Category Archives: privacy

Godfather of Abortion Inc. Converted to Pro-Life

Posted on by

At Catholic Education.org, the godfather of American abortion, Dr. Bernard Nathanson, confesses he’s had a change of heart:

“I am personally responsible for 75,000 abortions. This legitimizes my credentials to speak to you with some authority on the issue. I was one of the founders of the National Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Laws in the U.S. in 1968.

A truthful poll of opinion then would have found that most Americans were against permissive abortion. Yet within five years we had convinced the Supreme Court to issue the decision which legalized abortion throughout America in 1973 and produced virtual abortion on demand up to birth.

How did we do this? It is important to understand the tactics involved because these tactics have been used throughout the western world with one permutation or another, in order to change abortion law

The First Key Tactic was to capture the media

We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a liberal enlightened, sophisticated one. Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls. We announced to the media that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favour of permissive abortion. This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie. Few people care to be in the minority.

We aroused enough sympathy to sell our program of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure we gave to the media repeatedly was 1,000,000. Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public.

The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually. The figure constantly fed to the media was 10,000. These false figures took root in the consciousness of Americans convincing many that we needed to crack the abortion law.

Another myth we fed to the public through the media was that legalizing abortion would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally. In fact, of course, abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalization.

[Lila: Again, concealed from the public is the fact that the US has an abortion policy far more radical than many socialist countries, like India, where late-term abortions would be considered murder. Here, they are perfectly legal, and, as the Kermit Gosnell story shows, they are far more prevalent than the media admits.

Moreover, the Emily Letts  abortion snuff video shows that abortion is used instead of contraception or responsible prevention.

Indeed, the video was most likely disseminated to normalize and promote the practice of abortion as contraception. There is no doubt in my mind that the intention is not to sever and destroy the “stigma of abortion,” as the media claimed, but to sear and cauterize the mother’s conscience, to cut the umbilical cord of maternal affection, to pervert the energetic bond between mother and child.

In that sense, and in many others, the video was filled with “occult” religious clues, but it was the religion of black witchcraft, not Christianity or Judaism.]

The Second Key Tactic was to Play the Catholic Card

We systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its “socially backward ideas” and picked on the Catholic hierarchy as the villain in opposing abortion. This theme was played endlessly. We fed the media such lies as “we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy and not from most Catholics” and “Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform.”

And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the influence of the Catholic hierarchy and that Catholics in favour of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking. An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions were (and still are) monolithically opposed to abortion was constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists’ opinions.

[Lila: A key element in this strategy was to infiltrate and subvert the Catholic church from within. Thus, the church was first demonized for excluding gays; then when the gays in the church contributed to the pedophilic abuse, the blame was shifted onto celibacy and Catholic teaching on celibacy, rather than onto the proclivities of the priests.

Celibacy was thus associated with a so-called pedophilic hierarchy of conservative males, thus discrediting it.]

The Third Key Tactic was the Denigration and Suppression of all Scientific Evidence that Life Begins at Conception

I am often asked what made me change my mind. How did I change from prominent abortionist to pro-life advocate? In 1973, I became director of obstetrics of a large hospital in New York City and had to set up a perinatal research unit, just at the start of a great new technology which we now use every day to study the fetus in the womb. A favorite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one. Fetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy.

Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of fetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions?

Simple arithmetic: at $300.00 a time 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion.

[Lila: Actually, because of the trade in organs and fetal tissue, abortion is probably far more lucrative than that.  Kermit Gosnell apparently made something like $1500, not $300, from each abortion performed. That means roughly five times the figure above, or over $2 billion. This is just an extrapolation from media figures, of course.

The largest advocate of family planning services and the biggest provider of them, Planned Parenthood, relies largely on providing abortion to the public, not “other family services”:

“According to Planned Parenthood’s own apologist, Media Matters, its “total revenue from abortion services was approximately $164,154,000,” a year. Accordingly, over 51 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinic income comes from abortion.

In addition to its $320.1 million in clinic income and $223.8 million in private donations, Planned Parenthood receives $487.4 million dollars a year from taxpayers.

Lila (continued): The liberal-left darling, Planned Parenthood, dispenses abortion pills in addition to abortion procedures, making the outfit the killer of over 300,000 children every year.

It is not coincidental that those children are mostly black, brown, and from the underclass, given that the mother of family-planning, Margaret Sanger, was a devoted eugenicist who wanted to control the birth-rate of the population and weed out “undesirables.”

Bernard Nathanson (cont):

It is clear that permissive abortion is purposeful destruction of what is undeniably human life. It is an impermissible act of deadly violence. One must concede that unplanned pregnancy is a wrenchingly difficult dilemma. But to look for its solution in a deliberate act of destruction is to trash the vast resourcefulness of human ingenuity, and to surrender the public weal to the classic utilitarian answer to social problems.”

As a scientist I know, not believe,  that human life begins at conception. Although I am not a formal religionist, I believe with all my heart that there is a divinity of existence which commands us to declare a final and irreversible halt to this infinitely sad and shameful crime against humanity.”

