Thursday, June 30, 2016

Thursday 06-30-16


FEMA Contractor: Unrest After 395% Food Price Spike Coming Soon

Preparations by various cogs of the national security complex, including FEMA, indicate a coming worldwide food shortage — and a resulting crisis marked by extreme civil unrest around the globe.
As Motherboard noted of two reports published previously by CNA Corporation, but which largely escaped attention, the world’s food supply could be insufficient to maintain even current populations much further into the future. And the crisis — which several factors indicate may already be underway — may begin to worsen considerably as early as 2020.
Employing a desktop game simulation of the conditions of a global food shortage, titled “Food Chain Reaction,” CNA’s Institute for Public Research brought together “65 officials from the US, Europe, Africa, India, Brazil, and key multilateral and intergovernmental institutions,” Motherboard explained. And the Institute, which oversaw the simulation, “primarily provides scientific research services for the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA].”
According to the website for Food Chain Reaction: A Global Food Security Game — no commentary on Orwellian overtones needed — the “simulation and exercise intended to improve understanding of how governments, institutions, and private sector interests might interact to address a crisis in the global food system,” and took place in early November 2015.
“The scenario,” the description continues, “is set five years from today in a world where population growth, rapid urbanization, extreme weather and political crises combine to threaten global food security. The game’s players — high-level decision makers representing nations, international institutions, and the private sector — will collaborate, negotiate, make decisions, and confront tradeoffs while dealing with a chain reaction of consequences resulting from their actions.”
Participants received the briefing for the game through a mock TV newscast, which “challenged players to imagine a global food system under stress due to extreme weather and other environmental factors, urbanization and other demographic pressures, rising global food prices, and falling food stock levels.”
After receiving information specific to each participant’s national and regional geography and climate, players were also permitted to employ solutions to the game’s burgeoning food crisis scenario on “national, bilateral, and/or broadly cooperative” levels.
Divided into four rounds, the simulation found spikes in food prices up to a whopping 395 percent, driven by extended crop failures in key regions, resultant from the confused reactions by international officials, drastic changes in the environment, and skyrocketing oil prices — many similar factors, the report notes, that drove a global food crisis spanning 2007 to 2008.
Though, at the height of the simulation’s worst repercussions, the food crisis affected virtually every societal and governmental aspect — such as mass civil unrest and widespread crop failures in the planet’s ‘breadbasket’ regions — the Institute ultimately painted a rosy picture of economic and agricultural recovery.
But for as detailed and reactive as the scope of the game sought to be, several glaring omissions likely skewed both results and proposed solutions — and despite backing from the U.S. government, the simulation’s corporate participants could have tacitly or overtly influenced the outcome.
Commissioned in part by Cargill, an industrial agribusiness behemoth, and Mars, the giant whose candy business has vested interests in promoting both genetically-modified food and industrial agriculture, the Food Chain Reaction simulation excluded among possible solutions the abolishment of industrial, factory farming. Considering large-scale agribusiness’ sizable impact on the environment, as well as the paradoxical systemwhereby industrial agriculture largely supports livestock from factory farms, that exclusion certainly calls into question any results.
Additionally, with FEMA an aspect of the futuristic simulation, it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility to see a call for increased funding in the name of ‘being prepared’ for a coming crisis of epic proportions.
Perhaps, though, an imperative exists in examining both the aspects of massive food shortage studied as well as potential solutions omitted. China recently began the push away from a meat-centric diet, in part because pollution from factory farms has wrought havoc in the air and water. All moralistic pontificating aside, a return to small-scale, organic farming and switching to vegetarian diets, or at least a reduction in consumption of meat, could avert or abate the coming crisis.

http://www.thedailysheeple.com/fema-contractor-unrest-after-395-food-price-spike-coming-soon_062016

Simple skin cancer check that few people do
Dermatologists recommend coming in annually for a once-over to check for skin cancer. It's quick, painless and can pick up on early signs of trouble when the disease is most treatable.
http://wtop.com/health/2016/06/simple-cancer-check-us/slide/1/

Be careful of what you read and trust

HIT MAN Homemade Silencers (And Other Internet Hilarity)

I think i might have stumbled upon an internet equivalent of a comedy jackpot. In a HubPages post by ‘fr0gman’, the excerpts of a supposedly banned book HIT MAN: A Technical Manual For Independent Contractors detail how to build a “homemade silencer”. While the plans are funny in themselves, the user comments after the article had me rolling.
 

HIT MAN: A Technical Manual For Independent Contractors
In this article I am going to discuss the methods described in this book to build an improvised silencer for a standard, fixed-barrel .22 caliber pistol. This technique is very inexpensive (you can build a working model for around $40.00). The techniques are very effective and it is worth noting that production and possession of an assembled silencer or the parts used to make a silencer are illegal in the United States and many other countries. This information is presented for information purposes ONLY and you are strongly encourage NOT to attempt to build a silencer unless you have the proper authorization from the government.
 

THE FINISHED PRODUCT
Your finished product is whisper-quiet, the way a silencer is supposed to be! It is inexpensive, effective and reusable for over four hundred rounds before you will need to repack.

As promised, here are some comments about the ‘Hit Man’ suppressor that made me laugh out loud:

 Brandon Laden 8 years ago
man i think this stuff is bad you have won a lot of respect from me i hope this works but thanks becouse no other page i have read tells actualy how to make the silencer only how ellegal it is to make so thanks!!!!!!!


Hold Me Beer 7 years ago
well put frogman, this is very interesting information but do suppose it could work with say a 9mm, 40 cal, or 45


viper777 7 years ago
Hi man,
thanks for your suggestions. Really helpful and they work with bullets. I m trying hard to do something similar to a shot gun (not bullets) gauge 12. My results are close to rubbish.
Anyone has any ideas or help ?


2 loud .17 HMR 7 years ago
any chance you could tell me where to get one from overseas?


jigga 6 years ago
im too lazy to create this, i really need one… so does n e one know how to make one outta a 20 oz popbottle tape and insulation, and does it work.


bigcliffcole 6 years ago
i’ve made one from a soda can and a couple of old hats before but it is olny good for a few shots or so but it was still fun to make and shoot.


