Eeyores news and view

Tests reveal some pet supplements skimp on meds
July 9, 2009 - 2:21pm
In this June 25, 2009 photo, Nicole Albino poses for a photograph with her pug Chakka at her home in New York. Albino said Chakka was constantly chewing and licking his knees until her veterinarian recommended glucosamine and chondroitin. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg) By MARILYNN MARCHIONE AP Medical Writer
(AP) - Arthritis supplements bought by millions of pet owners for their dogs, cats and horses sometimes skimp on the ingredients the makers claim can help aching paws and aging joints, and some contain high amounts of lead, an independent laboratory found.
Four of the six joint supplements for animals tested by ConsumerLab.com lacked the amounts of glucosamine or chondroitin promised on their labels or had other flaws, such as lead. Wider testing by a trade group of 87 brands found that one-quarter fell short.
Over-the-counter dietary supplements for humans do not have to be proven safe or effective before they are sold, and pills for pets get even less scrutiny.
"There is and there always has been" a quality problem, although many companies do a good job, said Mark Blumenthal of the American Botanical Council, which tracks research on herbal products.
Even when these supplements contain what they claim, there is little evidence that they work, veterinary experts say. A large government study of people with arthritis found that glucosamine and chondroitin did no better than dummy pills in easing mild pain. Testing these supplements on pets is more difficult.
"You can't ask a dog or a cat to give you a subjective impression of how they're feeling after taking the product for several days. They can't say, 'On a scale of 1 to 5, I feel better or worse,'" Blumenthal said.
Giving supplements to an ailing pet can make its owner feel better, though. "The owner shelled out money for the pills and wants to believe they are helping," Blumenthal said.
Up to one-third of dogs and cats in the U.S. are given supplements, a government report estimates. Sales of pet supplements have roughly doubled since 2003, to nearly $1 billion a year in the United States, according to the Nutrition Business Journal. These supplements are sold over the Internet and at pet supply stores and some groceries.
Many pet owners believe they make a difference.
Nicole Albino, who lives in New York City, said her dog Chakka was constantly chewing and licking his knees until her veterinarian recommended glucosamine and chondroitin.
After taking the pills for a year, "he's definitely been licking his knees a lot less," she said. The dog resumed when she ran out of the stuff for a few weeks. "It just seems to help," Albino said.
Few high-quality studies have tested the effectiveness of animal supplements. The Food and Drug Administration says these products are not bound by quality rules for human ones.
In 2007, the FDA asked an expert panel to look into three popular pet supplements _ lutein, evening primrose oil and garlic _ but the group could not agree on a safe upper limit.
"Many people presume that supplements are safer than drugs, but the reality is that there is very limited safety data on dietary supplements for horses, dogs, and cats," the panel concluded.
That same year, 2007, pet food tainted with melamine sickened and killed thousands of cats and dogs. Melamine can mimic protein in some lab tests, and protein costs much more than melamine.
Similarly, certain substances can fool tests for chondroitin, an expensive joint-supplement ingredient, said Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab.com. The company tests supplements for manufacturers that want its seal of approval, and publishes ratings for subscribers.
Chondroitin usually comes from pig and cow cartilage, though shark and chicken cartilage also can be used, as well as algae. Glucosamine usually comes from the shells of crabs. It is also sold in chemical forms _ something that might surprise people who think of these as "natural" products.
ConsumerLab.com's most recent tests of human joint supplements, released this week along with the pet pill results, found that five out of 21 brands failed to meet quality standards, usually because of too little chondroitin. Four of the six pet supplements tested also failed. One contained only 17 percent of the promised chondroitin.
The National Animal Supplement Council, a trade group in suburban San Diego, found that 28 percent of the 87 brands it tested in April did not contain what was claimed, said council president, William Bookout. The group doesn't name names, but uses the results to help members improve quality control.
"Sometimes a company doesn't even realize they have a problem, or a company can make an honest mistake," Bookout said.
He warns consumers not to expect too much from a pill: "There isn't any magic bullet out there. It is not hip replacement in a bottle."
Dr. Babette Gladstein, a vet who makes house calls for dogs and cats in New York City, said she uses alternative methods but not supplements, because there is not enough proof they work. For overweight pets with bad knees, she advises healthy diets and weight loss.
"I teach the clients how to massage their animal, how to stretch their animal, how to get better range of motion" Gladstein said.
For people who do give pets joint supplements, experts suggest:
_Check with a vet beforehand to see if it is safe.
_Look for a seal of approval by an independent lab or organization.
_Keep a log of your pet's behavior, such as its ability to go up and down stairs, before and after supplement use so you can tell if it helps.
_Don't exceed recommended doses. Too much can cause loose stools and gas pains.
_Watch for shellfish allergies if using glucosamine derived from seafood.
_Avoid versions in salt form (NaCl, or sodium chloride on the label) if the animal has high blood pressure.
_Do not use glucosamine or chondroitin with blood thinners, such as heparin or aspirin, unless a vet advises it. Some breeds, such as Doberman pinschers, are predisposed to bleeding problems.
___
On the Net:
National Academy of Sciences report on supplements for animals: http://tinyurl.com/clmfff
American Botanical Council: http://tinyurl.com/lddnqq
National Animal Supplement Council: http://www.nasc.cc

Here is a combo of three articles that was on Survival Blog yesterday. Tamiflu does not appear to be the panacea that it was first reported to be. Back on July 4th i blogged about a case in Hong Kong being resistant to Tamiflu.
Canada: Tamiflu Resistance In Saskatchewan
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/07080902/H274Y_SK.html
Tamiflu Resistance in San Francisco
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/08/MNG318KL8K.DTL
Tamiflu Resistance in Hong Kong, Japan, and Denmark http://www.who.int/csr/disease/swineflu/newsbriefs/h1n1_antiviral_resistance_20090708/en/index.html
US State Department under cyberattack for fourth day
The US State Department said Thursday its website came under cyberattack for a fourth day running as it tried to prevent further attacks.
"I'm just going to speak about our website, the state.gov website. There's not a high volume of attacks. But we're still concerned about it. They are continuing," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.
"We are taking measures to deal with this and any potential new attacks," Kelly added.
According to computer security experts, a dozen US government websites, including those of the White House, Pentagon and State Department, were targeted in a coordinated cyberattack which also struck sites in South Korea.
South Korean lawmakers were quoted as saying Wednesday that South Korea's intelligence service believes North Korea or its sympathizers may have staged the attack.
But Kelly added: "I have no information... of North Korean involvement. I have... nothing that I can confirm."
He said that the site based at the US embassy in Seoul, South Korea was not shut down and was not materially affected by any of these attacks.
Kelly has said the US computer emergency readiness team is working with State Department experts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies to try to resolve the problem.
DHS is leading the probe, Kelly said.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed earlier that US government and private sector websites had come under so-called "distributed denial of service" attack but declined to identify any of the targeted sites.
A denial of service attack attempts to paralyze a website by flooding it with traffic from an army of malware-infected computers known as a "botnet."
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.a6c27e3843e8f645f9e395649a3a85e5.c51&show_article=1

UFO Club allows sighters to share without scorn
July 10, 2009 - 9:45am By RICARDO LOPEZ The Virginian-Pilot
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) - Mae Burdette knows that when she mentions UFOs and extraterrestrials, her statements often fall on skeptical or even deaf ears.
But at the second meeting of a newly formed UFO Club, Burdette found an audience willing to listen with an open mind.
She told a group of 20 people Wednesday night at the Princess Anne Area Library about her experiences with alien abductions, mysterious men in dark suits and her ability to foresee events, such as a neighbor's house fire.
"The club is about bringing people together and putting their experiences into perspective," said Burdette, 64, who lives in Chesapeake.
Cameron Pack, 25, created the UFO Club so people like Burdette can share their experiences and connect with others who have felt marginalized after speaking about peculiar events.
He began to advertise the club through fliers distributed at local holistic healing stores and in a classified ad. About a dozen people attended that first meeting.
"People have been wanting to have this for a long time," said Pack, a Virginia Beach resident.
Pack, who works part time in retail, is a local field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network. He became interested in UFOs after seeing a triangular object in the sky with many bright lights in 2003.
Pack is passionate about his investigative work. He receives assignments to look into UFOs from his director. He interviews witnesses, collects any evidence and updates the network's nationwide database with a completed report.
Pack carries a briefcase packed with reports, a camera and a field manual on how to conduct inquiries. He is not paid for his work, even though it takes up a lot of his time.
In a little more than a month on the job, he's worked on about 25 cases.
"Cameron is new, but he's very good," said, Susan Swiatek, the network's state director. "We're glad to have him aboard. He writes well, and he writes copious quantities in his reports."
Most of the sightings are reported directly to Mutual UFO Network on its Web site, but some are forwarded by Virginia Beach police dispatch, a practice that began in the 1970s.
A 1976 letter from the Advance Research of UFO Organization to then-Chief of Police William Davis requested that the Police Department forward UFO sighting reports to the organization. Shortly after, an internal memo sent to dispatchers instructed them to take reports and then call UFO Central to relay the information.
An officer is rarely sent out to investigate, said Sue Frazier, a dispatch supervisor.
Several dozen reports have come in to dispatch since then, and most people never figure out an object and keep silent, Swiatek said.
"When you experience something like that, what you believe to be alien spacecraft, you really start to question yourself," said Terrell Copeland, a Marine veteran who reported seeing a huge triangle-shape craft floating over a Suffolk shopping center in 2005. "You're just lost."
Copeland said people aren't open to talking about their experiences because they don't want to strain their relationships with coworkers, family or friends.
"This club was necessary because there's nothing like it in the area," Copeland said.
Wednesday's meeting included a diverse group _ 20-somethings, senior citizens, a married couple _ and all showed genuine interest in hearing Burdette's experiences.
When a pair of men in dark suits approached her at work in 1973 in downtown Norfolk, Burdette said, they knew her husband, where he worked, how many children she had and other personal information. They questioned her, but she became spooked and asked them to leave. They returned a few days later, she said, and requested that she not tell anyone about them.
"Then I saw the movie 'Men in Black,' and I made the connection," she told the group. "I still don't know who they were to this day, but I knew something was suspicious."
___
Information from: The Virginian-Pilot, http://www.pilotonline.com

