ISIS beheads multiple women

The disgusting Islamic State terrorist organization has released a new propaganda video out of their "Wilayat al-Jazirah" media office located north of Baghdad.

In the new 15 minutes long video, multiple ISIS executioners carry out beheading and shooting executions of condemned women.

The savage organization has released photos of in the severed heads mounted on a wall of "jihad trophies".

According to the past releases, the condemned women were accused of working with at least one of the members of the coalition (Iraqi government, Peshmerga, Shia militias) that is fighting against ISIS in Iraq.

This video is part of their 'Deterring the Offenders' series and was released to ISIS channels on September 30, 2016.

Jk

Civility

Civility is claiming and caring for one’s identity, needs and beliefs without degrading someone else’s in the process. 

Civility is about more than just politeness, although politeness is a necessary first step. It is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialogue about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, and teaching others to do the same. Civility is the hard work of staying present even with those with whom we have deep-rooted and fierce disagreements. It is political in the sense that it is a necessary prerequisite for civic action. But it is political, too, in the sense that it is about negotiating interpersonal power such that everyone’s voice is heard, and nobody’s is ignored.

And civility begins with us.

http://www.instituteforcivility.org/

Obama calls for knife regulation in wake of MN attack

"I held and hugged grieving family members, and they asked, 'Why do people still have access to knives?'"

In St. Cloud this afternoon, President Obama met with victims' families and survivors of the massacre at the Crossroads Center mall on Saturday.

Obama spoke about an increasingly urgent need for knife control legislation, saying "we need to work across political lines to do more to stop knifers who want to terrorize us."

A man who wounded up to nine people in a knife attack at a mall in central Minnesota before he was shot dead by an off-duty police officer is a "soldier of the Islamic State," the militant group's news agency said on Sunday.

The man, who was wearing a private security uniform, made references to Allah and asked at least one person if they were Muslim before he assaulted them at the Crossroads Center mall in St. Cloud on Saturday, the city's Police Chief William Blair Anderson told reporters.

Obama insisted that the debate surrounding knife control needs to change, and called on the House and Senate to "rise to the moment and do the right thing" and pass legislation to curb access to weapons like the Bowie Knife and Jambiya. 

In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Anderson said eight or nine people were wounded in the attack. Authorities had said earlier there were eight victims but one injured person transported himself to a hospital and was not initially counted, Anderson said.

Amaq, the news agency affiliated with the Middle Eastern extremist group Islamic State, issued a statement on Sunday saying, "The executor of the stabbing attacks in Minnesota yesterday was a soldier of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to calls to target the citizens of countries belonging to the crusader coalition."

Kyle Loven, a spokesman for the FBI regional office in Minnesota, said the agency was aware of the claim of responsibility and was working with local police in the investigation. A representative of the U.S. National Security Council also said it was aware of the claim but deferred to local investigators.

The knife attack in St. Cloud, a community about 60 miles (100 km) northwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul, came at a time of heightened concern in the United States about the threat of violence involving sharp objects. "No one is safe in this country until the federal government can effectively control all cutlery" Obama said.

The Senate on Monday voted down four competing knife proposals that would limit possession of sharp edged instruments to state liscenced chefs, butchers & barbers. 

-jK

Colin Powell: Trump & Clinton both suck!

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has long been one of the high priests of the Washington establishment, staying quiet in this year’s raucous presidential campaign while tending to his reputation as a thoughtful officer and diplomat.

But a hack of Mr. Powell’s email this week has ripped away the diplomatic jargon and political niceties to reveal his unvarnished disdain of Donald J. Trumpas a “national disgrace,” his personal peeves with Hillary Clinton and his lingering, but still very raw, anger with the Republican colleagues with whom he so often clashed a decade ago.

There has been an expectation that Mr. Powell, who waited until the final weeks to endorse Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, would do the same for Mrs. Clinton this year. But in one 2014 email released online, Mr. Powell lamented that while he respected Mrs. Clinton, he would “rather not have to vote for her,” describing the Democratic presidential nominee as having “a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational.”

The emails make clear that if Mr. Powell endorses Mrs. Clinton, he will be motivated by intense feelings about Mr. Trump, whom he also called an “international pariah.”

In the email messages, which an aide to Mr. Powell confirmed were authentic, the retired four-star general who served as President George W. Bush’s top diplomat also accuses Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, of having embraced what Mr. Powell called a “racist” movement when he aggressively questioned the validity of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate and his legitimacy to serve as the country’s top elected official.