Numbah9 6 years ago
Change to a higher impulse powder with a smaller charge such that the end of barrel pressure is near, or closer to, zero. Longer barrel helps. Requires some experimentation but does work rather well. 17cal Finnish sniper rifle adapts well to this technique


Redneck 6 years ago
I just tried the pop bottle, I wrapped hi voltage tape around bull barrel 10/22 ruger slid on mountain dew bottle with 1/2 inch hole in bottom center, walked outside and racked off 6 shots and did not even wake the old lady and did not hurt anything, hell I left it on there for now. I would say it cut down the sound by at least 2/3. I think tomorrow I will cut bottle in half and glue some steel wool all along insides leaving good passage for the bullet. This should help some more hell Im not trying to kill anybody, But if I want to snipe a deer in the night nobody will know, and it did not show in my scope, I bet frogmans works great , It took about 5 minutes to make this one.


yadaddy 6 years ago
ur retarded . . . go buy a keyless drill chuck that has a max larger than your o.d. of the barrel . . . better yet anneal the end of the barrel and use a tap and dye set . . . better yet if you didn’t know this already study a bit on proper machining. a dependabl supressor requires baffeling come on now just promise me you wont ruin your pistols or rifles by applying f*ckin fiberglass wtf ? and i really don’t care if i mis-spelled a few words


samalamadingdong 6 years ago
i made one using a similar idea ive made about 15 of these ive never had one blow up in my face


Ray Murphy 6 years ago
Why would any gun enthusiast want a silencer any way .. The big BANG is half the fun


what’s it matter 6 years ago
several people that i know made these things and they work really well, all u hear is the pin hitting sounds like a missfire.and about it being legal,…who gives a f*ck? i bet these people never speed eather huh?and if someone WAS goin to kill someone im sure they don’t want to buy one, that would be real smart.i cant even remember the guys name that wrote this (thanks by the way) because ive been reading everyones bullsh*t.. if you just left a comment just to talk shit talk sh*t to yourself and get a life.
and yo teach… i could 2 shits less if i mizspelledd anything.
yours truly
……. outlaw M.C.


shoot em up 6 years ago
Appreciate the info…my neighbor a couple of houses from me makes them. I know a lot about making them, but this adds to it.


Janie Hersch 6 years ago
My villain (in the book All’s Fair) is to be shot at Goodwood races (UK) I had no idea of the mechanics required by a Hit Man except speed, efficiency and secrecy. I am researching this now and am extremely grateful for the information on here. I thought a seach for Hit Man would bring a zero; this is welcome information, many thanks.

 http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/06/27/hit-man-homemade-silencers-and-other-internet-hilarity/

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Wednesday 06-29-16

Gun Control Is Not The Answer To Islamic Terrorism




“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” — Rahm Emanuel.
The left is renewing their calls for gun control as they try to salvage their narrative from the damage of their Islamic sacred cow massacring their LGBT one. Across their spectrum, so many people know so little about firearms, rights of American citizens, and the goals of radical Islam for the world. All they see is an opportunity to further accomplish their goals of control of the populace.
Anyone with a social media account can broadcast their thoughts to the world, and their ignorance breeds with itself and makes yet more. We at ROK have the opportunity to inject some reason into the insanity and keep the liberals from grabbing more control.

The solution to cognitive dissonance

One would expect some mental introspection from the left. It’s Gay Pride month, the attack was at the supposedly trendiest gay bar in Orlando, and the shooter reportedly was gay and had been there before.
Omar Mateen was Islamic, had ties to a fundamentalist cleric, was of Afghani descent, and even swore to ISIS. If this had been a terrorist attack against Christians, or conservatives, not one damn would have been given by Barack Obama Inc., and his vaunted Muslims would have been spared any criticism.
However, the victims were all presumably gay, which makes them matter to the left agenda. It’s hard to choose with which flag you should color your Facebook picture; the ISIS flag, or a rainbowed Lake Eola.

The solution is the same as it always is for the left; double down on some other part of your narrative, and that’s gun control. Never mind that Mateen also had bombs and a pistol on him, and was a hateful man blinded by religious fury to kill people of a legal sexual preference, let’s blame the rifle he used instead.

The difference between Paris, Brussels, and Orlando

If we compare the ISIS attacks in Paris and in Brussels to this attack in Orlando, we learn a few things. The Paris terrorists used suicide bombs and AK pattern rifles, both of which are illegal in Europe. The Brussels terrorists used bombs made of explosives presumably illegal in Europe.
However, the semi-automatic carbine used in this attack was legal to purchase by citizens who pass the NICS background check to buy. If you have no criminal record, or a history of mental illness or instability, you can buy one wherever they are sold.
Mateen was of legal status to purchase firearms, even though he had ties to radical clerics and Islamic fundamentalism. His Floridian Concealed Weapons Permit should never have been issued (or at least revoked), and he should have failed the NICS check, but, thanks to the policies of the left, radical Islam is NOT considered a mental illness or reason to deny a firearms sale, nor is it enough to flag your background check in the employment of a large security company. G4S, Mateen’s employer, claims that they saw nothing of his radicalism.
Mateen also was rejected by a gun store a month prior to the shooting for wanting large amounts of ammunition, body armor, and speaking a foreign language into a phone while he was there. The owners denied his sale and contacted the FBI, who did nothing.

It is illegal to carry into a bar in Florida. I hold a Florida CWP, and, just like most concealed carry permits, you cannot take it into schools, government buildings, or any place where alcohol is the primary product sold.
Murder always has been illegal. The only forms of killing someone that are legal are: military action, self-defense, execution by governmental authority, and abortion. The core problem with using control over a weapon to prevent a crime with that weapon is that the criminal will simply find an illegal way to get one, or use a different weapon.
If someone mows down ten Black Lives Matter thugs with his car, are you going to ban his vehicle from private ownership? What about two men arguing and one picks up a rock and kills him? Are rocks now illegal? Dead is dead, no matter the weapon.
Would have allowing guns in bars and other “gun free zones” have stopped this massacre? Probably not in this case, but usually, in any public gathering place in Florida where firearms are allowed to be carried and like-minded people are there, at least someone, hopefully multiple people, would be shooting back within ten seconds.

A decent, free people or disarmed animals?

