Behind The Woodshed Blogcaster – April 20, 2014.

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Constitutional Government?

• Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy

  The news: A new scientific study from Princeton researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page has finally put some science behind the recently popular argument that the United States isn’t a democracy any more. And they’ve found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.

  An oligarchy is a system where power is effectively wielded by a small number of individuals defined by their status called oligarchs. Members of the oligarchy are the rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and finance or the military.

• Forced to Release List of Keywords Used to Monitor Social Networking Sites

  The complete DHS Analyst’s Desktop Binder is available here.

  You can read the original article at the DailyMail.co.uk

• Scalia To Student: If Taxes Go Too High ‘Perhaps You Should Revolt’  
  

  Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told a crowd of law school students that if taxes in the U.S. become too high then people “should revolt.” (Getty Images)

Preparing Now for the Current Oppression

• Proactive Prepping With Special Guest Hal Anthony

  Proactive Prepping With Special Guest Hal Anthony! 
  The Road Less Traveled!
  Saturdays
  9:00pm/Est 8:00pm/Ct 7:00pm/Mt 6:00pm/Pt
  Live Listen and Chat go to: http://prepperbroadcasting.com/listen-chat/

  On this excursion we welcome special guest Hal Anthony from “Behind The Woodshed” to discuss myriad topics on how to be a Proactive Prepper!

• Internments can happen again, Scalia warns
  The longest-serving member of the U.S. Supreme Court talks at two isle schools

  “Well, of course, Kore­ma­tsu was wrong. And I think we have repudiated in a later case. But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again,” Scalia told students and faculty during a lunchtime question-and-answer session.

  Scalia cited a Latin expression meaning “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

  “That’s what was going on — the panic about the war and the invasion of the Pacific and whatnot. That’s what happens. It was wrong, but I would not be surprised to see it happen again, in time of war. It’s no justification but it is the reality,” he said.

 
Just Say No!

• Monsanto and Big Food Losing the GMO and ‘Natural’ Food Fight 
  

  By Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

  After 20 years of battling Monsanto and corporate agribusiness, food and farm activists in Vermont, backed by a growing Movement across the country, are on the verge of a monumental victory—mandatory labels on genetically engineered foods and a ban on the routine industry practice of labeling GMO-tainted foods as “natural.”

• Russia will not import GMO products – PM Medvedev 

• 

  Russia will not import GMO products, the country’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said, adding that the nation has enough space and resources to produce organic food.

  Moscow has no reason to encourage the production of genetically modified products or import them into the country, Medvedev told a congress of deputies from rural settlements on Saturday.

  “If the Americans like to eat GMO products, let them eat it then. We don’t need to do that; we have enough space and opportunities to produce organic food,” he said.

• Ex-Russian Alaska ‘too cold’ to annex, Putin jokes  

  During Putin’s annual marathon phone-in session Thursday, when Russians pose questions to the Russian leader, a pensioner asked him to possibly follow the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine with the taking of Alaska.

  “Faina Ivanovna, dear, why do you need Alaska?” Putin asked the pensioner.

  “We have a northern country — 70 percent of our territory are in the north and the far north,” he noted.

  “Alaska is cold too,” he said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  Alaska was settled by Russians since the 18th century after Russian boats reached it from the Russian Far East territories of Kamchatka and began fur trading with the indigenous population.

• Effective Immediately: France Bans All GMO Cultivation  

  The French National Assembly has made a sweeping declaration with a new bill, effective immediately. No more genetically modified crops.

  On Tuesday, the French lower house of parliament adopted a law immediately banning cultivation of any GMO corn, due to environmental safety concerns.

  Recently, they also made a halt decree to prohibit planting the only GM crop allowed in the EU – Monsanto’s MON810 corn, with built-in insect resistance.

• Vermont Senate passes mandatory GMO food-labeling law  

  The Vermont Senate passed a bill on Wednesday that would make the state the first in the United States to enact mandatory labeling of foods made with genetically modified crops.

  “We are really excited that Vermont is going to be leading on this,” said Falko Schilling, a spokesman for the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which backed the bill.

  The bill, approved 28-2 by the Senate, has already passed the Vermont House of Representatives. It now goes back to the House to see if members will approve changes made by the Senate.

  The law is set to take effect July 1, 2016.

• Will Jackson County, Oregon Finally Take Monsanto Down in the GMO Fight?

  Elise Higley is a Jackson County, Oregon farmer and the director of Our Family Farms Coalition which is standing firm against Monsanto’s attempt to stall measure 15-199 which would ban genetically modified crops in Jackson County. As the campaign manager, she reflects on why the Big Ag bully is so afraid of one little town.

  As the campaign’s manager, and a farmer, Higley is familiar with the threat of GMO crops. GMO pollen can drift into farms such as her own, making her organic farming methods worthless and causing viable seeds to become suicide seeds at the hands of Monsanto, Dow, and other agricultural companies. 

