31 Dec 2013

Flavour of the Evolution 2013

Angelo Agathangelou: By far the most popular posts this year have been the series of reviews of my pal serial modder genius Lukasz Fikus's extraordinary Lampizator supreme reference Hi Fi equipment. Guess those topics aren't pissing against the wind like the issue of equality for men and boys and as I said, there's no time for good music like a revolution.
World First: Lampizator 'BIG SIX' DAC - "The best sound we can possibly make" + "Make Mozart Not Nukes!" Lampizator GM 70 SE Amplifier
(Also check out AKALA's excellent new album below.)
The following stories are in no particular order and there were many more very popular posts, but I have chosen a few readers favorites that seemed to capture the flavour of 2013, a year that saw great strides in the men's movement in which I have participated for over a decade and an apparent expansion of the general awakening. There were many popular financial posts but I'm marking them down as boring and a positive broad acknowledgement of the Banksters for what they are, enough said. Also some great moments from the cypherpunks
Click the titles to read/watch the full stories.
I have a dream - The COCK Fairy

"A Structuraly Misandrist Society." UCL Debate: Feminism Is Sexist

Propaganda is the New Empiricism

The Trends to Watch For in 2014

Government overreach, economic stagnation & civil discontent

When Risk Is Separated From Gain, The System Is Doomed

By Charles Hugh Smith: If the gambler has no feedback from his bets because the casino reimburses his losses, then he will continue gambling wildly and losing spectacularly.
Risk is an ever-present characteristic of life; it cannot be eliminated, it can only be masked or hedged. We know this intuitively, yet we blithely accept official assurances that risk can be eliminated by the monetary machinations of the Federal Reserve, the Central Bank of China, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank.
To confuse masking risk with the elimination risk is the acme of hubris and the perfect setup for disaster. In my view, the global central bank response has been directed at masking risk and presenting this as the "solution" that has sent risk back to its lair, defeated. But cloaking risk does not eliminate it; official obfuscation merely pushes risk beneath the surface where it accumulates unseen.
Once the built-up risk reaches criticality, it explodes in "unforeseen" volatility that is often triggered by a seemingly unimportant event.

Empire Kaput, Crypto-Currencies 2014! - Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert with Barb Jacobson

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss whether or not 2014 will be one of economic and financial fallout from the 2013 Year of Bitcoin and Snowden. They look at Paul Krugman's claim that Bitcoin is evil because it's not backed by men with guns and the latest in the financial fallout from Snowden's NSA revelations in terms of contractual demands that data never enter the US.

Heroic Boycott of Apartheid Israel Universities Angers Zionazi Lawmakers

"If you want peace and democracy, I will support you. If you want formal Apartheid, we will not support you. If you want to support racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing, we will oppose you." Nelson Mandela.
 

Two New York legislators say they will introduce a bill to strip state aid from universities that take part in a recent movement to boycott Israeli academic centers.
UK BANNED Press TV: State Sen. Jeff Klein, a Bronx Democrat, and Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat who is also a former member of the Jewish Defense League that was classified as a “terrorist group” by the FBI in 2001, say they want to cut off state aid to universities affiliated with the American Studies Association’s movement to boycott Israeli institutions.

MHRA: My New Year’s Resolution for 2014

"When it comes to dealing with self-elected but non-functional directors of matters in which they will not share in the work, I pledge to tell you to fuck off with a little more courtesy than I did in 2013."
By I rarely use AVfM any more for personal style blog posts. It just seems inappropriate, as though AVFM is no longer just mine. And it isn’t. This corner of the internet as my personal blog yielded to a movement a long time ago.
I am still going to ask your indulgence as I take a selfish trip into the personal.
It is a time of resolutions for many and I am no exception. As I look back on the last year and examine myself, looking at the (many) things I could do to make changes for the better, one of the things that strikes me as the most glaring is composure.

War Loving Christian Hypocrisy - Resource Based Economy Self Defense + The Battle to Steal Your Money

Stefan Molyneux: War loving Christian hypocrisy, health is the result of healthy practices, loving friends vs. loving romantic partners, arguments from analogy, your history is an excuse for nothing, and the resource based economy as self-defense.

Sun ‘Flips Upside Down’ While Reversing Magnetic Poles

RT: The sun has undergone a “complete field reversal,” with its north and south poles changing places as it marks the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24.
A reversal of the sun's magnetic field is, literally, a big event,” NASA’s Dr. Tony Phillips said in a statement issued on the space agency’s website.

