
Abdulmutallab is accused of attempting to ignite explosives in his underwear on a Dec. 25 flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. He was subdued by other passengers after trying to ignite it.

A Call to the People of the World to Support Iceland Against the Financial Blackmail of the British and Dutch Governments and the IMF

2010-01-11T06:31:00.000-08:00

January 5, 2010 is a historical day for Icelanders.

The Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson had a tough decision to make, and difficult choices to make. To listen to the 23% of the nation that signed a petition calling on him to put the state guarantee for 5.4 billion dollars to be paid to the British and Dutch governments to a national referendum. Or to ignore the nation and sign the bill for the government, after the bill had been passed through the parliament with a narrow vote on December 30, 2009 after months of acrimonious debate, tainted with secrecy and dishonesty on the part of the government. Every day throughout the debate, new information would emerge and documents would leak to local media or wikileaks. Yesterday, the people of Iceland finally had a chance to have something to say about their fate, because if the state guarantee is accepted it will mean that Iceland will become like a third world country, spending its GDP largely on paying interest on foreign debt. Last summer, a bill for a state guarantee was passed that had a significant meaning not only for Iceland, but also for other nations around the world facing the same problems of private debt being forced on taxpayers. The bill included a reasonable and fair way of handling the interest and the debt: Icelanders would pay, but only a certain percentage of their GDP, and if there were to be another financial black hole, they would not pay during that time. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Dutch and British governments reacted so swiftly with a condemnation of Iceland’s citizens for having the audacity to think they have the right to exercise their democratic rights in deciding for themselves what is in the best economic interests of their nation.

Let’s also put this debt into perspective: 320.000 people live in Iceland, each and every person on the island, including children and the elderly, the disabled and the poor, would have to pay around $30,000 under the bill. The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to run it. On January 5th the Icelandic president had the courage, backed up by his nation, to place the interest of the people before that of the banks.

Of course there has been an incredible spin by the government controlled media, attacking the nation and the president for this simple and fair demand. The UK and Dutch media were also full of misleading news, saying the nation had demanded not to pay, and that we would become isolated and there were even suggestions that the British navy should flex its muscles against this nation which has no military. As if the terrorist act they imposed on us was not enough during the darkest hour of our crises to bring us further down!

The spin is failing because people around the world are finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always won. Let’s hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation and let’s hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks, corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support. I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga.

Love and rage from Iceland Birgitta Jónsdóttir Party group chairman for The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament

http://tarpley.net/2010/01/07/a-call-to-the-people-of-the-world-to-support-iceland-against-the-financial-blackmail-of-the-british-and-dutch-governments-and-the-imf/

30 Million Productive Jobs to Rebuild U.S. Infrastructure, Industry and Agriculture: The Program to End the Economic Depression

2009-12-30T11:15:00.000-08:00

The US and the world are gripped by a deepening economic depression. There is no recovery and no automatic business cycle which will revive the economy. This bottomless depression will worsen until policies are reformed. The depression results from deregulated and globalized financial speculation, especially the $1.5 quadrillion world derivatives bubble. The US industrial base has been gutted, and the US standard of living has fallen by almost two thirds over the last four decades. We must reverse this trend of speculation, de-industrialization, and immiseration. Current policy bails out bankers, but harms working people, industrial producers, farmers, and small business. We must defend civil society and democratic institutions from the effects of high unemployment and economic breakdown. We therefore demand:

1. Measures to reduce speculation and minimize the burden of fictitious capital: End all bailouts of banks and financial institutions. Claw back the TARP and other public money given or lent to financiers. Abolish the notion of too big to fail; JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Wells Fargo and other Wall Street zombie banks are insolvent and must be seized by the FDIC for chapter 7 liquidation, with derivatives eliminated by triage. Re-institute the Glass-Steagall firewall to separate banks, brokerages, and insurance. Ban credit default swaps and adjustable rate mortgages. To generate revenue and discourage speculation, levy a 1% Tobin tax (securities transfer tax or trading tax) on all financial transactions including derivatives (futures, options, indices, and over the counter derivatives), stocks, bonds, foreign exchange, and commodities, especially program trading, high-frequency trading, and flash trading. Set up a 15% reserve requirement for all OTC derivatives. Use Tobin tax revenue and a revived corporate income tax to provide immediate tax relief to individuals, families, the self-employed, and small business by increasing personal exemptions and standard deductions. Stop all foreclosures on primary residences, businesses, and farms for five years or the duration of the depression, whichever lasts longer. Set a 10% maximum rate of interest on credit cards and payday loans. Re-regulate commodities markets with 100% margin requirements, position limits, and anti-speculation protections for hedgers and end users to prevent oil and gasoline price spikes. Enforce labor laws and anti-trust laws against monopolies and cartels. Restore individual chapter 11.

2. Measures to nationalize the Federal Reserve, cut federal borrowing, and provide 0% federal credit for production: Seize the Federal Reserve and bring it under the US Treasury as the National Bank of the United States, no longer the preserve of unelected and unaccountable cliques of incompetent and predatory bankers. The size of the money supply, interest rates, and approved types of lending must be determined by public laws passed and debated openly, passed by the congress and signed by the president. Stop US government borrowing from zombie banks and foreigners — let the US government function as its own bank. Reverse current policy by instituting 0% federal LENDING with preferential treatment for tangible physical production and manufacturing of goods and commodities, to include industry, agriculture, construction, mining, energy production, transportation, infrastructure building, public works, and scientific research, but not financial services and speculation. Issue successive tranches of $1 trillion as needed to create 30 million union-wage productive jobs and attain full employment for the first time since 1945, reversing the secular decline in the US standard of living. Provide 0% credit to reconvert idle auto and other plants and re-hire unemployed workers to build modern rail, mass transit, farm tractors, and aerospace equipment, including for export. Extend 0% federal credit for production to small businesses like auto and electronics repair shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, tailors, family farms, taxis, and trucking. Maintain commercial credit for retail stores. Create an unlimited rediscount guarantee by the National Bank for public works projects to provide cash to local banks for bills of exchange pertaining to infrastructure and public works. Repatriate the foreign dollar overhang by encouraging China, Japan, and other dollar holders to place orders for US-made capital goods and modern hospitals. Revive the US Export-Import Bank. Set up a 10% tariff to protect domestic re-industrialization. Nationalize and operate GM, Chrysler, CIT, and other needed but insolvent firms as a permanent public sector. Maintain Amtrak and USPS.

3. Measures to re-industrialize, build infrastructure, develop science drivers, create jobs, and restore a high-wage economy: state and local governments and special government agencies modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority will be prime contractors for an ambitious program of infrastructure and public works subcontracted to the private sector. To deal with collapsing US infrastructure, modernize the US electrical grid and provide low-cost energy with 1,000 fourth generation, pebble bed, high temperature reactors of 1,000 to 2,000 megawatts each. Rebuild the rail system with 50,000 miles of ultra-modern maglev Amtrak rail reaching into every state. Rebuild the entire interstate highway system to 21st century standards. Rebuild drinking water and waste water systems nationwide. Promote canal building and irrigation. For health care, build 1,000 500-bed modern hospitals to meet the minimum Hill-Burton standards of 1946. Train 250,000 doctors over the next decade. The Davis-Bacon Act will mandate union pay scales for all projects. For the farm sector, provide a debt freeze for the duration of the crisis, 0% federal credit for working capital and capital improvements, a ban on foreclosures, and federal price supports at 110% of parity across the board, with farm surpluses being used for a new Food for Peace program to stop world famine and genocide. Working with other interested nations, invest $100 billion each in: biomedical research to cure dread diseases; high energy physics (including lasers) to develop fusion power and beyond; and a multi-decade NASA program of moon-Mars manned exploration, permanent colonization, and industrial production. These science drivers will provide the technological spin-offs to modernize the entire US economy in the same way that the NASA moon shot gave us microchips and computers in the 1960s. These steps will expand and upgrade the national stock of capital goods and enhance the real productivity of US labor. Return the federal budget and foreign trade to surplus in 5 years or less.

4. Measures to defend and expand the social safety net: Restore all cuts; full funding at improved levels for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, jobless benefits, WIC, Head Start, and related programs. Offer Medicare for All to anyone under 65 who wants it at $100 per person per month, with reduced rates for families, students, and the unemployed. Pay for this with Tobin tax revenues and TARP clawback, and by ending the Iraq and Afghan wars. Seek to raise life expectancy by five years for starters. No rationing or death panels; savings can come only by finding cures. Quickly reach a $15 per hour living wage. Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act and affirm the right to organize. Pass card check to promote collective bargaining.