The insanity of public debate in America

Posted on by

Consider the following,:

1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.

These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.

2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.

Leading “libertarian” activists  say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public.  This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.

No one thinks of simply ignoring and not linking the Sterling material. Instead, they all follow the media’s cue automatically, as though pulled by invisible strings. Then they call themselves “fiercely independent” and talk about “freedom,:” “free speech,” “free choice,” “self-ownership” and other flattering mythologies with a straight face.

Meanwhile, so-called “evil statists” are the only ones arguing that the the recordings are on their face illegal and should not be distributed in the public realm.

The parameters of debate in the much-vaunted “free press” are set by media barons who profit from cheap gossip and extortion (which lowers the cost of running a paper, since the public does the reporting for free or for small sums), pornographers, and paid operatives of the government posing as private actors.

No one considers this a gross conflict of interest. The media barons are presumed not to have political agendas and presumed not to manipulate in collusion.

Nor is this manipulation termed what it is – an extension of the state into the private sphere. It is all deemed “free market” unproblematically.

3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.

I actually agree with that argument, but those who deny a Donald Sterling his privacy can surely have no justification for giving a Belle Knox hers.

With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide)  is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).

4. The same people who attack Donald Sterling’s private speech and hold it to an arbitrarily decided public standard also denounce theocracy (with its logically entailed blasphemy laws) as an insupportable and “medieval” intrusion into free speech and thought. And they declare themselves the embodiment of “reason” against the “irrationality” of the religious.

5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate. They even object to any constraint placed on their right to disseminate for commercial profit the vilest images, even where they would be accessible by minors.

They defend their right to view violent child pornography, even though that right supplies the demand that drives a global market of child abuse and murder and though the act of viewing itself has been deemed criminal.

But while the act of viewing child-porn is criminal, the act of dismembering a child is deemed “private” and protected.

The left also defends without any nuance or moderation the right to publish “art”  that inflames the public, even where major violence could result  as in the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which, as it turns out, were a deliberate provocation from a neo-con flack.

Mommy dearest makes snuff-movie, calls critics “haters”

Posted on by

UPDATE:

Please note that this piece is not intended to bash or mock women who have undergone abortions. That is a matter between a woman and her conscience, at least under current law.

The post is intended to deride an abortion-activist who turns a  matter that at all other times she claims is private into a public spectacle, even while branding critics as pure evil, for simply telling her what they think about it.

ORIGINAL POST

Yet another gloriously “humanitarian” feminist, not content with aborting her child,  goes viral with the deed so she can blot out her guilt.….

The malign mommy didn’t really film her first trimester abortion in gory detail, because that would put a crimp in her “you-go-girl” story.

She just filmed herself – the heroine of the episode.

A genuine aborti-flick would have shown the unpleasant reality behind the flattering fiction.

And, of course, this brand of feminism is all about spinning flattering fiction…. and erasing unflattering reality.

Mommy dearest writes:

“A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes. It is safer than giving birth. There is no cutting, and risk of infertility is less than 1 percent. Yet women come into the clinic all the time terrified that they are going to be cut open, convinced that they won’t be able to have kids after the abortion. The misinformation is amazing, but think about it: They are still willing to sacrifice these things because they know that they can’t carry the child at this moment.

[Lila: To an objective observer, this “sacrifice” is nothing of the sort. It is sheer recklessness.]

“There are three options for a first-trimester abortion: medical abortion, which is the pill; a surgical abortion with IV sedation, where you’re asleep through the whole thing; and a surgical abortion with local anesthesia during which you’re awake. Women are most terrified of being awake.

[Lila: Indeed.]

“I could have taken the pill, but I wanted to do the one that women were most afraid of. I wanted to show it wasn’t scary — and that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story. It’s my story.

Everyone at the clinic was really supportive of filming it.”

[Lila:  Mass man is at his core a voyeur, a bored busy-body.  He seems never happier than when playing peeping- tom at your expense, or sharing more than you want to know, at his own.]

“At first they wanted to sit down and talk about the real consequences of this. There are a lot of politics involved. We knew we could have hundreds of protesters at our door; we could have bomb threats. Working at an abortion clinic, every once in awhile it feels like you’re working in a war zone.

[Lila:  Her self -dramatization takes away the focus from the real victims, her unborn baby.]

“But I said, “Bring it,” and they were on board.

I knew the cameras were in the room during the procedure, but I forgot about them almost immediately. I was focused on staying positive and feeling the love from everyone in the room. I am so lucky that I knew everyone involved, and I was so supported. I remember breathing and humming through it like I was giving birth. I know that sounds weird, but to me, this was as birth-like as it could be. It will always be a special memory for me. I still have my sonogram, and if my apartment were to catch fire, it would be the first thing I’d grab.

[Lila: If this were metaphysics, it would be excellent. As abortion documentary, it’s nothing more than delusion.]

