Fully Armed U.S. Troops Patrol Minnesota Neighborhood
A photo showing fully armed U.S. National Guard troops patrolling a quiet residential street in Crookston, Minnesota has gone viral, once again underscoring concerns that Americans are being conditioned to accept the gradual imposition of martial law.
Although the photo is undated, Guard troops from the local Crookston Armory routinely take part in off-base exercises which train the local population to accept the sight of armed soldiers patrolling their neighborhoods as normal.
One such exercise in February 2011 dubbed “Urban Operations Training” involved military Humvees and 27 armed soldiers conducting a drill around the Bridge Street area of Crookston.
According to “Maggie,” the woman who took the photograph, when she started taking pictures of the troops one of them told her, “Just training Ma’am. Joining up with another patrol at the rally point.”
When Maggie asked why they were training on the streets of a quiet residential area, a younger soldier responded, “To be honest ma’am, I don’t know.”
Members of the same Guard unit shown on the photograph – Minnesota National Guard, Unit 2-136 CAB / B Company – have been deployed to Iraq where their duties would potentially have included rounding up alleged insurgents and taking them to prison camps, a frightening prospect given that the recently passed National Defense Authorization Act allows for American citizens to be similarly kidnapped and detained without trial. Continue reading at Fully Armed U.S. Troops Patrol Minnesota Neighborhood
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Mugging victim turns into math genius after head injury
Jason Padgett doesn't have a PhD, or a Masters degree. In fact, he dropped out of college and works at a futon store, but he is a mathematical genius and has been since being brutally attacked and kicked in the head by muggers a decade ago.
The 41-year-old from Tacoma, Washington used to mostly be interested in working out and partying when muggers beat him outside a karaoke club for his $99 leather jacket. Now he sees complex formulas everywhere and turns them into diagrams.
"All I saw was a bright flash of light and the next thing I knew I was on my knees on the ground and I thought, 'I'm going to get killed," he told ABC.
Doctors initially thought it was a concussion, but then Padgett started becoming obsessed with drawing intricate diagrams. He couldn't draw before and at first had no idea what the diagrams were of.
The diagrams turned out to be fractals, small portions of a visual representation for Pi that are similar to the whole image. Everywhere he looks, he sees formulas such as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Because of the damage, his brain is forced to overcompensate in areas most people can't access.
"Savant syndrome is the development of a particular skill, that can be mathematical, spatial, or autistic, that develop to an extreme degree that sort of makes a person super human," said Berit Brogaard, a neuroscientist and philosophy professor at the Center of Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, to ABC.
Because of how he sees math and objects, Padgett can be compared to John Nash, who was played by Russell Crow in "A Beautiful Mind."
Other famous savants have also been known to have brain damage. Kim Peek, who was the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Rain Man, was born with severe brain damage. While he struggles with ordinary motor skills such as buttoning his shirt, he can remember everything on a page even though he reads two at once. His left eye reads the left page and his right eye reads the right page and he reads both of them in about three seconds.
Leslie Lemke was born with severe birth defects and while he didn't learn to walk until age 15, he could flawlessly play any kind of music on piano after hearing it just once.
Like Padgett, Orlando Serrell became a savant after suffering a head injury. He was struck by a baseball on the left side of the head when he was 10. For a while after the accident he had headaches, but when they went away he could perform complex calendar calculations and remember the weather every day from the day of the accident.
As for Padgett, he is hoping to start teaching others how beautiful math can be.
"Sometimes I would really like to turn it off, and it won't," he told ABC when asked if he thought his talent was a burden. "But the good far outweigh the bad. I would not give it up for anything." - yahoo
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Homeland Security to Release Bacteria in Boston Subway System
Despite the fact that the U.S. government has a history of dangerous biological testing against the American people, the Department of Homeland Security claims that a bacteria it plans to release in the Boston subway later this year to test biological sensors is harmless to healthy people.
“Federal officials say they test the subway sensors by releasing dead bacteria called B-subtilis. They say it is used in food supplements, has been rigorously tested and has no adverse health effects for low exposure in healthy people,” reports CBS News.
