Author Archives: marcia

USA Concern over Surveillance Trumps Terrorism

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  • Major opinion shifts, in the US and Congress, on NSA surveillance and privacy

    Pew finds that, for the first time since 9/11, Americans are now more worried about civil liberties abuses than terrorism

NSA headquarters

The NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: EPA

Numerous polls taken since our reporting on previously secret NSA activities first began have strongly suggested major public opinion shifts in how NSA surveillance and privacy are viewed. But a new comprehensive poll released over the weekend weekend by Pew Research provides the most compelling evidence yet of how stark the shift is.

Among other things, Pew finds that “a majority of Americans – 56% – say that federal courts fail to provide adequate limits on the telephone and internet data the government is collecting as part of its anti-terrorism efforts.” And “an even larger percentage (70%) believes that the government uses this data for purposes other than investigating terrorism.” Moreover, “63% think the government is also gathering information about the content of communications.” That demonstrates a decisive rejection of the US government’s three primary defenses of its secret programs: there is adequate oversight; we’re not listening to the content of communication; and the spying is only used to Keep You Safe™.

But the most striking finding is this one:

“Overall, 47% say their greater concern about government anti-terrorism policies is that they have gone too far in restricting the average person’s civil liberties, while 35% say they are more concerned that policies have not gone far enough to protect the country. This is the first time in Pew Research polling that more have expressed concern over civil liberties than protection from terrorism since the question was first asked in 2004.“

For anyone who spent the post-9/11 years defending core liberties against assaults relentlessly perpetrated in the name of terrorism, polling data like that is nothing short of shocking. This Pew visual underscores what a radical shift has occurred from these recent NSA disclosures:

pew NSA

Perhaps more amazingly still, this shift has infected the US Congress. Following up on last week’s momentous House vote – in which 55% of Democrats and 45% of Republicans defied the White House and their own leadership to vote for the Amash/Conyers amendment to ban the NSA’s bulk phone records collection program – the New York Times has an article this morning which it summarizes on its front page this way:

nyt nsa

The article describes how opposition to the NSA, which the paper says was recently confined to the Congressional “fringes”, has now “built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable, drawing support from Republican and Democratic leaders, attracting moderates in both parties and pulling in some of the most respected voices on national security in the House.”

It describes how GOP Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner – a prime author of the Patriot Act back in 2001 and a long-time defender of even the most extremist War on Terror policies – has now become a leading critic of NSA overreach. He will have “a bill ready when Congress returned from its August recess that would restrict phone surveillance to only those named as targets of a federal terrorism investigation, make significant changes to the secret court that oversees such programs and give businesses like Microsoft and Google permission to reveal their dealings before that court.”

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren is quoted this way: “There is a growing sense that things have really gone a-kilter here”. Yesterday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Democratic Sen Dick Durbin, one of Obama’s closest Senate allies, said that the recently revealed NSA bulk record collection program “goes way too far”.

The strategy for the NSA and its Washington defenders for managing these changes is now clear: advocate their own largely meaningless reform to placate this growing sentiment while doing nothing to actually rein in the NSA’s power. “Backers of sweeping surveillance powers now say they recognize that changes are likely, and they are taking steps to make sure they maintain control over the extent of any revisions,” says the NYT.

The primary problem enabling out-of-control NSA spying has long been the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress. That’s an ironic twist given that those were the committees created in the wake of the mid-1970s Church Committee to provide rigorous oversight, as a response to the recognition that Executive Branch’s surveillance powers were being radically abused – and would inevitably be abused in the future – without robust transparency and accountability.

But with a few rare and noble exceptions, the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress are filled with precisely those members who are most slavishly beholden to, completely captured by, the intelligence community over which they supposedly serve as watchdogs. Many receive large sums of money from the defense and intelligence industries.

There is a clear and powerful correlation between NSA support and amounts of money received by these members from those industries, as Wired’s Dave Kravets adeptly documented about last week’s NSA vote and has been documented before with similar NSA-protecting actions from the Intelligence Committee. In particular, the two chairs of those committees – Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate and Republican Mike Rogers in the House – are such absolute loyalists to the NSA and the National Security State generally that it is usually impossible to distinguish their behavior, mindset and comments from those of NSA officials.