How Faith Poisons Everything

By carlos morales: An exposé on the evils of faith. Faith is a short-term comfort that is antithetical towards reason and evidence. Faith begins the loosening up of self-directed fate, and the shifting of the locus of control by removing your ability to decipher truth from fiction and placing that responsibility unto someone else. It is a belief in an authority rather than an acknowledging of facts - faith is what gets us totalitarian ideas, it's what leads to dictatorial mandates based on the whims of some other authority. Faith is in direct opposition to freedom.

How The NSA Hacks Your iPhone and The Great Firewall Of Earth

Following up on the latest stunning revelations released yesterday by German Spiegel which exposed the spy agency's 50 page catalog of "backdoor penetration techniques", today during a speech given by Jacob Applebaum (@ioerror) at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress, a new bombshell emerged: specifically the complete and detailed description of how the NSA bugs, remotely, your iPhone. The way the NSA accomplishes this is using software known as Dropout Jeep, which it describes as follows: "DROPOUT JEEP is a software implant for the Apple iPhone that utilizes modular mission applications to provide specific SIGINT functionality. This functionality includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control and data exfiltration can occur over SMS messaging or a GPRS data connection. All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted."

30 Dec 2013

UK-Based Banksters Accused Of Massive Mis-Selling In Italy

Woman outside perfume shop in Rome
Several UK-based investment banks have been accused of mis-selling financial products to Italian cities and regions.
Nomura, UBS and Deutsche Bank are among those accused by Italian prosecutors of mis-selling derivatives in deals worth 35bn euros (£28bn).
The banks deny wrongdoing, but refused to comment further because the matter is now before the Italian courts.
BBC Newsnight discovered that London's financial watchdog was made aware of the mis-selling, but failed to act.
Now those Swap derivatives look as if they could further damage the entire Italian economy - the third largest in the eurozone.
Sicily has already needed a 400m-euro bailout from the federal government in Rome, which itself may soon need aid from its eurozone partners to stay financially afloat.
On Monday, official figures revealed that the Italian economy, which has contracted for the past four quarters, shrank by 0.8% between April and June, slightly more than previously estimated.
Between 1997 and 2007, dozens of Italian cities and regions borrowed 111bn euros from London-based investment banks - the repayments of which were funded by a type of derivative called a Swap

Mothers Rights Versus Fathers - Boycott Divorce Corp Movie?

By : Divorce Corp, a documentary due to be released in January 2014 is causing quite a stir between mother’s rights / “women’s rights” and father’s rights groups who support equally-shared parenting. In calling for a boycott of the movie, mother’s rights groups are quite upset that Divorce Corp advocates for more fair and balanced divorce and family court process, something that apparently irks the mother’s rights crowd which for years has enjoyed courts centered around them. As shared-parenting is being advanced across the world, it appears that many in the mother’s rights arena are calling for a boycott of Divorce Corp in an effort to maintain their position of total control.

Indian Communist Feminist Commits Suicide After Rival Feminists Public Shaming Rape Allegations

By : In New Delhi, the Jawahar Lal Nehru University, which is popularly known as JNU, is a strong bastion of communists. Many of its professors have strong left-wing orientation. This place is also a hotbed of radical feminism. Khurshid Anwar, aged 55, is a former student of JNU and he a communist, who used to run a Non-Government Organization (NGO) known as the Institute for Social Democracy. He was a male feminist and just like other male feminists, all through his life he never bothered about false allegations of rape and their possible impact on the innocent men, who are accused. In fact, he may have even believed that the percentage of false allegations miniscule or less than 2% and hence not worth any attention, which is the standard Feminist line.
After an incident of rape of a young women one a bus in Delhi, violent protests broke out in Delhi, as many people read in the international news. Khurshid Anwar, his NGO, and his fellow comrades organised many of these protests. Pictures in his Facebook profile show him leading one such protest and he standing next to the police barricade.
On 18th December, less than 1 year of the protests that Kurshid Anwar organised, he committed suicide by jumping from his building, after media started flashing news that he allegedly raped a young feminist colleague, working in another NGO. The alleged incident happened in the month of September in his house, where some members of an NGO had organised a party.

