The Left Is Schizoid on Sexuality‏

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The left is hopelessly schizoid on the issue of sexuality. Those on the left celebrate changes in gender but want to criminalize those who help others make changes in sexual orientation.

This is illustrated by two stories currently in the news. One is, of course, the celebrated gender “change” in Bruce Jenner, who now claims to be a woman even though he is still a man in every single solitary cell of his body, and will be until the day he dies.

He has been lionized by the media, celebrated as a hero (or, heroine, as the case may be) and granted an award by ESPN for courage. He has sold a record number of magazines as the cover boy on Vanity Fair . . .

There is now a concerted effort underway to squash all conversion therapy everywhere in the United States. Three states, Oregon, California, and New Jersey, along with Washington D.C., have banned such therapy for minors, and a bill has been introduced in Congress that will ban reparative therapy for anybody of any age everywhere.

The American Psychological Association wrote in 2009, “Enduring change to an individual’s sexual orientation is uncommon.” Well, “uncommon” is hardly the same as “impossible.” The APA’s own report on sexual orientation change says that “for some, sexual-orientation identity is fluid or has an indefinite outcome.” If it’s “fluid,” then logic dictates that change can take place from gay to straight as well as from straight to gay. (Read more from “The Left Is Schizoid on Sexuality‏” HERE)

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Why Is Obama Keeping Obamatrade’s New Global Governance Secret?

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Photo Credit: Breitbart Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, has written a scathing new letter to President Barack Obama pressuring him to explain why Obamatrade has been so secretive.

“On May 6th of this year, I sent you a letter (enclosed) regarding your request for Congress to grant you fast-track executive authority,” Session wrote to Obama on Friday in a letter provided exclusively to Breitbart News ahead of its public release. “Under fast-track, Congress transfers its authority to the executive and agrees to give up several of its most basic powers.

“These concessions include: the power to write legislation, the power to amend legislation, the power to fully consider legislation on the floor, the power to keep debate open until Senate cloture is invoked, and the constitutional requirement that treaties receive a two-thirds vote.

“The latter is especially important since, having been to the closed room to review the secret text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is clear it more closely resembles a treaty than a trade deal” . . .

The letter hones in on the new global governance, as Sessions calls it, that would be created by the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)—which would almost certainly be approved by Congress should the House of Representatives vote in favor of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) to fast track TPP and other trade deals. TPA, which passed the Senate a couple weeks ago, would ensure—barring some unforeseen development—the congressional approval of TPP, and collectively the two have become known as Obamatrade. (Read more from “Why Is Obama Keeping Obamatrade’s New Global Governance Secret?” HERE)

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Apple CEO Tim Cook Makes Stand on Data Privacy and the Country’s ‘Founding Principles’

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In a blistering speech given to the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Privacy Information Center on Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that many successful Silicon Valley companies have “built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information.”

“They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong,” he said. “And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be. So we don’t want your data” . . .

He apparently isn’t even a fan of companies leaving a “backdoor” open for law enforcement agencies to utilize because it makes the data inherently less secure. He broke it down like this:

“If you put a key under a mat just for the cops, a burglar can find it, too,” said Cook. ”Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people’s accounts. If they know there is a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it” . . .

Further, such practices can have a “chilling effect on our first amendment rights, and undermine our county’s founding principles,” the Apple boss added. (Read more from “Apple CEO Tim Cook Makes It Clear Where He Stands on Data Privacy and the Country’s ‘Founding Principles'” HERE)

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Parents Outraged Over This Disgusting High School Extra Credit Assignment

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The teacher’s extra-credit assignment requested that Encinal High School students scour through their parent’s dresser drawers in search of condoms, sex toys or anything provocative and snap a selfie of themselves, according to KPIX-TV.

It is unclear whether any students actually turned in the assignment or what the teacher may have done with the assignments. It’s also unknown which class this was an assignment for and why.

When high school officials heard about the teacher’s homework assignment, they contacted the administrators with the Alameda Unified School District, who launched an investigation into the allegations, district spokeswoman Susan Davis said . . .

“We take reports like this seriously,” Davis said. “We know that it’s hard for the public, and especially for parents, to hear that we can’t talk about the details of the investigation in public. But that information has to be kept confidential, both to protect the rights of all involved and to preserve the integrity of the investigation” . . .

District officials expect to wrap up their investigation next week, but by then, school will be over for the year. (Read more from “Parents Outraged Over This Disgusting High School Extra Credit Assignment” HERE)

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Two New Studies: Cat Parasite Linked to Mental Illnesses

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Coming into close contact with cats can spread a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) – also dubbed the “cat poop parasite” – which are linked to schizophrenia and other mental disorders that affect humans.

The cat-carried parasite is the most common in developed countries and can infect any warm-blooded species, according to the Schizophrenia Bulletin. Although most humans don’t suffer any symptoms from the widespread parasite, it can cause the illness T. gondii, which is linked to weeks of flu-like symptoms, blindness and even death, CBS News reports.

