Will Chinese troops gun down women and children?

 
 This may well be a a scheduled changeover to bring in fresh units to replace those in garrison.  this does happen all the time.

The problem though is that there is evidence that these units have been getting special training and this must include hardening as well.  The material does quote a major's harangue which is disquieting and strongly suggest preparation to viciously knock down all the protests.

What is deeply concerning is that the turn out of the protesters represent a majority percentage of the population.   This must include huge numbers of women and children.   Any blood bath will be photographed on thousands of cell phones.  Thus an assault on the population will likely see a com-plete shut down of all communication and a bank holiday as well.

This will also be disastrous to the Mainland as well as it will immediately trigger a complete global disinvestment from China and a full blockade of Chinese trade.

This is coming to a head and that is the price on the table.  SE Asia will swiftly become a complete replacement for the Chines factory..



China rotates new troops into Hong Kong amid mass protests

August 29, 2019

https://news.yahoo.com/hong-kong-activist-joshua-wong-004032534.html


HONG KONG (AP) — China's military deployed fresh troops to Hong Kong on Thursday in what it called a routine rotation amid speculation that it might intervene in the city's pro-democracy protests.

Video broadcast on China Central Television showed a long convoy of armored personnel carriers and trucks crossing the border at night and troops in formation disembarking from a ship. Earlier, scores of soldiers ran in unison onto trucks, which the state broadcaster said were bound for ports and entry points into Hong Kong. A handover ceremony was held before dawn.

"This time the task has a glorious mission. The responsibility is great. The job is difficult," an unnamed major said to troops before they departed. "The time for a true test has arrived!"

The official Xinhua News Agency said it was the 22nd rotation of the People's Liberation Army's garrison in Hong Kong. The previous one was in August 2018.

Nearly three months of fiery anti-government demonstrations have sparked concerns that the military will be deployed in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. The Hong Kong garrison earlier published a promotional video with scenes of soldiers facing off with people dressed like protesters.

Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang told reporters in Beijing on Thursday that the demonstrators must abide by Hong Kong's laws.

A leader of 2014 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong said the city's government is using the same tactics as five years ago.

"The government is just trying to threaten people with emergency law, with the entrance of the People's Liberation Army," Yvonne Leung said at a news conference.

A former British colony, Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 under a "one country, two systems" framework, which promises the city certain democratic rights that are not afforded to the mainland. In recent years, however, some Hong Kong residents have accused Beijing of steadily eroding their freedoms.

The newly arrived Chinese troops have been educated on Hong Kong's laws and vowed to defend the nation's sovereignty, Xinhua said.

"We will firmly implement the guideline of 'one country, two systems' and the Basic Law and the Garrison Law of Hong Kong," Liu Zhaohui, the garrison's deputy chief of staff, said on CCTV.

The Garrison Law allows the Hong Kong-stationed troops to help maintain public order at the request of the city government. That has never happened, and Hong Kong authorities have said they can handle the situation themselves.

Troops stationed in Macao, another special administrative region, also completed a rotation Thursday.

The Xinhua report on the previous rotation in August 2018 did not mention "one country, two systems" or national sovereignty.

___

Wang reported from Beijing. Associated Press videojournalist Johnson Lai contributed to this report.

Almost Every Sector of the US Economy Is a Monopoly or an Oligopoly - Crushing the Working Man

 

This is a huge and festering problem.  Yet the crux of the matter lies in our bought of political infrastructure.   None of these private monopolies could ever prosper without that.  do remeber all that.

 

Driving a permanent solution will be the structural ending of poverty in particular.  this requires the application of the rule of twelve in particular and once the base is actually working the whole problem will devolve away and even become irrelevalnt.

 

The process can also be sped along by forcing all too big to fail entities to take out insurance against failure in which all debt and social costs of failure are covered.  These are all readily calculated and can be readily applied to strictly the largest organizations.  Do note that mining corporation now establish reserves against closing down.  So a precedent does exist and ir certainly can be mandated.

 

Almost Every Sector of the US Economy Is a Monopoly or an Oligopoly - Crushing the Working Man
Shocking facts and statistics about how corrupt the US economy has become. 

 
This article from our archives was first published on RI in December 2018

Michael Snyder (End of the American Dream) 

 

Tue, Aug 6, 2019 

 

https://russia-insider.com/en/almost-every-sector-us-economy-monopoly-or-oligopoly-crushing-working-man/ri25617

Editor's Note: This is manifestly true in telecommunications as amply demonstrated in Thursday's article: Russia: $10/Month for Superfast Broadband, in US $70 for Slower Speeds - Survey of 195 Countries. At America's tech leader and having the biggest economy, cellular and internet access should be the cheapest in the world, instead it is the most expensive, and it doesn't work as well. Another article the same day addresses the problem from a different perspective - Conservatives have swallowed the (((free trade))) ideology hook, line, and sinker: Conservatives' Obsession With Free Markets Is Foolish, and Not at all Conservative.

Vibrant competition is absolutely essential in order for a capitalist economic system to function effectively. Unfortunately, in the United States today we are witnessing the death of competition in industry after industry as the biggest corporations increasingly gobble up all of their competitors.

John D. Rockefeller famously once said that “competition is a sin”, and he was one of America’s very first oligopolists. According to Google, an oligopoly is “a state of limited competition, in which a market is shared by a small number of producers or sellers”, and that is a perfect description of the current state of affairs in many major industries. In early America, corporations were greatly limited in scope, and in most instances they were only supposed to exist temporarily. But today the largest corporations have become so huge that they literally dominate our entire society, and that is not good for any of us.







just look at what is happening in the airline industry. When I was growing up, there were literally dozens of airlines, but now four major corporations control everything and they have been making gigantic profits…


AMERICA’S airlines used to be famous for two things: terrible service and worse finances. Today flyers still endure hidden fees, late flights, bruised knees, clapped-out fittings and sub-par food. Yet airlines now make juicy profits. Scheduled passenger airlines reported an after-tax net profit of $15.5bn in 2017, up from $14bn in 2016.

 

What is true of the airline industry is increasingly true of America’s economy. Profits have risen in most rich countries over the past ten years but the increase has been biggest for American firms. Coupled with an increasing concentration of ownership, this means the fruits of economic growth are being monopolised.


If you don’t like how an airline is treating you, in some cases you can choose to fly with someone else next time.

But as a recent Bloomberg article pointed out, that is becoming increasingly difficult to do…


United, for example, dominates many of the country’s largest airports. In Houston, United has around a 60 percent market share, in Newark 51 percent, in Washington Dulles 43 percent, in San Francisco 38 percent and in Chicago 31 percent. This situation is even more skewed for other airlines. For example, Delta has an 80 percent market share in Atlanta. For many routes, you simply have no choice.

And of course the airline industry is far from alone. In sector after sector, economic power is becoming concentrated in just a few hands.

For a moment, I would like you to consider these numbers… 

 
Two corporations control 90 percent of the beer Americans drink.

Five banks control about half of the nation’s banking assets.

Many states have health insurance markets where the top two insurers have an 80 percent to 90 percent market share. For example, in Alabama one company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, has an 84 percent market share and in Hawaii it has 65 percent market share.

When it comes to high-speed Internet access, almost all markets are local monopolies; over 75 percent of households have no choice with only one provider.

Four players control the entire U.S. beef market and have carved up the country.

Support Russia Insider - Go Ad-Free! After two mergers this year, three companies will control 70 percent of the world’s pesticide market and 80 percent of the U.S. corn-seed market.


I knew that things were bad, but I didn’t know that they were that bad.

Capitalism works best when competition is maximized. In socialist systems, the government itself becomes a major player in the game, and that is never a desirable outcome. Instead, what we want is for the government to serve as a “referee” that enforces rules that encourage free and fair competition. Jonathan Tepper, the author of “The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition”, made this point very well in an excerpt from his new book…


Capitalism is a game where competitors play by rules on which everyone agrees. The government is the referee, and just as you need a referee and a set of agreed rules for a good basketball game, you need rules to promote competition in the economy.

Left to their own devices, firms will use any available means to crush their rivals. Today, the state, as referee, has not enforced rules that would increase competition, and through regulatory capture has created rules that limit competition.