5. Measures to re-launch world trade and promote world recovery: Create a new world monetary system including the euro, the yen, the dollar, and the ruble, plus emerging Arab and Latin American regional currencies, with fixed exchange rates and narrow bands of fluctuation enforced by participating governments. Institute clearing and gold settlement among member states. Replace the IMF with a Multilateral Development Bank to finance world trade and infrastructure. The goal of the system must be to re-launch world trade through exports of high-technology capital goods, especially to sub-Saharan Africa, south Asia, and the poorer parts of Latin America. Promote a world Marshall Plan of great projects of world infrastructure, including: a Middle East reconstruction and development program; plans for the Ganges-Bramaputra, Indus, Mekong, Amazon, and Nile-Congo river basins; bridge-tunnel combinations to span the Bering Strait, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Straits of Malacca, the Sicilian narrows, and connect Japan to the Asian mainland; second Panama canal and Kra canals; Eurasian silk road, Cape to Cairo/Dakar to Djibouti, Australian coastal, and Inter-American rail projects, and more. American businesses will receive many of these orders, which means American jobs.
This program will create 30 million jobs in less than five years. It will end the depression, rebuild the US economy, improve wages and standards of living, re-start productive investment, and attain full employment with increased levels of capital investment per job. Most orders placed under this program will go to US private sector bidders. Because of the vastly increased volume of goods put on the market, inflation will not result.

http://tarpley.net/2009/11/16/30-million-productive-jobs-to-rebuild-us-infrastructure-industry-and-agriculture-the-program-to-end-the-economic-depression/

Tarpley.net

Here are the true Heroes of the USA!

2009-12-29T15:33:00.001-08:00

EMERGENCY ANTI-ESCALATION RALLY

2009-12-08T18:52:00.000-08:00

EMERGENCY ANTI-ESCALATION RALLY

Saturday, Dec. 12, 2009 • 11am-4pm • Washington DC

Tell Obama & Congress: "NO, YOU CAN'T!"
No Escalation • End the Wars • Bring Our Troops Home

Lafayette Square | White House
Metro: Farragut West or Farragut North

Speakers: Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Sen. Mike Gravel, Kathy Kelly, Chris Hedges, David Swanson, Rev. Graylan Hagler, Gael Murphy, Brian Becker, Debra Sweet, Mathis Chiroux, Elaine Brower, Coy McKinney, Chioma Oruh, Lynne Williams, Hon. Betty Hall, Marian Douglas-Ungaro, Dr. Michael Knox, Ralph Lopez, Dr. Sahar Shafqat, David Zirin, Chris Towne, Cpt. Ron Fisher.
Plus: Statements from Rabbi Michael Lerner, Col. Ann Wright, Kevin Zeese, Dr. Stephen Zunes, Granny D (turning 100), and others.

Live Music: Jordan Page, Head-Roc, Emma's Revolution, Precise Science.

http://www.enduswars.org/

New Videos up on TheCoolinator1 Youtube Channel !

2009-11-17T07:33:00.001-08:00

Hello all,

After a two month hiatus from Youtube I finally dragged myself out of that apathetic pit we all know so well and put together two intriguing new videos. One of which dealing with Veteran's day and the present reality behind the two wars and the other is a review of the Neo-Retro Handhelds and Game systems that have been popping up these days.

I hope you enjoy them.

YouTube Channel: TheCoolinator1

Please comment! Thanks !

Happy Veteran's Day! Now Stop the Fake Wars!!!

2009-11-11T10:51:00.000-08:00

Another year, another Veteran's Day, another fake war for profit.......It's time to stop the carnage.

Go to the websites below and make a difference.

Iraqi Veteran's Against the War

http://www.ivaw.org/about

Battle plan

NEEDED: AN ANTIWAR OPPOSITION TO OBAMA

http://actindependent.org/LeftOpp.pdf

http://actindependent.org/

Resistance is victory.........

Gothic 3 - Fast pace action...one click at a time

2009-10-26T07:06:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,

It's a beautiful monday morning here in corporate slave land and I would love to share with you my first impressions of a game I was playing a little of this weekend....... Gothic 3.

The game itself is very well made. It takes a while to get used to the combat but once you get the hang of it your swashbuckling like a mad man. The game starts out with you and your band arriving on the shores of a fantasy-esq land. You seem to walk in on a band of orcs ransacking a town. The boss orc (the albino one) takes one look at you and then BOOM your in combat with people sword fight all around you. It was a good idea to throw you right into the action. After you defeat all the orcs you then begin to literally finish what the orcs had started by pillaging the town yourself. At this point though the town elder doesn't seem to care. So after your done taking grabbing everything that isn't nailed down you follow one of you chums to the rebel camp. The story then goes into this pseudo-Star Wars-ish storyline with rebels, an evil necromancer Xardas (sith lord), Evil orcs (stormtroopers), mercenaries (Bounty Hunters), and bandits. Right now I'm helping the rebels but I noticed that you can gain reputation with numerous factions so the game isn't linear. Yes, your first quest is going to "see the rebel base" but after that is finished you can be friends with whoever you please.

The Good - The game is beautiful - graphics and detail are superb, the music is epic, the character modification (equipment / skill) is easy to learn, and the quests just keep on coming. There is TONS to do in this game.

The Bad - With the exception of using bows and arrows and magic the combat system is very primitive. You can either click rapidly to do fast attacks or you can hold down one of the mouse buttons and release for a more powerful attack. The right mouse button is the parry / quick attack while the left mouse button provides a heavier attack. Also you can hold down the left mouse button to do a devastating blow or hold the right mouse button and the left button to do a thrusting attack which stuns the enemy for a second or two. The biggest problem that I have with it is that some AI are so dumb that you can just do quick attacks on them until they die. That doesn't mean combat is easy. Sometimes they will gang up on you and knock your ass down so fast it will surprise you. It works but its a very odd system.

Edit:

With the newest patch you can change the difficulty level and have alternate AI which makes the game substantially harder.

The Ugly - You NEED a high end machine to play this game. Yes, the game came out in 2006 but that doesn't mean your PC system is going to run it like nothing. Your going to need a good video card to play this. Even with my system as it is plus Gamebooster the game still hiccups a bit. At certain loading areas the game will freeze for a few seconds leaving you crossing your fingers hoping the dam thing didn't crash. Speaking of crashing the game is technically sound. It only crashed once on me and I have no idea what happened.

If you have a good PC and love RPG games.....I would definitely suggest you playing it. You can find the 3-Pack RPG bundle for around $20 dollars. Just this game and Loki alone are worth that much but you get Dungeon lords with the deal as well so it's an incredible buy.

Comments? Questions?

Obama Broken Promises....wake up to WallStreet Puppets....

2009-10-20T12:22:00.000-07:00

Hello, I am TheCoolinator.....I'm a registered Democrat and a life long enemy of the Republican party. Please do not accuse me of being a right winger. To me, Reality is more important than any political party. Shake off your LEFT vs RIGHT bias and see that both sides are controlled by Wall Street Corporate elites.

Obama racks up list of broken promises

1. 'Sunlight Before Signing'

"When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as the president, you the public will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it,"

2. Capital gains tax elimination

3. New American jobs tax credit

4. Hiatus on 401(k) penalties

5. 'No jobs for lobbyists'

6. Earmark reform

7. Bring troops home in 16 months

8. Sign 'Freedom of Choice Act'

9. $4,000 college credit

10. Transparency

WND has reported on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's status as a "natural born citizen." The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

Obamacrimes.com - Attorney Philip Berg

11. Executive signing statements

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=91286#

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/rulings/promise-broken/

LOKI - The forgotten Diablo Clone!

2009-10-19T07:24:00.000-07:00

Hey! Hey!

So starts a new week of corporate slavery and one of my most favorite things to do on Monday mornings is give you all a detailed summary of what PC games I bought this weekend.

Before I begin however, let me give you a little back story. A few weekends ago my friend and I visited our local Best Buy to see if there were any new movies or games we could pick up. As I was perusing through the PC game aisle I saw a 3-Pack RPG set which contained Dungeon Lord, Gothic 3, and LOKI. Now I must admit that I'm a big Dreamcatcher fan. They are a wonderful developer of action and adventure titles. I did quite a bit of research on these games in the past and I finally had the chance to pick all of them up at one time. I do think the price was a little high for them however. $20 dollars. I would have been sold at $14.99 but whatever.

