Matt Drudge: “Something Doesn’t Feel Right In D.C.”

Super SEALs? "Promising Signs" From Navy SpecOps' "Brain-Stimulating Technologies"

At a conference near Washington, D.C., in February, Military.com's Hope Hodge Seck reports that the commander of all Navy special operations units made an unusual request to industry: Develop and demonstrate technologies that offer "cognitive enhancement" capabilities to boost his elite forces' mental and physical performance. 

"We plan on using that in mission enhancement," Rear Adm. Tim Szymanski said. "The performance piece is really critical to the life of our operators."

Seck reports that Szymanski expanded on his remarks in a brief interview later, saying he has his eye on a number of technologies, including pharmaceutical aids. But the results of one breakthrough involving the direct application of electrical stimulation to the brain have particularly caught his eye.

"In experiments, people who were watching these screens ... their ability to concentrate would fall off in about 20 minutes," Szymanski said. "But they did studies whereby a little bit of electrical stimulation was applied, and they were able to maintain the same peak performance for 20 hours."

Transcranial electrical stimulation was one of the technologies touted by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter in July 2016 as part of his Defense Innovation Unit (Experimental), or DIUx, initiative. Since then, multiple SEAL units have begun actively testing the effectiveness of the technology, officials with Naval Special Warfare Command told Military.com.

"Earlier this year, Naval Special Warfare units, working with DIUx, began a specific cognitive enhancement project with a small group of volunteers to test and evaluate achieving higher performance through the use of neuro-stimulation technology," Capt. Jason Salata, a spokesman for the command, said in a statement.

The elements testing the technology include Naval Special Warfare Development Group, the unit known more popularly as SEAL Team Six. Other teams are also conducting tests, Salata said. He declined to confirm how many operators are participating in the testing, or to cite specific findings to date. But there have been positive outcomes so far, he said.

"Early results show promising signs," he said. "Based on this, we are encouraged to continue and are moving forward with our studies."

The company that makes the brain-stimulating device -- a headset that could be mistaken for a pair of Beats by Dre headphones -- is Halo Neuroscience. And the technology offers not cognitive enhancement, but neuro-priming, Chief Technology Officer and Company Co-Founder Brett Wingeier told Military.com.

Developed for elite athletes, the headset purports to work by stimulating the brain to enter a state of hyper-elasticity, allowing users to learn better and more efficiently. In physical training, he said, the technology has proven useful in developing explosive power for athletes whose sports require vertical leaps or sudden starts.

For operators, the same system could improve shooting performance, Wingeier said.

"Whatever you're training on as far as a movement-based skill," he said, "if you do deep practice, hard repetition, this accelerates the benefit of that."

Regardless of the technology or method, he said it is important that the military conduct robust tests and demonstrations on aids to human performance, contributing resources to making the warfighter stronger and more resilient the way it did to developing cutting-edge aircraft and gear.

"You really want to test these things in high-end training environments, which could tell you, do these matter in a warfare scenario," he said. "We need to really believe that investing in the human makes sense."

Szymanski signaled an interest in testing other performance-enhancement technologies, as well as pharmaceutical aids such as blood testosterone in the future. But he said he's approaching the field of enhancements carefully, with an eye to side effects, and warning operators not to take the first steps on their own.

"I'm always anxious, because I'm in a community of risk-takers," he said. "Guys may want to try experimenting on their own, which is against policy and has to be completely drug-tested and those types of things. So I'd want to do that in a very systematic kind of way."

Credit to Zero Hedge

Trudeau “Christians are the worst part of Canadian society”

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau brought more than 30,000 refugees to Canada over the last year and half , mostly refugees who fled war torn countries like Syria.

Most of those refugees were Muslims, some reports say 99 percent of refugees that came to Canada were Muslim.

Why didn’t Trudeau bring Christian or Jew refugees to Canada who fled rape, beatings and many more sufferings, Trudeau seems to hate Christians, he says: “Christians are the worst part of Canadian society”

Credit to jewsnews.co.il

http://www.jewsnews.co.il/2017/03/31/trudeau-christians-are-the-worst-part-of-canadian-society.html

The Ticking Time Bomb That Will Wipe Out Virtually Every Pension Fund In America

Are millions of Americans about to see the big, juicy pensions that they were counting on to fund their golden years go up in flames in the biggest financial disaster in U.S. history? When Bloomberg published an editorial entitled “Pension Crisis Too Big for Markets to Ignore“, it simply confirmed what a lot of people already knew to be true.  Pension funds all over America are woefully underfunded, and they have been pouring mind boggling amounts of money into very risky investments such as Internet stocks and commercial mortgages.  Just like with subprime mortgages in 2008, this is a crisis that everyone can see coming well in advance, and yet nothing is being done about it.

