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The Lebensborn Society: “The Chosen Ones” Speak Out

“They stare blankly into the lens, their lips tellingly pursed. All are the Norwegian subjects of a terrifying Nazi experiment. All were involved in one of the most shocking trials of eugenics the world has ever known. All are Lebensborn – the “spring of life”. And all are here to tell their stories for the first time.

The Lebensborn Society was born on 12 December 1935, the brainchild of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s right-hand man and head of the SS. He had designed a project to promote an “Aryan future” for the Third Reich and turn around a declining birth rate in Germany. People were given incentives to have more children in the Fatherland as well as in occupied countries, most importantly in Scandinavia, where the Nordic gene – and its blond-haired, blue-eyed progeny – was considered classically Aryan.

But after the conflict had ended, many of the Norwegians born into the programme suffered. In an attempt to distance itself from the occupying forces, the Norwegian government publicly vilified the children born by Norwegian mothers and Nazi fathers. Many of those children subsequently experienced intense bullying, and in some cases, extreme mental and physical abuse. In recent years, a Lebensborn group in Norway has been fighting what it sees as the Norwegian government’s complicity in their horrific ordeal.”

(via The Independent)

The bankruptcy of the Unites States of America

January 19, 2008 / Fell

While this is an interesting and short read, worth its perusal, I found this little snippet quite interesting about possible solutions to help the U.S. out of its sinking situation. I’m interested in the first point, but like I said, the whole thing is worth reading:

We might possibly be saved, he explains, if the nation engages in massive, radical reform in three areas: 1) Eliminating the current income tax system and moving to a national retail sales tax of 33 percent. 2) Privatizing social security so that workers own their savings accounts and the federal government can no longer swipe funds from Social Security. 3) Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.

Full article via NewsTarget, by Mike Adams

Brain scans reveal that inflation gets you hot

January 15, 2008 / Fell

From io9:

Inflated prices trigger the pleasure centers in your brain more than fair ones. Not only is the idea of buying something expensive more exciting than buying something on sale, but you’ll actually get more genuine pleasure out of something expensive — even if it’s not worth the cost. A group of social scientists at CalTech and Stanford discovered this not-entirely-unexpected fact when they stuck people into MRI brain scanners and gave them several glasses of wine, assigning each one a random price.

In point of fact, all the wines were exactly the same. But the results of the MRI scans showed greater neurological activity in people’s pleasure centers when they were told they were drinking expensive wine. The best (creepiest?) part of all this is that the authors of the study hope to use these findings to manipulate consumers. The authors write:

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.

Yes, marketing can modulate your neurological system. You already knew that, but somehow finding out that there’s an objective truth to it in a brain scanner makes it feel more like Big Brother than Brooks Brothers.

Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness

Boy Is Empowered By His Weakness

January 7, 2008 / TiamatsVision

“Every Wednesday at the Sydney M. Irmas Transitional Living Center in North Hollywood, Michael Guggenheim teaches a handful of students how to type their names and basic phrases in Microsoft Word and how to work with math, vocabulary and typing programs. At a recent tutoring session, Michael moved between the laptops used by shelter residents Alicia Lewis and Heaven Sanders, both 7. He coached them for 30 minutes on typing their names, then switched to a half hour of vocabulary and math games

“Michael, I’m lost,” Heaven said, resting her face on her hands. He quickly went to her computer and punched the “load” button on the keyboard to get the software working. Another student in distress, another rescue. But Michael is not just another teacher. He is 12, a sixth-grader at Los Encinos School in Encino. He can’t drive, vote or write much with a pencil, but he started a nonprofit when he was 11 and teaches computer skills to elementary students once a week.

He doesn’t regard his dysgraphia, a learning disorder that severely impairs writing, as a disability. Instead, he has turned it into a driving force. For starters, he was quick to discover that he could use a computer, and now he earns straight A’s using a laptop for course work. Later, he started the nonprofit organization that takes laptops and educational software to elementary school children in homeless shelters.”

(via LA Times)

(Splat Charity)

Taser Parties? No Kidding

January 5, 2008 / TiamatsVision

Forget about Tupperware and sex toy parties. How about having a Taser party instead? My thoughts on this are mixed. On the one hand I think it would be great to have one when walking alone at night or kept in the house for protection. On the other hand I could see certain people abusing it. Would we would hear more stories of a person getting blasted with one because they looked at someone wrong, or said something offensive? It’s good to know they do background checks on people who purchase them. But, what about the people who attend the party? What if it’s bought as a gift for someone? Some of these questions were probably asked when pepper spray was introduced to the public. You don’t hear of massive abuse with that. A few cases every now and then, but that’s it. Readers, what do you think?