When I got home I installed them all but Gothic 3 and Dungeon Lord seem to be very in depth games so I focused my attention solely on LOKI. Now for all you Diablo fans LOKI is literally a Diablo clone. If Blizzard Entertainment would have came out with Diablo 3 a few years back it would have looked exactly like LOKI. That doesn't mean it’s bad, it's actually very well made, the graphics, animation, sound, and voice acting are superb. The game itself (LOKI) like Diablo is pretty straight forward. Pick a hero, move around, talk to quest givers, and bash heads.

The only real problem I have with the game as of yet is the choice of heroes. You get 4 choices, 2 Women and 2 Men and I have to be honest here I really don't care for any of them except the Norse Warrior. The Amazon Shaman girl shows some promise but they just all fall under the "Blah" category in terms of interest. I understand why they did this to make it balanced but they needed to include at least one more Male character just to give it an extra little boost. They seem to be equipped with a multiplayer option but I haven't had the chance to play online with any of them yet. If I could get into the groove of LOKI this could be the Diablo-ish game to get me all warmed up for the soon to be released Diablo 3 game.

Have you guys ever heard of LOKI or the other games? And if so what do you think?

The RetroGen!!!!

2009-10-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

Retrogen Review:

Hi guys,

My RETROGEN arrived in the mail yesterday and the minute I put my hands on it I started plugging in cartridges to give it a test drive. All of them seem to work fine EXCEPT Castlevania: Bloodlines. Which makes me very sad . The device itself is incredibly light and well made. The screen is a good size, it's not as big as it appears on the box or in pictures, but its a solid 2.8". The buttons are nice. It takes a little while to get used to them because they are set at an angle but they get the job done. I haven't tried TV out yet but I'm sure it works well. The music that comes out of it is slightly off. It's not a big deal really, I actually find it kind of funny.

The only thing that isn't too good about it is the D-Pad which surprised the hell out of me because the D-Pad on the Retrogen "looked" a whole lot better then the GenMobiles one. The D-pad is a big solid silver disc on the left hand side. It works well with platformers and shooter games but is almost impossible to use during a fighting game like Street Fighter II or Samurai showdown. There is also a bit of slowdown that effects certain games. An example of this would be that I get a little slow down in Contra Hardcorps and quite a bit of slowdown in Earthworm Jim. You can barely notice it though so it won't hurt your experience.

Final Words:

The Achilles heel of this portable is the D-pad. Everything else is done very well. The screen is a perfect size and the graphics are clear, the buttons are responsive and spring-y, and the music is OK. If you could overlook the crappy D-pad then I would say pick it up. If not just wait for the GenMobile.

To Purchcase:

http://www.gsubooks.com/

For further information about the new retro Sega systems and hand helds please click on the link below.

http://the-coolinator-lounge.blogspot.com/2009/08/whats-deal-with-retro-gaming-part-2.html

Thanks for reading and comments are always appreciated!

Wikipedia Shills for Water Fluoridation

2009-10-12T08:26:00.000-07:00

Today Wikipedia's Featured Article shills for water Fluoridation.

CAUTION LIES AHEAD!

“Water fluoridation is the controlled addition of fluoride to a public water supply to reduce tooth decay. Fluoridated water has fluoride at a level that is effective for preventing cavities; this can occur naturally or by adding fluoride. Fluoridated water operates on tooth surfaces: in the mouth it creates low levels of fluoride in saliva, which reduces the rate at which tooth enamel demineralizes and increases the rate at which it remineralizes in the early stages of cavities. Typically a fluoridated compound is added to drinking water, a process that in the U.S. costs an average of about $0.92 per person-year. Defluoridation is needed when the naturally occurring fluoride level exceeds recommended limits. A 1994 World Health Organization expert committee suggested a level of fluoride from 0.5 to 1.0 mg/L (milligrams per liter), depending on climate. Dental cavities remain a major public health concern in most industrialized countries, affecting 60–90% of schoolchildren and the vast majority of adults, and costing society more to treat than any other disease. Water fluoridation prevents cavities in both children and adults, with studies estimating an 18–40% reduction in cavities when water fluoridation is used by children who already have access to toothpaste and other sources of fluoride. There is no clear evidence of other adverse effects. It is controversial, and opposition to it has been based on ethical, legal, safety, and efficacy grounds."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation

REALITY OF THE SITUATION

Sodium Fluoride is considered under the Department of Transportation to be a 6.1 Poison. Like Mercury it causes Neurological harm, nervous system disruption, and organ failure. One of Sodium Fluorides signature traits is causing bone cancer. The effects of Sodium Fluoride on the mind have shown to make animals less active. Lab Rats fed Sodium fluoride did not protect their territory and were less aggressive.

Sodium Fluoride was first used in Soviet Prisoner camps as well as Nazi Germany concentration camps to create a docile atmosphere among the inmates.

I have switched to a Non-Sodium Fluoride brand and I suggest you all do too. Some non-fluoride brands can be found at Mothernature.com by using their search engine.

Non-Fluoride Brands

Tom's of Main

Desert essence

Painkiller and the NEW Painkiller Resurrection

2009-10-07T10:59:00.000-07:00

In my opinion Painkiller was the closest thing we gamers got to an old school shooter in the last decade. If IDSoftware remade Doom correctly then it would have turned out similar to Painkiller.

Painkiller was an FPS that didn't need a storyline. It had the balls, it had the action, it had the atmosphere. The story was just extra. What was really important was to see how many monsters you could cut to pieces with the whirling blade thing or how many bad guys you could stick to the wall with your steak gun.

The boss battles were perfect. Giant monsters that took up the whole screen in a large arena...Perfect. The challenges were not annoying to complete at all, and the upgrades were awesome....Slowing down time and rapid fire were my favorite.

What don't present day game developers get about making a good FPS game? They need to re-play DOOM, Hexen, or DukeNukem3D as soon as possible and realize what they are missing.

Now, I'm not just making this blog to praise Painkiller. We should all do that in private. I'm creating this blog to show people that a NEW Painkiller game is coming out soon.

http://www.dreamcatchergames.com/dci/painkiller_ressurrection

http://pc.ign.com/articles/971/971617p1.html#

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painkiller:_Resurrection

Click the links and Discuss!

Bioshock review! With Spoilers!

2009-10-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

Bioshock is probably the most well thought out First Person Shooter I have ever come in contact with. The storyline is epic and the ideology of Ryan (the creator of Rapture) is a very nice portrait of how elites think and how their ideas drip down to the lower masses and infect them as well. You hear Ryan speaking of "Parasites" AKA poor and then when you fight the citizens of Rapture they have fallen victim to his crass elitism. The game mechanics are truly remarkable and filled with an almost endless amount of variety

. Weapons can be upgraded, Plasmids (Super Powers) can be upgraded, ammo can be invented, things can be hacked, and so on and so forth.

Flashbacks are common and it gives the player an uneasy feeling that they aren't being told something. There are hints within the NPC dialogues that something isn't what it seems and as the story unfolds twists and turns arise that can only be found in some kind of 1940's radio broadcast.

Now the graphics are wonderful. Problem is that because my game has no CD/DVD to read off of there is a lot of frame rate loss in the loading areas. Most of which are at doors when the frame rate drops significantly. The atmosphere of the game is remarkable and you really need a super charged computer to work this game properly. So if you have a PS3 or XBOX360 I would advise you to buy the console version because it doesn't run too well on PC.

The game has this early 1900 feel to it. Neon lights, retro futuristic architecture, even peoples accents come from the early 1900's. Except instead of playing a noir detective in New York your playing a stranger in an underwater city filled with insane people.

Disclaimer!! Spoilers!!!

So I have to admit that after Andrew Ryan died the games story took a nose dive. I don't know what it was really; maybe the voice actor of Andrew Ryan was so good that the other guy "Atlas" Frank Fontaine couldn't really match his performance. All in all, I have to hand it to them, it was a good twist in the storyline though but it just lost a lot of momentum. Andrew Ryan's elitist voice going on and on about parasites and the tyrannical hand of government really filled the game with his insane ideology and I like how all the people of Rapture were conditioned over the time they spent there to think just like him. I think towards the end of the game Frank Fontaine said it the best. "Everyone who came to Rapture thought they were going to be captains of industry but they forgot that there is always someone who has to scrub the toilets" Andrew Ryan catered to the elitist class and Fontaine catered to the poorer classes. They both used their social class to fight one another and in doing so, destroyed each other, the city, and were all driven mad while doing so..

Cryostasis first look!

2009-09-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

First off, let me say that Amazon.com has amazing customer service. They really get the product to you fast and in the same condition it is advertised.

Ok, I was roaming around the internet a couple of days ago and I went over to Destructoid to check out the news and they had an article on how Amazon.com was having a super sale on the new game Cryostasis. So, Me being a sucker for sales I checked it out. It seems to be a $39.99 game and it was on sale for $12.99. I said sign me up! So I purchased it and it got to my house yesterday.

