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Best of the Web: Powerful earthquakes hit Japan - tsunami warnings issued across Pacific region

Strongest quake, measuring magnitude 8.9, triggers 10 metre-high tsunami that sweeps away homes, vehicles and crops


A series of massive earthquakes have struck north-east Japan, unleashing a 10-metre tsunami that swept buildings, vehicles, crops and debris across swaths of farmland.

The first 8.9 magnitude shock is said to be the biggest to have hit Japan in 140 years, rocking buildings 235 miles (380km) away in Tokyo and sparking fires.

At least five people are known to have died, but amid widespread reports of landslides, floods, collapsed buildings and fires the death toll is expected to rise.

The quake hit at 2.46pm (5.45am GMT), about 6 miles below sea level and 78 miles off the east coast. It was swiftly followed by five powerful aftershocks of up to 7.1 magnitude.

Vader

Best of the Web: "Operation Libya": The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya and the Battle for Oil

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Part I: Insurrection and Military Intervention: The US-NATO Attempted Coup d'Etat in Libya?

The US and NATO are supporting an armed insurrection in Eastern Libya, with a view to justifying a "humanitarian intervention".

This is not a non-violent protest movement as in Egypt and Tunisia. Conditions in Libya are fundamentally different. The armed insurgency in Eastern Libya is directly supported by foreign powers. The insurrection in Benghazi immediately hoisted the red, black and green banner with the crescent and star: the flag of the monarchy of King Idris, which symbolized the rule of the former colonial powers. (See Manlio Dinucci, 'Libya-When historical memory is erased', Global Research, Febraury 28, 2011)

US and NATO military advisers and special forces are already on the ground. The operation was planned to coincide with the protest movement in neighbouring Arab countries. Public opinion was led to believe that the protest movement had spread spontaneously from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya.

Gear

Best of the Web: The Final Steps in Achieving Global Totalitarianism

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© Unknown
"The ultimate tyranny in a society is not control by martial law. It is control by the psychological manipulation of consciousness, through which reality is defined so that those who exist within it do not even realize that they are in prison. They do not even realize that there is something outside of where they exist." -- Barbara Marciniak, Content of Bringers of the Dawn, pg. 87, Chapter Eight.
For several years now, I've been watching the evolution of the virtual community. At first I had rather naïve, high hopes for its possibilities. I imagined it might spawn a viable counterculture that could become a global phenomenon bringing the People of Earth together in a way never possible before.

I have studied innumerable forums, social networks, blogs and news and information sites. On virtually every venue that allows reader comment or contribution I have found only one common factor: Conflict.

Nuke

Best of the Web: Magical Mineral Supplement (MMS)

MMS Miracle Mineral Solution
© Marc Circus
The truth is that MMS is a dangerous poison, and as such it has no business whatsoever in the alternative health arena.

~ Dr. Gabriela Segura
Magical or not it's sometimes called Miracle Mineral Supplement or the master mineral supplement. No matter what it's called one does have to be careful when using a substance like MMS. And whether its main proponent Jim Humble is going out of his mind or not we have to be clear about what this substance can do safely and what it cannot. I say out of his mind for now he has invented, out of the pocket of his imagination, the new profession titled "Doctor of MMS", which anyone can become. "Americans can afford the training of less than two weeks, or buy the new book, The Master Mineral of the Third Millennium. In an email he recently said, "We thought you might like to see the difference in a MMS doctor and a Medical doctor."

As Jim has become increasingly embarrassing to the health field I have personally eaten some of my words on the value of this chlorine-type of substance as I have been carefully experimenting with it on myself. In fact, if the truth be known, I am finding out there may be some possible benefits to it but would never take this supplement orally for anything since there are so many better and safer ways to accomplish what Humble claims MMS can do.

