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Sext Up Kids

Sext Up Kids: How Growing Up in a Hyper Sexualized Culture Hurts Our kids

Doc Zone (CBC) 2012

Film Review

The ubiquitous sexualization of children in the mass media is having devastating effects on our adolescents. Sext Up Kids interviews a range of experts, including teachers, psychologists and teen sex bloggers. They all agree that pop culture has become a virtual porn culture, with the increasing prevalence of sexually provocative teen and pre-teen (as young as 9) girls in advertising, music videos and movies.

Teenage girls seem to bear the brunt of the psychological damage. They feel immense pressure to copy the sexualized image of their teen idols, at risk of being unpopular or socially excluded if they don’t. The pressure is aggravated by boys, who are also constantly exposed to the same soft porn and call them sexually abusive names if they don’t measure up.

With boys as young as five accessing hard porn on the Internet, there’s also intense pressure for girls thirteen and up to engage in sexual activity. Because boys base their sexual expectations on male-dominated pornography, intercourse is frequently painful because the girls do it without being aroused or lubricated.

Pressure for girls to engage in oral (fellatio) and anal sex is also intense. Teenage boys expect it because they see it on-line. In one study by an Atlanta psychologist, 22% of teenage girls reported having anal sex in the past sixty days.

Sext Up Kids also covers the controversial topic of sexting, sending sexual explicit texts and selfies. Sexting can have extremely painful consequences for both girls and boys, especially aggravated sexting, a form of bullying in which the naked photos a girls sends her boyfriend are forwarded and go viral.

Apparently girls succumb to their boyfriends’ requests for nude selfies out of fear boys won’t like them if they don’t flaunt and promote themselves. While increasingly boys run the risk of being charged with sex crimes for possessing pornographic photos of girls under eighteen.

The documentary concludes with a plea to parents, urging them to talk to their teenagers about their sexual choices. Experts agree this is the best way support them in resisting pressure to be sexual before they’re emotionally and psychologically ready.

Justice denied: examining the evidence that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a patsy in Boston bombing

stuartbramhall:

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Like the JFK assassination and the 9-11 attacks, the official version of the Boston bombing makes no sense. Starting with the alleged murder of MIT cop Sean Collier. We’re told that the brothers had one gun but wanted a second one. So they allegedly fire multiple times into Collier’s car and took off without taking his gun.

If the brothers’ escape plan included going to the campus of MIT and shooting a cop, then they must really have wanted to get caught.

Next comes the alleged carjacking that they supposedly committed after shooting Collier. This makes no sense either.

Why would they carjack someone when they already had a vehicle? Why would each drive a vehicle for a while before abandoning the one they had originally? Why continue to drive Danny’s SUV when its theft would have been reported to police? Why let Danny go, or let him escape, so that he can run to police and pass on the confession? Why confess to something in the first place?

And why remain in the Boston area three days after the bombing if they were actually guilty? None of this passes the smell test, and yet we’re supposed to believe it on the word of a single “victim” whose identity wasn’t even known for two years.

Like Lee Harvey Oswald, both brothers were well known to US intelligence and the FBI prior to the bombing. Their uncle Ruslan Tsarni was married to the daughter of a senior CIA official and lived in his home. Tamerlan attended had attended CIA-linked training sessions in Tblisi Georgia. JFK assassination researcher Peter Dale Scott believes Tamerlan was an FBI informant like Oswald.

Originally posted on Truth and Shadows:

By Craig McKee

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev never had a chance.

While there is significant evidence supporting the accused Boston bomber’s innocence, none of it made it into his trial, which just concluded with guilty verdicts on all 30 counts against him. It seems that law enforcement, the media, and especially Tsarnaev’s own lawyer, Judy Clarke, were focused on suppressing any evidence that could have undermined the official story of the bombing. The truth has been covered up just as effectively as it was the day Lee Harvey Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby.

Clarke insured Tsarnaev’s conviction when she opened the trial by admitting that he had carried out the bombing on April 15, 2013 with his brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan, who was killed in the aftermath. Clarke painted Tamerlan as

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Former CIA Station Chief to Face Murder Charges

According to the Guardian, Pakistan’s high court justice Shaukat Asiz Siddi has ruled that murder charges be brought against Jonathan Banks, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad. The charges relate to CIA drone strikes against innocent civilians in North Waziristan. It’s an extremely explosive story, which the US media has largely ignored.

Siddiqui also ordered criminal charges brought against John A Rizzo, the former CIA lawyer who signed off on the legality of drone strikes against Pakistan.