Eeyores news and view

Netanyahu adviser raises "MAD" nuclear scenario
JERUSALEM, July 9 (Reuters) - Israel must have "tremendously powerful" weapons to deter a nuclear attack or destroy an enemy that dares to launch an atomic strike, a senior adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted on Thursday as saying.
National security adviser Uzi Arad, in comments to Haaretz newspaper, appeared to allude to what is widely believed to be Israel's own nuclear arsenal and a standing policy of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD). He warned other countries they could bring about their own devastation if they launched an attack.
Israel has never confirmed it has atomic arms.
In excerpts on Haaretz's English-language website of an interview to be published on Friday, Arad said he feared that if Iran became a nuclear power, five or six other states in the Middle East would follow suit. He called such a prospect a "nightmare" for Israel.
"The defensive might we have must be improved and become tremendously powerful, and create a situation in which no one will dare to realise the ability to harm us," Arad said.
"And if they do dare, we will exact a full price, so that they too will not survive."
Israel has three German-made submarines that are widely assumed to carry nuclear missiles.
One of the submarines sailed from the Mediterranean, via the Suez Canal, to Israel's Red Sea port of Eilat last week, in what officials called a signal to Iran of the long reach of its arsenal.
Israel and its Western allies fear that Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of producing nuclear weapons. Iran says it is pursuing only a nuclear power generation programme.
In a 2006 Reuters interview, then-vice premier Shimon Peres, currently Israel's president, said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, should bear in mind his country also could be destroyed.
"They want to wipe out Israel ... Now when it comes to destruction, Iran too can be destroyed (but) I don't suggest to say an eye for an eye," Peres said. (Writing by Jeffrey Heller, Editing by Alastair Macdonald)
http://alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L9623800.htm

Hundreds protest in Iran, defy crackdown vow
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Hundreds of young men and women chanted "death to the dictator" and fled baton-wielding police in the capital Thursday as opposition activists sought to revive street protests despite authorities' vows to "smash" any new marches.
For days, supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi have been calling for new protests in Tehran and other cities on Thursday, their first significant attempt to get back on the streets since security forces crushed massive demonstrations nearly two weeks ago in Iran's post-election turmoil.
Tehran Gov. Morteza Tamaddon warned that any new march Thursday would meet the same fate.
"If some individuals plan to carry out any anti-security actions by listening to calls by counterrevolutionary networks, they will be smashed under the feet of our aware people," he said, according to the state news agency IRNA in a report late Wednesday.
Thursday afternoon, a stepped-up number of uniformed policemen along with plainclothes Basiji militiamen stood at intersections all along Revolution Street and at nearby near Tehran University, some of the sites where protests were called.
Still, a group of around 300 young people gathered in front of Tehran University and began to chant, "Death to the dictator," witnesses said. Many of them wore green surgical masks, the color of Mousavi's movement.
Police charged at them, swinging batons, but the protesters fled, then regrouped at another corner and resumed chanting, the witnesses said. Police chased them repeatedly as the protesters continued to regroup, the witnesses said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they feared government retribution.
Within an hour, the number of protesters grew to about 700 and marched toward the gates of Tehran University, the witnesses said. A line of policemen blocked their path, but they did nothing to disperse the gathering as the protesters stood and continued to chant, the witnesses said.
At another location, on Valiasr Street, around 200 protesters gathered, and police fired tear gas to disperse them, but the demonstrators sought to regroup elsewhere, the witnesses said.
It was the first such protests in 11 days, since the crackdown — though it did not compare to the hundreds of thousands who joined the marches that erupted after the June 12 presidential election, protesting what the opposition said were fraudulent results.
The calls for a new march have been circulating for days on social networking websites and pro-opposition websites. Opposition supporters planned the marches to coincide with the anniversary Thursday of a 1999 attack by Basij on a Tehran University dorm to stop protests in which one student was killed.
Mousavi and his supporters say he won the election, which official results showed as a landslide victory for incumbent hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared the results valid after a partial recount and warned that unrest would not be tolerated.
In the crackdown since the election, at least 20 protesters and 7 Basijis were killed.
Police have said 1,000 people were arrested and that most have since been released. But the state-run English language news network Press TV quoted prosecutor-general Qorban-Ali Dorri Najafabadi saying Wednesday that 2,500 people were arrested and that 500 of them could face trial. The remainder, he said, have been released.
Among those still being held are top figures in the country's reform movement, including a former vice president and former Cabinet members. Arrests have continued over the past week, with police rounding up dozens of activists, journalists and bloggers.
Ahead of Thursday's planned march, authorities appeared to have taken a number of other steps to prevent participation. SMS mobile phone messaging was down Thursday for a third straight day — a step believed to be aimed at thwarting protesters' communications. A similar cutoff took place from the election until a week ago, amid the height of the protests.
The government also closed down universities and called a government holiday on Tuesday and Wednesday, citing a heavy dust and pollution cloud that has blanketed Tehran and other parts of the country this week. Many saw the move as aimed at keeping students away from campuses where protests could be organized. Thursday is a weekend day in Iran, and many people used the surprise long holiday to travel to other cities where weather was better.
Iranian authorities have depicted the post-election turmoil as instigated by enemy nations aiming to thwart Ahmadinejad's re-election, and officials say some of those detained confessed to fomenting the unrest. Opposition supporters say the confessions were forced under duress.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-07-09-iran-protests_N.htm

Parts of Britain "near an H1N1 epidemic"; 14 dead
LONDON (Reuters) - Fourteen Britons who had contracted H1N1 flu have died and the rapid spread of infection in two areas of the country is close to epidemic level, health officials said on Thursday.
The Department of Health said Britain now had 9,718 laboratory-confirmed cases, the third most in the world behind the United States and Mexico.
Britain's Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson said the actual number of cases was likely to be higher.
All 14 who have died had underlying health issues and it was not clear in how many cases the patients had died as a direct result of the virus, known as swine flu.
"In London and the West Midlands we are getting pretty close to epidemic levels. We've seen big surges there," Donaldson told
BBC TV.
"For the country as a whole, the average is about the level of the flu season but in some parts of the country the levels are getting pretty big."
The World Health Organization declared on June 11 that the outbreak of the virus was a pandemic and more than 94,500 cases have been reported worldwide.
Health Minister Andy Burnham said last week the government was projecting more than 100,000 new cases a day of the flu by the end of August.
While most people who have caught the infection have suffered mild symptoms, in a small minority it has proven more severe.
The Department of Health said that 335 people in Britain were currently in hospital after contracting the infection, with 43 of those described as critical.
Donaldson said there were no signs the virus was becoming more virulent, although he warned it could mutate.
"It does tend to affect people with underlying illnesses quite severely and a small number of healthy adults can get the severe complications of flu but the majority of them get a mild illness," he said. (Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Louise Ireland and Steve Addison)
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE5685ER20090709?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true

Akron police investigate teen mob attack on family
Akron police say they aren't ready to call it a hate crime or a gang initiation.
But to Marty Marshall, his wife and two kids, it seems pretty clear.
It came after a family night of celebrating America and freedom with a fireworks show at Firestone Stadium. Marshall, his family and two friends were gathered outside a friend's home in South Akron.
Out of nowhere, the six were attacked by dozens of teenage boys, who shouted ''This is our world'' and ''This is a black world'' as they confronted Marshall and his family.
The Marshalls, who are white, say the crowd of teens who attacked them and two friends June 27 on Girard Street numbered close to 50. The teens were all black.
''This was almost like being a terrorist act,'' Marshall said. ''And we allow this to go on in our neighborhoods?''
They said it started when one teen, without any words or warning, blindsided and assaulted Marshall's friend as he stood outside with the others.
When Marshall, 39, jumped in, he found himself being attacked by the growing group of teens.
His daughter, Rachel, 15, who weighs about 90 pounds, tried to come to his rescue. The teens pushed her to the ground.
His wife, Yvonne, pushed their son, Donald, 14, into bushes to keep him protected.
''My thing is,'' Marshall said, ''I didn't want this, but I was in fear for my wife, my kids and my friends. I felt I had to stay out there to protect them, because those guys were just jumping, swinging fists and everything.
''I'm lucky. They didn't break my ribs or bruise my ribs. I thank God, they concentrated on my thick head because I do have one. They were trying to take my head off my spine, basically.''
After several minutes of punches and kicks, the attack ended and the group ran off. The Marshalls' two adult male friends were not seriously hurt.
''I don't think I thought at that moment when I tried to jump in,'' Rachel Marshall said. ''But when I was laying on the ground, I was just scared.''
Marshall was the most seriously injured. He suffered a concussion and multiple bruises to his head and eye. He said he spent five nights in the critical care unit at Akron General Medical Center.
The construction worker said he now fears for his family's safety, and the thousands of dollars in medical bills he faces without insurance.
''I knew I was going to get beat, but not as bad as I did,'' Marshall said. ''But I did it to protect my family. I didn't have a choice. There was no need for this. We should be all getting along. But to me, it seems to be racist.''
Akron police are investigating. Right now, the case is not being classified as a racial hate crime. There were no other reports of victims assaulted by the group that night.
The department's gang unit is involved in the investigation, police said.
''We don't know if it's a known gang, or just a group of kids,'' police Lt. Rick Edwards said.
The Marshalls say they fear retaliation at home or when they go outside. They are considering arming themselves, but they're concerned about the possible problems that come with guns.
For now, they are hoping police can bring them suspects. They believe they can identify several of the attackers.
''This maks you think about your freedom,'' Marshall said. ''In all reality, where is your freedom when you have this going on?''
http://www.ohio.com/news/50172282.html

