America is a Food Stamp Nation

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handout050815The gospel according to Wall Street, the White House and propaganda media is that the U.S. economy is recovering just fine.

Last week, happy-faced talking heads told us that unemployment was down to 5.4 percent — the lowest rate since May 2008 — even while the number of Americans not in the labor force climbed [by one estimate] to a record 93,194,000. The Labor Force Participation Rate (the percent of people 16 years old and older eligible to work) stands at 62.8 percent. Still, government men dutifully claim all is well, that the stock market is bullish. Now the Fed is talking about raising interest rates.

Yet as of January 2015, the number of Americans receiving food stamps, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, had topped 46 million for 41 straight months, according to data released by the Department of Agriculture (USDA). Every month now for more than three years, going back to September 2011, 14.5 percent of the American population received food stamps.

In the Great Depression, long bread lines of hungry people waiting hours to get a meager bite to eat were visible reminders to everyone of the country’s economic pain. This went on while, thanks to FDR’s Agriculture Adjustment Act; farmers were paid to slaughter livestock, burn crops and leave their land fallow in order to prop up farm prices.

Today’s digital bread lines are invisible and easy to ignore. Food stamps are today’s soup kitchens. Most Americans are totally unaware of their magnitude. But they are real. (Read more from “America Is a Food Stamp Nation” HERE)

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Almost Half of US States Are Officially Broke

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download (16)Last month, we documented the case of Louisiana State University, the large, well-known public institution whose 2014 enrollment totaled nearly 31,000 students. LSU, it turns out, is facing funding cuts of as much as 82% which, if realized, would likely force the school into financial exigency, the college equivalent of bankruptcy. The reason for the cuts: the sharp decline in oil prices and fiscal mismanagement have conspired to blow a $1.6 billion hole in the state’s budget.

Bloomberg has more:

With tax revenue from the oil industry falling short of projections, the deficit has swelled to $1.6 billion for the fiscal year that starts July 1. Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s say they may lower Louisiana’s credit rating if officials don’t come up with sustainable budget solutions . . .

The real problem however is that large budget shortfalls aren’t confined to Louisiana. In fact, a new study from AP shows that big gaps are becoming more the rule than the exception across the US.

Via AP:

An Associated Press analysis of statehouse finances around the country shows that at least 22 states project shortfalls for the coming fiscal year. The deficits recall recession-era anxiety about plunging tax revenue and deep cuts to education, social services and other government-funded programs.

(Read more from “Almost Half of US States Are Officially Broke” HERE)

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House Will Vote on 20-Week Abortion Ban on Day Kermit Gosnell Convicted of Snipping Babies’ Necks [+video]

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gosnell5By Steven Ertelt. LifeNews has confirmed that the House of Representatives this week will indeed vote on the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act — the bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks, on the anniversary of the conviction of Kermit Gosnell. That anniversary and the vote will take place on Wednesday.

On this day two years ago, Gosnell was found guilty of killing Baby A, Baby C and Baby D by snipping their necks in brutal abortion-infanticides still legal in the United States. He was also convicted on hundreds of lesser charges ranging from infanticide to running a corrupt organization.

Leading pro-life groups are working hard to generate calls and emails to members of Congress to support the bill.

National Right to Life told LifeNews: “The bill is the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R. 36), which would extend general protection from abortion to unborn children beginning at 20 weeks fetal age — nationwide. This bill could save the lives of thousands of babies each year. This federal bill was developed from model legislation developed by National Right to Life, which has been enacted so far in 11 states.” (Read more from “House Will Vote on 20-Week Abortion Ban on Day Kermit Gosnell Convicted of Snipping Babies’ Necks” HERE)

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Abortion Doctor Who Did 1,200 Abortions Tells Congress to Ban Them

By Steven Ertelt. This week, the House of Representatives is voting on a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The last time the House considered this bill, a former abortion practitioner urged members of Congress to pass it.

Dr. Anthony Levatino is a pro-life physician from New Mexico but, before having a change of heart on the issue of abortion he was an OBGYN who also performed abortions. Levatino did as many as 1,200 abortions — some of them after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Then, after his daughter died in a tragic automobile accident, he re-evaluated his position on abortion and stopped doing abortions.

Dr. Levatino told members of a Congressional committee that they should support the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

(Read more from this story HERE)

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Microbiomes Raise Privacy Concerns and Here’s Why

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reduced for web C0115044-Faecal_bacteria_SEM-SPLCall it a ‘gut print’. The collective DNA of the microbes that colonize a human body can uniquely identify someone, researchers have found, raising privacy issues.