Comment: Is the Mainstream Media Helping or Hindering? MMS on The One Show

The Debate between HealthWyze.org and Jim Humble about whether M.M.S. is a Fraud

Jim Humble, Nexus Magazine and The MMS Mafia

Bleachgate: How boy's campaign against Miracle Mineral Solution went worldwide

Down the Rabbit Hole - The Assassination of JFK, Bishop Jim Humble And The Nexus Conference

Snake Oil Humbles Nexus Conference


Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: New Zealand: Threat of Earthquakes Pales Beside The 50 Volcanoes on Our Doorstep

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© Brett PhibbsRangitoto, sitting at our front door, a silent reminder of its violent arrival in two eruptions 600-700 years ago.

It hardly needs an official list from the council to remind Aucklanders that, like Christchurch, this city is peppered with old buildings that are likely to tumble down in a severe earthquake.

The main arterial roads through well-established suburbs such as Newmarket, Herne Bay, Mt Eden, Dominion Rd, Onehunga and Otahuhu all have clusters of 100-year-old, two-storey brick retail premises, shops downstairs, dwellings above.

In the CBD, old masonry buildings provide the "character" between the anonymous glass towers. Some have been strengthened, many not. The day after the Christchurch earthquake I emerged from a lunch bar in downtown Queens Arcade debating which side of the street would be safer to walk up if I succumbed to quake phobia.

Of course, venturing below the old harbour shoreline at Shortland St to the arcade was a bad move to start with. The old Auckland Regional Council's earthquake hazard guide warns that ground shaking would be greater in "reclaimed land such as parts of downtown Auckland".

This would also be prone to liquefaction, but only if the shake was "quite a large one", the guide says, helpfully adding that in Auckland there is "a 10 per cent chance of [that] occurring in the next 50 years".

As well as buildings falling on you and silt squirting up your trouser legs at that end of town, there's the added risk of death by tsunami.

Top Secret

Best of the Web: What if It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?

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© Unknown
If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution and Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution,'' accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America. Or, just possibly this: they find out both of the above are true.

When Atkins first published his Diet Revolution in 1972, Americans were just coming to terms with the proposition that fat -- particularly the saturated fat of meat and dairy products -- was the primary nutritional evil in the American diet. Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart's desire, because it was the carbohydrates, the pasta, rice, bagels and sugar, that caused obesity and even heart disease. Fat, he said, was harmless.

Atkins allowed his readers to eat ''truly luxurious foods without limit,'' as he put it, ''lobster with butter sauce, steak with béarnaise sauce . . . bacon cheeseburgers,'' but allowed no starches or refined carbohydrates, which means no sugars or anything made from flour. Atkins banned even fruit juices, and permitted only a modicum of vegetables, although the latter were negotiable as the diet progressed.

Atkins was by no means the first to get rich pushing a high-fat diet that restricted carbohydrates, but he popularized it to an extent that the American Medical Association considered it a potential threat to our health. The A.M.A. attacked Atkins's diet as a ''bizarre regimen'' that advocated ''an unlimited intake of saturated fats and cholesterol-rich foods,'' and Atkins even had to defend his diet in Congressional hearings.

Info

Best of the Web: Where's Tyche, the 9th planet? Getting the full story

Solar System
© Ars Technica

On February 14th, the UK's Daily Mail reported the possible discovery of a planet four times bigger than Jupiter and lurking in the outer solar system. From there, the story quickly spread like a wildfire on the Internet, seeing coverage by mainstream outlets including the Huffington Post and TIME online. The tone of various news stories varied from "Tyche, Giant Hidden Planet, May Exist In Our Solar System" (The Huffington Post) to "Astronomers Question Existence of Solar System's Mystery Planet Tyche" (Fox News). So, is there really a new planet lying out there?

The original research article was published in the February issue of the international planetary science research journal Icarus by John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. It was titled "Persistent evidence of a jovian mass solar companion in the Oort cloud."

Black Cat

Best of the Web: More Weirdness in 'Suicide County'! Bridgend, South Wales: Town terrorised by 250 wild horses 'abandoned by gypsies who can't afford to feed them'

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© UnknownAbandoned: 250 wild horses have been left in Brigend by gypsies who could not afford to feed them
A town is being overrun by a pack of 250 wild horses abandoned by gypsies who can't afford to feed them.

