Consciousness TV | COLORADO GUNMAN POSSIBLE MK-ULTRA

Colorado Batman Shooting Shows Obvious Signs of Being Staged

worldtruth.tv | Jul 20th 2012

James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter who reportedly opened fire at a Batman movie premiere, was a medical student at the University of Colorado, pursuing a PhD in neuroscience, reports ABC News. (http://abcnews.go.com/US/mass-shooting-colorado-movie-theater-14-peop…)

As part of the attack, Holmes painted his hair red and referred to himself as “The Joker,” one of the arch enemies in the DC Comics-inspired Batman movie series. ()

According to news reports, this sudden violent rampage was completely out of character for James Holmes, who was described as “shy.”

The New York Times is now reporting:
Billy Kromka, a pre-med student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked with Mr. Holmes for three months last summer as a research assistant in a lab of at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Mr. Kromka said he was surprised to learn Mr. Holmes was the shooting suspect. “It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this,” he said. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/colorado-mall-shooting.html?page…)

“He spent much of his time immersed in the computer, often participating in role-playing online games…”

There is already conjecture that James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research and ended up becoming involved at a depth he never anticipated. His actions clearly show a strange detachment from reality, indicating he was not in his right mind. That can only typically be accomplished through drugs, hypnosis or trauma (and sometimes all three).

His behavior doesn’t add up

His behavior already reveals stark inconsistencies that question the mainstream explanation of events. For example, he opened fire on innocent people but then calmly surrendered to police without resistance. This is not consistent with the idea of “killing everyone.”

Furthermore, he then admitted to police that his apartment was booby-trapped with explosives. If you were really an evil-minded Joker trying to kill people (including cops), why would you warn them about the booby trap in advance? It doesn’t add up.

“Holmes was taken into custody shortly after the shooting, police said, adding he didn’t resist when he was arrested,” reports a local CBS news affiliate (http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/07/20/police-14-dead-in-colorado-the…).

“After his arrest, Holmes told police about ‘possible explosives in his residence,’ Oates said. When police searched his apartment, they discovered it was booby-trapped and evacuated surrounding buildings, police said. Oates said bomb technicians are determining how to disarm flammable or explosive material in the third-floor apartment. He said police could be there some time.”

None of this checks out. If you’re a killer bent on causing mayhem, why tell the police about your surprise bomb waiting for them back at your apartment?

Holmes was clearly provided with exotic gear

Continuing from CBS:

“He said pictures from inside the apartment are fairly disturbing and the devices look to be sophisticated, adding the booby-traps were ‘something I’ve never seen.’ One rifle, two handguns, a knife, a bullet proof vest, a ballistic helmet, a gas device, a gas mask, military SWAT clothing and unidentified explosives were also found in Holmes’ car, a law enforcement source told CBS News. Oates said Holmes wore a gas mask, a ballistic helmet and vest as well as leg, groin and throat protectors during the shooting.”

In other words, this guy was equipped with exotic gear by someone with connections to military equipment. SWAT clothing, explosives, complex booby-traps… c’mon, this isn’t a “lone gunman.” This is somebody who was selected for a mission, given equipment to carry it out, then somehow brainwashed into getting it done.

“Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes’ apartment is booby-trapped with a ‘sophisticated’ maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it,” reports Yahoo News (http://sg.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/suspect-neuroscience-phd-stu…).

This is not your run-of-the-mill crime of passion. It was a carefully planned, heavily funded and technically advanced attack. Who might be behind all this? The FBI, of course, which has a long history of setting up and staging similar attacks, then stopping them right before they happen. See four documented stories on these facts:

http://www.naturalnews.com/035849_domestic_terror_plots_FBI.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/034325_FBI_entrapment_terror_plots.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/033751_FBI_terrorism.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/035757_FBI_terror_plots_false_flag.html

As you soak all this in, remember that the FBI had admitted to setting up terror plots, providing the weapons and gear, staging the location of the bombings and even driving the vehicles to pull it off! This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s been admitted by the FBI right out in the open. Even the New York Times openly reports all this in stories like this one:

NYT: Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-help…)

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. …the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving…

Mystery man Holmes has no background

On top of all this, Holmes apparently has no background. “He’s not on anybody’s radar screen — nothing,” said a peace officer in a NYT article. “This guy is somewhat of an enigma. Nobody knows anything about him.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/colorado-mall-shooting.html)

Mr. Holmes’s only criminal history is a traffic summons, the authorities said. He earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in neuroscience in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside, and was a graduate student in neurosciences at the University of Colorado at Denver’s Anschutz Medical Campus… He was currently collecting unemployment…

Question: How does an unemployed medical student afford $20,000 in weapons gear?

If you start to look at the really big picture here, the obvious question arises: How does an unemployed medical student afford all the complex weapons gear, bomb-making gear, “flammable” booby trap devices, ammunition, multiple magazines, bullet-proof vest, groin protection, ballistic helmet, SWAT uniform and all the rest of it?

A decent AR-15 rifle costs $1,000 or more all by itself. The shotgun and handgun might run another $800 total. Spare mags, sights, slings, and so on will run you at least another $1,000 across three firearms. The bullet-proof vest is easily another $800, and the cost of the bomb-making gear is anybody’s guess. With all the specialty body gear, ammunition, booby-trap devices and more, I’m guessing this is at least $20,000 in weapons and tactical gear, much of which is very difficult for civilians to get in the first place.

The mere manufacture of an explosive booby-trap device is, all by itself, a felony crime by the way. And remember: “Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes’ apartment is booby-trapped with a ‘sophisticated’ maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it,” reported Yahoo News (http://sg.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/suspect-neuroscience-phd-stu…).

Question: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more? Certainly not in graduate school!

All this leads to an obvious third party influence over all this. Someone else taught this guy these skills and funded the acquisition of the equipment.

Staged just in time for a vote on the UN small arms treaty?

More and more, this shooting is looking like a deliberate plot staged by the government itself much like Operation Fast and Furious pulled off by the ATF (http://www.naturalnews.com/032934_ATF_illegal_firearms.html) which helped smuggle tens of thousands of guns into Mexico for the purpose of causing “gun violence” in the USA, then blaming the Second Amendment for it.

All this looks like James Holmes completed a “mission” and then calmly ended that mission by surrendering to police and admitting everything. The mission, as we are now learning, was to cause as much terror and mayhem as possible, then to have that multiplied by the national media at exactly the right time leading up the UN vote next week on a global small arms treaty that could result in gun confiscation across America. (http://lewrockwell.com/eddlem/eddlem61.1.html)

Even Forbes.com wrote about this quite extensively, warning readers about the coming gun confiscation effort related to the UN treaty. The story was authored by Larry Bell (http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/07/u-n-agreement-should…) and says the UN treaty could “override our national sovereignty, and in the process, provide license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.”

In other words, this has all the signs of Fast & Furious, Episode II. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover someone in Washington was behind it all. After all, there’s no quicker way to disarm a nation and take total control over the population than to stage violence, blame it on firearms, then call for leaders to “do something!” Such calls inevitably end up resulting in gun confiscation, and it’s never too long after that before government genocide really kicks in like we saw with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and other tyrants.

Governments routinely murder millions

Here’s a short list of government mass murder carried out throughout history, almost always immediately following the disarmament of the public (and usually involving staged false flag events to justify the disarmament):

50+ million dead: Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50)
12+ million dead: Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) – concentration camps, civilian deaths and dead Russian POWs
8+ million dead: Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908)
6+ million dead: Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39)
5+ million dead: Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44)
2+ million dead: Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-22)
1.7 million dead: Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79)
1.6 million dead: Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94)
1.5 million dead: Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78)
1 million dead: Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970)
900,000 dead: Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982)
800,000 dead: Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994)
See more at:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html

Death by government:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP1.HTM
http://www.infowars.com/democide-government-killed-over-260-million-i…

A “monopoly of force” in government is far more dangerous than a crazed lone shooter

So yes, James Holmes and other crazed shooters kill a number of people each year in random acts of violence. It’s horrifying and wrong, but it’s nothing compared to the millions of lives that governments tend to destroy when they gain total power over the populace.

