Shareholders of PepsiCo have filed a resolution with the Securities and Exchange Commission in an effort to force the company to stop contracting with a research firm that uses cells from aborted babies in its process of producing artificial flavor enhancers. According to LifeNews.com, Pepsi has “ignored concerns and criticism from dozens of pro-life groups and tens of thousands of pro-life people who voiced their opposition to PepsiCo contracting with biotech company Senomyx even after it was found to be testing their food additives using fetal cells from abortions.”

On its website Senomyx explains that its flavor research programs “focus on the discovery and development of savory, sweet and salt flavor ingredients that are intended to allow for the reduction of MSG, sugar and salt in food and beverage products. Using isolated human taste receptors, we created proprietary taste receptor-based assay systems that provide a biochemical or electronic readout when a flavor ingredient interacts with the receptor.”

But Debi Vinnedge of Children of God for Life, a pro-life group that has focused its attention on Pepsi’s relationship with Senomyx, pointed out that what the company does not reveal is that it is “using HEK293 — human embryonic kidney cells taken from an electively aborted baby to produce those receptors. They could have easily chosen animal, insect, or other morally obtained human cells expressing the G protein for taste receptors.”

When asked about her company’s use of HEK293, Senomyx vice president Gwen Rosenberg assured a reporter for the Miami New Times that “you won’t find anything on our website about HEK293.” Queried about the company’s position on stem-cell research, Rosenberg boasted, “We don’t have a position on anything. We’re dedicated to finding new flavors to reduce sugars and reduce salt. Our focus is to help consumers with diabetes or high blood pressure have a better quality of life.”

Read More: New American

Did you lose yourself?  Did they get to you? If so, then how? You represented some good principles when you ran for president, and you said a lot of good things.

It’s not that you lied, but it’s like you made promises that you couldn’t keep. I don’t blame you, it’s a structural and systemic problem, it’s not your fault.  But, will you be coming back to the side of the citizenry anytime soon? Will you leave the side of multinational corporations and the big bankers and the military industrial complex? Or is is possible that you were never with us in the first place? Sometimes you make me more sad and angry than George W. Bush did when he was president (at least you didn’t steal the elections!).

Regardless, enjoy the G-8. If you get a chance, please tell those protesters I say hi. P.S. What do you think of Ron Paul?

Lisa Mascaro writes in the the LA Times:

Acting with minutes to spare, President Obama approved a four-year extension of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act, after Congress overcame mounting opposition from both parties to narrowly avoid a lapse in the terrorist surveillance law.

Obama, attending an international summit in France, awoke early Friday to review and approve the bill, directing that it be signed in Washington by automatic pen before the provisions expired at midnight Thursday Eastern time.

The administration had warned Congress that any interruption in the surveillance authority would threaten national security.

Passage came late Thursday after a protracted political struggle that played out over several months, a sign of increased unease with powers granted to the federal government to investigate citizens and foreigners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Conservative Republicans, many of them elected with backing from the “tea party” movement, and liberal Democrats resisted attempts to extend the three expiring provisions of the act.

Read More: LA Times

Mickey Fantasia Fountain, Disneyland Paris. (CC)

Via Aaron Dames: Observations on Nature and Humanity:

The end excuses any evil. — Sophocles, Electra

Read what’s presented to you the same way you would read Iraqi Propaganda. — Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions

For the liberation of a people more is needed than economic policy, more than industry: if a people is to become free, it needs pride and willpower, defiance, hate, hate and once again hate. — Adolf Hitler, Munich speech, April 10, 1923

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why do we kill people who kill people to show people that killing people is wrong? — From a bumper sticker

Jesus Christ would slap the shit of out you. — Another bumper sticker

This week President Obama visited the World Trade Center due to the death of Osama Bin Laden. The murder of this madman has already been celebrated by volumes of children and college students — cheering like barbarian lunatics — as though having won a football game or beaten a difficult level in a video game. If when speaking, President Obama were to hoist a chest upon the podium and from it draw the decapitated head of Bin Laden, the crowd would go wild. (Were there not initial reports of Obama crowd surfing after the news broke out in front of the White House? Pictures of Obama holding the meaty head, the people drinking the blood?)

The reaction of the bread and circus throngs should not come as a surprise. In the effort to catch Bin Laden, the US military, funded by US tax payers (they couldn’t have done it without us), has killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians (were you keeping track?), and it’s not even over.  Much like Goethe’s Sorcerers Apprentice (perhaps better depicted by Disney), many tiny Bin Ladens have been created in the process of destroying the original.

