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1
Tacitus' Realm / Armed tax evader barricades self in home
« on: January 19, 2007, 01:42:18 AM »
By Julie Masis

BOSTON (Reuters) - An armed man who has refused to pay U.S. federal taxes for a decade has barricaded himself inside his hilltop home in New Hampshire with 20 supporters for a week after resisting an order to show up in court.

Edward Brown, 64, and his wife Elaine Brown, 65, of Plainfield, New Hampshire, were found guilty by a federal jury on Thursday of owing the U.S. government more than $700,000 in unpaid taxes dating back to 1996.

Contacted by Reuters by telephone, Brown said he has paid all his taxes to his town but does not want to pay the federal government.

"The industry and the military are working together to control everything. People don't even know it. Little frogs sitting in boiling water," he said. "The United States of America now is a fascist country."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Morse said Brown and his wife were both looking at "a substantial jail sentence."

The tax bills piled up mostly because Brown's wife, who owns a dental business, failed to pay income tax and payroll taxes for her staff, Morse said.

U.S. Marshal Stephen Monier said authorities were speaking with Brown by telephone but have so far stayed away from the house.

Elaine Brown, who was in court when the guilty verdict was announced, was released to the custody of her son in Massachusetts on condition that she would have no face-to-face contact with her husband.

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

source

wonder how this will turn out?

2
Open Free for All / Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers
« on: January 17, 2007, 06:51:07 PM »
11:58 17 January 2007
Andy Coghlan

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their ?immortality?. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

DCA attacks a unique feature of cancer cells: the fact that they make their energy throughout the main body of the cell, rather than in distinct organelles called mitochondria. This process, called glycolysis, is inefficient and uses up vast amounts of sugar.

Until now it had been assumed that cancer cells used glycolysis because their mitochondria were irreparably damaged. However, Michelakis?s experiments prove this is not the case, because DCA reawakened the mitochondria in cancer cells. The cells then withered and died (Cancer Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.ccr.2006.10.020).

Michelakis suggests that the switch to glycolysis as an energy source occurs when cells in the middle of an abnormal but benign lump don?t get enough oxygen for their mitochondria to work properly (see diagram). In order to survive, they switch off their mitochondria and start producing energy through glycolysis.

Crucially, though, mitochondria do another job in cells: they activate apoptosis, the process by which abnormal cells self-destruct. When cells switch mitochondria off, they become ?immortal?, outliving other cells in the tumour and so becoming dominant. Once reawakened by DCA, mitochondria reactivate apoptosis and order the abnormal cells to die.

?The results are intriguing because they point to a critical role that mitochondria play:

they impart a unique trait to cancer cells that can be exploited for cancer therapy,? says Dario Altieri, director of the University of Massachusetts Cancer Center in Worcester.

The phenomenon might also explain how secondary cancers form. Glycolysis generates lactic acid, which can break down the collagen matrix holding cells together. This means abnormal cells can be released and float to other parts of the body, where they seed new tumours.

DCA can cause pain, numbness and gait disturbances in some patients, but this may be a price worth paying if it turns out to

be effective against all cancers. The next step is to run clinical trials of DCA in people with cancer. These may have to be funded by charities, universities and governments: pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to pay because they can?t make money on unpatented medicines. The pay-off is that if DCA does work, it will be easy to manufacture and dirt cheap.

Paul Clarke, a cancer cell biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK, says the findings challenge the current assumption that mutations, not metabolism, spark off cancers. ?The question is: which comes first?? he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... ncers.html

3
The Troubled Teen Industry / Teen programs are going to be around for a while
« on: January 13, 2007, 12:04:18 PM »
Program ideology is legal.

Restraints are legal.

Psychological confrontation is legal.

LGAT's are legal.

Sending your kid away is legal.

Program facilities are legal.

Isolation rooms are legal.

Child abuse is illegal.

Authorities do not consider programs child abuse unless physical assault occurs, or lack of physical care occurs, like we see in Randall's case.