In sum, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees are the pure embodiment of the worst of Washington: the corrupting influence of money from the very industries they are designed to oversee and the complete capture by the agencies they are supposed to adversarially check. Anything that comes out of the leadership of those two Committees that is labeled “NSA reform” is almost certain to be designed to achieve the opposite effect: to stave off real changes in lieu of illusory tinkering whose real purpose will be to placate rising anger.

But that trick seems unlikely to work here. What has made these disclosures different from past NSA scandals – including ones showing serious abuse of their surveillance powers – are the large numbers of the NSA’s own documents that are now and will continue to be available for the public to see, as well the sustained, multi-step nature of these disclosures, which makes this far more difficult for NSA defenders to predict, manage and dismiss away. At least as much as they are shining long-overdue light on these specific NSA domestic programs, the NSA disclosures are changing how Americans (and people around the world) think about the mammoth National Security State and whether it can and should be trusted with unchecked powers exercised in the dark. Those public opinion shifts aren’t going to disappear as the result of some blatantly empty gestures from Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers masquerading as “reform”.

Despite the substantial public opinion shifts, Pew found that Americans are largely split on whether the NSA data-collection program should continue. The reason for this is remarkable and repugnant though, at this point, utterly unsurprising:

Nationwide, there is more support for the government’s data-collection program among Democrats (57% approve) than among Republicans (44%), but both parties face significant internal divisions: 36% of Democrats disapprove of the program as do 50% of Republicans.

Just as Democrats went from vehement critics of Bush’s due-process-free War on Terror policies to vocal cheerleaders of Obama’s drone kills and even Guantanamo imprisonments, the leading defenders of the NSA specifically and America’s Surveillance State generally are now found among self-identified Democrats. That was embodied by how one of the most vocal Democratic NSA critics during the Bush years – Nancy Pelosi – in almost single-handedly saved the NSA from last week’s House vote. If someone had said back in 2007 that the greatest support for NSA surveillance would be found among Democrats, many would find the very idea ludicrous. But such is life in the Age of Obama: one of his most enduring legacies is transforming his party from pretend-opponents of the permanent National Security State into its most enthusiastic supporters.

But despite that hackish partisan opportunism, the positive opinion changes toward NSA surveillance and civil liberties can be seen across virtually all partisan and ideological lines:

pew NSA

The largest changes toward demanding civil liberties protections have occurred among liberal Democrats, Tea Party Republicans, independents and liberal/moderate Republicans. Only self-identified “moderate/conservative Democrats” – the Obama base – remains steadfast and steady in defense of NSA surveillance. The least divided, most-pro-NSA caucus in the House for last week’s vote was the corporatist Blue Dog Democrat caucus, which overwhelmingly voted to protect the NSA’s bulk spying on Americans.

As I’ve repeatedly said, the only ones defending the NSA at this point are the party loyalists and institutional authoritarians in both parties. That’s enough for the moment to control Washington outcomes – as epitomized by the unholy trinity that saved the NSA in the House last week: Pelosi, John Bohener and the Obama White House – but it is clearly not enough to stem the rapidly changing tide of public opinion.

from:    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/29/poll-nsa-surveillance-privacy-pew

Gulf Woes Persist – BP Denies

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Shirking Responsibility in the Gulf

By STEPHEN TEAGUE
Published: July 30, 2013

BILOXI, Miss. — IF you don’t live near the Gulf Coast, you may have the impression that the area has fully recovered from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the largest environmental disaster in American history. Sadly, that’s not the case for tens of thousands of gulf residents still trying to put their lives back together.

That is, however, what BP wants the public to believe — which is why it is now engaged in an aggressive legal and public-relations campaign to limit how much it pays individuals and businesses for the losses its reckless behavior caused. After having a hand in this huge disaster, the company wants to leave these communities to rebuild on their own, even as it takes in record profits.

The spill resulted in the release of more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and the deaths of 11 people. In September 2011 a federal investigation found BP responsible for the leak, and in November 2012 the Department of Justice reached a court settlement with the company that included a $4.5 billion fine.

In 2010 the company set up a $20 billion fund to settle claims arising from the disaster, and since then it has made payments to hundreds of thousands of individuals and businesses affected by the spill. In 2012 a federal court took over supervision of the fund.