Eeyores news and view

The 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence proved freedom is not free
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 Rev. John C. Blackford Religion Columnist
This is the time of the year when Americans celebrate patriotic themes. Memorial Day and Flag Day are meaningful, but the Fourth of July is accompanied by the most fanfare. Bands, parades and speeches remind us of our cherished gift of freedom.
Forest Lake has one of the largest Independence Day celebrations in Minnesota and it happens this week, July 1-4.
It all began on July 4, 1776 in the city of Philadelphia when a small group of men, suffering under the restraints of a European power 3000 miles away, and acting as the Second Continental Congress, declared their 13 colonies to be free and independent of Great Britain.
Knowing their proclamation would bring difficulties, they committed themselves and their constituents to what they believed was their “unalienable right” — freedom from tyranny.
The Revolutionary War resulted from their declaration. It was a time of tremendous hardship for the new nation, but it ushered in a new era for the world. What is sometimes overlooked, as we consider both the results and the sufferings of our founders, is the price that was paid by the signers.
Nearly all the 56 men of the Congress could be described as professional politicians, and 24 were lawyers. Yet, by affixing their signatures to Thomas Jefferson’s historical document, they risked everything.
Five were later captured by the British and died after being tortured. Nine were wounded in various confrontations with the enemy, and 12 had their homes set on fire.
The British failed to capture Francis Lewis, who represented New York. But after burning his Long Island estate, they took his wife and threw her aboard a prison ship, where she died a few months later.
Lewis never recovered from his grief.
Others who found their homes destroyed for signing were Lewis Morris, Arthur Middleton and Richard Stockton. Thomas Nelson, Virginia’s governor during the siege of Yorktown, implored General George Washington to blow up his mansion when he learned that British General Lord Cornwallis had made it his headquarters. Washington complied, but in doing so, destroyed Nelson’s main financial asset.
Virginia merchant Carter Braxton owned a fleet of trading vessels when he signed. The Royal Navy tracked down and sank those ships.
North Carolina’s Joseph Hewes also lost his merchant fleet in that he donated it to become the core for the new Continental Navy. He died at the age of 50 in 1779.
Made wealthy through his import business, Robert Morris was placed in charge of the new nation’s finances, which were in sad shape. To feed and equip Washington’s troops for the crossing of the Delaware River — the psychological turning point of the war — Morris used $10,000 of his own money, thus placing his personal fortune at the country’s disposal. He later died in poverty.
A year after signing, William Whipple of New Hampshire fought alongside Ethan Allen, Benedict Arnold and Horatio Gates at Saratoga. The American victory there brought France into the conflict.
Connecticut’s Oliver Wolcott and South Carolina’s Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward and Edward Rutledge all saw combat, and the latter three were captured and tortured.
George Walton of Georgia was taken captive in battle, but received his release in a prisoner exchange in 1779. Fellow Georgian Button Gwinnett led a failed invasion of British Florida after returning from Philadelphia. Shortly afterward he was shot in a duel by political opponent Lachlan McIntosh.
New Jersey’s Richard Stockton was captured in November 1776, and spent years in prison. After his release he died a pauper in Princeton.
The same month that Stockton was captured, British troops devastated the campus of the College of New Jersey. Signer John Witherspoon spent the remainder of the war rebuilding the college before he went blind in 1792.
Thomas Lynch of South Carolina and his wife were lost at sea when their ship disappeared during a voyage to the West Indies.
Constant British pursuit prevented Delaware’s Caesar Rodney from getting medical treatment for a cancerous growth on his face. It claimed his life in 1784.
Thomas Jefferson went on to be elected governor of Virginia, but had to resign and go into hiding because the British hunted him relentlessly.
In the past 233 years since these 56 brave men risked all in the cause of freedom, many others have sacrificed to maintain and extend this wonderful gift. Their faith in freedom as a right granted by the providence of the Almighty to all peoples has been the great heritage of our country.
There are still enemies of this precious bestowal, and the threats may be more subtle today.
Americans need to be on the alert to guard against them, and to strengthen the things which will make us faithful to the cause of freedom.
http://forestlaketimes.com/content/view/3182/1/

Federal agents hunt for guns, one house at a time
In front of a run-down shack in north Houston, federal agents step from a government sedan into 102-degree heat and face a critical question: How can the woman living here buy four high-end handguns in one day?
The house is worth $35,000. A screen dangles by a wall-unit air conditioner. Porch swing slats are smashed, the smattering of grass is flattened by cars and burned yellow by sun.
“I’ll do the talking on this one,” agent Tim Sloan, of South Carolina, told partner Brian Tumiel, of New York.
Success on the front lines of a government blitz on gunrunners supplying Mexican drug cartels with Houston weaponry hinges on logging heavy miles and knocking on countless doors. Dozens of agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — sent here from around the country — are needed to follow what ATF acting director Kenneth Melson described as a “massive number of investigative leads.”
All told, Mexican officials in 2008 asked federal agents to trace the origins of more than 7,500 firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico. Most of them were traced back to Texas, California and Arizona.
Among other things, the agents are combing neighborhoods and asking people about suspicious purchases as well as seeking explanations as to how their guns ended up used in murders, kidnappings and other crimes in Mexico.
“Ever turning up the heat on cartels, our law enforcement and military partners in the government of Mexico have been working more closely with the ATF by sharing information and intelligence,” Melson said Tuesday during a firearms-trafficking summit in New Mexico.
Firearms dealers visited
The ATF recently dispatched 100 veteran agents to its Houston division, which reaches to the border.
The mission is especially challenging because, officials say, that while Houston is the number one point of origin for weapons traced back to the United States from Mexico, the government can’t compile databases on gun owners under federal law.
Agents instead review firearms dealers’ records in person.
People who are legally in the United States and have clean criminal records, but are facing economic problems are often recruited by traffickers to buy weapons on their behalf in order to shield themselves from scrutiny.
Knocks at the door of the shack that looked to be the definition of hard times went unanswered.
“I am out of here,” Sloan said a few moments later, as a pit bull lazily sauntered from the back yard. “I don’t like pit bulls walking up behind me.”
Test information source
On second thought, Sloan switched to Spanish and interviewed a neighbor.
The neighbor said the woman left a month ago after a fight with her husband or boyfriend, who still lived there with what she called “other degenerates.”
“An angry ex-girlfriend or wife is the best person in the world, the greatest source of information,” Sloan said.
The night before, the duo were in a stakeout where they watched a weapons sale.
They also combined efforts with the Drug Enforcement Administration for an aircraft to stealthily follow traffickers to the border.
On this day, agents weren’t wearing raid jackets or combat boots and weren’t armed with warrants.
Guns were hidden under civilian shirts.
Another tip took agents on a 30-minute drive from the shack to a sprawling home with a pool in the back and an American flag out front.
It turned out two handguns, of a type drug gangsters prefer, were bought by a pastor for target practice.
Some stories, they say, are hard to believe.
The lamest so far came from a police officer: He said he bought a few military-style rifles, left them in his car and — on the same night — forgot to lock a door. He couldn’t explain why he didn’t file a police report or why he visited Mexico the day after the alleged theft.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6505651.html

Should linking be illegal?
In a misguided attempt to aid newspapers, one of America's most influential judges is suggesting a new copyright law
Those who wish to keep the internet free and open had best dust off their legal arguments. One of America's most influential conservative judges, Richard Posner, has proposed a ban on linking to online content without permission. The idea, he said in a blog post last week, is to prevent aggregators and bloggers from linking to newspaper websites without paying:
Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.
Posner's notion set off an eruption from the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Matt Welch and Erick Schonfeld, among others. And they are right to be furious. Not only would Posner stop online media dead in their tracks, but he would also overturn long-established rules of fair use, which, among others things, allow for the reproduction of short excerpts of copyrighted material for the purposes of commentary, parody and the like – precisely what bloggers and aggregators do all the time.
And Posner, who sits on the seventh circuit court of appeals in Chicago, has a way of getting his way. A brilliant, provocative thinker and a frighteningly prolific writer, he was described in a 2001 New Yorker profile as "the most mercilessly seditious legal theorist of his generation". And if, at 70, Posner and his generation are not quite so influential as they once were, he is still a formidable presence on the legal scene.
In something of an irony for journalists who might be inclined to cheer Posner's latest, it was a 2003 opinion he wrote that helped cement journalists' modern status as cultural and social pariahs. Posner's decision in the case of McKevitt v Pallasch did more than any other to vanquish the idea that journalists called into court had some protection under the first amendment from having to reveal their confidential sources.
For a generation, journalists and their lawyers had relied upon the hazy wording of a 1972 supreme court case called Branzburg v Hayes, in which a bare majority ruled there was no reporter's privilege. One of the majority, Lewis Powell, wrote what his fellow justice Potter Stewart called "an enigmatic concurring opinion" suggesting that maybe, in some cases, there was a privilege. As retired New York Times lawyer James Goodale explained in the Frontline documentary News Wars several years ago, media lawyers used Powell's opinion to keep the reporter's privilege on life support for more than 30 years until Posner, finally, pulled the plug.
As an appeals court judge, Posner could not, of course, overrule the supreme court. In McKevitt, though, he didn't have to: he wrote that he had reread Branzburg and had come to the conclusion that, lo and behold, it meant what it said. No more reporter's privilege, although the states were free to create their own through shield laws and state court precedents. (All except Wyoming have done so, many of them long before McKevitt. And Congress may create a federal shield law later this year.)
Posner's opinion on copyright – expressed, thankfully, in a blog post rather than a ruling from the bench – has its roots in a celebrated essay he wrote for the New York Times Book Review in 2005 called Bad News. Although Posner was complimentary toward bloggers, and even asserted that their swarm-like verification system was superior in some ways to that of the traditional media, he nevertheless offered a few withering observations about where they get their material.
"The bloggers are parasitical on the conventional media," Posner wrote. "They copy the news and opinion generated by the conventional media, often at considerable expense, without picking up any of the tab. The degree of parasitism is striking in the case of those blogs that provide their readers with links to newspaper articles. The links enable the audience to read the articles without buying the newspaper."
Posner comes across as willfully blind to the ways in which bloggers and aggregators actually drive traffic to news sites, resulting in more readers seeing their content and, thus, their advertising. Yes, there are ways not to do it – the Boston Globe's wholesale, automated aggregation of a competitor's local content in a case settled out of court earlier this year comes to mind. But normal linking practices benefit everyone. The news business may be cratering, but it's not the fault of those who link to newspaper content.
Fortunately, Posner this time can't transform his desires into a judicial decree – his proposal would have to enacted in the form of an amendment to the copyright law. Unfortunately, such an idea is already making the rounds. Not to go all Kevin Bacon here, but Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz, who supports it, is married to Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, which led Jeff Jarvis to demand that Schultz register as a federal lobbyist.
The thing is, Congress has been known to act with great alacrity on copyright matters when they affect corporate interests. And newspaper owners have been remarkably successful in calling attention to their plight.
But though tax breaks, special non-profit status and other federal goodies will likely go nowhere, a law aimed squarely at the linking practices of sites such as Google News and the Huffington Post would probably prove popular, the facts be damned.
It's ominous that those would push for such a law now have an ally as brilliant and influential as Posner. Keep a close eye on this one.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/01/richard-posner-copyright-linking-newspapers

