Best of the Web:


Stock Down

Best of the Web: Severe disaffection: Seventy-five percent of U.S. citizens don't trust government

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A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds the nation is increasingly distrustful of the federal government: 73 percent don't have faith that lawmakers - members of Congress in particular - will do the right thing. Judy Woodruff asks Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, for more details and historical context. - PBS Newshour

Dominant Social Theme: This has been going on for a long time and is nothing new. When the economy improves, people will feel better.

Free-Market Analysis: The Pew Survey has found that three-quarters of the United States population doesn't trust government but for the Public Broadcasting System, it's a partisan issue and also "business as usual."

From our point of view, it is not, of course. It is a manifestation of a larger disaffection that has been exacerbated by what we call the Internet Reformation. The Internet allows people to understand their world in ways they didn't before and tends to put discontent into a larger perspective.

War Whore

Best of the Web: Hillary Clinton: Profile of imperial arrogance and lawlessness

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She was Washington's 67th Secretary of State. She served from January 21, 2009 - February 1, 2013. She's arguably America's worst.

From 2001 - 2009, she was US Senator from New York. In 2008, she challenged Obama for the Democrat party's presidential nomination.

Supporters urge her to run again in 2016. She's noncommittal. When asked, she says "I am not thinking about anything like that right now."

She also said she'll "do everything (she) can to make sure that women compete at the highest levels, not only in the United States but around the world."

Husband Bill urges her to run. Some suspect she already made her move.

War Whore

Best of the Web: Calling out the hypocritical, war-loving left

For much of the last decade, the left participated in activism and protests condemning the Bush administration's wars of aggression, and calling for the President's impeachment. Now that it is a Democrat in the White House, however, these self-same activists are suddenly shying away from impeachment as a way to stop the American war machine. Find out more about the movement to impeach Obama -- and its opponents in the phoney "anti-war" left -- in this week's GRTV Backgrounder.


Yoda

Best of the Web: George Galloway: Drones, Palestine, 'Tony Blair belongs at the Hague'

Abby Martin speaks to George Galloway, author and politician of UK's Respect Party about Iraq, Palestine, US drone wars, and the British Parliament.


Star of David

Best of the Web: "The Hagel circus": It's all about Israel

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© ABC NEWSChuck Hagel faces senators in a confirmation hearing, Jan. 31, 2013, in Washington.
If former Defence Secretary-designate Sen. Chuck Hagel's lacklustre performance at his confirmation hearing Thursday heartened neo-conservatives and other hawks opposed to his nomination, those who argued that the Israel lobby has been exerting too great an influence on U.S. foreign policy were ecstatic.

Indeed, Stephen Walt, the Harvard international relations professor who co-authored the "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy", issued a special thanks to the Senate Armed Services Committee that held the hearing on his foreignpolicy.com blog Friday, suggesting that controversial 2007 book should sell like hotcakes after what he called "the Hagel circus".

"I want to thank the Emergency Committee for Israel, Sheldon Adelson, and the Senate Armed Services Committee for providing such a compelling vindication of our views," wrote Walt, who, among other things, has been accused of anti-Semitism for writing a book that criticised the allegedly excessive influence the Israel lobby wields over U.S. foreign policy and the public debate that surrounds it.

As evidence, Walt cited the number of mentions of Israel and its most powerful regional foe, Iran, received in the course of Hagel's eight-hour ordeal - 166 and 144, respectively, according to a compilation by the Internet publication, Buzzfeed.

By comparison, he noted, the epidemic of suicides among U.S. troops - a necessary concern for any incoming Pentagon chief - was addressed only twice.

Comet

Best of the Web: On viral 'junk' DNA, a DNA-enhancing Ketogenic diet, and cometary kicks

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The most important tool you have to change your health is the food you eat.
"Junk" DNA includes a whole subset of names such as introns, retrotransposable elements, and non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). In fact, ncRNAs are often located near genes known to be important to both stem cells and cancer, to serve as enhancer elements which promote their gene expression.[1] Stem cells are the cells that have the potential to turn into lots of other cells. So this junk DNA can influence how stem cells specifically differentiate into multiple cell types.