This country was founded on decent people having autonomous rule. People self-governed, and, if they didn’t like what you were trying to pull, they shot you. This went for criminals and the Crown Regulars. Decent, armed people would’ve shot Omar Mateen shortly after he pulled out his rifle. Yes, a rifle would beat a handgun, but it wouldn’t have beaten multiple handguns, and heroes would have gone down swinging instead of being forced to hide.
The left doesn’t want decent armed people. They don’t want this because good people who have a means at their disposal to resist bullshit have the annoying habit of resisting ALL bullshit that comes their way, and they don’t discriminate between governmental oppression and criminal acts. The left wants to push their authoritarian agenda on you free men, take your income and your kids, promote their protected classes, and your having the ability to fight back is not in their playbook.
13423713_1027355907311747_8439360277609720444_n
The Second Amendment was written for the purpose of keeping the population armed to resist the abuses of an over-reaching government. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
This means organized groups of local men protecting their homes and interests. Any time there’s a natural disaster, and people patrol for looters, that’s a militia in the Founders’ sense of the word.
“A free state” is why the Amendment exists. We have this right protected by the Constitution so that we can be free from people trying to kill or control us. A man being persecuted for his sexual preference by an Islamic terrorist would definitely be covered.
This amendment means have and carry guns. Arms means handheld firearms of modern design, both then and now. One of the favorite leftist tactics is to gradually restrict your rights. They like to “compromise” by agreeing since they want all your rights gone, and you want to keep them all, that you should “compromise” by giving up some of them. You need to push the OTHER way, for the abolishment of gun free zones so that we can protect ourselves always.

You can’t have it both ways

Even when the radical portions of the religion want Sharia Law implemented worldwide (including the killing of homosexuals, slavery of women, and enslavement of non-Muslims), the left adores the very people who would conquer and kill them. The idea of “moderate Muslims” being good people is not always true, and is something to be verified for each one you encounter individually.
This guy was an Islamic terrorist with clear ties to radical Islam. His background checks failed to catch this, and the FBI did NOTHING when a gun shop called. Did the owner of the gun shop where he finally got the weapons have any concerns, or had he been browbeaten into politically correct lockstep and so afraid of being branded Islamaphobic that he made the sale anyway?

I would suggest that the leftist regime wants events like this to happen to have an excuse to crack down on control of the people.

I don’t care what gun he had, I care that his victims had none

Some consternation is being raised about the fact that the left rushed to call the rifle used an AR-15 and misspoke in their zeal to start a gun ban. The rifle used is a Sig Sauer MCX carbine, which is a proprietary weapon of an style similar to an AR pattern rifle. I urge anyone arguing with a leftist not to try to score points on the technicality of which model gun it was and which ones it was not. I mean, one reporter went and shot an AR and claimed he was traumatized, even though little girls shoot it and it’s too little to be used for legal deer hunting.

Sig Sauer MCX. Not an AR-15. Any liberal suggesting they look or are the same just because they’re both black might be justifiably called a racist.
The important point is that a mass murderer carried a legal weapon into a “gun free zone” and committed murder with it. His victims were prevented from protecting themselves by unjust laws, and their blood is on the hands of any lawmaker who ever had a say in making a “gun free zone” a part of the law.
We must stand united against Islamic terror and the liberal left who would try to disarm us in the face of the enemy.

Beating the left at their game

First, you must discount any talk of gun control as in horribly poor taste. “Over 50 people are DEAD, and you want to push a political agenda?!?!”
Secondly, imply they hate gay people. “What, you don’t want gay people to be able to defend their lives and lifestyle against bigots? Being gay is NOT a mental illness, you know, they’re allowed to own firearms just like you and me, and firearms should NOT be banned in gay bars, either.”
Third, appeal to what little bit of national pride they may have left and explain the difference between how a European reacts to danger versus an American. “I don’t know if you know this, but the USA has stood up against Islamic terror since the Barbary Wars 200 years ago. We don’t run and hide from terrorists; we kill them.”
Fourth, push for enforcement of laws already on the books and fighting Islamic terror. “You know, he should have tripped the existing NICS background check system and never gotten a Florida weapons permit if it was known he had ties to radical Islam. He was denied a sale by a gun store and the FBI was called, and they did nothing. We already have these laws, let’s just enforce them better along with our borders.”
Fifth, show sympathy that they have never known guns and offer to help them learn and buy their first. “Man, I’m sorry your dad was not around to teach you shooting; why don’t we go to the range, you can learn some basic skills and find out what guns you like, and I’ll help you decide on your first one and teach you safe use and maintenance of it.”
Sixth, vote for Trump, because you know what happens when a Clinton is in the White House; mass shootings (by the government.)

Seventh: Arm up, don’t forget lots of ammo and magazines.

Conclusion

The left is trying to turn this tragedy into their political gain by making it about gun control instead of fighting terrorism. You need to own the conversation, imply that anyone who thinks more gun control is the answer is mentally deficient, then give them the opportunity to be on the right side of the debate. Imply that you are totally opposed to any more gun control and that any attempts to enact it on you would be ill advised. There is a movement called the Three Percent, and I urge you to adopt their doctrine:
“We will not disarm. You cannot convince us. You cannot intimidate us. You can try to kill us, if you think you can. But, remember, we’ll shoot back. And, we are not going away. Your move.”
In the spirit of resisting leftist tyranny and disarmament attempts, I’ve got some AR-15 lower receivers on order, and we’re going to build one up right here on ROK in future articles. Until then, be safe.

http://www.returnofkings.com/88927/gun-control-is-not-the-answer-to-islamic-terrorism

Here is an interesting idea

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Warns of Imminent Crisis — Urges Return to Gold Standard