“The first night I posted the video to my Facebook page, I couldn’t sleep. I went out with friends, and I was so paranoid people were looking at me a certain way because they saw my video. The intimacy of it made me nervous, even though I really wanted people to see it.

[Lila: Can anyone any more wonder why the population doesn’t object to its medical records being pawed through by the government? People simply have no sense of privacy. If the love of private life is the mark of the civilized man, then we must confront the truth that we are no longer civilized.]

“Then I looked at my Facebook wall. I was expecting this tsunami of hateful, scary things, but everyone was so breathtakingly supportive. People who I have never talked to started writing their own abortion stories.

[Lila: Bad taste, thy name is “sisterhood.”]

“I had one woman who messaged me saying she’d had an abortion that week and she was plagued with guilt. Her boyfriend called her a killer, but she said she was recovering well and appreciated the video. Another woman told me she’d had a miscarriage and that because of my video she felt like she could talk to me about it. Just all of these things started pouring out of women.

There were hateful responses, of course, which was the hardest part of this whole thing. When I put it up on YouTube, pro-lifers put it on their newscasts. And so I got, “You’re a Nazi,” “You deserve to die,” “You killed your baby.” Just so much blind hatred without knowing who I am or what I’m about.

[Lila: This so-called  “hatred” is far from blind. It’s the wide-awake anger of the sentient and the just, appalled by her self-absorption and indifference to what is, finally, a killing.

It is both natural and good to hate something hate-worthy, like  irresponsible killing.]

“Still, every time I watch the video, I love it. I love how positive it is. I think that there are just no positive abortion stories on video for everyone to see. But mine is.

I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

[Lila: Yes, guilt. That little voice from one’s conscience that says that abortion is not all fine-and-dandy.]

“Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about it.

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily, wake up! What are you doing? I was going against the advice I give to patients all the time. So I had them put an IUD in after the abortion. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.”

Lila: Translation:

As long as you can make yourself feel good about it, go ahead and do what you want. Ignore anyone who suggests that, if not garden-variety murder, this is something less and more at the same time.

Above all, feel good, because feeling good is all that matters.

For that, keep tight control of the language and the images.

Don’t let either get out of your control.

As long as you can make yourself look good, through subversion of the language  you can feel good.

As long as you feel good, you are good.

And anyone who fails to go along with that self-portrait, why, they’re nothing more than haters.

UK’s Cinderella Law: Jail for “Emotionally Abusive” Parents

Posted on by

The United Kingdom, already one of the most heavily surveilled states on earth, has decided that spying on its citizens with street cameras, shop cameras, cell-phone software, GPS tracking, email snooping, financial audits, welfare agency monitoring, and neighborhood snitches is simply not enough.

It wants to poke its nose into family life.

As usual, the pretext is a humanitarian one – the protection of children from abuse at home.

But child protection laws already punish physical/sexual violence and neglect of any kind severely.

So what’s left?

Now, parents face jail-time for convictions for emotional abuse, which can be anything from fighting in front of their children, blaming their children, being cold to them, or not paying enough attention to them.

Emotional abuse is real. And it is damaging.

But it’s also dynamic, complex and definitely not something a government official should meddle in.

Imagine the thousands of decent, loving families that are going to be ripped apart and destroyed by this malign law, as The Independent rightly points out:

“These days, parents who smoke or drink alcohol in front of children risk being characterised as child-abusers. Opponents of the tradition of male circumcision condemn Jewish and Muslim parents as abusers of children. Health activists denounce parents of overweight children for the same offence. Mothers and fathers who educate their children to embrace the family’s religion have been characterised as child abusers by anti-faith campaigners.”

Educating people about family interaction is one thing.

But there’s  already plenty of that going on.

What this law does is empower yet another empire-building department to pile up parental scalps in its quest for budgets, clout, and public profile.

Meanwhile, kids who tattle on their parents are losers too. They face the trauma of losing their parents to jail; losing their family life to endless days in court; and losing their own selves to a web of foster homes and government offices.

This isn’t a Cinderella law.

It’s a Cruel Step-mother (government) Law.

Telegraph.co:

“Changes to the child neglect laws will make “emotional cruelty” a crime for the first time, alongside physical or sexual abuse.

The Government will introduce the change in the Queen’s Speech in early June to enforce the protection of children’s emotional, social and behavioural well-being.

Parents found guilty under the law change could face up to 10 years in prison, the maximum term in child neglect cases.

The change will update existing laws in England and Wales which only allow an adult responsible for a child to be prosecuted if they have deliberately assaulted, abandoned or exposed a child to suffering or injury to their health.”

Once again, this is not about protecting children.

It is about giving the government the tools to intervene on behalf of  the “politically correct” agenda, which is the mask under which censorship of potentially disruptive political speech takes place.

It’s not about protecting a child who has sexual identity (or other) problems from harassment and cruelty.

Laws against physical abuse already do that.

It’s about using the accusation of “bigot,” “homophobe,” or “sexist” to jail human beings who are otherwise law-abiding citizens.

It takes no great imagination to see how universal surveillance plays into this.

