Society – Page 618 – Infinite Unknown

Poverty, Pension Fears Drive Japan’s Elderly Citizens to Crime

November 14, 2008 by Infinite

Elderly customers shop in a grocery store in Tokyo, Aug. 12, 2005. Photographer: Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg News

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) — More senior citizens are picking pockets and shoplifting in Japan to cope with cuts in government welfare spending and rising health-care costs in a fast-ageing society.

Criminal offences by people 65 or older doubled to 48,605 in the five years to 2008, the most since police began compiling national statistics in 1978, a Ministry of Justice report said.

Theft is the most common crime of senior citizens, many of whom face declining health, low incomes and a sense of isolation, the report said. Elderly crime may increase in parallel with poverty rates as Japan enters another recession and the budget deficit makes it harder for the government to provide a safety net for people on the fringes of society.

“The elderly are turning to shoplifting as an increasing number of them lack assets and children to depend on,” Masahiro Yamada, a sociology professor at Chuo University in Tokyo and an author of books on income disparity in Japan, said in an interview yesterday. “We won’t see the decline of elderly crimes as long as the income gap continues to rise.”

Family homelessness rising in the United States

November 12, 2008 by Infinite

A man sweeps the area outside his tent with a broken broom at “tent city”, a terminus for the homeless in Ontario, a suburb outside Los Angeles, California December 19, 2007. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to help middle-class U.S. homeowners facing foreclosure, but he has said little about how he will help low-income families made homeless by a worsening economy.

Obama has spoken broadly about boosting affordable housing and restoring public housing subsidies. But with economists forecasting a deep recession in 2009, he may find it hard to find the money to fulfill those promises soon.

At the same time, advocacy groups and the country’s czar for combating homelessness say immediate action is needed to halt the foreclosures of tens of thousands of homes and rehouse thousands of families amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

“President-elect Obama understands the economy will only get back on track if we end the foreclosure crisis. And he realizes that part of ending the crisis is both preventing and ending homelessness for families losing their homes,” said Jeremy Rosen of the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness.

World is facing a natural resources crisis worse than financial crunch

October 30, 2008 by Infinite

• Two planets need by 2030 at this rate, warns report
• Humans using 30% more resources than sustainable

The world is heading for an “ecological credit crunch” far worse than the current financial crisis because humans are over-using the natural resources of the planet, an international study warns today.

The Living Planet report calculates that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. As a result, we are running up an ecological debt of $4tr (£2.5tr) to $4.5tr every year – double the estimated losses made by the world’s financial institutions as a result of the credit crisis – say the report’s authors, led by the conservation group WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund. The figure is based on a UN report which calculated the economic value of services provided by ecosystems destroyed annually, such as diminished rainfall for crops or reduced flood protection.

Homeless numbers are alarming

October 21, 2008 by Infinite

Thomas Malinowski, 48, who lived on New York’s streets for 13 years, sits on his cot in the “Safe Haven” shelter in Manhattan on January 21, 2007.

FORECLOSURES INCREASING

A surge in families seeking housing aid or shelter has followed rising home foreclosures nationwide.

Foreclosures Jan.-Aug.

2006: 801,354

2007: 1,341,295

2008: 2,049,782

Source: RealtyTrac

More families with children are becoming homeless as they face mounting economic pressures, including mortgage foreclosures, according to a USA TODAY survey of a dozen of the largest cities in the nation.

Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.

“Everywhere I go, I hear there is an increase” in the need for housing aid, especially for families, says Philip Mangano, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates federal programs. He says the main causes are job losses and foreclosures.

Other factors have been higher food and fuel prices hitting families with “no cushion,” says Nan Roman of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F—- You

October 18, 2008 by Infinite

From the Scorched Earth Files:

Andrew Lahde, manager of a small California hedge fund, Lahde Capital, burst into the spotlight last year after his one-year-old fund returned 866 percent betting against the subprime collapse.

Last month, he did the unthinkable — he shut things down, claiming dealing with his bank counterparties had become too risky. Today, Lahde passed along his “goodbye” letter, a rollicking missive on everything from greed to economic philosophy. Enjoy.

Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would be entirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts in previous letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” I could not agree more with that statement. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

There are far too many people for me to sincerely thank for my success. However, I do not want to sound like a Hollywood actor accepting an award. The money was reward enough. Furthermore, the endless list those deserving thanks know who they are.

Read moreHedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F—- You

Lahde quits hedge funds, thanking “stupid” traders for making him rich.

October 18, 2008 by Infinite

NEW YORK, Oct 17 (Reuters) – Andrew Lahde, the hedge fund founder who shot to fame with his small fund that soared 870 percent last year on bets against U.S. subprime home loans, has called it quits, thanking “stupid” traders for making him rich.

In a biting, but humorous letter to investors posted on the website of Portfolio magazine on Friday, Lahde told investors last month he will no longer manage money because his bank counterparties had become too risky.

Lahde ripped his profession in the letter. He noted another hedge-fund manager who recently closed shop and was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying: “What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it.” To which Lahde responded, “I could not agree more with that statement.

“The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking,” said Lahde, who according to the website birthdates.com is 37.

“These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.”

Police clash with police in Brazil violence

October 17, 2008 by Infinite

Striking police officers were embroiled in a mass-melee with hundreds of their own colleagues in riot gear who policed their protest, amid bizarre scenes in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo.

The clashes between state police and plainclothes investigators last night came after the demonstrators tried to break through a barrier protecting the state government palace. Officers fired shots, tear gas and shock bombs, and the scuffles broke out.

Critics will highlight the incident as another example of the chaotic and dysfunctional nature of policing in Brazil. Last year, the UN pointed out that very low salaries – over which officers are currently striking – encourage widespread corruption, with many police units forming their own vigilante groups, death squads and militias.

It also sharply criticised Brazilian police for major human rights violations, pointing out that many of the 694 deaths caused by officers between January and June 2007 in Rio were likely to have been extra-judicial killings.

Officers are also known to engage in gunfire with Rio’s heavily armed drug gangs. Innocent civilians are often caught in the crossfire.

India terrorised by holy war

October 11, 2008 by Infinite

A holy war in India has left tens of thousands of Christians crammed into relief camps, too scared to return home following weeks of clashes with Hindu mobs in which at least 35 people have died.

More than 40,000 Christians have had to flee their homes in Kandhamal district, one of India’s poorest, in the eastern state of Orissa. Their homes have been systematically attacked, looted and burned down by Hindu mobs since the end of August as the local police have looked on helplessly.

“Villagers have threatened to kill me because I am a Christian. They have said I will be welcome back only if I change my religion and become a Hindu,” said Jibit Kumar Digal, 30, who has spent over a month in a relief camp at Baliguda, 200 south west of the provincial capital Bhubaneswar.

Aligned to the radical Hindu Opposition Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the marauding mobs supported by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council, are alleged to have killed Christians by burnign them alive, gang-raped a nun and destroyed over 140 churches and orphanages across Kandhamal.

Zeitgeist: Addendum

October 8, 2008 by Infinite

Added: Oct 3, 2008

Source: Google Video

American financier kills his family and himself after losing fortune in credit crunch

October 7, 2008 by Infinite

Tragedy: A coroner’s assistant brings out a body

A businessman gunned down five members of his family then shot himself after seeing his family’s fortune wiped out by the stock market collapse.

Karthik Rajaram, 45, who had made almost £900,000 on the London stock market, shot his wife, three children and mother-in-law in the head before turning the gun on himself at the family home near Los Angeles.

He was found with the gun still in his hand.

In a suicide note to police, he blamed the killings on financial hardship brought on by a collapse in shares.

Los Angeles Police Deputy Chief Michael Moore said: ‘The source of it appears to be a financial state, a crisis that this man became embroiled in that has unfolded over the past weeks.

‘We believe he has become despondent recently over financial dealings and the financial situation of his household and that this is a direct result of that.

‘This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed,’ he added. ‘It is critical for us to step up and recognise we are in some pretty troubled times.’

Using a handgun bought on 16 September, Rajaram went from room to room, picking off the family one-by-one.