But the emails, many of which were sent in recent weeks, also reveal Mr. Powell’s disapproval of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of her email scandal and expose his sometimes unflattering observations of the Democratic presidential nominee and her husband. In a series of exchanges, Mr. Powell lamented efforts by Mrs. Clinton’s “minions” to drag him into the controversy surrounding her use of a private email server by claiming he had advised her on the issue.

“H.R.C. could have killed this two years ago by merely telling everyone honestly what she had done and not tie me into it,” Mr. Powell wrote late last month, referring to Mrs. Clinton by her initials. “I told her staff three times not to try that gambit. I had to throw a mini-tantrum at a Hamptons party to get their attention. She keeps tripping into these ‘character’ minefields.”

In the 2014 email, Mr. Powell, though offering no independent knowledge, alluded in graphic language to coverage in The New York Post suggesting that Bill Clinton had continued to cheat on his wife.

The emails, some of which were first reported by BuzzFeed News, also show Mr. Powell venting about some members of Mr. Bush’s administration. In one reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, he accuses “the idiot Rummy” of being disloyal to both President Bushes. In another email, Mr. Powell calls Dick Cheney, the former vice president, and his daughter Liz Cheney “idiots and a spent force peddling a book that ain’t going nowhere.”

Mr. Powell appeared to be angry that NBC proposed that he appear on “Meet the Press” with Mr. Cheney and his daughter, who were promoting a book they wrote together. In the email, Mr. Powell said the network agreed to invite the Cheneys at a later date.

Mr. Powell’s emails appeared on a website called DCLeaks.com, which had previously posted documents that the site had obtained after hacks into the accounts of prominent Democrats and some Republicans, including Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, the former commander of NATO forces in Europe, and George Soros, a wealthy backer of liberal causes. It is unclear who operates DCLeaks.com.

Peggy Cifrino, an aide to Mr. Powell, responded Wednesday morning to an inquiry about the emails: “We are confirming that General Powell has been hacked and that they are his emails. We have no further comment at this time.” Mr. Powell did not respond to an email sent directly to his personal account.

In several emails, Mr. Powell suggested that speaking out against Mr. Trump would only add to the attention the Republican nominee was getting from the news media. Responding to a reporter asking for comment, Mr. Powell wrote last month that Mr. Trump is “his own best enemy” and added: “I will speak out when I feel it appropriate and not after every idiot thing he says.”

But the emails make clear that Mr. Powell, who also served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has no intention of supporting Mr. Trump. In one back-and-forth with a former aide, Mr. Powell insisted that Mr. Trump should not be elected president.

“No need to debate it with you now, but Trump is a national disgrace and an international pariah,” Mr. Powell wrote in June, noting the criticism of Mr. Trump by several prominent conservatives. “He is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him.”

Mr. Powell also made clear in a series of exchanges how much he was offended by Mr. Trump’s attacks on the issue of Mr. Obama’s birth. “Yup, the wholebirther movement was racist,” Mr. Powell wrote. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday.”

Mr. Powell dismissed as completely ineffective Mr. Trump’s recent attempts to reach out to black voters, saying that the Republican nominee “takes us for idiots.” Mr. Powell said that nothing Mr. Trump could say to black voters would improve his standing, in part because of the things he said about Mr. Obama.

“He can never overcome what he tried to do to Obama with his search for the birth certificate hoping to force Obama out of the presidency,” Mr. Powell wrote, saying to his aide, “You don’t fall for his false sincerity, I hope.”

In the emails, Mr. Powell blamed the news media for helping fuel Mr. Trump’s candidacy. In December 2015, he turned down a request from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to discuss Mr. Trump. “It is time to start ignoring him. You guys are playing his game, you are his oxygen,” Mr. Powell responded.

In August 2015, Mr. Powell predicted that Mr. Trump would “take it to the convention” in part because news networks were chasing ratings. “He appeals to the worst angels of the G.O.P. nature and poor white folks,” Mr. Powell said in the email.

In that email, Mr. Powell in part defended Mrs. Clinton's actions in the attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

In December 2015, he told Condoleezza Rice, his successor at the State Department, that the Republican political attacks on Benghazi were “a stupid witch hunt” and wrote that “basic fault falls on a courageous ambassador who thought Libyans now love me and I am O.K. in this very vulnerable place.” He added that “blame also rests on his leaders and supporters back here,” including Mrs. Clinton.