Our founders were very suspicious of large concentrations of power. That is why they wanted a very limited federal government, and that is also why they put substantial restrictions on corporate entities.

When power is greatly concentrated, most of the rewards tend to flow to the very top of the pyramid, and that is precisely what we have been witnessing. The following comes from the New York Times…


Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worththan the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.

So what is the solution?


Well, one of the big things that we need to do is to stop crushing small business.

In America today, the rate of small business creation has been hovering near all-time lows and the percentage of Americans that are working for themselves has been hovering near all-time lows.

In order for more competition to exist, we need more competitors to enter the marketplace, but instead we have been crushing “the little guy” with mountains of regulations and deeply oppressive taxes.

And you know what? Many of the big corporations actually like all of the red tape because they know that they can handle it much easier than their much smaller competitors can. That gives them a competitive advantage, and it creates a barrier to entry that is difficult to overcome.

When I was in school, I was taught that one of the reasons why the U.S. system was so much better than communist systems was because we had so many more choices.

But today our choices are very limited in industry after industry, and the gigantic corporate entities that dominate everything don’t really care if we like it or not.


We can do so much better than this, but in order to do so we must return to the values and principles that this nation was originally founded upon.

HUMAN 3.0 Aspergers Syndrome?

For far too long, Asperger's has been conflated with the Autism spectrum to no one's benefit.  As it is the majority of Aspies identified have been boys.  This is likely because their natural obsessive traits do get channeled easily into schoolwork where they obviously prosper.

I will also conjecture that the Aspie has a strongly charged nervous system as well and likely perceives much more.  I wonder if most of them are left handed as well.

More interestingly is that Aspies are typically at the end of the Bell curve and this also explains the odd dominance of boys on the IQ based bell curve for mathematical talent.  I am sure this anomaly has since been winkled out since i reviewed in in 1965.

More recently a researcher who is also an aspie strongly made the case for Aspies been Human 2.0 while normies are human 2.0.

I will make a somewhat different case here.  I do strongly Suggest that  Human 1.0 are our Abos and many other extant hunter gathering tribes still out there and who populated our prehistory forever.  The shift to human 2.0 was clearly biological and it was brought about by a built in capacity to pursue agriculture.  That biological shift subsumed the majority of Human 1.0 by sheer population expansion and inevitable intermarriage.  This is what happened to the Neanderthals in particular and why their genetics live on in us.

Human 3.0 has existed throughout our human history as anomalous individuals.  Here is the kicker though.  Their talents are hugely beneficial in a complex society.  They also appear to readily pass their genes down to their offspring.  Thus in a world in which artificial means can be used to ensure a high performance child, this is the one way to do exactly that.

Thus the fastest way for sharply expanding the percentage of high performance individuals will be to simply insist that this takes precedence for artificial insemination where possible.  In fact as this becomes better understood there will be volunteers welcoming this option that can provide a high performance child.

 Regardless, all this means is that the human population will naturally transition to HUMAN 3.0 over the next few centuries with or without intervention.  Knowledge alone is enough and all mothers will know that their own DNA makeup for their offspring can be overcome with this step.  That is a huge incentive with no obvious downside at all.

In the end we are all Vulcans.

 .  .

Asperger’s Syndrome vs. High-Functioning Autism: Understanding the Difference

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder and the fastest-growing developmental disability among children. Learning that your child has been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be a shock, and  it is overwhelming to parents who do not yet understand what the diagnosis will mean for their child and how they can help. Even more frustrating for some parents is that within ASD are two separate diagnoses that are often used interchangeably by medical professionals, despite key differences between them. Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) and High-Functioning Autism (HFA) are singular diagnoses with differences in language development, age of onset, and cognitive function. 

History of Asperger’s Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism

Asperger’s Syndrome, identified in the 1940s by Hans Asperger, is a subgroup within the autism spectrum in which children display far more significant motor skill delays and obsessive interests, yet fewer issues with speech delays. Asperger’s is more noticeable in boys. 

High-Functioning Autism specifically applies to children with autism who have an IQ of 70 or higher and exhibit milder symptoms. For example, these children exhibit fewer language delays, few to no cognitive deficits, and better spatial skills. The most significant difference for children with High-Functioning Autism is that they do not have intellectual disabilities.

Asperger’s Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism do have some significant differences. Knowing the differences can help you better attend to your child’s needs.

Language Development

Both Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) and High Functioning Autism (HFA) are considered more mild than other levels of disability on the autism spectrum, but the most noticeable difference between the two is language. With HFA, the child displays delayed language early in development, whereas an AS diagnosis only exists if there are no significant impairments in language. Although children with AS can suffer from language delays, the challenges are typically not as significant as for children diagnosed with HFA.

Age of Onset

Those with AS are not typically diagnosed until much later in life, sometimes not even until adulthood. Due to the persistent language delay, children with HFA are diagnosed much earlier. In some cases, a diagnosis is changed from HFA to AS once the child is in school and other characteristics, such as cognitive and social skills, can be better assessed. Early diagnosis is important, especially for children with AS, so that they can receive the proper intervention.

Level of Cognitive Functioning

It is often believed that neither AS or HFA can occur in children with IQs below 65-70, but unfortunately, that is not always the case for children diagnosed with AS. Children can be diagnosed with AS and still struggle with other cognitive impairments not directly related to autism, such as dyslexia. On the other hand, HFA is typically present in children with IQs that are average to above average. Cognitive impairments are not associated with HFA.

+

Even though there are differences between AS and HFA, children on the spectrum who have either diagnosis share some challenges, including being more prone to anxiety and depression, especially during early teen years. Early intervention is key. A diagnosis of autism can be very different from one child to another, and many children fall through the cracks with diagnoses like AS and HFA, because these children appear to fit typical norms, aside from a few social quirks. 

Understanding the differences and similarities between the two diagnoses will help doctors and specialists provide the correct interventions. Seeking help as soon as possible is the best way to ensure success for children with special needs, and having the right diagnosis and the right information allows parents to better advocate for their children. Every child deserves equal opportunity to feel safe and comfortable in their environment, and obtaining the right diagnosis is the first step.

Agricultural add-on pulverizes weed seeds

Well perhaps.  Simply bagging the chaff seems an equally viable choice as well.  That may even be a better choice as the material could make good cattle feed.

Grinding it up demands energy as well and that cannot get all the seeds either.  Capture prevents any thing going back on the field as well.

I do think that we need to see a new practice of light mulching established now that we are engaged in no till systems.  Since we no longer want to tear up the whole soil bed, it is time to make much lighter equipment that typically disturbs the top one inch of soil and tie this to much lighter tractors able to operate at a decent speed.  The point is to disturb the top layer in order to trigger several days of weed sprouting that is then followed be an additional reworking that knocks down those weeds...  

This can additionally be integrated with the seeding process itself if it has not been done already. 



Agricultural add-on pulverizes weed seeds




By Ben Coxworth
 
August 22, 2019




The Seed Terminator can be retrofitted onto a number of existing combines


Herbicides are not only harmful to the environment, but they're also costly and time-consuming to apply. A new device could drastically reduce the need for them, however, while also providing crops with a soil-health-boosting mulch.

Known as the Seed Terminator, the gadget was invented by Dr. Nick Berry, who is a farmer on Australia's Kangaroo Island. It incorporates two multi-stage hammer mills, which are retrofitted into the back of an existing third-party combine harvester.

Such harvesters already have screens inside of them, which are used to separate crop grain from the seeds of weeds that get harvested along with the crop plants. Those unwanted seeds are then expelled out the back of the harvester – along with the chaff waste from the crop plants – where they'll subsequently sprout back into new weeds. To kill at least some of those weeds, herbicides are typically used.

In the case of the Seed Terminator, however, the mills pulverize the seeds, so that they can't sprout. What's left is a fine sawdust-like mulch, that actually fertilizes the ground that it's spread upon. Installed on a typical harvester, the system flings that mulch a distance of 10 to 14 meters (33 to 45 ft).




When tested at the University of Adelaide, the device was found to kill 96 to 100 percent of "notoriously" tough rye grass seeds.