Try calling the cops on another WWASPS camp and tell them ALL the kids there are being psychologically abused and see what kind of response you get.


Physical abuse charges aren't going to shut down programs when everyone including the public believes in the ideology and theory behind it.

And trying to paint all programs with the bloodied brush of physically abusive programs will not work. It's not a strategy, it's a trick and fails to recognize the fact 'soft programs' are wrong in of themselves simply because of the coercive ideology.

Sure they'll morph into something more marketable, but they ain't going anywhere.

And even if there are video cameras and phones on the walls and they don't beat the kids, do people really think this will change the ultimate effect? A lot of program kids are not physically assaulted in a program and still have the same negative effect, but nothing 'illegal' was really done to them. So who is going to stop that?

Unless the parents stop paying that is.

4
Tacitus' Realm / Why the US and socialism were never friends
« on: January 12, 2007, 02:05:27 PM »
Daniel Finkelstein
Our columnist on the man who explained a central 20th-century question...

What?s your favourite fact? Come on, everyone has a favourite fact. Here?s mine: more young people supported the Vietnam War than did any other section of the American population. As the war progressed, the whole country turned against it, but those under 30 remained least likely to regard it as an error.

I have deployed this point on countless occasions ? arguments about the Sixties, disputes about the political views of young people, discussions on the differences between the views of activists and the general public ? but I bring it up now for a different reason. The man from whom I first learnt it (it was in one of his many books) died last week.

The sociologist and political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset was 84 and had been ill for some time. His name is unknown to almost everybody in this country. Not so the political grouping of which he was a founder member. The small group of Trotskyites with whom Lipset associated when he was a student at City College in New York grew up to become known as the neocons. Lipset?s contribution to their thinking was critical.

Neocon has become the ultimate term of political abuse, a description of an alien idea foisted on an unwary nation by hardline conservatives. Can I take a few moments on the occasion of Lipset?s death to suggest that this isn?t quite right? Let me start with the most common misconception of all, with an error that Lipset?s career exposes quite clearly. Neoconservatism is thought to be a doctrine of the Right. It isn?t. It is a critique of the Left. And the difference is important.

A few years ago Lipset met General Colin Powell at a cocktail party. The academic joked to the soldier that they had both been born in Harlem, brought up in the Bronx and graduated from City College. Later he wrote: ?I failed to add what was more relevant, that he joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps, while I joined the youth section of the Young People?s Socialist League, Fourth International.?

Why more relevant? Because it was while trying to make sense of the failure of American socialism that Lipset began to develop one of the central tenets of neocon thought ? American exceptionalism.

Lipset?s work began with a simple observation ? that socialist parties enjoyed considerable success throughout Europe but had failed entirely in America, even in the years of the Great Depression. The mystery was one that exercised socialists a great deal. In the early years of the 20th century they had believed that the US would be the first place to usher in a socialist republic. Within a few decades Stalin was attending a special commission of the Communist International to discuss the perplexing ?American Question?.

The young American scholar turned to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville for an answer, to his idea of ?American exceptionalism?. America, went the argument, is different. Lacking a feudal past, it is more socially egalitarian, more meritocratic, more individualistic and more rights-orientated. It also rejected state religion; instead individuals enjoy a personal relationship with their God.

The spirit of the Revolution made America the land of liberty, anti-statism and individualism. Lipset was always ambivalent about this. He regretted the country?s high crime rates, insecurity and extremes of wealth. Later in life he would write a book entitled American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. But on one thing he was clear: on American soil, socialism, even social democracy, could not take root.

From this insight, Lipset?s insight, flowed most of neoconservative thinking. On the domestic front neocons discussed the sort of welfare provision that could survive in such an inhospitable climate. They began to argue that protecting bourgeois values was essential in a country with a small State. And this led to a clash with another part of the Left ? the New Left, intent on challenging the traditional American way of life.