The most dangerous thing in the world, it turns out, is not a crazy person with a rifle; it’s a government with a “monopoly of force” over the entire population. And that’s exactly what the UN spells out as its goal for the world: Stripping all power from individual citizens and handing “monopolies of force” to the governments of the world, shoring up their positions as the only “legitimate” power on the planet.

See this document entitled, “Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF)” policy paper No. 24:
http://www.naturalnews.com/files/Revisiting-the-State-Monopoly-on-the…

As this document reveals, a table entitled “Governance solutions for reasserting the state monopoly on the use of force” lists the options available to governments to re-establish “monopolies of force” against their own people:

• (Re-)establish state monopoly
- Ownership of WMDs
- Safety Inspectorates

• Prohibit business activity
- Justice and Execution
- Deadly Force?

• Regulate/limit activities
- Private defense/security services
- Control of financial transfers
- Export controls
- Transport and infrastructure safety
- Environmental impact

Interestingly, that document also describes “terrorism” in a way that perfectly matches the Aurora, Colorado “Batman” movie theater shooter:

Terrorists aim to spread panic and fear in societies in order to achieve political goals, be they based on left- or right-wing, social-revolutionary, nationalistic or religious ideologies. They are organized in a clandestine way, most often in small groups and cells… Typical tactical means include kidnapping, hostage-taking, sabotage, murder, suicide attacks, vehicle bombs and improvised explosive devices.

A global monopoly of force

This document is a goldmine of information about the globalist agenda to disarm and enslave the population. Check out page 28, which reads:

The legitimate monopoly of force should not be limited to the nation-state but should be based on the local, national, regional and the global levels.

Global Security Governance and the Monopoly of Force

At the global level no monopoly of violence exists. The UN Security Council already has a monopoly power to authorize the use of force at the global level, although the UN was never given the necessary means to exercise this authority, such as the capacity to implement sanctions, a police force and armed forces…

This deficiency in global governance acts as a bottleneck and a barrier to the creation of the democratically legitimized monopoly of violence that is globally required.

Source:  http://www.naturalnews.com

Original Page: http://worldtruth.tv/colorado-batman-shooting-shows-obvious-signs-of-being-staged/

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Disgraced Former Penn State University President Now Working for U.S. Government in National Security Role

blacklistednews.com | Jul 29th 2012

Echos of the Franklin imbroglio.

Via: Washington Post:

Graham Spanier might have been ousted from his post at the helm of Penn State over the sex-abuse scandal that engulfed the university, but it seems he’s found a backup employer: the American taxpayer.

Only a disgraced public figure would consider joining the much-maligned ranks of the federal workforce as a step up, reputation-wise. We can assume there were no openings for a used-car salesman.

Spanier was faulted in an internal Penn State report after the conviction on child-molestation charges of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. The report said he, head coach Joe Paterno and others helped cover up Sandusky’s abuse.

His lawyer confirms to the Loop that Spanier is working on a part-time consulting basis for a “top-secret” agency on national security issues. But the gig is so hush-hush, he couldn’t even tell his attorneys the name of the agency. In April — months after his ouster as president but before the release of the internal report — he told the Patriot-News of central Pennsylvania that he was working on a “special project for the U.S. government relating [to] national security.”

But who’s he working for? The CIA? Homeland Security? Or maybe just a dull consulting firm with a government contract?

“I have no idea,”says his lawyer, Peter Vaira. “We know the work is in security and he’s prohibited from disclosing which agency or agencies he’s working for.”



Original Page: http://www.blacklistednews.com/Disgraced_Former_Penn_State_University_President_Now_Working_for_U.S._Government_in_National_Security_Role/20746/0/38/38/Y/M.html

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Homeland “Security” Propaganda Video: What to do if caught in a Mass Shooti

Homeland “Security” Propaganda Video: What to do if caught in a Mass Shooting

yeoldefalseflag.com | Jul 22nd 2012 7:11 PM

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See Video:

Original Page: http://yeoldefalseflag.com/thread-homeland-“security”-propaganda-video-what-to-do-if-caught-in-a-mass-shooting

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NSA director shows up at hacker conference to recruit talent | Defcon

NSA director shows up at hacker conference to recruit talent

by Agence France-Presse, rawstory.com
July 27th 2012 8:28 PM

LAS VEGAS — US spy master Keith Alexander courted hackers at an infamous Def Con gathering rife with software tricksters wary of police and ferociously protective of privacy.

National Security Agency (NSA) director Alexander was the latest, and perhaps the most controversial, federal official to attend the annual hacker conference in Las Vegas to recruit warriors for battles being fought on the Internet.

“I am absolutely impressed with some of the stuff going on here,” Alexander said during a keynote presentation to a packed auditorium.

“In this room is the talent our nation needs to secure cyber space.”

His Def Con visit came after he was quoted by the New York Times as saying that between 2009 and 2011 there was a 17-fold increase in cyber attacks on critical US infrastructure such as power grids and mobile phone networks.

Along with being boss of the NSA, Alexander is an Army general and head of US Cyber Command created to defend against Internet-based attacks.

“My concern is destructive attacks with serious consequences on critical infrastructure (and key government systems),” Alexander said.

He displayed a list of major companies including banks; credit card firms; videogame and car makers, and even computer security outfits, successfully hacked in the past two years.

“There are a lot of companies with tremendous cyber security expertise getting hacked,” Alexander said.

“The reality is that this is the community that who builds many of these tools,” he continued with an apparent reference to software weapons wielded by cyber attackers.

“This community, better than anyone, understands where this is going and what we can do to fix that.”

He referred to Def Con as “the world’s best cyber community.”

Alexander, who sprinkled humor and personal stories into his talk, displayed a website for NSA job seekers.

“We need great talent,” he said. “We don’t pay as high as some of the others, but we are fun to be around.”

Public domain photo of NSA Director Keith Alexander via Wikimedia Commons

Original Page: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/07/27/nsa-director-shows-up-at-hacker-conference-to-recruit-talent/

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DailyDDoSe™ July 23, 2012 From an "UNDISCLOSED LOCATION"

FOREIGN INTERNAL DEFENSE TACTICS, TECHNIQUES, AND PROCEDURES FOR

by fuf, docstoc.com
February 27th 2010

Sorry folks! The PDF does not work through API - so you will have to link to the document here... Bring your own device... Until the USA gets their shit together on this raw data mobile security initiative! 

That's the DailyDDoSe™ July 29, 2012

Just me,

e

@ELyssaD™

From an "UNDISCLOSED LOCATION" 

... Lulz 

Original Page:

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Colorado Massacre Linked To Historic Bank Fraud

by Sorcha Faal, whatdoesitmean.com
July 25th 2012

By:

A highly disturbing Ministry of Finance report on the largest bank fraud in history that is circulating in the Kremlin today warns that it is "within the realm of possibility" that the shocking movie massacre in Colorado this past week is but another "integral part" in the deliberate plan put in place by Western banking elites and their allies to collapse the global economy.

The massacre cited in this report is being referred to as the "2012 Aurora Shooting" wherein suspect James Holmes [photo 2^nd left] is purported to have opened fire during the playing of a movie killing 12 and injuring 58 in one of the worst mass shootings in recent US history.

Interestingly, this report notes, James Holmes is extremely intelligent, a gifted scientist and grew up in an affluent neighborhood; an eerie similarity he shares with other noted American killers of the past 3 decades including Andrew Cunanan, John Gardner, John Hinckley, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Most important to note about James Holmes, however, this report says, is that his father, Robert Holmes, was said to have been scheduled to testify within the next few weeks before a US Senate panel on the largest bank fraud scandal in world history that is currently unfolding and threatens to destabilize and destroy the Western banking system.

Robert Holmes, whose "blueblood" family links go back to the Mayflower, is known throughout the global banking community as being the creator of one of the most sophisticated computer algorithms ever developed and is credited with developing predictive models for financial services; credit and fraud risk models, first and third party application fraud models and internet/online banking fraud models.

Educated at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, Robert Holmes is currently the senior lead scientist with the American credit score company FICO, which was formally known as Fair, Isaac and Company, and which every American citizen is beholden to should they need to borrow money.