Now when I finally got into the game play I had this old familiar feeling. I couldn't place it until I got my first weapon (A heavy lock) which my character used as brass knuckles. Right then I new exactly what game I was dealing with. It seems to be a more detailed clone of Sega's Condemned: Criminal Origins. If you haven't played a game like this the way to describe it is that its not solely based on long range combat like many other FPS's, its more of a down and dirty, in your face, first person brawler. Like Condemned. At least in the beginning.

They did inject something new into this tired old genre. As you progress throughout the game you will come upon corpses that blink red. Kind of like if they had one of those lights that the cyclists use clipped on to them. Its funny the first time you see it because the corpses are lit up and blinking like Christmas trees in all these strange positions. So, you go over to them and right click and instantaneously you are transported into their past, playing as them, trying to change the events that led up to their demise.

For example: I found one dead body huddled up (blinking of course) by a door. When you click on him you are brought back to the situation that killed him and you have to run to the right, lock the door so that water doesn't flood the chamber and then use the broken handle from that same door you just came from to fit into the other door that is missing a handle. Then you open all the locks by using all the handles and you move through the door and its over. His soul is saved!

I like the mix of puzzle, creepiness, and action. Good stuff all around!

But Beware of the dreading SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS!......This PC game is for those who have tricked out their PC's. Don't get this if your computer has trouble running Pac-Man emulators.

How to translate the news!

2009-09-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be a good idea to show people how to translate a corporate media news article so we can all learn how to "read between the lines". We will be translating "The Way out of Afghanistan" by Fareed Zakaria. It's a misleading title because its actually a pro-war, pro-imperialistic article.

Hope you enjoy my commentary!

The Way Out of Afghanistan

Author: Fareed Zakaria

http://www.newsweek.com/id/215318

:Quote:
The United States, NATO, the European Union, and other nations have invested massively in stabilizing the country over the past eight years, and they will not—and should not—abandon it

The most important reality of the post-9/11 world has been the lack of any major follow-up attack. That's happened largely because Al Qaeda has been on the run in Afghanistan and Pakistan. :End Quote:

Channeling the 9/11 myth and then stating that "Al-Qaeda" (US funded) is on the run. Where are they on the run? Pakistan. Why? Because Obama wanted to and HAS BEEN bombing Pakistan because they are allies with China.

:Quote:
Were America to leave the scene, all the region's players would start jockeying for influence over Afghanistan. That would almost certainly mean the revival of the poisonous alliance between the Pakistani military and the hardest-line elements of the Taliban. :End Quote:

If we left that means that the Afghani's would have control over their own country again......What a Terrible idea, right? "Poisonous alliance" = fear mongering

:Quote:
The number of civilian deaths, while grim, is less than a 10th the number in Iraq in 2006. In the recent election, all four presidential candidates publicly endorsed the U.S. presence there. Compare this to Iraq, where politicians engaged in ritual denunciations of the United States constantly, to satisfy the public's anti-Americanism. :End Quote:

The innocent deaths continue for no reason. Wars built on lies. the Afghani president was funded into power by the US. If the new candidates speak out against the US they may get shot or the funded may be stripped away.

:Quote:
The Obama administration's answer to the worsening situation in the country appears to be: "more." More troops, civilians, tasks, and missions. There is nothing wrong with helping Afghans develop their country. But if the goal is to give Afghanistan a strong, functioning central government and a viable economy, the task will require decades, not years. :End Quote:

Translation = ENDLESS WAR, JOIN THE ARMY, ENDLESS IMPERIALISM

:Quote:
The focus must shift from nation building to dealmaking. The central problem in Afghanistan is that the Pashtuns, who make up 45 percent of the country and almost 100 percent of the Taliban, do not feel empowered. We need to start talking to them, whether they are nominally Taliban or not. Buying, renting, or bribing Pashtun tribes should become the centerpiece of America's stabilization strategy, as it was Britain's when it ruled Afghanistan. :End Quote:

Great, use a British destabilization plan to bribe the Afghani people to shoot at our troops so we can loot their land. Wonderful idea.

:Quote:
First, increase American troops. Second, increase Afghan troops. Third, shrink the number of enemy forces by making them switch sides or lay down their arms. That third strategy is what worked so well in Iraq and urgently needs to be adopted in Afghanistan. A few years from now, we can be sure that Afghanistan will still be poor, corrupt, and dysfunctional. But if we make the right deals, it will be ruled by leaders who keep the country inhospitable to Al Qaeda and terrorist groups like it. That's my definition of success. :End Quote:

Translation = Increased number of body bags, pay off Afghan troops to subjugate their own people, and shrink the number of civilians through Obama Predator drone attacks on villiages, wedding parties, friendly sports games, and all of this while siphoning all the natural resources and heroine away from their country.

Ingredients Found in Spermicides, Cleaners, and Cosmetics along with Thimerosal, and Squalene Present in Experimental H1N1 Vaccine

2009-09-16T07:16:00.000-07:00

Trials for the experimental H1N1 Swine flu vaccine commence Tuesday, September 15th in Thornton, Colorado. Novartis, a bio-pharmaceutical company that manufactures the vaccine, is recommending that children participating in the trial receive two doses of an experimental vaccine which contain ingredients found in spermicides, cleaners, and cosmetics along with thimerosal and squalene (MF59). Everyone should have a sense of concern as the only safety checks for these children are a few blood draws and follow-up phone calls. No neurological testing. No kidding.

http://vactruth.com/2009/09/11/ingredients-found-in-spermicides-cleaners-and-cosmetics-along-with-thimerosal-and-squalene-present-in-experimental-h1n1-vaccine/

^ Don't ever take a vaccine. Remember that these pharmaceutical companies are FOR PROFIT and will put the cheapest and most dangerous ingredients into their "PRODUCTS". Beware.

Quick overview from the article.

1. The vaccine contains squalene (MF59) which has not been tested for causing cancer.

2. The vaccine contains thimerosal, a known culprit in causing autism and neurological deficits.

3. The vaccine curiously contains nonoxynol-9 used in spermicides.

4. The vaccine will likely cause (and spread) the flu.

5. No neurological testing will be done to ensure the vaccine is safe from harmful neurological side effects.

6. Monitoring for safety will last 13 months, well beyond the flu season.

Never forget....9/11 was an inside job

2009-09-15T07:36:00.001-07:00

New YouTube video is up. Tackles the long standing official myth of 9/11 and brings up some seriously question on how this fantasy was used to single handedly destroy the USA and plunge it face first into a fascist police state.

Youtube channel: TheCoolinator1

Enjoy!

DVD REVIEW! Highlander franchise!

2009-09-14T12:13:00.000-07:00

Ok, So I finally got my fill of Highlander goodness and I'm just about ready to throw the new DVD's I bought on my shelf until the next time I feel the need for some sword fights and lighting storms but before I let it go I feel the need to share my experience with the Community.

I don't know why. I'm bored at work. Humor me.

So I got Highlander I (Directors Cut), Highlander III: The Final Dimension (Directors Cut) and the 2 DVD collectors edition of Highlander: Endgame (Also Directors cut)

A. We all know Highlander I. Great movie, cult classic. Clancey Brown is hardcore. Moving on. (See my article on Fantasy movies. Highlander is the first one I talk about)

B.

Highlander III

The only way I can describe this movie is that its a reboot. It's the Highlander franchises version of Escape from L.A. Its the same exact movie as the first one but told in a different way and given a few new twists. Namely, Kane's illusion power which I have to admit kept it somewhat fresh. Now I got the directors cut so you know what that means.....SHAMELESSLY EXTENDED SEX SCENE (is that a double entendre?? "extended"....whatever). Ugh! You would think that the prospect of seeing Debra Unger in action would make this scene a little more watch able but no.....absolutely not. Just skip it.

Other than that the movie does the Escape from L.A. cloned storylines like other reviewers have said in the past. Kane defeating Connors teacher (Kurgan killed Ramirez), Kane harassing his son in the car (Kurgan harassing Brenda from HL: I), and finally Kane mouthing off to Connor in a church (Kurgan mouthing off in a church). The scenes are the same but a little different. Which keeps in interesting. IMO.