“Before she lets them shoot her little pink stun gun, Dana Shafman ushers her new friends to the living room sofa for a serious chat about the fears she believes they all share. “The worst nightmare for me is, while I’m sleeping, someone coming in my home,” Shafman says, drawing a few solemn nods from the gathered women. Shafman, 34, of Phoenix, says she knows how they feel. She says she used to stash knives under her pillow for protection. Welcome, she says, to the Taser party. On the coffee table, Shafman spreads out Taser’s C2 “personal protector” weapons that the company is marketing to the public. It doesn’t take long before the women are lined up in the hallway, whooping as they take turns blasting at a metallic target. “C’mon!” she says. “Give it a shot.”

Shafman isn’t an employee for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Taser International. She’s an independent entrepreneur who’s been selling Tasers the way her mother’s generation sold plastic food storage containers.”

(via The Chicago Tribune)

U.S. image abroad handled by old Texan women. I’m not kidding

January 3, 2008 / Fell

Was reading my new issue of Print — a design magazine I subscribe to — and the new issue is dedicated to “global graphics that inform, incite and inspire.” Anyone interested in propaganda might wanna check it out, as design has played a huge part in swaying public opinion for well over a century now.

On pg 72 (Print, Feb 2008), in “From Despotism to Destination,” Ben Carmichael writes about rebranding nations. He exposes American propaganda in the Middle East:

Countries that try to fake an image are countries that court disgrace — which is precisely what the U.S. got as a result of a disastrous recent campaign. Shortly after September 11, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell hired Ogilvy & Mather veteran Charlotte Beers to launch a pro-American advertising and public relations effort in the Middle East. As Powell put it, the goal was “to rebrand American foreign policy.” As a part of her “Shared Values” campaign, in 2002 Beers launched Hi magazine, meant for modern Arabic youth, Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language radio station, debuted the same year, and Alhurra, an Arabic-language satellite TV station, went on the air in 2004. Both are funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, formerly known as the United States Information Agency. So negative was Arab countries’ reaction to Beers’s programs that she left in 2003 before many of them got off the ground, though Radio Sawa and Alhurra are still on the air. Her successor, Margaret Tutwiler, lasted five months; Karen Hughes, who remained in office for two and a half years, announced her resignation on Halloween.

Karen Parfitt Hughes (born December 27, 1956) is a Republican politician from the state of Texas. She served as the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the U.S. Department of State with the rank of ambassador. She resides in Austin, Texas.

Karen Hughes To Work on The World’s View of U.S.
Can Karen Hughes help US image abroad?

Charlotte Beers (born July 26, 1935 in Beaumont, Texas) is an American businesswoman and former Under Secretary of State.

She was the first female vice-president at the JWT advertising firm, then CEO of Tatham-Laird & Kudner until 1992, and finally CEO of Ogilvy & Mather until 1996. In 1997, Fortune magazine placed her on the cover of their first issue to feature the most powerful women in America, for her achievements in the advertising industry. In 1999, Beers received the “Legend in Leadership Award” from the Chief Executive Leadership Institute of the Yale School of Management.

From October 2001 until March 2003, she worked for the Bush Administration administration as the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Bush’s Muslim propaganda chief quits
The invasion of Iraq hasn’t begun, but the U.S. marketing machine has been going strong

Aside from noting a few critical mistakes that they seem to have made with their Middle East propaganda efforts, it’s just that public image abroad is flagrant propaganda maintained by really old Republican Texan women. Ugh.

I came across Hughes name a second time in two days in the Washington Post article having to do with “Persistence of Myths Could Alter Public Policy Approach“:

Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Those notions remain widespread even though the federal government now runs Web sites in seven languages to challenge them. Karen Hughes, who runs the Bush administration’s campaign to win hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism, recently painted a glowing report of the “digital outreach” teams working to counter misinformation and myths by challenging those ideas on Arabic blogs.

Era of the hunter-gatherer not a social or environmental Eden

December 30, 2007 / Klint Finley

Not so many women as men die in warfare, it is true. But that is because they are often the object of the fighting. To be abducted as a sexual prize was almost certainly a common female fate in hunter-gatherer society. Forget the Garden of Eden; think Mad Max.