In fact, since 2016, a total of 82 Seed Terminators have been successfully field-tested in various parts of Australia. Another unit was trialed last year, near the Canadian city of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. For this year's harvest season, a second device will be joining the one in Saskatchewan, plus two others will be assessed by universities in Washington state and Missouri. A fourth machine recently completed testing in Europe.

There's a new-and-improved version of the Seed Terminator now in the works, with plans for it to be commercially available sometime next year. It should be priced at about US$75,000.

You can see the device in use, in the following video.

‘Bizarre as Hell’: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five

 This is very curious.  However, the first mistake was the wrong turn after the snack stop.  This is best explained as a case of simply getting turned around and this happens to even the best.  That is why you should always pack a compass and a top map in rough country.  In this case they were certainly blinded by the deteriorating weather.

What happened after that they then followed the road never really catching on at all until they abandoned their vehicle for some reason.  At this point, turning around should possibly have saved them as worked for the witness.  Instead the driver who the rest were following blindly chose to walk on ahead with them all. This is the only situation that matters because of the general mental deficiency. All three of his companions were abandoned one way or the other, likely expecting him to come back and recover them.

 My point here is that this loss of control took place around were the car was abandoned.  Seeing a women and child on the side of the road would do this.  Again the witness also experienced this women or a mental lure.  This conforms to a Giant Sloth style kill that we have seen before.  They all saw the lure and followed along and were weak minded enough to be caught by this.

..

‘Bizarre as Hell’: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five

The disappearance of five friends during a winter storm sparked a mysterious investigation and riled superstitious theories among the families.


Mental Floss | 

Jake Rossen 


https://getpocket.com/explore/item/bizarre-as-hell-the-disappearance-of-the-yuba-county-five?

Joe Shones was having a heart attack. The 55-year-old Californian had felt fine just a few minutes previously, navigating his Volkswagen on a desolate mountain road near Rogers Cow Camp in the Plumas National Forest to see if weather conditions were good enough to bring his family along for a weekend excursion the following day. But as he drove further into the night, snowdrifts slowed his tires. When he got out to push his car, the exertion brought on a searing pain in his chest. It was February 24, 1978, and Shones was miles from help.


As he sat in his car wondering what to do, he noticed two sets of headlights, one belonging to a pickup truck. Hoping he could flag down the passerby, he exited his vehicle and began screaming for help. He would later say he saw a group of men, one woman, and a baby. They continues walking, ignoring him. Hours later, back inside his car, he saw what he thought were flashlights. When he went back outside to yell into the darkness, no one responded to the sound of his voice.


Hours into his ordeal and with his car still stuck and now out of gas, Shones felt well enough to begin walking down the mountain road and toward a lodge roughly eight miles away. He passed a 1969 Mercury Montego, but the vehicle had no occupants. Perhaps, Shones thought, it belonged to the group he had seen earlier.


At the time, Shones was preoccupied with his own emergency. But authorities would later realize the biggest story to emerge from that dark, desolate road wasn't his brush with death. It was the fact that Shones had likely wound up being the last person to see Ted Weiher, Gary Mathias, Jack Madruga, Jack Huett, and Bill Sterling alive. 

Five Beloved "Boys"


How these five men came to be on an inhospitable mountain road more than 50 miles from their homes in and around Marysville and Yuba City, California, was just one of the mysteries surrounding their disappearance. None of them was known to have any business on that part of the mountain. All five had intellectual disabilities or psychiatric issues to various degrees; all of them lived with family, who kept a close eye on them. They were often lovingly referred to as “boys,” despite being from 24 to 32 years of age. An impromptu road trip was definitely out of character.


If authorities couldn’t make any sense of how the group's day had ended on February 24, they at least had some idea of how it began. Madruga, who owned the Mercury, drove his four friends to a collegiate basketball game at the California State University, Chico. All were fervent basketball fans, and even had a game of their own scheduled for the following day, playing on a team representing the rehabilitation center they all frequented.


At 32, Weiher was the oldest, a former janitor who was closest to the youngest of the group, 24-year-old Huett. Sterling and Madruga, an Army veteran, were another set of best friends. Mathias had been in the Army, too, but was discharged because of psychiatric problems. He was schizophrenic, a condition controlled by medication he hadn’t bothered to bring along. There was no reason to believe he wouldn’t be home in time for his next dose.


The game ended around 10 p.m. The “boys” stopped at a convenience store for junk food: Hostess pies, soda, candy bars. All five piled back into the Mercury and took off. But instead of driving south toward their homes roughly 50 miles away, they inexplicably drove east. And they traveled for a very long time. When Shones spotted their abandoned Mercury, the car had been driven roughly 70 miles away from the Chico basketball game.

In the early morning hours of February 25, Shones made it to the lodge and was able to get medical treatment. There was no reason to mention having seen the Mercury until newspapers began to blare out notices about the five men who had gone missing that Friday. When Weiher and Sterling didn’t come home, their mothers began calling the parents of the others, and soon the police were involved.


On Tuesday, February 28, authorities found the Mercury on the same mountain road where Shones had last seen it, and where a park ranger had reported its location after hearing the missing persons bulletin. The junk food had been consumed, save for one half of a candy bar. The keys to the vehicle were gone. It had enough gas to continue on, but a snowbank had likely caused its tires to spin out. Madruga and the four other able-bodied men should have been able to dislodge it without a lot of difficulty. Instead, it looked abandoned. Around them, police saw nothing but rugged, dense forest, hardly an appealing option for the lightly dressed young men.


“This case is bizarre as hell,” Yuba County undersheriff Jack Beecham told reporters.


Organizing a search party in the midst of winter was no easy task, especially when it meant combing through rough terrain filled with rocky surfaces, wooded paths, and snow-covered slopes. Helicopters surveyed the area from above. On the ground, officers tried to use horses to get around on the rocky roads. They entertained a number of eyewitness sightings of the men, including one where they were driving the pickup Shones had mentioned, but none seemed plausible. Their families raised a $2600 reward for information, petitioned psychics, and waited by their phones, but heard nothing. Not until the thaw came. 

 The Body in the Trailer

In June of that year, a small group of weekend motorcyclists came across an abandoned forest service trailer on a campground site. Curious, they went inside. They found a body tucked into a bed, draped in sheets from head to toe. When authorities lifted the veil, they found Weiher, his shoes missing and his feet badly frostbitten. The trailer was over 19 miles from the Mercury.


Soon, police found two other corpses—those of Sterling and Madruga—4.5 miles away from Weiher's remains. Police believed their bodies had simply given up before they found shelter while Weiher and others marched on. Madruga had held on to the keys to the car.


Huett’s bones were found not long after. There was no sign of Mathias, aside from his tennis shoes, which had been left in the trailer. Almost certainly, he had taken Weiher’s leather shoes, though police had no real idea why.


If police and the families of the men were expecting closure from the discovery of their bodies, they weren’t about to get it. What puzzled them most was how Weiher was found emaciated, despite the fact that the trailer been stocked with plenty of canned and dried food and a can opener. From his beard growth, they knew Weiher had been living there anywhere between eight and 13 weeks. Yet only about 12 cans had been opened, and he had not bothered to turn on the propane tank, which would have provided heat for the entire trailer. Several paperback books—perfect for fires—were also left untouched. No one had even bothered to cover the broken window they had smashed in to get inside.


Talking to Shones proved even more frustrating. It was reasonable enough that he had seen the men strike out from a car they believed to be stuck, but who was the woman and the child? Shones would admit he was very ill at the time of the sighting and could have hallucinated some of the details, but that didn’t explain why the men bothered to abandon the car at all, or why they didn’t acknowledge Shones’s cries for help—unless he had somehow imagined the whole thing. 

"Tricked or Threatened"


“Why” was a common question for investigators and the relatives of the men, but no answers were forthcoming. Why did the men turn east in the first place? Why didn’t they attempt to move the car once it got stuck, instead of walking to nowhere in the middle of the night? Was it by chance they came across the trailer, or did someone lead them there? Why not start a fire for warmth? If Mathias went for help, where was his body?