But tens of thousands of gulf residents still haven’t been fully compensated for their losses, and many are struggling to make ends meet. Many low-wage workers in the fishing and service industries, for example, have been seeking compensation for lost wages and jobs for three years. In many cases, their claims aren’t successful because they can’t afford the legal help required to navigate the complex claims process.

Their troubles stem in part from BP’s increasingly brazen attempts to stonewall payouts. Most recently, the company made a motion in court to freeze payments on tens of thousands of legitimate claims, arguing that a staff attorney from the Deepwater Horizon Court-Supervised Settlement Program, the program responsible for evaluating compensation claims, had improperly profited from claims filed by a New Orleans law firm. The attorney is said to have received portions of settlement claims for clients he referred to the firm.

But the alleged bad behavior of one attorney does not justify freezing the payment of all claims, as BP has demanded, especially when the firm handled a small fraction of the claims that have been submitted for compensation. In any case, the attorney has resigned, and Carl J. Barbier, the federal judge who is overseeing the settlement, ordered an investigation, which is continuing. So far the judge has refused to freeze payments while the investigation is under way, a ruling that the company is appealing.

Of course, this isn’t really about the possible extent of the damage done by the attorney. BP is using the case to cast doubt, both in public and in the courts, on the entire process. And it’s working: its talking points have been echoed in mainstream media coverage, which has so far featured few voices of actual oil-spill victims.

Such guilt by association ignores the robust measures built into the settlement program to ensure a fair compensation system. The fraud-detection mechanisms are so extensive that the processing of claims is slowed down to accommodate them.

Meanwhile, the company has fought aggressively to undermine individual claims. In some instances, BP has tried to deny payment of claims that its own settlement program had already deemed legitimate.

The company’s efforts know no bounds and have pushed the claimants and their legal representatives to the limit. My organization, the Mississippi Center for Justice, is one of several groups providing pro bono legal assistance. Since 2011, we have helped approximately 10,000 people navigate the difficult claims process and obtain money they are owed by BP.

We have seen firsthand the extent to which BP will go to avoid paying even patently legitimate claims. One claimant with whom we worked, whose employer closed its doors in the wake of the spill, finally received an offer for compensation after two years. Then BP appealed the award, seeking to have it revoked. After he received assistance in countering BP’s appeal, the company finally admitted that he was, in fact, owed money and withdrew its appeal of his claim.

But while we can carry on the battle through lawsuits and in the affected communities, we are outgunned in the court of public opinion. In countless high-priced TV spots and full-page newspaper ads, the company is selling the story that it is committed to helping victims of the oil spill and rebuilding the gulf.

We know different. The company has turned its back on the people whose lives it derailed. BP must end its stall tactics and keep its promises to the people of the gulf.

Stephen Teague is a staff attorney at the Mississippi Center for Justice.

from:    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/opinion/shirking-responsibility-in-the-gulf.html?_r=1&emc=0&

August Hurricane Potential

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A massive dust storm that formed over the Sahara Desert early this week has now pushed out over the tropical Atlantic, and will sharply reduce the odds of tropical storm formation during the first week of August. The dust is accompanied by a large amount of dry air, which is making the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) much drier than usual this week. June and July are the peak months for dust storms in the Southwest Sahara, and this week’s dust storm is a typical one for this time of year. Due in large part to all the dry and dusty air predicted to dominate the tropical Atlantic over the next seven days, none of the reliable computer models is predicting Atlantic tropical cyclone formation during the first week of August.


Figure 1. A massive dust storm moves off the coast of Africa in this MODIS image taken at 1:40 UTC July 30, 2013. Image credit: NASA.

Video 1. The predicted movement through August 3 of this week’s Africam dust storm, using the NOAA NGAC aerosol model. Image credit: NOAA Visualization Laboratory.

How dust affects hurricanes
Saharan dust can affect hurricane activity in several ways:

1) Dust acts as a shield which keeps sunlight from reaching the surface. Thus, large amounts of dust can keep the sea surface temperatures up to 1°C cooler than average in the hurricane Main Development Region (MDR) from the coast of Africa to the Caribbean, providing hurricanes with less energy to form and grow. Ocean temperatures in the MDR are currently 0.7°F above average, and this anomaly should cool this week as the dust blocks sunlight.