Constant warfare was necessary to keep population density down to one person per square mile. Farmers can live at 100 times that density. Hunter-gatherers may have been so lithe and healthy because the weak were dead. The invention of agriculture and the advent of settled society merely swapped high mortality for high morbidity, allowing people some relief from chronic warfare so they could at least grind out an existence, rather than being ground out of existence altogether.

Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. When rural peasants swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell of their birth.

Full Story: The Economist.

You’re not sorry? That’s OK

December 29, 2007 / TiamatsVision

I admit it. I’ve always had a problem with this. I “forgive and let go” eventually but only after much time has passed, and after a lot of venting. I do it mainly as a “gift” to myself for health reasons. And not always for the person who wronged me. So, can this be called forgiveness? Along with my fascination with the problem of evil, I found it necessary to study the other side of coin. What exactly is forgiveness and is it something we can learn? I ordered some periodicals from the International Instutite of Forgiveness, when it was first established in the early 90’s. The publication is no longer being published, but I’ve provided a link to their site in case anyone wants to order back copies that are still available. There are also a lot of great books out there on it as well.

“CLOSE your eyes and think of someone who has hurt you. The offense may be profound or small but deeply painful, a single arrow to your heart or a thousand wounding slights. The perpetrator may be a stranger — the guy who caused your accident, the gang-banger who took your child. More likely, it will be someone close and trusted. The sister who killed herself. The parent who lashed out, the spouse mired in addiction, an unfaithful lover. Maybe it’s the boss who’s a tyrant, the business partner who’s an idiot, the trickster who seduced you. It might even be yourself. Let all the anger, hurt and resentment you feel for that wrongdoer bubble to the surface. Seethe, shout, savor it. Feel your heart pounding, your blood boiling, your stomach churning and your thoughts racing in dark directions.

OK, stop. Now, forgive your offender. Don’t just shed the bitterness and drop the recrimination, but empathize with his plight, wish him well and move on — whether he’s sorry or not.”

(via The LA Times)

(International Forgiveness Institute)

Also an excellent site that deals with conflict resolution: Beyond Intractability.

The Top 10 Data Breaches of 2007

December 27, 2007 / TiamatsVision

“If there’s only one thing you’ll remember from 2007, it will be Britney Spears’ meltdown. But if there are two things you remember, it will be Britney and the thousands of data breaches that were reported in 2007, right? Right? Well, it’s what we’ll remember, and since we don’t necessarily do celeb gossip (unless you’ve got a good security angle…) we decided to offer up a review of the best and worst of Disclosure ’07.

Each breach gets rated on our nifty, unscientific “Class-Action Outrage Scale,” judging the likelihood that ambulance-chasing lawyers could have a field day. Look out Monster.com: We estimate nine of 10 lawyers are outraged on behalf of your 1.3 million victims. Our “D’oh! Factor” (thank you, Homer Simpson) reflects just how egregious and goofy the breach was. Take a look at how Swedish Urology Group earned itself five out of five Homers. Ick. Some breaches on our list are serious. Some are funny. And some are just plain sad. But all of them were probably preventable. Alas.”

(via CSO)

The Pentagon’s Electronic Warfare Program

December 26, 2007 / TiamatsVision

“In 2003, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a document called the Information Operation Roadmap which outlined, among other things, the Pentagon’s desire to dominate the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

From the Information Operation Roadmap:

“We Must Improve Network and Electro-Magnetic Attack Capability. To prevail in an information-centric fight, it is increasingly important that our forces dominate the electromagnetic spectrum with attack capabilities.” [emphasis mine] – 6

“Cover the full range of EW [Electronic Warfare] missions and capabilities, including navigation warfare, offensive counterspace, control of adversary radio frequency systems that provide location and identification of friend and foe, etc.” – 61

“Provide a future EW capability sufficient to provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, denying, degrading, disrupting, or destroying the full spectrum of globally emerging communication systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependant on the electromagnetic spectrum.” [emphasis mine] – 61

“DPG [Defense Planning Guidance] 04 tasked USD(AT&L) [Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics], in coordination with the CJCS [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and Services, to develop recommendations to transform and extend EW capabilities, … to detect, locate and attack the full spectrum of globally emerging telecommunications equipment, situation awareness sensors and weapons engagement technologies operating within the electromagnetic spectrum.” [emphasis mine] – 59″

(via Global Research)

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