The massive banking crime being investigated by the US Senate is called the LIBOR Scandal where UK banks fixed the London Interbank Borrowing Rate with the complicity of the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve (which knew about this crime for 4 years and didn't report it) and many other major Western banks.

Not known to the majority of those affected by this LIBOR rate scandal (which is everyone in the world) is that its historically low setting of interests rates since the beginning of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2012 has done more to destroy the life savings, stock investments and retirements of Americas middle class than any other single event in their entire history.

Even worse, according to this report, Holmes recently completed his work on what is called one of the most sophisticated computer algorithms ever developed that not only uncovered the true intent of this massive fraud, but is, also, able to trace the Trillions of Dollars "lost" to the exact bank accounts of the elite classes who have stolen it.

Ministry intelligence officials note in this report that it is "no coincidence" that this Colorado massacre occurred within minutes of London's Guardian News Service releasing their shocking report this past Saturday (21 July) titled "Wealth Doesn't trickle Down – It Just Floods Offshore, Research Reveals" as Robert Holmes algorithms were said used to discover this massive fraud scheme.

Equally curious to note about this massacre is that the American intelligence website TheIntelHub.Com in their 23 July article titled "" states that just mere hours before this shocking crime was committed the Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine was holding an identical drill that simulated a shooter in a movie theater.

The popular InfoWars.Com website further notes that "false flag" events such as the Colorado massacre are actively planned for by the US Army as noted in their training manual titled "Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces".

Even though the true objective of this massacre was may never be known, it is more than interesting to note that some in the "mainstream" US media are not accepting the "official line," such as Fox News reporter Ben Swann from their WXIX-FOX19 station out of Cincinnati, Ohio, who asks:

"Why did Holmes go to the expense and trouble of rigging his apartment with an array of deadly explosives and then immediately tell police about the bombs when he was arrested? If Holmes wanted to kill as many people as possible, why warn the cops ahead of time?

Given the fact that Holmes was a graduate student in neuroscience, where did he obtain the skills to create a maze of bombs so complex that it took the FBI two days to disarm them? According to experts, the intricacy of the bombs was reminiscent of war zones – how could Holmes have set all this up without help from an explosives expert?

Despite police claiming "every single indicator" tells them the shooting was a lone wolf attack, numerous witnesses have described accomplices. Initial police reports that suggested the involvement of two or more shooters were quickly buried and the lone wolf narrative aggressively pushed.

As Swann points out, eyewitnesses interviewed after the shooting such as Corbin Dates state that Holmes received a phone call from someone while he was inside the theater and responded by moving to the emergency exit, suggesting the call was an accomplice coordinating the attack.

Dates also said he saw Holmes by the exit door "signaling somebody or looking for somebody to come his way.

Another eyewitness added, "From what we saw he wasn't alone – he had someone with him. Because the second can of tear gas didn't come from his side."

July 25, 2012 © EU and US all rights reserved. Permission to use this report in its entirety is granted under the condition it is linked back to its original source at WhatDoesItMean.Com. Freebase content licensed under CC-BY and GFDL.

[Ed. Note: Western governments and their intelligence services actively campaign against the information found in these reports so as not to alarm their citizens about the many catastrophic Earth changes and events to come, a stance that the Sisters of Sorcha Faal strongly disagrees with in believing that it is every human beings right to know the truth.  Due to our missions conflicts with that of those governments, the responses of their 'agents' against us has been a longstanding misinformation/misdirection campaign designed to discredit and which is addressed in the report "Who Is Sorcha Faal?".]

They Are Going To Come For You…Why Are You Helping Them?

Global Endgame Calls For US Civil War

Shattered America Falls Into Coma

As The End Draws Near, A Nation Cowers In Fear

Silence Falls Upon America

To Believe A Liar Makes You A Liar Too

Total War Against Human Thought Declared

Special Report from Sister Ciara: What Are The Odds?

Original Page: http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1600.htm

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Democrats slip gun control into cybersecurity bill - National Conservative | Examiner.com

Democrats slip gun control into cybersecurity bill

by Anthony Martin, examiner.com
July 27th 2012

Senate Democrats slipped in a gun control amendment to a cybersecurity bill Friday, claiming that it is time to impose "reasonable gun control measures," according to The Hill.

The cybersecurity bill has advanced to the stage in the process when amendments can be attached. Amendments to bills often have nothing to do with the issue being addressed in the bill itself.

Senators Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Jack Reed, D-R.I., sponsored bill S.A. 2575 which would make it illegal to possess or transfer large capacity magazines, belts, feed stripes, or drums holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

Schumer has been one of the most ardent proponents of gun control in the U.S. Senate, along with Lautenberg and Feinstein.

Anticipating the heated opposition the amendment will encounter from Republicans and gun rights activists, Schumer claimed that both sides can find "common ground." Said Schumer,

The basic complaint is that the Chuck Schumers of the world want to take away your guns. I think it would be smart for those of us who want rational gun control to make it know that that’s not true at all.

But gun rights activists have not suggested that Senate Democrats proposed the repeal of the Second Amendment. The problem, say pro-gun groups, is that politicians such as Schumer gradually render the Second Amendment null and void not by repealing it but by passing a series of laws over a period of time that have the effect of violating the specific wording of the Amendment, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

Gun rights groups such as Gun Owners of America, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and the NRA have stated that each time politicians pass gun control laws, they infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms -- a direct violation of the Second Amendment.

For example, why should citizens who have never committed a crime be deprived of using magazines that fire more than 10 rounds? If criminals can get their hands on such devices, which they do each day on the streets illegally, then preventing average citizens from purchasing them legally only strengthens the hand of dangerous persons who intend to do harm to others.

Thus, the Second Amendment can be rendered useless by loading it up with various restrictions and limitations passed by Congress that have the effect of nullifying the Amendment without repealing it.

Despite their claims that they would not do so, Democrats have jumped at the chance to implement more gun control in the wake of the Colorado shooting last Friday.

President Obama also waded into the waters of the controversial issue when he stated Wednesday in a campaign speech that only soldiers need to have semi-automatic high capacity firearms rather than criminals.

But the overwhelming majority of persons who own semi-automatic weapons are not criminals but average citizens who bought them legally and use them responsibly. The laws that are already on the books prevent criminals from purchasing these and other weapons, meaning that they get them from the black market on the street.

Thus, why would an American president wish to punish average citizens by banning them from owning such guns, when criminals are going to get them anyway through illegal means?

Although the Senate will more than likely pass the gun ban amendment to the cybersecurity bill next week, the measure will be dead on arrival in the House where Republicans hold the majority.

Most House Republicans strongly oppose gun control measures, and most are fully aware that citizens are in no mood for more gun control, given that firearms and ammo sales have skyrocketed in recent years, especially after the Colorado shooting.

Democrats still hold a 53-47 seat majority in the Senate.

OF SPECIAL INTEREST

A new entry in my regular series Musings After Midnight is now posted at my blog, The Liberty Sphere. It's titled "So What Was Roberts REALLY Up To In His ObamaCare Ruling?" Don't miss it!

Visit my ministry site at Martin Christian Ministries.

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Original Page: http://www.examiner.com/article/democrats-slip-gun-control-into-cybersecurity-bill

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ALL the Vaccines Are Contaminated - Every Last One of Them

ALL the Vaccines Are Contaminated - Every Last One of Them (Nov. 29, 2011)

by Airport Authoritarianism, educate-yourself.org
August 12th 2011

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/november292011/vaccines-contaminated-se.php

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) - Have you been rushing out to get a yearly flu vaccine or diligently taking your children for the 40 or so mandated childhood vaccines?

That's really a shame because you have unwittingly been trading a run-of-the-mill flu or just the measles, for loading up your or your children's bodies with cancer and other deadly viruses, a destructive bacteria, a chemical selected to damage fertility, and with synthetic DNA that threatens to damage your own DNA - the biologic code for your existence.

Who is saying the vaccines are contaminated?