Americans celebrating the death of a murderer should be expected in a country that has explosive violent crime and incarceration rates (as a reminder, the US and Japan are the only countries in the “industrialized world” where governments execute their own citizens), a country steered by a trigger-happy military which accounts for 40% of the world’s military budget. As with the Iraqis who cheered as American contractors hung from a bridge in Fallujah, or as with the Somalis whom cheered as they dragged a dead US marine through the streets of Mogadishu, Americans (at least many in NYC and DC, presumably two “progressive” cosmopolitan hubs) celebrating the death of an enemy is a natural outcome of a society which views revenge as reconciliation, or at least as an excuse to party (the clear difference in these comparisons is the absence of Osama bin Laden’s slain body, which was apparently buried at sea … I have the boat they used to do this with and I can sell it to you, especially if you think we’ll be leaving Iraq or Afghanistan anytime soon. But Americans are by no means immune to glorifying murder when a physical corpse is present, one only needs to view the photographs of soldiers and kill teams smiling over the tortured and dead bodies Iraqis and Afghanis to understand this).  Why is it that, chances are, you think that we should aspire to react with more civility to death of Bin Laden?  I think the answer ultimately has something to do with the survival of our species.

It is noteworthy that the police broke up the party in Lafayette Park in DC. The police state that has emerged in the United States since 9/11 may have been intended to protect civilians from terrorists, but its function has extended to monitoring, controlling, and terrorizing the very people it claims to protect. Just as the decision to be mired in various was of aggression has been that of America’s choosing, the elimination of our civil liberties and constitutional rights has also been our choice — Osama Bin Laden did not enact or extend the PATRIOT ACT, he didn’t set up the TSA body scanners, he didn’t set up and then not close Guantanamo Bay and other detention centers. Yet the death of Bin Laden seems to lend legitimacy to the actions, strategies, and systems used as a means to kill him.  It seems to legitimize the police state, the predator drone strikes on untried civilians, the torture and detention of innocent men, the billions of dollars exhausted by the military-industrial complex, the countless violations of law, and the idea of offensive violence as practical solution to our problems. In bringing the American public Bin Laden’s head, the power structure shall receive a stamp of approval for the countless vile steps it has taken over the past ten years, and the green light to proceed in driving down the road to hell.  Don’t condone evil, don’t let them perpetuate it, don’t let them make you think that they’re okay.

History scholars are mainly attributed with sometimes pointing out that if the allied powers were to have lost WWII, then a different reversed version of the Nuremberg Trials would have taken place, and that the leaders of the US, UK, and USSR would have been the ones tried and hung for war crimes.

For the record: Questioning the government doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist, but not questioning the government does make you an idiot.

— Aaron Dames

The Japanese government is trying to calm fears about radiation levels and food safety in the region around the heavily damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, even as it has raised the severity rating of the crisis to the highest possible level. “Radiation is continuing to leak out of the reactors. The situation is not stable at all,” says Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and the City College of New York. “The slightest disturbance could set off a full-scale meltdown at three nuclear power stations, far beyond what we saw at Chernobyl.”

“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
— Senator Barack Obama, December 20, 2007

Also, here’s Ron Paul on “Freedom Watch” (I don’t see how Napolitano can remain on Fox News, I think by this time next year, I’ll be he’ll have been kicked out):

Unrelatedly, Fox News uses CPAC 2010 footage of Paul’s CPAC win then (when many in the audience booed), to pretend it was the same reaction this year:

First Facebook and Twitter were made inaccessible, now the entire Web. Blocking access to Twitter and Facebook just wasn’t enough for the Egyptian government. Around 11 hours ago — or a little after midnight in Egypt — the Internet went completely dark.

Source: Vator.tv

Now protesters all across Egypt must find a way to organize without the Web and, in Cairo, with an elite special operations force deployed to put a stop to massive demonstrations that have rippled across the state, ignited by a revolt in Tunisia that successfully toppled the regime there.

Both were drastic measures taken as preemptive steps by the Egyptian government ahead of possibly the largest demonstrations yet, which Reuters says are planned for Friday after weekly prayers.

But neither the people taking to the streets in Tunisia nor those in Iran during the summer of 2009 ever had to face a complete blackout of the Internet, a highly strategic attack on Egyptians’ freedom of speech undoubtedly ordered into effect by the Egyptian government.

“It’s probably a phone call that goes out to half a dozen folks who enter a line on a router configuration file and hit return,” said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks the security company responsible for the graph above. “It’s like programming your TiVo — you have things that are set up and you delete one. It’s not high-level programming.”