2) The Saharan Air Layer (SAL) is a layer of dry, dusty Saharan air that rides up over the low-level moist air over the tropical Atlantic. At the boundary between the SAL and low-level moist air where the trade winds blow is the trade wind inversion–a region of the atmosphere where the temperature increases with height. Since atmospheric temperature normally decreases with height, this “inversion” acts to but the brakes on any thunderstorms that try to punch through it. This happens because the air in a thunderstorm’s updraft suddenly encounters a region where the updraft air is cooler and less buoyant than the surrounding air, and thus will not be able to keep moving upward. The dust in the SAL absorbs solar radiation, which heats the air in the trade wind inversion. This makes the inversion stronger, which inhibits the thunderstorms that power a hurricane.

3) Dust may also act to produce more clouds, but this effect needs much more study. If the dust particles are of the right size to serve as “condensation nuclei”–centers around which raindrops can form and grow–the dust can act to make more clouds. Thus, dust could potentially aid in the formation and intensification of hurricanes. However, if the dust acts to make more low-level clouds over the tropical Atlantic, this will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ocean, cooling the sea surface temperatures and discouraging hurricane formation (Kaufman et al., 2005.)


Figure 2. Map of the mean summer dust optical thickness derived from satellite measurements between 1979 and 2000. Maximum dust amounts originate in the northern Sahel (15° to 18° N) and the Sahara (18° to 22° N). The Bodele depression in Chad is also an active dust source. Image credit: Evidence of the control of summer atmospheric transport of African dust over the Atlantic by Sahel sources from TOMS satellites (1979-2000), by C. Moulin and I. Chiapello, published in January 2004 in Geophysical Research Letters.

Dust in Africa’s Sahel region and Atlantic hurricane activity
The summertime dust that affects Atlantic tropical storms originates over the southwestern Sahara (18° – 22° N) and the northwestern Sahel (15° – 18° N) (Figure 3.) The dust from the Southwest Sahara stays relatively constant from year to year, but the dust from the Northwest Sahel varies significantly, so understanding this variation may be a key factor in improving our forecasts of seasonal hurricane activity in the Atlantic. The amount of dust that gets transported over the Atlantic depends on a mix of three main factors: the large scale and local scale weather patterns (windy weather transports more dust), how wet the current rainy season is (wet weather will wash out dust before it gets transported over the Atlantic), and how dry and drought-damaged the soil is. The level of drought experienced in the northwestern Sahel during the previous year is the key factor of the three in determining how much dust gets transported over the Atlantic during hurricane season, according to a January 2004 study published in Geophysical Research Letters published by C. Moulin and I. Chiapello. In 2012 (Figure 3), precipitation across the northwestern Sahel was much above average, which should result in less dust than usual over the Atlantic this fall, increasing the odds of a busy 2013 hurricane season.


Figure 3. Rainfall over the Northwest Sahel region of Africa was about 200% of average during the 2012 rainy season. The heavy rains promoted vigorous vegetation growth in 2013, resulting in less bare ground capable of generating dust. Image credit: NOAA/Climate Prediction Center.

Links
Saharan Air Layer Analysis from the University of Wisconsin

Atlantic dust forecast from the Tel-Aviv University Weather Research Center

Dr. Amato Evan published a study in Science magazine March 2009 showing that 69% of the increase in Atlantic sea surface temperatures over the past 26 years could be attributed to decreases in the amount of dust in the atmosphere.

Kaufman, Y. J., I. Koren, L. A. Remer, D. Rosenfeld, and Y. Rudich, 2005a: The effect of smoke, dust, and pollution aerosol on shallow cloud development over the Atlantic Ocean. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 102, 11 207–11 212.

Wang, Chunzai, Shenfu Dong, Amato T. Evan, Gregory R. Foltz, Sang-Ki Lee, 2012, Multidecadal Covariability of North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature, African Dust, Sahel Rainfall, and Atlantic Hurricanes, J. Climate, 25, 5404–5415.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00413.1

from:    http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Perseid Meteors Arriving Now

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FIRST PERSEIDS OF 2013: Earth is entering a broad stream of debris from comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, source of the annual Perseid meteor shower. Although the shower won’t peak until August 12-13, when Earth hits the densest part of the stream, the first Perseids are already arriving. “Despite poor weather over our network of meteor cameras, we detected three Perseid fireballs on July 30-31,” reports Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. He made this plot showing the orbits of the meteoroids:

In the diagram, the green lines trace the orbits of Perseid meteoroids. All three intersect Earth (the blue dot). The orbit of the parent comet is color-coded purple. An inset shows one of the fireballs shining almost as brightly as the Moon: video.