On a day to day basis, Americans generally don’t think very much about pensions.  Most of those that have been promised pensions simply have faith that they will be there when they need them.

Unfortunately, the truth is that pension plans all over the country are severely underfunded, and this has already resulted in local fiascos such as the one that we just witnessed in Dallas.

But what happened in Dallas is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg.  According to Bloomberg, unfunded pension obligations on a national basis “have risen to $1.9 trillion from $292 billion since 2007″…

As was the case with the subprime crisis, the writing appears to be on the wall. And yet calamity has yet to strike. How so? Call it the triumvirate of conspirators – the actuaries, accountants and their accomplices in office. Throw in the law of big numbers, very big numbers, and you get to a disaster in a seemingly permanent state of making. Unfunded pension obligations have risen to $1.9 trillion from $292 billion since 2007.

And of course that $1.9 trillion number is not actually the real number.

That same Bloomberg article goes on to admit that if honest math was being used that the real number would actually be closer to 6 trillion dollars…

So why not just flip the switch and require truth and honesty in public pension math? Too many cities and potentially states would buckle under the weight of more realistic assumed rates of return. By some estimates, unfunded liabilities would triple to upwards of $6 trillion if the prevailing yields on Treasuries were used. That would translate into much steeper funding requirements at a time when budgets are already severely constrained. Pockets of the country would face essential public service budgets being slashed to dangerous levels.

So where are all of these pensions eventually going to come up with 6 trillion dollars?

That is a very good question.

Ultimately, even if financial conditions stay as stable as they are right now, a whole lot of people are not going to get the money that they were promised.

But things will get really “interesting” if we see a major downturn in the financial markets.  According to Dave Kranzler, if the stock market were to fall by 10 percent or more and stay there for a number of months, that “would cause every single public pension fund to blow up”.  And Kranzler is also deeply concerned about the tremendous amount of exposure that these pension funds have to commercial mortgages…

Circling back to the mall/REIT ticking time-bomb, while the Fed can keep the stock market propped up as means of preventing an immediate nuclear melt-down in U.S. pensions (all of which are substantially “maxed-out” in their mandated equities allocation), the collapse of commercial mortgage-back securities (CMBS) will have the affect of launching a nuclear sub-missile directly into the side of the U.S. financial system.

The commercial mortgage market is about $3 trillion, of which about $1 trillion has been packaged into asset-backed securities and stuffed into yield-starved pension funds. Without a doubt, the same degree of fraud of has been used to concoct the various tranches in these CMBS trusts that was employed during the mid-2000’s mortgage/housing bubble, with full cooperation of the ratings agencies then and now. Just like in 2008, with the derivatives that have been layered into the mix, the embedded leverage in the commercial mortgage/CMBS/REIT model is the financial equivalent of the Fukushima nuclear power plant collapse.

I have previously talked about the ongoing retail apocalypse in the United States which threatens to make so many of these commercial mortgage securities go bad.  It is being projected that somewhere around 3,500 stores will close in the months ahead, and this is going to absolutely devastate mall owners.  In turn, it is inevitable that a lot of their debts will start to go bad, and pension funds will be hit extremely hard by this.

But the coming stock market crash is going to hit pension funds even harder.  Stocks are ridiculously overvalued right now, and if they simply return to “normal valuations”, pension funds are going to lose trillions of dollars.

We are talking about a financial tsunami that will be absolutely unprecedented in our history, and yet investors continue to act like the party can last forever.  In fact, we just learned that margin debt on Wall Street has just hit another brand new record high…

The latest data from the New York Stock Exchange show margin debt, or cash borrowed to buy shares, hit a record $528.2 billion in February, up from its prior high of $513.3 billion in January.

Of course my regular readers already know that margin debt also shot up to dramatic peaks just before the last two stock market crashes as well…

Prior periods when margin debt hit records occurred around stock market peaks, including 2000 when the dot-com stock boom went bust, and 2007 when stocks began to crater amid early signs of trouble in the housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis.

