Saturday, July 30, 2011

latest Views...

War and Religion: Air Force Cites New Testament, Ex-Nazi, to Train Officers on Ethics of Launching Nuclear Weapons






Werner Von Braun, a former member of the Nazi Party who used Jews imprisoned in concentration camps, captured French anti-Nazi partisans and civilians, and others to help build the V-2 rocket for Hitler's Third Reich, is cited in an Air Force PowerPoint presentation about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons.  The United States Air Force has been training young missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons by citing passages from the New Testament and commentary from a former member of the Nazi Party, according to newly released documents.

The mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which includes a discussion on St. Augustine's "Christian Just War Theory [3]," is led by Air Force chaplains and takes place during a missile officer's first week in training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The Christian Just War Theory has been touted [4] by Rep. Ron Paul, a 2012 presidential candidate, on the campaign stops. During his Nobel Prize acceptance speech two years ago, President Obama also invoked [5] the concept of a "just war," stating there will be times when the use of force will be "morally justified."

St. Augustine's "Qualifications for Just War," according to the way it is cited in a 43-page PowerPoint presentation [6], are: "to avenge or to avert evil; to protect the innocent and restore moral social order (just cause)" and "to restore moral order; not expand power, not for pride or revenge (just intent)."

The Air Force documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and provided to Truthout by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation [7] (MRFF), a civil rights organization. MRFF President Mikey Weinstein said more than 30 Air Force officers, a majority of whom describe themselves as practicing Protestants and Roman Catholics, have contacted his group over the past week in hopes of enlisting him to work with the Air Force to have the Christian-themed teachings removed from the nuclear weapons ethics training session. [Full disclosure: Weinstein is a member of Truthout's Board of Advisers.]

Included with the PowerPoint presentation are more than 500 pages of other documents [8] pertaining to a missile officer's first week of training. After missile officers complete their training they are sent to one of three Air Force bases to guard the country's Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) arsenal and, if called upon to do so by the president, launch their nuclear-armed Minuteman IIIs.

One of the slides used to explain to missile officers the moral justification for launching nuclear weapons quotes Wernher Von Braun [9], a former member of the Nazi Party and SS officer who used Jews imprisoned in concentration camps, captured French anti-Nazi partisans and civilians, and others, to help build the V-2 rocket.
"We knew that we had created a new means of warfare and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision [emphasis in document] more than anything else," Von Braun said upon surrendering to American forces in May 1945. "We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured." [emphasis in document]





Von Braun was part of a top-secret military program known as "Operation Paperclip [10]," which recruited Nazi scientists after World War II who "were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for [Adolf] Hitler's Third Reich, [Nazi Party] and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas," according to the Operation Paperclip web site [11].

Von Braun and about 500 or so other Nazi scientists who were part of the classified program worked on guided missile and ballistic missile technology at military installations in New Mexico, Alabama and Texas.


Ethical Questions
The Air Force has been mired in numerous religious scandals [12] over the past decade and has been sued for allowing widespread proselytization at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It has been citing Christian teachings in its missile officer training materials for at least a decade.

One Air Force officer currently on active duty, who spoke to Truthout on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media, said he was trained as a missile officer in 2001 and vividly recalls how the chaplain leading the training session on the ethics of launching nuclear weapons said, "the American Catholic Church and their leadership says it's ok in their eyes to launch nukes."

Last year, however, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican representative to the United Nations, said [13] in speeches in Washington and New York City that "nuclear weapons are no longer just for deterrence but have become entrenched in the military doctrines of the major powers."

"The conditions that prevailed during the Cold War, which gave a basis for the [Catholic] Church's limited toleration of nuclear deterrence, no longer apply in a consistent and effective manner," the Archbishop said.

The 381st Training Group and 392nd Training Squadron are responsible for training every Air Force Space and Missile Officer. Several emails and phone calls left for spokespeople at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where the squadron is based, were not returned. The PowerPoint identifies Chaplain Capt. Shin Soh as leading the nuclear ethics presentation.

One of the ethical questions contained in the PowerPoint presented to missile officers asks: "Can you imagine a set of circumstances that would warrant a nuclear launch from the US, knowing that it would kill thousands of non-combatants?

Another question trainees are confronted with asks: "Can we train physically, emotionally and spiritually for a job we hope we never have to do?"