The shower is just getting started. Rates should remain low for the next week as Earth penetrates the sparse outskirts of the debris stream, then skyrocket to ~100 meteors per hour as the calendar turns to the second week of August.

fr/spaceweather.com

Your Color Vibe for 08/01

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Thursday, August 1:    Cloudy Red

Yes, indeed, the old stuff is coming back and making you wonder just what is going on.  You can find yourself really out of touch with things that are going on.  Along with that may come some self-doubt and questioning.  You might be feeling as though your basis is shifting and moving and not really solid enough.  Because of this, today is not a good day for making decisions or setting up allegiances.  You can find that a lot of those decisions you will want to change tomorrow.  Moreover you can be wondering, even as you ally yourself with a person, place or cause just why you are doing that.  The best way to be today is to be the observer.  Watch what is going on.  Again, more pieces are falling into place.  As that happens, the pattern is shifting and your piece gets moved around.  It is best to see how everything else is moving before taking any action.

The Power of FOrgiveness

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Forgiveness: The Ultimate Cleanse

cleansing26th July 2013

By Carmen Allgood

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

Most people in the Western world are constantly on the lookout for pills and potions that will prove to be the “fountain of youth” and help us live longer, healthier lives.

First, why is it that we want the body to live longer? For it is certain if our focus is on our body, we are banking on the impossible and already know that nothing in this physical world is capable of lasting an eternity. There will never be any security or safety found in a physical entity, and this includes the body.

The search for Truth cannot be a partial commitment. Wishful thinking will never turn the truth into something we want it to be, mainly because we are not the author of reality.

In order to experience what is capable of lasting forever, and promises us a perfect release from the thought of death and all the ills that seem to go along with it, we’re going to need to accept that the body is not our reality. The body is merely a part of our experience in this temporary world; its function and purpose are highly overrated because, in and of itself, it has no real function or value, aside from being a vehicle for sharing thoughts in this realm.

True communication is invisible and pure thought. Can we see it? No, but we can experience the decisions we make and see the outcome quite clearly.

Be willing to at least entertain the idea that the body is not who and what we are, and focus entirely on what is going on in the mind. This is where our life takes place because how we feel is always going to revolve around what we are thinking, and how we feel as a result.

Recently, one of the new young leaders of this world, Malala Yousafzai, addressed the United Nations Youth Assembly and world on her 16th birthday. By all rights she should have left this world behind, because how many bodies can withstand a bullet to the brain and still function? This miracle has obvious repercussions because it has become the “shot heard round the world.” Malala is now a spokesperson for millions of young people who deserve an education, and her crime, according to the Taliban, is that she wanted to go to school. For this, she deserved to die.

But live she did, and with the media behind her, Malala is teaching all of us the most powerful lesson in the world with her amazing statement:

“… this is the forgiveness that I have learned from my father and from my mother. This is what my soul is telling me: be peaceful and love everyone.”

Is there any doubt that she is still in this incarnation precisely to deliver this timely message? Forgiveness is the ultimate cleanse that removes all pain, heals all wounds, repairs the heart, and renews the mind. A forgiving mind reveals the Light that each of us stands in when we have decided to side with peace. If Malala can find it in her heart to forgive those who would kill her, what’s keeping us from forgiving this world so we can live in peace?

Forgiveness is not a new message. Countless spiritual teachers and healers tell us that this is a free and freeing practice that can only heal our split perception so that everything fuses gently into One Thought, One Love, One Life, and reveals the Oneness of the Universe that binds us all together. There is no other way if what we want is eternal peace and happiness. Forgive and free the world from all we thought was unloving, and we free ourselves right along with it. Love is the Answer.

Carmen Allgood © July 2013

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2013/07/26/forgiveness-the-ultimate-cleanse/

Roundup as a Contraceptive?