Authorities would later discover that a Snowcat vehicle had pushed snow aside to cut a path toward the trailer on February 23, which may have given the men some hope they were in an area where Forest Service employees might soon return. There was also the theory that Mathias convinced the group to head toward Forbestown, an area between Chico and the mountain road, so he could visit a friend who lived there. It was possible that Madruga had missed the turn-off and gotten lost, driving deeper into darkness until the snow ground the Mercury to a halt. The men, panicking, may have believed their car was stuck and that they needed to get help.


A year after their disappearance, police were no closer to solving the mystery. Mathias's body has never turned up. There was never any accounting for their strange decision to turn toward unfamiliar territory. Weiher seemingly walked nearly 20 miles to the trailer in frigid conditions, despite having left his coat at home. None of the men thought to walk downhill, from where they came, and instead faced the treacherous and unfamiliar path ahead.


Police never ruled out foul play, nor did the families. Melba Madruga, Jack's mother, told The Washington Post that she believed "some force" had led the group astray. "We know good and well somebody made them do it," she said. To the Los Angeles Times, she said it was impossible for her to believe Madruga would ever drive his car, which he prized, into an area where it might be damaged. He had even left a window rolled down, something he would never normally do. "I'm positive he never went up there on his own," she told the paper. "He was either tricked or threatened."


Ted Weiher's sister-in-law has theorized that the men may have seen something take place at the basketball game that prompted someone to chase them. Police were never able to establish evidence for pursuit, but no one could shake the idea that the men seemed to be determined to move forward. Why do that unless something more frightening was right behind them?


"Bizarre as hell" was Beecham’s summary. To date, there hasn’t been any evidence to contradict him.

Borrowed bacteria make plants salt-resistant

This is welcome news. Inoculated alfalfa seeds will sprout in saline soils and prosper.  That alone is important.  Other protocols exist to stimulate viable soils as well, but this means that a damaged soil can be turned back into a robust sod that runs deep.  

That can feed cattle and the sod can be maintained until the salinity itself has been slowly washed away.

We can stop been quite so fearful in terms of irrigation damage. In fact, actual rotation with an inoculated alfalfa may well help to balance out the damage. 



Borrowed bacteria make plants salt-resistant 

By Ben Coxworth
 
August 22, 2019


 A close look at one of the salt-resistant alfalfa plants

https://newatlas.com/science/plants-bacteria-salt-resistance/

Much of the world's soil is already too salty for agriculture, while existing cropland is becoming ever-saltier with repeated irrigation/evaporation cycles. There could be hope, though, as scientists have developed a method of growing plants in what would otherwise be "unusable" soil.

Led by Prof. Brent Nielsen, researchers at Utah's Brigham Young University started by grinding up the roots of three types of plants known collectively as halophytes. They're able to grow in very salty soil, thanks to bacteria that occur naturally in those roots.

After placing the ground-up roots in Petri dishes, the scientists were able to grow and isolate some of these beneficial bacteria. The microbes were subsequently incorporated into a liquid solution, which was in turn applied to alfalfa seeds. When those inoculated seeds were put in a growth medium that was 1 percent sodium chloride – a salt concentration that would greatly inhibit the growth of untreated seeds – they readily sprouted and grew into plants.

Among the bacteria that were isolated from the halophyte roots, it is believed that Halomonas and Bacillus were particularly responsible for the salt-tolerance effect. Armed with this knowledge, the researchers have now begun conducting greenhouse experiments on rice, green beans and lettuce, with full-scale field trials on crops set to follow.

"We've long wondered if increasingly salty land was just a losing battle or if there was something we could do about it," says Nielsen. "Now we have shown there is something we can do about it."

Trump Looking ‘Very Seriously’ at Ending Birthright Citizenship

 

As he should of course, simply because folks are busy gaming it all.  I do think that the promise does have merit, but it also needs to be cleanly limited.   After all a child born in the USA represents a legitimate promise to the State by a future citizen to work toward citizenship.

The easiest fix is to simply allow a finite number each year of such authorized births.  It does not particularity end the practice, but makes it way more difficult to game.

The practice does have a certain charm to it because it is actually a promise and this should be accommodated as a real preference.

 

..

Trump Looking ‘Very Seriously’ at Ending Birthright Citizenship

By Charlotte Cuthbertson

August 21, 2019 Updated: August 22, 2019


https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-looking-very-seriously-at-ending-birthright-citizenship_3051127.htm


WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump called birthright citizenship “frankly ridiculous” on Aug. 21 while talking to media.

“We’re looking at that very seriously—birthright citizenship, where you have a baby on our land. You walk over the border, have a baby, congratulations, the baby is now a U.S. citizen,” Trump said.

“We’re looking at it very, very seriously.”

Birthright citizenship is the practice of granting full citizenship to anyone born in the United States, including those born to parents who are in the country illegally, on a temporary visa, or as tourists. It is blamed for being a magnet for “birth tourism,” and for igniting chain migration through “anchor babies.”

Between 200,000 and 300,000 babies are born to illegal aliens and nonresidents every year, equaling about 7 percent of all births in the United States, according to Pew Research Center estimates using Census Bureau data.

In October 2018, weeks after Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed onto the Supreme Court, Trump said he planned to remove birthright citizenship via an executive order, saying he expects it would end up in the nation’s highest court.


There is controversy about whether birthright citizenship is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment, which states, in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

 

The sticking point is the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” portion of the 14th Amendment, which was first interpreted by the Supreme Court in the 1873 slaughterhouse cases, relating to citizenship of African Americans, but has never been interpreted regarding illegal aliens.

The majority opinion in 1873 said, “The phrase, ‘subject to its jurisdiction’ was intended to exclude from its operation children of ministers, consuls, and citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.”

 

Trump wrote on Twitter about the 14th Amendment on Oct. 31: “So-called Birthright Citizenship, which costs our Country billions of dollars and is very unfair to our citizens, will be ended one way or the other. It is not covered by the 14th Amendment because of the words ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Many legal scholars agree.”

 

 

 

An ultrasound printout is found on the banks of the Rio Grande where many illegal aliens are ferried across in rafts by smugglers from Mexico, near McAllen, Texas, on April 18, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) 

 

 

Only 30 of the world’s 195 countries give universal birthright citizenship, with the United States and Canada being the only two developed economies that offer it. Many nations in the past several decades have moved away from giving citizenship to everyone born within their borders, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Ireland.


Once a child born in the United States to illegal immigrants turns 18, he or she can sponsor an overseas spouse and any unmarried children. Once 21, he or she can also sponsor parents and siblings, who, in turn, can sponsor their unmarried children, parents, and siblings down the road.

 

According to a Center for Immigration Studies report, legislation to end birthright citizenship has been introduced by Democrats and Republicans alike in every Congress since at least 1993, when Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced a bill to limit birthright citizenship.

 

At the time, Reid said on the Senate floor: “If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right?

 

“Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship. And guarantee of full access to all public and social services this society provides—and that’s a lot of services. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense at county-run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers?”

How One California Marxist Is Indoctrinating Millions of School Children

 

Sorry folks.  It seems astounding to those of us who never bought into the whole Marxist criminal enterprise through which an elite of political organizers progressively take over the political apparatus for self aggrandize while telling any lie to get there.  Your first clue was that all the undergrads were all on the C team.

 

We are now reaching a crisis point in which all these communist sympathizers will need to be literally hunted down and banned from any political participation.  As most of them are active in criminally subverting elections, they may well be already trapped ( 100,000 sealed indictments? ).  What also needs to happen is that all clear Marxist sympathizers need to be thrown out of Academe and their whole faux intellectual disciplines need to be unfunded totally.   In fact this will cut about one third of the student population as well.

 

No longer do we need a class of studies that are no more than intellectual sophistry at best and otherwise a jobs for the stupid program..

How One California Marxist Is Indoctrinating Millions of School Children

Trevor Loudon

August 22, 2019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-one-california-marxist-is-indoctrinating-millions-of-school-children_2899563.html

Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is coming for your children.

Not content with taking over school boards and sending comrades into the teaching profession, the United States’ largest Marxist group is also writing the textbooks your children study.