Surveillance allows the government to surreptitiously target the people it wants to harass through analysis of their online activity, cell phone conversations, purchases, and social networks.

The guidelines for what constitutes a public threat have already been drawn up.

Provocateurs, agents, and civilian snitches, embedded in schools and welfare agencies, will then monitor the child of the  targeted person for investigation, coercive interviews, and direct threats.  Few children can stand up to such tactics.

Whatever they admit under pressure  then becomes the platform for a full-scale intervention into the targeted family.  Then follows jail-time, shrink sessions, and re-education camp  for the unlucky parent/s, whose entire private life now becomes public criminal record.

Criminalizing ordinary behavior and intimidating law-abiding citizens with an amorphous and expansive law is as good a way as any of politically gelding a large chunk of the population, hitherto beyond the reach of the criminal justice system.

Google’s “Hummingbird”: IP Theft & Mind-Control

Posted on by

Google’s new search algorithm Hummingbird adds to the company’s sinister reputation among privacy advocates.

Google’s creepy Google Glass didn’t help it either.

Now comes Hummingbird, the biggest algorithm change in the search engine in twelve years.

“Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words,” Sullivan reports. “It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘iPhone 5s’ is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.”

(“Hummingbird is Google’s biggest algorithm change in 12 years,” WebProNews,  Sept. 28, 2013)

Simply put, Hummingbird is about Google trying to find the holistic meaning behind the individual words of a search-string (the query or series of words you input into the search function),  or, in the case of websites, the overall intent behind the key-words most used.

Bottom-line: Google is trying to figure out what’s going on in your mind when you type out certain words.

That is terribly similar to an area of research dear to the defense and spy agencies – predictive software and technology.

For instance,  DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is very interested in developing the cognitive footprints of users for identification purposes.

The goal is to bypass the need for passwords, which tend to be cumbersome for users and vulnerable to password-cracking, phishing, social-engineering, memory failures, and hardware theft.

“Software biometric modalities” are to be used to develop what it terms Active Authentication.

Anyone can see how useful the new Hummingbird algorithm would be to DARPA.

Indeed, given Google’s prior collaboration with the CIA in the monitoring of social media, it wouldn’t be surprising if Hummingbird has also come out of a joint project with the government.

The defense agencies come up with the technology to figure out what random “bad guys” are up to. Google monetizes it and returns the favor by data-sharing with the government.

The consumer might have his every need…indeed wish…met, but web-users are now going to find that Google’s “free lunch:” is not only not free, it’s not remotely cheap.

And web users are the ones footing the bill.

Here’s how.

“Google Hummingbird: Where no search has gone before,” Jeremy Hull, iProspect, Wired, October 15, 2013

“Google has updated its search algorithm many times over the past few years, but previous updates were focused on making Google better at gathering information — for example, indexing websites more often and identifying spammy content. Hummingbird is focused on the user. It’s about Google getting better at understanding what searchers really want and providing them with better answers.”

That’s Google’s stated objective, of course. But how about websites?

When you search Google for answers to questions, what website owners want is for you to go to their site to get the information.

This is not only because they might hope to sell you something and thereby earn a living.

It’s also because they hope that by giving you good information not available in the mainstream media,  they might attract you to their site and persuade you on other issues.

By offering free information, web writers hope you will find them reliable, credible, or interesting and become committed readers. That’s why millions of writers and websites, spend inordinate amounts of energy and time finding answers and giving them away to others for free.

Of course, ethics and decency demand that readers who benefit from that information cite the place they found it and give the author credit.

Not Hummingbird.

It harvests information from the net and puts it on Information cards that pop up in answer to searches.

Now, if the information is immediately given to the reader by Google, why will they visit the websites from which Google might have culled the answer?

They won’t.  That means that Google is not only stealing the private data of its users through Gmail, Google Earth, and a bunch of other programs, it’s also stealing from the websites it’s supposed to be helping.

But “Hummingbird” is not just unfriendly to websites offering information to the public, it acts to control what information is presented to you and how.

Hummingbird’s graphic is an easy way for Google to give you what Google (and very likely, the government) want you to know, rather than what you might learn if you delved into your search results yourself.

The new graphic could even give you downright misleading or inaccurate information. Just think about Snopes, the ostensibly myth-busting site that somehow manages to bust myths only in left-liberal ways.

So, Hummingbird is not only using your personal information for Google’s own commercial (and the government’s surveillance) purposes, it’s using information from blogs/websites, without their permission, for its own operations.

That’s two counts of IP theft.

Then, the whole business of trying to determine exactly what you’re thinking when you type certain things into the search function sounds awfully like mind-reading to me. In order to do that kind of mind-reading, all sorts of personal information from your web usage (even more than Google has been collecting so far) has to be collated and compared. Mapped, if you will.

That’s two counts of privacy invasion.

Finally, by manipulating access to the knowledge available on the Internet, under the guise of consumer satisfaction, by giving you pre-packaged answers before it gives you your search results, Google is actually  trying to control your thinking.

That’s one count of mind-control.