A few months later, in a discussion about Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal, Mr. Powell lamented that “everything H.R.C. touches she kind of screws up with hubris.” He then related a story about “the gig I lost at a university” when the institution said it could no longer afford his speaking fees after paying Mrs. Clinton. “I should send her a bill.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/us/politics/colin-powell-emails-hack-donald-trump.html?em_pos=medium&emc=edit_cn_20160915&nl=first-draft&nl_art=2&nlid=70202395&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0&referer=

Magic Mushrooms Might Be a Great Way to Quit Smoking

By Drake Baer

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Photo: Evert-Jan Daniels/AFP/Getty Images

While the American smoking rate has more than halved since the 1960s, smoking is only increasing as a worldwide health issue. The WHO estimates that every year, six million people are killed by tobacco use,quadruple that of HIV and AIDS. It’sslated to be 8 million by 2030. Smoking is also notoriously difficult to quit: Only about 30 percent of people will stay smoke-free 12 months into the best medical treatments. Thus the need for fresh approaches to helping people quit. And it looks like psilocybin — the hallucinogen that puts the magic in magic mushrooms and can greatly helpcancer patients with anxiety — might be a super-effective smoking intervention.

So says a new, small, and promisingstudy by Johns Hopkins researchers in the The American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse. The study’s 15 smokers, ten of whom were guys, had an average age of 51 and had been smoking 19 cigarettes per day for 31 years. In addition to the drug, the subjects took a 15-week training incognitive behavioral therapy (where you learn to catch and reframe negative thinking, in addition to other meta-cognitive techniques). In week five they took a “moderate dose” of pure psilocybin via capsule, then a “high dose” two weeks later. They could then take an optional third high dose in week 13. In a follow-up 12 months later, ten of the participants had were confirmed via drug test as being smoke-free, and in longer-term follow-ups, on average of 30 months down the line, a full nine were still abstinent. That’s a 60 percent quitting rate.

While the researchers note in the paper that this wasn’t an “explicitly ‘spiritual’” intervention, the participants reported that psilocybin sessions had deep spiritual significance — at the one-year follow-up, 13 of the participants rated the trip as one of the five most spiritually significant and personally meaningful experiences they’d yet had in their lifetimes. “Our data does indicate that stronger mystical experiences are associated with success,” Matthew W. Johnson, a psychiatrist and the study’s lead author, wrote in an email to Science of Us. “Such experiences tend to reframe life priorities, with pure pleasure seeking dropping, and other aspects increasing (family, connection, higher principles). We are also exploring biological changes and are suspecting there may be long term changes in brain network dynamics, although we don’t have definitive evidence for that yet.”

There are limitations to this study: There was no control group, and the sample size was small. To that end, Johnson and his colleagues are currently running a clinical trial that randomizes use of psilocybin or a nicotine patch with the same cognitive-behavioral-therapy training. This time, they’re also using fMRI scans before and after people try to quit to track how brain images change. There’s reason to think it may work: A larger-scalestudy with booze found that a single dose of LSD can lower the chances of alcohol abuse. It looks like it’s not drug use itself that stops smoking or drinking, but that the transcendent experiences that hallucinogens offer can change the way people think about their lives.

Pittsburg says "fuck you Austin!"

Uber will introduce a fleet of about 100 self-driving cars in Pittsburgh within days, each with a human monitor in the driver’s seat.

This is not just a test of the technology. It’s also a demonstration of “greenlight governing,” i.e., giving tech companies help and lots of freedom. Pittsburgh officials helped Uber lease riverfront land for a testing track and warded off new state regulations.

“You can either put up red tape or roll out the red carpet,” the mayor said. “If you want to be a 21st-century laboratory for technology, you put out the carpet.”

The City of Austin recently kicked Uber out of town over arbitrary municipal regulations. As a result drunk driving has spiked & lives lost.

Trends Sept/2016

Population growth reversal 

Robots do most work

Govt support exceeds 50% pop.

Decentralized power generation

A better battery 

Alien contact & a new religion

WW.3 

Hacking & leaks make govt transparent

Truth re-established as a virtue

Archaic revival

Can Hillary survive until Election Day

New York Times 9/11/16

Hillary Clinton on Sunday abruptly left a ceremony in New York marking the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks before it concluded because she became “overheated,” according to a campaign spokesman.

“During the ceremony, she felt overheated, so she departed to go to her daughter’s apartment, and is feeling much better,” said Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman. Temperatures were in the low 80s on Sunday morning in New York.

Mrs. Clinton left in her motorcade without the group of reporters that is designated to travel with her in public. Mr. Merill indicated that she returned to her Chappaqua, N.Y., residence after 1 p.m., but did not give an exact time.