Euro-Enthusiasts Can't Quite Hide Their Contempt For The Masses

Anti-slavery campaigners were also written off as cranks and gadflies
By : How do you get a poll to register a large majority in favour of EU membership? Easy. Confine your survey to quangocrats, charity heads, civil servants, CEOs of multi-national corporations and the like. The pro-EU lobby group, British Influence, has been trying to get people excited about its poll of “leading figures” – that is, 700 bien pensant metropolitans of whom, sure enough, 69 per cent want to stay in the EU. Indeed, the only surprise is that, of a demographic specifically selected for pro-Brussels bias, 31 per cent don't agree.
Not that I blame British Influence: when every poll of the general population shows an anti-EU majority, you have to clutch at whatever support you can find. Nor am I saying that all, or even most, of the people surveyed are beneficiaries of the Brussels racket. They don’t have to be. When enough NGOs get money from the Commission, even those that don’t tend to be inflected by the Euro-enthusiasm of their peers. When a large number multinationals and megabanks have invested in lobbying to get rules that suit them, other corporates get carried along by the groupthink.
Let’s run over some of the other things that all these “leading figures” have favoured over the years, shall we? State planning, prices and incomes policies, the SDP, the ERM. Almost without exception, the “leading figures” trotted out by British Influence to argue for the EU were, a decade ago, making precisely the same arguments about joining the euro: we’ll lose influence, overseas investment will dry up, blah blah fishcakes.

FUKUSHIMA: Desperate Tepco Hires Triads To Corral The Destitute For Work In Radioactive Areas.

Is this the bottom of the barrel at last?
fukuhomelessShizuya Nishiyama. 57, homeless man
By John Ward: I’m sure you will all be relieved to know that the situation at the Fukushima site is now so completely safe, nobody wants to work on cleaning it up, perhaps on the grounds that there’s no point in cleaning something up when it’s already clean.
Except that not even those on the dole will work there, because they’d rather take their chances – any chances – than work at Fukushima. Nobody believes the Tokyo government’s reassurances. And so Tepco is now hiring bounty hunters to search the streets and ditches for homeless people. Tepco is paying them $100 a mug – and the homeless victims themselves below the minimum wage – because only those on the verge of starvation will do it.

What Really Happens in the Drone Program from Someone On the Inside

By Michael Krieger: Over the weekend, Heather Linebaugh wrote a powerful Op-ed in The Guardian newspaper lamenting the lack of public understanding regarding the American drone program. Heather should know what she’s talking about, she served in the United Stated Air Force from 2009 until March 2012. She worked in intelligence as an imagery analyst and geo-spatial analyst for the drone program during the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here are some key excerpts from her article:
Whenever I read comments by politicians defending the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Predator and Reaper program – aka drones – I wish I could ask them a few questions. I’d start with: How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile?” And: How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help while bleeding out from severed legs?” Or even more pointedly: “How many soldiers have you seen die on the side of a road in Afghanistan because our ever-so-accurate UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] were unable to detect an IED [improvised explosive device] that awaited their convoy?”
Few of these politicians who so brazenly proclaim the benefits of drones have a real clue of what actually goes on. I, on the other hand, have seen these awful sights first hand.

The Radioactive Bomber (that irradiated girls)

Thunderf00t: I got a radiation meter to measure the radiation you get exposed to when flying. But how to test if its working or not?

LEAKED Confession: Cesspool Of Greek-German Corruption + Max Debt

By Wolf Richter: Apparently, it has been impossible to sell Greece any weapons at all, not even a water pistol, without bribing officials at the Defense Ministry. Corruption is so pandemic that Transparency International awarded Greece once again the dubious honor of being the most corrupt country in the EU. For 2013, Greece ended up in 80th place of the 177 countries in the survey, same as China. But it takes two to tango.
And in holier-than-thou Germany, where exporting at any price is a state religion (with chart) regardless of who runs the show, the defense industry was allegedly eager to dance with Greece – supplying tanks, submarines, and other equipment that broke Greece didn’t need and couldn’t afford.
Now there’s a confession. After four days of grilling, investigating magistrates in Athens extracted it from Antonios Kantas, General Secretary for Procurement at the Defense Ministry between 1996 and 2002. He’d been arrested in mid-December after authorities found nearly €14 million in various accounts. In his 30-page testimony, elements of which have been leaked, he admitted having pocketed €15 million in bribes since 1989 – just this one guy!
But it was a community effort that stretched across party lines. He named names, euros, and dollars, implicating 17 Greek politicians and businessmen.

