Sabbath Manifesto is organizing a National Day of Unplugging from Sundown, Friday, March 19 to Sundown, Saturday, March 20. Join in fighting back against the tidal wave of technology taking over society and our lives. Are you sick of having conversations with people with their noses buried in an iPhone? Are you that person?
Put down the cell phone, stop the status updates on Facebook, shut down Twitter, sign out of e-mail and relax…
People across the nation will tune out to reclaim time to slow life down and reconnect with friends, family, the community and themselves for 24 hours, starting at sundown, Friday, March 19. The Sabbath Manifesto’s principles were created for individual styling, but for one day we are asking you to take on the challenge of Principle Number 1: AVOID TECHNOLOGY.
Smith County (East Texas) judges and juries have long had a reputation of meting out severe, some might say ridiculous, punishment for drug convictions. And Henry Wooten’s case is no exception: the 54-year-old Tyler man was sentenced to 35 years in prison for possessing slightly more than four ounces of pot. Wooten actually got off easy — the prosecutor asked the jury to give him 99 years. (We just hope TDCJ can free up room for this menace to society; maybe the state can release a child molester or serial arsonist to find a cell for Wooten.)
While the sentence may be asinine, we can’t help but feel Wooten brought much of this upon himself — mostly by choosing to be both a pothead and live in Tyler, when clearly that calls for an either/or scenario. But Wooten could have taken at least a few steps to minimize his chances of being busted so easily, and Hair Balls would like to lay out a few of these so that other lovers of the weed in Smith County can take heed.
The government of New Zealand has quietly implemented an internet filter and is urging the leading ISPs in the country to adopt the measure, in a move that would give the authorities the power to restrict whichever websites they see fit.
The New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) reportedly turned on the internet filter on February 1st without making any announcement, prompting critics to charge that the measure had been activated in stealth.
“It’s a sad day for the New Zealand internet” a spokesperson for online freedom lobby Tech Liberty told the leading New Zealand tech website Computerworld.
“It establishes the principle that the government can choose to arbitrarily set up a new censorship scheme and choose which material to block, with no reference to existing law,” the group states.
The filter is already being used by leading internet providers Maxnet and Watchdog, with the government refusing to comment on which other providers are set to take up the technology similar to that used by the Communist Chinese government and the ruling regime in Iran.
Tech Liberty says that it has received inside information that other companies including Telstra Clear, Telecom and Vodafone plan to implement the filter. Other companies including Orcon, Slingshot and Natcom have reportedly said they will not implement the filter, however, Orcon CEO Scott Bartlett has said it is not accurate to say that Orcon will not be taking part.
A New Zealand government spokesman commented “We anticipate all major ISPs will embrace this development as they have the many other filters they employ on the internet for a range of purposes.”
The websites were blocked at the ISP level by all companies using Asia Netcom for their international internet traffic. These companies included Woosh, Telecom, Slingshot and Orcon.
Orcon announced that the loss of access was due to a “technical issue”, yet the block was only removed after five days, following a raft of complaints.
Tech Liberty says that filtered material is being kept secret by the New Zealand government, a policy that contravenes established rules on censorship where the Chief Censor is required to publish decisions banning “offensive” material.
There is therefore no way of knowing whether Alex Jones’ websites were blocked as part of the government’s actions, however the timing of the so called “technical issue” seems an extraordinary coincidence.
The list revealed that blacklisted sites included “online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.”
The filter will even block web-based games deemed unsuitable for anyone over the age of fifteen, according to the Australian government.
Australian communication minister Stephen Conroy has said the government would be the final arbiter on what sites would be blacklisted under “refused classification.”
Similar internet filtering is being developed for use in the UK and the U.S. – we have covered in depth moves to regulate the internet in both countries.
The official justification for the filters is to block child pornography, however, as the watchdog group Electronic Frontiers Australia has pointed out, the law will also allow the government to block any website it desires while the pornographers can relatively easily skirt around the filters.
The ominous spectacle of major free speech websites going dark in supposedly democratic countries is a shocking portend of what the establishment wants to impose on a widespread basis. Only by screaming bloody murder in defense of the last true outpost of free speech – the Internet – and threatening boycotts and aggressive public relations campaigns can we counter the insidious move to silence the only remaining open forum of lawful dissent.
