Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Infowars.com
June 12, 2010
Appearing on the Alex Jones Show earlier in the week, pastor Lindsey Williams said that gases — Hydrogen Sulfide, Benzene, Methylene Chloride, and other toxic gases — pose a greater risk to human health than the presence of oil washing up on Gulf of Mexico beaches. Williams said the EPA is not reporting on the amount of gases escaping from the BP oil gusher. However, the second video below suggests the EPA has released data on the amount of Hydrogen Sulfide and Benzene in the air in Louisiana.
On May 14 WWLTV in New Orleans ran a report on the levels of Hydrogen Sulfide and Benzene in the air at that time. 5-10 parts per billion is the established allowable amount for Hydrogen Sulfide. WWLTV reported that on May 3 the level was recorded at 1,192 ppb. Pastor Williams said his sources report the level detected in the Gulf at 1,200 ppb and the amount poses a serious and even fatal health risk.
“The media coverage of the BP oil disaster to date has focused largely on the threats to wildlife, but the latest evaluation of air monitoring data shows a serious threat to human health from airborne chemicals emitted by the ongoing deep water gusher,” the Institute for Southern Studies blog reported on May 10.
Today the Louisiana Environmental Action Network released its analysis of air monitoring test results by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA’s air testing data comes from Venice, a coastal community 75 miles south of New Orleans in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish.
The findings show that levels of airborne chemicals have far exceeded state standards and what’s considered safe for human exposure.
For instance, hydrogen sulfide has been detected at concentrations more than 100 times greater than the level known to cause physical reactions in people. Among the health effects of hydrogen sulfide exposure are eye and respiratory irritation as well as nausea, dizziness, confusion and headache.
The concentration threshold for people to experience physical symptoms from hydrogen sulfide is about 5 to 10 parts per billion. But as recently as last Thursday, the EPA measured levels at 1,000 ppb. The highest levels of airborne hydrogen sulfide measured so far were on May 3, at 1,192 ppb.
From the H2S Safety Factsheet:
Health Effects of Hydrogen Sulfide
H2S is classed as a chemical asphyxiant, similar to carbon monoxide and cyanide gases. It inhibits cellular respiration and uptake of oxygen, causing biochemical suffocation. Typical exposure symptoms include:
L
O
W
0 – 10 ppm
Irritation of the eyes, nose and throat
M
O
D
10 – 50 ppm
Headache
Dizziness
Nausea and vomiting
Coughing and breathing difficulty
H
I
G
H
50 – 200 ppm
Severe respratory tract irritation
Eye irritation / acute conjunctivitis
Shock
Convulsions
Coma
Death in severe cases
Prolonged exposures at lower levels can lead to bronchitis, pneumonia, migraine headaches, pulmonary edema, and loss of motor coordination.
Health Effects of Exposure to Benzene (from the CDC):
- The major effect of benzene from long-term exposure is on the blood. (Long-term exposure means exposure of a year or more.) Benzene causes harmful effects on the bone marrow and can cause a decrease in red blood cells, leading to anemia. It can also cause excessive bleeding and can affect the immune system, increasing the chance for infection.
- Some women who breathed high levels of benzene for many months had irregular menstrual periods and a decrease in the size of their ovaries. It is not known whether benzene exposure affects the developing fetus in pregnant women or fertility in men.
- Animal studies have shown low birth weights, delayed bone formation, and bone marrow damage when pregnant animals breathed benzene.
- The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has determined that benzene causes cancer in humans. Long-term exposure to high levels of benzene in the air can cause leukemia, cancer of the blood-forming organs.
People who breathe in high levels of benzene may develop the following signs and symptoms within minutes to several hours:
* Drowsiness
* Dizziness
* Rapid or irregular heartbeat
* Headaches
* Tremors
* Confusion
* Unconsciousness
* Death (at very high levels)
People Fall ill in BP Spill Cleanup, May 27, 2010 (from Democracy Now)
The government is passing the buck on illnesses related to exposure to BP. “Getting statistics on worker illness related to the Gulf oil spill is proving to be difficult, as federal agencies continually refer requests either to another federal agency or to BP,” ProPublica reported on June 10. “When we asked for statistics on health complaints related to the Gulf spill, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us to ask the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA has told us to ask BP. The Environmental Protection Agency recommended via e-mail that we contact someone at the Department of Homeland Security.”