To help officers answer these ethical queries, the PowerPoint presentation cites numerous examples of characters from the New and Old Testament fighting "just" wars. For example, "Abraham organized an army to rescue Lot," God motivated "judges (Samson, Deborah, Barak) to fight and deliver Israel from foreign oppressors," and "David is a warrior who is also a 'man after God's own heart.'"

Also included in the PowerPoint presentation is a slide containing a passage from the Book of Revelation that attempts to explain how Jesus Christ, as the "mighty warrior," believed war to be "just."




It goes on to say that there are "many examples of believers [who] engaged in wars in Old Testament" in a "righteous way" and notes there is "no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history."

The PowerPoint documents' blatant use of religious imagery and its numerous citations of the Bible would appear to be a violation of the First Amendment establishing a wall of separation between church and state and Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution, which specifically prohibits a "religious test."

Weinstein, a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a former Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG), said a section of the PowerPoint presentation that has been cited by MRFF clients as being at the top of the list of "unconstitutional outrages" is the one "which wretchedly asserts that war is both ethical and part of 'the natural order' of man's existence on earth."

"Astonishingly, the training presentation grotesquely attempts to justify that unconscionable concept of 'war is good because Jesus says it is' by specifically textually referencing allegedly supportive bible passages from the New Testament Books of Luke, Acts, Hebrews, Timothy and, finally even Revelation," said Weinstein, a former White House counsel during the Reagan administration. "If this repugnant nuclear missile training is not Constitutionally violative of both the 'no religious test' mandate of the Constitution and the First Amendment's No Establishment Clause then those bedrock legal principles simply do not exist."

A senior Air Force Space and Missile officer who reviewed the materials, said the teachings are "an outrage of the highest order."

"No way in hell should this have been presented as a mandatory briefing to ALL in the basic missiles class," the officer, who requested anonymity, said in an email. "It presumes ALL missile officers are religious and specifically in need of CHRISTIAN justification for their service.

"If they wanted to help people with their spiritual/religious/secular justification for serving as missile officers, then they should've said something like 'for those of you with religious concerns about missile duty, we've arranged the following times to chat with chaplains from your particular faith group.' For those with secular concerns about the morality of missile duty, we'll have a discussion moderated by a professor [and/or] counselor, a noted ethicist, too. If you're already good with your role and duty as a missile officer, then you're welcome to hit the golf course or gym."



==========================================



Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post


Police are on alert because a political activist liked a Facebook article about the right to resist illegal police authority with the sensational title “When Should You Shoot A Cop”



(lissynote: you should only shoot them with a camera when they are acting as agent provocateurs at protests, and they forget their cop issued boots stand out as all shiny and new as all the coppers boots!
Then we should line them up in the town square and kiss and love them back to health so they never feel the need to rule over others again...)




With the increase in propaganda being pushed by the mainstream media government police state agencies regarding “right wing extremists” and “domestic terrorists,” many are no longer surprised when law enforcement or government agents single out individuals or groups that may express controversial or unpopular points of view, or even points of view that are simply critical of government or its agents.
Most people are content to accept the fact that these types of free speech violations happen but that they happen somewhere else like New York or Los Angeles where any number of things can happen on any given day.
However, some South Carolina residents are receiving a wake-up call today, as police in Kershaw County have been placed on alert for “people out there that might want to hurt them.” The reason for the alert? An article that was posted to a Facebook page and an individual that “liked” it.
The article, entitled “When Should You Shoot A Cop?” was published by CopBlock.org, an organization that promotes transparency and accountability of law enforcement. The article discusses the issue of resistance to police “authority” and those police officers who are acting in an illegal fashion. The article also discusses the right that you have, as an individual, to defend your life and your person even when it is being threatened by a member of the police.
The article in question can be read here. Read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with the thesis, the article never advocates or encourages anyone to kill police. At worst, it advocates the use of lethal force in self-defense. In fact, no one in Kershaw County is claiming that it does. It simply states that you have the right to defend yourself and your rights against unlawful police action, even to the point of using lethal force if necessary.
The article became an issue when Jeff Mattox, the co-chair of the Kershaw County Republican party, “liked” the article on Facebook. According to WISTV.com, the article was posted to Facebook by the Kershaw County Patriots, a grassroots conservative political organization of which Mattox is a member. It was at this point that he committed the crime of “liking” the article.
As a result, the Sheriff of Kershaw County, Jim Matthews, a man with an extensive background in freedom-crushing law enforcement divisions such as the DEA and SWAT (as well as the FBI and the US Army), put his officers on high alert upon his knowledge of the article.


