What Is This World Coming To?

The Jerusalem Post cites anonymous sources in reporting that six supporters of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi have been hanged in the holy city of Mashhad. The report has not been confirmed independently.

The sources said the hangings occurred Monday after the country’s top legislative body upheld the victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Earlier today, Mousavi reiterated his demand for a revote and said he was working to help organize a group to defend citizens’ rights. He said the committee would release documents “proving fraud and irregularities in the election.”

The Basij militia wants him prosecuted, accusing him of “disturbing the nation’s security” in a letter to the country’s top prosecutor, the Guardian reports

The Times of London has a profile of Mousavi.

Former president Mohammad Khatami delivered a strong attack against what he termed the “coup” on democracy. He criticized the outcome of the June 12 vote and called for the release of hundreds of opponents who have been arrested in demonstrations and at home.

Whites and blacks, Christians and Jews, Cubans and Mexicans, along with tax-hating Americans were among several political leanings listed in the “Domestic Extremism Lexicon” that came out of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) in late March.

The lexicon lists definitions for key terms and phrases used by Homeland Security analysts “that addresses the nature and scope of the threat that domestic, non-Islamic extremism poses to the United States,” the report said.

A copy of the Homeland Security draft memo in PDF format can be downloaded here.  Be the first on your block to know the secret handshake!

The World Health Organization issued a warning that “all of humanity is under threat” and called for “global solidarity” to combat the virus, which it has labeled a Category Five threat — the second-highest rating for a pandemic disease.

In Mexico there have been eight confirmed deaths from the virus, with another 160 suspected swine flu fatalities. There have been 93 confirmed cases in the US, 19 in Canada, 13 in New Zealand, five in Britain, four in Germany, 10 in Spain, two in Israel, and one in Austria.

The US has confirmed the first death outside of Mexico on Wednesday, while a further “probable” case of swine flu has emerged in Glasgow, Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond told MSPs today. -UK Telegraph

Let’s look at that again.  Eight confirmed deaths and 160 suspected deaths at Ground Zero in Mexico.  One death in America — a baby who contracted the virus in Mexico City.  And maybe a couple hundred cases world-wide, all of which were relatively mild.

There are emerging a few voices of reason, like this one, (from the LATimes of all places)

Flu viruses are known to be notoriously unpredictable, and this strain could mutate at any point — becoming either more benign or dangerously severe. But mounting preliminary evidence from genetics labs, epidemiology models and simple mathematics suggests that the worst-case scenarios are likely to be avoided in the current outbreak.

“This virus doesn’t have anywhere near the capacity to kill like the 1918 virus,” which claimed an estimated 50 million victims worldwide, said Richard Webby, a leading influenza virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

In the U.S., between 5% and 20% of the population becomes ill and 36,000 people die — a mortality rate of between 0.24% and 0.96%.

Dirk Brockmann, a professor of engineering and applied mathematics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., used a computer model of human travel patterns to predict how this swine flu virus would spread in the worst-case scenario, in which nothing is done to contain the disease.

After four weeks, almost 1,700 people in the U.S. would have symptoms, including 198 in Los Angeles, according to his model. That’s just a fraction of the county’s thousands of yearly flu victims.

How is the White House handling it?   There are rumors floating about that the Oval Office is considering the imposition of martial law.    Vice President Joe Biden is advising all Americans to avoid travel on subways or aircraft.

“I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now,” Biden said when asked whether he would advise family members to use public transportation.

“I would tell members of my family, and I have, I wouldn’t go anywhere in confined places now. It’s not that it’s going to Mexico, it’s you’re in a confined aircraft when one person sneezes it goes all the way through the aircraft. That’s me. I would not be, at this point, if they had another way of transportation suggesting they ride the subway. “

The vice president also implied that schools should be closed as the threat of swine flu increases. (New York News)

EIGHT confirmed fatalities in Mexico.  ONE confirmed fatality in the US.  NONE elsewhere in the world.   What was it that Rahm Emmanuel said?  Never let a good crisis go to waste?