Authorities hid truth surrounding September 11 in the immediate aftermath of the attack, telling dying heroes “the air is safe to breathe,” so how on earth can asking what else they lied about be hurtful to the very victims the government stabbed in the back?
The $650 million dollar payout in the 9/11 toxic dust settlement serves as a stark reminder amidst an attempted establishment purge of any questions surrounding what happened on September 11, that the government did indeed conspire to lie about 9/11 in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
“Rescue and recovery workers who were exposed to a toxic brew of smoke and dust in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks have been awarded $650 million in a compensation deal struck in New York,” reports the London Times.
“Thousands of 9/11 heroes, including firefighters, police officers, construction experts and emergency workers, have filed lawsuits since 2003 but last night’s agreement is expected to put an end to years of legal battles.”
As 9/11 truth organizations have constantly emphasized as part of their efforts to aid 9/11 first responders, it was a government lie about 9/11 in the very days after the tragedy that set in motion an 8 and half year legal battle to obtain justice for the heroes of that fateful day.
However, the EPA’s own Office of the Inspector General later revealed that this was an outright lie. In August 2003 it was revealed that the government ordered the EPA to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers on September 12 it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available and Asbestos levels were known to be three times higher than national standards.
“Whitman’s deliberate and misleading statements to the press, where she reassured the public that the air was safe to breathe around lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that there would be no health risk presented to those returning to those areas, shocks the conscience,” Manhattan Federal Judge Deborah Batts wrote in February 2006.
Further documents obtained by CBS news in September 2007 revealed that Lower Manhattan was reopened a few weeks following the attack even though the air was not safe.
The two devastating memos, written by the U.S. and local governments, show officials knew the toxic soup created at ground zero was a deadly health hazard. Yet they sent workers into the pit and people back into their homes.
“Not only did they know it was unsafe, they didn’t heed the words of more experienced people that worked for the city and EPA,” said Joel Kupferman, with the group Environmental Justice Project.
The letter claimed that EPA-funded research on the toxicity of breathable alkaline dust at the site “falsified pH results” to make the substance appear benign, when it was, in reality, corrosive enough to cause first responders and other workers in lower Manhattan to later lose pulmonary functions and, in some cases, to die.
According to the 2003 EPA Inspector General’s investigation, Whitman conspired with the White House to lie about air quality at ground zero. Internal documents show it was Condoleezza Rice’s office that gave final approval to the infamous Environmental Protection Agency press releases days after 9/11 claiming the air around ground zero was “safe to breathe,” and that Whitman was merely following orders to mislead the public and ground zero workers.
If the government was happy to take actions they knew full well would lead to the deaths and crippling illnesses of thousands of the finest and most upstanding Americans in the country, how the hell can we close our eyes to the possibility that they could have had any involvement whatsoever in the actual 9/11 attack itself?
Now that it is public knowledge and proven that the government conspired to lie about the toxic dust, putting thousands of people’s lives at risk, and leading to the deaths of hundreds, why on earth should we so readily believe any other aspect of what they told us in the days and weeks after the tragic event?
9/11 truth organizations like We Are Change have been instrumental in aiding the thousands of ground zero heroes who were lied to and abandoned by their own government, and have spent years running charity and fundraising events in support of 9/11 first responders. And how did the media and the establishment react? By demonizing 9/11 truthers as dangerous extremists and terrorists.
While the establishment continues to attack and smear the mere act of questioning the official 9/11 story as hateful and upsetting to the victims of 9/11, the government has, since the day of the attack, stuck a knife in the back of those very victims and twisted it for the last 8 and a half years.
Today’s ruling serves as a stark reminder that challenging the official 9/11 story and demanding a new investigation is not only necessary for the country, it’s imperative in order to achieve justice for those who were killed on 9/11 and the heroes who paid with their lives trying to save others – people who were cruelly disregarded by a government that had resolved to lie about the immediate aftermath of the attack.
Lame joke? Apt metaphor? Sign of the apocalypse? Future trend? In an effort to gain Google’s favor in the hopes of winning a high-speed internet sweepstakes, Kansas’s capital city has temporarily renamed itself after the company. CNN reports:
In a formal proclamation Monday, Bunten announced his city will be known as “Google” — Google, Kansas.
The unusual move comes as several U.S. cities elbow for a spot in Google’s new “Fiber for Communities” program. The Web giant is going to install new Internet connections in unannounced locations, giving those communities Internet speeds 100 times faster than those elsewhere, with data transfer rates faster than 1 gigabit per second.