"if you play the tape backwards, you can see I was helping him up..." (Bill Hicks)



He then went to the local newspaper where he stated, “The article in and of itself doesn’t advocate shooting an officer, but some who read it will get out of it what they want . . . Some warped individuals may get it in their mind that it’s OK to resist an officer to the point of shooting them.” Matthews also stated that the article “irritated” him because it came out just as he was about to attend the funeral of a Laurens County Deputy.
Of course, Mattox didn’t write the article. He didn’t even post it to Facebook. He merely “liked” it on someone else’s page. Not only that, but the Sheriff, as quoted above, even admits that the article itself never advocated shooting an officer.
But that didn’t stop the Sheriff from fear mongering the public and his officers about the dangers of free speech and those who not only exercise it, but those who listen to it. Thoughtcrime if you will.

read more...



==============================================

'It has to go away': Facebook director calls for an end to internet anonymity










Facebook's marketing director has called for an end to on-line anonymity, saying internet users would 'behave a lot better' if everyone had to use real names when surfing or posting on the internet.
Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s marketing director and sister of multi-millionaire founder Mark, made the comments during a round table discussion on cyber bullying.
The ubiquitous social networking site, which has been at the centre of recent controversy over internet privacy and bullying issues, currently requires all its members to use their real names and emails when signing on.


Mrs Zuckerberg argued the end of on-line anonymity could help curb the trend of trolling and harassment on the web.
Speaking at a Marie Claire panel discussion on social media, she said: ' I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away.
'People behave a lot better when they have their real names down. … I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.'
The comments echo those of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt who has previously labelled internet anonymity a 'dangerous' precedent, before predicting government intervention will one day lead to its demise.





==============================================


New NASA Data Blows Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism





NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.
Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.
“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”
In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.
The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.



===========================================


Poor Polar Bear Warming Scam





==============================



Former French FM: Israel Controls French Intelligence, Lobby Pressures US President






Former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas referred in a book he published entitled "Coups et blessures" (Assaults and Injuries), that "The "Israelis" are doing whatever they want in France, and are controlling the French Intelligence with what serves them".




=============================================================



After Oslo: Time to Crack Down On Mossad Terrorism







Israel’s most secret and tried-and-true weapon is the “false flag” terrorist attack.

State-sponsored terrorism is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as the “systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective [and] is employed by governments -- or more often by factions within governments -- against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups.”

On July 22, a bomb, said to be an Oklahoma City-type explosive device, crafted with fertilizer and diesel fuel, blew up in downtown Oslo, Norway, in the heart of the government district. Shortly thereafter, a man dressed in a Norwegian police uniform opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya in Tyri fjord. Access to the island was by boat only.  Over 100 people were killed in the twin terror attacks.

Almost immediately, the world’s corporate media began pushing the story that those who were responsible for the blast and mass shooting were associated with “Al Qaeda” and other radical Islamist groups. CNN’s Washington, DC chief anchor Wolf Blitzer, a former spokesman for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby and a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, began his late afternoon program by pointing to “Al Qaeda” and radical Islamists as the chief culprits for the terrorist attacks in Norway.

CNN paraded out a number “experts,” in actuality, propagandists for the Israeli agenda linked to neo-conservative outlets and the Pentagon’s “terrorism industrial complex,” before the cameras to advance the radical Islamist meme even as Norwegian authorities pinned blame on the attack on at least one perpetrator, a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. CNN constantly showed footage of frightened people in downtown Oslo running for their lives from the site of the blast, as well as still photograph of a pall of light-brown smoke over downtown Oslo. Of course, CNN’s intention was to evoke memories of the 9/11 attack in Manhattan.

Breivik, who sometimes anglicized his name as Andrew Berwick in his numerous web postings, was said to be a right-wing Islamophobe who sympathized with Zionism and who was a Freemason… Breivik was also reported to be a fundamentalist Christian but he adopted a stance against the Lutheran Church, the state church of Norway, and argued for a “collective” counter-reformation to return the Protestant churches to the control of the Vatican and the Pope. Breivik lambasted the Lutheran Church and other mainstream Protestant churches, condemning “Priests in jeans who march for Palestine.”