None other than the (now deceased) head of vaccines at Merck, Dr. Maurice Hillerman, who on camera admitted that Merck's Hepatitis B vaccines, contaminated with a virus, caused the AIDS epidemic in the US. He went on to say that all of Merck's vaccines are contaminated with cancer and other viruses. (The US government has conceded the HEB B vaccine causes Lupus. That vaccine is mandated for every infant in the US on the day of birth, and is associated with MS as well.)

That vaccine is mandated for every infant in the US on the day of birth, and is associated with MS as well.)

For Jews who have almost religiously believed in medical authorities about vaccines and poo-pooed those worried about the safety of vaccines, they might want to notice that Hillerman was Jewish.

Or they might recognize that so is Dr. Larry Palevsky, a board certified NY pediatrician, who for ten years routinely gave vaccines to his patients until he noticed them losing eye contact and then began looking into the vaccines he had blindly trusted. He found that they are ALL contaminated with viruses that are so small they can never be removed. He no longer gives any vaccines. He now treats his young patients for autism and other neurologic injuries from vaccines.

Donald W. Scott, the editor of The Journal of Degenerative Diseases and the co-founder of the Common Cause Medical Research Foundation, links vaccines to AIDS (as did Hillerman) and to US bio-weapons research, and says they are contaminated with mycoplasma, a primitive bacteria that takes apart cell walls.

Perhaps the highest scientific authority saying vaccines are contaminated is Dr. Garth Nicolson. He is a cell biologist and editor of the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Metastasis, and the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry. He is one of the most cited scientists in the world, having published over 600 medical and scientific peer-reviewed papers, edited over 14 books, and served on the editorial boards of 28 medical and scientific journals. He is not just saying that vaccines are contaminated with mycoplasma but is warning the US that they are. Nicolson goes further and says that we are all being damaged by them and contracting chronic degenerative diseases that.

That damage translates into lifelong patients (and thus life-long profit) for the pharmaceutical industry making the vaccines and he says doesn't appear to be accidental.

According To CIA Statistics: As Shots Increase, U.S. Lifespan Is DECREASING

1980: 9 vaccines, autism is rare
2009: 36 vaccine$ before age 5
2010: 55 vaccine$ before age 6

All the vaccines mandated to children and many other vaccines as well, including the seasonal flu vaccines being mandated to health care workers, are contaminated with polysorbate 80, the central ingredient in a pharmaceutical industry patent to damage fertility. The pharmaceutical industry has a long history of of seeking a vaccine that would covertly sterilize whole populations So, in addition to being contaminated with cancer and other viruses, and with the bacteria mycoplasma, vaccines are intentionally "contaminated" with a chemical as well, which is, given the patent, a "patently" sought-after sterilizing agen

Beyond containing polysorbate 80 and cancer and other viruses, and likely mycoplasma, the Gardasil vaccines are contaminated in an additional way. It and all the new vaccines are contaminated with genetically engineered DNA. It can contaminate people's DNA, just a genetically engineered crops can contaminate normal crops. Gardasil itself is contaminated with a man-made version of the HPV DNA, the very virus it was supposed to protect against, which now it threatens not only altering kids' healthy DNA with synthetic DNA (!) but with a diseased version.

Gardasil was suspended in India after 4 girls died but the killing has gone on in the US despite the confirmed deaths of 100 girls. and now the CDC, with special ties to Merck, its maker, wants all boys to take it, too.

Informed consent is the core of the Nuremberg Code that was created by the Nuremberg Tribunal to keep the pharmaceutical industry from ever again committing the hideous "medical" abuses it did during the Holocaust. In California, Jerry Brown is dismantling informed consent in order to get these deadly vaccines associated with infertility, into all school children. And it was during the Holocaust that the pharmaceutical experimented on Jewish women prisoners at Auschwitz to develop a vaccine that sterilized covertly. Henry Kissinger recommended the development of covertly sterilizing vaccines in a major report to the US government and as late as 2009 a Finnish Health Minister said he was behind the H1N1 vaccine that was meant to lower population.

Jerry Brown has just signed into law a bill that will allow children as young as 12 to decide whether to take a vaccine for sexually transmitted disease. Parental consent is not needed and parents will not even be allowed knowledge as to whether the child has taken the vaccine. Merck's Hepatitis B vaccine is one that is included, as is another Merck vaccine, Gardasil, allegedly for ovarian cancer. A Gardasil researcher says there is no evidence it works. "This raises questions about the CDC's recommendation that the series of shots be given to girls as young as 11-years old. 'If we vaccinate 11 year olds and the protection doesn't last... we've put them at harm from side effects, small but real, for no benefit,' says Dr. Harper. 'The benefit to public health is nothing, there is no reduction in cervical cancers … ' "

Disabled 763
Deaths 103
Did Not Recover 4777
Abnorm. Pap Smear 430
Cervical Dysplasia 157
Cervical Cancer 41
Life Threatening 444
Emergency Rm. Visit 9115

Hospitalized 2307
Extended Hosp. Stay 201
Serious 3111
Adverse Events 23388

But these figures are based on statistics from medical professionals who do not wish to be sued. In reality, "less than 10% of deaths, seizures, paralysis, etc., are being reported as caused by the vaccinations that doctors gave in their office.

The following real-world estimates are based on reports from a law firm:

The California law even approves in advance, ALL yet-to-be made (and completely untested) vaccines for sexually transmitted diseases, though of the two current Merck vaccines they are pushing on children, one Merck vaccine caused AIDS and causes Lupus and the other Merck vaccine is contaminated in multiple ways and proving highly lethal. Children will be the ones decide whether to take the vaccines, and they will make that decision after being forced to see videos of people dying terrible deaths from cancer. Not only would the vaccine be given without parental consent, but parents are denied knowledge that the vaccine is going to be given or that it was given. If the child has a seizure or dies afterward, parents may not see their own children's medical records.

This is what is left of the "informed consent" meant to provide human rights to protect the world from pharmaceutical industry abuses against mankind.

After World War II, it was Merck which received the flight capital of the pharmaceutical industry indicted for crimes against humanity, human enslavement and mass murder.

In the case of children, rather than their facing childhood diseases of insignificant threat, they are, by legal mandate, being bombarded repeatedly throughout their childhood with viruses that cause diseases (including cancer), a cell-destroying bacteria, a a threat to the very integrity of their DNA, and a chemical specifically chosen to impair fertility. And laws are being written to add to the already long list of vaccines they must take, including two mandated Merck vaccines. One is an old Merck vaccine that caused AIDS and is causing Lupus. The other is a Merck vaccine claiming to prevent cervical cancer though girls have little chance of contracting it in the first place (and boys, none!) and it can easily be detected by pap smear and treated successfully and there is NO evidence the vaccine prevents it. Meanwhile, it is killing children.

Contamination of the polio vaccine and the continuing effects

FACT: Before the Polio Vaccine, there had never been a virus from another species deliberately injected into humans.

FACT: 61% of all human tumors (at autopsy) now contain the SV40 monkey virus, traceable to the Polio vaccine of the 1950s and 60s

FACT: CUTTER vaccine division and WYETH produced a deadly Polio vaccine with a live virus that actually gave the recipient POLIO

FACT: All above information was withheld from the public for years to avoid a public panic and to prevent a loss of faith in vaccines. polio was a very rare infectious disease that presented little risk to the public, but the risk was greatly exaggerated by the Polio Foundation before the introduction of the polio vaccine, the miracle vaccine - contaminated with a monkey virus which has been the cause of soft tissue cancers for decades since.

Though facing no serious health risk, people are paying to have their bodies contaminated by contaminated vaccines. In taking vaccines, they are trading the minimal risk of even contracting common diseases and which themselves are rarely dangerous and can be treated if contracted - for the absolute certainty of loading their bodies with

1. cancer and other infectious viruses,

2. a destructive bacteria, and

3. a fertility impairing chemical.

They are doing this because they are being terrorized by their own government with false information on the risks of various diseases and denied critical information on the scientific risk of the vaccines.

Those vaccines without a doubt threaten their own and their children's fertility, and their very lives.