Two new studies have now linked the T. gondii parasite to increased rates of mental illness in cat owners who may have had increased exposure to parasitic infection.

“Cat ownership in childhood has now been reported in three studies to be significantly more common in families in which the child is later diagnosed with schizophrenia or another serious mental illness,” write study authors E. Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute and Dr. Robert H. Yolken of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

The researchers compared two previous studies that linked childhood cat ownership and the development of schizophrenia later in life from a 1982 mental health survey. A second study by A.L. Sutterland from the Department of Psychiatry at the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam reviewed 50 published studies to a T. gondii infection being tied to mental disorders. (Read more from “Study: Cat Parasite Linked to Mental Illnesses” HERE)

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Major Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules; Liars Want to Use Fed’s RICO to Criminalize Truth

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Photo Credit: Breitbart By Steve Milloy. E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency.

In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal-fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage.

Across the media, the authors were innocuously described as simply university-affiliated “researchers.” After all, the researchers had declared they had “no competing financial interests” in their study. Both universities had issued media releases heralding the study as the “first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind.”

Study co-author Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University told the Buffalo News, “I’m an academic, not a politician. I don’t have a dog in this fight.” The claim of independence was also emphatically asserted by study co-author Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard University. “The EPA, which did not participate in the study or interact with its authors, Buonocore says, roundly welcomed its findings.” [Emphasis added] . . .

An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA. (Read more from “Major Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules” HERE)

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Senator: Prosecute Climate Realists Under Anti-Mafia RICO Law

By Alex Newman. When former senior NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer referred last year to vicious climate alarmists as “global warming Nazis” who threaten humanity, he may have been closer to the truth than even he realized at the time. Writing in the Washington Post last week, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) called on the Obama administration to use the anti-gangster Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to persecute those who cast doubt on the increasingly discredited man-made global-warming theory — a theory that just four in 10 Americans believe, but that underpins a wide array of statist and globalist scheming at the national and global levels. Critics promptly ridiculed the Rhode Island senator and his bizarre conspiracy theory. But the totalitarian dream he expressed — using government to enforce ideological compliance and beliefs — represents just the tip of a tyrannical iceberg.

In his wildly inaccurate opinion piece, headlined “The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people,” Senator Whitehouse, ignoring the facts, claims that oil companies and their “allies” are “funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.” Setting aside the fact that carbon dioxide is essential to life on Earth, that human emissions of CO2 make up a fraction of one percent of all the greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere, and that Sheldon, like all people, exhales CO2 “pollution” every time he takes a breath, the radical senator from Rhode Island also concealed other key facts. For example, Big Oil and its beneficiaries — the Rockefeller dynasty, among others — have been among the chief promoters and financiers of global-warming alarmism from the start.

Perhaps hoping to profit from “carbon credits” gimmicks run by Al Gore and mega-bank Goldman Sachs, major oil and energy companies have been flocking to the alarmist cause. Giants such as BP America, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, PG&E, and more all joined the pro-“cap and trade” lobbying group “U.S. Climate Action Partnership.” Just this week, a cartel of the world’s top oil companies — Europe’s Statoil, Total, BP, Shell, ENI, BG, and more — demanded that the UN and its member regimes put a “price” on carbon emissions aimed at extorting consumers out of even more money under the guise of fighting “global warming.” Of course, the satellite data show there has been no global warming in almost two decades, despite contrary UN predictions and “climate models,” but Big Oil, crony Big Business, and Big Government are all demanding more anti-“carbon” scheming nonetheless.

Senator Whitehouse’s deception and extremism only get more pronounced after the initial untruths. Among other claims, the senator said the alleged activities of oil companies are “often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking.” “Thankfully,” Whitehouse claimed,” the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO.” In 1999, the Justice Department filed a RICO suit against tobacco companies and industry groups claiming that they were engaged in a “50-year scheme” to “defraud the public” in violation of RICO. A federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton agreed with the DOJ (though many of her demands were overturned on appeal). And now, Senator Whitehouse wants the Obama administration to try the same tactics against those who expose the increasingly obvious flaws in the man-made global-warming theory promoted by Obama, the UN, its members, and the scientists they fund.

“The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking,” Whitehouse claimed, falsely. As evidence, he points to a memo by an industry lobbying group outlining a tentative plan to expose the flaws in the man-made global-warming theory, just a generation after the man-made global-cooling theory was exposed as a fraud. Of course, by now, the flaws in the alarmist narrative, not to mention ClimateGate and other scandals, are so obvious that the overwhelming majority of Americans reject both the cooling and warming theories. Whitehouse’s other piece of non-evidence cited in the Post column, a “study” published by Drexel University “sociologist” Robert Brulle, claimed that huge sums of “dark money” were nefariously being pumped into what he called “climate denial.” Ironically, the deceptive paper, published in Climatic Change, became a laughingstock almost immediately after its publication. (Read more from this story HERE)

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“Biggest Breach Ever”: U.S. Government Hacked, Here’s Who the Feds Think Is the Culprit

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By Kevin Liptak and Theodore Schleifer. Four million current and former federal employees might have had their personal information hacked, the Office of Personnel Management said on Thursday.