Ham radio operators not yielding to future By Hilary Kraus Staff writer
Chuck Ward likes to dial his technology down a notch.
He's a ham radio guy
And this is the time of year when Ward is in hog heaven as he and the Cape Fear Amateur Radio Society compete in national Field Day
The 61-year-old Morse code expert was among the 25 radio operators who gathered at Methodist University on Saturday and Sunday for the 24-hour event.
"Cell phones, the Internet, computers are OK. It's that time of change in the world." Ward said Sunday.
"This is just an old skill I want to keep alive."
The object of the competition was to communicate with as many other ham radio operators throughout the U.S., trading signals reports and location information.
Conversations were kept brief, be it through pecking out Morse codes or talking.
"It's like any other hobby," said Ward, past president of the local club, "This hobby is technical and very challenging."
To get things up and running, the club erected 40- and 30-foot antennas outside Reeves Auditorium.
Members set up mobile stations under tents to keep out of the heat. They operated off generators, batteries and solar energy.
Ward, who got a few hours of shut- eye in the back of his truck, said his group made more than 720 contacts. The only state missing was Vermont.
The Cape Fear Amateur Radio Society has about 95 members. Many are retired military.
"It's tough to get young people involved," said Leon Porter, a 43-year-old voice operator. "Their thinking is, why do I need to sit in front of a radio to talk to someone on the other side of the world when you have a cell phone to do that?"
Young Ethan LaMaster takes advantage of today's conveniences but also looks at things differently than his peers.
The 18-year-old got his ham radio license when he was 10.
LaMaster, a recent graduate of East Bladen High School, said he picked up the hobby because it's fun. Now, he likes the idea of being ready if disaster strikes.
"A car battery, a generator, any source of power and we can communicate," LaMaster said.
Ward started teaching Morse code in 1968 and introduced LaMaster to amateur radio operating.
"Morse code is my second language," Ward said.
His wife, he said, is not a fan.
"I had ham radio before I met her. That was one of the conditions," Ward said.
"She doesn't share the same enthusiasm."
http://www.fayobserver.com/Articles/2009/06/29/913233

Extra addition, a couple of articles on the economy and the flu that should not be over looked.

MOUNTAIN OF DEBT: Rising debt may be next crisis
July 3, 2009 - 3:38pm By TOM RAUM Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Founding Fathers left one legacy not celebrated on Independence Day but which affects us all. It's the national debt.
The country first got into debt to help pay for the Revolutionary War. Growing ever since, the debt stands today at a staggering $11.5 trillion _ equivalent to over $37,000 for each and every American. And it's expanding by over $1 trillion a year.
The mountain of debt easily could become the next full-fledged economic crisis without firm action from Washington, economists of all stripes warn.
"Unless we demonstrate a strong commitment to fiscal sustainability in the longer term, we will have neither financial stability nor healthy economic growth," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently told Congress.
Higher taxes, or reduced federal benefits and services _ or a combination of both _ may be the inevitable consequences.
The debt is complicating efforts by President Barack Obama and Congress to cope with the worst recession in decades as stimulus and bailout spending combine with lower tax revenues to widen the gap.
Interest payments on the debt alone cost $452 billion last year _ the largest federal spending category after Medicare-Medicaid, Social Security and defense. It's quickly crowding out all other government spending. And the Treasury is finding it harder to find new lenders.
The United States went into the red the first time in 1790 when it assumed $75 million in the war debts of the Continental Congress.
Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, said, "A national debt, if not excessive, will be to us a national blessing."
Some blessing.
Since then, the nation has only been free of debt once, in 1834-1835.
The national debt has expanded during times of war and usually contracted in times of peace, while staying on a generally upward trajectory. Over the past several decades, it has climbed sharply _ except for a respite from 1998 to 2000, when there were annual budget surpluses, reflecting in large part what turned out to be an overheated economy.
The debt soared with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and economic stimulus spending under President George W. Bush and now Obama.
The odometer-style "debt clock" near Times Square _ put in place in 1989 when the debt was a mere $2.7 trillion _ ran out of numbers and had to be shut down when the debt surged past $10 trillion in 2008.
The clock has since been refurbished so higher numbers fit. There are several debt clocks on Web sites maintained by public interest groups that let you watch hundreds, thousands, millions zip by in a matter of seconds.
The debt gap is "something that keeps me awake at night," Obama says.
He pledged to cut the budget "deficit" roughly in half by the end of his first term. But "deficit" just means the difference between government receipts and spending in a single budget year.
This year's deficit is now estimated at about $1.85 trillion.
Deficits don't reflect holdover indebtedness from previous years. Some spending items _ such as emergency appropriations bills and receipts in the Social Security program _ aren't included, either, although they are part of the national debt.
The national debt is a broader, and more telling, way to look at the government's balance sheets than glancing at deficits.
According to the Treasury Department, which updates the number "to the penny" every few days, the national debt was $11,518,472,742,288 on Wednesday.
The overall debt is now slightly over 80 percent of the annual output of the entire U.S. economy, as measured by the gross domestic product.
By historical standards, it's not proportionately as high as during World War II, when it briefly rose to 120 percent of GDP. But it's still a huge liability.
Also, the United States is not the only nation struggling under a huge national debt. Among major countries, Japan, Italy, India, France, Germany and Canada have comparable debts as percentages of their GDPs.
Where does the government borrow all this money from?
The debt is largely financed by the sale of Treasury bonds and bills. Even today, amid global economic turmoil, those still are seen as one of the world's safest investments.
That's one of the rare upsides of U.S. government borrowing.
Treasury securities are suitable for individual investors and popular with other countries, especially China, Japan and the Persian Gulf oil exporters, the three top foreign holders of U.S. debt.
But as the U.S. spends trillions to stabilize the recession-wracked economy, helping to force down the value of the dollar, the securities become less attractive as investments. Some major foreign lenders are already paring back on their purchases of U.S. bonds and other securities.
And if major holders of U.S. debt were to flee, it would send shock waves through the global economy _ and sharply force up U.S. interest rates.
As time goes by, demographics suggest things will get worse before they get better, even after the recession ends, as more baby boomers retire and begin collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits.
While the president remains personally popular, polls show there is rising public concern over his handling of the economy and the government's mushrooming debt _ and what it might mean for future generations.
If things can't be turned around, including establishing a more efficient health care system, "We are on an utterly unsustainable fiscal course," said the White House budget director, Peter Orszag.
Some budget-restraint activists claim even the debt understates the nation's true liabilities.
The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, established by a former commerce secretary and investment banker, argues that the $11.4 trillion debt figures does not take into account roughly $45 trillion in unlisted liabilities and unfunded retirement and health care commitments.
That would put the nation's full obligations at $56 trillion, or roughly $184,000 per American, according to this calculation.
__
On the Net:
Treasury Department "to the penny" national debt breakdown: http://tinyurl.com/yrxrsh
Peter G. Peterson Foundation independent assessment of the national debt: http://www.pgpf.org/
"Deficits do Matter" debt clock: http://tinyurl.com/l6mvjb

Hong Kong finds 1st case of Tamiflu-resistant H1N1
HONG KONG, July 3 (Reuters) - Hong Kong's health department said on Friday it had detected a case of human swine influenza virus that was resistant to Tamiflu, the main antiviral flu drug.
The World Health Organisation has declared a pandemic is under way from the new H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu.
"This is the first time Tamiflu resistance in HSI virus (was) found in Hong Kong," a spokesman for the health department said in a statement.
Only two other cases of Tamiflu-resistant H1N1 have been found so far, in Denmark and Japan.
According to the statement, the virus was isolated from a specimen taken from a 16-year-old girl coming from San Francisco, who was taken in by the Port Health Office at the Hong Kong International Airport upon arrival on June 11.
The virus was identified during the health department's routine sensitivity test of HSI virus to oseltamivir and zanamivir, the spokesman said.
Tamiflu, a tablet known generically as oseltamivir, is made by Switzerland's Roche AG and Gilead Sciences (GILD.O), while Relenza, an inhaled drug known generically as zanamivir, is made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK.L) under licence from Australia's Biota Inc (BTA.AX).
The department said that tests showed that the strain was sensitive to zanamivir.
Resistance to Tamiflu has been previously documented in the deadly bird flu virus H5N1 and seasonal H1N1 flu.
"You can always expect a certain number of resistances," said Roche spokeswoman Claudia Schmitt. "It does not necessarily mean that the strain is resistant to Tamiflu."
http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssHealthcareNews/idUSHKG30741920090703