Banks’s undercover CIA role first became public in 2009 when tribesman Karin Khan filed a civil lawsuit against him over a drone attack that killed his father and son.

With his cover was blown, Banks was forced to resign his post and leave Pakistan.

The incident sparked major speculation how Khan and his lawyer Shahzad Akbar could possibly have known the identity of the CIA station chief. Many suspected Pakistani intelligence of leaking the name out of frustration with the illegal undeclared US war on their country.

It’s considered highly unlikely the Obama administration will extradite either Banks or Rizzo to stand trial in Pakistan.

Also posted at Veterans Today

The New Rape Culture

Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes

BBC (2014)

Film Review

Blurred Lines is about the new misogyny, which makes it socially acceptable to be sexually offensive to women.

BBC reporter Kirsty Wark makes a clear distinction between sexism, which she sees as an irrational bias against women’s equality, and misogyny, which is the dislike and deliberate denigration of women.

She focuses on four main manifestations of so-called “rape culture”: in stand-up comedy, social media, on-line gaming and adolescent male-female interactions.

The Year of the Rape Joke

2012 was known as the Year of the Rape Joke at the Edinburgh Festival. Several men Wark interviews argue strenuously that casual talk about rape is perfectly acceptable so long as it’s done in a humorous or ironic way. Others disagree. She talks to a psychologist who has studied the effect of sexual assault jokes on male behavior. His research shows that rape jokes validates the sexist views of men with underlying resentment towards women. After listening to jokes about sexual assault, they are more likely to oppose women’s equality in politics, in the workplace and in the home.

Misogynistic Social Media

Blurred Lines also examines several high profile incidents in which prominent females were subjected to vicious, graphic sexual slurs and rape threats on social media. The most highly publicized involved Caroline Criado-Perez, who received around 50 abusive tweets an hour for a 12-hour period after successfully campaigning for Jane Austen to appear on the ten pound note.

Misogyny is also extremely common in on-line gaming. Grand Theft Auto, the most popular on-line game of all times, is a classic example. It provides for players to score points by paying prostitutes and then mugging or killing them to get their money back. Meanwhile women gamers are frequently bombarded with sexually dismissive language and rape threats once male players discover they are female.

Recently Anita Sarkeesian, a Canadian media critic, tried to crowdfund a study on women’s roles in on-line games. The reaction she got was a barrage with graphically violent rape threats, in addition to having her crowdfunding site hacked and shut down. What was even more remarkable was that many of threat threats weren’t anonymous, as they were linked with Facebook pages.

Male Anger Towards Women

Wark, explores where this intense anger comes from by interviewing Australian feminist Germaine Greer, who shocked the world by discussing men’s unconscious hostility towards women in the Female Eunuch (1970). Greer maintains that many men still view a women’s position in family and society as subordinate. Thus they feel threatened by women assuming previously male roles.

Martin Daubney, editor of the British men’s magazine Loaded, has a somewhat different take. He blames the anger on extreme role confusion, especially among young men who have no jobs or clearly defined gender roles and see women passing them by.

The Role of Pornography on the Adolescent Brain

The documentary ends by examining the extremely violent on-line pornography teenage boys consume and whether this has an effect on their developing sexuality. According to the young women Wark interviews it does. They feel on-line pornography leads teenage boys to demand sex in the male-dominant way pornography portrays it. It also causes them to feel threatened and dismissive towards women who express sexual needs.

Another, more pernicious effect of ubiquitous on-line pornography, humor that makes light of sexual assault and the constant objectification of women in advertising is confusion about consent. This ranges from inappropriate groping at parties to gang rape which is posted to Facebook or live tweeted on Twitter.

Strikes proliferate in China as working class awakens

stuartbramhall:

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More than three decades after Beijing began allowing market reforms, China’s 168 million migrant workers are discovering their labor rights through the spread of social media. They are on the forefront of a labor protest movement that is posing a growing and awkward problem for the ruling Communist Party, wary of any grassroots activism that can threaten its grip on power.

Originally posted on Ethics Asylum:

Image Credit: APTN

NANLANG TOWNSHIP, China (AP) – Timid by nature, Shi Jieying took a risk last month and joined fellow workers in a strike at her handbag factory, one of a surging number of such labor protests across China.

Riot police flooded into the factory compound, broke up the strike and hauled away dozens of workers. Terrified by the violence, Shi was hospitalized with heart trouble, but with a feeble voice from her sickbed expressed a newfound boldness.