Highlander: Endgame

Now I must say they really brought some new ideas to the table in this one which I found very enjoyable. They finally bridged the gap between the Christopher Lambert movies and the Adrian Paul TV series. They gave some additional back story to the main characters and Bruce Payne (Jacob Kell) is a wonderful villain. Even rivaling Clancey Brown's Kurgan character from the original. Another thing that they injected in to the film was the premise of the "Posse" of immortals going around breaking the rules of the game and taking heads. This idea was first done in the TV series when the Hunters (Humans) would shoot up an immortal and then allow another immortal of their choosing to take their heads (I think it was called Unholy Alliance, 2 part episode, I watched it on Hulu). The other nice new twist would be that Jacob Kell really didn't want to take Connor's head. He wanted to torture him until they were the last two immortals AND THEN take his head. This is very different if you've ever seen the first and third movie because the main villains’ are always after Connor's powers. The last portion of the movie that I think they did a great job on was how Connor had to sacrifice himself in order to make Duncan strong enough to take Kell on. This was done very well and indicates the whole passing of the torch motif. Usually the mentors (before it was Ramirez, then the Sorcerer) both got killed by the main villain of the movie. However, in this one they gave it a nice little twist with Connor forcing Duncan to take his head. I don't know about you but I got a little teary eyed.

Ok, That was the good. Now the bad. In the behind the scene featurette they talked about how "large" the budget was for the film but you can tell right off the bat that this movie has a cheap feel to it. Not Sci-fi channel cheap but almost there.

Secondly, the Posse of immortals didn't really do anything in the movie other than get shot up in the first fight with the Watchers, fight Duncan Macloed half way through the movie, and then all of them get their heads cut off in this surreal anti-climactic last supper scene. I think they needed to get rid of them and they said "HEY! How about Jacon Kell just walks around the table lobbing off their hands while they just stand there!" BRILLIANT! I mean, come on, at least make them attempt to fight back so they can get completely owned by Jacob.

Thirdly, they blatantly reused a fight scene in the final battle and I mean BLATANTLY. They are fighting through .....you guesses it.....another abandoned factory when all of a sudden Duncan and Jacob do the same exact fight movements from 5 minutes ago. This pissed me off a lot because the fight choreography looked good the first time they did it but when they literally replayed it again to lengthen the end battle it took away from its original goodness.

Hope you enjoyed my retrospective. I think the movies aren't as bad as people make them out to be. Just have fun with it and take them with a grain of salt.

Thanks for reading. Comments are appreciated.

New Youtube Episode! On....The News!

2009-09-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

So, I was laying in bed around 10:30pm tired from a long day of corporate serfdom when I came to the startling realization that I had been ignoring the millions of subscribers to my Youtube channel. So I shrugged off the fatigue, sprung up out of bed, put my headphones on, and started talking. The episode is entitles "The News!". It is a compilation of news articles that I've been posting on the political thread in the Sega-16 forums. There is a lot of eye opening information and commentary to be found in this new video with some very nice picture if I say so myself! Thank you, Ixquick search engine! http://www.ixquick.com/

If you feel like taking a gander at it then take a stroll over to my Youtube channel: TheCoolinator1

Thank you! Comments are always appreciated!

Happy Birthday Sega Dreamcast! 10 Years of Fun!

2009-09-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

It is 9/9/09 and today marks the 10th anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast. Since the beginning consoles have attempted to bring the real arcade experience into peoples homes but it wasn't perfected until the Sega Dreamcast hit shelves on 9/9/99 !

This little white box had one of the greatest and most creative software libraries in the history of gaming and years after it was orphaned by Sega games are continuing to be developed and produced for it.

We salute you Dreamcast! Thank you for being one of the best!

It's still thinking!

Welcome to neo-serfdom. Slavery is just around the corner.

2009-09-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

I guess people don't care or even notice that their world is literally being turned into one giant slave grid. Just recently near where I live they have installed Red Light Camera's on a road where no one has EVER ran the red light. In all the years of driving up and down this town road I have not once seen anyone getting pulled over but like magic the town "officials" had this wonderful plan to put in red light cameras at this and many other intersections across the our county.

It makes me sick.

Everyone knows we are in an economic depression, so why I ask, would the people we elect to help us go and install a piece of machinery that is created for the sole purpose of robbing the general population out of money they can't afford to lose? It boggles the mind. To make matters worse we have a police force that might as well have been trained by a pack of medieval bandits. If you get pulled over now a days you will either get tazered to death or they will throw a bag of drugs in your back seat and steal your car. Now, Where I live there are no town hall meetings, nor is there any way to get in contact with your representative or legislator. Its almost as if these people they are sitting on a cloud somewhere on top of a huge mountain that no one would ever dare to climb in the first place. These "officials" are more elusive then giant squids. The public is getting screwed from sun up to sun down, seven days a week, and they continue to get squeezed with a smile on their face. Its unbelievable.

Lets go down the list....shall we?

1. Most Police are trained to be gang members instead of public servants and the ones in suburban areas are over paid by about 50%. They feed on the public while being guard dogs for wealthy criminals.

City and Urban Police excluded: They are getting the shaft worse then us and they have to put their lives on the line everyday for a measley paycheck and more and more dangerous assignments.

2. Red Light Camera. We are delegating the power of law enforcement over to a robot that can malfunction, could be programmed incorrectly, or has been purposely programmed incorrectly to raise revenue so it can be siphoned out and deposited right back in the coffers of other state and local "Officials".

3. No end to absurdly high property taxes. How much does a family need to pay in a state like New York or California? Some people are actually paying 10,000 to 12,000 dollars a year JUST in property taxes alone. Where is that money going to? AND why? It's getting to the point where people are going to have to start moving to rural areas just to evade these outrageous taxes.

4. The systematic destruction of the middle class. This is the most chilling, horrendous, and counterproductive thing I have ever been privy to in my life. The combination of "free trade" agreements and the lack of labor support in this country is disgraceful. These people WANT a population that is wage slaves. They WANT a population who are afraid to ask questions and fight for their living wage. They WANT to destroy labor organizations and finally they WANT to convert high salary property owners into LOW WAGE PROPERTY-LESS MASSES. This is not a theory, this is a fact. Look around you. College graduates with Masters Degrees are working in coffee houses. We have doctors working at Wal-mart and Target. We have people who are so afraid of losing their jobs they continue to take more and more of a work load for the same amount of money.

We all need to wake up now. Its time to face reality. To understand who are the real enemies. Not the Blue team. Not the Red Team. Not the hippies, soulless capitalists, or the queers. The enemy is WALLSTREET. The enemy is financial oligarchs. We must regain consciousness and be aware of such dangers instead of stumbling through life as hedonistic cretins.

FIGHT. FIGHT FOR YOUR ECONOMIC RIGHTS. There are no fruits without struggle.

Fantasy movies and why we love them!

2009-08-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Since I’ve been somewhat of a downer lately I felt that I should write an upbeat post that shines a spotlight on some of the greatest feel good fantasy films of all time. The good old days before CGI ruined the media world.

Now I know what you’re thinking, Fantasy Movies usually are stigmatized as either really nerdy or really girlie but my dear friends you must understand that the oldest and greatest stories ever penned were fantasy in concept. The hero’s journey has been around since the dawn of man and has been retold time and time again throughout a multitude of different cultures across the face of the world. As simple as this formula is it is timeless and resonates with all of us because we too have encountered the hero's journey in our own lives and probably haven’t even noticed!

The Hero’s Journey:

The Call to Adventure
Accepting the Journey
Teacher coming down from the mountain
The Ordeal
&
The Triumphant Return

Just from memory I'm going to pick a few movies that I’ve seen in my life and talk about the impressions they made on me and what special messages I believe were hidden within them.

Let's begin!

Highlander

Recently I created a thread on the SpoonyExperiment.com forums regarding the Highlander series. The original movie was an epic adventure filled to the brim with swordfights, immortals, and large supernatural electrical storms but other than all the flashy special effects the movie touches upon a timeless motif.

Immortality

Since the beginning of time Human's have been attempting to make sense of their environment. How they would do this was to categorize all the elements and emotions they felt and anthropomorphize them into one specific deity. This deity of course would be immortal and embody their specified element (Earth, water, fire, wind, lightning, etc), emotion (love, jealousy, hatred, happiness, etc), or vocation (Medicine, blacksmithing, war, hunting, etc). In the movie Highlander however we see that the immortals have no power other than their universal immunity to death, unless of course they are decapitated. In an odd way they are similar to the Gorgans's from the ancient story of Perseus. All of them are semi-immortal unless their heads are separated from their bodies. The premise is gruesome but somewhat feasible if you think about it long enough.

Another idea which is taken from different stories throughout the ages is the battle of good and evil. It’s never said out loud but the personalities of Connor and his adversary Kurgan are polar opposites in every way. Connor is kind and thoughtful while Kurgan is a violent sociopath. The world of the immortals gets even more intriguing because they live among regular people but sadly have trouble taking part do to their long lives and sterility (all immortals seemed to be sterile until the newest Highlander movie "The Source" where it was shown that they can impregnate women some how..... but who cares about the Highlander sequels, they are all screwed up beyond recognition anyway), so by nature they are outcasts.

