May 12, 2013

Floral Tribute Paid to Statues of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il

1. Delegations of different countries and regions Sunday visited the statues of President Kim Il Sung and leader Kim Jong Il on Mansu Hill. The delegations came here to participate in the 16th Pyongyang Spring International Trade Fair.
They laid a floral basket before the statues of the peerlessly great men who made immortal contributions to developing the friendly relations among countries before paying tribute to them.

2. Rodong Sinmun Warns against Japanese Society’s Lurch to Right

The Japanese reactionaries should awaken from the nightmare of realizing their ambition for overseas expansion, clearly mindful that their society’s lurch to the Right would lead Japan to ruin, warns Rodong Sinmun Sunday in a bylined article.
The Japanese ruling quarters are putting a group visit to Yasukuni Shrine on an official and regular basis and justifying it, the article says, and goes on:
Nearly 70 years have passed since Japan sustained a defeat in the war. Politicians of Japan are, however, thronging to the shrine to console the departed soul of the top-class war criminals and pray for “the soul of Yamato”. This is nothing but a wriggling of a venomous serpent of militarism keen to militarize Japan and avenge its defeat in the war. It is not without reason that Japanese society is rapidly veering to the Right. Steeped in the idea of denying history to the marrow of their bones, Japanese politicians are making confusion of people’s thinking in a sly method to attain their sinister political aim.

For more on the evil deeds of the West, go to www. watching politics.com and see the many headlines and links on the left side of the page.

Even Tony Scalia can’t get it wrong all the time.

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Police following up on drunk driving investigations will no longer be able to draw their suspect’s blood without a court order authorizing the search, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

In a 5-4 decision, with Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy and Elena Kagan making up the majority, the court ruled that the natural expiration of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute “destruction of evidence,” which would otherwise give officers cause for a warrantless search.

The decision in Missouri v. McNeely springs from a DUI arrest in which an officer claimed that blood was drawn without a warrant or the suspect’s consent because the suspect’s liver was in the process of destroying evidence of a crime. The Missouri Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in favor of the arrested man’s contention that the search was unconstitutional and violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

“As an initial matter, States have a broad range of legal tools to enforce their drunk-driving laws and to secure blood-alcohol content evidence without undertaking warrantless noncon­sensual blood draws,” Justice Sotomayor wrote for the court’s majority. “For example, all 50 States have adopted implied consent laws that require motorists, as a condition of operating a motor vehicle within the State, to consent to BAC testing if they are arrested or otherwise detained on suspicion of a drunk-driving offense.”

“Such laws impose significant consequences when a motorist withdraws consent; typically the motorist’s driver’s license is immediately suspended or revoked, and most States allow the motorist’s refusal to take a BAC test to be used as evidence against him in a subsequent criminal prosecution,” she added, noting there is “no evidence” to suggest restricting such blood draws has impeded enforcement efforts.

“We hold that in drunk-driving investigations, the natu­ral dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in every case sufficient to justify conducting a blood test without a warrant,” the court’s majority opinion concluded.

Reacting to the ruling, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Legal Director Steven Shapiro praised the court’s agreement with justices in Missouri who clung to the integrity of the Fourth Amendment. “We know from experience that drunk-driving laws can be strictly enforced without abandoning constitutional rights,” he said in an advisory. “Today’s decision appropriately recognizes what half the states have already demonstrated — that maintaining highway safety does not require sacrificing personal privacy.”

Escapees from Transylvania, Breyer, Alito and, of course, Clarence Thomas voted to “take the blood!” Roberts straddled.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7llu2aQRSQ

Atkins, South Beach, and all the others, it is time to move to the sidelines. There is a new kid on the block getting all the attention.

New England Journal of Medicine, 04/08/2013 Continuing Medical Education
Estruch R. et al.– Observational cohort studies and a secondary prevention trial have shown an inverse association between adherence to THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET. and cardiovascular risk. The study is a randomized trial of this diet pattern for the primary prevention of cardiovascular events. It was concluded that among persons at high cardiovascular risk, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra–virgin olive oil or nuts reduced the incidence of major cardiovascular events.

Methods

In a multicenter trial in Spain, the authors randomly assigned participants who were at high cardiovascular risk, but with no cardiovascular disease at enrollment, to one of three diets: a Mediterranean diet supplemented with extra–virgin olive oil, a Mediterranean diet supplemented with mixed nuts, or a control diet (advice to reduce dietary fat). Participants received quarterly individual and group educational sessions and, depending on group assignment, free provision of extra–virgin olive oil, mixed nuts, or small nonfood gifts. The primary end point was the rate of major cardiovascular events (myocardial infarction, stroke, or death from cardiovascular causes). On the basis of the results of an interim analysis, the trial was stopped after a median follow–up of 4.8 years

Results

A total of 7447 persons were enrolled (age range, 55 to 80 years); 57% were women. The two Mediterranean–diet groups had good adherence to the intervention, according to self–reported intake and biomarker analyses. A primary end–point event occurred in 288 participants.