A hundred days into his presidency, Barack Obama’s standing with the public remains high, increasing the odds he can enact his fascist agenda. Most Americans like the new president, even amid some reservations about his policy goals, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

Among the 19 executive orders and 12 laws that bear his signature, Obama expanded a  federally funded, state-run children’s insurance program and enacted pay equity changes, not to mention his $787,000,000,000.00 “stimulus package” borrowed from the next two generations of Americans.

The poll also finds that the president himself is more popular than his policies, a divide that may catch up with him as Congress begins debate over the big issues in earnest.

Or not.  Somebody Down There seems to like him.

I got an odd email today from some guy I never heard of regarding an Amazon.com purchase I never made.   I did a little research before opening the attachment.  This is what I found.  Is worth knowing about:

Look out for this E-mail. The fake e-mail calls itself a Worldpay Card Transaction Confirmation and claims to be a payment to the “Academic Resources Center Inc”. There is an attached file that contains a exe that is disguised as a doc. If you have your computer set to show extensions rather than hide them, you will see that it is actually an exe file. And as usual, and exe file sent from a strange e-mail, is of course a trojan virus. Delete this one, set it as spam.

Hillary abroad: On autopilot and with excesss baggage

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TIME selected Barack Hussein Obama to be its ‘Person of the Year’ some three days after Vice President-elect Joe Biden (that still doesn’t sound right) picked senior TIME editor Jay Carney to be his communications aide.

TIME says that Obama has risen to “dominate the public sphere” in his short time on the national scene. It says the incoming president overcame “centuries of the social pecking order” to become the first African-American elected to the White House.

Time is also praising Mr. Obama for the swift and business-like manner in which he has assembled his administration, beginning the very day after his historic election.

The president-elect tells the magazine there are a number of issues he hopes to resolve over the next two years, including putting the U.S. economy back on track, closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp,  withdrawing troops from Iraq, healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind and raising the dead (provided they’re Democrats.)

Barack Hussein Obama joins Irish rock singer Bono, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, and three of the most recent U.S. presidents: outgoing President George Bush, his father George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton as TIME’s “Persons of the Year.”

Consumer prices in November plunged by the largest amount on records going back 61 years as energy costs posted nearly double the decline of the previous month.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that consumer prices fell 1.7 percent in November, surpassing the previous record decline of 1 percent set in October. The drop was the largest one-month decline dating to February 1947.

The huge decreases reflect the severe recession gripping the country and raise the pressure for the Federal Reserve to act decisively to guard against a debilitating bout of deflation.

In other economic news, the Commerce Department reported that construction of new homes fell in November by 18.9 percent, the biggest drop in a quarter-century. The steep decline pushed construction down to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 625,000 homes, the slowest pace on records that go back to 1959.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi , in an Asia Times Online ARTICLE, argues that, contrary to a recent Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) REPORT that stated Iran would soon achieve Nuclear Weapons Breakout Capability – in fact, the opposite is true. Whatever the truth, Afraisabi infers that President elect Obama will need to sift through the conflicting information:

The incoming Barack Obama administration has already been inundated with reports, policy recommendations and position papers vying for the president-elect’s attention on the Iran nuclear issue.

A little further into his essay, Afrasiabi claims:

By ignoring these issues completely, the respected nuclear experts seem unconvincing in their quasi-alarmist projections of Iran’s near-term nuclear weapon capability - the same projections which are indirectly fueling the argument of the more hawkish experts for the military option.

Their report serves as a half-cooked meal for new US policy-makers gearing up for action come next January. But it will surely give them indigestion, as it replicates the coercive approach that is centered on the theology of Iran’s “nuclear intentions” and “capability”.

Read the rest of this entry »

They say that it takes faith to believe in God. I submit that it also takes faith to be an atheistic scientist. While there is no foundation for a belief in “goo to you” evolution, evolution is required to be “true” and “indisputable” because the alternative (a divine cause) is strictly disallowed.

Recently, I read a book REVIEW by Royal Truman over at Creation Ministries International. The book, “A review of Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome”, written by John C Sanford, will most likely end up putting the scientist in hot water with his academic colleagues. Ben Stein, who produced the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” blew the whistle on the common practise of ostracizing dissenters. Read the rest of this entry »