The following are previous humanoid / cryptid encounter reports received by various agencies worldwide:
UNFORTUNATE ENCOUNTER
Location/Date: Mafra, Santa Catarina, Brazil – Summer 1986 – 10:00 pm
After hearing unusual noises coming from outside in the front yard, a family of three including a 5-year old girl. Her mother opened the wooden door and her father armed with a piece of wood peeked outside to see a bizarre creature standing no more than 4 meters from the front door. After seeing the look of terror on her parents the little girl ran to the door and also saw the creature, which years later she described as about 3 meters in height, man-shaped, with a pair of huge wings covering its back, shiny black in color. It had large pointed ears, and brilliant red triangular shaped eyes. It carried in one hand an object resembling a “trident”. She did not remember seeing a mouth or nose.
The little girl screamed and the terrifying humanoid stared at her. Her mother then pulled her back from the door, not before she saw her stepfather fling the piece of wood at the creature….but, before it reached the figure, the piece of wood vanished in plain sight. The creature remained immobile. It then suddenly pulled what appeared to be some kind of cape over its body emitting something that the witness could now only describe as a “magnetic field” and vanished in front of the terrified family.
They never spoke about the matter and her mother always prohibited any discussion about the encounter. Strangely, soon after the encounter, her mother developed a rare type of cancer, which killed her in a very short time. The witness believes there was a connection with the encounter and her mother’s untimely death.
Source: Portal UFO Genesis, Brazil
NOTE: a man from Louisiana had a similar encounter during the same time period:
Location/Date: Metairie, Louisiana – Summer 1986 – late night
The witness was asleep when suddenly he woke shaking and convulsing uncontrollably. After a few minutes, he became calm….he opened his eyes and saw a tall figure standing over him, wearing a dark robe and hood. It was standing in front of the window and the light from the streetlight outside seemed to pass right through the being. It had round very large eyes, at least three times larger than normal and they glowed in a black radiance. Its eyes were totally black, but shone bright. The eyes and face had no expression and stared coldly at the witness. The entity never spoke or touched the witness. The witness was partially paralyzed and was struggled the get free. He was finally able to break free, leap to his feet and throw a punch at the figure….but it had vanished completely.
To this day, the witness experiences violent shaking tremors while sleeping.
Location/Date: Nildottie, South Australia – June 1979 – early evening
The two witnesses, Jack and Don, had been experiencing problems with their outside TV antenna being twisted around. The cause puzzled them. One evening, after cooking a meal, the Venetian blinds went up and down. Both went outside to look and were approached by ‘European’ looking people. They appeared to be wearing dark colored woolen jumpers and were both male and females. A bright light shone on them and both men felt calm.
They were then taken over to a mound of gravel adjacent to which a oval shaped craft was located. The men were escorted inside though they never remember entering a passageway. It was cold, so the beings agreed to escort them back to the house to get coats. They were not allowed to take food. They then returned to the craft and it took off. As it rose they saw the TV antenna on the house below twist around. They could see across the Murray River as they rose up.
Don, the younger of the two, was given strange, repetitive tests. Many hours later they were returned. Later, a neighbor visited and found them confused. The local police were immediately called in. The two men were taken to a local hospital and seemed to be suffering from yellow jaundice and eye problems. Both men, who were in their 30’s, eventually lost their sight and passed away within two years of the encounter. There was an autopsy performed on both men but an official cause of death was never released.
Source: “The Oz Files” through witness statements
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THE DEVIL MONKEY
NOTE: the following was forwarded to me a few years ago by a friend who has been collecting reports of what he describes as a ‘Devil Monkey’. Of course, “chupacabras” came to mind, but these descriptions were somewhat different. In at least one instance, this creature killed and fed on dogs and cats but did not bother livestock…Lon
On January 12, 2006, the witness walked into his home to find a devil-like creature confronting his 6 year old labrador dog. This creature seemed to be an unusual combination of a monkey, dog, and the devil. Suddenly, it sprang to its hind legs and ran, nearly pushing us over to get to the open door I had just come through. This creature had long fangs, monkey-like tail and extremely bright glowing eyes.