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Related

Vaccine Dangers Index of Articles
http://educate-yourself.org/vcd/

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Current News | Introduction | Colloidal Silver | Chemtrails | Sylphs | Emerging Diseases | Forbidden Cures |Ozone | Immunity Boosting | Nutrition | The CIA Mind-Body Connection | Ozone | Bioelectrification | Story on Drugs | Vaccine Dangers | Cancer | Newsletter | New World Order | NWO News | Pam Schuffert James Casbolt | Phil Schneider | Al Bielek | Trevor James Constable | Mind Control | Brice Taylor | Ted Gunderson | The Relfes | Free Energy || Montalk Dr. Robert Bitzer | T. Lobsang Rampa | Ruth Drown | ZS Livingstone | David Brandt | Red Elk | Phil Ledoux | Gary Wade | BBB | The Draft | Veterans Awaken Tone Gen | Depleted Uranium | Discussion | Dowsing | Police & Tasers | Rev. Sun Myung Moon | British Israel | The End Times | Amy Goodman Gatekeeper 'Peak Oil' | Amitakh Stanford | Military Draft | Rosie's Predictions | Project Blue Beam | Otto Skorzeny | Insights on Aliens | Cell Towers | Cell Phone Dangers CPS/DCF Tyranny | Adrenal Burnout | The Women Warriors | Orgone Adventures | Dr. John Coleman | Railroading Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald | Henry Makow Bush Family & Nazis | Holistic Dentists | Metal Free Dentistry | Water Supply Sabotage | Dr. Hulda Clark Books | Planet X Sequel | 'Undocumented Immigrants' War on Terror | Tavistock | U.S. Concentration Camps | FEMA | Aliens Are Coming! | Guiding Principles | Global Warming | Gang Stalking | Monoatomic Gold Spiritualsim | Hope | Healing Thought Forms | Vanquish Fear | Prevent Alien/Demonic Attacks | Rethinking Noam Chomsky | Rockefeller File | War is a Racket Letters | Codex Alimentarius | Zeitgeist Refuted | | Daily Blog | Global Warming | Allies Contact Sheet | Hydrogen Peroxide | Protocols of Sion | Radio Interviews | The Strawman Explained | Swine Flu Hoax/Vaccine | Gary Null on Vaccine Dangers | Don Nicoloff | "Everything is OK" | Daily Blog | Products | Orgone Generators | The Succor Punch | The Mini Silver Terminator | Home | Links | Contact Us/ E-mail Want to Contact the Editor? First read this

Current News | Introduction | Colloidal Silver | Chemtrails | Sylphs | Emerging Diseases | Forbidden Cures |Ozone | Immunity Boosting | Nutrition | The CIA Mind-Body Connection | Ozone | Bioelectrification | Story on Drugs | Vaccine Dangers | Cancer | Newsletter | New World Order | NWO News | Pam Schuffert James Casbolt | Phil Schneider | Al Bielek | Trevor James Constable | Mind Control | Brice Taylor | Ted Gunderson | The Relfes | Free Energy || Montalk Dr. Robert Bitzer | T. Lobsang Rampa | Ruth Drown | ZS Livingstone | David Brandt | Red Elk | Phil Ledoux | Gary Wade | BBB | The Draft | Veterans Awaken Tone Gen | Depleted Uranium | Discussion | Dowsing | Police & Tasers | Rev. Sun Myung Moon | British Israel | The End Times | Amy Goodman Gatekeeper 'Peak Oil' | Amitakh Stanford | Military Draft | Rosie's Predictions | Project Blue Beam | Otto Skorzeny | Insights on Aliens | Cell Towers | Cell Phone Dangers CPS/DCF Tyranny | Adrenal Burnout | The Women Warriors | Orgone Adventures | Dr. John Coleman | Railroading Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald | Henry Makow Bush Family & Nazis | Holistic Dentists | Metal Free Dentistry | Water Supply Sabotage | Dr. Hulda Clark Books | Planet X Sequel | 'Undocumented Immigrants' War on Terror | Tavistock | U.S. Concentration Camps | FEMA | Aliens Are Coming! | Guiding Principles | Global Warming | Gang Stalking | Monoatomic Gold Spiritualsim | Hope | Healing Thought Forms | Vanquish Fear | Prevent Alien/Demonic Attacks | Rethinking Noam Chomsky | Rockefeller File | War is a Racket Letters | Codex Alimentarius | Zeitgeist Refuted | Airport Authoritarianism | Daily Blog | Global Warming | Allies Contact Sheet | Hydrogen Peroxide | Protocols of Sion | Radio Interviews | The Strawman Explained | Swine Flu Hoax/Vaccine | Gary Null on Vaccine Dangers | Don Nicoloff | "Everything is OK" | Daily Blog | Products | Orgone Generators | The Succor Punch | The Mini Silver Terminator | Home | Links | Contact Us/ E-mail Want to Contact the Editor? First read this

Original Page: http://educate-yourself.org/vcd/allvaccinescontaminated29nov11.shtml

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Twitter Updates Search Features and Improves Results

by Sam Sudano, lovell.com
July 26th 2012

Notice anything different about Twitter? This month, in an effort to enhance search functionality, the social networking and micro-blogging platform improved its search features, allowing you to discover people, topics, mentions and hashtags more easily. If you haven’t visited the site recently, here are a few changes to look out for:

Search Term Autocomplete:

Type in any search term and watch as Twitter offers autocompletes of related terms, keywords and topics. For instance, a search for “news” offers a dropdown list of the terms “newsroom” and “newsnight.”

Related Suggestions:

If you’re searching a topic or event, it’s likely there are multiple keywords and phrases used in the online dialogue around this topic. The platform now offers relevant suggestions using cues from real-time dialogue on Twitter.

Before the latest update went into effect, searching for a term could produce hundreds of results. Now, Twitter bases search returns around users you may have interacted with in the past or topics you may have searched. That same search for “news” also displays several Twitter handles including CNN, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and PR News.

Spelling Corrections:

Previously, a misspelled search term would send you to a blank page. The spell-check update brings the misspelled word to your attention and suggests words you may have meant, improving search results. And there’s good news for iPhone and Android users – recently Twitter released a mobile update that includes the spelling correction, autocomplete, and search suggestion developments.

Real Names and Usernames in Results:

Searching for a person on Twitter? With the new search features, you’ll not only find that person but all tweets that mention them in any way – username and real name. Twitter also attempts to pull related users and displays the results at the top of the search.

What do these changes mean for your business? Twitter’s related suggestions feature presents a search engine optimization opportunity for businesses to optimize outgoing Tweets through keyword targeting. Strategically placing keywords in your company’s Tweets can increase the chance that your product or service will be discovered when people are searching those keywords. Now that’s something to Tweet about!

Original Page: http://lovell.com/social-media/twitter-updates-search-features-improves-results/

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Press Release: AutismAid to launch "Beyond The Limits Campaign" to support individuals impacted by Autism Spectrum Disorder

Press Release: AutismAid to launch "Beyond The Limits Campaign" to support individuals impacted by Autism Spectrum Disorder
> Press Release Steve Knowlton Guinness World Record Run
> > Catlin, IL: AutismAid is proud to support ultra-marathoner Steve Knowlton. Steve has committed to help us introduce a message of service support equity for those individuals impacted by Autism Spectrum Disorder from coast to coast as he runs to break the Guinness World Record this fall. The journey, which we are calling our "Beyond the Limits" Campaign will consist of Steve running from San Francisco to New York in 45 days commencing on September 1st.
> > "Last year, with inner determination and help from God, I ran Solo 3,717 miles across America,from Seattle to Key Largo. This fall I plan on breaking a 32-year-old World Record set in 1980 by Frank Giannino who averaged 67 miles a day for 46 days and 8 hours running across America. I will set the New World Record by averaging over 70 miles a day for 45 days... This September, I will begin my Record Run starting in San Francisco, California and head through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and finishing in New York City, New York for a total of 3,100 miles." - Steve Knowlton
> > We want to support Steve in every way that we can and we are so very grateful for his commitment and sacrifice. We are in the process of looking for sponsors as well as in-kind donations to help Steve with his journey. Our growing organization welcomes contact from all members of the community as we address the service needs of individuals on the spectrum through our partner Non Profit groups.
> > About AutismAid: AutismAid is a National Consortium that will change the way Local Autism Service Non Profits Raise Donations, Collaborate, and Operate. Our mission is to raise funds, confidence, and community action levels. http://www.AutismAid.org For more information contact Executive Director Tim Welsh tim@autismaid.org or Creative Director Zidlow Marx zidlow@autismaid.org
>

painfully evident

Amid a Horrific Scene, Tears

by KERRI MACDONALD, lens.blogs.nytimes.com
December 7th 2011

Massoud Hossaini has never cried like this before.