“We deserve fair compensation,” said Shi, 41, who makes $4,700 a year at Cuiheng Handbag Factory in Nanlang, in southern China. Only recently, she had learned she had the right to social security funding and a housing allowance – two of the issues at stake in the strike.

“I didn’t think of it as protesting, just defending our rights,” she said.

More than three decades after Beijing began allowing market reforms, China’s…

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The 1% at Their Finest

The Super Rich and US

BBC (2015)

Film Review

The Super Rich and Us features casual cameos of British billionaires openly displaying their narcissistic indulgence in trophy assets. There is also a brief appearance by economist and author Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century). The goal of the documentary is twofold: to debunk trickle down theory and to critique government policies that have made Britain one of the most unequal nations on the planet.

The filmmakers maintain that Britain’s top 1% generates and consumes all the so-called growth the UK has experienced over the last five years. None of it derives from increased investment, job growth, wages or productivity.

The British 1% has doubled their income between 1980 and 2015, while income for everyone else has stagnated or declined. Likewise the Conservative government’s 80 billion pounds in austerity cuts is roughly equal to the bonuses banks paid out to CEOs.

Why Britain Has the Most Billionaires

The UK has more billionaires per head (104) than any other country. This stems largely from a policy decision to compensate for factories moving overseas by making the country a tax haven for rich colonials seeking to avoid taxes in their own country – under the delusional belief it would make everyone else richer.

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher significantly reduced taxes on Britain’s native millionaires and billionaires. She argued, as Reagan did in the US, that taxing the rich made society poorer. These policies, which have changed little over thirty years, have made Britain the world’s favorite tax haven, as international pressure forces other traditional tax havens (Switzerland, Luxemburg, Cayman Islands, etc) to shut up shop.

Trickle Up vs Trickle Down

Thanks to the wholesale repeal of banking and corporate regulations, none of this surplus wealth trickled down to the rest of the population the way Thatcher claimed it would. Instead the super rich have been sucking up shrinking lower and middle classes resources into their vast reservoir of private wealth. The main reason trickle down doesn’t work is that the 1% spends their surplus wealth on diamond jewelry, yachts, sports cars and other luxury goods that generate income for only a handful (if any – most of these goods are imported) of working people.

The film contrasts British tax policies with those of Sweden and Denmark, which the rich pay a fair share of taxes. Not only do both have GDPs equal to or higher than the UK’s, with numbers that reflect genuine improvement in productivity and job and wage growth. When polled, eighty-eight percent of Danish people are perfectly happy with their tax rate because they see it reflected in generous government services.

Iceland Wisens to Banksters Game with Plan to Remove Power of Commercial Banks to Create Money*

stuartbramhall:

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Iceland’s government is considering a revolutionary monetary proposal – removing the power of commercial banks to create money (out of thin air) and handing it to a government-run central bank. The proposal, which would be a turnaround in the history of modern finance, was part of a report written by a lawmaker from the ruling centrist Progress Party, Frosti Sigurjonsson, entitled “A better monetary system for Iceland”.

Originally posted on Hwaairfan's Blog:

Iceland Wisens to Banksters Game with Plan to Remove Power of Commercial Banks to Create Money*

Who knew that the revolution would start with those radical Icelanders? It does, though. One Frosti Sigurjonsson [seriously, that’s his real name], a lawmaker from the ruling Progress Party, issued a report April 2 that suggests taking the power to create money away from commercial banks, and hand it to the central bank and, ultimately, Parliament.

Can’t see commercial banks in the western world be too happy with this. They must be contemplating wiping the island nation off the map. If accepted in the Icelandic Parliament, the plan would change the game in a very radical way. It would be successful too, because there is no bigger scourge on our economies than commercial banks creating money and then securitizing and selling off the loans they just created the money (credit) with.

Everyone, with the…

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The Case for Unconditional Basic Income (UBI)

Transitions for Society: Job Guarantee and Basic Income

Prosocial Progress foundation (2014)

Film Review

This 20 minute documentary attempts to address the structural unemployment that seems to have become a permanent feature of monopoly capitalism. According to the St Louis Federal Reserve, as of February 2015, only 62.8% of working age Americans have jobs – translating into a 36.2% unemployment rate. A substantial proportion of the jobless are young adults between 16 and 24. Who face more or less permanent exclusion from the economy.

The premise of the film is somewhat unusual. The filmmakers lay out the proposition that the political elite could save capitalism by enacting an unconditional basic income (UBI) for all citizens. However based on past history, they probably won’t. Instead of making the necessary reforms, they will allow human misery and social unrest to increase until the system is overthrown by popular revolt. They see a small chance one or more European countries could enact a UBI. A grassroots Swiss movement has successfully petitioned for a (binding) UBI referendum in 2016.

