"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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?)

I hope you will excuse my cynicism but there is something quite remarkable about this interview with Lembit Opik, the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire. You will not find one single trace of political gobbledegook or point scoring.

What you will find are the thoughts and feelings of an individual who passionately believes in what he is trying to achieve. This is a brave man carrying a message that no one wants to hear and he is prepared to take the brickbats and mocking that inevitably accompany such a message.

What other tribute could I possibly offer, aside from accusing him of also being a very warm, approachable human being, other than to say that I only wish he was my Lembit Opik MP...

Lembit is the leading voice in the UK on asteroids and the little matter of one of them smacking into us, probably sooner rather than later. And one of those bits of rock doesn't have to be particularly large in order to cause immense devastation and loss of life. Or rather, let me put it this way. If on Christmas day last year I had told you that a giant wave would sweep across south East Asia, hit land and cause the loss of 220,000 lives (so far), you would not have believed me. There's no argument - you wouldn't have believed me. The next day it happened.

We need to wake up rapidly and do something.

What's going on in Wisconsin?

If you look at both sides of the story, one side is insinuating that teachers there make too much money and are a target for cuts, while the other side is angry because they have seen the banks and the elite getting bailed out - so why should they be targeted instead.

I believe that this is only the tip of the iceberg that awaits us all, and not just here in the U.S. Geopolitical unrest has been spreading around the world from Tunisia, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Egypt, Libya to Ohio and Wisconsin in the U.S.

The underlying problem is money.

People are angry over higher prices, especially high food prices in other parts of the protesting world. Higher food and energy prices are creeping in to the American economy as well, and some predict the rate of increase to go higher as an inflationary environment gets underway.