There was also foreign policy. If America was different ? if it was, uniquely, a state created to advance liberty ? didn?t it have a mission? Shouldn?t it resist the oppression of totalitarian ideologues? Shouldn?t it promote freedom around the globe? This led to a second breach with others on the Left. The neocons lost patience with what they saw as the soft attitude the rest of the Left had toward communism. When the Cold War ended, neocons continued to talk of a global mission to combat totalitarianism. Not all, however, supported the Iraq war.

I said that understanding neoconservatism as a critique of the Left (even this title was foisted on the group by a socialist opponent, Michael Harrington, as an attack on their Left credentials) was important. Why? Because the neocons are not trying to guide America to a new policy. Instead they are trying to interpret the traditions and spirit of the country. As Robert Kagan argues in his new book Dangerous Nation: ?This enduring tradition has led Americans into some disasters where they have done more harm than good, and into triumphs where they have done more good than harm. These days this conviction is strangely called ?neoconservatism?, but there is nothing ?neo? and certainly nothing conservative about it. US foreign policy has almost always been a liberal foreign policy.? And if this is right, it means that the policy advocated by neocons will long survive their own departure from the scene.

One more episode in the intellectual journey of Seymour Martin Lipset is worth recording. Very near the end of his life, before a debilitating stroke rendered him unable to speak, the great political scientist turned his attention to a new development ? the third way social democracy of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder.

America, he argued, was still different, but it had become less exceptional. Europe ? now more meritocratic, more rights-orientated, more libertarian ? was becoming like America, and it too no longer provided good soil for the traditional Left.

It?s a change I welcome but, reading Lipset, I wonder. Perhaps modern anti-Americans do not really dislike how different they are. They fear how similar we are becoming.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 08,00.html

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The Troubled Teen Industry / How to lock my parents up against their will?
« on: January 11, 2007, 11:20:18 AM »
My parents are both in their mid 60's now. My mother's family has a history of alzheimer's, my dad was adopted so we don't know his history. They both have a long history of alcohol, drug use and psychological issues.  

Recently they have both been causing me a lot of trouble. They've been calling me at work too much, and my boss is getting upset. They've been staying out late, drinking and partying and hanging out with peers I don't approve of. One night I woke up to find my car was not in the driveway, and all my liquor bottles were taken. I was tempted to call the police but I didn't want to get them involved. I want another option.

I am looking for an escort service and a private program. Preferably, I can send them to the same program, and they will be seperated, if only to save cost. I also expect some sort of discount for having two people at the facility please.

I don't need anything fancy, just a place to put them. I am done. I've been doing this for the last ten years and I've had enough, it's time for ME to live. It's time to take back MY house for me and my kids.

Other kids told me they had good experience with the escorts, but to make sure they come in in the middle of the night to surprised them.

I hope they don't hate me, but at this point I don't really care. I am willing to do anything. I have narrowed down my choice of old folks programs down to a couple but I'd really love some advice.

They need to change if they want to come home so this can't just be a vacataion. Thanks.

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Open Free for All / Harsh treatment
« on: January 10, 2007, 05:28:12 PM »
NEW YORK: On Dec. 8, 43 HIV-positive women were killed by a fire in a locked Moscow hospital ward, where they were supposedly being treated for drug addiction. Two nurses also perished. Until governments in Asia and the former Soviet Union stop punishing drug users in the name of treatment, such tragedies are bound to be repeated, and efforts to control both addiction and AIDS will continue to fall tragically short.

In Russia, the locked ward is a legacy of the Soviet era, where medical specialists (or "narcologists") subjected alcoholics and drug addicts to hypnosis, aversion therapy and, when deemed necessary, forced labor.

State power to enact compulsory treatment largely collapsed with the Soviet Union, but in many former Soviet republics the bars on the windows and fire escapes of drug treatment facilities remain in place. So does the attitude that drug users are best treated like drugs ? as something to be controlled and contained for the good of society.