Martin Luther King’s Call for a UBI

Martin Luther King first called for a UBI in 1967 – in combination with a job guarantee. He maintained the US could easily afford such a program based on the massive automation-related productivity gains. He could not have predicted the financialization of the US economy that would occur in the 1970s, when Wall Street abandoned manufacturing to focus on selling financial products. Nor that this transformation would ensure that the benefits of higher productivity would accrue to the capitalist class, rather than workers.

A UBI, financed by progressive taxation, pays a fixed income to all citizens regardless of their employment or financial status. The most common argument against UBI is that it’s wrong to pay people for doing nothing. However as one interviewee points out, western governments presently pay billions in subsidies to corporations who provide no social benefit whatsoever. If we paid these subsidies to real people instead of corporations, society as a whole would gain gains by reducing the social costs of chronic unemployment and poverty.

How UBI Increases Productivity

Studies in third world countries show that guaranteeing income security causes people to increase their productivity by working more.

The most interesting section of the film describes a pilot program in Madhya Pradish India, in which all men, women and children were paid a UBI. After eighteen months, investigators found their was a clear reduction in illness (due to better nutrition and improved access to health care), a clear increase in the number of women farming their own land and a significant increase in school attendance.

California Governor Order Mandatory Water Cuts

 

 

image credit Zero Hedge

Guest Post by Kevin Moore

The item below indicates the kind of devastation that has occurred, and will increasingly occur, as a consequence of outlandishly high energy consumption and the abject failure throughout most of the world to address energetic and environmental matters.

As long as New Plymouth District Council (NPDC) continues to focus on business-as-usual (economic growth, covering ‘everything’ with concrete and asphalt, tourism, entertainment, boondoggles etc. ) everything in the district will continue to be made worse by NPDC, until everything collapses.

With California (population 40 million and ‘food-basket’ for America going under, we are in for a very ‘interesting’ period 2015 to 2016.

For First Time In History, California Governor Orders Mandatory Water Cuts Amid “Unprecedented, Dangerous Situation” (from Zero Hedge)

Amid the “cruelest winter ever,” with the lowest snowpack on record, and with 98.11% of the state currently in drought conditions, California Governor Jerry Brown orders mandatory water cuts in California for the first time in history…

And finally some action…

As ABC reports,

California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. announced a set of mandatory water conservation measures today, as the state continues to struggle with a prolonged drought that has lasted for more than four years.

“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” Brown said in a statement after visiting a manual snow survey in the Sierra Nevadas. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action.”

Read more here

Kevin David Moore, a fellow New Plymouth resident, is a founding and executive member of ASPO-NZ (The Association for the Study of Peak Oil). He’s New Zealand’s leading energy-environment-economic analyst, and has written five books on the global economic system and its effects on both the global environment and on ordinary people. He is noted for highest-level analysis, for telling truths most people shy away from, and for challenging the dysfunctional policies formulated and implemented by central and local government.

Iceland Does The Unimaginable To Its Criminal Bankers (4:01)

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Unlike the US and Britain, Iceland has a reputation for taking steps that other countries have until now refused to even consider, such as nationalizing their banks. This radical change has boosted the Icelandic economy and leaves other European countries trailing miserably behind.

It’s high time the US followed Iceland’s example – either lock ‘em up or string ‘em up.

Originally posted on Tales from the Conspiratum:

http://www.trueactivist.com/iceland-jails-four-top-bankers-for-fraud-in-landmark-case/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TrueActivist+%28True+Activist%29

http://www.trueactivist.com

by Sophie McAdam

March 30, 2015

Iceland has jailed four bankers for market manipulation in a landmark case which sets a precedent for the rest of the world. The verdict relates to corruption at the Kaupthing bank, which collapsed after the financial crisis in 2008 due to fraud at the highest levels. Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, Kaupthing’s former chief executive, former chairman Sigurdur Einarsson, former chief executive of Kaupthing Luxembourg Magnus Gudmundsson, and Olafur Olafsson, the bank’s second largest shareholder at the time, were all sentenced this month to between four and five and a half years.

The sentence given is the heaviest penalty in the country’s history, and Iceland‘s special prosecutor said it was evidence that it is possible to crack down on financial fraud without any adverse effect to the economy. Iceland has a reputation for taking steps that other countries have until now refused to even consider, such as nationalizing…

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