Is it any surprise that the new algorithm shares its name with DARPA’s nano flying robot/drone Hummingbird, which beats its wings like a bird?.

DARPA’s Hummingbird is a spy drone:

“The drone, built by AeroVironment with funding from DARPA, is able to fly forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. Not only does the ‘bot resemble its avian inspiration in size (it’s only slightly larger than a hummingbird, with a 6.5-inch wingspan and a weight of 19 grams), it also looks impressively like a hummingbird in flight.

But that’s not vanity — it’s key to the drone’s use as a spy device, as it can perch near its subject without alerting it.”

Google’s Hummingbird seems no less innocuous and no less insidious.

It’s more evil-doing from the Franken-SearchEngine that routinely spies for the NSA and CIA and systematically  commits Intellectual Property theft.

Read more at Entrepreneur .com

Anti-Spy Wear: Modest Swim-Suits Fight the Pornocracy

Posted on by

In an age of universal surveillance and blackmail, involuntary porn, state-mandated voyeurism, mass rape and sodomy of prisoners,  Google-Glass, and citizen-spying, modest swim-wear might be the most astute political statement a woman can make.

It protects her privacy and dignity from snoopers and pornographers, looking for cheap shots, as well as from state operatives and contractors, fattening their files for blackmailing purposes.

I’ve made the connection between surveillance and blackmail many times on this blog and even back in 2004, in essays on virtual crime (used later in Language of Empire).

Alfred McCoy’s recent piece on the subject (cited above) substantiates the accuracy of my analysis.

The making and circulation of pornographic images are powerful tools of the state-corporate complex.

The key role of such images in blackmailing operations that universalize the power of the state is precisely the reason I am less than admiring of theorists who praise the public virtues of blackmail unthinkingly, people like Murray Rothbard and Walter Block.

Check out the Christian blog,  Big-is-Beautiful, for attractive, modern swimwear that is modest….

..that lets a woman be a lady and leaves her physical dignity and privacy intact.

(Here is a list of modest swim-wear made for Jewish ladies; this one is for Muslims).

US “Strip-Search”: Same As Soviet Gulag’s

Posted on by

http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/women-src/images/nightsearch.jpg

Gulag history: online exhibit

This is a drawing by Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, a former prisoner of the Soviet Union, of prisoners stripped of their clothes by prison guards in the Soviet gulag.

[Courtesy of Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow.]

Note: These are political prisoners in a concentration camp in the Soviet Russia.

Note: “Strip-searches” that humiliate the subject in exactly the same way as in Soviet Russia, and to the same extent (and worse), are conducted routinely as “standard procedure” in the United States, without any kind of sustained questioning from the media and academic institutions.

QUOTE (Preet Bharara about Khobragade’s strip-search)

“He said she was “fully searched” by a female deputy marshal in private and called it standard procedure for “every defendant, rich or poor, American or not.”

[The red herring is the emphasis by Bharara on the notion of equality.

Of course, the treatment of a diplomat as though she were a random citizen is in itself an issue.

A gross violation of international protocol/law is clearly a hostile act by the Dept. of State and the NY attorney.

But the outrage among Indians over the matter was perfectly appropriate, even beside the question of the immunity of foreign diplomats in a host country.

Strip-searches, regardless of the status of the victim, are barbaric and violate human rights.]

In the US, such searches are being used for mere suspects, people not yet found guilty of anything at all, people arrested for any charge whatsoever.  In practice, people have been strip-searched for trivial offenses like unpaid traffic-tickets.

Please note that visual inspection of cavities which is a part of all standard strip-searches requires the subject to bend over and part the buttocks for inspection of the anus, often with a flash-light. It also requires the subject to move the testicles or bare the labia for visibility.

Often, the subject is asked to squat on his haunches and cough while baring his genitals. These are, by any standard, deeply humiliating and self-demeaning acts for any one, innocent or guilty, to perform in public, especially in front of a uniformed stranger, subject to few or no restraints. and especially when the procedure is also video-taped, ostensibly for security, thus harnessing the subjects not only into acts of voyeurism but into their pornographic representation and subsequent replication ad infinitum in contexts and for audiences over which he/she has no control, practical or legal.

Strip-searches – whether they include visual inspection of the body-cavities or digital probes of body-cavities  – constitute a type of custodial rape or sexual molestation, and have been deemed so by the laws of some countries.

But they have been defined as constitutionally sanctioned behavior permissible to the state, even in the case of minor offenses, by decree of the US Supreme Court:

QUOTE:

“Every detainee who will be admitted to the general population may be required to undergo a close visual inspection while undressed,” Justice Kennedy wrote, adding that about 13 million people are admitted each year to the nation’s jails.

The procedures endorsed by the majority are forbidden by statute in at least 10 states and are at odds with the policies of federal authorities. According to a supporting brief filed by the American Bar Association, international human rights treaties also ban the procedures.”

Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom:

“The arrival at the corrective labor camp turned out to be the culmination of the humiliation. First we were made to strip naked and were shoved into some roofless enclosures made out of planks. Above our heads the stars twinkled; below our bare feet lay frozen excrement. An enclosure measured 3 square feet. Each held three to four naked, shivering, and frightened men and women. Then these ’kennel cages’ were opened one after the other and the naked people were led across a courtyard‘the camp version of a foyer‘into a special building where our documents were ’formulated’ and our things were ’searched.’

The goal of the search was to leave us with rags, and to take the good things ’sweaters, mittens, socks, scarves, vests, and good shoes’for themselves. Ten thieves shamelessly fleeced these destitute and barely alive people.

‘Corrective‘ is something that should make you better, and ‘labor‘ ennobles you. But ‘camp‘? A camp wasn‘t a jail. So then what on earth was going on? ”

“The night search, the most degrading procedure, was frequently repeated. “Get up! Get undressed! Hands up! Out into the hall! Line up against the wall.” Naked we were especially frightened. “Among the blind, the one-eyed is king,” and next to them I was still a hero—for the time being. Our hair was undone. What were they looking for? What more could they take away from us? There was something, however: they pulled out all the ties that had been holding up the nuns’ skirts and our underwear.”

Courtesy of Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia Foundation, Moscow. Translation by Deborah Hoffman.

Ambani, Manmohan: CIA Spying On India Helps Poor

Posted on by

Aadhar (biometric ID) will help the Indian poor, say Nandan Nilekani (CEO of Infosys), Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), Mukesh Ambani (CEO of Reliance), Manmohan Singh (PM of India); and George Tenet (CIA spymaster), although social science research and the experience of the US and UK with national identification schemes have overall been negative toward it.

Ambani and Co. all support the introduction of the ID via a company called MongoDB which is connected to the CIA-related firm, In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s venture capital arm):

From MoneyLife.in (March 12, 2013)

“Meanwhile, according to a report from Economic Timesand Navbharat Times, Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB (formerly called 10gen), a technology company from US which is co-funded by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was in New Delhi two weeks back to enter into a contract with UIDAI.

This company is a Palo Alto and Manhattan-based database software provider in the $30 billion relational database market. Relational databases commenced in the 1970s when computers were moving away from punch cards (that facilitated holocaust in Germany using census data) to terminals. It is taking away customers from Oracle and IBM. This contract has not been disclosed so far. MongoDB will take data from UIDAI to undertake its analysis. UIDAI is tight-lipped about CIA’s role in it.”

10gen is the company behind MongoDB, a popular open-source, document-oriented database. It forms a part of a new generation of NoSQL — Not Only SQL — database products developed as an alternative to conventional relational databases from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft……

According to the report, one of the investors of MongoDB is In-Q-Tel (IQT), a not-for-profit organisation based in Virginia, USA created to bridge the gap between the technology needs of the US Intelligence Community and emerging commercial innovation. It identifies and invests in venture-backed startups developing technologies that provide “ready-soon innovation” (within 36 months) which is vital for the mission of the intelligence community. IQT was launched in 1999. Its core purpose is to keep CIA and other intelligence agencies equipped with the latest in information technology to support intelligence capability. Edward Snowden had revealed that US intelligence agencies are targeting communications in Asian countries. It was founded by Norman Ralph Augustine.

In his book ‘At The Center Of The Storm: My Years at the CIA”, former CIA director George Tenet says, “We (the CIA) decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM-DIA operation Able Danger], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.”

In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on 15 November 2005. The stocks were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, the CIA funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth. On 15 August 2005, Washington Post reported that In-Q-Tel was funded with about $37 million a year from the CIA. “In my view the organisation has been far more successful than I dreamed it would be,” said Norman R Augustine, who was recruited in 1998 by Krongard and George J Tenet, who then was director of central intelligence (DCI) to CIA, to help set up In-Q-Tel. Augustine, former chief executive of defense giant Lockheed Martin, is an In-Q-Tel trustee.

Notably, former CIA chief, Tenet, was on the board of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software, which was a US company when UIDAI signed a contract agreement with it. A truncated copy of the contract agreement accessed through RTI is available with the author. This company has now been bought over by Safran group, a French defence company. The subsidiary of this French company in which French government has 30.5% shares, Sagem Morpho has also signed a contract agreement with UIDAI. In August 2011, Safran acquired L-1 Identity Solutions.

In the backdrop of these disclosures, how credible are the poor-centric claims of Mukesh Ambani, Nilekeni and Eric Schmidt who are taking Indian legislators, officials, citizens and the Indian intelligence community for a royal ride. Clearly, aadhaar creates a platform for social control and surveillance technologies to have a field day and undermines nations’ sovereignty, security and citizens’ democratic rights. Nilekeni wrote ‘Imagining India’, McKinsey & Company edited ‘Reimagining India,’ it is evident that their idea of India is contrary to idea of India that emerged from the freedom struggle since 1857 and the constitution of India.”

US And Its Keystone Kops Gestapo?