No diet–related adverse effects were reported.

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Do it the right way – THE JEWISH WAY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nqydycykiE

According to a tale that sadistic Christians like to tell each other with unrelenting pleasure, their hero was hung up to dry and, when he was sufficiently emaciated, the Bad Guys nailed him down. We commemorate the occasion with great glee. It seems the day ought to be named AWFUL FRIDAY but what do heretics know?

The principal reaction of Outsiders when this tale is thrust upon them once each year is:

OUCH!

For some obscure reason, after the nailing is completed, the body is taken down and put into a coffin. One might have expected the Bad Guys to have finished the job by roasting the poor chap. Why take chances, and why not inspire Charles Lamb in ways even more hilarious than we now know?

However, who are the Outsiders to be so presumptuous as to offer suggestions? Outsiders try to mock Christianity with an assortment of unanswerable questions such as “Where is heaven?” For that, there is an easy answer: Heaven is 1 trillion, 650 billion miles from the equator. A Stairway To Heaven is practical and has in fact been built. One needn’t travel at preposterous speeds (300,000 km per second, a.k.a. 186,000 MPH) to get there before Stephen Hawking can mumble terminological nominalism. I won’t save you the trouble but you can easily see that even though the speed limit on the Stairway is 100,000 miles per second, [MPS for those gifted enough to understand abbreviations], it is not a bad trip at all. The Stairway is difficult to see but so what? What does that prove? As for heaven itself, the question comes up, “Mustn’t it be immense to hold all the souls who qualified to get in?” Answer: It is, if you think a chunk of land 500 miles long by 500 miles wide is immense. [But do the math.] At a distance of 1 trillion plus miles from Earth to Heaven, you need a mighty telescope to spot it. Actually, one has been built but it has smudges on it in all the wrong places and they cannot be removed. What a calamity! I am thinking that perhaps it is even a catastrophe. Well beyond whatever Calamity Jane ever imagined.

Do not fret. Those making the trip won’t soon need telescopes. As for the Outsiders, to hell with them [literally!).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVvGEBDioHg

Want to know if and how you will die THIS YEAR? Here’s the good word.
http://www.v1news.com/page4/1/odds_of_dying/odds_of_dying.htm

If you don’t like clicking, here are some highlights.

Chance that you will die from a bee sting this year – 1 in 25 million.
From an asteroid impact – 1 in 75 million. Better chance of winning a big lottery.
From dog bite – 1 in 11 million. Struck by lightning – 1 in 10 million.
Firearms discharge – 1 in 514,000.
From falling down stairs – 1 in 157,000.
Killed by acts of war – 1 in 135,000.
Post-Surgical complications – 1 in 117,000. [This does not include deaths by surgical negligence and incompetence. The odds against the latter are not given but these events occur 100,000 times per year.]
In a fire – 1 in 107,000.
Suicide – 1 in 9000.
Vehicular accident – 1 in 6500.
HEART DISEASE – 1 in 467.

If you live long enough, something will get you.

Cause of Death Lifetime Odds
Heart Disease 1-in-5
Cancer 1-in-7
Stroke 1-in-23
Accidental Injury 1-in-36
Motor Vehicle Accident* 1-in-100
Intentional Self-harm (suicide) 1-in-121
Falling Down 1-in-246
Assault by Firearm 1-in-325
Fire or Smoke 1-in-1,116
Natural Forces (heat, cold, storms, quakes, etc.) 1-in-3,357
Electrocution* 1-in-5,000
Drowning 1-in-8,942
Air Travel Accident* 1-in-20,000
Flood* (included also in Natural Forces above) 1-in-30,000
Legal Execution 1-in-58,618
Tornado* (included also in Natural Forces above) 1-in-60,000
Lightning Strike (included also in Natural Forces above) 1-in-83,930
Snake, Bee or other Venomous Bite or Sting* 1-in-100,000
Earthquake (included also in Natural Forces above) 1-in-131,890
Dog Attack 1-in-147,717
Asteroid Impact* 1-in-200,000**
Tsunami* 1-in-500,000
Fireworks Discharge 1-in-615,488

Odds against writing a NY Times best seller 220 to 1
Odds against dating a supermodel 88,000 to 1 Odds against dating a millionaire 215 to 1.
Odds against winning a powerball jackpot 146 million to 1.
Odds against being audited by the IRS 175 to 1.

THE REALLY GOOD NEWS – ODDS OF GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER 1 IN 2.

One of America’s best penologists, Nick Medvecky, the editor of American Tribune, puts my concerns about Obama’s neglect of the prisons this way [the title of this post is his]:

Having lived on Earth for 70 years, warehoused in a dozen federal prisons for 20, and now “free” for the past three, my knowledge and experience with all this compu-high tech is limited. Tech-wise, I might as well have been on a prison asteroid.

