NYU and Stanford Law Schools say we are committing a war crime that is considered a terrorist act by our own government — double tap.

What is double tap? It’s when you blow up someone, and when you see first responders and family coming to help, you blow them up too.

Yep. You. You are doing this. Your vote and your tax dollars and your silence, did this. That is how the world sees it, and it’s not too far of a stretch.

Why do writing posts like this become so… meh? So we’re international terrorists, by our own standard. Meh. So we killed some more kids today, in an act condemned by nations around the world. Meh. We will presently be under an investigation by the UN for war crimes. Meh meh meh.

It’s because we’re shocked into not giving a flying pig. We’d say wake up, but odds are you might just flip us off and take a permanent nap. Still, it’s our duty to tell you. Discuss, spread, or yawn and roll over.

From this place and many other sources:

The double tap is when a targeted strike site is hit multiple times by hellfire missiles in relatively quick succession, meaning that the second missile often strikes first responders.

A 2007 report by the Homeland Security Institute called the double tap a “favorite tactic of Hamas” and the FBI considers it a tactic employed by terrorists.

The new report, Living Under Drones, provides first-hand accounts of its devastating effect on rescuers and humanitarian workers.

Here’s one of those accounts:

The lone survivor of the Obama administration’s first strike in North Waziristan, Faheem Qureshi, stated that “[u]sually, when a drone strikes and people die, nobody comes near the bodies for half an hour because they fear another missile will strike.” He believes that he would likely not have survived if he had not managed to walk out of the smoking rubble of his hujra on his own, because his neighbors would have waited too long in coming to rescue him.

The report concludes that double taps by U.S. drones raises “crucial moral and legal concerns. Not only does the practice put into question the extent to which secondary strikes comply with international humanitarian law’s basic rules … but it also potentially violates specific legal protections for medical and humanitarian personnel, and for the wounded. As international law experts have noted, intentional strikes on first responders may constitute war crimes.”

A 1930′s economic study advocating that we walk away from a debt-based currency has been recently run through advanced computer models at the IMF, and the results suggest it would work marvelously… The Chicago Plan Revisited (pdf).

Any educated person knows that fractional reserve banking is a leading horse in the race to the real “fiscal cliff” — the end point of a self-destructive system that just so happens to feed off of the ground it’s running on. A perpetual growth-based economy relies on the growth of using up resources that keep us eating, drinking, sheltering and moving, and as people race to pay off growing debts created out of thin air, the problem gets exponentially worse, literally eating and burning away the resources they need in the future to continue civilization.

We call it, “negligent suicide.”

The paper argues that fiat currency can be, and has been, powerful and beneficial to the general public if held by the state, not a few zillionaires who developed a system gamed to give them ever more power. It does not need to be backed by gold, but by the government, who would not link its borrowing to its currency’s value.

From a piece in the Daily Telegraph’s Finance section:

One could slash private debt by 100pc of GDP, boost growth, stabilize prices, and dethrone bankers all at the same time. It could be done cleanly and painlessly, by legislative command, far more quickly than anybody imagined…

The conjuring trick is to replace our system of private bank-created money — roughly 97pc of the money supply — with state-created money. We return to the historical norm, before Charles II placed control of the money supply in private hands with the English Free Coinage Act of 1666.

Specifically, it means an assault on “fractional reserve banking”. If lenders are forced to put up 100pc reserve backing for deposits, they lose the exorbitant privilege of creating money out of thin air.

The nation regains sovereign control over the money supply. There are no more banks runs, and fewer boom-bust credit cycles. Accounting legerdemain will do the rest. That at least is the argument.

Some readers may already have seen the IMF study, by Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof, which came out in August and has begun to acquire a cult following around the world….

The IMF paper says total liabilities of the US financial system – including shadow banking – are about 200pc of GDP. The new reserve rule would create a windfall. This would be used for a “potentially a very large, buy-back of private debt”, perhaps 100pc of GDP.

More study should be done, exploring what this would look like under an already corrupt, overly-stretched US government, currently wholly owned by the banking system, but one thing is clear: as the dude sitting in the horse carriage, if you don’t want your society and you to die a nasty, senseless death akin to negligent suicide, you’ve got to do something to stop the horses from running you over that cliff. Slowing them down or veering them off a degree or two still leads them to the same nearing cliff, and there’s plenty of history indicating that it’ll suck.

I searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 9 November 2012 that have the keyword phrases “global warming” or “global climate change.” The search produced 13,950 articles. See methodology…

…24 of the 13,950 articles, 0.17% or 1 in 581, clearly reject global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming… The 24 articles have been cited a total of 113 times over the nearly 21-year period, for an average of close to 5 citations each. That compares to an average of about 19 citations for articles answering to “global warming,” for example. Four of the rejecting articles have never been cited; four have citations in the double-digits. The most-cited has 17. For an analysis of the 113 citations, see here.

Of one thing we can be certain: had any of these articles presented the magic bullet that falsifies human-caused global warming, that article would be on its way to becoming one of the most-cited in the history of science.

So, if this is kind of the biggest deal ever, why was it never mentioned during the 2012 presidential debates? You should know that by now, educated one. If not, get educated, then Occupy Educated!

For years the biotechnology industry has trumpeted that it will feed the world, promising that its genetically engineered crops will produce higher yields.

That promise has proven to be empty, according to Failure to Yield, a report by UCS expert Doug Gurian-Sherman released in March 2009. Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase U.S. crop yields.

Failure to Yield is the first report to closely evaluate the overall effect genetic engineering has had on crop yields in relation to other agricultural technologies. It reviewed two dozen academic studies of corn and soybeans, the two primary genetically engineered food and feed crops grown in the United States. Based on those studies, the UCS report concludes that genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report finds, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.