His photograph of a young Shiite woman, bloody and screaming, made the front page of The New York Times this morning. It also appeared on the front page of The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, which ran a variation of the photo. Mr. Hossaini was one of the few photographers at the scene in Kabul, Afghanistan, following a series of coordinated bombings on Tuesday, which also struck the cities of Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif, killing at least 63 Shiite worshipers.

Mr. Hossaini was photographing young Afghan Shiites during a procession for Ashura, which marks the death of Shiite Islam’s holiest martyr. Some of those he had photographed recognized him. The 30-year-old photographer, who is Shiite himself, remembered seeing some of them smile.

Then, everything changed.

He heard a large explosion behind him. He was thrown to the ground. When he could focus, he stood up. He saw that his left hand was bleeding, but he didn’t have time to think about it. Mr. Hossaini ran — against the crowd, most of whom were running away from the smoke — and reached the scene about 10 seconds after the blast. The smoke began to clear, but he still had trouble concentrating.

He realized he was amid a circle of bodies, almost exactly at the place where the explosion had happened. He saw a few pairs of eyes moving, but body parts were scattered on the floor. His hands were shaking. Having covered Afghanistan — the place where he was born — since 2004, Mr. Hossaini has seen suicide attacks before. In 2007, he photographed an attack that killed 70 civilians. He cried then, too.

But this time was different.

“I have never experienced that before,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Kabul.

Mr. Hossaini was focused on what he was seeing and hearing: shouting voices, sounds of confusion. A few other people began to approach the circle. Some tried to pick up bodies. “I was taking pictures and I did want to help,” he said. “But I just saw that the bodies were completely destroyed and I said, ‘O.K. I can’t do anything for them, so I have to wait for whoever comes.’”

Behind him, he noticed a group of women and children. One woman stood on the corner, covered in blood. “Women were asking me, ‘Help, help, help,’” Mr. Hossaini said. “I couldn’t. I was recording and I was taking pictures.” One of the women who was holding a baby, called out for help — her other child had died. Another man lifted the child from the ground. But blood was pouring from its head. The man placed the child back on the ground and walked away.

As Mr. Hossaini photographed, he realized he was weeping. When he looked down, he realized how badly his own hand was bleeding. He wrapped it with the cleanest piece of material he could find. No one around him could think straight. People were yelling, “Allah Hu Akbar,” which means, “God be praised.”

“Death to Al Qaeda,” he heard them say.

When an ambulance arrived and the staff inside saw the circle of bodies, they were also at loss for words. They began piling bodies in the back of a vehicle.

Shortly after, a few young people arrived. They began targeting Mr. Hossaini, angrily forcing him out of the circle of bodies. “They thought I was foreign,” he said. A few minutes later, bleeding and depressed, Mr. Hossaini decided to go back to the office to file his pictures and videos. He called his brother, Hamid, a doctor, who treated his hand.

As he filed, he couldn’t stop crying. He sent most of the pictures without editing them. But he stopped when he saw the picture of the girl screaming, her hands open at her sides, her white pants splattered with blood, the sunlight on her face. He had noticed the woman in green — a color worn as a sign of remembrance — before the explosion, during the ceremony. He had planned to return to her after he took some pictures of the men.

“With the blood and tension, she didn’t know what she was doing,” he said.

After filing his images, he cried all the way home. He kept crying, hard.

Original Page: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/07/in-the-midst-of-a-horrific-scene-tears/

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Connectome: A New Way To Think About What Makes You You

by Maria Popova, brainpickings.org
March 22nd 2012 8:12 PM
by

“You are more than your genes. You are your connectome.”

The nature vs. nurture debate pitted the hard and social sciences against each other for decades, if not centuries, stirred by a central concern with consciousness, what it means to be human, what makes a person, and, perhaps most interestingly to us egocentric beings, what constitutes character and personality. In Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, MIT Professor of Computational Neuroscience Sebastian Seung proposes a new model for understanding the totality of selfhood, one based the emerging science of connectomics — a kind of neuroscience of the future that seeks to map and understand the brain much like genomics has mapped the genome.

A “connectome” denotes the sum total of connections between the neurons in a nervous system and, like “genome,” implies completeness. It’s a complex fingerprint of identity, revealing the differences between brains and, inversely, the specificity of our own uniqueness. Seung proposes a simple theory: We are different because our connectomes differ from one another. With that lens, he argues, any kind of personality change — from educating yourself to developing better habits — is a matter of rewiring your connectome.

That capacity is precisely what makes the connectome intriguing and infinitely promising — unlike the genome, which is fixed from the moment of conception, the connetome changes throughout life. Seung explains:

Neuroscientists have already identified the basic kinds of change. Neurons adjust, or “reweight,” their connections by strengthening or weakening them. Neurons reconnect by creating and eliminating synapses, and they rewire by growing and retracting branches. Finally, entirely new neurons are created and existing ones eliminated through regeneration.

We don’t know exactly how life events — your parents’ divorce, your fabulous year abroad — change your connectome. But there is good evidence that all four R’s — reweighting, reconnection, rewiring, and regeneration — are affected by your experiences. At the same time, the four R’s are also guided by genes. Minds are indeed influenced by genes, especially when the brain is ‘wiring’ itself up during infancy and childhood.*

[…]

The connectome theory of mental differences is compatible with the genetic theory, but it is far richer and more complex because it includes the effects of living in the world. The connectome theory is also less deterministic. There is reason to believe that we shape our own connectomes by the actions we take, even by the things we think. Brain wiring may make us who we are, but we play an important role in wiring up our brains.”

Harnessing the power of those four R’s, Seung believes, is the most important goal of neuroscience — but, given your connectome is 100 billion times larger than your genome and has a million times more connections than your genome has letters, it’s a daunting task. Still, new technologies and new directions of scientific curiosity are bringing us closer to understanding this microcosm of meticulously structured chaos.

At the heart of Seung’s vision is a new way of thinking about human personality, a fascinating and controversial subject we’ve previously explored. He proposes an apt metaphor, underpinning which is a desire not only to find and understand our connectomes, but also to develop methods for changing and optimizing them:

In the nineteenth century, the American psychologist William James wrote eloquently of the stream of consciousness, the continuous flow of thoughts through the mind. But James failed to note that every stream has a bed. Without this groove in the earth, the water would not know in which direction of the flow. Since the connectome defines the pathways along which neural activity can flow, we might regard it as the streambed of consciousness.

The metaphor is a powerful one. Over a long period of time, in the same way that the water of the stream slowly shapes the bed, neural activity changes the connectome. The two notions of the self — as both the fast-moving, ever-changing stream, and the more stable but slowly transforming streambed** — are thus inextricably linked. This book is about the self as the streambed, the self in the connectome — the self that has been neglected for too long.”

In elaborating on this dichotomy of the self, Seung echoes Daniel Kahneman’s notion of the experiencing self vs. the remembering self:

One self changes rapidly from moment to moment, becoming angry and then cheering up, thinking about the meaning of life and then the household chores, watching the leaves fall outside and then the football game on television. This self is the one intertwined with consciousness. Its protean nature derives from the rapidly changing patterns of neural activity in the brain.

The other self is much more stable. It retains memories from childhood over an entire lifetime. Its nature — what we think of as personality — is largely constant, a fact that comforts family and friends. The properties of this self are expressed while you are conscious, but they continue to exist during unconscious states like sleep. This self, like the connectome, changes only slowly over time. This is the self invoked by the idea that you are your connectome.”

Sample Seung’s insights with his 2010 TEDGlobal talk:

See Video:

Scientific American has an excellent Q&A with Seung about Connectome.

* For more on this fascinating early wiring, especially as it applies to our emotional lives, see the excellent A General Theory of Love.