More incredibly, the London tabloid of Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-plagued News International, The Sun, went to press with the following false headline: “Norway’s 911: ‘Al Qaeda’ Massacre.” On March 29, 2011, Harvard Law School’s extremist Zionist Professor Alan Dershowitz penned a piece in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that actively discriminates against the hiring of non-Jews as reporters anread on...d editors in violation of U.S. civil rights and equal opportunity employment laws, in which he called Norway anti-Semitic. Dershowitz cited as an example former Norwegian Prime Minister Kare Willock’s criticism of President Barack Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff because he is Jewish. In fact, Emanuel’s pro- Israeli sympathies as a former member of the Israel Defense Force are what prompted many political observers in Washington and elsewhere to question his primary loyalty to the United States.

A network of Israeli bloggers pushed a claim of responsibility on a previously-unknown group called Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (the Helpers of the Global Jihad). The group’s claims were picked up and run by several corporate media outlets and then pulled when it was discovered the claim was a hoax. Mossad has a program to distribute bogus claims of responsibility for Islamist terrorist attacks via “Jihadist” websites that are actually operated by the Mossad and a network of “hasbaratchiks,” Israeli and foreign Jews who act as propagandists on the web. These hasbara (propaganda) agents and volunteers operate through such programs as Megaphone and GIYUS (“Give Israel Your United Support.”) After the attempt to blame the Norway attacks on Islamists failed, the “hasbaratchiks” shifted to “sock puppet” troll mode, posting comments on blogs that criticized allegations that Mossad and Zionists were behind the Norway attacks, emphasizing that such beliefs were “anti-Semitic” and wild “conspiracy theories.” Some Israeli “sock puppets” even offered lunatic suggestions that Breivik was planted by Islamists to make Israel and Zionists look bad.


============================================================



Only a Domestic Terror Attack Can Rescue Brand Obama



2012 defeat is assured unless administration can exploit a crisis


Despite being hailed as a Christ-like savior when he was elected, a record number of Americans have lost faith in Barack Obama, with just 17 per cent believing the his administration is leading the nation in the right direction, figures that illustrate how Obama’s handling of the debt crisis has virtually assured his 2012 election defeat, unless the President can exploit a terror attack on U.S. soil to regain popular support.
“Just 17% of Likely U.S. Voters now say the country is heading in the right direction. That finding is the lowest measured since Barack Obama took office,” reports Rasmussen.
Obama has also beaten his all time high for the number of Americans who think the country is on the wrong track, with 75 per cent, or three quarters of all Americans, losing faith in his administration’s policies.
Wrangling over the debt crisis has clearly turned many more Americans against Obama. In the previous week’s poll, before the debt story rose to the center of public attention, the number of Americans who thought the country was heading in the right direction stood at 21 per cent. The figure has declined by 8 per cent in just the last two weeks alone.
But Americans’ disdain for Obama has almost been matched by their disapproval for Congress. A new high of 46 per cent of likely voters think members of Congress are “corrupt”. Just 29 per cent think they are not corrupt, and Congress has a pathetic 6 per cent approval rating.


Unsurprisingly, the only group that retains a slim majority of people confident in the nation’s current course are from the “political class,” which is precisely whom most Americans would blame for the country’s downfall in recent years.

As John Pilger warned leftists right at the start of Obama’s term in office, the presidency of Barack Obama was nothing more than a corporate marketing creation designed to quell building resentment after the Bush era. It has taken two and a half years for most liberals to realize that fact. The poll shows that 58 per cent of Democrats believe the country is heading in the wrong direction.





=================================================

Scientists clone genetically-modified dog that 'glows' when given antibiotic


(lissynote: this is not THE actual cloned dog ... this is just a dog from the '80's)



Friday, July 29, 2011 by: Jonathan Benson

(NaturalNews) Mad science continues with the recent announcement that South Korean scientists at Seoul National University (SNU) have successfully cloned a genetically-engineered (GE) dog that they say glows "fluorescent green" under ultraviolet light when fed an antibiotic known as doxycycline. And just why did scientists feel the need to spend the equivalent of roughly $3 million on this gene-tampering experiment? To allegedly find cures for human diseases, of course, which is the only explanation that even begins to approach justifying such insanity (yet miserably fails).