If you have already seen this movie and want some more immortal sword fighting action I would suggest giving the TV series a try. It really dives deeper into the world of immortals, the battles they fight, and how they interact within society.

Willow

Right from the beginning the movie draws inspiration from the biblical story of Moses. A woman who is holding a baby is being pursued and as a last ditch effort so save the child she sends it down stream. Luckily for the child it gets picked up by a nearby village of little people. I guess you can call them Hobbits, or dwarves, but in this specific movie they are called Pecks. I think? Peck may be a derogatory word used to describe them but I’m drawing a blank right now so it will have to do. They however are a good people who survive through agriculture and seem to be at peace with the land. After the baby is found by the main character (Willow) and his family they discuss about what to do with the child. The child is not of their race and must be brought to the council so that the elder can decide on what do to with it. This part in the story is known as the call to adventure because the Elder picks Willow to be the person to deliver the child to a nearby Human village. From there it the story goes on an exciting journey throughout their world. Chock full of Evil Sorceresses, a Skull Knight (General Kael!), and a multitude of other characters that really make the experience enjoyable. Mad Martigan is the typical Han Solo-ish character that starts out as an opportunist and as the movie progresses transforms into the white knight of the film. There are some very interesting supporting characters and different kinds of entities that draw the viewer deep within their world .

This is a very good movie and I must insist that all of you reading this should go and see it for yourselves. It is one of the last great fantasy films of all time. You shouldn’t miss it!

Krull

The world of Krull is a magnificent place. The environment is truly pristine and the inhabitants are colorful and pleasant. There is however an antagonist of mass proportions terrorizing the land. His name is the Beast and he commands an army of armored soldiers called Slayers who are equipped with weapons that are far superior to whatever the Krullites wield. The Beast is described as an all powerful entity who travels from world to world conquering the lands and doing what he pleases with the populations. The movie begins with Cowyln and Lyssa’s marriage to unite the kingdoms and from what it looks like after years of slayer onslaughts there isn’t that much left of either fiefdoms. As the wedding ceremony is about to be completed the slayers attack with a almost unstoppable power. They swarm the castle, grab Lyssa, and haul her back to the Beasts castle which seems to resemble a giant out of place mountain. To make matters worse this castle has the ability to teleport anywhere the Beast pleases and Cowyln is shot to pieces and has to be nursed back to health by the wise old hermit Ynyr. This is the mentor motif. An old sage of some sort who comes down from the mountain to bestow his knowledge on the up and coming hero. The movie Highlander had this as well with the teacher known as Ramirez (Sean Connery). Unfortunately most mentors tend to have short life spans after assisting their hero and meet their demise half way through the story. To make a long story short Cowyln who is commanded by Ynyr to find the “Glaive” which is an awesome weapon that looks like a gold five pointed star with blades that come out of the points. Its very well made and just to see it in action towards the end of the movie is well worth the wait. Now a lot of people were critical of how the weapon is used at the end but I for one thought it was done very well and I will explain why. The Glaive is supposed to embody power while love is represented in the form of fire. If you have seen the movie it’s a little easier to understand but it all comes together from one quote from the film.

“Power is fleeting, Love is eternal”

The reason why this cryptic message is so important is because the glaive (Power) is not strong enough to defeat the beast. Yes, it is used in many other important tasks within the Beast’s castle but it falls short of finishing the job. Only the fire (Love) of Lyssa and Cowyln together can vanquish the evil Beast and send him back into the void of space.

This is a very powerful movie and I remember searching for it forever before picking up the VHS (which I still own). It’s an amazing story that brings a message of how friendship and love is important to vanquish the evil and vices in ones life.

So ends this posting. I hope you have all enjoyed it and if you haven’t seen the movies I listed about please find time to watch them at least once. They are films that are very well made and have yet to be matched by any present day works.

Honorable Mentions:

Conan the Barbarian

Beast Master
-
LadyHawke
-
Highlander III
-
Legend
-
Dark Crystal
-
Labyrinth

Hawk the Slayer

Tron

Rush Job.....

2009-08-28T11:13:00.001-07:00

Hello all,

Just wanted to spread the word about my three new videos, as I said in my previous post I will continue my comments on the present day situations that effect us all, like always you can find them on my YouTube channel: TheCoolinator1.

I must apologize though they are not edited. I accidentally exported them immediately after I was finished so its all raw footage.

The third video is called “Fight the Power” and consists of me critiquing some present day personality disorders that I've observed in some of the people I have come across in my life and a slight recap on my “Individuality” video about how one must stand for something and truly embody the morals and standards which they live by.

Hope you enjoy it. Comments are always appreciated.

Shaking off the apathy.......

2009-08-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

It's been a week now since I've last posted on YouTube. Its not that I ran out of subject matter its more along the lines that I don't think its interesting to most people. I think my newest article on this blog spot summed up my reaction the other day when I concluded that more people would go to a Video Game or Comic Book convention then an Anti-War march or political protest. It was very disheartening to have to face.

All of these smiling faces buying this entertainment fluff, living in the fantasy, living on the ecstasy but missing something much more important....................REALITY.

This is why I have came to the realization that I must continue my work on YouTube, Continue to inject the harsh cold reality on to the web. People need to be shocked out of this dream they live in. To a world that is a lot darker, a world that doesn't revolve around Video game or Movie reviews but of wars, oligarchs, and crazed eugenicists. Call me crazy but that’s a lot more entertaining then any of the mediocre fluff out there today.

War......What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing.

2009-08-24T07:48:00.000-07:00

I never thought in my life that I would have to live through another Vietnam. At first I tried to compare it to Desert Storm 1 as an example but that skirmish didn't linger half as long as the nightmare that perpetuates on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan.

What's the reason for this article?

Well, I'm sick and tired of seeing mountains of fluff and entertainment. Yes, I do them as well but I also know how to balance them with the cold hard ugly reality that we need to gaze into every once in a while.

I guess the next question I should ask myself would be why do I care?

No one else does. People love to wave around their chinese made American flags and drink beer and obsess about their material posessions. Well I'm not going to be like that, I remember the first time the war(s) hit home for me. I turned on the television and we saw the portraits of dead soldiers recently blown to bits in the pointless wars. The same wars that were built on paranoia and lies. Most of the visages I let pass by without even glancing at their once smiling faces until just then a young blonde haired boys mug centered on the screen. Until this very day I hear the media announcer stating his age as his face continued to stare back at me through the television screen.

21 years old......21 years old...... the voice echoed.

I was twenty one as well at the time and for some reason I put myself in his position. I pictured myself shot to pieces in some desert wasteland by a bunch of Iraqi people that didn't want us there to begin with. I saw the anger in their faces of what we were doing to them, bombs dropping on suburban areas, my troops and private mercenary groups shooting civilians for no reason. Then I pictured the black rubber body bag bring zipped around me and the bouncing around on the cargo deck of a plane heading back home. To the land of the free. I didn't stop there either. I went even farther with my thoughts. I pictured my mother in pain and misery looking at me inside the shiny casket. The child which she once gave birth to dead prematurely because of lies....... because of deceit........ because of greed of the wealthy war profiteers.

I still hold those feeling with me every time I come home. Every time I see my father screaming at the TV because he disagrees with the news reporter. Every time I see my Mother cooking dinner. I then think of the Fathers and Mothers of the children who were led to the slaughter because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, GE, Halliburton, Blackwater, and now Obama wanted to make a profit off the Human sufferage. I sometimes think of Colin Powell holding up the fake "anthrax" vial and shaking it around as if Saddam Hussein the nefarious substance at his disposal. I think of how President Bush kept envoking the 9/11 myth over and over again to fool the American people into fighting a war of imperialism. How they played upon their irrationality, their emotional weakness convince them to offer up themselves and their children on the to alter for the good of corporate monopolies.

It still continues to this day. Obama is no different. He promised an end to the war but then starts a new one with Pakistan. Obama's predator drones are the bane of peaceful Pakistani villages all over the country. Civilians are prey for our souless flying machines. Commanded cynically by some brainwashed 19 year old service member in some far off air conditioned bunker.

I now invite all of you to look at Mrs. Sheehans website and continue the anti-war sentiments until this useless chaos stops. Please visit the link below and realize that Obama and Bush are controlled by the same people. The same people who killed that 21 year old soldier and ruined the lives of his family.

http://www.cindysheehanssoapbox.com/

Do you have Video Gamer OCD?