** For a different metaphor articulating an analogous concept, see Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, where he describes the self as the interplay between the conscious “rider” and the unconscious “elephant” he struggles to command.

Original Page: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/03/22/connectome-sebastian-seung/

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Stanford Magazine - The Menace Within - The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Menace Within

stanfordalumni.org | Nov 30th -0001

What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?

By Romesh ratnesar

It began with an ad in the classifieds.

Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks. More than 70 people volunteered to take part in the study, to be conducted in a fake prison housed inside Jordan Hall, on Stanford's Main Quad. The leader of the study was 38-year-old psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. He and his fellow researchers selected 24 applicants and randomly assigned each to be a prisoner or a guard.

Zimbardo encouraged the guards to think of themselves as actual guards in a real prison. He made clear that prisoners could not be physically harmed, but said the guards should try to create an atmosphere in which the prisoners felt "powerless."

The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. But no one knew what, exactly, they were getting into.

Forty years later, the Stanford Prison Experiment remains among the most notable—and notorious—research projects ever carried out at the University. For six days, half the study's participants endured cruel and dehumanizing abuse at the hands of their peers. At various times, they were taunted, stripped naked, deprived of sleep and forced to use plastic buckets as toilets. Some of them rebelled violently; others became hysterical or withdrew into despair. As the situation descended into chaos, the researchers stood by and watched—until one of their colleagues finally spoke out.

The public's fascination with the SPE and its implications—the notion, as Zimbardo says, "that these ordinary college students could do such terrible things when caught in that situation" —brought Zimbardo international renown. It also provoked criticism from other researchers, who questioned the ethics of subjecting student volunteers to such extreme emotional trauma. The study had been approved by Stanford's Human Subjects Research Committee, and Zimbardo says that "neither they nor we could have imagined" that the guards would treat the prisoners so inhumanely.

In 1973, an investigation by the American Psychological Association concluded that the prison study had satisfied the profession's existing ethical standards. But in subsequent years, those guidelines were revised to prohibit human-subject simulations modeled on the SPE. "No behavioral research that puts people in that kind of setting can ever be done again in America," Zimbardo says.

The Stanford Prison Experiment became the subject of numerous books and documentaries, a feature film and the name of at least one punk band. In the last decade, after the revelations of abuses committed by U.S. military and intelligence personnel at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the SPE provided lessons in how good people placed in adverse conditions can act barbarically.

The experiment is still a source of controversy and contention—even among those who took part in it. Here, in their own words, some of the key players in the drama reflect on their roles and how those six days in August changed their lives.

The Superintendent

Phil Zimbardo
Zimbardo joined Stanford's psychology department in 1968 and taught there until his retirement in 2007.

The study was focused originally on how individuals adapt to being in a relatively powerless situation. I was interested in prisoners and was not really interested in the guards. It was really meant to be a single, dramatic demonstration of the power of the situation on human behavior. We expected that we would write some articles about it and move on.

After the end of the first day, I said, "There's nothing here. Nothing's happening." The guards had this antiauthority mentality. They felt awkward in their uniforms. They didn't get into the guard mentality until the prisoners started to revolt. Throughout the experiment, there was this conspiracy of denial—everyone involved was in effect denying that this was an experiment and agreeing that this is a prison run by psychologists.

There was zero time for reflection. We had to feed the prisoners three meals a day, deal with the prisoner breakdowns, deal with their parents, run a parole board. By the third day I was sleeping in my office. I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail. That was who I was: I'm not the researcher at all. Even my posture changes—when I walk through the prison yard, I'm walking with my hands behind my back, which I never in my life do, the way generals walk when they're inspecting troops.

We had arranged for everyone involved—the prisoners, guards and staff—to be interviewed on Friday by other faculty members and graduate students who had not been involved in the study. Christina Maslach, who had just finished her PhD, came down the night before. She's standing outside the guard quarters and watches the guards line up the prisoners for the 10 o'clock toilet run. The prisoners come out, and the guards put bags over their heads, chain their feet together and make them put their hands on each other's shoulders, like a chain gang. They're yelling and cursing at them. Christina starts tearing up. She said, "I can't look at this."

I ran after her and we had this argument outside Jordan Hall. She said, "It's terrible what you're doing to these boys. How can you see what I saw and not care about the suffering?" But I didn't see what she saw. And I suddenly began to feel ashamed. This is when I realized I had been transformed by the prison study to become the prison administrator. At that point I said, "You're right. We've got to end the study."

[As the study was underway], there was an escape attempt at San Quentin prison and [former Black Panther] George Jackson was shot and killed. Three weeks after that, there's the Attica prison riot [in New York]. Suddenly, prisons are hot. Two government investigative committees start hearings and I'm flown out to Washington to present to a congressional subcommittee on the nature of prisons. I went from knowing nothing firsthand about prisons to being an expert. But I worked hard to learn more. I visited a number of correctional facilities all over the country. I organized a program for Stanford students to teach a course at a prison. For years I had an active correspondence with at least 20 different prisoners.

It wasn't a formal experiment. My colleagues probably never thought much of it. But as a result of the prison study, I really became more aware of the central role of power in our lives. I became more aware of the power I have as a teacher. I started consciously doing things to minimize the negative use of power in the classroom. I encouraged students to challenge me.

I think I became more self-reflective. I'm more generous and more open because of that experience. I think it made me a better person.

The Whistleblower

Christina Maslach
Maslach, PhD '71, became a professor at UC-Berkeley. She and Zimbardo married in 1972. They live in San Francisco.

I had just finished my doctorate and was about to leave Stanford to start my new job. Phil and I had started dating. The prison study was never anything I was considering playing a part in. During the first few days of the experiment, I did hear from Phil, but not in great detail. What I was getting, though, was a sense that it was becoming a real prison—people were not just fooling around but actually getting caught up in the situation. But it still wasn't evident to me what that might mean.

At first Phil didn't seem different. I didn't see any change in him until I actually went down to the basement and saw the prison. I met one guard who seemed nice and sweet and charming, and then I saw him in the yard later and I thought, "Oh my God, what happened here?" I saw the prisoners being marched to go down to the men's room. I was getting sick to my stomach, physically ill. I said, "I can't watch this." But no one else was having the same problem.

Phil came after me and said, "What's the matter with you?" That's when I had this feeling like, "I don't know you. How can you not see this?" It felt like we were standing on two different cliffs across a chasm. If we had not been dating before then, if he were just another faculty member and this happened, I might have said, "I'm sorry, I'm out of here" and just left. But because this was someone I was growing to like a lot, I thought that I had to figure this out. So I kept at it. I fought back, and ended up having a huge argument with him. I don't think we've ever had an argument quite like that since then.

I feared that if the study went on, he would become someone I no longer cared for, no longer loved, no longer respected. It's an interesting question: Suppose he kept going, what would I have done? I honestly don't know.

The clearest influence the study had on me was that it raised some really serious questions about how people cope with extremely emotional, difficult situations, especially when it's part of their job—when they have to manage people or take care of them or rehabilitate them. So I started interviewing people. I started with some prison guards in a real prison, and talked to them about their jobs and how they understood what they were doing. At first I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I was just trying to listen.

I interviewed people who worked in hospitals, in the ER. After a while I realized there was a rhythm and pattern emerging, and when I described it to someone they said, "I don't know what it's called in other professions, but in our occupation we call it 'burnout.'" And so I spent a good chunk of my professional life developing and defining what burnout is—what are the things that cause it and how can we intervene and help people cope with it more effectively. All of that work on burnout had some origins in the experience I had in the prison experiment.

People will sometimes come up to me—at conferences, or maybe they're students who have taken psychology classes—and they'll say, "Oh my God, you're such a hero! What is it like to be a hero?" And it's always a little surprising to me because it sure didn't feel heroic at the time. The prison study has given me a new understanding of what "heroism" means. It's not some egocentric, I'm-going-to-rush-into-that-burning-building thing—it's about seeing something that needs to be addressed and saying, I need to help and do something to make it better.