The agency, which is conducting background checks, warned it was urging potential victims to monitor their financial statements and get new credit reports.

U.S. officials believe this could be the biggest breach ever of the government’s computer networks.

The breach is beyond the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Interior, with nearly every federal government agency hit by the hackers, government officials said . . .

U.S. investigators believe they can trace the breach to the Chinese government. Hackers working for the Chinese military are believed to be compiling a massive database of Americans, intelligence officials told CNN on Thursday night. (Read more from “U.S. Government Hacked; This Is Who the Feds Think Is the Culprit” HERE)

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China Suspected in Massive Breach of Federal Personnel Data

By Ken Dilanian and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. China-based hackers are suspected of breaking into the computer networks of the U.S. government personnel office and stealing identifying information of at least 4 million federal workers, American officials said Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that data from the Office of Personnel Management and the Interior Department had been compromised.

“The FBI is conducting an investigation to identify how and why this occurred,” the statement said.

The hackers were believed to be based in China, said Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican.

Collins, a member of the Senate intelligence committee, said the breach was “yet another indication of a foreign power probing successfully and focusing on what appears to be data that would identify people with security clearances.” (Read more from “China Suspected in Massive Breach of Federal Personnel Data” HERE)

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Hidden Camera: James O’Keefe Exposes How the VA Is Turning Veterans Into Drug Addicts

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This is a must watch exposé by James O’Keefe and Project Veritas on how the VA is admittedly turning veterans into drug addicts. And they are doing it just to get these vets out of their hair, so to speak, instead of actually treating their illnesses. It’s simply disgusting.

(Read more from “Hidden Camera: James O’Keefe Exposes How the va Is Turning Veterans Into Drug Addicts” HERE)

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Hunting for Hackers, NSA Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border

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Photo Credit: NY Times By Charlie Savage, Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson and Henrik Moltke. Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency‘s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the N.S.A. sought permission to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, come at a time of unprecedented cyberattacks on American financial institutions, businesses and government agencies, but also of greater scrutiny of secret legal justifications for broader government surveillance.

While the Senate passed legislation this week limiting some of the N.S.A.’s authority, the measure involved provisions in the U.S.A. Patriot Act and did not apply to the warrantless wiretapping program. (Read more from “Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border” HERE)

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The NSA’s Bulk Collection Is Over, but Google and Facebook Are Still in the Data Business

By Kaveh Waddell. Don’t be fooled: Congress may have finally passed the bill reining in the National Security Agency’s bulk-surveillance programs, but your data is still being collected on the Internet.

Lost in the debate over the NSA is the fact that companies like Google and Facebook continue to vacuum up vast troves of consumer data and use it for marketing.

The private-sector tech companies that run the social networks and email services Americans use every day are relatively opaque when it comes to their data-collection and retention policies, which are engineered not to preserve national security but to bolster the companies’ bottom lines.

Critics say the consumer data that private companies collect can paint as detailed a picture of an individual as the metadata that got caught up in the NSA’s dragnets. Companies like Google and Facebook comb through customers’ usage statistics in order to precisely tailor marketing to their users, a valuable service that advertisers pay the companies dearly to access.

“What both types of information collection show is that metadata—data about data—can in many cases be more revelatory than content,” said Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “You see that given the granularity with which private data collection can discern very intimate details about your life.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Women’s College Votes to Admit Transgender Women; US Air Force Changes Rules on Transgenders

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Photo Credit: AP By Associated Press. Barnard College has decided to admit transgender women, becoming the latest women’s college to issue a new policy acknowledging the fluidity of gender.

The new policy, announced Thursday, says Barnard will consider applicants who consistently live and identify as women. That excludes transgender men — those born female but identifying as male. The decision is an attempt to balance Barnard’s identity as a women’s college with what the school calls “an evolving understanding of gender identity.” (Read more from “Women’s College Votes to Admit Transgender Women” HERE)

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Air Force Eases Rules on Transgender Troops

By Mark Hensch. The Air Force will announce Thursday that it will offer more protections for its transgender service members against potential discharge.

Troops diagnosed with gender dysphoria or who identified as transgender were typically discharged in the past on medical grounds, according to USA Today.

Doctors and unit commanders were previously in charge of those diagnoses, it reported.

The Air Force’s new measures will require such judgments to receive review from high-level officials at the military branch’s headquarters.

“Though the Air Force policy regarding involuntary separation of gender dysphoric Airmen has not changed, the elevation of decision authority to the Director, Air Force Review Boards Agency, ensures the ability to consistently apply the existing policy,” Daniel Sitterly, a top Air Force personnel, said in a statement. (Read more from this story HERE)

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