Intersectionality is not just a word

scrabbleBy On December 23rd, Eleanor Robertson made a passionate plea in The GuardianIn defence of intersectionality – one of feminism’s most important tools”. She laments that many feminists revile intersectionality as meaningless and appeals to us to recognize the internal importance of the issue.
I agree. There is much to be learned.
Intersectionality is not just a word, it is a word with many letters. Some of those letters are privileged. They are over-represented not only in this word but within language as a general body. While the letters C and Y are acknowledged as oppressed members of the alphabet, as evidenced by their enhanced point value in Scrabble, there are many letters with only a singular occurrence in this word which struggle to be seen as uniquely disadvantaged.
The letters A and I share the distinct privilege of being, in and of themselves, an entire word. Yet we can see with intersectionality that the letter I occurs a whopping three times whilst the letter A struggles to be seen only once and, even then, doesn’t appear until the the word is over half finished… almost as if an afterthought. Obviously the situation is more complex than we thought. Just as white feminists are deemed by some to be advantaged they, like the letter A in this word, have their own unique battles that they fight to expose.
We all know that the letter Y is marginalized. Quite often it only appears tacked on to the end of words and not only does Y suffer from being consistently last, it has the multiple oppression factor of being placed in a suffix.

Why Antifeminism is a Thing

Re: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0jk1...
VarmitCoyote asks me a couple of questions. He is waiting to get his internet connection back in his home for a Skype conversation with me. I only answer one of his questions because I would prefer to address the other in the Skype vid.

Chomsky Warns About Growing Threat Of Nuclear War In 2014

"It’s beyond irony that the richest most powerful countries in the world are racing towards disaster while the so-called primitive societies are the ones in the forefront of trying to avert it,” 
UK BANNED Press TV: Renowned American linguist, philosopher and political commentator Noam Chomsky warns that the world is racing towards “environmental catastrophe” and nuclear war in 2014.
Answering a question in an interview with Salon.com about the contemporary issues which particularly concerns him, the scholar answered that there are two major problems from among a long list that are worth mentioning.
“These are issues that seriously threaten the possibility of decent human survival. One of them is the growing threat of environmental catastrophe, which we are racing towards as if we were determined to fall off a precipice, and the other is the threat of nuclear war, which has not declined, in fact it’s very serious and in many respects is growing,” Chomsky said.

29 Dec 2013

Apartheid: Israeli Panel Backs Own Legislation To Steal Jordan Valley

A panel of Israeli cabinet ministers has approved their own legislation to steal (annex) the Jordan Valley region of the West Bank, the world's largest open air prison. 
UK BANNED Press TV: The legislation, backed by far-right members of the ruling Likud party, was endorsed on Sunday, just days ahead of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s scheduled visit to the Middle East to push talks between Tel Aviv and the Palestinian Authority.
If it becomes law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be unable to accept the US proposal to put the Jordan Valley under Palestinian control.
Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who leads negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, challenged the motion, saying she would use her powers to block the legislation from being voted on in the parliament.
Israel occupied and then stole (annexed) the West Bank and East al-Quds in the Six-Day Massacre of 1967, but the move has never been recognized by the international community.

A Message From Edward Snowden +

By Six months ago, I stepped out from the shadows of the United States Government’s National Security Agency to stand in front of a journalist’s camera.
Espionage Whistleblower Edward Snowden to Seek Asylum in Brazil
I shared with the world evidence proving some governments are building a world-wide surveillance system to secretly track how we live, who we talk to, and what we say.
I went in front of that camera with open eyes, knowing that the decision would cost me family and my home, and would risk my life. I was motivated by a belief that the citizens of the world deserve to understand the system in which they live.
My greatest fear was that no one would listen to my warning. Never have I been so glad to have been so wrong. The reaction in certain countries has been particularly inspiring to me, and Brazil is certainly one of those.
At the NSA, I witnessed with growing alarm the surveillance of whole populations without any suspicion of wrongdoing, and it threatens to become the greatest human rights challenge of our time.