California DSA member Duane Campbell helped write the new History-Social Science Framework for the state, which was adopted in 2017. Sacramento-based Campbell, a DSA comrade since at least 1983, is an emeritus professor of bilingual/multicultural education at California State University–Sacramento and former chair of the Sacramento DSA. He is also the author of “Choosing Democracy: A Practical Guide to Multicultural Education.”

According to Campbell, “Because of California’s large size and market, what goes into California textbooks frequently also gets written into textbooks around the nation.”

In the mid-1990s, Campbell was a contributing editor to Oakland-based Maoist-leaning CrossRoads magazine, which sought to “promote dialogue and build new alliances among progressives and leftists … to bring diverse Marxist and socialist traditions to bear, while exploring new strategies and directions for the progressive political movements.”


In the mid-2000s, Campbell was a contributor to a Bay Area socialist blog called Educational Justice, described as being “from a collective of progressive education activists—stuff about teaching, thinking, parenting, social justice, desegregation, self-determination, economic justice, music, creativity, and building progressive movements for our future.”

Other contributors included Tom Edminster, a teacher’s unionist and DSA member; Karen Zapata of Teachers 4 Social Justice; and Eric Mar, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization supporter and, like Campbell, a member of Progressives for Obama.

As a young man, Campbell was one of several communist or socialist organizers with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union, an experience he now wants to impart to America’s youth.

Campbell has served on DSA’s leadership body, the National Political Committee, and has also served on the DSA’s Latino Commission and Anti-Racism Commission. In 2017, Campbell was co-chair of the DSA Immigrant’s Rights Committee. Campbell is steeped in Marxist racial politics.
More Voters

The DSA’s interest in education is completely political. Inspired by Italian Communist Party theoretician Antonio Gramsci, DSA seeks to infiltrate U.S. society’s main opinion-forming institutions to change the popular consciousness in a socialist direction. In the more short-term, DSA is committed to both expanding the Latino vote and pushing it to the left to give its allies in the Democratic Party an unchallengeable majority in national elections.

Campbell’s DSA comrade, Eliseo Medina, was also active in the United Farm Workers union under Chavez. Medina transferred to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), rising to executive vice president. As one of the most influential advocates for amnesty for illegal immigrants in the country, Medina served as an informal immigration adviser to then-President Barack Obama.

When Obama was still a senator, he declared at a campaign stop while addressing SEIU, “Before immigration debates took place in Washington, I spoke with Eliseo Medina and SEIU members.”

At the America’s Future Now! conference in Washington on June 2, 2009, Medina addressed attendees on the necessity of “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Speaking of Latino voters, Medina explained their importance to the socialist project:

“When they voted in November, they voted overwhelmingly for progressive candidates. Barack Obama got two out of every three voters that showed up.

“So I think there’s two things that matter for the progressive community:

“Number one: If we are to expand this electorate to win, the progressive community needs to solidly be on the side of immigrants. That will expand and solidify the progressive coalition for the future. …

“Number two: [If] we reform the immigration laws, it puts 12 million people on the path to citizenship and eventually voters. Can you imagine if we have, even the same ratio, two out of three?

“If we have eight million new voters … [we] will create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”

Campbell wants to use his influence on the education system to play his part in DSA’s revolutionary program.

 
Educational Change

In the early 2010s, Campbell set up a network to change the California history and social studies textbooks, which had mainly been written by objective historians appointed by Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Wrote Campbell:

“I have spent more than six years working on this project—and it was well worth it. The important changes we achieved were produced by years of collective advocacy, lobbying, letter writing, and organizing. After being blocked in our efforts in 2008, we created the Mexican American Digital History site, then organized a statewide network of scholars and community activists to pressure the State Board of Education.

“At each stage, we had to explain why this tedious process of changing the Framework was important. We received assistance from civil rights groups and Latinos in the Democratic Party. Similar and parallel campaigns were organized within the Filipino, Hmong, South Asian, and LGBT communities.”

According to Campbell, this work will result in a new “progressive” path of learning for California’s school children:

“History and social science textbooks in public schools in California and most of the nation are racist, class-biased, and ignore LGBT history. This condition will change in California in 2017 when new textbooks are adopted.

“Under a unanimous decision by the California Board of Education made on July 14, 2016, California students will finally be encouraged to know the history of Latino civil rights leaders like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and Filipino labor leaders like Larry Itliong, as well as an accurate and inclusive history of LGBT activists as a part of the history of California and the nation.

 

 These topics are currently substantially absent from public school textbooks.”

That’s right—now young Californians can learn all about Campbell’s old boss Chavez, a man who trained for six years in Chicago with the father of “community organizing” himself: Saul Alinsky. They’ll also learn about Chavez’s right-hand woman Dolores Huerta, a longtime DSA comrade and general communist hang-around.

Chavez worked with a lot of Communist Party USA supporters, including Filipino labor organizer Larry Itliong—who will also be profiled in the new curriculum.

This is supposedly all about fairness and giving minorities equal treatment. Teaching kids about communists, it seems, will make them better students and more engaged citizens—especially the more than 1 in 10 students who Campbell claims are homosexual:

“In the current books … the 51 percent of students who are Latino, the 11.5 percent who are Asian, and the estimated 11 percent of students who are LGBT, do not see themselves as part of history, for many their sense of self is marginalized.

“As I argued in a prior book, marginalization negatively impacts their connections with school and their success at school. This has resulted in a nearly 50 percent dropout rate for Latinos and some Asian groups and LGBT students.”

Campbell then goes on to reel off a whole list of leftist individuals and the radical events they inspired, including the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay by communist-inspired militants, the communist-inspired American Indian Movement and the standoff at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the Marxist-led La Raza Unida Party, and the communist-led Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War.

And, of course, the 11 percent of California’s children who are allegedly LGBT shouldn’t feel left out. Their far-left champions are profiled, too: “California activists like Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones were part of a broader movement that emerged in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, which brought a new attention to the cause of equal rights for homosexual Americans.”

Coincidentally, these educational priorities may end up helping DSA’s revolutionary electoral strategy. According to Campbell:

“School marginalization also contributes directly to low-level civic engagement. An accurate history would provide some of these students with a sense of self, of direction, of purpose. History and social science classes should help young people acquire and learn to use the skills, knowledge, and attitudes that will prepare them to be competent and responsible citizens throughout their lives. …

“And, while California and the nation have a general problem with low civic engagement among young people, it is also true that the state has a very specific problem with the rate of Latino and Asian voter participation in civic life.

“Rates of voting and voter registration provide a window into civic engagement. The proportion of state voter registration that is Latino and Asian has remained far below the proportions of these groups in the state’s overall population. …

“We know that we can do better. California has the largest school population of any state, with more than 6,226,000 students in school in 2015, more than 11 percent of the United States total.”

So, not only will millions of California school children be moved to the left by Campbell’s pro-communist propaganda, but they will also likely vote in significantly higher numbers.

This will, of course, consolidate the left’s already iron-grip on California politics, but will likely affect other states as well.

One well-placed Marxist operative can negatively influence millions, even hundreds of millions, of people.

Every pro-American school board in the country should immediately review and probably ban all history and social studies textbooks coming out of California.

Inside China's attempt to boost crop yields with electric fields

.

The history of all that is spotty.  How it will turn out will take years to actually see of course.  In the meantime we have evidence of yield gains as the technology is refined.

 

This is at least one other varible that can be profitably managed.

 

All good.

Inside China's attempt to boost crop yields with electric fields

In greenhouses across China, scientists are exposing lettuces and cucumbers to powerful electric fields in an attempt to make them grow faster. Can electroculture work?

 21 August 2019

By Donna Lu and David Hambling

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332440-800-inside-chinas-attempt-to-boost-crop-yields-with-electric-fields/

AT FIRST blush, the huge commercial greenhouse on the outskirts of Beijing doesn’t seem unusual. Inside, lettuces sit in neat rows and light pours in through the glass above. But there is a soft hum and an intense feeling in the air, almost as if a thunderstorm is on the way. The most obvious sign that this is no ordinary growing space is the high-voltage electrical wiring strung over the crops.