The decision to bar all online access was also likely spurred on by a nonstop flow of protest footage to sites like YouTube, disseminated through social networks, displaying the deteriorating situation on the ground. Additionally, there are reports that possibly dozens have been killed along with at least 100 injured in Cairo alone…

[continues at Vator.tv] ]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2011/01/no-internet-in-egypt-as-protests-escalate/feed/ 9 http://www.disinfo.com/2011/01/mass-animal-deaths-tracked-by-google-maps/ http://www.disinfo.com/2011/01/mass-animal-deaths-tracked-by-google-maps/#comments Wed, 12 Jan 2011 14:46:20 +0000 Aaron Dames http://www.disinfo.com/?p=44055 From Jennifer Viegas at Discovery News:

The recent mass deaths of birds, fish, crabs, manatees, penguins and other animals are now being tracked by Google Maps.

“Aflockalypse,” as the Washington Post and other news outlets are calling the bird die offs, can now be studied, along with the other animal deaths, online at the single Google webpage.

The events appear to all date from December 2010 to the present — likely a choice of the map’s creators, since previous events could have also been documented. The majority of the events are shown to have occurred in the United States, but the map also charts the following:

• “100 tons of fish” dead in South America
• “Hundreds of snapper” perished in New Zealand
• “Thousands of fish” were found floating dead in the Philippines
• “150 tons of red tilapias” died in Thailand
• “Scores of dead fish” in Haiti
• 50-100 Jackdaws dead in Norway
• Over 300 doves dead in Italy

and several more.

The question has been asked:…

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

Craig Torres and Scot Lanman writing for Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve’s emergency lending during the financial crisis spanned the global economy, from the largest U.S. financial firms to community banks, hedge funds and a fast-food company.

The Fed, in compliance with orders from Congress, today named recipients of $3.3 trillion in emergency aid. Among them were U.S. branches of overseas banks, including Switzerland’s UBS AG; corporations such as General Electric Co. and McDonald’s Corp.; and investors like Pacific Investment Management Co. and computer executive Michael Dell.

Lawmakers demanded disclosure, over the Fed’s initial objections, as U.S. central bankers pushed beyond their traditional role of backstopping banks to stem the worst financial panic since the Great Depression. The Fed posted the data on its website to comply with a provision in July’s Dodd- Frank law overhauling financial regulation.

“Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations,” Senator Bernard Sanders, the Vermont Independent who wrote the provision on Fed disclosure, said in a statement today. “As a result of this disclosure, other members of Congress and I will be taking a very extensive look at all aspects of how the Federal Reserve functions.”…

[continues at Bloomberg]

(For the disinfo regular, I’d recommend the watching the movie The Constant Gardener and the documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, but perhaps you already have…)

Ron Paul, from a year and a half ago: “What if Obama has no intention of leaving Iraq? What if the American people learn the truth: that our foreign policy has nothing to do with national security, that it never changes from one administration to the next?”

And before you reactionaries react, Ron Paul spoke out against the Tea Party: See Ron Paul’s Shocking message to the Tea Party.

Congressman Ron Paul decries TSA abuses on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:

Mr. Speaker, today I introduce legislation to protect Americans from physical and emotional abuse by federal Transportation Security Administration employees conducting screenings at the nation’s airports. We have seen the videos of terrified children being grabbed and probed by airport screeners. We have read the stories of Americans being subjected to humiliating body imaging machines and/or forced to have the most intimate parts of their bodies poked and fondled. We do not know the potentially harmful effects of the radiation emitted by the new millimeter wave machines.

In one recent well-publicized case, a TSA official is recorded during an attempted body search saying, “By buying your ticket you gave up a lot of rights.” I strongly disagree and am sure I am not alone in believing that we Americans should never give up our rights in order to travel. As our Declaration of Independence states, our rights are inalienable. This TSA version of our rights looks more like the “rights” granted in the old Soviet Constitutions, where freedoms were granted to Soviet citizens — right up to the moment the state decided to remove those freedoms.

The incident of the so-called “underwear bomber” last Christmas is given as justification for the billions of dollars the federal government is spending on the new full-body imaging machines, but a Government Accountability Office study earlier this year concluded that had these scanners been in use they may not have detected the explosive material that was allegedly brought onto the airplane. Additionally, there have been recent press reports calling into question the accuracy and adequacy of these potentially dangerous machines.

My legislation is simple. It establishes that airport security screeners are not immune from any US law regarding physical contact with another person, making images of another person, or causing physical harm through the use of radiation-emitting machinery on another person. It means they are subject to the same laws as the rest of us.

Imagine if the political elites in our country were forced to endure the same conditions at the airport as business travelers, families, senior citizens, and the rest of us. Perhaps this problem could be quickly resolved if every cabinet secretary, every member of Congress, and every department head in the Obama administration were forced to submit to the same degrading screening process as the people who pay their salaries.