Steve Keen About Money And Debt - S.K. Over Geld En Schulden

MeJudice1: Economists know especially why they do not have money and debt in their models as Steve Keen, Professor of Economics and Finance, University of Western Sydney. Or by incorporating it into an economic model private debt Keen knew in 2005 that a crisis was coming, the private debts were too high. Keen was recently a guest speaker at Duisenberg School of Finance

How Retailers are Seeing Big Upside by Accepting Bitcoin

By Michael Krieger: For a while now, I have been highlighting the fact that it is an absolute no brainer for small businesses to accept Bitcoin. Not only are you providing your customers with another method of payment with essentially zero downside (if you use a payment processor such as BitPay or Coinbase), it is the best free PR you could ever achieve. Back in November I wrote the following in my article You Can Now Buy a Plane Ticket with Bitcoin:
Notice the CEO’s comment about people coming to his site just because of Bitcoin. This is undoubtedly true, and as I have mentioned before on several occasions, it is a no brainer for a small business to accept bitcoin. It is early enough in the adoption phase that it will still drive tremendous press and buzz for your business and make you look technologically savvy.
It seems many businesses in NYC are finally recognizing the upside. According to the New York Post:
Sure, its value might rise and fall by the day, but some small-business owners in New York City are buying into bitcoin by accepting the buzzed-about currency at their brick-and-mortar locations. They’re saying the benefits are many, and the disadvantages are next to none.

Petticoat Justice: An Alimony Slave’s Bricks Of Logic

Alimony free licence public domainBy : While the poster (left) advertises a classic movie from the 1940′s, its theme was based on a very real social malady spanning the length of the 20th century. It was the alimony racket that inspired the first organized resistance in the United States to government-sponsored misandry. The first of many anti-alimony organizations was formed in New York City on 1927. (see “Robert Ecob: Early MHRA“). Newspapers regularly recount horror stories of men whose lives were ruined by women who demanded to be supported by ex-husbands and, research has revealed, wives enjoyed the power to demand an ex-husband’s incarceration at will when he could not afford to pay up– even when the former wife had no need for the funds (see “The Alimony War of 1935” for the results of this research). It was in 1933 that a young Italian immigrant, a humble bricklayer by the name of Umberto Politano, became the poster boy of the New York anti-alimony activists with his story of a de factolife sentence to jail for failing to live up to his briefly-wedded wife’s demand that he support her and the Italian relatives she imported.

Make No Mistake About It: The Storm Has Hit in Turkey

Testosterone Pit: There is n emerging crisis in Turkey that will set the investment terrain for 2014. This week, we feel the subject warrants more investigation as Prime Minister Erdogan, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the business elite attached to them have become targets of a very focused corruption scandal that Erdogan may not survive—and that should shake investor confidence to its core.

A series of raids and 60 arrests have Erdogan thinking that he is the real target of the corruption probe—and he is not mistaken. This is what happens when you take on the Gulenists as we noted last week.

The corruption probe is targeting Erdogan’s allies first—those AKP fellows in key ministries, and key dynasties with whom Erdogan and the AKP are close to.

A day after the raids and arrests Erdogan reshuffled his Cabinet, replacing 10 ministers. Erdogan’s reshuffle has only fueled the fires—similar to those that burned all last summer in the form of the Gezi Park protests—with the opposition accusing him of trying to create a secret “deep state” of authoritarian rule. Indeed, Erdogan is hoping that the new Cabinet will be solidly loyal during the ensuing probe.

Bitcoin Catches Attention Of Goldman Sachs (And Walmart, And Cisco): Goldman Director Joins Bitcoin Startup

When Bitcoin fans were hoping for fast track adoption by the mainstream, catching the attention of the all-seeing eye of Sauron Goldman Sachs was probably low on their list of action items. Yet that is precisely what they got with the arrival of a Goldman Sachs board member M. Michele Burns, who recently joined the board of Boston-based Bitcoin payment processing system startup Circle Internet Financial.
As Fortune reports "Circle launched earlier this year, and was founded by Jeremy Allaire, who has led other Internet start-ups, but recently has become a Bitcoin evangelist. The company got $9 million in funding from a number of venture capitalist firms. Jim Breyer, a partner at Accel and an early backer of Facebook (FB), is also on Circle's board, as is Raj Date, who recently left a top post at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Circle declined to comment about Burns. Two sources with knowledge of her move confirmed it."
Perhaps of same or greater importance is that in addition to being the chair of the audit committee at the preeminent FDIC-backed hedge fund, Burns also was a board member of the largest retailer in the world, Walmart (WMT accepting BTC?), and is currently on the board of the one company that is at the nexus of the Internet economy, Cisco (and which was punished furiously following Snowden's NSA-spying revelations after projected Chinese revenues imploded and that Cisco may or may not have been collaborating with the government in leaking private data).