This place may be different, but it is far from unique. Over the past few years, greenhouses like this have sprouted up across China, part of a government-backed project to boost the yield of crops by bathing them in the invisible electric fields that radiate from power cables. From cucumbers to radishes, the results are, apparently, incredible. “The overall quality is excellent,” says Liu Binjiang, the lead scientist on the project. “We’re really entering a golden age for this technology.”


Using electricity to boost plant growth – not by powering heaters or sprinkler systems, but simply by exposing plants to an electric field – is an old idea. It is also controversial. Electroculture was tested in Europe many decades ago and found wanting, with the results too inconsistent to be any use. The mechanism was also mysterious: no one knew how or why electric fields might boost growth. So what exactly is going on in China’s new greenhouses? Can you really improve agriculture through the power of electric fields – and if so, how?
 

 
It was Finnish physicist Karl Selim Lemström who introduced the world to the idea of electroculture in the 1880s. He was studying the northern lights in Lapland when he noticed that trees grew well there in spite of the short growing season. He suggested it might be because of the electrical field produced by charged particles rushing into Earth’s atmosphere to create the aurora. Lemström carried out tests with plants growing under electric wires and achieved mixed results. In one experiment conducted in a field in Burgundy, France, he saw that “carrots gave an increase of 125 per cent and peas 75 per cent”.

In 1896, a reporter for the North American Review breathlessly described Lemström’s work and that of rivals in France and Russia, writing: “Gardens that have been stimulated by the atmospheric electricity… have increased their growth and products by fifty per cent. Vineyards have been experimented upon, and the grapes produced have not only been larger in size and quantity, but richer in sugar and alcohol. The flowers have attained a richer perfume and more brilliant colours.”

Before long the results were replicated in the UK. The botanist J.H. Priestley reported a 17 per cent increased yield of cucumbers with Lemström’s technique, while physicist Oliver Lodge cultivated a large field of wheat with wires strung above it and saw a 24 per cent boost in the grain harvest. The words in the North American Review seemed to ring true: “It is difficult to explain why the electric current so marvellously affects the growth of plants, but the fact that such stimulation does occur cannot be denied.”

At the end of the first world war in 1918, the UK set up the Electro-Culture Committee, a group of scientists and farmers, and asked it to find out whether electroculture was worth pursuing. The committee experimented through the 1920s with wheat, oats, peas and potatoes, but the results were frustratingly inconsistent. This, together with the cost of electricity, eventually doomed electroculture. “Increases of 20 per cent can hardly be considered economic even if obtained in most years,” said the committee’s final report in 1936. Nevertheless, the scientists seemed to think the effect was real, if erratic.

The US Department of Agriculture conducted some experiments at Arlington Experimental Farm, near Washington DC, but these, too, were difficult to interpret. Many patents were taken out, but the technique never took off in the US either.

“Plants may take applied electric fields as a signal of impending rainfall”

Research in electroculture slowed to a trickle for some 50 years. Then, in the 1980s, Liu began looking into the technique as a researcher at the Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in Hohhot, China. He says he had been fascinated by the effect of lightning on soil nutrients, and began looking into whether electricity boosted the growth of wheat and barley. Around this time, the Chinese government began giving out grants in agricultural science, allowing him to expand his study.


 

In China, scientists are exposing crops to electric fields

Power plants

Liu began developing what he calls the “space electric field” method. There is usually a natural vertical electric potential gradient in the air of about 100 volts per metre. Liu began setting up experiments in greenhouses where that was increased to between 700 and 20,000 volts per metre. Electrical wires were strung above the crops and the field emanated from these. He began seeing impressive improvements in crop yields: increases in lettuce and cucumber by up to 40 per cent, and similar improvements for potato, radish and fennel. Liu worked with a company in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen to develop a commercial generator to power the wires in 2000. Within a few years, electroculture greenhouses were being set up in Beijing, Dalian and Tianjin.

The motivation wasn’t just to increase yields, though. In China, there is widespread public wariness about food safety, following several high-profile incidents in which illegal pesticides were found on produce. Fruit and vegetables are almost never eaten raw or unpeeled out of concern over harmful chemicals. Because of this, there was interest in electroculture as a possible alternative to pesticides. 

 

“There’s a big focus on eco-friendly farming right now,” says Liu. “We are looking at how to combine physics-based and biological techniques to reduce pesticide use, while still maintaining crop yield.”

In 2013, Liu, now based at the Dalian City Academy of Agricultural Sciences, introduced a second electroculture technique called “charged cultivation”. This involves overhead wires again, but this time the current they generate runs through the plants, says Tong Yuxin at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAS), which is supporting Liu’s work. Touch the plants, and you would get a mild shock. This effect drives insects away, says Liu. The electric field also removes microorganisms from the greenhouse air, he says, because when an electric field is discharged, it produces radicals, chemical species that can kill airborne bacteria. A report from CAS this year looking at electroculture says the yields of crops are generally increased by 30 per cent.

It isn’t easy to assess the scientific validity of Liu’s work. He and his colleagues haven’t published much of their research in international journals, though he has published more than 100 papers in China. New Scientist asked several Chinese-speaking plant scientists to look at these. They found the research unconvincing. “The statistics were generally weak and replications were not clear,” says plant scientist Yang Aijun at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.

Yet Liu isn’t the only researcher working on electroculture. Erika Bustos at the Centre of Research and Technological Development in Electrochemistry in Querataro state, Mexico, has been exploring its effects on Arabidopsis thaliana. This small flowering plant is a member of the same family as cabbages and is often used as a botanical guinea pig. In a 2016 study, Bustos set up trays of the plants and stuck electrodes in the soil at either end to create an electrical circuit. It was a small trial and a different method to Liu’s, but the plants did grow faster and thicker, as long as the current wasn’t cranked up too high. Bustos says she and her colleagues also have unpublished results showing that electrodes in the soil can increase the yield of wheat and maize by up to 85 per cent.
Grow with the flow

Let’s assume something is going on. How could this effect work? We know that plants make use of electricity. Some plant cells build up and release electric charge by moving ions like calcium and magnesium around their cells. It is thought that this plays a role in signalling throughout the plant, and some people even suggest that electrical signals could form the basis of plant memories. We have recently also discovered that tomato plants pass electrical signals to each other through the soil via their roots. This shows the flow of electricity is important to plants. It is harder to see how an external electric field would boost their growth.

“Lettuce and cucumber yields increased by up to 40 per cent”
There is one good reason why it might, at least according to ideas developed in the 1990s by Andrew Goldsworthy, a now-retired plant scientist who worked at Imperial College London. His suggestion was that it would be beneficial for plants to ramp up their growth following a thunderstorm when there is a lot of rain. Rather than the standard 100 volts per metre electrical field gradient in the atmosphere, a storm can produce a gradient of several hundred volts per metre or more. Goldsworthy reasoned that plants might have evolved to sense the change in field. He conducted experiments with tobacco plants in 1991 in which he showed that applying a weak external field changed the pattern of calcium ion currents in the plants. He reckoned this might be how they sensed electric fields.

If he was right, it might explain why the electroculture experiments in the early 20th century were so mixed. The plants would have taken the applied electric fields as a signal of impending rain, and when it didn’t come, that might have affected them negatively.

Still, this is all conjecture. Biophysicist Ellard Hunting at the University of Bristol, UK, says there is no detailed understanding of how growth might be enhanced by electric fields. “The mechanisms that underpin these observations remain largely elusive,” he says. “But there is definitely a very interesting interaction between plants and their electrical environment – time will tell how this might actually benefit agriculture.”

Jean Yong at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala takes a more optimistic view. “In a nutshell, plants do respond to electrical fields,” he says. It is logical, he says, that an electric field could speed up the flow of crucial nutrient ions like nitrate or calcium. “But there is no concrete or published data to prove the phenomenon.”

Although economics did for electroculture in the early 20th century, electricity is now far cheaper and less polluting. Yet even with that stumbling block removed, there are plenty of other ways to boost crop yields, from adding more fertiliser to increasing the carbon dioxide in greenhouses. How electroculture compares is unclear for the moment. If it does turn out to be a good option, the evidence might well come from those greenhouses scattered across China, where the charged air quietly hums above the greenery.