Experts Can’t Protect Themselves. How Can They Protect You? 

• The Most Irony Ever: Food Poisoning Strikes Diners at Gov’t Food Safety Summit

  Food served at a Food Safety Summit held earlier this month between several of our federal agencies including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Big Food industry giants the likes of Tyson, ConAgra and McDonald’s, actually gave some of the people who attended food poisoning.

  At least four people called the Baltimore City Health Department this week to report that they developed diarrhea, nausea and other symptoms about 12 hours after eating a meal April 9 during the conference at the Baltimore Convention Center. (source)  Is it really even irony? Or is karma more appropriate…

Scientific Findings And Wonders

• Cicada wing destroys bacteria solely through its physical structure  
  
  

  

  The veined wing of the clanger cicada kills bacteria is able to destroy bacteria by its structure alone – one of the first structures ever found that can do this. The clanger cicada is an insects that looks like something between a fly and a locust; its wings are covered with a vast hexagonal array of ‘nanopillars’ – basically blunted spikes with sizes comparable to that of bacteria. What happens is that when a bacteria settles on this surface, its cellular membrane sticks to the surface of the nanopillars and stretches into the crevices between them, where it experiences the most strain. When the stretch is powerful enough, the membrane ruptures.

Smarter Than a Brush Turkey?

• Nanoparticles make turkey eggs microbe-resistant

  

  Australian brush turkeys incubate their eggs in places most animals would stay clear of: moist piles of rotting vegetation. There are some advantages to this approach, most notably that the heat released by the microbes keeps the eggs warm but those same microbes can also get through eggshells and kill the embryos. However, even though the risks are apparently huge, only 9% of eggs laid by Australian brush turkeys (Alectura lathami) are infected.

  Researchers now believe they know why this happens: the shells are covered in a layer of nanometre-sized spheres of calcium phosphate, which makes them repel water and harder to crack.  The results are extremely promising, with potential applications in antimicrobial coatings for plastics and other surfaces.

• Scientists cool semiconductor with laser light   

  By harnessing the science of both quantum and nano physics, scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute have come up with an innovative new way of cooling semiconductor membranes by using laser light. Through this new technique, the researchers were able to cool the tiny, thin membrane from room temperature to -269 degrees Celsius. Paradoxically, the laser warms the bulk semiconductor material as  a whole, so one could claim that they achieved cooling by heating.

  Semiconductor chips, for instance, are vital in today’s information age, and while technology tends to become ever miniaturized, the need for a more efficient energy consumption and cooling is required if tomorrow’s smartphones and tablets are to become smarter, more efficient or cheaper.

  For many years now, scientists at the Niels Bohr Institute have successfully managed to cool gas atoms using laser, actually very close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius), by creating entanglement between two atomic systems.

  “The paradox,” explains Koji Usami, associate professor at Quantop at the Niels Bohr Institute., “is that even though the membrane as a whole is getting a little bit warmer, the membrane is cooled at a certain oscillation and the cooling can be controlled with laser light. So it is cooling by warming! We managed to cool the membrane fluctuations to minus 269 degrees C.”

  “It would mean entirely new possibilities for what is called optomechanics, which is the interaction between optical radiation, i.e. light, and a mechanical motion.”

Cooling semiconductor by laser light

“Changing the distance between the membrane and the mirror leads to a complex and fascinating interplay between the movement of the membrane, the properties of the semiconductor and the optical resonances and you can control the system so as to cool the temperature of the membrane fluctuations. This is a new optomechanical mechanism, which is central to the new discovery. The paradox is that even though the membrane as a whole is getting a little bit warmer, the membrane is cooled at a certain oscillation and the cooling can be controlled with laser light. So it is cooling by warming! We managed to cool the membrane fluctuations to minus 269 degrees C”, Koji Usami explains.

“The potential of optomechanics could, for example, pave the way for cooling components in quantum computers. Efficient cooling of mechanical fluctuations of semiconducting nanomembranes by means of light could also lead to the development of new sensors for electric current and mechanical forces. Such cooling in some cases could replace expensive cryogenic cooling, which is used today and could result in extremely sensitive sensors that are only limited by quantum fluctuations,” says Professor Eugene Polzik.

Scientists Draw The Line On Scienceology

• James Lovelock: environmentalism has become a religion  

  

  Environmentalism has “become a religion” and does not pay enough attention to facts, according to James Lovelock.

  The 94 year-old scientist, famous for his Gaia hypothesis that Earth is a self-regulating, single organism, also said that he had been too certain about the rate of global warming in his past book, that “it’s just as silly to be a [climate] denier as it is to be a believer” and that fracking and nuclear power should power the UK, not renewable sources such as windfarms.