The finding, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 11 May, suggests that it might be possible to identify a participant in an anonymous study of the body’s microbial denizens — its microbiome — and to reveal details about that person’s health, diet or ethnicity. A publicly available trove of microbiome DNA maintained by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, already contains potentially identifiable human DNA, according to a study published in Genome Research on 29 April.

The papers do not name individuals on the basis of their microbiomes — and predict that it would be difficult to do so currently — but they do suggest that those conducting microbiome research should take note.

“Right now, it’s a little bit of a Wild West as far as microbiome data management goes,” says Curtis Huttenhower, a computational biologist at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the latest study1. “As the field develops, we need to make sure there’s a realization that our microbiomes are highly unique.”

Human-genomics researchers have grappled with privacy concerns for years. In 2013, scientists showed that they could name five people who had taken part anonymously in the international 1,000 Genomes project, by cross-referencing their DNA with a genealogy database that also contained ages, locations and surnames. (Read more from “Microbiomes Raise Privacy Concerns and Here’s Why” HERE)

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White House Denies Obama’s Gulf Overtures Are Unraveling

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download (14)The White House on Monday raced to dispel the notion that President Barack Obama’s efforts to reassure anxious Persian Gulf nations about his overtures to Iran were unraveling ahead of a rare Camp David summit this week.

Officials insisted there was no weakening in ties between the U.S. and the Gulf, despite the fact that just two other heads of state will join Obama for Thursday’s meetings at the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains. The rulers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman are skipping the summit and instead sending lower-ranking, yet highly influential representatives.

“We very much feel we have the right group around the table,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser.

The absence of Saudi Arabia’s newly crowned King Salman in particular has sparked questions about summit’s effectiveness. The Saudis are bitter rivals with Iran and among the most outspoken critics of Obama’s nuclear detente with Tehran.

Adding to the diplomatic intrigue: Saudi Arabia’s announcement Sunday that Salman would not travel to the U.S. came just two days after White House officials said Obama and the king would hold one-on-one talks in Washington ahead of the Camp David meeting. (Read more from “White House Denies Obama’s Gulf Overtures Are Unraveling” HERE)

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In a First, Russia and China Conduct “Provocative” Live-Fire Naval Excercises in Mediterranean

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lead_960Neither Russia nor China has one inch of coastline on the Mediterranean Sea, making it an unlikely and provocative venue for their first joint naval war games.

The 10 days of maneuvers that got underway Monday will include live-fire exercises in the strategic sea connecting Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The point is lost on no one: A powerful new alliance of eastern giants is flexing its muscles in the very backyard of Western Europe — much as China has done on its own in the Pacific.

The war games follow Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, where he headlined Victory Day celebrations and spent three days making billion-dollar deals with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s World War II allies mostly stayed away.

Russia has been driven into the arms of its communist neighbor by Western sanctions imposed for its role in the bloody Ukraine crisis. The United States and European Union have cut off Russian businesses and its government from international lending and provoked tit-for-tat trade embargoes that have hurt both sides.

In response, Putin has steered his country away from a U.S.-dominated post-Soviet world order, pivoting instead toward China, its not-always-friendly eastern neighbor. (Read more from “In a First, Russia and China Conduct Live-Fire Naval Excercises in Mediterranean” HERE)

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What Makes Peaceful Neighbors Become Mass Murderers?

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Photo Credit: Nature

Photo Credit: Nature

What happens in the brains of people who go from being peaceable neighbors to slaughtering each other on a mass scale? Back in 1997, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried at the University of California, Los Angeles, conscious of the recent massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda, described this switch in behavior in terms of a medical syndrome, which he called ‘Syndrome E’ 2. Nearly 20 years later, Fried brought sociologists, historians, psychologists and neuroscientists together at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris to discuss the question anew. At the conference, called ‘The brains that pull the triggers’, he talked to Nature about the need to consider this type of mass murder in scientific as well as sociological terms, and about the challenge of establishing interdisciplinary dialogue in this sensitive area.

On which data did you base your hypothetical Syndrome E?

Historians had analyzed personal accounts from numerous massacres, such as of Armenians in 1915, the European Jews in the Second World War, Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime and the ethnic killings in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. I also gathered information from the few social-science experiments available at the time, such as the famous Milgram experiment (which studied the willingness of someone to inflict on another when obeying authority figures). I was particularly struck by Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men, which described the testimony of hundreds of middle-aged, non-politicized German reservists who were taken to Poland in 1942. In a short time, most became efficient killers, participating in the shooting of 38,000 Jews who had been rounded up by the Nazis, and herding 45,000 more into trains destined for the gas chambers. Their commander allowed the reservists to opt out, but only 10% or so decided not to kill. I felt that the transformation into repetitive killer had to have a biology behind it — all of our behavior is guided by brain activity.

What are the main features of the syndrome?