Electric face cleaners to get the oil and dead skin out of your pores

These are only brush systems, but it is establishing a clear market.  Ultrasound should also be explored in order to stimulate the removal of oil, skin and dirt that soap does not easily remove.

This is important because all present systems actually weaken the skin by covering the skin with cosmetics.

The skin should actually by washed well, then also scrubbed with hydrogen peroxide to draw out material from the pores as well.  This will block skin deterioration.




Electric face cleaners to get the oil and dead skin out of your pores

We could all use a facial.

By PopSci Commerce Team August 22, 2019


Time to make some pore choices.

Amazon https://www.popsci.com/exfoliating-electric-face-cleaners/


The average adult has 20,000 pores on their face, which makes the odds of getting one of them stuffed up with dead skin pretty high. If you don't wash your face regularly, you risk blackheads, acne, and other unpleasantness. To combat those woes, you'll want to exfoliate and cleanse. Check out these electric face cleansers that will get the work done for you in just a few minutes. 

Fancii Complete Face Spa System 


 

If only our bathwater was this color blue.Amazon


At just under seven inches wide, this sleek brush kit will easily fit on your bathroom countertop or on the soap dish in the shower (don’t worry, it’s waterproof ). Just remember to buy two AA batteries and you’re in for a gentle cleanse or that extra exfoliation. It also comes with a mint case that’ll help keep the brush clean longer and makes it easier to throw in your carry-on for your next trip. 

Pixnor Facial Cleaning Brush

  

With seven brush heads, this brush is basically 7 in 1.Amazon

The best part about this brush is that it comes with seven brush heads. The pumice stone head doubles as a mini pedicure, ready to scrub the calluses from your feet. This waterproof brush is made with hard plastic specifically designed for those who prefer to use it in the shower. Pixnor offers you your money back within one year if you really don’t like this one. You probably don’t want to buy it if you’re allergic to latex, since one of the brush heads is made of it. 

Luxsio Sonic Facial Cleaning Brush


  


It’s pretty (and functional) in pink.Amazon

The great thing about this brush is that it contours to all the angles and hard to reach spots to clean on your face. Not only does it unclog your pores, but it stimulates the collagen in your skin. Collagen is the main structural protein that helps your skin retain its elasticity. With age, it weakens often leading to wrinkles (hello, anti-aging!) Another nice part if that you don’t have to buy batteries for this lightweight brush like you do for the other brushes. Just plug it in and the four-inch cleaner is ready to get to work on that skin.


Interested in talking about deals and gadgets? Request to join our exclusive Facebook group. With all our product stories, the goal is simple: more information about the stuff you're thinking about buying. We may sometimes get a cut from a purchase, but if something shows up on one of our pages, it’s because we like it. Period.

Patrick Brne

The importance of Patrick Byrne is simple.  His fate will prove to the whole world that the USA is now again under the Rule of law.   This will allow thousands of other witnesses to safely come forward.

This is part of the continuing disclosure of Deep state activity.

Plenty more folks will soon be singing to fill in the narrative..


"I could not come forward until there was rule of law in this country." - Patrick Byrne

Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne tendered his shock resignation yesterday after 20 years of guiding the company he founded into one of the premier shopping sites on the Internet. This was followed by a blizzard of halting appearances on several cable news shows. His first and least rehearsed appearance was on FBN's Bulls & Bears, seen here.

Byrne's demeanor shifts dramatically during the beginning of the interview, where he starts out very confidently talking about the great performances of his various companies and becomes very agitated or even under the influence of drugs and quite terrified, which is disturbing to watch. It is unlikely that Byrne would have imploded his corporations and jeopardized his personal safety on a whim. In other interviews he gave yesterday, Byrne said that he "liked Obama" and that he did not vote for Trump.

He says that the third time in his life that he helped the FBI was in 2015-2016 and he oddly refers to them as the "Men in Black". The first time was in 2002, to help solve the murder of his friend [former NBA player] Brian Williams, the second time was in 2005-2010, when he helped take down some bad actors on Wall Street.

Byrne says that it was while watching Peter Strzok's testimony before Congress last summer in July 2018 that he understood he'd been used by the latter as a tool in "political espionage" for the 2016 campaign. He says Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump were all spied on and that there were other whistleblowers who would be coming forward. He said Clinton supporters in Hollywood had been spied on.

Although he won't say their names publicly in this interview, agents "X, Y, and Z" can easily be gathered to mean Andrew McCabe, William Priestap and James Comey. During his CNN interview with Chris Cuomo, he confirmed that "Z" was Comey. "Political espionage" is not a legal term but Espionage is a felony that carries a maximum jail sentence of 20 years.

He says, "I could not come forward until there was rule of law in this country," which he did do in April of 2019, as soon as Attorney General William Barr was sworn in and an investigation into the origins of the Russian Collusion probe was initiated.

Byrne begins to cry at two different points during this interview, the first, when referring to the El Paso shooting as a symptom of the undeclared civil war in the US and the second time, when referring to his mentor, Warren Buffett, who he says told him to come forward with his story about being used by these FBI officials of the Obama Administration.

Byrne says that all of the information he gathered is now in the hands of Connecticut US Attorney John Durham, who has been conducting an investigation into the origins of the Russia probe at the behest of Attorney General William Barr, of whom he says, "There’s going to be a sculpture of granite of him somewhere!"



***

Transcript of interview starting at 1:46.

Patrick Byrne: I've been warned that if I come forward to America, that the apparatus of Washington is going to grind me into a dust…I have to get that away from the company (Overstock.com).

Why is it going to grind me into a dust? You’ve caught me off guard, David (removes hat) and I can tell that what I said before, some sparkies up there, they didn't quite get the joke, when I say that I know about the Russia investigation, this is what I mean [during interviews he gave last month].

Because, 17 years ago, I helped them crack a murder - and they knew me and I helped them a bit on Wall Street 12 years ago - and they knew me and they called me in 2015 and 2016 to assist in something and I did. I didn’t know who the orders came from but I assisted…I took some orders that were fishy.

Last summer, watching television, I figured out the name of who sent me the orders and this has all now been confirmed to me.

The name of the man who sent me was Peter Strzok. Got it? So, this is going to be quite a Whirlwind.

David Asman: that has not been revealed, so far as I know as of yet. Are you working with the Attorney General in his investigation?

Patrick Byrne: Let me be clear, I'm not working with anybody…Last time I talked to Federal officers was 5 months ago and I explained everything to them, between April 5th and 30th over a course of 7 hours and then I disappeared.

Bill Barr – there’s going to be a sculpture of granite of him somewhere!

I have been sitting on this stuff for 3 years. I could not come forward until there was rule of law in this country. I wasn’t going to come forward when this guy, Jeff Sessions – Truman said of an opponent, “I’d carve a better man than that out of a banana.”

That's how everyone should feel about Jeff Sessions!

We finally have rule of law and I can come forward in April and…I don't want to get into any Federal way. I want to disappear - but there's other whistleblowers from in the Federal bureaucracy with similar stories and I can tell you the bottom line - and again, people didn't seem to get it last time - the bottom line is, it's a big cover-up: that there was political espionage connected against Hillary Clinton – against Hillary Clinton - Marco Rubio, [Ted] Cruz, Donald Trump.

And this is not a theory of mine, it’s not a political position. I was in the room when it happened. I was part of it. I thought I was doing law enforcement. Sorry!

David Asman: Welcome to the show. I hope the rest of your post-CEO career goes well.

Gary Smith: Patrick, Gary Smith, welcome to the show. First of all, I hope your post-CEO career goes well.

Question, first of all, your story sounds like something that should be a movie for theatrical release. I want to know who will be playing you.

Patrick Byrne: I will cooperate with anyone who can get Denzel Washington to play me!

Gary Smith: You mentioned during the break, you’ve had a rough few months. I'm curious to why you said that and what do you see happening in the next few weeks and months? Do you have legal counsel? What do you think will happen with you and with your story?

Patrick Byrne: This is extraordinarily…who the heck knows? This is quite an ambiguous situation.

But the issue is, I realized that these orders I got came from Peter Strzok and as a put together things, I know much more than I should know and it’s right to keep silent.