Eeyores news and view

Plan to protect D.C. from nuke EMP attack
Defense initiative focuses on saving government
Posted: June 25, 2009 12:00 am Eastern © 2009 WorldNetDaily
Editor's Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.
Air Force One
WASHINGTON – As North Korea threatens a missile launch on Hawaii and Iran continues to develop its own nuclear war capabilities, President Obama has greenlighted a plan to save the federal government from the devastating capabilities of a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse attack on the U.S, according to a report in Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.
As WND has reported, a high-altitude nuclear EMP attack potentially could disrupt or damage electronic systems over much of the U.S., William Graham, chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, told a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee in July 2008.
The commission concluded Iran is not only covertly developing nuclear weapons. Since 2005 Tehran has been testing ballistic missiles designed to destroy America's technical infrastructure, effectively neutralizing the world's lone superpower.
Detonated at a height of 60 to 500 kilometers above the continental U.S., one nuclear warhead could cripple the country – knocking out electrical power and circuit boards and rendering the U.S. domestic communications impotent.
Keep in touch with the most important breaking news stories about critical developments around the globe with Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the premium, online intelligence news source edited and published by the founder of WND.
In 2005, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security chaired by Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., held a hearing on the EMP threat.
"An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack on the American homeland, said one of the distinguished scientists who testified at the hearing, is one of only a few ways that the United States could be defeated by its enemies – terrorist or otherwise," wrote Kyl. "And it is probably the easiest. A single Scud missile, carrying a single nuclear weapon, detonated at the appropriate altitude, would interact with the Earth's atmosphere, producing an electromagnetic pulse radiating down to the surface at the speed of light. Depending on the location and size of the blast, the effect would be to knock out already stressed power grids and other electrical systems across much or even all of the continental United States, for months if not years."
While few preparations have been made since 2005 to protect the American heartland, the Defense Information Systems Agency plans to install a presidential network in the Washington area this year that will be able to survive an attack by a nuclear weapon that generates a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse.
The agency started work on the network last year to install communications equipment resistant to damage by an EMP attack. The network was developed at the direction of the "National Security Presidential Directive on Survivable Senior Leadership Communications in a HEMP Environment." It features Promina network switches from Network Equipment Technologies Inc. and manage communications over a specially designed and deployed Voice over Internet Protocol network.
DISA developed the HEMP system, which includes upgrades to a UHF network serving senior leadership in the Washington area, as part of a National Emergency Action Decision Network to serve the president, secretary of defense and other senior leaders. John Garing, DISA chief information officer and director of strategic planning, said the network supports radio systems on helicopters and feeds into the HEMP network. Funding for all systems in the National Emergency Action Decision Network is pegged at less than $1 million.
The systems will be installed in ground installations and executive aircraft, including Air Force One, four VIP Boeing 757s and two VIP Boeing 737 aircraft.
DISA also asked for $49.5 million in its fiscal 2010 budget for the Crisis Management System, a "high-performance, closed network that provides classified multimedia teleconferencing for the president, Cabinet secretaries, designated agency directors and their staffs," budget documents noted.
http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=102023

Well almost Judicial Restraint, i guess as close as we will come too it.
Court says strip search violated girl's rights
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court's decision Thursday striking down the strip search of an eighth-grade girl for prescription-strength ibuprofen requires schools nationwide to weigh more carefully how intrusively they search for drugs.
By an 8-1 vote, the justices ruled that school officials in a rural Arizona district violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Savana Redding when they forced her to take off her clothes after an unverified tip that she had the pain relief pills. The court emphasized the difference between a routine search of a backpack and a search that exposes a student's private parts. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.
The decision, which differs from signals the justices sent during oral arguments in April, also departs from a recent trend giving administrators wide latitude to search for drugs in schools.
Writing for the court, Justice David Souter said an official must have a "reasonable suspicion of danger" regarding the drugs sought and a belief they could be hidden in a student's underwear before making "the quantum leap from outer clothes and backpacks to exposure of intimate parts."
Matthew Wright, lawyer for the Safford school district, predicted the decision would have a "chilling effect" on administrators responding to threats of drugs. Francisco Negron, lawyer for the National School Boards Association, said the decision could be confusing for school officials, who typically lack formal training in drugs yet would have to consider whether the contraband they seek is dangerous enough to do to a strip search.
Savana Redding, who was 13 at the time of the search and is now 19, said, "I'm so glad that they recognized that my rights were violated. I don't want this to happen to anyone else." Her lawyer, Adam Wolf, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the case, added, "Today's ruling affirms that schools are not constitutional dead zones."
In October 2003, after Assistant Principal Kerry Wilson heard from a student that Redding might have ibuprofen, he asked a school nurse and administration assistant, both women, to search Savana in the nurse's office. They asked her to take off her shirt and pants, then to pull out her bra and underpants to see whether she was hiding any pills.
No pills were found. Savana's mother, April Redding, sued, saying school officials breached Savana's rights under the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches. A lower U.S. appeals court ruled for Redding and said Safford officials were financially responsible for harm to her.
In affirming that her rights were violated, Souter said a strip search requires officials to have an "indication of danger (and) reason to suppose that Savana was carrying pills in her underwear."
Souter was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito. Dissenting Justice Thomas said the decision allows judges "to second-guess" officials trying to ensure student safety.
By a separate vote of 7-2, the court said that because rulings in this area of the law have not been clear, Safford officials are shielded from financial responsibility for their actions. Stevens and Ginsburg dissented from that part of the ruling in Safford Unified School District No. 1 v. Redding.
During oral arguments April 21, many justices voiced more sympathy for school administrators than for Redding. Several, including Souter and Roberts, appeared open to arguments that administrators need considerable leeway to look for drug abuse. Ginsburg was most forceful on the other side. In a concurring opinion Thursday, Ginsburg emphasized the humiliation Savana endured, including being forced to sit on a chair outside Wilson's office even after the search found no pills.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/judicial/2009-06-25-scotus-strip-search_N.htm

US swine flu cases may have hit 1 million June 26, 2009 - 12:53am AP Medical Writer
ATLANTA (AP) - Swine flu has infected as many as 1 million Americans, U.S. health officials said Thursday, adding that 6 percent or more of some urban populations are infected. The estimate voiced by a government flu scientist Thursday was no surprise to the experts who have been closely watching the virus.
"We knew diagnosed cases were just the tip of the iceberg," said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious diseases expert who was in Atlanta for the meeting of a vaccine advisory panel.
Lyn Finelli, a flu surveillance official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made the 1 million estimate in a presentation to the vaccine panel. The number is from mathematical modeling, based on surveys by health officials.
Regular seasonal flu sickens anywhere from 15 million to 60 million Americans each year.
The United States has roughly half the world's swine flu cases, with nearly 28,000 reported to the CDC so far. The U.S. count includes 3,065 hospitalizations and 127 deaths.
The percentage of cases hospitalized has been growing, but that may be due to closer scrutiny of very sick patients. It takes about three days from the time symptoms appear to hospitalization, Finelli said, and the average hospital stay has been three days.
Other health problems have been a factor in most cases: About one in three of the hospitalized cases had asthma, 16 percent diabetes, 12 percent have immune system problems and 11 percent chronic heart disease.
The numbers again highlight how the young seem to be particularly at risk of catching the new virus. But data also show that the flu has been more dangerous to adults who catch it.
The average age of swine flu patients is 12, the average age for hospitalized patients is 20, and for people who died, it was 37. It seems to be deadliest to people 65 and older, with deaths in more than 2 percent of elderly people infected, Finelli said.
Also at the meeting, CDC officials made projections about flu vaccines expected to be available to protect against both seasonal and swine flu this fall.
More than 25 million doses of seasonal flu vaccine should be available by early September, CDC officials and vaccine manufacturers said.
The same five manufacturers that make the seasonal vaccine are producing swine flu vaccine as well. As many as 60 million doses of vaccine to protect against the new virus could be ready by September, said Robin Robinson, an official with the federal agency that oversees vaccine manufacture and distribution. That prediction seemed a bit optimistic, others at the meeting said.
The vaccinations might be given as two shots, spaced 21 days apart. But the vaccine has to be tested before it's made available to the public.
http://wtop.com/?nid=106&sid=1661303