In another report, An Ohio woman driving through Roanoke, Virginia at about 2:30 a.m. reported a similar encounter in the late 1990’s while driving on a dark road at night and forced to take a detour due to road construction. She had driven past a road sign that read, “Red Wolf Crossing” close to Elizabeth City when a creature, which was not a wolf, leaped in front of her car.
The creature was all black with very short sleek fur, pointy ears and had a long thin tail. She described it as catlike, and yet not like any cat she had ever seen. The snout was flatter than a dog’s and more like a cat’s. The creature was very tall, because she saw it when it was standing on its hind legs and was easily 6 feet tall. She indicated its torso looked very much like that of a very thin man and its head resembled a large monkey but with a pointy beard. However, the creature’s hind legs were like a wild cat or dog. It was very muscular and thin.
Later, the woman checked with the US Game and Wildlife Department who told her there were no black wolves in the area, but suggested she had seen a feral dog (feral meaning “wild”) or a wolf-dog hybrid. But the woman was emphatic it was not a wolf or dog.
The woman explained the creature may have been on all fours just before leaping. The creature leaped with such force and height that it only took one bound to make it across both lanes of the highway. This indicates the creature leaped more than 18 feet or 6 meters to get across the road. Dogs and wolves do not leap this far in one jump. Even larger animals such as deer usually take several bounds to leap across a road.
These descriptions are somewhat similar to the infamous ‘Dover Demon’ which began at on April 21, 1977, in Dover, Massachusetts.
The House of Representatives Budget Committee on Monday will consider a reconciliation bill that Democrats hope clears the way for final congressional approval of an overhaul of U.S. healthcare, House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer said on Friday.
Representative Jim Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership, said he hopes a vote by the full chamber could be held on the measure within the next 10 days.
The White House announced earlier on Friday that President Barack Obama has postponed a trip to Asia so that he could stay in Washington and help fellow Democrats get healthcare across the finish line.
Obama has pushed hard for a final vote on the healthcare overhaul, a top domestic priority, which has ignited a long-running political brawl with Republicans and consumed Congress for the last nine months.
George W Bush’s top political adviser has said he was ‘proud’ of controversial techniques such as waterboarding, which he claimed broke the will of terrorist.
Karl Rove – known as the former president’s ‘brain’ – said he did not believe that the interrogation method amounted to torture.
In an interview with the BBC, he claimed that waterboarding – which simulates drowning – had helped prevent terrorist attacks.
‘I’m proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots,’ he said.
‘I am proud that we kept the world safer than it was by the use of these techniques. They are appropriate, they are in conformity with our international requirements and with US law.’
Four Afghan prisoners in the most notorious detention center, Bagram, have turned to a US court for help. They claim ignorance as to why they are being held.
“Like many people of Bagram, they have been held for more than a year, and two of our clients have been held for almost two years. We’ve talked to their family, we’ve talked to anyone we can get a hold of, and nobody has any idea of why they are being held. They have not been told as far as we know,” Manes told RT.
“I should say that this is not a first case – other Bagram detainees have brought their cases to the court,” he added. “And the federal court in the District of Columbia has held that at least some of them have the right to go to federal court to challenge their detention and to have a judge the United States review why they are lawfully held.”
MAN-MADE carbon emissions are staving off a new ice age, says a leading environmental scientist.
Climate-change expert Dr James Lovelock says the greenhouse gases that have warmed the planet are likely to prevent a big freeze that could last millions of years.
In a talk at London’s Science Museum Dr Lovelock said the balance of nature was in charge of the environment.
He said: “We’re just fiddling around. It is worth thinking that what we are doing in creating all these carbon emissions, far from being something frightful, is stopping the onset of a new ice age.
“If we hadn’t appeared on the earth, it would be due to go through another ice age and we can look at our part as holding that up.
“I hate all this business about feeling guilty about what we’re doing.
“We’re not guilty, we never intended to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s just something we did.”
In a brazen effort to drum out rising Tea Party voices, Obama’s Coffee Party has scheduled a “National Coffee Party Day” to be held on March 13 around the country.
“The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government,” the Coffee Party USA website explains. “We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.”
As noted in its mission statement, Obama’s Coffee Party will attempt to drown out Americans demanding the government adhere to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It will propagandize against Americans outraged by an out of control federal government that has socked future generations with an astronomical debt that will be paid to bankers. Obama’s Coffee Party is a thinly veiled attempt to support the bankster plan to bankrupt the country and turn it into a third world cesspool and slave labor gulag based on the China model.