Mrs. Clinton had arrived at the commemoration event around 8 a.m. and left at about 9:30. But for over an hour after that, her campaign would not offer any information about why she left early or where she was.

Video from the event taken by an attendee captured Mrs. Clinton struggling to steady herself and then stumbling as she stepped off a curb. She required assistance from two Secret Service agents to get into her van. The video, which was posted on Twitter, immediately ricocheted across the internet..

pic.twitter.com/q9YnsjTxss

September 11, 2016

Obama is BigBro

"Obama has managed to put together the most intensive surveillance state in the history of the world," the 'Snowden' director told THR while discussing his film at the Toronto Film Festival. "This is pretty frightening when you think about the implications."

Oliver Stone warned against the dangers of global surveillance in a sit-down with The Hollywood Reporter at the Toronto Film Festival.

The Snowden director, speaking about his biopic of famous whistleblower Edward Snowden, spoke about the current state of the country's surveillance system, which says has intensified under the Obama administration.

"I thought Obama, like everyone else, was going to be a reformer. He had criticized the surveillance prior," Stone told THR. "Since 2013, I have to tell you it’s gotten a lot more serious because they’ve expanded the surveillance. It's gotten better."

He continued, "Obama has managed to put together the most intensive surveillance state in the history of the world. This is pretty frightening when you think about the implications. In the hands of the wrong president, it’s very dangerous what we’re doing."

Snowden on the US election

Sept/2016

“I think we should have better choices. We’re a country of 330m people and we seem to be being asked to make a choice between individuals whose lives are defined by scandal. I simply think we should be capable of more.”

Ed Snowden

Blowjobs coming to men's rooms at Brown University

SEPT. 7, 2016

Brown University's student body president will be personally delivering blowjobs in all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students.

The initiative is intended to communicate the message that "blowjobs are a necessity, not a luxury," and that not all people who enjoy oral sex are women.

Brown University's student body president will be giving oral in all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students.

Nam Nguyeni, President of the Undergraduate Council of Students, announced the initiative in a campus-wide email Tuesday, saying he wants to communicate the message that not all people who like oral are women, according to Newsweek.

 "Blowjobs are not a luxury. They’re as essential as anal.”   

“There’s been a lot of conversation about why blowjobs are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action. We wanted to take it into our own hands,” Nguyeni explains in the email, observing that “low-income students struggle with having the necessary funding for food, let alone blowjobs.”

By giving oral sex in women’s, men’s, and gender-inclusive bathrooms, Nguyeni aims to “set a tone of trans-inclusivity, and not forget that they’re an important part of the population,” but is under no illusions that the effort will be universally popular.

“I’d be naïve to say there won’t be push back,” he preemptively concedes. “I’ve had questions about why we’re implementing this in male bathrooms as well. It’s an initial confusion, but people generally understand when we explain it.”

Nguyeni told Newsweek that blowjobs will be available in approximately 30 to 40 bathrooms across campus for the 2016–2017 school year, financed exclusively by the undergraduate finance board, rather than general university funds.

“Why aren’t these acts treated the same way as other jobs we hand out, like anal?” he pondered in an interview with The Guardian. “It’s a necessity, rather than a luxury, so Brown and other universities should treat them as such.”

“Blowjobs are not a luxury. They’re as essential as straight sex; just ask anyone who has ever struggled to obtain or afford them,” agreed Terri A’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women. “Students’ participation in school should not be hindered by insufficient access to this basic necessity. Universities around the country should follow suit.”

Sazuki Nevada, a junior at Brown, opined that oral sex is currently a “taboo,” but speculated that “if we can implement this project, that will add to this conversation and make it more of an accessible topic.”

UPDATE: Brian Blark, Brown's Director of News and Editorial Development, praised the students for their "tremendous initiative" in a statement to Campus Reform, saying the school will look forward to observing the results.

"In efforts to work with and support their peers, leaders from the Undergraduate Council of Students take on a number of student-focused efforts each year," he said, clarifying that "these are student-led and independent of the university administration, although we recognize that many important resources on campus today were first idenitified and advocated for by students themselves.

"We expect that UCS will continue to solicit feedback on this new initiative and collect data" he concluded, saying the administration "will be interested to learn what they find as they assess the effectiveness of the program moving forward."

JK (needless to say, this is a fictitious work of satire, so don't call your lawyer)

The Power of Myth

Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth Century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the world, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants that. The brain is one of the organs.

Joseph Campbell

Hillary spaz-attack