US Military Standards For Females Reduced Again In Order For Them To Be “Equal.”

By : While writing this, I just got an email update that the Military Justice Improvement Act has been passed in congress and is on its way to being signed by the President as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.  I am going to have to do some digging to see exactly what changes and amendments have been made.  Initially, it looks like the worst case scenario. MC
As we have seen so many times before, military standards for females are reduced in order for them to beequal.”
The United States Marine Corps quietly announced recently on social media that the current requirement for female Marines to do a minimum of three (3) pull-ups as part of their training by January 1, 2014 has been delayed for another year.  Currently, females are not required to do even a single pull-up, but rather a test called a “flexed-arm hang” in which they can score points based on the amount of time that they can hang from a pull-up bar absent any gear.  A maximum score can be obtained if they hang for 70 seconds with their chin over the bar.

UK Family Court Sanctioned Domestic Abuse + “Escape Committee” and the “Resistance”

"I knew it was unfair, but I wanted to punish him"
By Forty Two: I was flicking through the Daily Mail the other day and this headline/title caught my eye.

 I cut my ex out of our daughter’s life. Now I’m glad he fought tooth and nail to see her

Sally Windsor ends the peace with If James hadn’t fought me in court, Ruby wouldn’t be the delightful, clever, kind and happy child she is today. I’m just glad I eventually saw through my own resentment and hurt—and put my child first During the article sally talks about the benefits of her child having contact with her father, and is grateful James has forgiven her for making him fight tooth and nail just to see his child. In all probability Sally believes she has produced something that extolls the merits of allowing a father access to his child and has in some way moved the plight of fathers seeking access to their children forward. However, there is something much deeper held within her words.

Sally’s story goes along the lines of, after a traumatic birth and failing to bond with her daughter, sleepless nights arguments started. So in order to make a better life for the child she failed to bond with she moved out with the child. She cut her ex partner out of her life and made it impossible for the parent that had bonded with his child, she states I ignored his calls, I refused to answer the door and slandered him to anyone who would listen. I told  everyone he was a awful father;

German Agencies: “Greece is Not Suitable For European Presidency”

By Abed Alloush
By Abed Alloush
By Abed Alloush
By Abed Alloush
By Abed Alloush: In a few days, Greece will assume the six-month rotating presidency of the EU and German media openly doubt Greece’s capability to effectively handle all the European challenges that lay ahead. Despite the fact that the Greek Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, appears reassuring towards Greece’s economic recovery, many German agencies are at least skeptical for the assumption of the European Presidency by a country in a memorandum that has avoided bankruptcy after receiving loans of billions of euros. Among other agencies, Deutsche Welle wonders how a country that is at the centre of the European economic crises could find solutions in serious European matters while simultaneously struggling to be relieved of the unbearable debt.
“For a period of six months we want to become honest mediators and forget our national interests,” underlined the Greek deputy minister of Foreign Affairs, Dimitris Kourkoulas, and his team. He and his team are tasked with the preparations of the Greek Presidency in order for the country to cope with the European demands when the country takes the reins of the European Union.

The problematic child of the eurozone must prove that the worst is over for the country itself and the monetary union in general,” German Weser Kurier commented, according to Deutsche Welle.

Hundreds Of Teens Go On 'Trashing' Spree In NYC Mall

RT: Hundreds of aggressive teenagers stormed a New York mall, trashing stores and terrifying customers and personnel, local media report. Some teens allegedly took part in a game of “knockout.” The mall briefly shut down in response to the violence.
Kings Plaza Shopping Center (credit: Google Maps) More than 400fast and furiousteens reportedly stole cheap items, smashed jars of candy and even beat up security guards at Kings Plaza Shopping Center in Brooklyn between 5 pm and 7 pm on Thursday. They used social media to set up the attack, designed to put the mall “on tilt”.
“I’ve been here seven years and I have never seen anything like this before — I’m so scared. I know they will come back,” a clerk at Candy Plaza 2, Abu Taleb, told the New York Post.
“I was begging them to stop. There were a lot of kids, hundreds of kids… [Security] would chase them out one door and they would come back in another door,” the 31-year-old man added.