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Again, do your research:

Is It Time To Acknowledge Roundup Herbicide As A Contraceptive?

herbacide-contraceptive31st July 2013

By Sayer Ji

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

How much longer will we deny the growing body of research linking Roundup to infertility before calling this chemical a contraceptive?

Following closely on the heels of the EPA’s decision to allow Roundup herbicide residues in your food at concentrations a million times higher than shown carcinogenic, a concerning new study published in the journal Free Radical Medicine & Biology implicates the herbicide, and its main ingredient glyphosate, in male infertility, at concentration ranges well within the EPA’s “safe level” for food.[1]

Performed by Brazilian researchers, the study found acute Roundup exposure at low doses (36ppm, 0.036g/L) for 30 minutes induced cell death in Sertoli cells in prepubertal rat testis.  Sertoli cells are known as “mother” or “nurse” cells within the testicles, as they are responsible for maintaining the health of sperm cells, and are required for normal male sexual development.

Roundup herbicide exposure was found to induce oxidative stress and to activate multiple-stress response pathways within affected cells, and was associated with an increase in intracellular calcium (Ca2+) concentration leading to Ca2+ overload, and cell death.

Thirty minute incubation tests with glyphosate alone (36 ppm) also increased Ca2+ uptake, and both Roundup and glyphosate were observe to downregulate reduced glutathione levels. As glutathione is an antioxidant (electron donor) found within every cell in the human body, protecting it against oxidative stress, as well as maintaining a wide range of biochemical reactions such as DNA and protein synthesis and repair, amino acid transport, prostaglandin synthesis, amino acid and enzyme activation, a dysregulation of glutathione can result in a wide range of adverse effects.

The researchers noted

Glyphosate has been described as an endocrine disruptor affecting the male reproductive system; however, the molecular basis of its toxicity remains to be clarified. We could propose that Roundup® toxicity, implicating in Ca2+ overload, cell signaling misregulation, stress response of the endoplasmic reticulum and/or depleted antioxidant defenses could contribute to Sertoli cell disruption of spermatogenesis that could impact male fertility.

This study adds to a growing body of research implicating Roundup herbicide in male infertility:

  • A 2007 study published in the journal Reproductive Toxicology found that Roundup herbicide altered the structure of the testis and epididymal region (part of the tubular spermatic duct system), as well as the serum levels of testosterone and estradiol, in male ducks, leading the researchers to conclude that Roundup “…may cause disorder in the morphophysiology of the male genital system of animals.”[2]
  • A 2010 male rat study published in the Archives of Toxicology revealed prepubertal exposure to commercial formulation of the herbicide glyphosate alters testosterone levels and testicular morphology, leading researchers to describe the herbicide as “a potent endocrine disruptor.”[3]
  • A 2011 male rat study published in the Archives of Toxicology revealed maternal exposure to glyphosate disturbed the masculinization process and promoted behavioral changes and histological and endocrine problems in reproductive parameters.[4]
  • A 2011 study published in the journal Toxicology In Vitro found a glyphosate-based herbicide induced necrosis and apoptosis in mature rat testicular cells in vitro, and testosterone decrease at lower levels.[i] In the study, Roundup and glyphosate at concentrations as low as 1 part per million produced a testosterone decrease in sperm cells by 35%.
  • A more recent 2013 study in male rats published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Reproductive Safety found glyphosate (in combination with another pesticide) provoked severe oxidative stress in male testes, resulting in inhibited testosterone production and disrupted gonadotropin levels.[5]

Given the growing body of research clearly revealing Roundup’s toxicity to the germline of animal species, the argument can be made that this chemical has contraceptive properties and therefore genocidal consequences. By directly affecting the biologically immortal cells within the testes, whose DNA contains over 3 billion years worth of information essential for there being a future for our species as a whole, Roundup should be considered an instrument of mass destruction. At the very least, the precautionary principle should be applied, and any chemical that signals the potential to disrupt or destroy our species’ germline cells, should be banned unless the manufacturer can prove beyond a reasonable doubt its safety to exposed populations.

For additional research on the wide spectrum of adverse health effects now linked to glyphosate-based herbicide formulations such as Roundup, view our research articles on GMOs, as well as view and download our free biomedical PDF on glyphosate/Roundup research.