Many Russian narcologists offer drug users little more than extreme sedation to mitigate withdrawal from heroin. Drug users' names are added to government registries. Psychological support is minimal or nonexistent. Prescription of the oral medications most effective in reducing heroin injection and HIV risk, such as methadone or buprenorphine, is illegal.

China, spurred by the spread of HIV among injecting drug users, has won well-deserved praise for new programs prescribing methadone to heroin addicts. Less attention, however, has been given to the fact that most Chinese methadone patients receive medication only after spending two terms in compulsory detoxification centers run by the Public Security Bureau, where they are offered such measures as 12 hours of daily, unpaid labor, therapy with electric shocks, and sessions where they chant such slogans as "drugs are bad, I am bad."

In Southeast Asia, drug users are also forced into overcrowded facilities where conditions more closely resemble prisons than treatment centers. Some 35,000 Vietnamese are now detained in rehabilitation centers in Ho Chi Minh City alone.

In Malaysia, an estimated 5,000 drug users are in compulsory rehabilitation centers where they are subjected to boot-camp style drills, and locked at night into barred cells where as many as 40 patients sleep on the floor.

Experts estimate that from 90 percent to 100 percent of drug users subjected to coercive internment in the former Soviet Union and Southeast Asia return to illicit drug use. Bizarrely, this finding has sparked some governments to increase the length of internment rather than to re-examine their approach. In Ho Chi Minh City, detention reportedly can last four years or more.

The cost of these failed approaches can be measured not only in terms of unchecked drug dependence, but also in new HIV infections. In China, Russia, Malaysia and Vietnam, the largest share of all HIV cases are due to injecting drug use.

Outside Africa, the UN now estimates, nearly one in three infections is the result of contaminated needles. For the hundreds of thousands of drug users who are HIV-positive and unlucky enough to find themselves in punitive clinical settings, the problem of ineffective drug treatment is usually compounded by the absence of any HIV treatment at all. Sterile syringes and condoms are also unavailable, even though reports of drug use and sex in compulsory treatment settings are common.

The tragedy in Russia should move national governments and the United Nations to increase monitoring of what for too long has passed for drug treatment, and to speak out against abuses committed in the name of health. Otherwise, we leave millions of drug users in Asia and the former Soviet Union like those young, HIV-positive women: trapped, screaming and with no one to help.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/27/ ... dwolfe.php

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Open Free for All / Shenzhen's public humiliation of sex workers
« on: January 10, 2007, 04:58:12 PM »
Shenzhen's public humiliation of sex workers provokes a backlash

SHANGHAI: For people who saw the event on television, the scene was a chilling flashback from 30 years ago: Social outcasts and supposed criminals, in this case prostitutes and a few pimps, were paraded in front of a jeering crowd, their names revealed, and then taken to jail without trial.

The act of public shaming was intended as the inaugural event in a two- month campaign by the authorities in the southern city of Shenzhen to crack down on prostitution. Chinese law enforcement often works on the basis of campaigns, and for its organizers the idea of marching 100 or so prostitutes, all dressed in identical yellow smocks, before the cameras must have seemed like a clever way of launching a battle against the sex trade.

What the authorities in Shenzhen, an industrial boomtown adjacent to Hong Kong seem not to have counted on was an angry nationwide backlash against their tactics, with many people around China joining in a common cause with the prostitutes over the violation of their human rights and expressing their outrage at the incident in one online forum after another.

So-called rectification campaigns like these were everyday occurrences during the Cultural Revolution, which officially ended in 1976. Popular justice was meted out and class enemies were publicly beaten, forced to make confessions and sent to work camps for re- education. That the practice saw a revival last week in Shenzhen, the birthplace of China's economic reforms and one of its richest and most open cities, seems to have added to peoples' shock.

"Even people who commit crimes deserve dignity," one person wrote on the popular Internet forum 163.com. "Must we go back to the era of the Cultural Revolution?"