“We are 100% grassroots,” declares the Coffee Party USA “About” page. “No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of civic engagement that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented.”
The claim is less than honest. On March 3, writing for Prison Planet, Paul Joseph Watson revealed that the Coffee Party USA’s founder is an Obama campaign operative. “Park campaigned for Obama in 2008 and was one of the organizers and operators of the influential United for Obamavideo channel at YouTube,” writes Watson. “She made over twenty promotional videos for the Obama campaign that drew tens of thousands of views.”
In addition, Annabel Park worked for The New York Times as a Strategy Analyst. Both the Times and the CIA’s favorite newspaper, The Washington Post, have published fawning accounts of Park’s effort to bring Americans back into the government fold. The New York Times acted as a propaganda outlet for neocon lies that ultimately resulted in the murder of over a million Iraqis.
In the above video, we are told the Coffee Party will work with all Americans to ensure respect for their “collective will” (not their god-given individual rights, but a socialist Borg hive collective will no doubt determined by limo libs in Washington).
As Watson notes, however, Park harbors animosity toward millions of Americans who either follow or participate in the Tea Party movement. “Park’s various tweets reveal that, far from being open to working with Tea Party activists, Park appears to have a vitriolic hatred of them,” he writes. Park refers to Tea Party activists and supporters as “teabaggers,” a pornographic term taken up by the corporate media, most notably Keith Olbermann who works for MSNBC, the state propaganda organ owned by the death merchant General Electric, a “defense” contractor that sells attack helicopters and various murder accouterments to the Pentagon.
“The Coffee Party simply is part of the perpetual Obama campaign, a means by which to subvert the real grassroots Tea Party movement by co-opting part of the message, but in a way which supports keeping Obama in power,” writes William A. Jacobson in a blog post aptly entitled “Coffee Party Parasites.” Jacobson says the Coffee Party is a political parasite which presents itself as something it is not.
The Obama Coffee Party is basically a sweep-up operation designed to marginalize those of us not co-opted by Glenn Beck and the neocon Republicans who hijacked the real Tea Party months ago. The neocon Tea Party now insists supporters follow the Republican party platform of more war and unending favors for plutocrats and Wall Street mobsters and drug money launderers.
Obama operative Park’s Coffee Party represents the “collective will” of the bankers and one-world globalists who dominate the Obama administration.
“In fact, when you examine the Obama leadership team, you stumble into a smorgasbord of politically elite favorites, tied to organizations that promote international management,” writes Carl Teichrib. The Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council On Foreign Relations are well represented in Obama’s inner core.
Timothy F. Geithner is a former Treasury boss at the influential New York Fed. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was director of a CFR Task Force on trade policy. He’s also been part of the Bilderberg Group and is connected to Rand Corporation, a premier military-industrial “think-tank” that has lobbied the Pentagon to start World War Three and thus “save” the economy Geithner and his cronies helped destroy at the behest of the bankers.
Lawrence Summers is a former economist at the globalist loan sharking operation, the World Bank, notorious for imposing “austerity” measures on third world countries and thus starving untold numbers to death or at minimum condemning them to lives of unspeakable misery. He is a former Secretary of the Treasury. Summers is directly linked to the Council on Foreign Relations, having chaired the CFR’s Independent Task Force on Transatlantic Relations, along with Henry Kissinger, according to Teichrib’s research. He has also been an active member of the Trilateral Commission.
Paul Volcker, who heads up Obama’s Economic Recovery Committee, was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve during the Jimmy Carter presidency. Volcker is an advocate for a single global currency and an international monetary structure. He is a founding member of the Trilateral Commission, a member of the CFR, and is intimately associated with the bankster elite through the Rockefeller family. “Volcker thinks Americans have been living above their means for too long,” The Los Angeles Times reported in December, 2008. “It is the United States as a whole that became addicted to spending and consuming beyond its capacity to produce,” Volcker told the Economic Club of New York. Mr. Volcker failed to mention that his bankster buddies and their transnational corporations exported that capacity to Asian slave gulags years ago.
Big time globalist and Rockefeller minion Zbigniew Brzezinski supported Obama during the election, as did master war criminal and Rockefeller associate Henry Kissinger. “I think that his task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period, when really a ‘new world order’ can be created,” Kissinger said from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last January.
Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Richard Haass, Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke, George Mitchell, Robert Gates, Arne Duncan, Ray LaHood, Janet Napolitano, Eric Holder, General James Jones, Leon Panetta, Rahm Emanuel — the list is long — these are only a sampled taste of the sort of insiders, CFR, Trilateral, and Bilderberg members working directly for the Obama administration against the “collective” interest of the American people.
Annabel Park and the contrivance known as the Coffee Party USA work indirectly for these insiders and the global elite.
If you’d like to participate in the real Coffee Party, follow this link. Updates coming soon.
Moscow says the United States and NATO’s inaction in fighting drug trafficking in Afghanistan, translates into an “undeclared war” against Russia.
Russia’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin slammed the alliance for its loose surveillance on drug trafficking out of Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported on Friday.
Afghanistan produces some 90 percent of the world’s opium. The Afghan drugs enter Russia and Central Asia before reaching Western Europe.
Rogozin said the drugs imported from Afghanistan kill 30,000 people in Russia annually, adding that this amounted to “an undeclared war against our country.”
Moscow as well argues that the drug production within the Afghan borders has increased ten times since the 2001 US-led invasion of the country.
There are currently more than 100,000 US-led troopers staged in Afghanistan. The war-weary nation is as well hit with unprecedented levels of violence which is seen as a militant reaction to the sprawling military presence.
A teenager in Littleton, Colorado, was arrested and spent eight hours in jail for failing to return an overdue DVD to a local library.
Nineteen-year-old Aaron Henson was pulled over for speeding on Interstate 70 last month, and found himself in prison after police found a failure-to-appear warrant out for his arrest.
Henson hadn’t returned House of the Flying Daggers, a Chinese DVD valued at just over $30 that he had borrowed from the library.
“I was just shocked,” Henson told ABC News. “I was like ‘What? I’ve got a what now?’”
Henson says when he called his parents from jail, he had a hard time convincing his mother he was telling the truth. She told him there is no such thing as “book police.”
Though the charge against Hanson was dropped and the city now says it won’t have people arrested over $30 DVDs, the incident showcases the extreme lengths some municipalities — faced with declining revenues — are going to in order to plug budget holes. The city of Littleton says it lost $7,800 last year in library materials that weren’t returned.
National Public Radio notes that cities are coming up with “novel ways” to raise revenues, including “new charges for responding to 911 calls to taxes and fees on sodas, bottled water, groceries and grocery bags.”
ABC News reports that Littleton is by no means the only city that has taken to issuing summonses for missing library materials. “Similar arrests and warrants have been reported in Washington state, Iowa and Texas,” it states.
In Hanson’s case, the arrest was for failure to appear, not for theft. The city of Littleton says it sent Hanson repeated notices in the mail and left phone messages for him, requesting that he return the DVD. Hanson says he failed to return it because he accidentally packed it while moving last fall. The move, he says, is why he didn’t receive the library’s messages.
Because he never received notice of the summons, the arrest was “a clear violation of his right to due process,” Hanson’s father, Allen Hanson, said.
KMGH in Denver reports that the arrest cost Hanson’s family $460 in all — $200 for bail, $200 to get his car out of the impound lot, and $60 for court costs. The city says it will reimburse the Hansons, and Littleton Mayor Doug Clark has announced a change in the city’s policy, saying that “we’re not going to arrest people who don’t return $30 DVDs.”
“Cities and states are going mostly after these kinds of sin taxes,” Justin H. Higginbottom, an analyst with conservative research group Tax Foundation, told NPR. “They’ll target a politically unpopular industry and go after them to raise revenue. It’s much easier to do that than to raise rates on sales taxes.”
NPR’s Alan Greenblatt reports that “one reason sin taxes are easier to sell is that they aren’t presented purely as ways to raise money. Mayors like to stress the idea that they’re helping to curb bad behaviors.”
telegraph – The Goliath beetle, from Africa, is housed at London’s Natural History Museum.
Staff at the museum became puzzled by small circular holes in the giant bug’s tough carapace.
But it was only when cameras started rolling for a BBC documentary on the museum that the mystery was solved.
Forensic scientist Heather Bonney confirmed the beetle had been shot.
Her investigation identified entry and exit wounds, and X-rays revealed a shotgun pellet still inside the the body.
The positioning of the wounds showed the beetle was in flight when it was bagged, but the pellets hit the creature’s back and not its underside.