The Guards

Dave Eshelman
The son of a Stanford engineering professor, Eshelman was a student at Chapman University at the time of the experiment. He was the prison's most abusive guard, patterning himself after the sadistic prison warden (portrayed by Strother Martin) in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Today he owns a mortgage business in Saratoga.

I was just looking for some summer work. I had a choice of doing this or working at a pizza parlor. I thought this would be an interesting and different way of finding summer employment.

The only person I knew going in was John Mark. He was another guard and wasn't even on my shift. That was critical. If there were prisoners in there who knew me before they encountered me, then I never would have been able to pull off anything I did. The act that I put on—they would have seen through it immediately.

What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona. I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another personality before you step out on the stage. I was kind of running my own experiment in there, by saying, "How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before they say, 'knock it off?'" But the other guards didn't stop me. They seemed to join in. They were taking my lead. Not a single guard said, "I don't think we should do this."

The fact that I ramped up the intimidation and the mental abuse without any real sense as to whether I was hurting anybody— I definitely regret that. But in the long run, no one suffered any lasting damage. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, my first reaction was, this is so familiar to me. I knew exactly what was going on. I could picture myself in the middle of that and watching it spin out of control. When you have little or no supervision as to what you're doing, and no one steps in and says, "Hey, you can't do this"—things just keep escalating. You think, how can we top what we did yesterday? How do we do something even more outrageous? I felt a deep sense of familiarity with that whole situation.

Sometimes when people know about the experiment and then meet me, it's like, My God, this guy's a psycho! But everyone who knows me would just laugh at that.

John Mark
Mark was about to begin his junior year at Stanford. He graduated in 1973 with a degree in anthropology. He lives in the Bay Area and has worked for the last 18 years as a medical coder for Kaiser Permanente.

I had spent my sophomore year at Stanford in France and returned to campus that spring. It was one of the most pivotal times in my life. Over Thanksgiving of the year before, I went with a friend to Amsterdam. You have to remember this is 1970, it was basically the '60s. We went to one of those clubs where you could buy drugs. We bought hash and actually brought some back with us, and I was caught at the French border. For a few hours I was told by French border guards that I was going to prison. In the end they let me go, but I definitely had been scared out of my wits.

When I saw this thing about a prison experiment, I thought I had some life experiences to bring to it. I felt this was going to be an important experiment. I told them all about what I'd been through and why it was important to me to be a prisoner. It was very disappointing to be assigned to be a guard, but I did the best I could.

During the day shift, when I worked, no one did anything that was beyond what you'd expect in a situation like that. But Zimbardo went out of his way to create tension. Things like forced sleep deprivation—he was really pushing the envelope. I just didn't like the whole idea of constantly disturbing people and asking them to recite their prisoner numbers in a count. I certainly didn't like when they put a guy in solitary confinement.

At that time of my life, I was getting high, all day every day. I got high before I went to the experiment; I got high on my breaks and lunch. I got high afterwards. I brought joints with me, and every day I wanted to give them to the prisoners. I looked at their faces and saw how they were getting dispirited and I felt sorry for them.

I didn't think it was ever meant to go the full two weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment, he knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experiment—by how it was constructed, and how it played out—to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds—people will turn on each other just because they're given a role and given power.

Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch. I don't think the actual events match up with the bold headline. I never did, and I haven't changed my opinion.

The Researchers

Craig Haney
A graduate student of Zimbardo's, Haney, MA '71, PhD '78, JD '78, was responsible for overseeing the experiment and analyzing the data gathered from it. He went on to become a professor at UC-Santa Cruz, a leading authority on the psychological effects of incarceration and an advocate for prison reform.

What we thought we were going to find is that there would be subtle behavioral changes that would take place over time. There were moments, in the course of deciding about whether to do it, where we wavered. Not because we thought it would go too far or be too dramatic, but because we weren't sure anything was going to happen. I remember at one point asking, "What if they just sit around playing guitar for two weeks? What the hell are we going to do then?"

People have said to me, you must have known this was going to happen. We didn't—and we were not naive. We were very well read in the literature. We just did not anticipate these kinds of things happening. It really was a unique experience to watch human behavior transform in front of your eyes. And I can honestly say that I try never to forget it. I spend a lot of time with real prisoners and real guards, and having seen what I saw then, while a graduate student, gave me respect for the power of institutional environments to transform good people into something else.

I also realized how quickly we get used to things that are shocking one day and a week later become matter-of-fact. During the study, when we decided to move prisoners to different parts of the prison, we realized that they were going to see where they were and be reminded they're not in a prison—they're just in the psych building at Stanford. We didn't want that to happen.

So we put paper bags over their heads. The first time I saw that, it was shocking. By the next day we're putting bags on their heads and not thinking about it. That happens all the time in real correctional facilities. You get used to it. I do a lot of work in solitary-confinement units, on the psychological effects of supermax prisons. In places like that, when prisoners undergo the so-called therapy counseling, they are kept in actual cages. I constantly remind myself never to get used to seeing the cages.

The prisoners in this study were a downtrodden lot by the end of it. Even the guys who didn't break down were hurting. This was a really difficult experience. And for me that was a lesson, too. Real prisoners learn how to mask their pain and act like it doesn't matter. The prison study showed what it feels like for people who have not learned how to wear that implacable mask. I try to talk to prisoners about what their lives are really like, and I don't think I would have come to that kind of empathy had I not seen what I saw at Stanford. If someone had said that in six days you can take 10 healthy college kids, in good health and at the peak of resilience, and break them down by subjecting them to things that are commonplace and relatively mild by the standards of real prisons —I'm not sure I would have believed it, if I hadn't seen it happen.

The Prisoner

Richard Yacco
A community college student at the time, Yacco helped instigate a revolt against conditions in Zimbardo's prison. He was released one day early from the study after exhibiting signs of depression. After working in radio and television production, he now teaches at a public high school in Oakland.

At the time I was debating: If I were drafted to fight in Vietnam, what would I do? Would I be willing to go to jail? Since that was one of the considerations, I thought, well, a prison experiment would give me some insight into what that would be like.

The first thing that really threw me off was the sleep deprivation. When they woke us up the first time, I had no idea it was after only four hours of sleep. It was only after they got us up and we did some exercises and then they let us go back to bed that I realized they were messing with our sleep cycles. That was kind of a surprise from the first night.

I don't recall exactly when the prisoners started rebelling. I do remember resisting what one guard was telling me to do and being willing to go into solitary confinement. As prisoners, we developed solidarity—we realized that we could join together and do passive resistance and cause some problems. It was that era. I had been willing to go on marches against the Vietnam war, I went on marches for civil rights, and was trying to figure out what I would do to resist even going into the service. So in a way I was testing some of my own ways of rebelling or standing up for what I thought was right.

My parents came on visitors' night. They were really concerned with the way I looked. I told them that they're breaking up our sleep, that we weren't having the chance to take showers. My appearance really concerned both of my parents, my mother especially.

When I asked [Zimbardo's team] what I could do if I wanted to quit, I was told, "You can't quit—you agreed to be here for the full experiment." That made me feel like a prisoner at that point. I realized I had made a commitment to something that I now could not change. I had made myself a prisoner.

I ended up being paroled by the "parole board." They released me Thursday night. That's when they told me they were going to end the experiment the next day. What I learned later is that the reason they chose me [to parole] is because they thought I'd be the next guy to break down. I was surprised, because I never thought I was going through any kind of depression or anything like that.

One thing that I thought was interesting about the experiment was whether, if you believe society has assigned you a role, do you then assume the characteristics of that role? I teach at an inner city high school in Oakland. These kids don't have to go through experiments to witness horrible things. But what frustrates my colleagues and me is that we are creating great opportunities for these kids, we offer great support for them, why are they not taking advantage of it? Why are they dropping out of school? Why are they coming to school unprepared? I think a big reason is what the prison study shows—they fall into the role their society has made for them.

Participating in the Stanford Prison Experiment is something I can use and share with students. This was one week of my life when I was a teenager and yet here it is, 40 years later, and it's still something that had enough of an impact on society that people are still interested in it. You never know what you're going to get involved in that will turn out to be a defining moment in your life.

Original Page: http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2011/julaug/features/spe.html

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