France’s former elite go on trial over arms trade

October 7, 2008 by Infinite

The son of a former French president, an Israeli-Russian billionaire and a tycoon with ties to Arizona’s jet set were among the headliners yesterday as 42 defendants went on trial in Paris, accused in a worldwide web of trafficked arms to Angola, money laundering and kickbacks.

Defense lawyers and Angola’s government are trying to stop the show, however, arguing the trial has no right to go on.

Prosecutors allege that between 1993 and 1998, two key suspects – French magnate Pierre Falcone, a longtime resident of Scottsdale, Arizona, and Arkady Gaydamak, an Israeli businessman based in France at the time – organized a total of $791 million in Russian arms sales to Angola, a breach of French government rules.

Most of the other suspects are accused of receiving money or gifts, undeclared to tax authorities, from a company run by Falcone in exchange for political or commercial favors. Investigators say the corruption grew into a tangle of laundered money and parallel diplomacy that left a stain on France’s relations with Africa.

Among the defendants who filed into a Paris courthouse Monday were icons of France’s political elite – including late President Francois Mitterrand’s eldest son, Jean-Christophe, and an economic adviser to current President Nicolas Sarkozy, Jacques Attali.

Economic chaos creates surge in homelessness

October 7, 2008 by Infinite

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (AP) — The number of homeless families in Massachusetts has surged — a spike that has overwhelmed the state’s shelter capacity and forced it to again place homeless families in motels.

The number of homeless families living in Massachusetts motels skyrocketed in September 2008.

Driving the increase is the sour economy, rising energy costs, escalating unemployment and shortage of affordable housing. For the first time, the state is tracking how many families are winding up homeless due to foreclosures.

“You’re seeing a perfect storm,” said Robyn Frost, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless.

Finnish Student Kills 10 at College, Commits Suicide

September 23, 2008 by Infinite

Such actions are just a mirror of our society.
If you have time do some research on Prozac, Zoloft and Ritalin(= Concerta) linked to school shootings and suicide. _________________________________________________________________________________

Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) — A student in Finland opened fire at his college in the western town of Kauhajoki, killing 10 people before turning his gun on himself, the government said, in the country’s second school shooting in a year.

Gunfire erupted at 10:54 a.m. local time, Interior Minister Anne Holmlund said, and police surrounded the catering school, about 330 kilometers (205 miles) from Helsinki. The suspect died from a gunshot wound to the head, said Rauno Ihalainen, director of the Pirkanmaa hospital district. At least one other person was injured in the incident.

India: where Christians are a target for the religious murder mobs

December 12, 2008September 7, 2008 by Infinite

Namrata, a young Christian villager who was injured in an attack by a Hindu mob

The mob appeared an hour after sunset, armed with axes, clubs and paraffin. The carnage that followed would have been much worse if the Christians of Gadragaon, a remote village in northeast India, had not been warned by text message: “The Hindus are coming to kill you.”

The alert gave most enough time to flee to the jungle, where 114 of them would hide for a week, drinking rainwater and foraging for food.

But the warning did not come early enough for those unable to run. “They doused him with petrol and taunted him; we could hear him screaming,” said Ravindra Nath Prahan, 45, of his paralysed brother, Rasananda, 35, who was burnt alive by Hindu fanatics. “I could have tried to save him. But we had to save ourselves.”

Spy Grid Part Of Consumer Technology

July 9, 2010May 3, 2008 by Infinite

Tech savy proponents might think it’s great, meanwhile skeptics and naysayers still deny its existence, but microphones and internal listening devices are being installed in hi-tech hardware, and have been for several years.

Motorola released a fact sheet concerning their next generation HD cable boxes and broadband devices and admitted that:

This innovative plug-and-play technology enables broadband operators to offer consumers a way to control their digital services by voice commands with no complicated set-up or the need for training. Consumers can “talk” to their TV through a remote which incorporates a microphone. By just spoken commands, they can navigate digital programming, the IPG and on-demand services using phrases like “scan sports” or “find movies with Julia Roberts”. From a consumer’s perspective, the solution only requires a small receiver which attaches to the cable set-top to receive signals from the enhanced remote. The technology, which recognizes over 100,000 phrases and deciphers multiple languages, has been field tested in an alpha deployment on the Motorola DCT2000 digital set-top platform.”