H1N1 / 6,000 Deaths / The Pandemic is Here
Those who dismiss H1N1 as a panic-fest are profoundly wrong - even the mild version in a country like Canada could kill thousands. And the nightmare scenario? That would be really scary
So it's here at last. After months of will-it-won't-it anticipation, H1N1 officially went pandemic on June 11.
Yet despite increasing numbers of cases in over 70 countries, many still think it a fuss over nothing: "What's the big deal? It's just ordinary flu." It is worrying that even Canadians are saying this, although they know from recent memory what it is to experience a big disease outbreak.
Many in Britain are saying the same thing. One high-profile commentator, Simon Jenkins in the Guardian newspaper, asserted that swine flu was a panic stoked in order "to posture and spend," saying that health scares such as this enable media-hungry doctors, public-health officials and drug companies to benefit by manipulating fright.
Those who dismiss H1N1 as a panic-fest are profoundly wrong. This "ordinary flu" might have real consequences to many Canadians.
Canada has an excellent flu vaccination program and good access to medical care. Nonetheless, 6,000 to 8,000 Canadians die of seasonal flu each year, mostly older people or those with other health problems. These are people's mothers and grandfathers, uncles and fathers. Ordinary flu causes a great many deaths, even in a country such as Canada.
Let's say that H1N1 continues to be mild and is no worse than seasonal flu. "Mild" means having up to five days feeling really unwell with fever, cough, sore throat and muscle aches, and then a further week before one feels able to return to work and normal life.
The old story about the difference between flu and a cold holds good: If a $50 bill is dropped outside your front door, if you've got a cold, you'll go pick it up; if you've got flu, not even $50 will get you out of bed.
This is a novel flu. While people over 50 seem to have some immunity, perhaps because of the Asian flu of 1957, those who are younger have not been exposed before and have no defences in place. Current H1N1 attack rates are about 20 per cent. That is, one in five people exposed to this new flu will come down with symptoms like the ones above; exposure can result from merely touching a surface where there are viruses, because someone else has touched it. Pretty much everyone who comes into contact with other people will be exposed to this flu, sooner or later.
4-PER-CENT IMPACT ON GDP
That means 20 per cent of the population becoming sick, with perhaps another 10 per cent of the working population home looking after them. Think about the effects on business, on transport, on day-to-day life, of so many people being off sick at the same time. Flu is estimated to have a 4-per-cent impact on a country's GDP.
And think about its effect on hospitals. Not on its effect on patients requiring intensive care, but its effect on staffing. A tanker drivers' strike in Britain bought our hospitals to a halt in less than a week. Why? Because schools didn't have fuel for heating and were closed, working mothers had to stay home to look after their children. Where are there are large proportion of working mothers? In nursing and allied health services.
There are 33 million people in Canada. At an attack rate of 20 per cent, six million people would develop flu. The death rate in Canada is currently tiny, at roughly 0.1 per cent (12 deaths, 4,905 cases). But 0.1 per cent of six million is 6,000. These 6,000 will not be just the old and the sick, whose deaths, extraordinarily, don't seem to greatly concern many commentators, but will include previously healthy twentysomethings (such as three of those admitted to intensive care units in Britain), pregnant women and a disproportionate number of those sections of the population that are genetically particularly susceptible. Such effects are already appearing in Canada with outbreaks of severe illness among previously healthy native people in Manitoba.
This is not scaremongering. This is reality.
Many people expect that all medical staff will turn up for work during a flu pandemic. Toronto's experience of SARS in 2003 shows that they won't, and cannot be made to do so. Many of them won't be able to, because they are looking after family at home, and some will fear catching flu and its effects. Normal hospital schedules will grind to a halt, meaning that far fewer elective procedures such as hip replacements and heart surgery can take place. It will inevitably cause deaths that should have been preventable. This is without the strain on services from many more people requiring respiratory support because of flu.
So why couldn't the hospital authorities make flu vaccines mandatory for health-care staff when they become available? Britain does not make this mandatory, and only 13 per cent of National Health Service Staff front-line staff voluntarily had seasonal flu vaccination in 2008-2009. Why? It's principally because staff think of flu as "ordinary," not something that causes severe illness. Recently, unvaccinated NHS staff were shown by Britain's Health Protection Agency to have been the cause of a major outbreak of flu among patients who were already critically ill in a hospital in Liverpool.
When people look upon the threat to themselves as "mild," they will not consider vaccination, which they feel has greater risks than the illness.
Playing in the background are current attitudes to vaccines, coloured by the long-running contention that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism, but also by the experience of swine flu in the United States in 1976.
THE FORT DIX PRECEDENT
In January, 1976, scores of army recruits at Fort Dix, N.J., complained of flu symptoms - not unusual at that time of year. But 18-year old Private David Lewis, with the bravado of youth, decided to ignore medical advice to go to bed; he went out on a strenuous all-night exercise in the bitter cold. At the end of the exercise, he collapsed. He died a few hours later. An autopsy revealed that his death was caused by a previously unknown variant of swine flu A/H1N1. But what really spooked the Centers for Disease Control was its similarity to the strain that had killed more than 40 million people across the world in 1918.
The CDC rightly decided to develop a swine-flu vaccine for use in the following flu season. But there were many production problems. It was on the point of being cancelled, when there was an outbreak of fatal pneumonia after the Pennsylvania convention of the American Legion. The media linked it with swine flu (although today it is known to have been what is called legionnaires' disease), and politicians joined in the clamour to push forward the swine-flu vaccination program.
The threat from swine flu was vastly exaggerated in the media, although it was already clear that the outbreak (which involved no more than 300 people) was over. President Gerald Ford took personal charge of a mass vaccination program, and it had deadly consequences.
With all manufacturing capacity devoted to swine flu, seasonal flu production stopped. That year, there was a particularly virulent strain of seasonal flu, and there were thousands more regular flu deaths than normal, largely in unvaccinated seniors. There was also the problem of vaccine side effects.
SIDE EFFECTS BECOME NUMEROUS
When millions of people are vaccinated, very rare side effects become numerous. About nine in every million of those vaccinated then developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a paralytic disease. There were 500 cases and 25 deaths.
The batches may have been contaminated with a bacterium. In any case, the vaccination program was stopped, having only treated 24 per cent of the population.
This is not then. There are already thousands of cases, and vaccine technology is better than it was. But no vaccine is absolutely safe. There will be very rare side effects with new H1N1 vaccines too, and most have not yet been tested on children, who are one of the groups that are most likely to be vaccinated as a priority, because they seem to be especially affected. But people can only ever see risk from their own perspective.
It seems probable that, despite knowing that 6,000 or more Canadians might be prevented from dying and tens of thousands more prevented from having serious illness, people will concentrate on their own individual risks, with many choosing to remain unvaccinated. This places individuals at risk but also friends, family and loved ones and those who are unable to be vaccinated for one reason or another.
All this comes from a mild illness that many people think is not a risk and claim to be overhyped. Everyone should think again about the seriousness of pandemic flu.
Let us hope that the nightmare scenario of a new virus with the virulence of H5N1 (bird flu) and the transmissibility if H1N1 does not come to pass. That really would be scary.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/h1n1-6000-deaths-the-pandemic-is-here/article1190655/

Dollar Falls on China Call for World Currency; Stocks Pare Gain
June 26 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar weakened and stocks pared their advance after China’s central bank reiterated a call for a “super sovereign currency” and said the country’s financial institutions face a tougher environment this year.
The Dollar Index that measures the currency’s performance against six trading partners fell as much as 0.8 percent at 1:01 p.m. in London after China’s central bank also said the International Monetary Fund should manage part of members’ foreign reserves. The Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index of European shares added 0.3 percent, trimming an advance of as much as 1.3 percent. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index futures fell 0.2 percent.
China, the biggest foreign owner of U.S. Treasuries, cut its holdings of government notes and bonds by $4.4 billion to $763.5 billion in April, according to data released on June 15 in Washington. People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan in March urged the IMF to expand the functions of its unit of account and move toward an international reserve currency to reduce dependence on the dollar.
“In the longer term there will be diversification among global central banks,” said Beat Siegenthaler, chief emerging markets strategist at TD Securities Ltd. in London. “These comments tend to remind traders of that, but there’s still a question about the time horizon.”
The Dollar Index fell below 80 as the People’s Bank of China said that the IMF relies on too few foreign currencies. The central bank was commenting in an assessment of the country’s financial situation at the end of 2008 posted on its Web site today.
Special Drawing Rights
Group of 20 leaders on April 2 gave approval for the IMF to raise $250 billion by issuing Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, the artificial currency that the agency uses to settle accounts among its member nations. It also agreed to put another $500 billion into the IMF’s war chest.
"There’s a very strong case to be made for reducing the reliance on the dollar,” said Steven Barrow, a currency strategist with Standard Bank Plc in London. “But the market is making a mountain out of a mole hill. Among the BRIC countries, China seems the least positive about the idea. If they talk down the dollar they’re talking down a vast bulk of their assets.”
The asset quality and profitability of China’s financial institutions face challenges and the correction in the country’s property market may raise banks’ credit risks, the central bank also said today.
The yen also headed for a weekly loss against the euro. Japan’s benchmark interest rate is 0.1 percent and the U.S.’s is between zero and 0.25 percent, compared with 1 percent in the euro region and Norway’s 1.25 percent.
OECD Forecast
Today’s gains in European stocks trimmed the Stoxx 600’s second-straight weekly drop to 1.5 percent after a three-month, 36 percent rally drove price-earnings valuations to the highest level in five years. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development boosted its forecast for the economy of its 30 member nations for the first time in two years this week, while a U.S. government report today may show consumer spending rose in May for the first time in three months.
“Risk appetite is coming back,” Peter Redward, the head of Asian emerging-markets research at Barclays Plc in Singapore, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We’re now seeing the effects of fiscal and monetary stimulus beginning to kick in and those themes are going to continue.”
Stocks gained in Asia and Europe after Bridgestone Corp., the world’s largest tiremaker, narrowed its loss forecast. Bridgestone gained 8.5 percent in Tokyo.
Emerging Markets
The MSCI Emerging Markets Index rose 1.8 percent. While the 22-country benchmark has dropped 1.2 percent this month, it’s headed for the best quarterly gain on record, up 34 percent since March.
OAO Lukoil, Russia’s second-biggest oil producer, advanced 1.6 percent as crude gained, while OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, the country’s biggest mining company, added 6.7 percent as copper climbed 1.8 percent this week to $5,119 a metric ton on the London Metal Exchange. The Micex is recovering from a retreat this month that sent it down more than 20 percent from its June 1 peak, the world’s first benchmark equity index to enter a bear market since global stocks began rallying in March.
Crude oil for August delivery rose as much as 1.5 percent to $71.29 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange after Nigerian militants said they attacked a Royal Dutch Shell Plc offshore oil field late yesterday, hours after an offer of an amnesty by President Umaru Yar’Adua.
New Zealand’s dollar weakened 0.3 percent versus the U.S. dollar after the nation’s statistics bureau said gross domestic product declined 1 percent in the first quarter. The median of 11 estimates in a Bloomberg News survey was for a 0.7 percent contraction.
U.S. Consumer Spending
A report at 8:30 a.m. in Washington will show consumer purchases in the U.S. increased 0.3 percent after falling 0.1 percent in April, according to the median forecast of 76 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
A U.S. report yesterday showed gross domestic product shrank last quarter at a 5.5 percent pace, slower than the 5.7 percent decrease previously estimated by the government.
Futures on the S&P 500 slid 0.3 percent today after the GDP report helped send the gauge up 2.1 percent yesterday.
Stocks and credit markets have rebounded since the U.S. government and Federal Reserve pledged $12.8 trillion to combat the first global recession in five decades and almost $1.5 trillion in losses and writedowns at financial firms from the collapse of subprime mortgages.
The cost of borrowing in dollars for three months in London fell below 0.6 percent for the first time today, according to the British Bankers’ Association. The London interbank offered rate, or Libor, that banks charge for three-month loans fell less than half a basis point to 0.598 percent.
Libor-OIS
The Libor-OIS spread, which measures banks’ reluctance to lend, has narrowed to 38 basis points, from a record 364 basis points in October, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Analysts covering S&P 500 companies began to boost 2009 profit estimates for the first time this year in May as economists predicted the U.S. economy will start to expand next quarter, weekly data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Global market liquidity is at its strongest level since November, according to an index updated today by the Bank of England. The index, which measures market prices, including gaps between bid and offer prices, the ratio of returns to trading volumes, and spreads in the credit market, reached a low in April.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aLpv3.MFL1Oc