Article Resources

from:    http://wakeup-world.com/2013/07/31/is-it-time-to-acknowledge-roundup-herbicide-as-a-contraceptive/

Your Color Vibe for 7/30

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Tuesday, July 30:    Pale Violet

You might just feel as if you had dodged a bullet today, but you need to be wary lest there be some reverberations coming back your way.  This means that you are needing to take a long and critical look at the places in which you find yourself, the things you are involved with, and the people whom you think are important.  Things are changing now, and if you are not the center of each and every one of your personal equations, then you can find yourself on the outs,  Today the energy is asking you to step back form all the stuff around you, all the got-to’s, have-to’s need-to’s, and see each and every one of them for what they are.  Once you have done that, then that is the time for setting up your priorities, working with this or that, jettisoning that or this, and moving forward on your own.

Hexagon Formation on Saturn

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Cassini Images Bizarre Hexagon on Saturn
03.27.07

Pasadena, Calif. — An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped feature circling the entire north pole of Saturn has captured the interest of scientists with NASA’s Cassini mission.

NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft imaged the feature over two decades ago. The fact that it has appeared in Cassini images indicates that it is a long-lived feature. A second hexagon, significantly darker than the brighter historical feature, is also visible in the Cassini pictures. The spacecraft’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer is the first instrument to capture the entire hexagon feature in one image.

six-sided feature at Saturn's north pole Image right: This nighttime view of Saturn’s north pole shows a bizarre six-sided hexagon feature encircling the entire north pole. The red color indicates the amount of 5-micron wavelength radiation, or heat, generated in the warm interior of Saturn that escapes the planet. Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”

The hexagon is similar to Earth’s polar vortex, which has winds blowing in a circular pattern around the polar region.  On Saturn, the vortex has a hexagonal rather than circular shape. The hexagon is nearly 25,000 kilometers (15,000 miles) across. Nearly four Earths could fit inside it.

The new images taken in thermal-infrared light show the hexagon extends much deeper down into the atmosphere than previously expected, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) below the cloud tops. A system of clouds lies within the hexagon. The clouds appear to be whipping around the hexagon like cars on a racetrack.

“It’s amazing to see such striking differences on opposite ends of Saturn’s poles,” said Bob Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, University of Arizona, Tucson. “At the south pole we have what appears to be a hurricane with a giant eye, and at the north pole of Saturn we have this geometric feature, which is completely different.”

Spinning Saturn Image left: This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
+ Full movie and caption

The Saturn north pole hexagon has not been visible to Cassini’s visual cameras, because it’s winter in that area, so the hexagon is under the cover of the long polar night, which lasts about 15 years. The infrared mapping spectrometer can image Saturn in both daytime and nighttime conditions and see deep inside. It imaged the feature with thermal wavelengths near 5 microns (seven times the wavelength visible to the human eye) during a 12-day period beginning on Oct. 30, 2006. As winter wanes over the next two years, the feature may become visible to the visual cameras.

Based on the new images and more information on the depth of the feature, scientists think it is not linked to Saturn’s radio emissions or to auroral activity, as once contemplated, even though Saturn’s northern aurora lies nearly overhead.

six-sided feature encircling the north pole of SaturnImage right: Another view of the bizarre six-sided feature encircling the north pole of Saturn. Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
+ Full image and caption

The hexagon appears to have remained fixed with Saturn’s rotation rate and axis since first glimpsed by Voyager 26 years ago. The actual rotation rate of Saturn is still uncertain.

“Once we understand its dynamical nature, this long-lived, deep-seated polar hexagon may give us a clue to the true rotation rate of the deep atmosphere and perhaps the interior,” added Baines.

The hexagon images and movie, including the north polar auroras are available at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona.

from:     http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20070327.html

EPA Raises Levels of Glyphosate in Food

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EPA to American People: ‘Let Them Eat Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Cake’

EPA30th July 2013

By Sayer Ji

Contributing Writer for Wake Up World

The EPA, whose mission is to “to protect human health and the environment,” has approved Monsanto’s request to allow levels of glyphosate (Roundup) contamination in your food up to a million times higher than have been found carcinogenic.

If you haven’t already heard, it’s now official. Monsanto’s request to have the EPA raise allowable levels of its herbicide glyphosate in food you may soon be eating has been approved [see Final Rule]. Public commenting is also now closed, not that it was anything but a formality to begin with.