The next generation equipment is being fused by Motorola into their ‘AgileTv‘ program, which will allow customers to use voice commands to search and choose programs, listen to music, order movies, etc etc. The program is called ‘PromptU’ and promises to allow seamless voice recognition in order to remove tedious typing and scanning by customers to find what they want. The PromptU spoken search is described as:

“Phones can support more content than ever, and subscribers want it all: ringtones, games, wallpapers, songs and videos. There are hundreds of thousands of titles, and the selection grows daily. Yet subscribers don’t buy as much as they could, because looking for content with text searches, or endless scrolling and clicking, is frustrating. Too many searches are abandoned or not even attempted. Promptu Spoken Search™ changes everything. With Promptu finding content as easy as asking for it. For example, requesting “Tiger Woods,” “Coldplay,” “Spiderman,” or any other favorite from a mobile handset returns on-target search results instantly, from across all types of content. So subscribers find everything they want, and discover all kinds of related titles to buy in the process.”

Last year Microsoft also acquired its own listening technology in the Tellme Networks which will allow consumers to choose and interact with multimedia via voice recognition software over their own systems. Of course what they won’t tell you is how these voice recognition commands will be interpreted, which of course will be done by internal audio devices called microphones – implemented into the hardware via remotes, boxes, or even ones as small as mobiles and pdas.

Bill Gates has been championing this next generation, interactive technology, and in his Strategic Account Summit speech last year, he glowed over the introduction and acceptance of this new technology by customers. Apparently, the industry is ecstatic that the privacy concerns aren’t presenting any kind of hurdle for consumers who are only intent on getting things that are bigger, faster, and in higher resolution. As long as it blinks and lets them veg out, all the better.

Web 2.0 should actually be called World 2.0 and will incorporate technology into every aspect of our lives, even more so than it is now. The next generation of cable boxes, internet, IPTV, VOIP, iphones, PDAs, and mobiles are all being absorbed into the control grid; and the cameras, microphones and other spy technology is just being pitched to the public as a product feature, rather than the all-invasive big brother hardware that it is. Private companies don’t mind it because it allows more focused marketing strategies, ie more profits for the bottom line; and of course governments love it because it allows them to circumvent privacy rights by integrating with companies in order to use this technology grid to spy on its own people.

But to simplify it all, yes, microphones exist in our cable boxes and computers, and will continue to be used, whether we accept it or not. The corporations are listening, the governments are listening; are you?

05-02-2008
Ethan Allen

Source: Rogue Government

Fluoride, Aspartame And Agenda 21 (Video)

November 1, 2013March 22, 2008 by Infinite

“Fluoride causes more human cancer, and causes it faster, than any other chemical.”
– Dean Burk, Chief Chemist Emeritus, US National Cancer Institute

YouTube

More on Aspartame: HERE

More on Agenda 21: HERE

More info on fluoride:

– Dr. Dean Burk Former Head Of National Cancer Institute Research: ‘Fluoridated Water Amounts To Public Murder On A Grand Scale’ (Video)

– ‘The Great Culling: Our Water’ (Documentary – Trailers)

– Non Organic Foods That Contain Upwards Of 180 Times The Fluoride Level Of Tap Water

– Guinness Made In Dublin Brings You FLUORIDE!

– Dr. Paul Connett: The Case Against Water Fluoridation – The Truth About Fluoride (Video)

– Fluoridegate (Documentary)

– 25 Studies Prove That Fluoride Reduces Your IQ

FBI Taps Cell Phone Microphone As Surveillance Tool

August 15, 2010February 15, 2008 by Infinite

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the “roving bug” was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect’s cell phone.

Kaplan’s opinion said that the eavesdropping technique “functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.” Some handsets can’t be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.

While the Genovese crime family prosecution appears to be the first time a remote-eavesdropping mechanism has been used in a criminal case, the technique has been discussed in security circles for years.

The U.S. Commerce Department’s security office warns that “a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone.” An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can “remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner’s knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call.”

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. “They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time,” he said. “You can do that without having physical access to the phone.”