  Speaking to the Guardian for an interview ahead of a landmark UN climate science report on Monday on the impacts of climate change, Lovelock said of the warnings of climate catastrophe in his 2006 book, Revenge of Gaia: “I was a little too certain in that book. You just can’t tell what’s going to happen.”

  “It [the impact from climate change] could be terrible within a few years, though that’s very unlikely, or it could be hundreds of years before the climate becomes unbearable,” he said.

• UN, Obama Flog Global-warming Alarmism — As More Scientists Defect   

  Former global-warming alarmist and “Gaia Guru” Dr. James Lovelock is once again doing combat with his erstwhile comrades in the “green” movement, dishing out scorn for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which recently issued its latest dire global-warming predictions. In an interview with The Guardian on March 30 and another with the BBC on April 3, Lovelock, the geophysicist best known as the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, said environmentalism has “become a religion” for many, and suggested that the IPCC has virtually copied his own exaggerated predictions from eight years ago — views that he has since repudiated.

  The 94-year-old author, inventor, and former NASA scientist who is one of the most famous founders of the environmental movement also reiterated his support for natural gas “fracking” and his contempt for advocates of wind and solar energy, which he says will never provide sufficient energy for modern society. He also took swipes at the massive government funding of global-warming research, which has corrupted and politicized the science. 

  The IPCC’s report, Lovelock told BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, “is very similar to the statements I made in my book about 8 years ago, called The Revenge of Gaia. It’s almost as if they’ve copied it.”  The following exchange then ensued: 

  Jeremy Paxman: Sure. But you then, after publishing these apocalyptic predictions, you then retracted them.

  James Lovelock: Well, that’s my privilege. You see, I’m an independent scientist. I’m not funded by some government department or commercial body or anything like that. If I make a mistake, then I can go public with it. And you have to, because it is only by making mistakes that you can move ahead. 

  Lovelock caused serious heartburn for the globalist greens in 2012, when he launched some highly critical statements during the United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, as The New American reported in our video here and our article here.

• Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society  

  From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara

  To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

  6 October 2010

  Dear Curt:

  When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

  How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society. 

NO DATA to Justify Regulations

• EPA Concedes: We Can’t Produce All the Data Justifying Clean Air Rules  Seven months after being subpoenaed by Congress, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy conceded that her agency does not have –  and cannot produce – all of the scientific data used for decades to justify numerous rules and regulations under the Clean Air Act.

• ‘Biggest land grab in the history of the world’
  Requested EPA authority over streams would ‘freeze’ economy 

  

  WASHINGTON – In a move lawmakers and farmers are calling “the biggest land grab in the history of the world,” the Environmental Protection Agency is requesting jurisdiction over all public and private streams in the United States that are “intermittent, seasonal and rain-dependent.”

  The EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in late March jointly released a proposed rule, Waters of the United States, in an effort to clarify which streams and wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act.

  A statement issued by the EPA says “the proposed rule will benefit businesses by increasing efficiency in determining coverage of the Clean Water Act.”

  But some lawmakers strongly disagree.

• Portland Reservoir To Be Flushed After Teen Pees In The Water Supply Portland officials are once again preparing to flush millions of gallons of treated water because someone urinated in a city reservoir.
  Water Bureau Administrator David Shaff said 38 million gallons will be discarded after a 19-year-old was videotaped in the act Wednesday.
  The open reservoirs hold water that’s already been treated and goes directly into mains for distribution to customers.
  The urine poses little risk — animals routinely deposit waste without creating a public health crisis — but Shaff said he doesn’t want to serve water that was deliberately tainted.
  “There is at least a perceived difference from my perspective,” Shaff said. “I could be wrong on that, but the reality is our customers don’t anticipate drinking water that’s been contaminated by some yahoo who decided to pee into a reservoir.”
  Water quality test samples have been taken from the reservoir, with results due Thursday. The water will be drained into the sewage system that eventually dumps into the Columbia River.

No Lawful Authority to Interfere with Appropriated Water. Another Crime without a Name

• Governor Signs Basin Agreement  Governor John Kitzhaber and other Oregon and California leaders are gathering this morning for the official signing of the historic Upper Klamath Basin Comprehensive Agreement.  

No It Is NOT State Land . . . . Federally Owned NEITHER.
Listen to Why Behind The Woodshed

• Do the Fed’s Really Own the Land in Nevada? Nope!  “The United States never held any municipal sovereignty, jurisdiction, or right of soil in and to the territory of which Alabama, or any of the new States, were formed, except for temporary purposes, and to execute the trusts created by the acts of the Virginia and Georgia legislatures, and the deeds of cession executed by them to the United States, and the trust created by the treaty of the 30th April, 1803, with the French Republic ceding Louisiana.”

Similar Posts:

• Behind The Woodshed Blogcaster – February 2, 2014.
• Behind The Woodshed Blogcaster – March 23, 2014.
• Behind The Woodshed Blogcaster – May 4, 2014.