Margin debt jumped 22% from the end of 1999 before peaking in March 2000 at $278.5 billion, the same month stocks peaked. In 2007, margin debt shot up to $381.4 billion in July, three months before stocks topped.

We are perfectly primed for the greatest financial disaster in American history, and yet very few people are sounding the alarm.

This massive financial bubble is a ticking time bomb, and when it finally goes off it is going to wipe out virtually every pension fund in the United States.

Credit to Economic Collapse

Russian robot tank in action: Uran-9 performs fire drill

Britain’s airports and nuclear power stations on terror alert

Britain’s airports and nuclear power stations have been told to tighten their defences against terrorist attacks in the face of increased threats to electronic security systems.

Security services have issued a series of alerts in the past 24 hours, warning that terrorists may have developed ways of bypassing safety checks.

Intelligence agencies believe that Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) and other terrorist groups have developed ways to plant explosives in laptops and mobile phones that can evade airport security screening methods.

It is this intelligence which is understood in the past fortnight to have led the US and Britain to ban travellers from a number of countries carrying laptops and large electronic devices on board.

Terrorists attacked Brussels International airport last year. CREDIT: REUTERS


Now there are concerns that terrorists will use the techniques to bypass screening devices at European and US airports.

There were also fears that computer hackers were trying to bypass nuclear power station security measures. Government officials have warned that terrorists, foreign spies and “hacktivists” are looking to exploit “vulnerabilities” in the nuclear industry’s internet defences.

Jesse Norman, the energy minister, told The Telegraph that nuclear plants must make sure that they “remain resilient to evolving cyber threats”.

A series of explosions claimed by the Islamic State group ripped through Brussels airport and a metro train last year. CREDIT: AFP


Mr Norman said: “The Government is fully committed to defending the UK against cyber threats, with a £1.9 billion investment designed to transform this country’s cyber security.”

He said the civil nuclear strategy published in February sets out ways to ensure that the civil nuclear sector “can defend against, recover from, and remain resilient to evolving cyber threats”.

Prof Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, an independent think tank for defence and security, said: “It is important for the Government to respond rapidly to evolving cyber security threats. “The potential threats are wide-ranging and are coming from government and non-government sources. “Crucially there has to be clear co-operation with the private sector to tackle this, especially as airports are usually in private hands.”


Credit to telegraph.co.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/01/airports-nuclear-power-stations-terror-alert-government-officials/

The FDA Admits That Nearly Over 70% of U.S. Chickens Contain Cancer-Causing Arsenic

I don’t know about the rest of you, but lately my poultry purchases at my local market have become more and more of a ‘hit-and-miss’ situation, with more ‘misses’ if I’m being honest. As I bite into my homemade chicken nuggets or Coq au Vin (when I’m feeling fancy) I can’t help but feel that the chicken just tastes weird, stringy, just…funny. So a few days ago when I turned on the tube and saw the news headlines stating that the FDA has finally confirmed that chicken meat sold in the USA contains arsenic, my head, and stomach, nearly hit the roof. 

This cancer-causing toxic chemical, that in high doses could kill you, is actually being added to chicken feed on purpose, giving store-bought chicken the illusion of healthy coloring and plump appearance. Shockingly, this is the case with more than 70 percent of all U.S. chickens! That is just awful!

The FDA has asked Pfizer to stop manufacturing the arsenic-containing drug, Roxarsone, that was found in the livers of nearly half of all chicken tested. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The agency said it recently conducted a study of 100 broiler chickens that detected inorganic arsenic at higher levels in the livers of chickens treated with 3-Nitro compared with untreated chickens … Pfizer said sale of 3-Nitro would be stopped by early July in order to allow animal producers to transition to other treatments.” 

This urgent request by the FDA is surprising in itself as the agency has always maintained that the arsenic in chickens is at such low levels that it is safe for consumption, when meanwhile it has been clinically proven to be extremely toxic to human health, causing an array of neurological defects in developing fetuses and young children…Looks like the FDA finally got the memo, and not a moment too soon!

So, the next time you’re out buying chicken (if you’re not totally put off by it at this point) make sure you look out for the following:

-If the chicken meat is bright pink in color, like in an unnatural way, avoid it at all costs.

-Make sure that the fat content on the chicken is white to deep yellow, not gray or pasty.

-Check the date on the package.

-And finally, aim for “Certified Organic” meat products. It’s probably safest choice for you and your family.

Source: fda.gov

Credit to MSN