I warned at the time of the creation of the TSA that an unaccountable government entity in control of airport security would provide neither security nor defend our basic freedom to travel. Yet the vast majority of both Republicans and Democrats then in Congress willingly voted to create another unaccountable, bullying agency– in a simple-minded and unprincipled attempt to appease public passion in the wake of 9-11. Sadly, as we see with the steady TSA encroachment on our freedom and dignity, my fears in 2001 were justified.

The solution to the need for security at US airports is not a government bureaucracy. The solution is to allow the private sector, preferably the airlines themselves, to provide for the security of their property. As a recent article in Forbes magazine eloquently stated, “The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility.” In the meantime, I hope we can pass this legislation and protect Americans from harm and humiliation when they choose to travel.

According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi assistant professor at New York University is having a camera surgically embedded in the back of his head.

The unusual act is part of a museum installation called 3rdI. For a year, the camera will take still pictures in one-minute intervals and send them wirelessly to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, which will display them on monitors.

Bilal is known for his provocative art. He has a tattoo on his back that details American and Iraqi casualties, he set up a website where people could shoot him remotely with paint balls and created a suicide-bomber avatar of himself in a video game that hunted down President George W. Bush.

The 3rdI project, which launches December 15, has raised a bunch of privacy concerns that the university is still addressing. The semi-permanently installed camera could catch all activities of Bilal’s life, both personal and profesional, including the lives of students at the university.

“Obviously you don’t want students to be under the burden of constant surveillance; it’s not a good teaching environment,” Fred Ritchin, an associate chairman of the department, told the Wall Street Journal.

Read More at Discovery News

Senate Bill 510, the Food Safety Modernization Act, has been called “the most dangerous bill in the history of the United States of America.” It would grant the U.S. government new authority over the public’s right to grow, trade and transport any foods. This would give Big brother the power to regulate the tomato plants in your backyard. It would grant them the power to arrest and imprison people selling cucumbers at farmer’s markets. It would criminalize the transporting of organic produce if you don’t comply with the authoritarian rules of the federal government.

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“It will become the most offensive authority against the cultivation, trade and consumption of food and agricultural products of one’s choice. It will be unconstitutional and contrary to natural law or, if you like, the will of God.” – Dr. Shiv Chopra, Canada Health whistleblower.

This tyrannical law puts all food production (yes, even food produced in your own garden) under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security. Yep — the very same people running the TSA and its naked body scanner / passenger groping programs.

This law would also give the U.S. government the power to arrest any backyard food producer as a felon (a “smuggler”) for merely growing lettuce and selling it at a local farmer’s market.

It also sells out U.S. sovereignty over our own food supply by ceding to the authority of both the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Codex Alimentarius.

It would criminalize seed saving (http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/20…), turning backyard gardeners who save heirloom seeds into common criminals. This is obviously designed to give corporations like Monsanto a monopoly over seeds…

[continues at Natural News]

Not sure about the “harm score” reliability, but the chart is worth a gander nevertheless;  the BBC reports:

Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack, according to a study published in medical journal the Lancet. The report is co-authored by Professor David Nutt, the former UK chief drugs adviser who was sacked by the government in October 2009. It ranks 20 drugs on 16 measures of harm to users and to wider society.

Gavin Partington, of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, said alcohol abuse affected “a minority” who needed “education, treatment and enforcement”.

The study also said tobacco and cocaine are judged to be equally harmful, while ecstasy and LSD are among the least damaging.
…
The modelling exercise concluded that heroin, crack and methylamphetamine, also known as crystal meth, were the most harmful drugs to individuals, but alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the most harmful to society.

When the scores for both types of harm were added together, alcohol emerged as the most harmful drug, followed by heroin and crack…

[continues at the BBC]

Mike Maloney was recently invited to speak at the 8th International Banking Forum in Sochi, Russia. The theme was “Banks Of Russia – 21st Century”. The purpose of the conference was for bankers from around the world to meet and discuss the current state of the global economy, the banking system, and strategies for protecting their personal wealth.

The first morning passed without too much fuss as each speaker gave an introduction and a brief on his or her area of expertise. However, by the end of the day it became obvious that something was definitely wrong. After speaking with many of the attendees, Mike was alarmed to find that practically none of the international bankers understood our present monetary system. Most had no idea how currency is created!

Here at GoldSilver.com, we have always wondered exactly how well modern day bankers understand the worldwide predicament that we find ourselves in. Ladies and gentlemen, our worst fears have been confirmed — the lights are on, but nobody is home.

[continues at GoldSilver.com]