2009-08-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

Check list:

1. Have you ever bought multiple copies of one game for no reason?

2. Have you ever had a game disc that works perfectly fine but bought another copy just to have it in brand new condition?

3. Have you ever spent cash on video games instead of buying groceries?

4. Have you ever spent money on video games instead of on your Girlfriend / Boyfriend?

5. Have you ever started playing a video game at night and did not stop until the sun came up the next morning?

6. Do you have so many video game products that you are having trouble storing them?

7. Have you ever tried to sell one of your family members to get money for a new video game system?

8. Do you often fantasize about owning your own arcade?

9. When you see an arcade game in the wild do you have an uncontrollable urge to walk towards it?

10. Have you ever gotten into any physical altercations at an arcade or while playing a home console?

11. Do you sometimes dress up as video game characters?

12. Do you get emotional while listening to video game soundtracks?

13. Do you fear leaving your house because you think something might happen to your video game collection?

14. Have you ever asked your significant other to dress up like a video game character for odd reasons?

15. Do you like Final Fantasy games?

16. Do you sometimes want your NES not to work so you can ritualistically blow into the cartridge?

17. Have you ever applied for a job at a video game store?

18. Do you constantly argue on video game forums?

19. Do you know the Mortal Kombat blood code and the Contra extra lives code?

20. When friends come over to play video games do you not allow them to place the game discs in the console for fear they may damage something?

How many did you answer yes to?

Thanks for playing

How to stop the depression!

2009-08-18T07:47:00.000-07:00

1. Raise living standards (Minimum wage of $20 dollars)

2. Expand medicaid and allow it to compete with the private sector. This will allow us (the people) to pick which one we want.

Mandatory federal law - Medicaid & Private Medical Insurance companies CANNOT deny care for any reason what so ever. If the people are continuing to pay into the program they will receive proper care. No hoops to jump through, No strings attached. Medicaid workers & Private Medical insurance workers WHO DENY CARE will go to jail. 5-10 year jail time for those who deny care. They should consider themselves lucky. The Nuremberg Trials would have them hanged.

3. Repeal Nafta, Cafta, GAT. All free trade agreements must end.

4. Seize the privately run federal reserve. Make them a part of the US Treasury and immediately start pumping low interest loans into production centered jobs.

5. Cap CEO salaries at $300,000.

6. Disassemble the CIA, Homeland Security, and FEMA. These are parasitical government organizations that do NOTHING but cause trouble around the world (CIA), Encroach upon Civil Liberties (Homeland Security), and are incompetent when managing natural disaster relief (FEMA). They are a waste of our money and should be erased. The people who are laid off can get jobs from the new production based job sector.

7. Use Anti-Trust / Anti-Monopoly laws to SMASH big agricultural companies.

Mandatory federal law - GMO, synthetic fertilizers, synthetic pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides are here by banned from the United States of america. Give low interest loans to organic farmers. Just this alone with lower obesity, lower cancer rates, lower developmental harm rates, lower birth defects, infertility, and environmental pollution drastically.

8. Strengthen Labor organization

9. Leave all wars and military bases from around the world. The wars a fake. Based on profit and enough men and women have died for nothing. Bring them home to their family and get them the medical and psychiatric help they need. End all torture concentration camps for "military combatants" and allow them to have speedy PUBLIC trials. Torturers will be tried in a court of law and held to the standards set by the Geneva Convention and Nuremberg laws.

10. Repeal the patriot act and all of its previsions. Impeach Obama, incarcerate Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Bill clinton, Rob Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernake, Tim Giethner, Henry Paulson.

11. Mandatory federal Law - OUTLAW Derivatives, "instruments", "exotic" investments. AIG, Goldman saches, JPmorgan chase, citibank, and numerous other banks are BANKRUPT and should be seized and their Derivative books erased. They should not be given trillions of dollars from our friends from the privately run federal reserve and their puppet Bush and now Obama. Reenact the Glass-Steagal Act and Uptick rule. TAX Wallstreet. 1% Tobin tax on Wallstreet turnovers. Funnel that money into industry and public works.

12. Stop forclosures on victims of predatory loans. Buy up all the bad mortgages and re-adjust their insterest rates to keep these people in their homes.

Mandatory Federal Law - Predatory adjustable rate mortgages are here by banned. Any persons caught making a predatory loan will serve a minimum of 5 years in jail . A bank which forecloses on any house during this depressionary era will be fined heavily and or jail time for high ranking board members / CEO's.

PS3 is the new Sega Saturn! Is bankruptcy imminent?

2009-08-17T12:15:00.000-07:00

As we discussed in previous articles there has been a wave of backlash from the gaming community. We have three consoles on the market and the only one that has shown to sell in great numbers can be found collecting dust underneath a television or still in its original box. The others are either broken half the time or are still on the store shelves.

What has moved me to write this post is the foreboding nature of the present financial circumstances of Sony's latest console .....................the PS3.

Since its creation Sony has bet the farm on this huge black box. Just like its predecessor it doubles as another media device. A fancy Blue-Ray player. Now this is all fine and dandy in theory but who do you know that has a Blue-Ray player? And if they do own one, How many Blue-Ray movies do they own? I would think not many if any at all.

So where are we now? Well since a year and a half ago Sony has officially lost over 2 billion dollars on their new device. This a huge financial blow to this once technological giant. Every quarter that goes by Sony loses more that a hundred million dollars on their creation. Now that is just the profits, dear friends. Sony has had to let go over 20-30 percent of their workforce just in their gaming department. I ask. How long can they last? And that’s what brings me to this poorly written article that was posted earlier today in the Sega of America forums. An ironic place to have a conversation about bankruptcy and financial problems.

"Sony May Quit Gaming Market Claims GIN "

http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Gaming/Industry/M5B6J5L3?page=1

Immediately after reading it I made the comparison, the PS3 is the new Sega Saturn. It all came together so clearly now. The two systems are literally identical in terms of financial short comings. The sales for both are quite depressing and the system is not only hard to develop for but overpriced.

Now if you think that I'm being to harsh on the PS3 and Wii and not to the XBOX360 I must say that Microsofts console does fair much better. Yes, some gamers prefer the XBOX360 to the Wii and PS3 but I can tell you right now that consumer confidence in the XBOX brand has almost been chiseled to nothing. Microsoft is going to have an extremely tough time making sales whenever the new XBOX console comes out. People are not happy that their expensive new age gaming console can be turned into a hunk of useless plastic and circuits just because the temperature in the room goes up 2 degrees.

So is Sony out of the race? You would think me being a die hard Sega Fan I would scoff at this news but in all honesty I feel somewhat upset. I don't want Sony to go out like this. I feel that they did so well with the PS2. Yes, their games weren't as colorful, entertaining, or creative as some Dreamcast games but I still think it’s a good system none the less. I still have my second PS2 (first one broke) and I'm quite pleased with the variety of games I still have for it.

Now at the end of the article the writer muses that Sony may end up like Sega. A publisher of software after calling it quits in the hardware arena. Its completely understandable why Sega went down for the count. The trail of mismanagement was blatant and obvious. The 32X, Nomad, Sega Saturn. The Sega train ran out of coal right after the second year of the Dreamcast. Sony doesn't seem to have a beaten trail of folly like Sega had, what they had was bad luck. It was a gamble to them and they came up short. They bet it all on red and the roulette wheel turned up black. From an Electronics company that wiped the floor with the veteran video game corporations like Nintendo and Sega to a ravaged hulk a drift on the oceans of debt and misery.

I can't imagine what can come next but we all know that there is no Hope & Change in this economy. People don't have the time nor the money to invest on a new console and a $60 dollar game every pay check. People are saving, their using their money to pay off bills, pay off debt, medical costs, food, electric, oil, gas. The farthest thing from the peoples mind right now is to buy a giant black block to put it in their living room to collect dust because they can't afford the software.

Now who is to blame? The people?

No.

The Sony Employees?

No.

The Sony executives, CEO, and Board Members?

I guess. If blame needed to be hung around the neck of anyone it must be them. They are the decision makers. They are the signers of contracts and the designers of products.

Will they lost their jobs?

Probably not. They don't care if the company burns to the ground. They signed their contract. Its the little people that work for them that will suffer.

This is a lesson that everyone should take heed. The detach of upper management from the ground levels and consumer wants causes needless havoc. Not researching how much the average person is willing to buy and allowing Olympian like corporate elites to decide the life and death of an company only ends in disaster.

Note to all hardware manufacturers. Listen to your fans and ask them what they want.....and for what price they are willing to spend.

Organic food = Yummy Time!