Here is the original registration application, lest detractors claim it was not Monsanto behind this bold move to legalize what an increasingly educated public considers a form of institutionalized mass poisoning:

1. EPA Registration Numbers: 524-421, 524-475, and 524-537. Docket ID Number:EPA-HQ-OPP-2012-0132. Applicant: Monsanto Company, 1300 I Street NW., Suite 450 East, Washington, DC 20005. Active ingredient: Glyphosate. Product Type:Herbicide. Proposed Uses: Add wiper applicator use over the top to carrot and sweet potato, add preharvest use to oilseed crop group 20, add the use Teff (forage and hay), and conversion of the following old crop groups to the following new crop groups: Vegetable, bulb, group 3 to vegetable, bulb, group 3-07; vegetable, fruiting, group 8 to vegetable, fruiting, group 8-10; fruit, citrus, group 10 to fruit, citrus, group 10-10; fruit, pome, group 11 to fruit, pome, group 11-10; and berry group 13 to berry and small fruit, group 13-07. Contact: Erik Kraft, (703) 308-9358, email address: kraft.erik@epa.gov. [emphasis added]

Notice above, the proposal includes “Add wiper applicator use over the top to carrot and sweet potato,” revealing that one reason why Monsanto wants tolerances on glyphosate raised is because this chemical will be applied directly not just to Roundup Ready plants but to non-GMO crops as well, virtually guaranteeing that unless you eat 100% USDA organic concentrations of grave concern will end up in your food and body.

How grave? The Food Poisoning Bulletin describes the new tolerances as follows:

Under the new regulation, forage and hay teff can contain up to 100 ppm (100,000 ppb) glyphosate; oilseed crops can contain up to 40 ppm (40,000 ppb) glyphosate, and root crops such as potatoes and beets can contain 6000 ppb glyphosate. Fruits can have concentrations from 200 ppb to 500 ppb glyphosate. These numbers are magnitudes higher than the levels some scientists believe are carcinogenic.[emphasis added]

Indeed, only last month, a new study found that glyphosate has ‘xenoestrogen‘ properties and stimulated breast cancer proliferation in the parts per trillion range – that would be six orders of magnitude lower levels than presently receiving the EPA’s Monsanto-friendly stamp of approval. So how does the EPA address the potential for carcinogenicity in section 3 of their Exposure Assessment? They state their position as follows:

EPA has concluded that glyphosate does not pose a cancer risk to humans. Therefore, a dietary exposure assessment for the purpose of assessing cancer risk is unnecessary.

According to this ruthless logic, since the EPA designates itself a higher authority than the independent scientific evidence clearly signaling glyphosate’s carcinogenicity (view the toxicological data yourself here), it requires no safety testing. Let the exposed populations eat Roundup Ready cake and fester in an epidemic of cancers, as it turns a self-blinded eye to the problem.

The EPA has just made such a mockery of its own mission statement, which is “to protect human health and the environment,” that one wonders why they have not already declared themselves a wholly owned subsidiary of Monsanto.

The obvious reason why Monsanto and its ‘EPA cheerleading division’ successfully raised the tolerances of glyphosate in your food, is because the contamination is getting so bad they had no other choice. Either limits are raised, or Monsanto breaks the law (by contaminating our food and poisoning us beyond the “acceptable level of harm” already determined by the EPA) and the EPA is shown to be completely impotent to enforce anything resembling its mission statement.

But despite Monsanto’s latest apparent success, a growing grassroots movement comprised of millions of concerned citizens is defiantly expressing their own form of “glyphosate-resistance,” armed with a growing body of published toxicological data linking the glyphosate herbicide to over 30 health problems. This movement is mirrored poetically by the “super weeds” emerging throughout the Roundup Ready monocultured farmland of the world. In both cases, the center of real power is shifting away from Monsanto back to the people who are realizing that unless they retake back control over their food, they will be coerced and poisoned into a form of biological slavery the likes of which this world has never seen before, and if it manifests fully, will likely never recover from.

Learn more at our research page on GMOs: Health Guide: GMO Research

from:     http://wakeup-world.com/2013/07/30/epa-to-american-people-let-them-eat-monsantos-roundup-ready-cake/