And this country has gone nuts, especially for the last year, when I realized what I know; every time I see one of these things; somebody drive 600 miles to gun down 20 strangers in the mall, I feel a bit responsible (begins to cry). So, I have to come forward.

 

I went to see my rabbi (crying) and you know my rabbi is, right?

Who is my rabbi? Who’s my rabbi, David?

David Asman: Tell us, Patrick.

Patrick Byrne: It’s this guy in Omaha and he said, “Patrick, you come forward.” He said, “You cannot let this sit with the Feds. Let the Feds do their job. You have to come forward to the American people.”

So, I am.

I had never heard of the guy, I only figured out last summer who sent me these requests, a guy named Peter Strzok and he was doing it on behalf of three officials, I’m just identifying them now as “X, Y, and Z”.

They were named to me and I identified them to the law enforcement and I believe there is a massive Federal investigation that is going to turn up that there was political espionage connected, through a number of different venues; against Hillary Clinton and against Rubio, Cruz and Trump.

I know for fact. I know other people who were involved. That’s what really happened.

And my rabbi said, “You cannot go another day – you have to do this right now. People are killing each other in America.” That is the truth.

This is my “Soylent Green is people!” moment or whatever (laughs). That’s the truth.

Female Host: Patrick, I'm just curious, I'm sure this is a very difficult thing for you to come to terms with, there's so much at risk for you personally. How do you see your life unfolding after this? You gave up your CEO position. I understand why you have to do what's right for the shareholders, but making a decision to get involved in this has cost you a lot.

Patrick Byrne: Well, what can I say? That's not the main event. And I talked about that. The analysis here was, “What’s good for the country?” not “What’s good for you? What’s good for this?” It’s what’s good for the country. “You have to do this.” So I did.

My life, I have literally been warned, I was warned about 9 months ago, if you come forward… Washington, DC - everybody in Washington, DC will spend the rest of your life trying to grind you into dust.

And I’ll tell you something else that’ll come up. I believe I was offered $1 billion bribe to keep quiet – we’ll leave that to the Federal investigators.

If you wanna know what my life’s gonna be, listen to Warren Zevon’s “Money, Guns and Lawyers.” That’s my life.

David Asman: Patrick, you mentioned your rabbi. Without revealing too much, were you talking about a man named Buffett?

Patrick Byrne: Yes.

David Asman: Warren Buffett, who we should mention by the way, you worked with Warren Buffett and he acted as a mentor for you. Have you been taking advice from him on a regular basis now about all that’s happened to you?

Patrick Byrne: Just once, on this. He was one of the great heroines (sic) of my life – pardon me, for being verklempt.

David Asman: is understandable. With everything you've been through.

Patrick Byrne: I met him when I was 13 and I called him “rabbi” and he’d leave a message, “Tell Patrick his rabbi is calling,” and that's probably the right way to describe the relationship, although none of us are Jewish.

And he gives me advice and I went to see him on June 20th and he told me, “You have to do this.” And I’ve been trying to do so gracefully this summer - but anyway -

Other Male Host: You're the CEO of a company that you started, you have a board, shareholders, you have employees, I’ve just got to ask you, why are you involved in any of this, whatever any of this is, I don't know how to make heads or tails of it, although I'm sure it'll be fodder for every conspiracy theory known to man - but why?

You’re also a CEO and responsibly, you could've just said, this is not my lane, I'm not going there, and that is not an appropriate division of labor. That would've been honorable and legitimate thing to say.

Patrick Byrne: Well, I'm a citizen too. I'm a flag-waving hippie, like Jerry Garcia. I'm a citizen and I think that as a citizen, we have duties, too. And if everybody helped out a little bit when they had a chance, life would be much easier.

I helped out twice in my life. Once, when a friend of mine got murdered. I helped Brian Williams. If you Google his name, you’ll find the story. I helped the Feds bring the murderer to justice and it was my honor to help bring them to justice. And I helped them back in ‘05 through 2010, to take on Wall Street.

Both catching my friends’ murderer and taking on Wall Street were consistent with my values and it was my honor to help the Men in Black then.

And this was the third time that they came to me and I got some request, I didn’t know who the Hell it came from and it was fishy and 3 years later, I’m watching television, and I realized who it was. It was Peter Strzok and Andy McCabe, that’s who these orders came from.

David Asman: By the way, just to make it clear, that's not a Make America Great hat, is it?

Patrick Byrne: No, it isn't. (Puts hat back on) What is it?

David Asman: Make America Grateful Again, correct?

Patrick Byrne: Correct. With a Grateful Dead stele…

Jonathan Hoenig: Patrick, very briefly, its Jonathan Hoenig, thank you for being with us. I think to Zach's point, you were CEO of a publicly-traded company. You started the company. It's hard to see how some of this didn’t have some impact on shares.

There was DeepCapture.com, which was a website that you are involved with that had some legal troubles. This might sound –

Patrick Byrne: Not really. It’s just a suit in Canada. I lost a lawsuit in Canada. You're a journalist, you're supposed to defend the First Amendment.

I didn’t even have to do that, I have the same journalistic Protections and laws that protect you. Simply to fight for free speech, I took the case on in Canada. You're a journalist, you should stand up for me on something like that.

Jonathan Hoenig: As a CEO, a person who started the company, this might sound curved but how does it feel to see the stock rally when you step down?

Patrick Byrne: There is a very odd -- I agree about it, not only am I shareholder now but as a shareholder, I can tell you, given that I have now and what I have done, I don't think there's anything unethical about me saying this. Given what I have done, I didn’t choose this fight. I’m doing it. If you want to help me, go buy your daughter a rug at Overstock.com. If you want to help me out, even though the entirety of Washington, DC - even though I left the company – is gonna be coming after [me] -- who the heck knows…

What’s your question? It seems silly to me. You're a journalist, you should be smarter and stand for principles more than that question illustrated.

Of course, you have duties as a citizen, even when you’re a CEO. I never involved the company in anything, the company is completely unrelated. I have extracurricular activities, I skydive, I surf and twice in my life, when a friend of mine got murdered and when goons on Wall Street - I figured out what they were doing - I helped the Federal government take them down.

And when they told me that they needed my help with this and I thought I was helping with legitimate law-enforcement, I helped them. It turns out I was a tool in a game of political espionage.

I did not know that. I only figured it out last summer. I thought I was doing something legitimate and a tiny little thing on a side that took a little bit of time away from the office.

It turns out it was political espionage. I only figured it out a year ago.

David Asman: For those who don't know –

Patrick Byrne: Who was asking that question? Who was that fool?

David Asman: That was Jonathan Hoenig. Let me -

Jonathan Hoenig: I’m a fool?

Patrick Byrne: You’re a fool.

David Asman: Let just me say, take before things get out of control, Patrick is one person who has never focused on the day-to-day movement of his stock, because he realizes how mercurial that stock movement can be.

So, Patrick, in defense of your stand, with regard to the stock, that is a long-standing one but what happens now with regard to the whole blockchain that you have brought into Overstock, as a part of Overstock? I know that you feel that that’s a mission of yours, where does that go from here?

Patrick Byrne: That is great, I’ve had an idea that this was coming, since last July, since I put this jigsaw together. I didn't think there was any way that something like this would likely happen someday. Who the heck knows.

I have been preparing very carefully. These companies -- some of these companies, if they existed before we started them are just like some young guys, some java monkeys with a blockchain idea, “Hey, let's build a blockchain central bank,” and it's like the show, Silicon Valley, it's a bunch of guys like that.

We would show up, provide capital, professionalize them, turn them real. Those companies, now they have boards of directors, they capital, they’re all over the world, they’re solid companies and they have a tremendous reservoir of blockchain talent, back here in Utah, that services all of the other parts of the network.

It is really -- the guy who built this – I was maybe the draftsman, Jonathan Johnson, who is a great colleague of mine for 17 years has built that and fleshed it in and he’s done a great job. He’s becoming CEO and is super capable.

David Asman: Well, it's an extraordinary idea and I know both you and I think there is something to this that may actually undermine some of the central-bank nonsense that we're seeing going right now.

We have to run, we have to have you back Patrick. Please come back and see us again.

Patrick Byrne: I’m laying low.