DALLAS (AP) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is convinced that a lone gunman wasn’t solely responsible for the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and said his father believed the Warren Commission report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”

Read more:

via RFK Jr.: Evidence ‘Very Convincing’ Lone Gunman Did Not Kill JFK « CBS DC.

Published on Jan 10, 2013

In the wake of December’s horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Vice President Joe Biden is chairing a panel of experts that will make gun-control recommendations to President Barack Obama by the end of the month. The president has said that enacting new restrictions on guns will be one of his highest priorities.

No one wants to ever again see anything like the senseless slaughter of 26 people — including 20 children – at a school. But as legislators turn toward creating new gun laws, here are five facts they need to know.

1. Violent crime — including violent crime using guns — has dropped massively over the past 20 years.

The violent crime rate – which includes murder, rape, and beatings – is half of what it was in the early 1990s. And the violent crime rate involving the use of weapons has also declined at a similar pace.

2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years.

Despite terrifying events like Sandy Hook or last summer’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, mass shootings are not becoming more frequent. “There is no pattern, there is no increase,” says criminologist James Allen Fox of Northeastern University, who studies the issue. Other data shows that mass killings peaked in 1929.

3. Schools are getting safer.

Across the board, schools are less dangerous than they used be. Over the past 20 years, the rate of theft per 1,000 students dropped from 101 to 18. For violent crime, the victimization rate per 1,000 students dropped from 53 to 14.

4. There Are More Guns in Circulation Than Ever Before.

Over the past 20 years, virtually every state in the country has liberalized gunownership rules and many states have expanded concealed carry laws that allow more people to carry weapons in more places. There around 300 million guns in the United States and at least one gun in about 45 percent of all households. Yet the rate of gun-related crime continues to drop.

5. “Assault Weapons Bans” Are Generally Ineffective.

While many people are calling for reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons — an arbitrary category of guns that has no clear definition — research shows it would have no effect on crime and violence. “Should it be renewed,” concludes a definitive study, “the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.”

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is as horrifing a crime as can be imagined. It rips at the country’s heart and the call to action is strong and righteous. But as Joe Biden and his panel of experts consider changes to gun laws and school-safety policies, they need to lead with their heads and not just their hearts.

Over the past dozen years, too many policies — the Patriot Act, the war in Iraq, the TARP bailouts — have been ruled by emotion and ideology.

Passing sweeping new restrictions on Second Amendment rights won’t heal the pain and loss we all feel but just may create many more problems in our future.

Written by Nick Gillespie. Produced by Amanda C. Winkler. Additional camera work by Joshua Swain.

About 2.30 minutes. Go to http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/01/10/reasons-5-facts-on-guns-and-gun-violence for downloadable versions and links to all data cited above.

via 5 Facts About Guns, Schools, & Violence – YouTube.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.

Soon to be made into an HBO movie by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball, this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.

via The Immortal Life « Rebecca Skloot.

A group of like-minded patriots, bound together by pride in American exceptionalism, plan on building an armed community to protect their liberty.

The group, named Citadel, intends to purchase 2,000 to 3,000 acres for the project in western Idaho.  The community will comprise of 3,500 to 7,000 families of patriotic Americans who “voluntarily choose to live together in accordance with Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of Rightful Liberty.”

Read more:

via Patriotic Group To Build Armed ‘Defensible’ Neighborhood Fortress | CNS News.

MARK LEVIN: You know folks, I’ll be honest with you. I just told a friend of mine — even though I sit behind this microphone and I try to be civil and so forth — I can barely contain my fury about what’s going on in this country. I’m just being honest with you. I can barely contain it. I’m so frustrated by this tyranny, you have no idea. Now we can analyze it, we can intellectualize it, we can parse it and so forth and try to unravel it. But I’m just telling you, from an emotional point of view, it is just so damned infuriating to see the greatest country on the face of the earth run by a bunch of lilliputians, who are constantly attacking it from within.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/01/11/levin_i_can_barely_contain_my_fury_at_what_is_going_on_in_this_country.html

Sent from my iPad

Each year seems to hit a new level of hype surrounding the seasonal flu. The pharmaceutical-media complex is drooling over the latest “outbreak,” which has resulted in Boston declaring a “Health Emergency” as highlighted in the video below and New York reaching epidemic proportions. Additionally, nurses are being denied the right to refuse flu vaccinations, even on religious grounds, and are being fired for any resistance.

However, fine details are normally not the strong suit of corporate media, so that is where we must look before we decide to go into full-blown panic mode and start lining up to get jabbed with the latest vaccine concoction. For instance, people are still getting sick and are dying even after getting the flu shot.

Read more:

http://www.activistpost.com/2013/01/flu-scare-season-goes-into-overdrive.html?m=1

Common Sense Questions about the Economy, the Environment, and Depleting Energy Resources in a Finite World Growing Exponentially

http://3es.weebly.com/

The Guardian states that overly-cautious sell by dates, buy one get one free deals, and an obsession with only consuming fruit and vegetables that look perfect are some of the main reasons for this colossal waste of, not only food, but also the water, energy, and arable land used in the creation of the food.

http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Almost-Half-of-all-Food-Produced-is-Thrown-Away.html

The Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the operation on behalf of the city’s parks department, says that in the six weeks leading up to New Year’s Day, the crews in Queens had filtered 94,000 cubic yards of sand. That is enough, the agency estimated, to fill a football field to a depth four feet higher than the goal posts — or 44 feet — said Robert Schneider, an engineer technician for the corps.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/nyregion/after-hurricane-sandy-cleaning-up-sand-and-returning-it-to-beaches.html?_r=0

Sent from my iPad

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/01/10/superstorm-sandys-amazing-parking-lot-tens-of-thousands-of-damaged-cars-fill-n-y-airport-runway/