"Isn't this a brutal violation of human rights?" asked another poster, who likened the parading to an act out of the Middle Ages. "Shenzhen's image has been deeply shamed."

The incident has also reportedly elicited concerns from the All-China Women's Federation, a state affiliated body, which is said to have addressed a letter to the Public Security Ministry in Beijing.

Meanwhile, at least one lawyer has stepped forward to defend the prostitutes, citing legal reforms in 1988 that banned acts of public chastisement.

"With the development of human civilization and law, this kind of barbaric punishment with its strong element of vengeance has been abandoned," wrote Yao Jianguo, a Shanghai lawyer in a public letter addressed to the National People's Congress, China's legislature. Then, paraphrasing a letter by William Pitt during a debate over the excise tax in Britain in 1763, he wrote:

"Wind may come in, rain may come in, but the King may not, which is to say that even a poor person living in a slum has his own inviolable rights."

While voices condemning the behavior of the city and its police were the most energetic, some spoke up in support of the crackdown.

"Perhaps you've never been to Shenzhen, or you've been there and you don't have a thorough understanding of the place," wrote one contributor to an Internet forum. "A person who really knows Shenzhen would feel that this is not harsh enough, because the prostitution industry has become so prosperous there."

The parading of the arrested prostitutes in Shenzhen came after a provincial television station broadcast a report about prostitution in the city's Futian district, where sex is openly traded, both by streetwalkers and pimps and in bath houses and karaoke clubs. The news report was followed by a nationally broadcast segment about the district, which appears to have shamed the local authorities into initiating the campaign.

In recent years, the Internet has served as an important barometer of the public mood in China, and increasingly it functions as an outlet for criticism, as well. In this light, some commentators said the online reactions reflect a real evolution in public opinion. Show trials and shaming thrived from a spirit of conformity, and even in the recent past, they said, few would have stepped forward to defend prostitutes.

"For a long time there was only one voice on a subject like this, prostitution," said Zhu Dake, a cultural critic at Tongji University in Shanghai. "People have broken into camps and are willing to overturn the traditional morality in favor of a more universal notion of human rights. The fact that people came out defending these women shows a real maturity."

Instead of jumping on the bandwagon against prostitution, which is illegal but omnipresent in China, many commentators aimed their criticisms instead at the government for its lack of sustained action against the rich underworld that operates the sex trade, and the focus of law enforcement on prostitutes rather than their customers.

"Looming in the background of this case is the fact that the sex trade emerged along with China's reforms themselves," said Li Jian, a prominent Beijing human rights activist who has called for organized action to defend the arrested women.

"If you say that prostitution is illegal, there is an administrative backdrop to the issue. To punish the prostitutes in such a crude manner is a way of avoiding responsibility on the part of the administration and the police."

A poster on one Internet forum put it more plainly. "They only dare go after mosquitoes, but they are frightened of the tigers."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/08/ ... php?page=2

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The Troubled Teen Industry / Talk Show Hosts: the Grand Poobahs of Teen Torture
« on: January 10, 2007, 04:47:36 PM »
Sally Jesse Raphael w/Larry King
Quote
KING: Yes. How young do you have them?

RAPHAEL: I won't...

KING: How young do we get on television?

RAPHAEL: A lot of talk shows get very, very young.

KING: Ten?

RAPHAEL: Younger.

KING: Younger than 10?

RAPHAEL: We -- I've seen places where they're sent to boot camp younger than 10 years of age. I can't do it -- I can't.

KING: What's your age to draw the line?

RAPHAEL: To me, you have to be a teenager. You really do. Because, I think a teenager is aware of what they're doing, and I think that there are children who just don't know what they're doing.

KING: Are there shows where you say to yourself, I'm a little over the line today. we've gone too deep into...

RAPHAEL: Yes, and I cut it out in the tape.

KING: You do?