The bacteria will be released as a means of testing biological sensors that guard against the threat of a bio-terror attack. The DHS has released a 28-page summary entitled ‘Environmental Assessment for Bacillus subtilis Particles to Challenge Bio-Detection Sensors in Subway Stations’ (PDF).
Given the federal government’s ominous record in releasing biological agents into subway systems and other transport hubs, it’s no surprise that this latest example is sure to cause consternation, which is probably why the feds are being so open about it.
During a Senate hearing in 1977, it was revealed that the Pentagon had conducted numerous secret germ “attacks” on cities without public knowledge in an effort to test the threat posed by biological agents. These tests “may have caused outbreaks of disease which occurred in some of the test areas,” writes Leonard A. Cole, citing the Senate inquiry.
The hidden U.S. history of germ testing in general also serves as a warning that allowing the government to experiment with biological agents in public which it claims are perfectly safe has not always been a wise choice.
Project SHAD, a Cold War-era Department of Defense program in which veterans were exposed to deadly chemical weapons without their knowledge or consent, also represents a dark chapter in the U.S. government’s use of dangerous biological agents against its own people.
Since the 1940′s, the military and the CIA have conducted numerous “tests” on the American people, including the release of dengue fever carrying mosquitoes in Georgia and Florida, biological warfare tests on the civilian population in Puerto Rico, the release of bacillus globigii from a submarine on the port of Oahu, Hawaii, and dozens of other incidents, most of them classified. - The full article can be found at DHS To Release Bacteria In Boston Subway System
Homeland Security: A Complete Guide to Understanding, Preventing, and Surviving Terrorism
The Failure of Homeland In-Security: The Government's Dirty Little Secrets from an Insider
Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security
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Ötzi the Iceman survived arrow wounds
Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old "Iceman" mummy of the Alps, lived for some time after being shot in the back by an arrow, scientists said after using forensic technology to analyse his preserved blood.
Contrary to a leading theory, Ötzi did not expire immediately from his wounds, they reported in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, published by Britain's academy of sciences.
Scientists led by Albert Zink of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, southern Germany used nano-scale methods to probe the oldest blood known to modern science, preserved by thousands of years of alpine chill.
Probing the oldest known blood
Using a so-called atomic force microscope able to resolve images just a few nanometers (billionths of a metre) across, they identified corpuscles with the classic doughtnut shape of healthy blood cells.
"To be absolutely sure that we were not dealing with pollen, bacteria or even a negative imprint of a blood cell, but indeed with actual blood cells, we used a second analytical method," Zink said.
They deployed Raman spectroscopy, in which refracted light from a laser beam gives chemical clues about a sample.
Components of blood clotting found
This showed the presence of haemoglobin and fibrin, which are key components in blood clotting, at the arrow wound on Ötzi's back.
"Because fibrin is present in fresh wounds and then degrades, the theory that Ötzi died straight after he had been injured by the arrow, as had once been mooted, and not some days after, can no longer be upheld," Zink said.
Ötzi's remains were discovered by two German hikers in September 1991 in the Ötztal Alps in South Tyrol, northern Italy, 3,210 metres (10,500 feet) above sea level.
"Suffered a violent death"
Scientists have used high-tech, non-invasive diagnostics and genomic sequencing to penetrate his mysterious past.
These efforts have determined Ötzi died around the age of 45, was about 1.60 metres (five foot, three inches) tall and weighed 50 kilograms (110 pounds).
He suffered a violent death, with an arrow severing a major blood vessel between the rib cage and the left scapula, as well as a laceration on the hand.
According to DNA analysis presented in February, Ötzi had brown eyes and hair and was allergic to milk products.
This supports the theory that despite the increasing spread of agriculture and dairying at the time, lactose intolerance was still common.
According to a theory aired in 2010 by an Italian archaeologist, based on seasonal pollen found in his stomach contents and at the burial site, Ötzi did not die at the spot where his remains were found. Instead, he was only ceremonially interred there. - cosmomagazone
Iceman: Uncovering the Life and Times of a Prehistoric Man Found in an Alpine Glacier