On Monday, Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, dropped a bombshell that will both incite panic as well make people scratch their heads in disbelief.
Speaking on Bloomberg in an extensive 30-minute interview, Greenspan gave his assessment of Brexit. The former fed chair said David Cameron made a “terrible mistake” by even holding the referendum. Greenspan went on to explain that Brexit will inevitably lead to both Scotland and Northern Ireland declarations of independence as well.
“We are in very early days of a crisis which has got a way to go,” asserted Greenspan.
Today’s comments come after his already shocking assessment of Brexit on Friday, in which he said this was the worst situation he’s ever seen.
“This is the worst period, I recall since I’ve been in public service. There’s nothing like it, including the crisis — remember October 19th, 1987, when the Dow went down by a record amount 23 percent? That I thought was the bottom of all potential problems. This has a corrosive effect that will not go away. I’d love to find something positive to say.”
As if Greenspan’s predictions weren’t ominous enough, on Monday, he managed to top them. In his appraisal of the situation, Greenspan noted that unsustainable entitlement spending is eventually going to lead to a crisis.
The issue is essentially that entitlements are legal issues. They have nothing to do with economics. You reach a certain age or you are ill or something of that nature and you are entitled to certain expenditures out of the budget without any reference to how it’s going to be funded. Where the productivity levels are now, we are lucky to get something even close to two percent annual growth rate. That annual growth rate of two percent is not adequate to finance the existing needs.
I don’t know how it’s going to resolve, but there’s going to be a crisis.
When asked if “we need an accident of history” to address this, as reported by ZeroHedge, Greenspan replied, “Probably. In the United States, social benefits, which is the more generic term, or entitlements, are considered the third rail of American politics.  You touch them and you lose.  Now, that is a general view.  Republicans don’t want to touch it.  Democrats don’t want to touch it.  They don’t even want to talk about.  This is what the election should be all about in the United States.  You will never hear one word from either side.”
After calling out the establishment on entitlement spending, Greenspan went on to unmask the false recovery narrative as perpetuated by Washington. He then warned that “the fundamental issue is the fact that productivity growth has ground to a halt.” 
We are running out of people. In other words, everyone is very pleased at the fact that the employment rate is rising. Well, statistics tell us that we need more and more people to produce less and less. That is not a prescription for a viable political system. And so what we have at this stage is stagnation. I don’t think that there is anything out there which suggests that there is a recession, but I don’t know that. What I do know is that the money supply, and too, which has always been a critical indicator of inflation, is for the first time going up remarkably steadily 6 percent, 7 percent, almost a straight line. It’s tilted up in the last several months. It’s added a percentage point or two. The thing that we should be worrying about now, which we have actually given no thought to whatsoever, is that this type of economic environment ends with inflation. Historically, fiat money has always ended up that way.
After echoing the eerily similar sentiment of Ron Paul, Greenspan warned of hyperinflation.
I know if you look at human history, there are times and times again where we thought that there was no inflation and everything was just going fine. And I just basically say, wait. This is not the way this thing ordinarily comes up. I don’t know. I cannot say I see it on the horizon. In fact, commodity prices are soggy. The oil prices have had a terrific impact on global inflation. It’s not about to emerge quickly, but I would not be surprised to see the next unexpected move to be on the inflation side. You don’t have inflation now. And you don’t have it until it happens.
ZeroHedge aptly points out that Greenspan ignores his own role in the creation of the boom-bust cycle which has doomed the world to series of ever more destructive bubbles and ultimately, hyperinflation which will likely be unleashed once the helicopter money inevitably arrives. In retrospect, the 90-year-old, who clearly is looking forward not backward, has a simple solution: the gold standard.
If we went back on the gold standard and we adhered to the actual structure of the gold standard as it exited prior to 1913, we’d be fine. Remember that the period 1870 to 1913 was one of the most aggressive periods economically that we’ve had in the United States, and that was a golden period of the gold standard. I’m known as a gold bug and everyone laughs at me, but why do central banks own gold now?
Ironically, what Greenspan is referencing in 1913 still plays a devastating role in the current state of global economic affairs today. Immediately after the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Congress reassigned the responsibility To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures, otherwise known as Article 1, Section 8 of the Consitution, to the Federal Reserve.
The Fed quickly became a fourth branch of the federal government, only an entirely unaccountable and secret one. The newly created central bank began acting as a single point of controlling authority, setting interest rates for inter-bank lending and regulating the supply of money in circulation — setting of a chain reaction that has led us to the crisis we find ourselves in today.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Former_Federal_Reserve_Chairman_Warns_of_Imminent_Crisis_%E2%80%94_Urges_Return_to_Gold_Standard/52245/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Tuesday 06-28-16

Researchers find second 'superbug' gene in U.S. patient

By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Scientists have identified a second patient in the United States infected with bacteria carrying the mcr-1 "superbug" gene, which makes bacteria highly resistant to a last-resort class of antibiotics.
The gene, found in a sample of E. coli bacteria from a patient in New York, follows the discovery late last month of a patient in Pennsylvania who had a urinary tract infection caused by E. coli that carried the gene.
The finding was published on Monday in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
The mcr-1 gene makes bacteria resistant to colistin, an antibiotic used to treat multi-drug-resistant infections, including carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae or CRE, which U.S. health officials have dubbed a "nightmare" bacteria.
What is concerning about the mcr-1 gene discoveries in the United States is that bacteria have the capability to share resistance genes. U.S. officials are worried that the mcr-1 gene may find its way into CRE bacteria, potentially creating bacteria resistant to virtually all types of antibiotics.
Scientists have been tracking the mcr-1 gene's movement around the globe since it was discovered last year in people and pigs in China.
The latest U.S. finding of mcr-1 came as part of a global effort called the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program, led by Mariana Castanheira of JMI Laboratories based in North Liberty, Iowa.
Researchers tested 13,525 Escherichia coli and 7,481 Klebsiella pneumoniae strains from patients collected last year from hospitals in the Asia-Pacific region, Latin America, Europe and North America.
Of these, 390, or 1.9 percent, were resistant to colistin, and 19 of these isolates tested positive for the mcr-1 gene.
Samples carrying the gene came from 10 countries and included some from each region. Only one came from the United States. It involved a New York patient infected with E. coli whose name and condition were not disclosed.
In both U.S. cases, bacteria that carried the "superbug" gene were resistant to colistin but susceptible to a number of other antibiotics, making the infections treatable.
To keep track of the spread of this resistance gene in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has disclosed plans to expand laboratory capacity to seven or eight regional laboratories, plus add capacity to laboratories in each U.S. state as well as seven cities or territories.
In the United States, antibiotic resistance causes at least 2 million illnesses and 23,000 deaths annually.
 
 
Fentanyl worries changing way narcotics officers operate
 
 
 

Monday, June 27, 2016

Monday 06-27-16

The changing face of the country

Latinos are no longer the fastest-growing racial group in America

For decades, Latinos were far and away the fastest-growing minority group in America. Driven by both migration and higher birth rates, the are now on the verge of becoming one-fifth of the U.S. population.
But according to new Census data, Asians now represent the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S. The nation’s Asian population totaled 21 million as of July 1, 2015, up 683,000, or 3.4%, since July 1, 2014. The Latino population grew 2.2% during the same period. (In fact, Asians’ growth rate surpassed that of Latinos in 2013.)
Asian population growth in the U.S. is due largely to net migration, the bureau said. Data from the Migration Policy Institute show that the number of immigrants hailing from Asia, which includes the Middle East, outnumbered those coming from Mexico 12.8 million to 11.7 million in 2014. Chinese immigrants (including Taiwanese and Hong Kong natives) constituted the largest Asian immigrant population, followed by Indians and Filipinos. Southeast Asia was the largest Asian region of origin. Here’s a chart showing immigrants by country of origin since 2006.
Fusion, data via Migration Policy Institute
California had the largest Asian population of any U.S. state (6.5 million) as of July 2015. Hawaii was the nation’s only majority Asian state (56.0%). Los Angeles County, California, had the largest Asian population of any county (1.7 million) in 2015 and the largest numeric increase (30,200) since 2014. Honolulu County and Kauai County, both in Hawaii, were the nation’s only majority Asian counties.