In fact, it is now estimated that 80% of our genome is biologically active with only 1% of our genome encoding for proteins:
Junk DNA Not Junk After All

A staggering batch of over 30 papers published in Nature, Science, and other journals this month, firmly rejects the idea that, apart from the 1% of the human genome that codes for proteins, most of our DNA is "junk" that has accumulated over time like some evolutionary flotsam and jetsam.The papers, representing 10 years of work of the ENCODE ("Encyclopedia of DNA Elements") project, completed by hundreds of scientists from dozens of labs around the world, reveal that 80% of the human genome serves some purpose and is biochemically active, for example, in regulating the expression of genes situated nearby.
That was known for some time, but it is now official since September 2012 or so. Evolutionary speaking, it makes a lot of sense...

Viral "Junk" DNA

The greatest shock of genomic science was to find that the human genome contains more viral than "human" genes. That is, the human genome is made from thousands of viruses that infected our distant ancestors. They got there by infecting eggs or sperm, inserting their own DNA into ours.

Viruses are peculiar things that at a zoomed-in level may look very pretty or downright creepy depending on the virus. A virus may have DNA or RNA and the type of genetic material depends on the function and nature of the virus. Some are very infectious, others allowed us to be alive since the gene that encodes for a protein that allows for babies to fuse to their mothers during pregnancy, is a virus gene.[2]

Most genetic diversity can be found in virus genes. Scientists agree that there are some 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses in the ocean, and genetically they match almost nothing compared with genes from any microbe, animal, plant or other organism, even from any other known virus.

All living things have hundreds or thousands of genes imported by viruses. There is a group of viral species known as retroviruses which insert their genetic material into the host cell's DNA. When the host cell divides, it copies the virus's DNA along with its own. Retroviruses have "on switches" that prompt their host cell to make proteins out of nearby genes. Sometimes their switches turn on host genes that ought to be kept shut off, and cancer can result. This is precisely what our junk DNA - ncRNA- seems to be doing "next" to genes that have to do with stem cells and cancer cells.

What is known as endogenous retrovirus - endogenous meaning generated within - are the viruses that lurk in the genomes of just about every major group of vertebrates, from fish to reptiles to mammals. Virologists have found retrovirus-like segments in our human genome and they were able to track its genetic code down to an original functioning virus. The virus was called Phoenix, for the mythical bird that rose from its own ashes.

It is known that part of our junk DNA, the retrotransposable elements, is viral in its origin. It includes the endogenous retroviruses. But it is now argued that ncRNA (non coding RNA) might be viral in its origin as well.[3] This has interesting implications in the sense that epigenetic control of gene expression involves this junk DNA - ncRNAs.[4] It would mean that our entire junk DNA (98%) might well be very functional epigenetically speaking (more info on epigenetics below), and active in the induction of regulatory genes that code for stem cells, or for reprogramming or modulating genes known to respond to oxidative stress, DNA damage and p53 - a protein that regulates the cell cycle and is implicated in about half of all human cancers.

You might be wondering why we are reviewing all this viral genome potential. As it happens, the damage done by evil lectins - antinutrients - in our diet is through a lock-and-key mechanism, that is, a circulating lectin serves as a key that unlocks the cell to which it attaches. Evil lectins can initiate a cascade of events once they attach to the cell "mem-brain" that may lead to attraction of the immune system, cell death, production of chemicals, multiplication of the cell and so forth. It depends. And it might well depend on the adaptation response from the viral-like properties inside the cell, our "junk" DNA.

Harmful lectins - such as the ones found in gluten, soy, dairy, corn - cause inflammation and damage without a defense/immune response which end up being secondary to the initial damage. Some respond in quite a drastic way (i.e. autoimmune diseases) others respond in a milder way, constituting thus the wide nature of symptoms among people.