Five of the horses have been killed when they were hit by cars and others are starving because they are not being fed.

RSPCA inspectors were today on the scene at Bridgend, South Wales, after calls from worried animal lovers.

Comment: Something really strange has been going on for some time now in the area of Bridgend, South Wales. It started with the series of suicides, but also included other types of unstable behavior. Here is the chronicle of human tragedy:

25 Jan 2008: Number of young people found hanged in 'suicide cult town' rises to 13
15 Feb 2008: Bridgend, South Wales: Two cousins from 'suicide town' hang themselves within hours as death toll rises
19 Feb 2008: Bridgend, suicide and the internet: the facts
19 Feb 2008: Bridgend Suicides: Another young person's body found
21 Feb 2008: Father of Bridgend suicide teenager says death was linked
21 Feb 2008: Bridgend suicides: Some stories need to be told
08 Apr 2008: UK: Teenagers worked to keep young woman alive after 'suicide bid'
10 Apr 2008: What's going on? UK: Another hanging death in Bridgend
20 Apr 2008: Bridgend, UK: Officers probe death of man, 19
08 Jun 2008: Bridgend, UK: Tributes paid to the 20th person found hanged
17 Jun 2008: Suicide number 22: Three Bridgend 'hanging victims' lived in same street
22 Jun 2008: Bridgend Suicides Linked to Cell Phone Towers
12 Aug 2008: UK: Bridgend hanging is 23rd suicide in area in 20 months
11 Nov 2008: Bridgend, Wales: Woman found dead in 'suicide county'
06 Jun 2009: Wales: Earthquake hits Port Talbot
13 Oct 2009: South Wales cat killer strikes again
13 Nov 2009: Bridgend Is A Strange Place: Wife Posed As Schoolgirl To Trap Paedophile Husband
12 May 2010: UK: 20-Year-Old Hanged Himself in Private Prison
05 Jul 2010: UK: 5-Year-Old Girl is Second Child to be Crushed to Death by Electric Gates in a Week
06 Oct 2010: South Wales: "Bullied" 12-Year-Old Schoolgirl Dies in Dad's Arms
25 Oct 2010: What is going on in Bridgend, Wales? Another case in the string of weirdness: Schoolgirl battered to death with brick
05 Jan 2011: UK: Another hanging in Bridgend

Also, consider the following excerpt from Superluminal Communications session dated 20 June 2009:
(A**) What about these suicides in Bridgend, Wales? What's going on there?

A: Location amplifies the kinds of waves mentioned earlier leading to rapid disintegration.

Q: (L) So it's like underground water, or electromagnetic, or some kind of power point or something like that?

A: Yes

Q: (A**) So people are just disintegrating, and they're all hanging themselves. (Joe) Twenty four of them, all hung themselves. (A***) All under the age of thirty. (L) Well, you've got HAARP going, you've got microwave towers going, you've got cosmic waves going. (DD) I had a friend commit suicide in Tulsa last week.

A: Expect a lot more unstable behavior all over.



Top Secret

Best of the Web: Past medical testing on humans revealed

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© Associated PressIn this June 25, 1945 picture, army doctors expose patients to malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the malaria ward at Stateville Penitentiary in Crest Hill, Ill.
Atlanta Georgia - Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States - studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

Laptop

Best of the Web: Dear Koch Brothers, Tea partiers & union bashers: 'Anonymous' would like your attention please

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© DangerousMinds“Hello, Anonymous calling for the enemies of democracy. Are the Koch Brothers in?”
This warms my Trotskyite heart: After posting the following "open letter" to Koch Industries, effectively putting them on notice and asking the American and European population to stop buying their products, the politically motivated hackers of "Anonymous" have already begun to make good on their threat, as last night and this morning the Koch-supported rightwing political organization, Americans for Prosperity's website was knocked offline several times. If an elite hacker was able to get into the intranet of Koch Industries, they could probably really disrupt their business for a few days. Let's hope they cause maximum chaos for these evil bloodsuckers. (I hope Fox News is next. THAT would be the best thing ever, wouldn't it?)