RAPHAEL: Yes, yes, if something -- you see, I can't control -- if somebody goes to hit somebody or something happens or somebody gives somebody a passionate kiss, but I can take it out of the tape. And I do. And we will.

KING: How about subject matter? Is it hard to come up with these...

RAPHAEL: Well, as I said, what people want to hear today...

KING: Is?

RAPHAEL: ... is two things. They want to hear teenagers, everything and anything to do with teens: teen paternity tests, teen boot camp. Because we're...

KING: Teen sex, teen...

RAPHAEL: Yes, because we're afraid of them. And the other thing they want is punishment. That's why the boot camp works. You take bad people and you punish them. That's why the judge shows work. You punish them. Americans desperately want to see people punished. There's a certain thing about us that -- and we want the punishment to be very strong and right now.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/ ... kl.00.html

Quote
The second type of talk show is Sally Jessy Raphael, which although has some similar topics like Jerry Springer, this show mainly has to do with teenagers, especially teens that act out against their mothers.

Although Sally deals mainly with "teen issues", she has been known for her own creative rendition of the American Gladiators on her show. She focuses on redeeming these brats into respectable young adults, with the help of a greatly annoying red head therapist! Needless to say, it usually doesn't work!

Sally also likes to send these teenagers that drop out of school, get in trouble with the law and are mean to their mothers to boot camp! So, for future reference, if you are a teenager going on Sally, be prepared to be sent to boot camp! It's a given!

A typical Sally show consists of an overweight 12 year old girl wearing a midriff shirt strutting out and acting as if she is "Miss Thang." She's got a rap sheet longer than her ratty and knotty hair and an attitude worse than her make-up job! Her mother will be sitting next to her crying her poor head off because either she can't handle her daughter anymore or she can't believe she brought that kind of child into the world.

After this girl swears up a storm to the audience and continues to make her mother cry, Sally blows her lid. And you don't want that to happen! She usually gets two inches away from the girl's face and lets her know that her behavior is totally unacceptable. During this show of over heated emotion, Sally looks like she is having a stroke from all the commotion, and that's when the perky red-headed Gilda psychologist prances out! She is just about annoying with her expertise and her perfect ways as she is "gettin jiggy wit it" with her dancing performances she does while she talks to the guests and audience. As she goes through these antics, it reminds me of the introduction of guests on the Jerry Springer show. Just say your piece and move on. Why does everything on talk shows require a weird move to help convey the message?

Then the best and most "unexpected" part happens! After Gilda's act is over, a Marine Sergeant walks out and reads off the names of all the teenagers and they are sent off to boot camp for 8 weeks. Then the audience chants " Sally" and the infamous number you can call pops up on screen so all the sophisticated people of the world can come on the show!

Sally Jessy Raphael and Jerry Springer provide examples of what our world is like and will be like if people don't get educated. I beg you, go to school!
http://www.leland.k12.mi.us/roni99.htm

Quote
Worst of all, Maury began to focus on children. Today, almost every episode of the show deals with the 18-and-younger crowd: Troubled kids are sent to boot camp. Teens who dress "inappropriately" are shoved into Wal-Mart clothes. If an adult takes the stage, chances are there's a crying child in the green room, revealed to the entire audience on a large television screen. (If not, the adult is probably a fire eater or a mail-order bride.)

Not only are these schemes pathetic, but they're quickly growing tired. Each show I watched during my illness focused on teen mothers who were demanding paternity tests ? and most of them had been on the show at least three times before, unsuccessfully predicting the fathers of their child. As the women cry, Maury masquerades as some sort of therapist, simultaneously consoling them and inviting them on the show again.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/ ... -candy.htm

Dont forget Ricki Lake
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNaGWeEFIZM

At least Montel finally apologized for his actions.

Has the TV finally turned the program parent mind to mush? Has this become reality now? It would seem so...

9
Open Free for All / Insomniacs Unite
« on: January 10, 2007, 02:43:48 AM »
Looks like another long night..

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