Author Archive | JacobSloan

Dairy Associations Lobby The FDA To Alter The Definition Of “Milk” To Include Aspartame

definition of "milk"It’s not quite as bad as some have reported – cancer-causing artificial sweetening additives such as as aspartame likely would still need to be listed in tiny letters as ingredients. But the milk could otherwise be packaged, marketed, and sold as just “milk.” The stated goal is to reverse the trend of lagging dairy consumption by children, particularly in school. From the U.S. government’s Federal Register:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is announcing that the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have filed a petition requesting that the Agency amend the standard of identity for milk and 17 other dairy products to provide for the use of any safe and suitable sweetener as an optional ingredient.

IDFA and NMPF request their proposed amendments to the milk standard of identity to allow optional characterizing flavoring ingredients used in milk to be sweetened with any safe and suitable sweetener—including non-nutritive sweeteners such as aspartame.

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2,300-Year-Old Mayan Pyramid In Belize Bulldozed For Roadway Project

mayan pyramidThe Sydney Morning Herald reports that a private company has demolished key Mayan ruins in order to use the debris to fill potholes:

A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project. Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

“It’s a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity…they were using this for road fill,” Mr Awe said. “It’s just so horrendous…To think that today you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroy it.”

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875,000 People Are On America’s Terrorist Suspect List

terrorist suspect list

They’re all around us — the number of people being tracked as suspected terrorists will soon cross the one million mark, Reuters reports:

The number of names on a highly classified U.S. central database used to track suspected terrorists has jumped to 875,000 from 540,000 only five years ago, a U.S. official said. Among those was Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, whose name was added in 2011.

Maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center, the highly classified database is not a “watchlist,” but a repository of information on people whom U.S. authorities see as known, suspected or potential terrorists from around the world.

The “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment” is a master database which agencies use to build other catalogs of possible terrorists, like the “no-fly” list which prevents people on it from boarding airplanes.

Karen Greenberg, an expert in counter-terrorism policy at Fordham University, questioned whether the growth in the database’s size made it easier for officials to spot threats before they materialize.

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What If European History Was Told Like Native American History?

european historyAn Indigenous History of North America inverts the norm by imagining a U.S. school textbook devoted to the intricacies of indigenous societies in the Americas, with a few paragraphs covering the history of Europe:

The first immigrants to Europe arrived thousands of years ago from central Asia. Most pre-contact Europeans lived together in small villages. Because the continent was very crowded, their lives were ruled by strict hierarchies within the family and outside it to control resources. Europe was highly multi-ethnic, and most tribes were ruled by hereditary leaders who commanded the majority “commoners.” These groups were engaged in near constant warfare.

Religion infused every part of Europeans’ lives. Europeans believed in one supreme deity, a father figure, who they believed was made of three parts, and they particularly worshiped the deity’s son. They claimed that their god had given humans domination over the earth. They built elaborate temples to him and performed ceremonies in which they ate crackers and drank wine and believed it was the body and blood of their god, who would provide them with entrance into a wondrous afterlife called heaven when they died.

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Blueprint For 3D-Printable Gun Downloaded 100,000 Times In A Few Days

3d-printable gunFiles for a printable gun which is immune to metal detectors were downloaded briskly for two days, before the gun’s inventors and Kim Dotcom’s Mega site removed them at the government’s behest. A few days ago Forbes reported:

[100,000] is the number of downloads of the 3D-printable CAD files for the so-called “Liberator” gun that the high-tech gunsmithing group Defense Distributed has seen in just the last two days.

The State Department has now demanded Defense Distributed take down its printable gun files due to possible export control violations.

The controversial gun-printing group [was] hosting those files on Kim Dotcom’s Mega storage site. It’s also been uploaded to the filesharing site the Pirate Bay, where it’s quickly become one of the most popular files in the site’s 3D-printing category.

It’s worth noting that only a fraction of those who download the printable gun file will ever try to actually create one.

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Guantanamo-Style Force Feeding Occurs In U.S. Prisons Every Day

force feedingVia Common Dreams, Ann Neumann on barbaric force feeding occurring onshore and offshore against prisoners who see hunger striking as their last available method of protest:

I know a hunger-striking prisoner who hasn’t eaten solid food in more than five years. He is being force-fed by the medical staff where he’s incarcerated. Starving himself, he told me last year, is the only way he has to exercise his first amendment rights and to protest his conviction.