Do you think BP will address this serious health issue? The corporation will not even allow the media to report in oil washing up on beaches.
Government and corporations are not in the business of protecting our health. Corporations are in the business making as much money as possible and government is in the business of making sure corporations make as much money as possible. The health and welfare of the American people does not figure into the equation.
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By Jim Douglass
According to a Memphis jury’s verdict on December 8,1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King’s murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.
I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial’s second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson’s trial was the trial of the century. Clinton’s trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who’s here?"
What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from inspiration at the courage of the Kings, their lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper, and the witnesses, to amazement at the government’s carefully interwoven plot to kill Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers that be in the spring of 1968.
In the complaint filed by the King family, "King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators," the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies — particularly the FBI and Army intelligence — with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.
Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.
But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government’s "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King’s martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.
We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.
Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper’s progress as James Earl Ray’s attorney in uncovering Jowers’s role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police "wouldn’t be there that night."
In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $l00,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim’s Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.
As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto’s involvement in King’s slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:l5 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto’s warehouse in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony."
Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto’s in the late 1970’s, testified that Liberto had told her he "had Martin Luther King killed." Addison’s son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.
"[Liberto] said, ‘I didn’t kill the nigger but I had it done.’ I said, ‘What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?’ He says, ‘Ahh, he wasn’t nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man…a setup man.’"
The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King’s son Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim’s Grill. He said the planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough ...
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A Chicago nonprofit on which President Obama served as paid director provided startup capital and later funding to Midwest Academy, an activist organization described as teaching tactics of direct action, confrontation and intimidation, WND has learned.
Also, in 1998, Obama participated on a panel discussion alongside Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth, an extremist organizer and dedicated disciple of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky
.
The Woods Fund, a nonprofit on which Obama served as paid director from 1999 to December 2002, provided startup funding and later capital to the Midwest Academy. WND first reported Obama sat on the Woods Fund board alongside William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization.
Midwest was co-founded by Booth's husband, Paul Booth, a founder and the former national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society, the radical 1960s anti-war movement from which Ayers' Weathermen splintered.
In 1999, Booth's Midwest Academy received $75,000 from the Woods Fund. In 2002, with Obama still serving on the Woods Fund, Midwest received another $23,500 for its Young Organizers Development Program.
Midwest describes itself as "one of the nation's oldest and best-known schools for community organizations, citizen organizations and individuals committed to progressive social change."
It later morphed into a national organizing institute for an emerging network of organizations known as Citizen Action. Midwest teaches Alinsky tactics of community organizing.
Discover the Networks describes Midwest as "teach[ing] tactics of direct action, confrontation, and intimidation."
In August 1998, Obama participated in a panel discussion following the opening performance in Chicago of the play "The Love Song of Saul Alinsky," a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "bringing to life one of America's greatest community organizers."
Obama participated in the discussion alongside other Alinskyites, including Booth, political analyst Aaron Freeman, Don Turner of the Chicago Federation of Labor and Northwestern University history professor Charles Paine.
"Alinsky had so much fire burning within," stated local actor Gary Houston, who portrayed Alinsky in the play. "There was a lot of complexity to him. Yet he was a really cool character."
Booth herself is a notorious radical community activist and self-described dedicated disciple of Alinsky, of whom she says: "Alinsky is to community-organizing as Freud is to psychoanalysis."
Booth's vision of uniting various left-leaning organizations and factions has also been the subject of her two books: "Toward a Radical Movement and Citizen Action" and "The New American Populism."
Former 1960s radical and FrontPageMagazine Editor David Horowitz describes Alinsky as the "communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States."
Horowitz writes in his 2009 pamphlet "Barack Obama's Rules for Revolution. The Alinsky Model":
"The strategy of working within the system until you can accumulate enough power to destroy it was what sixties radicals called 'boring from within.' .... Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse."
As WND reported, Obama approached Northwestern University professor John L. McKnight – a loyal student of Alinsky's radical tactics – to pen a letter of recommendation for him when he applied to Harvard Law School. Under the tutelage of McKnight and other hardcore students of Alinsky, Obama said he got the "best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School."