Experts think it must have been performing one of the high aerobatic displays that make Goliath beetles notoriously difficult to catch.
Beetle curator Max Barclay said: ”Our collections are full of mysteries and every year scientists are discovering more about them and using them as evidence to help understand the world around us.
”The number of new discoveries just waiting to be made in these collections is astronomical, and every one of the museum’s 70 million specimens has a story to tell.”
Goliath beetles belong to the scarab family and are one of the largest insects on Earth, growing up to 4.5 inches long and weighing as much as 3.5 ounces.
The Natural History Museum specimen is 3.9 inches long and described as being about the size of ”a large sparrow or small blackbird”.
Newsweek reports on a shocking archeological find in Turkey — an ancient temple that is far, far older than anyone would have guessed:
A revolution in the story of human origins…a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built.
The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruin predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.
In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
The marketing executive who came up with Coca-Cola’s popular slogan in 1908 most likely never expected it would be taken so literally. However, a hundred years ago there probably weren’t many who imagined a term like “water wars” could exist in a region that experiences annual monsoons.
On February 25 a complaint was filed in the New York Supreme Court against the The Coca-Cola Company alleging that they knew about and sought to cover up human rights abuses in Guatemala. While that trial gets started, the company’s controversial practices in India continue involving the over-exploitation of limited water resources and the contamination of groundwater supplies. In response to public outcry the soft drink company is now championing itself as a longtime environmental leader and the business community is eager to advertise their claim. Yesterday CNN Money reported that:
Coke has been a leader when it comes to environmental issues: It is aiming to be water neutral — meaning every drop of water used by the company will be replenished — by 2020.
This would come as a surprise to the Plachimada community in the State of Kerala. Ever since Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant on their land in 2000 they have been faced with chronic drought and polluted water. In 2006 these residents of a small impoverished community in southern India began a pitched campaign to evict Coca-Cola from their land which led to fierce battles with local authorities.
Very few Americans realize there exists a large network of far left philanthropists and foundations in America dedicated to destroying the American way of life, our Christian-based culture and our free enterprise system. They seek to remove America from its constitutional foundations and move it toward a European-style socialism. Much of this effort is coordinated by a little known group called the Tides Foundation and its related group, the Tides Center.
The Strategic Principles of the Tides Foundation
Over the course of its 33 year history, the Tides network has given hundreds of millions of dollars to anti-free enterprise groups, gun control groups, anti-private property groups, abortion rights groups, homosexual groups, groups engaged in voter fraud, anti-military groups, and organizations that seek to destroy America’s constitutional basis. All told, over 100 leftist organizations have received funding from one of the two Tides groups.
Not surprisingly, this network of anti-American groups played a key role in electing Barack Obama by using classic propaganda techniques in making false allegations about Bush (he lied regarding WMDs, he stole the election in Florida, he knew in advance about 9/11, etc, etc.) and created the impression that Bush and by extension, the GOP, was corrupt. Obama, of course, was portrayed as the reformer who would save America from this corruption.
Millions of Americans fell for this mythology and so without being openly partisan, this vast network of far left groups, along with its media allies, was able to manipulate American public opinion during the last election cycle. Meanwhile, anyone who tried to reveal Obama’s real agenda, his role in the corrupt Chicago political machine, his socialist political associations, or his soft spot for Middle Eastern terrorists was labeled a kook by this same network.
The amount of funding the Tides Foundation and Tides Center provides the hard left is unprecedented. Indeed, its financial disclosures show that the Tides Center has raised between $48 and $71 million each year since 1998 and the bulk of this revenue is contributed back to far left groups. The closely-aligned Tides Foundation has reported revenues of between $59 and $77 million every year since 2002. The two tax exempt groups are supposed to be non-partisan, but they are certainly extremely political and they push the envelope regarding what non-profit groups are allowed to do politically. All together, both Tides groups have contributed over $500 million to the organized left.
The list of hard-left causes is long and there is not enough space to review them all. But here’s a brief review of a few of them:
starexponent – A man helping ready a Triangle, VA home for the rental market found two tombstones in its basement Wednesday.
For the last week, Edward Grogg has been doing handy work at the a one-story home on Triangle Street, helping landlord Elliot Diamond get the 60-year-old house ready to be rented again, after two “unfavorable” tenants abruptly left with little notice two weeks ago.