http://fusion.net/story/318008/asians-fastest-growth-ethnic-group-in-america/

A Brief History of Chemtrails

chemtrails_dees
By Peter A. Kirby
Your author recently put together a short video which gives a rough overview of the history of today’s New Manhattan Project.  It covers the inception and rollout of the project, early experiments, the development of ionospheric heaters, and the evolution of this project’s command and control apparatus.  I hope you find it entertaining and informative.



http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=721_1466917607

http://www.activistpost.com/2016/06/a-brief-history-of-chemtrails.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ActivistPost+%28Activist+Post%29

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Saturday 06-25-16

It is amazing how hypocritical the government is, they will do what they won't let you do and when they do it, they will exempt them selves from penalty.  But if someone had as many guys or ammunition as any of these agencies have on had, they would be called terrorists.  They need all these guns and ammunition for their protect from who (us?), yet if they had their way they would not let you own single shot guns.

There Are Now More Bureaucrats With Guns Than U.S. Marines

Report: Non-military federal agencies spend $1.48 billion on guns and ammo since 2006

There are now more non-military government employees who carry guns than there are U.S. Marines, according to a new report.
Open the Books, a taxpayer watchdog group, released a study Wednesday that finds domestic government agencies continue to grow their stockpiles of military-style weapons, as Democrats sat on the House floor calling for more restrictions on what guns American citizens can buy.
The “Militarization of America” report found civilian agencies spent $1.48 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between 2006 and 2014. Examples include IRS agents with AR-15s, and EPA bureaucrats wearing camouflage.
“Regulatory enforcement within administrative agencies now carries the might of military-style equipment and weapons,” Open the Books said. “For example, the Food and Drug Administration includes 183 armed ‘special agents,’ a 50 percent increase over the ten years from 1998-2008. At Health and Human Services (HHS), ‘Special Office of Inspector General Agents’ are now trained with sophisticated weaponry by the same contractors who train our military special forces troops.”
Open the Books found there are now over 200,000 non-military federal officers with arrest and firearm authority, surpassing the 182,100 personnel who are actively serving in the U.S. Marines Corps.
The IRS spent nearly $11 million on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment for its 2,316 special agents. The tax collecting agency has billed taxpayers for pump-action and semi-automatic shotguns, semi-automatic Smith & Wesson M&P15s, and Heckler & Koch H&K 416 rifles, which can be loaded with 30-round magazines.
The EPA spent $3.1 million on guns, ammo, and equipment, including drones, night vision, “camouflage and other deceptive equipment,” and body armor.
When asked about the spending, and EPA spokesman said the report “cherry picks information and falsely misrepresents the work of two administrations whose job is to protect public health.”
“Many purchases were mischaracterized or blown out of proportion in the report,” said spokesman Nick Conger. “EPA’s criminal enforcement program has not purchased unmanned aircraft, and the assertions that military-grade weapons are part of its work are false.”
“EPA’s criminal enforcement program investigates and prosecutes the most egregious violators of our nation’s environmental laws, and EPA criminal enforcement agents are law enforcement professionals who have undergone the same rigorous training as other federal agents,” Conger continued.
Other administration agencies that have purchased guns and ammo include the Small Business Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Education, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The report also highlighted that the Department of Health and Human Services has “special agents” with “sophisticated military-style weapons.” Open the Books also found $42 million in gun and ammunition purchases that were incorrectly coded.
“Some purchases were actually for ping-pong balls, gym equipment, bread, copiers, cotton balls, or cable television including a line item from the Coast Guard entered as ‘Cable Dude,’” the report said.
Open the Books appealed to both liberals like Bernie Sanders—who has called for demilitarizing local police departments—and conservatives in its report.
“Conservatives argue that it is hypocritical for political leaders to undermine the Second Amendment while simultaneously equipping non-military agencies with hollow-point bullets and military style equipment,” Open the Books said. “One could argue the federal government itself has become a gun show that never adjourns with dozens of agencies continually shopping for new firearms.”
_
Update June 23, 10:15 a.m.: Following publication of this article, Adam Andrzejewski, the CEO of Open the Books who wrote the report, pushed back against the EPA’s statement, and provided contract data to back up his claims.
“How can the EPA spokesperson deny hard facts from their own checkbook?” he said. “Alongside our oversight report, OpenTheBooks.com also released a PDF of all raw data. This line-by-line transactional record from the EPA’s own checkbook on page 113 clearly shows that in 2013 and 2014 the EPA purchased tens of thousands of dollars of ‘Unmanned Aircraft’ from Bergen RC Helicopters Inc which on a net basis amounted to approximately $34,000.”
“All of the assertions in our oversight report are the quantification of actual spending records produced and reported to us by the federal agencies themselves,” Andrzejewski said.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/now-bureaucrats-guns-u-s-marines/

Friday, June 24, 2016

Friday 06-24-16

It is voluntary?  We give it the power by using it.

Google Is the Worlds biggest Censor

Google, Inc., isn't just the world's biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world's biggest censor.
The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency. Google is not the only company suppressing content on the internet. Reddit has frequently been accused of banning postings on specific topics, and a recent report suggests that Facebook has been deleting conservative news stories from its newsfeed, a practice that might have a significant effect on public opinion – even on voting. Google, though, is currently the biggest bully on the block.
When Google's employees or algorithms decide to block our access to information about a news item, political candidate or business, opinions and votes can shift, reputations can be ruined and businesses can crash and burn. Because online censorship is entirely unregulated at the moment, victims have little or no recourse when they have been harmed. Eventually, authorities will almost certainly have to step in, just as they did when credit bureaus were regulated in 1970. The alternative would be to allow a large corporation to wield an especially destructive kind of power that should be exercised with great restraint and should belong only to the public: the power to shame or exclude.
If Google were just another mom-and-pop shop with a sign saying "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone," that would be one thing. But as the golden gateway to all knowledge, Google has rapidly become an essential in people's lives – nearly as essential as air or water. We don't let public utilities make arbitrary and secretive decisions about denying people services; we shouldn't let Google do so either.