Eeyore's News and View

Annual report due for Social Security and Medicare
May 12, 2009 - 11:26am
WASHINGTON (AP) - The financial health of the government's two biggest benefit programs may have slipped over the past year, reflecting the deep recession that has already bitten into other areas of the budget.
The trustees for Social Security and Medicare are scheduled to provide their annual report on the finances of both programs on Tuesday. In advance of the release, many private analysts said they expected both programs could run out of cash sooner than last predicted.
A year ago, the trustees projected that the Social Security trust fund would start paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes in 2017 and that the trust fund would be depleted in 2041.
For the Medicare trust fund, which pays for hospital care, the situation was more urgent. It was projected to start paying more in benefits than it collects in taxes within a year, and the trustees forecast that it would be depleted by 2019.
But many analysts said the worst recession in decades will produce a bleaker forecast for both Social Security and Medicare in the new trustees' report. The downturn has resulted in a loss of 5.7 million payroll jobs since it began in December 2007 and an unemployment rate that hit a 25-year high of 8.9 percent in April.
Fewer people working means less being paid into the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare.
The Congressional Budget Office recently projected that Social Security will collect just $3 billion more in 2010 than it will pay out in benefits. A year ago, the CBO had projected that Social Security would have a much higher $86 billion cash surplus for the 2010 budget year, which begins Oct. 1. The difference in the two estimates is the result of the recession.
While the smaller surplus will not have any impact on Social Security benefit payments, the government will need to borrow more at a time when the federal deficit is already exploding because of the recession and the billions of dollars being spent to prop up a shaky banking system.
For years, the Social Security trust fund has taken in more than it spent on benefits, resulting in a cushion of billions of dollars that the government could spend on other programs while giving the trust fund an IOU.
Even with the big drop in the Social Security surplus, Medicare's condition is more precarious, reflecting the pressures from soaring health care costs as well as the drop in tax collections.
For that reason, President Barack Obama is expected to focus on Medicare before he addresses Social Security.
Obama on Monday praised a pledge by the health care industry to achieve $2 trillion in savings on health care costs over the next decade, but it was unclear how much help those pledges would be in achieving Obama's goal of extending coverage to some 50 million uninsured Americans. The administration is pushing Congress to pass legislation in this area this year, preferring to tackle health care before Social Security.
The trustees report is still expected to set off a heated debate over the government's two large benefit programs, with critics saying it will highlight the failure of the Obama administration to take on the most serious problems in the budget _ soaring entitlement spending, before the retirement of 78 million baby boomers makes the problems even worse.
The administration on Monday revised its deficit forecasts upward to project an imbalance this year of $1.84 trillion, four times last year's record deficit, and said the deficits will remain above $500 billion every year over the next decade.
http://www.wtopnews.com/?sid=1673971&nid=111


Swine flu spreading too fast to count, CDC says
Confirmed cases are only the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ health official says
Swine flu is spreading so far and fast in the U.S. that state health officials may soon stop counting individual cases, a federal health official said Monday.
The novel H1N1 virus accounted for 40 percent of flu viruses logged in the U.S. in the past week and helped propel an uptick in overall flu-like illnesses, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a deputy director with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I think the cases we’re confirming are the tip of the iceberg here,” Schuchat said in a press briefing Monday.
The CDC has confirmed more than 2,000 cases in 43 states and Washington D.C., with 94 hospitalizations and three deaths. Another 700 cases are suspected. Although the flu is spreading quickly, it remains relatively mild in the U.S., say health officials.
“They tell us for sure this virus is circulating throughout the United States and it’s likely to be in every state,” Schuchat said, adding: “It’s a time when we really need to guard against complacency as we move to a new normal.”
The CDC has started tracking the novel virus using the surveillance system used for seasonal influenza, called FluView.
Because many states did not report cases over the past weekend, Schuchat said she expects a big jump in cases to be reported Tuesday.
So far, three people in the U.S. have died from complications of swine flu. On Saturday, Washington state health officials reported the death of a man in his 30s. America’s other two swine flu deaths — a toddler and a pregnant woman — each suffered from several other illnesses when they were infected with the virus, according to a study released Thursday.
Health officials said the Washington victim had underlying heart conditions and viral pneumonia when he died Thursday from what appeared to be complications from swine flu.
“We’re working with local and federal partners to track this outbreak,” said Washington State Secretary of Health Mary Selecky.
The man was not further identified. He began showing symptoms on April 30, and was treated with anti-viral medication. Dr. Gary Goldbaum, Snohomish Health District medical director, said medical officials hadn’t been able to isolate any “risk factors” for the man to identify where he might have been exposed.
Neighboring Canada reported its first death from swine flu on Friday — a woman who was in her 30s. Alberta's chief medical officer says the woman from northern Alberta and did not travel recently. He says she also had other medical conditions. Dr. Andre Corriveau made the announcement at a news conference Friday.
The report by the CDC presented a clearer picture of the complicated medical situations faced by those who have gotten swine flu and had the most serious cases so far.
The Mexican toddler had a chronic muscle weakness called myasthenia gravis, a heart defect, a swallowing problem and lack of oxygen. Little Miguel Tejada Vazquez fell ill and died during a family visit to Texas.
The pregnant woman, Judy Trunnell, 33, was hospitalized for two weeks until she died Tuesday. The teacher was in a coma, and her baby girl was delivered by cesarean section. According to the report, she had asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, a skin condition called psoriasis and was 35 weeks pregnant.
People with chronic illnesses are at greatest risk for severe illness from the flu, along with the elderly and young children. So far, most of those with the swine flu in the U.S. and Mexico have been young adults.
“We’re still learning about what patients are most at risk” from the new virus, said Dr. Fatima Dawood, a CDC epidemiologist.
The CDC report released by the New England Journal of Medicine also provided more detailed information on 22 people hospitalized with swine flu. Nine had chronic medical conditions, including the two who died and a 25-year-old man with Down syndrome and a congenital heart disease. Five of the patients had asthma alone.
President Barack Obama said Friday that public health agencies must reach all corners of the nation when providing information on matters such as swine flu.
The president dropped by a town hall-style meeting at the White House co-sponsored by the Spanish-language media company Univision.
He said, "we're all in this together. We're one country, we're one community. When one person gets sick, it has the potential of making us all sick."
‘We’re still learning’
Last week, the CDC also described the symptoms experienced by Americans with swine flu. About 90 percent reported fever, 84 percent reported cough and 61 percent reported a sore throat — all similar to what’s seen with seasonal flu. But about one in four cases have also involved either vomiting or diarrhea, which is not typical for the normal flu bug.
It’s possible the virus is spreading not only through coughed and sneezed droplets — as with seasonal flu — but also through feces-contaminated hands, said Dawood.
“This is a new virus and we’re still learning how transmission occurs,” she said.
About 10 percent of the Americans who got swine flu had traveled to Mexico and likely picked up the infection there.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30398682/