America, the land of the world’s largest prison gulag system in the history of the world, currently 2.4 million souls and growing, will most definitely usher in prisons on asteroids. I can almost predict how it’ll go down.

Prisons have become punitive projections of the sociopathy of conservatives.

Prisons are, in fact, a growing regimen of surplus labor for corporatist private prison enterprise primarily designed to replace free-world labor and destroy unions.

Today, some 85% of prison inmates are former mental, veteran, homeless and unemployed being warehoused as surplus labor. The vast majority are convicted of conservative moral and consensual “crimes.”

Justice is also caught up in presidential prison politics. Obama, the candidate of Hope & Change pardoned (post-prison) 22 of 1,019 applications (one in 50). Reagan pardon 1-in-3, Clinton 1-in-8 and Bush 1-in-16.

Obama commuted the sentence of one prisoner out of 5,000 applicants that made it past the Justice Department’s Pardons Attorney, a woman dying of leukemia. Reagan commuted 1-in-100 applicants, Bush 1-in-1,000 and Obama 1-in-5,000.

I suppose all this makes conservative-corporatist, political sense, since practically all justice is political to begin with.

Earthside or otherwise, I can easily perceive private enterprise having future “gov’t” serve almost exclusively as corporatism’s theft of public monies to build the infrastructure the ruling elite use to aid their accumulation of personal wealth and power).

That will certainly include the reposition high-value mineral asteroids into moon orbits in order to be mined by super-cheap prisoner labor. Actually, Hollywood has forecast all that.

Their health and lives will be as cheap as postbellum ex-slaves. True criminal predator population (3-to-15%) will serve as overseers as they have in the past as well as certain colonial minorities did for their imperial masters. Science-fiction? I think not…we’re already halfway there.

Justice itself will be mostly tailor-made. Need non-predator, hard-working miners? Prisoner doctors? Nurses? Equipment operators and engineers? Contractors, etc.?

No problem. Pull ‘em up on the social media, sort ‘em out, and criminalize them to order. No problem with their return; few will be coming back, if any. No need to even bury them; pop-toast ‘em into the sun.

Hardly any new laws even need be passed. Those that already exist in the Patriot Act and Homeland Security are more than enough. Most haven’t even yet been used; they sit there made-for-future-order.

But we’re not wholly there yet… When I went to prison back in 1990 it was another three years before the World Wide Web even went on-line. Now when things are happening anywhere in the world, the news is practically instant.

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SG: What are you waiting for, Mr. President?

Polls show that roughly half of Americans support gay marriage. A majority of Americans surveyed this week say they support gay marriage, just days after voters approved pro-gay marriage ballot initiatives in Maryland, Maine and Washington. The votes in those three states, coupled with the rejection of a constitutional amendment in Minnesota that would have banned same-sex marriages, marked the first occasion that voters directly approved pro-gay marriage initiatives on the state level. The division between the sexes on gay marriage is especially striking: Women are in favor by 59-38 percent, men opposed by 55-41 percent.

According to the survey, from ABC News and The Washington Post, 51 percent of Americans support same-sex marriages — the fifth consecutive poll taken by the news organizations that showed a majority of Americans in favor. Meanwhile, 47 percent of respondents say they oppose same-sex marriage.

More than six in 10 young adults say they support gay marriage, as do three in four Democrats. But two-thirds of seniors and more than eight in 10 voters who describe themselves as “very conservative” say they are against the practice.

The results closely mirrored exit polls from last week’s election, in which a slim plurality (49-46 percent) of voters said they supported gay marriage. Unsurprisingly, supporters favored President Obama by a nearly 3-to-1 margin, while the president won 76 percent of gay and lesbian voters.

Obama announced last year that he personally supported gay marriage, making him the first sitting president to do so publicly. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said repeatedly on the campaign trail that he supported only the traditional definition of marriage.

The national poll also seems to closely mirror attitudes in the four states that considered gay-marriage ballot initiatives last week. In Maine and Washington, voters broke in favor of legalization by 53-to-47 percent margins. In Maryland, voters approved same-sex marriages 52-38 percent; Minnesota rejected a constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman, 51-48 percent.

This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by landline and cell phone Nov. 7-11, 2012, among a random national sample of 1,023 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points. The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by SSRS/Social Science Research Solutions of Media, Pa.

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PEW poll, February 2012

PEW finds that the public divides almost evenly: 46% favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, while 44% are opposed.

Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants express the greatest opposition to same-sex marriage, with 74% saying they oppose allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally. A large majority of black Protestants also oppose same-sex marriage (62%). The views of these groups have not changed since 2010. Compared with evangelicals and black Protestants, white mainline Protestants are more supportive of same-sex marriage, with 54% saying they favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to get married.

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