Moreover, wheat's evil lectin (WGA) and viruses share similar properties. For instance, when the influenza virus incorporates its own genetic material into our cells, the defense/immune system must attack its own virally transformed cell in order to fight the infection. WGA has access to our bodies and to our cells' "mem-brains" through viral ports. They then influence gene expression and trigger autoimmune attacks like viruses do. As John B. Symes, D.V.M. pointed out back in 2007:

Eye 2

Best of the Web: 'America's Nazi scientists fulfilling dream of ruling the world' - Bruce Gagnon

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In an exclusive interview with the Voice of Russia, Bruce Gagnon shares little known facts about the militarization of space by the United States, the development of first strike space drones and the foundation of the US Military Industrial Complex by Nazi scientists bent on victory in World War III. If you thought missile defense and drones were bad, you haven't heard anything yet.

Robles: According to your organization the US Space Command has publicly stated they intent to control space in order to protect US interests and investments. Is space now US territory?

Gagnon: Well, indeed the United States likes to believe that it is its own space, and particularly the Space Command, who on their headquarters building in Colorado Springs, just above the doorway they have their logo that reads "Master of Space". So, I think that it is quite evident that the Space Command does indeed view space as US territory that must be controlled because they clearly understand that all warfare on the earth today is coordinated by space technology and that whoever essentially controls space will control the planet below, in this case on behalf I believe of corporate globalization. And so the Space Command in our thinking has become the military arm of corporate globalization.

And so today the US is developing a whole host of technologies to allow it to fight war from space, through space and in space, controlling not only the Earth but also the pathway on and off the planet Earth, the pathway to other planetary bodies as resources are discovered on other planets: magnesium, cobalt, uranium, gold, water etc.

In a congressional study done back in the 1980s, the Congress gave the Pentagon the mandate to develop the technologies to control the pathway on and off the planet Earth. So, the Space Command sees its role in a very-very robust kind of way.

Rocket

Best of the Web: The NAZI origins of NASA

Full spectrum dominance: The Nazi-American race to control space

Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II (1939/45). It was executed by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), and in the context of the burgeoning SovietAmerican Cold War (1945/91) one purpose of Operation Paperclip was to deny German scientific knowledge and expertise to the USSR.

Although the JIOAs recruitment of German scientists began after the European Allied victory (8 May 1945), US President Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August 1945. Truman's order expressly excluded anyone found to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism. Said restriction would have rendered ineligible most of the scientists the JIOA had identified for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, and the physician Hubertus Strughold, each earlier classified as a menace to the security of the Allied Forces.

To circumvent President Trumans anti-Nazi order, and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also expunged from the public record the scientists' Nazi Party memberships and régime affiliations. Once bleached of their Nazism, the US Government granted the scientists security clearance to work in the United States. Paperclip, the projects operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists new political personæ to their US Government Scientist JIOA personnel files.

Megaphone

Best of the Web: Powerful: Belgian MP exposes truth behind West's 'War on Terror'

On January the 17th, 32-year-old Belgium MP Laurent Louis, considered one of the most controversial and demonized national political figures, delivered the most powerful truth ever told in a political arena.

First, he explained why he voted against the Belgian support to war in Mali, that it was based on lies and rooted in neo-colonialism. Then he expressed his disgust and wrath against the criminal foreign policies of the Western elite and its submission to foreign financial and interest groups, before scolding his colleagues who voted for interventionist war with "fuck you's". Finally, he says that the war on terror is a lie and that 9/11 was a false flag to justify aggressive military action in the Muslim world.

Click on the "Captions" icon to get the English subtitles. You won't be disappointed.

War Whore

Best of the Web: Bomber in chief: 20,000 airstrikes in Obama's first term cause death and destruction from Iraq to Somalia

Obama drone
© Unknown

Day after day, U.S. air strikes have conclusively answered the familiar question of 9/11: "Why do they hate us?"


Many people around the world are disturbed by U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. The illusion that American drones can strike without warning anywhere in the world without placing Americans in harm's way makes drones dangerously attractive to U.S. officials, even as they fuel the cycle of violence that the "war on terror" falsely promised to end but has instead escalated and sought to normalize. But drone strikes are only the tip of an iceberg, making up less than 10 percent of at least 20,130 air strikes the U.S. has conducted in other countries since President Obama's inauguration in 2009.