The UCS report comes at a time when food price spikes and localized shortages worldwide have prompted calls to boost agricultural productivity, or yield — the amount of a crop produced per unit of land over a specified amount of time. Biotechnology companies maintain that genetic engineering is essential to meeting this goal. Monsanto, for example, was running an advertising campaign at the time of the report release warning of an exploding world population and claiming that its “advanced seeds… significantly increase crop yields…” The report debunks that claim, concluding that genetic engineering is unlikely to play a significant role in increasing food production in the foreseeable future.

The biotechnology industry has been promising better yields since the mid-1990s, but Failure to Yield documents that the industry has been carrying out gene field trials to increase yields for 20 years without significant results.

Failure to Yield makes a critical distinction between potential—or intrinsic—yield and operational yield, concepts that are often conflated by the industry and misunderstood by others. Intrinsic yield refers to a crop’s ultimate production potential under the best possible conditions. Operational yield refers to production levels after losses due to pests, drought and other environmental factors.

The study reviewed the intrinsic and operational yield achievements of the three most common genetically altered food and feed crops in the United States: herbicide-tolerant soybeans, herbicide-tolerant corn, and insect-resistant corn (known as Bt corn, after the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, whose genes enable the corn to resist several kinds of insects).

Herbicide-tolerant soybeans, herbicide-tolerant corn, and Bt corn have failed to increase intrinsic yields, the report found. Herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn also have failed to increase operational yields, compared with conventional methods.

Meanwhile, the report found that Bt corn likely provides a marginal operational yield advantage of 3 to 4 percent over typical conventional practices. Since Bt corn became commercially available in 1996, its yield advantage averages out to a 0.2 to 0.3 percent yield increase per year. To put that figure in context, overall U.S. corn yields over the last several decades have annually averaged an increase of approximately one percent, which is considerably more than what Bt traits have provided.

In addition to evaluating genetic engineering’s record, Failure to Yield considers the technology’s potential role in increasing food production over the next few decades. The report does not discount the possibility of genetic engineering eventually contributing to increase crop yields. It does, however, suggest that it makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries. In addition, recent studies have shown that organic and similar farming methods that minimize the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers can more than double crop yields at little cost to poor farmers in such developing regions as Sub-Saharan Africa.

The report recommends that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, state agricultural agencies, and universities increase research and development for proven approaches to boost crop yields. Those approaches should include modern conventional plant breeding methods, sustainable and organic farming, and other sophisticated farming practices that do not require farmers to pay significant upfront costs. The report also recommends that U.S. food aid organizations make these more promising and affordable alternatives available to farmers in developing countries.

“If we are going to make headway in combating hunger due to overpopulation and climate change, we will need to increase crop yields,” said Gurian-Sherman. “Traditional breeding outperforms genetic engineering hands down.”

Relevant Links

Original Article: http://goo.gl/gMIGU
Union of Concerned Scientists
View The PDF Report: Failure To Yield (PDF)
Environmental Effects of GMO Crops (UCS):  http://goo.gl/QAeQ1

What drives well-meaning police to harass and violate the rights of the public? Read these mind-blowing quotes, below, from active and retired NYPD police.

“When I came into this department, I wanted to help people, but the civilian population is being hunted instead of being protected.” —NYPD veteran officer of 10+ years

New York State law prohibits the use of quotas for arrests, summonses, and stops by the NYPD. But, active officers (speaking on condition of anonymity) explain that quotas are definitely being used, and officers are threatened with retaliation if they don’t meet them.  The NYPD is one of New York City’s only agencies to operate without independent oversight, leaving officers no safe place to file complaints about police practice and systemic problems.

►  Stop-and-Frisk Campaign: About the Issue
http://www.nyclu.org/stopandfrisk 

►Federal court to consider legality of NYPD’s “stop and frisk”
http://rt.com/usa/news/stop-new-york-frisk-615/

►15 Amazing Facts About NYPD Stop and Frisks
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/13/nypd-stop-and-frisks-15-shocking-facts_n_1513362.html

► How Does It Feel To Be Stopped And Frisked [Video]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvIBIn5Xp7s

►Stop and Frisk: San Francisco Plunges into a New York Controversy
http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2012/07/27/what-would-stop-and-frisk-mean-for-san-francisco/

“Higher Education is in a bubble. Not only has total student loan debt in the United States surpassed credit card debt, but much of this debt has been taken out for degrees that are not worth the price of tuition. This is due to the fact that many students go to college with the false belief that a degree is a degree. And the colleges and universities profit off this widespread, but mistaken idea. Not all degrees are created equal.

What we’ve found is striking. Not only have tuition and fees have skyrockted at rates much higher than inflation but student debt has grown much faster than consumer debt. As a nation we are investing vast resources into higher education, but what have been the results of this investment?

• Drop in the quality of education
• Degrees unmatched to the economic needs of the United States
• Decreasing graduation rates
• Declining value of most Bachelor’s degrees due to oversaturation
• Drastic increases in debt, and the emergence of a wage slave class

Some of have suggested that the United States is currently engaging in a massive mis-allocation of resources – that we’re spending away our wealth on a mis-directed, poor quality, inefficient and unoptimized higher education system. All while the colleges and universities stoke their bank accounts.

Do we think there’ s a solution? Yes. And the first step is to start assigning economic value to specific degrees so that students can make wise decisions about the debt that they take on for education.”

Original Source:  http://www.thebestcolleges.org/higher_education_bubble/