28 Dec 2013

Fathers 4 Justice in UK - George Galloway's Sputnik

liarpoliticians: Interviewing the Fathers 4 Justice founders who are campaigning for better rights for fathers and their children, rather than the current women only favoritism in the corrupt British courts - SECRET courts - secret injustice. With Matt and Nadine O'Connor.

GLOBAL LOOTING: A Year On, It Is Real….And Has More Slithery Tentacles Than Newscorp

NYeve2012
By John Ward: I wrote the above post almost exactly a year ago today. The piece looks odd today in some respects, but the prediction and the question remain: they’re going to steal from us, and if they do, who will consume with sufficient enthusiasm to keep the show on the road?
There are times when each year feels like another twelve months lying face-up beneath Madame la Guillotine, watching the razor-sharp blade head towards one’s neck. But in many ways, 2013 consisted of a sort of grudging, anger-inducing admiration (on my part anyway) for the myriad scams these people invented in order to soften us up for The Final Heist. And today, another of them has been uncovered.
It’s been revealed that millions of people are being ripped off by government agencies forcing them to use premium rate phone lines. Currently, a third of customer telephone lines across Central Government use higher rate numbers with half of those lines serving the poorest people. More than 130 million calls from the public are being charged at a rate of up to 45p per minute at an estimated total cost of £56 million a year.

When Law Breaking Becomes Basis For GDP - Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert with Neil Mitchell

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss that nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery; which is why there are no calls for punishment from the mainstream media for bankster crimes. They also report on the execution rate dropping in the US due to a European boycott of sending the executioners' drug.

The Wisdom of Socrates with Peter Boghossian and Stefan Molyneux + The Truth About Gandhi

Stefan Molyneux: Stefan Molyneux speaks with Peter Boghossian on the basics of the Socratic Method. Stefan also discusses governmental responses to gold backed alternative currencies and the fundamentals of love.

Duck Dynasty and Free Speech

ramzpaul: The suspension of Phil Robertson from A&E's Duck Dynasty is outrageous in a nation that values freedom, according to social critic and openly gay, dissident feminist Camille Paglia.

Male/female Discrepancies in Transsexualism

By : While transsexualism has been and remains a poorly-understood condition, certain consistent aspects have been outlined by experiment and observational evidence. One of these aspects is the discrepancy between the sexes, which several, mostly European studies have shown is quite wide, with around three times as many male-to-female as female-to-male transsexuals. But, what are the reasons for this discrepancy? To examine that, we must first examine the phenomenon of transsexualism itself.
Many would suggest that the cause of transsexualism is inherent and genetic. They point to differences in the brain structures of transsexuals, prior to any treatment with hormones or surgery, as evidence of these inherent differences. Transsexual brains appear to be more like those of the sex they identify with, rather than those of the sex they are associated with by virtue of their chromosomes, hormones, and primary and secondary sex characteristics.
These studies are problematic, however, since they tend to feature incredibly small sample sizes that make any statistical conclusions suspect. Further, even if we accept discrepancies in the brains of transsexuals as an assumption, this is a far cry from establishing that these differences are inherent. Indeed, there is strong evidence that human brains are extremely malleable, up to and throughout adulthood. Brains can quickly and dramatically rewire themselves in response to the right stimuli. Of course, this capacity is even greater in childhood.

Janet Street-Porter: The Most Vile Misandrist In Britain

By : Our thanks to J for pointing us to this story. An hour ago he called and spluttered, ‘Mike, you won’t believe what the hag has written about today!’ Sure enough, he was referring to a piece by the ‘personality’ and ‘journalist’ Janet Street-Porter. I can’t recall when a piece in a newspaper – British or otherwise – last made me so angry.
The Daily Mail has many fine female columnists and one truly vile one, Janet Street-Porter. At the very time of year when so many men are suffering the most due to denial of access to their children, because their vindictive ex-partners employ the services of the state to enforce that denial, JS-P has been so cruel as to write a piece published in today’s edition titled, ‘Deadbeat dads are the real problem. It’s the second story in her column:
In a vile piece, possibly the most vile is this:
In this country, courts do not deny dads access to their children unless they are deemed a threat. There has to be a very good reason not to grant them the right to see their kids every other weekend.
Leaving aside the issue of whether access to children every other weekend is reasonable access - we believe it’s not - can JS-P possibly be unaware how blatantly untrue these remarks are? More importantly, can her editor be unaware? And how about this?