The announcement comes roughly two years after researchers from the same school announced that they had created GEdogsthat glowed red, and which they claimed were "the world's first transgenic dogs." In that instance, researchers deliberately infected the GM dogs with a virus that implanted fluorescentgenesinto their cell nuclei. These nuclei were then transferred to another dog's cells whose nuclei had been removed, and the resultant cloned embryo implanted into a surrogate mother (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011...).

In the most recent experiment, Lee Byeong-chun and his team of researchers used somatic cell nuclear transfer technology to clone anotherdogthat, according to Reuters Health, was born in 2009. Now that she is about two years old, Tegon, as they call her, glows every time researchers add the doxycyclineantibioticto her food. Thefindingshave been published in the international journalGenesis.




============================================================


FDA admits heart drug doubles risk of death





Thursday, July 28, 2011 by: J. D. Heyes

(NaturalNews) Regulators with the Food and Drug Administration have warned that Multaq, a cardiac drugSanofi, has been linked with fatal heart problems in a clinical trial the company recently ended.

In the study involving 3,000 patients, 32 who were taking Multaq died from cardiac-related problems compared with 14 who were taking a placebo. In all, nearly twice as many people suffered heart attacks, strokes and death than those in the placebo control group.

Multaq is prescribed to control atrial fibrillation, the most common type of irregular heartbeat which is found in about 2.2 million Americans. It is a condition in which the primary electrical impulse thatcausesthe atria - the two upper chambers of theheart- to contract instead fires erratically, causing several other nodes, or electrical impulse points, to fire instead.

The resulting erratic firing causes the atria to become inefficient, and heart rates can climb to about 150. The condition can lead toheart attacksor, more commonly,stroke, because blood does not flow through them as quickly, causing clots.

The Sanofi study involvedpatientswho were 65 years old or older and who were afflicted with atrial fibrillation, or A-fib. TheFDAapproved Multaq for use in such patients in 2009 for a short-term type of the arrhythmia, as well as an associated condition known as atrial flutter.

As of June, some 241,000 patients nationwide had been prescribed twice-a-day Multaq. And whilethe FDAhasn't ordered thedrugto be taken off the market, the agency is advising patients who are on it to talk to their doctor about the findings.

Despite the FDA warning, Sanofi says it believes the drug is stillsafefor use.

oh Goody! Read more...


----------------------------------------------------------------------------



Nigerians face prosecution over polio vaccines





A Nigerian state that has battled polio outbreaks has vowed to prosecute parents who refuse to immunise their children against the highly contagious disease, a health official said Thursday.
"The government will henceforth arrest and prosecute any parent that refuses to allow health workers to vaccinate his child against child-killer diseases, particularly polio," the permanent secretary in the Kano state health ministry, Tajudeen Gambo, told AFP.
Parents would be charged under an already existing law prohibiting someone from denying children access to health care, he said. He said the law allows for penalties of jail time or fines, but he did not know how much for either.
Gambo said the government would also prosecute vaccine providers who refuse to report recalcitrant parents to the authorities.
"We have formed special surveillance teams and directed vaccinators to report any defaulting parent to such teams, and any vaccinator that fails to do that will also be prosecuted," he said.
Thousands of vaccinators Thursday began a four-day door-to-door immunisation campaign of six million children in the northern state as part of a renewed international polio eradication drive.




===================================================

The true story of SV40, the cancer-causing virus hidden in polio vaccines





In a July 15, 2001 report, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story detailing an increased concern among researchers that the SV40 virus found in those early polio vaccines was indeed responsible for higher cancer rates.

"For four decades,governmentofficials have insisted that there is no evidence the simian virus called SV40 is harmful to humans. But in recent years, dozens of scientific studies have found the virus in a steadily increasing number of rare brain,boneand lung-related tumors - the same malignant cancer SV40 causes in labanimals," the report said. "Even more troubling, the virus has been detected in tumors removed from people never inoculated with the contaminated vaccine, leading some to worry that those infected by the vaccine might be spreading SV40."


Read more....

No comments:

Post a Comment