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Let's start with the most trivial blacklist and work our way up. I'll save the biggest and baddest – one the public knows virtually nothing about but that gives Google an almost obscene amount of power over our economic well-being – until last.
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1. The autocomplete blacklist. This is a list of words and phrases that are excluded from the autocomplete feature in Google's search bar. The search bar instantly suggests multiple search options when you type words such as "democracy" or "watermelon," but it freezes when you type profanities, and, at times, it has frozen when people typed words like "torrent," "bisexual" and "penis." At this writing, it's freezing when I type "clitoris." The autocomplete blacklist can also be used to protect or discredit political candidates. As recently reported, at the moment autocomplete shows you "Ted" (for former GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz) when you type "lying," but it will not show you "Hillary" when you type "crooked" – not even, on my computer, anyway, when you type "crooked hill." (The nicknames for Clinton and Cruz coined by Donald Trump, of course.) If you add the "a," so you've got "crooked hilla," you get the very odd suggestion "crooked Hillary Bernie." When you type "crooked" on Bing, "crooked Hillary" pops up instantly. Google's list of forbidden terms varies by region and individual, so "clitoris" might work for you. (Can you resist checking?)






2. The Google Maps blacklist. This list is a little more creepy, and if you are concerned about your privacy, it might be a good list to be on. The cameras of Google Earth and Google Maps have photographed your home for all to see. If you don't like that, "just move," Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt said. Google also maintains a list of properties it either blacks out or blurs out in its images. Some are probably military installations, some the residences of wealthy people, and some – well, who knows? Martian pre-invasion enclaves? Google doesn't say.



3. The YouTube blacklist. YouTube, which is owned by Google, allows users to flag inappropriate videos, at which point Google censors weigh in and sometimes remove them, but not, according to a recent report by Gizmodo, with any great consistency – except perhaps when it comes to politics. Consistent with the company's strong and open support for liberal political candidates, Google employees seem far more apt to ban politically conservative videos than liberal ones. In December 2015, singer Susan Bartholomew sued YouTube for removing her openly pro-life music video, but I can find no instances of pro-choice music being removed. YouTube also sometimes acquiesces to the censorship demands of foreign governments. Most recently, in return for overturning a three-year ban on YouTube in Pakistan, it agreed to allow Pakistan's government to determine which videos it can and cannot post.
4. The Google account blacklist. A couple of years ago, Google consolidated a number of its products – Gmail, Google Docs, Google+, YouTube, Google Wallet and others – so you can access all of them through your one Google account. If you somehow violate Google's vague and intimidating terms of service agreement, you will join the ever-growing list of people who are shut out of their accounts, which means you'll lose access to all of these interconnected products. Because virtually no one has ever read this lengthy, legalistic agreement, however, people are shocked when they're shut out, in part because Google reserves the right to "stop providing Services to you … at any time." And because Google, one of the largest and richest companies in the world, has no customer service department, getting reinstated can be difficult. (Given, however, that all of these services gather personal information about you to sell to advertisers, losing one's Google account has been judged by some to be a blessing in disguise.)

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5. The Google News blacklist. If a librarian were caught trashing all the liberal newspapers before people could read them, he or she might get in a heap o' trouble. What happens when most of the librarians in the world have been replaced by a single company? Google is now the largest news aggregator in the world, tracking tens of thousands of news sources in more than thirty languages and recently adding thousands of small, local news sources to its inventory. It also selectively bans news sources as it pleases. In 2006, Google was accused of excluding conservative news sources that generated stories critical of Islam, and the company has also been accused of banning individual columnists and competing companies from its news feed. In December 2014, facing a new law in Spain that would have charged Google for scraping content from Spanish news sources (which, after all, have to pay to prepare their news), Google suddenly withdrew its news service from Spain, which led to an immediate drop in traffic to Spanish new stories. That drop in traffic is the problem: When a large aggregator bans you from its service, fewer people find your news stories, which means opinions will shift away from those you support. Selective blacklisting of news sources is a powerful way of promoting a political, religious or moral agenda, with no one the wiser.
6. The Google AdWords blacklist. Now things get creepier. More than 70 percent of Google's $80 billion in annual revenue comes from its AdWords advertising service, which it implemented in 2000 by infringing on a similar system already patented by Overture Services. The way it works is simple: Businesses worldwide bid on the right to use certain keywords in short text ads that link to their websites (those text ads are the AdWords); when people click on the links, those businesses pay Google. These ads appear on Google.com and other Google websites and are also interwoven into the content of more than a million non-Google websites – Google's "Display Network." The problem here is that if a Google executive decides your business or industry doesn't meet its moral standards, it bans you from AdWords; these days, with Google's reach so large, that can quickly put you out of business. In 2011, Google blacklisted an Irish political group that defended sex workers but which did not provide them; after a protest, the company eventually backed down.
In May 2016, Google blacklisted an entire industry – companies providing high-interest "payday" loans. As always, the company billed this dramatic move as an exercise in social responsibility, failing to note that it is a major investor in LendUp.com, which is in the same industry; if Google fails to blacklist LendUp (it's too early to tell), the industry ban might turn out to have been more of an anticompetitive move than one of conscience. That kind of hypocrisy has turned up before in AdWords activities. Whereas Google takes a moral stand, for example, in banning ads from companies promising quick weight loss, in 2011, Google forfeited a whopping $500 million to the U.S. Justice Department for having knowingly allowed Canadian drug companies to sell drugs illegally in the U.S. for years through the AdWords system, and several state attorneys general believe that Google has continued to engage in similar practices since 2011; investigations are ongoing.
7. The Google AdSense blacklist. If your website has been approved by AdWords, you are eligible to sign up for Google AdSense, a system in which Google places ads for various products and services on your website. When people click on those ads, Google pays you. If you are good at driving traffic to your website, you can make millions of dollars a year running AdSense ads – all without having any products or services of your own. Meanwhile, Google makes a net profit by charging the companies behind the ads for bringing them customers; this accounts for about 18 percent of Google's income. Here, too, there is scandal: In April 2014, in two posts on PasteBin.com, someone claiming to be a former Google employee working in their AdSense department alleged the department engaged in a regular practice of dumping AdSense customers just before Google was scheduled to pay them. To this day, no one knows whether the person behind the posts was legit, but one thing is clear: Since that time, real lawsuits filed by real companies have, according to WebProNews, been "piling up" against Google, alleging the companies were unaccountably dumped at the last minute by AdSense just before large payments were due, in some cases payments as high as $500,000.