Posted on by

Ilana Mercer at BarelyaBlog.com

“Note that TOP SECRET is defined as information which could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to America. Stolen and released here were 3 million documents. HOW SPECIFICALLY did America suffer from this “exceptionally grave damage”??? Did Godzilla stomp over Maine? Was Iowa sucked up by a sinkhole? Did bubonic plague kill everyone in California? Was Duck Dynasty cancelled? Did employment in the US drop from 65% of adults to 58% ? – (yes – but this was related more to wasting trillions on idiotic wars than Snowden’s leaks)?

According to the news, the Pentagon has come out with an assessment of the 3 million “beyond exceptionally grave damage” incidents that have ruined life in America. Of course, it turns out that the “beyond exceptionally grave damage” is also TOP SECRET – yes, America has been destroyed but don’t tell a soul.

Or is the real scandal that trillions of $$$$ have been spent generating classified documents that are mostly worthless toilet paper, while this country remains utterly ignorant of anything that occurs overseas?

[Lila: Slight correction. The “country remains utterly ignorant” is the POINT of the whole thing. That’s not “inept.” That’s super-efficient.]

That’s the way the whole system is supposed to operate, with complete “freedom of expression” guaranteed to produce cacophony, over which no one can distinguish true from false without considerable effort and time that most people cannot afford to expend.

“Trillions are “wasted” only if you care about the serfs who are generating the trillions of real “wealth,” which include people here and all over the world.

By the miracle of unlimited carpet-bombing-sustained-dollar-generation, global casino capitalism, rigged market indices, rigged media, and rigged language  (“free trade,” “human rights” and “democracy”), the cartel which runs the system manages to paper over what is actually a brutal global plantation of managed trade, liberventionism, and fascism, run through a malign network of spy/surveillance mechanisms, proxy wars, police-actions, NGO campaigns, and propaganda, operating globally, but headquartered in Israel, the US, and the UK, with satrapies all over.

“That the US winds up funding and building up both sides in wars and pseudo-wars in third-world countries by people who generally hate our guts?

Lila: They generally “hate our guts” because of things done by the US Govt, which are concealed or distorted by its propaganda arm – academia, think-tanks, and the media (left and right, print, online, major, and alternative, including conspiracy sites). All are infiltrated, controlled, and distorted, not only by propaganda but also by commercial imperatives.

That we have politicians who cannot find Niger on a map bloviating about the “evil of Snowden”? That the archived trillion-trillion bytes of searchable database on Americans is far more likely to be abused by paranoid politicians like Nixon, Clinton, Obama, and Christie against domestic political opponents than to sort out minutia between illiterate Taliban goat-herders in Afghanistan?

At best, after Abdul blows up his backpack, we may find that he had earlier been “talking Jihad” with Ishmael and we subsequently kill Ishmael and 50 others at a wedding party proudly announcing that we have killed “Ishmael the potential terrorist,” while forgetting the relatives of the other 50 who are new terrorist recruits.

What America has made is an NSA “Keystone-Kops-Gestapo” that is as inept as it is insidious – sucking up a whirlwind of mostly useless data and the 4th Amendment in the process. While the NSA archives our tweeting and our twerking, let us not forget Benjamin Franklin’s advice: “those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither”. The “exceptionally grave damage” is to our freedoms!

For syndication rights to http://BarelyABlog.com or http://IlanaMercer.com, contact ilana@ilanamercer.com. Read more @ http://barelyablog.com/#ixzz2qlmEsmhg
Comment:
I am in general agreement with this, except for the reference to Keystone Kops.
The Keystone Kops routine is only at the level of what the politicians and public figures do.

Behind the scenes, the spy agencies, the puppet-masters behind them (not always in control but certainly in charge) pursue, quite ruthlessly and well, an agenda whose visible outlines are by now apparent even to ordinary people.

Draupadi Disrobed: India Strip-Searched By US…..

Posted on by

Draupadi disrobed in the Mahabharat

Credit for image of Draupadi vastraharan to Naari.com

“When the US tows away a Russian diplomat’ car in Washington for a parking violation, six US diplomatic cars disappear in Moscow. The Russian car then magically appears with apology.

That is the type of diplomacy we need.”

This was a comment I saw posted at the Indian news site, Firstpost.com, below an article on the unequal “relationship” between the US and  India, as evidenced in the Devyani Khobragade case.

India is claiming “victory” …….even though a senior female diplomat still faces indictment and a possible 10 year sentence and was strip-searched and cavity-inspected, for an allegation over what amounts to a routine visa issue.

Meanwhile, not even a criminal case was registered against Wayne May (the State Dept Security chief in New Delhi who is behind the whole affair.

May was guilty of subversion of the Indian judiciary, actual trafficking, and tax and visa fraud.

Further clarification of  a canard being circulated that Khobragade was lying.

Devyani Khobragade says she was strip-searched, DNA swabbed, and cavity-searched, multiple times.

The US Marshals deny that she was cavity-searched but admit she underwent a standard procedure strip-search.

So who is telling the truth? Devyani or the Marshals?

BOTH. There is just a confusion of terms.