There was a myth that the primitive brain is held in check by our more-recently evolved prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complex analysis, and that the primitive, subcortical part takes over when we carry out brutal crimes such as repetitive murder. But I saw it the other way around. The signs and symptoms that I gathered in my research indicated that the prefrontal cortex, not the primitive brain, was responsible, because it was no longer heeding the normal controls from subcortical areas. I called it ‘cognitive fracture’ — the normal gut aversions to harming others, the emotional abhorrence of such acts, were disconnected from a hyper-aroused prefrontal cortex. I also proposed a neural circuitry in the brain that could perhaps account for this. In brief, specific parts of the prefrontal cortex become hyperactive and dampen the activity of the amygdala, which regulates emotion. (Read more from “What Makes Peaceful Neighbours Become Mass Murderers” HERE)

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Foss Maritime Fights to Host Shell’s Drilling Rigs in Seattle

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downloadFoss Maritime said Friday it plans to appeal the city’s decision that the Port of Seattle needs a new land-use permit to host Royal Dutch Shell’s Arctic drilling fleet at Terminal 5.

Mayor Ed Murray said Monday the Port needs a new permit because the current permit allows for cargo loading and unloading — not for maintaining and supplying oil-drilling rigs.

Foss argues, however, that the current permit for Terminal 5 allows port customers to tie up vessels so goods and cargo can be stored, loaded and unloaded, “which is precisely what Foss is doing at Terminal 5,” the company said in the statement.

The company estimates the appeal process will take months to complete. In the meantime Foss intends to move ahead with its operations at Terminal 5 as Shell prepares for the summer oil-exploration season in Alaska.

“The city’s position is not supported by the plain language of the permit at issue, and will cause long-term harm to the maritime industry as a whole,” Foss said in the release. “This action is akin to the mayor ordering Seattle City Light to cut off all electricity to Amazon on the Friday after Thanksgiving.” (Read more from “Foss Maritime Fights to Host Shell’s Drilling Rigs in Seattle” HERE)

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Franklin Graham Warns ISIS Sympathizers in United States: ‘Remember, in America, We Shoot Back’

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Franklin Graham, religious leader and son of Billy Graham in Washington, DC.By Leah Marieann Klett. Rev. Franklin Graham has responded to the FBI’s revelation that there are “hundreds, maybe thousands” of people across the country who are receiving recruitment overtures from the Islamic State to attack the U.S., emphasizing that the terror group must “remember that in America, we shoot back.”

On Thursday, FBI Director James Comey revealed that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is leveraging social media in unprecedented ways through Twitter and other social media platforms, sending messages to the smartphones of “disturbed people” who could potentially launch assaults on U.S. targets.

“It’s like the devil sitting on their shoulders, saying ‘kill, kill, kill,”’ Comey said in a meeting with reporters, ABC News reports.

He explained that ISIS recruiters operating from Syria are making contact with U.S. recruits, and then “steering” them into encrypted venues where their subsequent communications are “lost to us.”

“The haystack is the entire country,” Comey said. “We are looking for the needles, but increasingly the needles are unavailable to us. … This is the ‘going dark’ problem in living color. There are [ISIS sympathizers] out there that I have not found and I cannot see.” (Read more from “Franklin Graham Warns ISIS Sympathizers in United States: ‘Remember, in America, We Shoot Back'” HERE)

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Franklin Graham Facebook Post Warning ISIS that Americans “Shoot Back” Has Gone Viral

By News Editor. Franklin Graham posted this on his Facebook page on Friday:

The FBI warned yesterday that there could be hundreds or maybe even thousands of ISIS sympathizers in America, and they are being instructed to carry out deadly attacks on U.S. targets. FBI Director James Comey said, “It’s like the devil sitting on their shoulders, saying ‘kill, kill, kill’ all day long.” I pray this never happens. May God protect our country. I don’t advocate violence, but I do believe in self-defense. ISIS needs to remember that in America, we shoot back.

As of publishing of this article, Franklin Graham’s Facebook post has over 163,000 likes and almost 80,000 shares.

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Report: Obama Lied About Bin Laden Raid

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Photo Credit: The Hill

Photo Credit: The Hill

An expose published on Sunday alleges that President Obama deceived Americans with his narrative of the 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Author Seymour M. Hersh accuses Obama of rushing to take credit for the al Qaeda leader’s death.

This decision, Hersh argues in the London Review of Books, forced the military and intelligence communities to scramble and then corroborate the president’s version of events.

“High-level lying nonetheless remains the modus operandi of U.S. policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no,” Hersh wrote of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

Hersh based his report on a single, anonymous source. This individual, he said, is a “retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abottabad.” (Read more from “Report: Obama Lied About Bin Laden Raid” HERE)

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