The fact that force feedings are being discussed in the context of Guantánamo obscures the routine use of feeding tubes in American prisons. Other recent feeding tube cases have taken place in Washington state, Utah, Illinois and Wisconsin. No sweeping study of force-feeding has been done, so statistics on usage don’t exist. Only three states have laws against force-feeding prisoners: Florida, Georgia and California, where a hunger strike in 2011 at a facility in Pelican Bay effectively caused a court examination of prison conditions.

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The Mazzeri Dream Hunters Of Corsica

mazzeriOn the French isle of Corsica, the chilling prehistoric occult practice of dream hunting, performed by psychically-gifted individuals called mazzeri, is still done by a small number today. Drawing from descriptions by anthropologist Dorothy Carrington, TerraCorsa reveals:

The activities of the mazzeri stem from the Corsican hunting and foodgathering peoples of the pre-Neolithic times (before about 6000 B.C.)

The mazzeri are dream-hunters, who go out at night to kill an animal. They recognize in the face of the animal someone known to him, nearly always an inhabitant of his village. The next day he will tell what he has seen and the person mentioned will die in the space of time running from three days to a year, and always within an uneven number of days. If an animal is only wounded by the mazzere, then the person it represents will meet an accident or illness, but not death.

To be a mazzere it is necessary to have a psychic gift that opens the door to the parallel world.

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The Inventor Of Mothers’ Day Later Tried To Have It Abolished Due To Its Commercialization

founder of mothers' dayMental Floss on Anna Jarvis, founder of Mothers’ Day, who later tried have the holiday destroyed:

Jarvis soon soured on the commercial interests associated with the day. She wanted Mother’s Day “to be a day of sentiment, not profit.” Beginning around 1920, she urged people to stop buying flowers and other gifts for their mothers, and she turned against her former commercial supporters. She referred to the florists, greeting card manufacturers and the confectionery industry as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.”

She attempted to stop the floral industry by threatening to file lawsuits and by applying to trademark the carnation together with the words “Mother’s Day,” though she was denied the trademark.

Jarvis’s ideal observance of Mother’s Day would be a visit home or writing a long letter to your mother. She couldn’t stand those who sold and used greeting cards: “Any mother would rather have a line of the worst scribble from her son or daughter than any fancy greeting card.”

In one of her last appearances in public, Jarvis was seen going door-to-door in Philadelphia, asking for signatures on a petition to rescind Mother’s Day.

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Vatican Library To Digitalize Its 82,000-Manuscript Collection For Online Viewing

vatican library

Soon anyone with an internet connection will be able to access millennia-old texts previously available only to 200 scholars in Rome. Are secrets waiting to be uncovered? The Toronto Star writes:

With 2.8 petabytes of storage from global data company EMC, the Vatican Library had to decide where to begin. In all, the collection will take 43 petabytes of storage.

“We start with the most delicate, the books that are in a critical situation for conservation,” said Luciano Ammenti, who is in charge of IT at the Vatican.

They include the Vatican’s 8,900 incunabula (books printed before 1501): the Sifra, a Hebrew manuscript written a millennia ago, a 4th century manuscript of the Greek Bible and the De Europa of Pope Pius II, printed around 1491.

“People often think the Vatican Library is a place where secrets are kept,” said scriptor graecus Timothy Janz. Once digitization opens the library to the world, “many things that remain to be discovered will be found.”

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Former Guatemalan Dictator Convicted Of Genocide

guatemalan dictator

The military dictatorship led by Montt slaughtered thousands upon thousands of villagers in an effort to exterminate Guatemala’s indigenous ethnic Mayan population, which it regarded as sympathetic to leftist rebels. No word on whether the CIA and Ronald Reagan will be tried posthumously as accessories. Reuters reports:

Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty on Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 80 years in prison. It was the first time a former head of state had been found guilty of genocide in his or her own country.

Montt, now 86, took power after a coup in 1982 and implemented a scorched-earth policy in which troops massacred thousands of indigenous villagers thought to be helping leftist rebels.

Prosecutors say Montt turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson to try to rid Guatemala of leftist rebels during his 1982-1983 rule, the most violent period of a 1960-1996 civil war in which as many as 250,000 people died.

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