While in the basement, Grogg said he saw slabs of concrete lying on the floor.
“When I picked them up I could feel the grooves, so I took them and turned them around, leaned them against the wall and then I realized they were real tombstones,“ said Grogg. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I was kinda spooked.“
According to Grogg, the tombstone discovery is the latest in a series of eerie events in this house, including a light bulb that inexplicably turned on while power was shut off to the house.
The headstones of Mary J. Fitton, alive between 1880 and 1935, and David M. Ingram, alive between 1957 and 1980, are now in a police evidence room in Woodbridge. Grogg called authorities on Diamond’s advice and reported what he’d found.
Prince William library historian Don Wilson said a check of local records showed Fitton lived with her husband, Hanson Fitton, on Saint Asaph Street Alexandria before her death on Oct. 6, 1935. Social Security death records showed Ingram lived in Washington in 1971.
Wilson said both people could be buried in Alexandria, and that their headstones could have been stolen or replaced.
“Usually, when we find a tombstone in Prince William County, it has been removed from a grave site and replaced with a new one, after the stone begins to show wear,“ he said.
Investigators do not know how the stones got into the house, but they’re trying to find out.
Diamond bought the house as an investment property in 2003, and said his last tenants were a man and a woman who argued frequently. He said the man left without notice, and the woman weeks later surrendered the key to the house, leaving no contact information behind.
“The headstones weren’t there when I was in the basement about a year ago,“ said Diamond. “The police are going to have to track down where these guys went and ask them about it if they are going to find out who they belong to.“
While Diamond said he doesn’t know about any paranormal activity in his house, Grogg said the tenants previous to the man and woman who abruptly left moved out because they heard strange voices, doors slamming and footsteps on the wooden floors where no one was walking.
Grogg lives next door with his fiancée, Sabrina Ham, on the first floor of a house also owned by Diamond and below is a woman who helps Diamond manage his properties. For a few dollars off the rent, Grogg agreed to help Diamond clean the vacated house.
Three days ago, Grogg was doing electrical work there and had shut off power to the house. While back at his home, he saw a light on in the vacant house, and so did the property manager, who asked him about it.
“She said ‘Look inside the house, the light’s on,‘“ said Grogg. He pointed Wednesday to a single round light bulb that hangs in a light fixture above the kitchen, saying it had inexplicably turned itself on.
With much of the cleaning nearly finished, Grogg said he will not volunteer to paint the house or do any other side jobs there. He said he’ll leave them to someone else.
A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years.
The Solar System is surrounded by thousands of stars, but until recently it wasn’t at all clear where they were all heading.
In 1997, however, astronomers published the Hipparcos Catalogue giving detailed position and velocity measurements of some 100,000 stars in our neighbourhood, all gathered by the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos spacecraft. It’s fair to say that the Hipparcos data has revolutionised our understanding of the ‘hood.
In particular, this data allowed astronomers to work out which stars we’d been closer to in the past and which we will meet in the future. It turns out that 156 stars fall into this category and that the Sun has a close encounter with another star (meaning an approach within 1 parsec) every 2 million years or so.
In 2007, however, the Hipparcos data was revised and other measurements of star velocities have since become available. How do these numbers change the figures?
Today, Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg gives us the answer. He’s combined the Hipparcos data with several new databases and found an additional nine stars that have either had a close encounter with the Sun or are going to.
But he’s also made a spectacular prediction. The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.
Of course, trajectories are difficult to calculate when the data is poor so nobody has really been sure about what’s going to happen.
With numerous states facing significant budget shortages, legislators and voters across the country this month have been giving overwhelming support to measures that would reduce the penalty for possession of small amounts of marijuana to a civil fine.
Yesterday in New Hampshire, the state House voted 214-137 to pass H.B. 1653, a bill that would reduce the penalty for possession of up to a quarter-ounce of marijuana with a civil fine of up to $200.
In Hawaii, the state Senate voted 22 to 3 on March 2 to pass SB 2450, a bill that would eliminate criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marijuana and replace them with a civil fine of up to $300 for a first offense and $500 for a subsequent offense.
And in Vermont, 72% of voters in Montpelier approved a non-binding ordinance asking the state legislature “to pass a bill to replace criminal penalties with a civil fine for adults who possess a small amount of marijuana.”
Craig Malisow writes on 
Newsweek