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8. The search engine blacklist. Google's ubiquitous search engine has indeed become the gateway to virtually all information, handling 90 percent of search in most countries. It dominates search because its index is so large: Google indexes more than 45 billion web pages; its next-biggest competitor, Microsoft's Bing, indexes a mere 14 billion, which helps to explain the poor quality of Bing's search results.
Google's dominance in search is why businesses large and small live in constant "fear of Google," as Mathias Dopfner, CEO of Axel Springer, the largest publishing conglomerate in Europe, put it in an open letter to Eric Schmidt in 2014. According to Dopfner, when Google made one of its frequent adjustments to its search algorithm, one of his company's subsidiaries dropped dramatically in the search rankings and lost 70 percent of its traffic within a few days. Even worse than the vagaries of the adjustments, however, are the dire consequences that follow when Google employees somehow conclude you have violated their "guidelines": You either get banished to the rarely visited Netherlands of search pages beyond the first page (90 percent of all clicks go to links on that first page) or completely removed from the index. In 2011, Google took a "manual action" of a "corrective" nature against retailer J.C. Penney – punishment for Penney's alleged use of a legal SEO technique called "link building" that many companies employ to try to boost their rankings in Google's search results. Penney was demoted 60 positions or more in the rankings.
Search ranking manipulations of this sort don't just ruin businesses; they also affect people's opinions, attitudes, beliefs and behavior, as my research on the Search Engine Manipulation Effect has demonstrated. Fortunately, definitive information about Google's punishment programs is likely to turn up over the next year or two thanks to legal challenges the company is facing. In 2014, a Florida company called e-Ventures Worldwide filed a lawsuit against Google for "completely removing almost every website" associated with the company from its search rankings. When the company's lawyers tried to get internal documents relevant to Google's actions though typical litigation discovery procedures, Google refused to comply. In July 2015, a judge ruled that Google had to honor e-Ventures' discovery requests, and that case is now moving forward. More significantly, in April 2016, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the attorney general of Mississippi – supported in his efforts by the attorneys general of 40 other states – has the right to proceed with broad discovery requests in his own investigations into Google's secretive and often arbitrary practices.
This brings me, at last, to the biggest and potentially most dangerous of Google's blacklists – which Google's calls its "quarantine" list.
9. The quarantine list. To get a sense of the scale of this list, I find it helpful to think about an old movie – the classic 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still," which starred a huge metal robot named Gort. He had laser-weapon eyes, zapped terrified humans into oblivion and had the power to destroy the world. Klaatu, Gort's alien master, was trying to deliver an important message to earthlings, but they kept shooting him before he could. Finally, to get the world's attention, Klaatu demonstrated the enormous power of the alien races he represented by shutting down – at noon New York time – all of the electricity on earth for exactly 30 minutes. The earth stood still.
Substitute "ogle" for "rt," and you get "Google," which is every bit as powerful as Gort but with a much better public relations department – so good, in fact, that you are probably unaware that on Jan. 31, 2009, Google blocked access to virtually the entire internet. And, as if not to be outdone by a 1951 science fiction move, it did so for 40 minutes.
Impossible, you say. Why would do-no-evil Google do such an apocalyptic thing, and, for that matter, how, technically, could a single company block access to more than 100 million websites?

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The answer has to do with the dark and murky world of website blacklists – ever-changing lists of websites that contain malicious software that might infect or damage people's computers. There are many such lists – even tools, such as blacklistalert.org, that scan multiple blacklists to see if your IP address is on any of them. Some lists are kind of mickey-mouse – repositories where people submit the names or IP addresses of suspect sites. Others, usually maintained by security companies that help protect other companies, are more high-tech, relying on "crawlers" – computer programs that continuously comb the internet.
But the best and longest list of suspect websites is Google's, launched in May 2007. Because Google is crawling the web more extensively than anyone else, it is also in the best position to find malicious websites. In 2012, Google acknowledged that each and every day it adds about 9,500 new websites to its quarantine list and displays malware warnings on the answers it gives to between 12 and 14 million search queries. It won't reveal the exact number of websites on the list, but it is certainly in the millions on any given day.
In 2011, Google blocked an entire subdomain, co.cc, which alone contained 11 million websites, justifying its action by claiming that most of the websites in that domain appeared to be "spammy." According to Matt Cutts, still the leader of Google's web spam team, the company "reserves the right" to take such action when it deems it necessary. (The right? Who gave Google that right?)
And that's nothing: According to The Guardian, on Saturday, Jan. 31, 2009, at 2:40 pm GMT, Google blocked the entire internet for those impressive 40 minutes, supposedly, said the company, because of "human error" by its employees. It would have been 6:40 am in Mountain View, California, where Google is headquartered. Was this time chosen because it is one of the few hours of the week when all of the world's stock markets are closed? Could this have been another of the many pranks for which Google employees are so famous? In 2008, Google invited the public to submit applications to join the "first permanent human colony on Mars." Sorry, Marsophiles; it was just a prank.
When Google's search engine shows you a search result for a site it has quarantined, you see warnings such as, "The site ahead contains malware" or "This site may harm your computer" on the search result. That's useful information if that website actually contains malware, either because the website was set up by bad guys or because a legitimate site was infected with malware by hackers. But Google's crawlers often make mistakes, blacklisting websites that have merely been "hijacked," which means the website itself isn't dangerous but merely that accessing it through the search engine will forward you to a malicious site. My own website, http://drrobertepstein.com, was hijacked in this way in early 2012. Accessing the website directly wasn't dangerous, but trying to access it through the Google search engine forwarded users to a malicious website in Nigeria. When this happens, Google not only warns you about the infected website on its search engine (which makes sense), it also blocks you from accessing the website directly through multiple browsers – even non-Google browsers. (Hmm. Now that's odd. I'll get back to that point shortly.)

