Former FBI agent and current ACLU lawyer Michael German shares some insights into the mentality behind the arrests of journos and other mostly harmless people at some shindig or other that was going on in St. Paul, MN this week.
He cites guidelines issued to the LAPD:
It lists 65 behaviors that they say are behaviors related to terrorism, and the one that pertains here is “takes pictures or video footage.” [The entry on p. 40 reads: “Takes pictures or video footage (with no apparent esthetic value, i.e., camera angles, security equipment, security personnel, traffic lights, building entrances, etc.).”] “No apparent esthetic values?” So apparently they’re going to be sending police officers to art school to understand esthetic values.
But it actually mentions taking video footage of taking video footage of security personnel. So the mere taking of photographs or video footage of law enforcement – even law enforcement doing something improperly – they’ve identified that as a precursor to terrorism. So now you might understand why these police officers are focusing on people with cameras. It’s because it’s actual policy to do so.
When the sun is more active, several sunspots can appear on a daily basis. However, very few have been spotted in 2008. It wasn’t until August 21 and 22 that the Solar Influences Data Analysis reported the glimpse of one dark spot….Experts say the question is not when will the sunspots reappear, but rather how fast will their numbers increase once they start to appear.
Scientists from Norway, The US and Sweden found that the number of infections in the US seemed to shift along with changing climate conditions known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
The outbreaks seemed to occur during times of warm, wet conditions, authors wrote in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.
Global warming might mean fewer cases in a hotter, drier North America, but parts of the world expected to see warmer, moister tempertures might not be so lucky.
Neuron presents evidence that subliminal learning occurs in humans. The researchers observed how people perceived differences in new, unfamiliar symbols.
The researchers collected scans of the brain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, to investigate the specific brain circuitry that is linked to subliminal instrumental conditioning. “The ventral striatum responded to subliminal cues and to visible outcomes in a manner that closely approximates our computational algorithm, expressing reward expected values and prediction errors,” says Dr. [Mathias] Pessiglione [U. College, London]. “We conclude that, even without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brain can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making.”
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Former FBI agent and current ACLU lawyer Michael German shares some insights into the mentality behind the arrests of journos and other mostly harmless people at some shindig or other that was going on in St. Paul, MN this week.
They’re scarce this year.
Outbreaks of bubonic plague in the U.S.
Worth a spin; has considerable charm.