2009-08-12T06:37:00.000-07:00

The information found in this posting was taken from the official Cascadian Farms Website.

http://cascadianfarm.com/organic/Default.aspx

Why should you go organic?

For You and Your Family! Organic foods are grown without the use of synthetic pesticides, chemical fertilizers or genetically engineered ingredients.
For the Planet! Organic Farming helps keep air, water, and soil clean by not using synthetic pesticides or chemical fertilizers.
It's Easy! There are many organic options to choose from.

What is organic?

Organic refers to the way agricultural products and foods are grown and processed. Organic production is based on a system of farming that maintains and replenishes soil fertility without the use of toxic and persistent pesticides and fertilizers. To maintain the integrity of the final product, organic foods are minimally processed without artificial ingredients, preservatives, or irradiation. The "organic" food label identifies food grown with practices that:

Don't use synthetic pesticides, herbicides and soil fumigants.

Don't use genetic engineering

Don't use sewage sludge as fertilizer

Do improve the quality and fertility of the soil

Do protect water quality

Do reduce soil erosion

Do rely on natural biological systems for pest and weed control

Do reduce the impact of agriculture on our environment

Do produce high quality, great tasting food

do the terms "natural" and "organic" mean the same thing?
No. According to the USDA, the terms "natural" and "organic" are not interchangeable. Only food labeled "organic" meets USDA's national organic standards. While other claims, such as "natural," "free-range," and "hormone-free," can still appear on food labels these terms should not be confused with "organic."

Is organic food better for consumers and the environment?

By eating organic foods, you limit your exposure to synthetic insecticides, fungicides and herbicides, because these chemicals are not applied to organic crops. Additionally by eating organic foods, you limit your intake of growth hormones and antibiotics, because organic meat and dairy farmers are prohibited from using hormones and antibiotics in organic livestock and dairy production. Finally by eating organic foods, you limit your intake of genetically modified foods because organic farmers cannot raise genetically modified crops or livestock or use production aids that are genetically modified. Organic farming methods help provide a safer, more healthy environment by: 1) not polluting our groundwater, rivers, lakes, and oceans with synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers; 2) reducing soil erosion; 3) improving soil quality; 4) increasing the diversity of wildlife on and near farms; and 5) not exposing farm workers to synthetic pesticides.

When I go to the supermarket, how can I tell organically produced food from conventionally produced food?

On October 21, 2002, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) put into effect the national organic standards ensuring consistency for all organic products marketed in the U.S. Along with the new standards, the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has developed strict labeling rules to help consumers know the exact organic content of the food they buy. The "USDA Organic" seal helps you find products that contain at least 95 percent certified organic ingredients.You'll find four labeling categories when looking for organic products in stores and markets: 100 percent Organic: All of the product's content is certified organic. These products may display the USDA Organic seal on the label. Organic: At least 95 percent of the product's content is certified organic. These products may also display the USDA Organic seal on the label. These products contain some minor ingredients that are not certified organic, such as minerals and vitamins. Made with Organic Ingredients: At least 70 percent of the product's content is certified organic. Up to three ingredients can be listed on the label with the phrase "made with organic." Products containing less than 70 percent organic content may only identify the organic ingredients in the ingredient listing on the label.

Will I find the USDA Organic seal on all organic products?

No. The use of the USDA Organic seal is voluntary. And the USDA Organic seal can only be used on products with at least 95 percent certified organic ingredients.

On what food products can the USDA Organic seal be displayed?

The USDA Organic seal may appear on organic food products that contain at least 95 percent certified organic ingredients.

What are some key provisions of the national organic regulations?

The national organic regulations:
prohibit the use of irradiation, sewage sludge, or genetically modified organisms in organic food production
reflect the National Organic Standards Board recommendations on the allowable materials for use by organic farmers, organic livestock producers, and organic processors
require organic farmers to demonstrate soil quality improvement
prohibit antibiotics and growth hormones in organic meat and poultry
require 100% organic feed for organic livestock

Should I be concerned about the safety of eating organic food?

Certified organic farmers and processors follow strict food safety guidelines to assure safe and hygienic food production. All food producers, including organic farmers and processors, must comply with local, state and federal health standards. In addition to these health and safety standards, organic farmers and processors are also required to comply with the stringent requirements included in USDA's national organic regulations.
These more stringent food standards include restrictions on application of raw manure to soil; organic audit trail requirement; organic farm plan requirement; organic handling plan requirement; prohibition of synthetic pesticide use; prohibition of GMO (genetically modified organism) use; prohibition of food irradiation; and prohibition of chemical food processing methods.

What does the organic industry do to ensure safe and wholesome food production?

Certified organic farmers and processors are inspected annually by an independent, USDA accredited certification agent. During the annual inspection, the certification agent verifies compliance with the national organic regulations and reviews the food safety practices of organic growers and processors. This helps assure that organic producers are in compliance with all local, state, and federal health standards and with the more stringent requirements included in the USDA's national organic regulations.

http://cascadianfarm.com/organic/Default.aspx

Ok.....I got lazy this weekend.....

2009-08-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

I apologize that there hasn't been a new YouTube video yet. The last one I made was “Obama's Corporate Healthcare” and since then I've been struggling to pick what I want to do next. The video gamer inside me wants to do a review on the Sega Genesis and Hexen but the more serious side of me wants to make a tribute video to the author H.P. Lovecraft or an eye opening episode on Charlotte Iserbyt’s book “The Deliberate Dumbing down of America” which entails how the modern educational system has been destroyed from within by corporate elites.

Hopefully by the end of today we should have a few new episodes on TheCoolinator1 channel at YouTube.com

Thank you all for your support!

What's the deal with Retro-Gaming? Part 2

2009-08-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

Since my first article on Retro-Gaming many a things have come to pass. First off, I've discovered that there are these retro twin systems that have the capability of playing old 8-bit and 16-bit cartridges all in one. A very nice design, if I may say so!

FCTWIN!

http://www.dkoldies.com/FC3-Plus-System-Genesis-Nintendo-NES-SNES-p/fc3%20-%203%20systems%20in%201c.htm

They come fully loaded with two controllers and a light gun for old school gun games like Duck hunt and Hogan's Alley!

Then I found out that the new Genesis console is no longer called the "Firebox". It was renamed the Firecore.....you know....like HARDCORE! And it seems to be as well made as its last incarnation but this time with a port for downloadable content from the web. This is due to Sega wanting to develop 20 new 16-bit games for download with the new Firecore system. I would assume its to lure people into buying it considering most kids now a days have no idea what a cartridge even is. Dam kids! Some have criticized its predecessor's sound quality but hopefully they have fine tuned it this time around for our retro gaming enjoyment. The second new Genesis console is literally the same thing as the Firecore but the design of the system itself looks like Sonic's spikey head. What's next Sega? Sonic Roller-skates? Sonic Toasters? Sonic toothpaste? I guess its always a good time to exploit Sonic for financial gain. Eitherway, The system does look sharp.

FireCore! GenCore!

Remember! Each new Genesis console comes fully loaded with 20 games. Most of which are very good.....some are...ehhh...but how can you complain? When I first got my Genesis in the early 90's I never got a free game with it. All I got was the console and a controller with one foot of cord.

Its raining Nomads!!!!

This is a strange series of events that has been goin on in the retro gaming world. A few months back we heard rumors that there was going to be a Sega Nomad clone. What triggered it was a random video being circulated on YouTube which was filmed at some kind of gaming convention. In the video some chubby Asian guy said there was going to be a new Genesis console (The picture on the power point presentation in the video was the Gencore) and there would be a new Sega Nomad clone handheld (Picture on the projection screen resembled the RetroGen). Since then our wonderful friends at Gamesboro have been taking pre-orders for the device. This is where the story gets complicated. Most people have put in their pre-orders for their Retrogen's but just the other day AtGames has allowed pre-orders for .....you guessed it... THEIR Nomad clone!

The RetroGen is manufactured by a company called Innex and the GenMobile (The other Nomad Clone) is made by AtGames! So as you can tell this was right out of left field. Who would have thought in the year 2009 we would be getting not one but TWO Nomad clones?

RetroGen! GenMobile!

What are the differences between the two? Well, from what I see the RetroGen has a larger screen while the GenMobile has a slightly smaller screen but has 20 preloaded games on it like the HandHeld Megadrive and the new Genesis consoles. I don't know about you guys but I'm in somewhat of a dilemma here. I may just buy them both if I can't make up my dam mind! Decisions.....Decisions......

Honorable Mentions:

Handheld Megadrive

20 games in one. No cartridge slot but can plug into your TV. Great present for a younger family member or a person who commutes.

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