In a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, Alinsky's son praised Obama for stirring up the masses at the 2008 Democratic National Convention "Saul Alinsky style," saying, "Obama learned his lesson well."
The letter, signed L. David Alinsky, closed with, "I am proud to see that my father's model for organizing is being applied successfully."
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Humans, in the present state, are creatures of the raw and unbridled power of nature. We enter what appears to be a harsh world through a struggle that not more than one hundred years ago could end, many times, with the death of either the child or the mother.
We survive, and our instinct to survive is slapped across our face from the moment of inception. It is the nature of things for mankind to fight through life in order to maintain this fragile existence.
Every moment of life, whether we would like to believe it or not, is punctuated by the fact that this could be our last. The body is after all a machine with a limited life expectancy that does not come with a warranty from the manufacturer.
Survival of the fittest comes with the instruction booklet that is stuffed away in the back of our minds. That is the means by which we go from day to day, and live out this experience. It is neither good, nor bad, but simply a part of the being that you and I live as.
Of course there are many aspects to our personalities. There is goodness, as there is evil. There is kindness, as there is greed. We are loving creatures, but some of us could care less about our fellow man. We are sometimes apathetic to the plight of others. This is the one characteristic that will eventually lead us to our own destruction.
Apathy does not exist in the minds of the caring, or so they believe. In truth, those who have based their existence on ‘fighting the good fight’ can’t recognize that they are being apathetic for if they did it would destroy part of their idealism. I am fighting for you, but I can’t be bothered helping you because it’s not within my power to do so. In actuality, if you recognized the fight to begin with, there are more than enough resources.
America, and the world are on the verge of a great awakening, or so I’ve been told. Maybe I’m not speaking to the same people, but those I do cannot fathom the notion that the government is corrupt, or that questioning the government is the true action of a patriot. As Thomas Paine stated, “It is the duty of every Patriot to protect his country from its government.”
I was recently very shocked when someone told me that the government does not lie. I still don’t know if this person could possibly have been serious, but in the context of what came next I was convinced of his belief, or rather his indoctrination.
So, we are creatures of survival who are sometimes apathetic, sometimes caring, not all the time wary of our responsibility, and most assuredly not all that knowledgeable.
There are many groups out there that are participating in protests, and marches geared toward what they believe will be a peaceful revolution, something that has never been accomplished in known history. They will tell you, ‘We will never use violence’, which is of course a very noble stand.
The beatings, incarcerations, and the imprisonment of those who participate in protests, or just the innocents caught up in governments desire to maintain its power structure seems never to be thought of in terms of violence. Forgive my ignorance in the matter, but peaceful would denote a move that is debate, resolution, and conclusion without the acts of aggression on either side. Am I wrong in being such a purist? Should I turn my head when some young man, or woman is sentenced to years in prison because the government is fighting the fictitious ‘war on drugs’? Should I look away as the caskets come home from the battlefield? Should I shrug my shoulders, and laud the fact that we are peaceful as the thousands of young men we send off to foreign entanglements come home crippled and distraught?
What we are now engaged in is pacifism. We, that is to say those who claim they would never use violence, are willing to endure any type of physical pain, even death rather than to take up arms to defend. One of our biggest issues is that we do not understand the definition of our own course.
This is when you will understand the truth becomes clear because once you’ve had your head put upon by some rather large policeman wearing riot gear, who is looking to express his power, buddy you realize that you are on your own. Remember, we will never use violence, and we are not removing any of these people from public office because we simply are devoid of any power that remains from the origins of this nation.
The courts have given the police, prosecutors, judges, and the general government immunity. They have redefined police powers to mean the ability of the state to impose rules and regulations outside the rule of law, rather than its original definition of defending, and protecting the rights of the individual. As the judicial system erodes our rights, and the ability to fight back, we become weaker, and no amount of peaceful demonstration will deter those who seek unlimited power.
Patrick Henry stated, “They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?”
Are Mr. Henry’s words outdated, and unreasonable for an American who perceives that he/she is more civilized than our Founders? Are his words beyond the scope of what is taking place each and every day in this country?
The American people’s will to survive using the skills that were given to them have been supplanted ...
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