Under US law today (ratified by Supreme Court in a 2012 case), arrests are accompanied by strip-searches.

1 The standard procedure of a strip-search

This is what the US Marshals admitted happened.

It involves the removal of all clothes and examination of all bodily cavities, including mouth, nose, ears, eyes, genitals and rectum.

It involves “baring of the labia.” That can be done multiple times.

It includes DNA swabbing and recording (for security purposes).

As we now know, the US has a vast espionage and surveillance network and nearly all sensitive nodes of telecom and electronic communication are monitored centrally.

Thus, images of such a search WOULD HAVE BEEN RECORDED AND SHARED WITH SPY AGENCIES. THAT IS GUARANTEED.

These images can then be transferred to private corporations, working with the United States Government (and Israel.

Israel has complete access via backdoors in the electronic equipment as well as more directly).

Corporation working with the spy agencies and with the USG include Facebook, Microsoft,  Google, Digg, Verizon, Brighthouse and many many more.

There is immense  potential here for black-mail against a political figure like Khobragade, from a political family tied to the Dalit vote-bank (voting power of the lower caste/untouchable community), a prize for both Congress and the BJP.

Indeed, we don’t know that black-mail has not ALREADY occurred behind closed doors.

Extortion of the Khobragade family would mean extortion of the Ministry of External Affairs (foreign office of New Delhi), in which Uttam Khobragade, Devyani’s father, has power.

The MEA and the US Embassy in New Delhi were at logger-heads for some time before this episode

“Jail Strip Searches: The light at the end of the tunnel was not a train,” Gary W. De Land, Directors of Jail Operations, Utah’s Sheriff’s Association gives a detailed history of the litigation over strip-searches as well as the often confused terminology, from the perspective of someone in favor of more wide-spread use of strip-searches.  His description of the standard strip-search, including visual inspection of cavities (which he terms relatively useless since the cavities cannot actually be seen)

“The early strip search cases created a bit of confusion over what a strip search is. Part of that confusion was use of the term “body cavity search” or “visual body cavity search.”

The terms seem to imply searches actually probe or look inside of the rectum or vagina which was not the case.

The body-cavity searches were those where the male was required to lift his genitals for visual inspection to see if contraband was being hidden and bending or squatting to allow visual inspection of the anus (an external inspection). For females, prisoners were required to bend and spread their buttocks and/or squat to permit an visual inspection of the external genitalia and anus.

The Supreme Court commented on the different and confusing meanings that have been applied in various cases to “strip searches.”

The term is imprecise. It may refer simply to the instruction to remove clothing while an officer observes from a distance of, say, five feet or more; it may mean a visual inspection from a closer, more uncomfortable distance; it may include directing detainees to shake their heads or to run their hands through their hair to dislodge what might be hidden there; or it may involve instructions to raise arms, to display foot insteps, to expose the back of the ears, to move or spread the buttocks or genital areas, or to cough in a squatting position.

The impact of the Florence ruling is that the term “strip search” now covers each of the different levels of intrusion listed above. Since the so-called visual body-cavity searches are permitted without reasonable suspicion, then certainly the less intrusive strip searches are also authorized. It is now appropriate for jail officials to simply refer to levels levels of unclothed searches as strip searches.”

B. The procedure called a “cavity search”

Devyani mistakenly used this term, when she should have used the term “cavity inspection.”

That is understandable since in India, BOTH procedures would be considered custodial rape.

Cavity search (probe)  involves digital probing of the cavities (insertion of fingers or fists into rectums or vaginas).

This is literally sodomizing of an innocent person, on mere charges or suspicion.

“Probing” did NOT happen, which is why the US Marshals are denying the story.

Devyani used the wrong term, but she is not lying, just using the wrong terminology.

The standard inspection of the cavities would in fact be brutal and demeaning enough on its own.

The US apparently misjudged how people would react and then tried to muddy the affair by flooding the media with allegations and statements from the US prosecutor and the alleged victim.

In effect, this is a way to try the case in the media and cover up their own outrageous position.

The hoax video that was released on the net, showing the gang-rape of  Devyani, was apparently intended to muddy the story.

Perhaps that was so as to make it appear that the reaction was a misplaced reaction to exaggerated reports.

My first book “Language of Empire” dealt with such “hoaxes” and the problems they create.

Notice, as well, that almost immediately after the Facebook statements of the May surfaced, how another “gang-rape” allegation has surfaced from Delhi, this time by a Danish woman.

Yet, the police did not find any injuries consistent with a gang-rape and she refused to undergo a medical examination in Delhi.

She is using medical evidence from Denmark to press her case.

This is an extraordinary case from the point of view of setting precedents, because it means that the Delhi police might from now on be sued based on evidence cooked up abroad and concocted for political purposes.

Now, we see the political motivation behind the drum-beat about a “rape crisis” in Delhi

even while the rate of rape in the UK, for example, is ten time that in India, and although India is not to be found in the top ten countries for high rape rates, while the US, the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, and Belgium all are.

Read about the 25 signs of the Nazification of the US police-state.