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The mistakes are just one problem. The bigger problem is that even though it takes only a fraction of a second for a crawler to list you, after your site has been cleaned up Google's crawlers sometimes take days or even weeks to delist you – long enough to threaten the existence of some businesses. This is quite bizarre considering how rapidly automated online systems operate these days. Within seconds after you pay for a plane ticket online, your seat is booked, your credit card is charged, your receipt is displayed and a confirmation email shows up in your inbox – a complex series of events involving multiple computers controlled by at least three or four separate companies. But when you inform Google's automated blacklist system that your website is now clean, you are simply advised to check back occasionally to see if any action has been taken. To get delisted after your website has been repaired, you either have to struggle with the company's online Webmaster tools, which are far from friendly, or you have to hire a security expert to do so – typically for a fee ranging between $1,000 and $10,000. No expert, however, can speed up the mysterious delisting process; the best he or she can do is set it in motion.
So far, all I've told you is that Google's crawlers scan the internet, sometimes find what appear to be suspect websites and put those websites on a quarantine list. That information is then conveyed to users through the search engine. So far so good, except of course for the mistakes and the delisting problem; one might even say that Google is performing a public service, which is how some people who are familiar with the quarantine list defend it. But I also mentioned that Google somehow blocks people from accessing websites directly through multiple browsers. How on earth could it do that? How could Google block you when you are trying to access a website using Safari, an Apple product, or Firefox, a browser maintained by Mozilla, the self-proclaimed "nonprofit defender of the free and open internet"?
The key here is browsers. No browser maker wants to send you to a malicious website, and because Google has the best blacklist, major browsers such as Safari and Firefox – and Chrome, of course, Google's own browser, as well as browsers that load through Android, Google's mobile operating system – check Google's quarantine list before they send you to a website. (In November 2014, Mozilla announced it will no longer list Google as its default search engine, but it also disclosed that it will continue to rely on Google's quarantine list to screen users' search requests.)



If the site has been quarantined by Google, you see one of those big, scary images that say things like "Get me out of here!" or "Reported attack site!" At this point, given the default security settings on most browsers, most people will find it impossible to visit the site – but who would want to? If the site is not on Google's quarantine list, you are sent on your way.
OK, that explains how Google blocks you even when you're using a non-Google browser, but why do they block you? In other words, how does blocking you feed the ravenous advertising machine – the sine qua non of Google's existence?
Have you figured it out yet? The scam is as simple as it is brilliant: When a browser queries Google's quarantine list, it has just shared information with Google. With Chrome and Android, you are always giving up information to Google, but you are also doing so even if you are using non-Google browsers. That is where the money is – more information about search activity kindly provided by competing browser companies. How much information is shared will depend on the particular deal the browser company has with Google. In a maximum information deal, Google will learn the identity of the user; in a minimum information deal, Google will still learn which websites people want to visit – valuable data when one is in the business of ranking websites. Google can also charge fees for access to its quarantine list, of course, but that's not where the real gold is.
Chrome, Android, Firefox and Safari currently carry about 92 percent of all browser traffic in the U.S. – 74 percent worldwide – and these numbers are increasing. As of this writing, that means Google is regularly collecting information through its quarantine list from more than 2.5 billion people. Given the recent pact between Microsoft and Google, in coming months we might learn that Microsoft – both to save money and to improve its services – has also started using Google's quarantine list in place of its own much smaller list; this would further increase the volume of information Google is receiving.
To put this another way, Google has grown, and is still growing, on the backs of some of its competitors, with end users oblivious to Google's antics – as usual. It is yet another example of what I have called "Google's Dance" – the remarkable way in which Google puts a false and friendly public face on activities that serve only one purpose for the company: increasing profit. On the surface, Google's quarantine list is yet another way Google helps us, free of charge, breeze through our day safe and well-informed. Beneath the surface, that list is yet another way Google accumulates more information about us to sell to advertisers.
You may disagree, but in my view Google's blacklisting practices put the company into the role of thuggish internet cop – a role that was never authorized by any government, nonprofit organization or industry association. It is as if the biggest bully in town suddenly put on a badge and started patrolling, shuttering businesses as it pleased, while also secretly peeping into windows, taking photos and selling them to the highest bidder.

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Consider: Heading into the holiday season in late 2013, an online handbag business suffered a 50 percent drop in business because of blacklisting. In 2009, it took an eco-friendly pest control company 60 days to leap the hurdles required to remove Google's warnings, long enough to nearly go broke. And sometimes the blacklisting process appears to be personal: In May 2013, the highly opinionated PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak wondered "When Did Google Become the Internet Police?" after both his website and podcast site were blacklisted. He also ran into the delisting problem: "It's funny," he wrote, "how the site can be blacklisted in a millisecond by an analysis but I have to wait forever to get cleared by the same analysis doing the same scan. Why is that?"
Could Google really be arrogant enough to mess with a prominent journalist? According to CNN, in 2005 Google "blacklisted all CNET reporters for a year after the popular technology news website published personal information about one of Google's founders" – Eric Schmidt – "in a story about growing privacy concerns." The company declined to comment on CNN's story.
Google's mysterious and self-serving practice of blacklisting is one of many reasons Google should be regulated, just as phone companies and credit bureaus are. The E.U.'s recent antitrust actions against Google, the recently leaked FTC staff report about Google's biased search rankings, President Obama's call for regulating internet service providers – all have merit, but they overlook another danger. No one company, which is accountable to its shareholders but not to the general public, should have the power to instantly put another company out of business or block access to any website in the world. How frequently Google acts irresponsibly is beside the point; it has the ability to do so, which means that in a matter of seconds any of Google's 37,000 employees with the right passwords or skills could laser a business or political candidate into oblivion or even freeze much of the world's economy.
Some degree of censorship and blacklisting is probably necessary; I am not disputing that. But the suppression of information on the internet needs to be managed by, or at least subject to the regulations of, responsible public officials, with every aspect of their operations transparent to all.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-06-22/google-is-the-worlds-biggest-censor-and-its-power-must-be-regulated


Does it mean anything or does it explain everything?

People under 30 have way weaker grips than they did a few decades ago

If you get a weak handshake from a millennial, don’t blame him or her. It could be a generational thing.
Researchers from the Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina found that men and women under 30 have weaker grip strength than they did back in 1985. Their work was published (paywall) in the Journal of Hand Therapy.
 
The researchers asked almost 240 men and women under 30—most 20 to 24 years old—to exert as much force as they could on a hand dynamometer, which measures grip force in pounds. On average, men’s hand strength decreased by 20 pounds, and women’s hand strength decreased by 10 pounds.


The culprit? Probably a combination of increased technology use at home and at work, and less manual labor. “As a society, we’re no longer agricultural or manufacturing,” Elizabeth Fain, an occupational therapist and lead author of the study, told NPR. “What we’re doing more now is technology-related, especially for millennials.
It’s possible that looser grip strength could translate into a weaker handshake. That would be bad news for millennials, because handshakes have long been an important measure we use (paywall) to size up someone we’ve just met. But the researchers were actually looking for ways to improve the current treatments for people who have suffered hand injuries, and were not focused on improving the firmness of handshakes.
Still, if you have a weak handshake, you can always try to improve your hand strength by using one of these contraptions. Better yet, follow these basic tips on delivering a good handshake—which it turns out is more about eye contact and sensitivity to the other’s cues than it is about massive grip strength.