The King of Stupid acts, the US is doing, it will kill us and the econmoy soon. Cussword, cussword our politicians are so stupid.
US to borrow 46 cents for every dollar spent
WASHINGTON (AP) - The government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year, exploding the record federal deficit past $1.8 trillion under new White House estimates. Budget office figures released Monday would add $89 billion to the 2009 red ink - increasing it to more than four times last year's all-time high as the government hands out billions more than expected for people who have lost jobs and takes in less tax revenue from people and companies making less money.
The unprecedented deficit figures flow from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout and the cost of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus bill - as well as a seemingly embedded structural imbalance between what the government spends and what it takes in.
As the economy performs worse than expected, the deficit for the 2010 budget year beginning in October will worsen by $87 billion to $1.3 trillion, the White House says. The deterioration reflects lower tax revenues and higher costs for bank failures, unemployment benefits and food stamps.
Just a few days ago, Obama touted an administration plan to cut $17 billion in wasteful or duplicative programs from the budget next year. The erosion in the deficit announced Monday is five times the size of those savings.
For the current year, the government would borrow 46 cents for every dollar it takes to run the government under the administration's plan. In 2010, it would borrow 35 cents for every dollar spent.
"The deficits ... are driven in large part by the economic crisis inherited by this administration," budget director Peter Orszag wrote in a blog entry on Monday.
The developments come as the White House completes the official release of its $3.6 trillion budget for 2010, adding detail to some of its tax proposals and ideas for producing health care savings. The White House budget is a recommendation to Congress that represents Obama's fiscal and policy vision for the next decade.
Annual deficits would never dip below $500 billion and would total $7.1 trillion over 2010-2019. Even those dismal figures rely on economic projections that are significantly more optimistic - just a 1.2 percent decline in gross domestic product this year and a 3.2 percent growth rate for 2010 - than those of private sector economists and the Congressional Budget Office.
As a percentage of the economy, the measure economists say is most important, the deficit would be 12.9 percent of GDP this year, the biggest since World War II. It would drop to 8.5 percent of GDP in 2010.
In the past three decades, deficits in the range of 4 percent of GDP have caused Congress and previous administrations to launch efforts to narrow the gap. The White House predicts deficits equaling 2.9 percent of the economy within four years.
Polling data suggest Americans are increasingly worried about mounting deficits and debt.
An AP-GfK poll last month gave Obama relatively poor grades on the deficit, with just 49 percent of respondents approving of the president's handling of the issue and 41 percent disapproving. By contrast, Obama's overall approval rating was 64 percent, with just 30 percent disapproving.
"Even using their February economic assumptions - which now appear to be out of date and overly optimistic - the administration never puts us on a stable path," said Marc Goldwein of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group that advocates budget discipline. "The president ... understands the critical importance of fiscal discipline. Now we need to see some action."
For the most part, Obama's updated budget tracks the 134-page outline he submitted to lawmakers in February. His budget remains a bold but contentious document that proposes higher taxes for the wealthy, a hotly contested effort to combat global warming and the first steps toward guaranteed health care for all.
Meanwhile, the congressional budget plan approved last month would not extend Obama's signature $400 tax credit for most workers - $800 for couples - after it expires at the end of next year.
Obama's "cap-and-trade" proposal to curb heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions is also reeling from opposition from Democrats from coal-producing regions and states with concentrations of heavy industry. Under cap-and-trade, the government would auction permits to emit heat-trapping gases, with the costs being passed on to consumers via higher gasoline and electric bills.
Also new in Obama's budget details are several tax "loophole" closures and increased IRS tax compliance efforts to raise $58 billion over the next decade to help finance his health care measure. The money would make up for revenue losses stemming from lower-than-hoped estimates for his proposal to limit wealthier people's ability to maximize their itemized deductions.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090512/D984FCB80.html

Baxter pharmaceutical sent weaponized live H5N1 avian flu virus to eighteen countries
WHAT TO EXPECT, MEANDERING SPECULATIONS
by Alan Stang May 1, 2009 NewsWithViews.com
For years, I have been speculating about the weapon the conspiracy for world government would use to precipitate the panic that would cause America to demand its own enslavement. When the conspiracy launched the present financial debacle, I thought the question had been answered. As obvious as it was, it had never occurred to me that the conspiracy would choose two such weapons to work in tandem.
But maybe it has. Will they finally succeed in launching the deadly pandemic that has fizzled in several attempts? A pandemic offers many unique elements. When you drop bombs on people, they know they are being attacked. Also, bombs don’t kill everyone. But when you launch a weaponized pandemic, people don’t know that for sure. Sickness happens – even pandemics happen – without criminal encouragement. The Black Death happened by itself. And a pandemic involves everyone.
Imagine people broke and homeless now facing a deadly disease. It is now possible that the Communists who control the Executive Branch may be deliberately trying to provoke a massive, popular reaction they can use to justify martial law and the concentration camps that would be part of it. In this case, they would call it “quarantine,” and uninfected Americans, worried about their children, would applaud when the government puts the sick on the bus.
The program would include vaccinations, which would include the usual poisons. Remember that the 1976 version of the swine flu vaccination killed more people than the disease itself. Recently, the Baxter pharmaceutical company “accidentally” sent weaponized deadly, live H5N1 avian flu virus to eighteen countries, an “accident” that is impossible and was discovered only by a genuine accident. Had it been injected into humans in all those countries, there would have been an instant pandemic for sure. Czech newspapers were talking conspiracy. Now comes word that Baxter will make the vaccine to fight the Mexican flu. What? Yes.
Health Ranger Mike Adams speculates that “for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those same pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infect pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs –in Mexico! – and spread it to others.” Again, this is just one of many possible speculations.
Meanwhile, we have an affirmative action pretend “President” who almost blatantly hates the system he governs. Has there ever been such a critter in world history? Even psychotic exterminators like Stalin, Castro, Hitler and Mao professed to love the countries they governed. But Mr. Big Ears delights in telling dictators who want to destroy us how criminal we are.
The Declaration of Independence is the nation’s birth certificate. It can never be revoked. It says that whenever a government becomes oppressive, “destructive” of the people’s rights, they have the right to “alter or abolish it.” President Tom Jefferson says that every generation the tree of liberty must be altered with the “blood of patriots and tyrants.” Why would there be blood? Because governments don’t want to be abolished. They worship the power and lust for more.
Most of the time, the only way to abolish them is by force. That is why there would be blood. The Declaration says we have that right. President Tom encourages us to use it. Obviously he is talking about usurpation so total that the government is no longer the one the Founding Fathers left us but a totalitarian perversion. In such a case, he says, it is not only the people’s right to throw off such government; it is their duty.
We are very close to that situation now. Is that why people have bought every last round of ammunition in the country and then some? If Americans do as the President suggests, there would be blood, much blood, and death. Are they mentally prepared for that? Are they close to the intolerable desperation in which they have nothing to lose?
Whom would they be shooting at? In the excitement of getting it, I wonder how many people now laden down with ammo have thought about all this. Would they have the heart for it? So far, I have seen no discussion of these historic questions. No one is happier than I am that our people are so heavily armed. Have they taken time to think about the answers?
My hope and my belief are that, after years of exposés about the conspiracy for world government, enough Americans now understand the conspiracy is trying to provoke them to go military – wants them to rebel – providing the government the excuse to suppress them. My prayer is that such a horror never happens.
But we do have the Declaration and we do have authorization, even encouragement, from the President; we do know that political liberty and freedom of speech are being squelched and that we are moving into full blown totalitarian socialist dictatorship. Permanent cancellation of elections would not necessarily be a clue. Stalin had elections. They allow the people to vent. He was always “elected.”
Listening and reading about what could happen, I see a picture emerge. By the way, remember that I do not propose anything. I merely convey what I hear. In fact, I fervently hope none of this comes to pass. I am talking about the people DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Arizona bull dyke, is afraid of; the veterans she fears could become terrorists and who know how to do things. I am listening to them.
Of course the real terrorists are the communazis who run our government and who already lay a heavy hand on the people’s necks. Remember that Lenin created modern terrorism: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands. . . .” Felix Dzerzhinsky, his secret police chief, said: “We stand for organized terror. . . .” Terror to Lenin did not mean people rising up against the government. It meant government terrorizing people.
I believe there will be a series of incidents. The psychological pressure cooker artificially created on both sides is already too great to contain. As the Seventh Avenue girdle manufacturer once put it, “Something’s got to give.” The danger is that these isolated incidents could get out of control.
Happily, I do not believe that danger is great. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee should be forgiven for not recognizing soon enough that they faced satanic Communist monsters. Had they known in time, Jackson could perhaps have followed the fleeing Yankees all the way in to Washington after first Manassas, arrested our first Communist President and restored the Union. Lee said after Appomattox that had he known what he confronted soon enough, he would have fought to the last man.
But by now, after more than a century of Communism, after decades of alarms by a small band of tireless watchmen on the walls, I believe this generation of patriots is too knowledgeable to commit suicide by confronting a U.S. military liberated from the restraints of posse comitatus and persuaded by Napolitano that the patriots are “terrorists.” In lieu of such suicide, alternate scenarios are emerging.
One of the strangest posits a scenario in which the administration now is openly Nazi, denying the fundamental rights the Constitution guarantees. Elections are Stalinist charades. Police state controls make rebellion impossible. The judicious period of sober observation President Tom says must pass before a decision is made to “alter or abolish” a government has long since expired.
Suddenly, according to this scenario, the perpetrators begin to disappear. One by one by one, they vanish. There would be no shooting, no violence. One day they would be there, whistling while they work, reveling in confiscation of the people’s wealth, in loading people onto trucks, etc.; the next day they would not.
Of course, the men I hear talking do not mean people like affirmative action pretend “President” Mr. Big Ears. All Americans are united in the fervent hope that the Secret Service will keep him safe; the Obamatrons because they are morons who believe he is the One, the patriots because they want to see him humiliated and imprisoned for his crimes.
The same thing would apply to people like enemy alien chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, “the hemorrhoid.” Patriots want him safe for the same reason and he is no doubt too hard to reach, anyway. So, no, the scuttlebutt is not about Rahm. It is about the good folks who must leave the protected federal enclave to implement federal policy, not the police but, rather, the low- to mid-level people who do the confiscating, the speechmaking, the inspecting, the intimidating, etc.
Certainly one thing that inspires uncontrollable fear is uncertainty. Why did So-and-So at the next desk or in the next office disappear? People disappear for many reasons every day. Most of them have not been kidnapped. Maybe they were just fed up. Maybe they took the money and are sitting on a beach in Cancun, soaking up the flu. Maybe next week they will show up. In this case, there are no demands. There is no ransom. There are no anguished telephone calls. There is nothing for Jack Bauer and his loyal band of techies to investigate.
However true that is, the scenario says mere not knowing would inspire panic. So-and-So left his office and never came back. Is he in the Twilight Zone? What would happen were I to go up into the hills to inspect? The famous quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn would not apply. There would be no bloody corpses, no heads beaten in beneath the stairs. It would be something even more terrifying, more eerie: nothing. It could disrupt the smooth functioning of government, but there would be nothing for the government to attack.
Of course, all of this is mere chatter, just one of the crazy ideas floating in the ether, blowin’ in the wind. Let us devoutly hope it turns out to be nothing.
http://frc4u.org/phpbb/index.php?topic=1290.0;topicseen