"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" Is About Obama's Terror-Suspect Kill List, Say the Film's Directors

From MotherJones:

—By Asawin Suebsaeng

| Fri Apr. 4, 2014 7:23 AM PDT

Marvel Studios

There are currently no plans to screen Captain America: The Winter Soldier at the White House, as far as the film's directors have heard. But if it makes it to the White House family theater, President Obama would be watching one big-budget, action-packed, and Scarlett Johansson-starring critique of his controversial terror-suspect "kill list."

This isn't me reading things into a mainstream comic-book movie. It's what the directors themselves will tell you.

"[Marvel] said they wanted to make a political thriller," Joe Russo, who directed the film with his brother Anthony, tells Mother Jones. "So we said if you want to make a political thriller, all the great political thrillers have very current issues in them that reflect the anxiety of the audience...That gives it an immediacy, it makes it relevant. So [Anthony] and I just looked at the issues that were causing anxiety for us, because we read a lot and are politically inclined. And a lot of that stuff had to do with civil liberties issues, drone strikes, the president's kill list, preemptive technology"—all themes they worked into the film, working closely with screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

In The Winter Soldier, Captain America and the rest of the heroes (played by Chris Evans, Anthony Mackie, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, and so on) confront the government program Project Insight, which involves three Helicarriers (gigantic autonomous killer drones, basically) that are fed large amounts of data and intel. The Helicarriers process the data to identify and preemptively eliminate potential threats to national and global security. And though the film's topical parts were all crafted prior to the NSA revelations, the directors say it's no accident that data mining is a key element of the plot: "It was all leading up to Snowden," Joe says. "It was all in the ether [already], it was all part of the zeitgeist. The Snowden stuff actually happened while we were shooting."

"If there are 100 people we can kill to make us safer, do we do it? What if we find out there's 1,000? What if it's a million?"

The politics of The Winter Soldier fit comfortably into the Russo brothers' oeuvre, which has included plenty of political satire and commentary. Prior to The Winter Soldier, the duo was best known for directing episodes of Arrested Development, which produced some of the finest satire of the Bush era and Iraq War, and Community, which is also peppered with solid political humor and jabs. (As for their go-to sources for news and politics, Anthony's top two are the the New York Times and NPR, while Joe's are Digg and Reddit.) The day I interviewed them, they happened to be in Washington, DC, to meet with the Congressional Creative Rights Caucus.

According to Joe, the brothers pushed to make their Captain America political thriller even more political and topical than it initially was. "There were already things in the script that just needed to be pulled out to make it more [relevant]," he recalls. One of the film's stars, Robert Redford, was approached for the role in large part because he starred in the 1975 political thriller Three Days of the Condor.

"[That film] was a big influence on this movie," Joe says. "You could really call this movie 'Three Days of Captain America,' if you wanted to. The structure is so similar...We felt like we had a decent shot at getting [Redford] because the script had a political component to it and we thought that might motivate him."

But don't take any of this to mean the film is a stern lecture on American foreign policy. It's thrilling as hell, and also the best to emerge in the recent string of Marvel movies. "We're action fetishists," Joe says. "And we love '70s thrillers." The brothers drew on the influence of some of their favorite action-flick moments: The famous bank heist and shootout in Michael Mann's Heat. William Friedkin's The French Connection. John Schlesinger's Marathon Man. John McTiernan's Predator. Gareth Evans' The Raid: Redemption. (And for the Washington, DC-set car chase in The Winter Soldier, the brothers consulted YouTube, searching for videos of actual car chases. One video—wherein two escaped convicts in Brazil get stuck in traffic and plow through cars as police pursue them on foot—was especially helpful.) "Choreographing action, it's like choreographing a Broadway show," Anthony says.

But at the heart of the explosion and melee -filled film are the political themes, includingtargeted killing. "The question is where do you stop?" Joe says. "If there are 100 people we can kill to make us safer, do we do it? What if we find out there's 1,000? What if we find out there's 10,000? What if it's a million? At what point do you stop?"

Reuters: Obama's NSA overhaul may require phone carriers to store more data

Just as was pointed out here.  The last quote from the "senior Obama administration official" is laughable. "As questions arise with respect to the proposal, we look forward to working through them with Congress and relevant stakeholders." Just like what was done with the Affordable Care Act, right?

AA

Reuters:

BY MARK HOSENBALL AND ALINA SELYUKH

WASHINGTON Thu Apr 3, 2014 6:46pm EDT

in

A National Security Agency (NSA) data gathering facility is seen in Bluffdale, about 25 miles (40 kms) south of Salt Lake City, Utah, December 17, 2013.

CREDIT: REUTERS/JIM URQUHART

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama's plan for overhauling the National Security Agency's phone surveillance program could force carriers to collect and store customer data that they are not now legally obliged to keep, according to U.S. officials.

One complication arises from the popularity of flat-rate or unlimited calling plans, which are used by the vast majority of Americans.

While the Federal Communications Commission requires phone companies to retain for 18 months records on "toll" or long-distance calls, the rule's application is vague for subscribers of unlimited phone plans because they do not get billed for individual calls.

That could change if the Obama administration pushes through with a proposal to require carriers - instead of the NSA - to collect and store phone metadata, which includes dialed numbers and call lengths but not the content of conversations. Under the administration's proposal, the phone companies would be required to turn over the data to the NSA in response to a court-approved government request.

U.S. officials said the carriers might be forced to create new mechanisms to ensure that metadata from flat-rate subscribers could be monitored. They said these issues will require further discussion between the White House, Congress and industry.

"These are very complex systems," said one industry source familiar with data storage policies. "I doubt there are companies out there that have a nice, neat, single database that can tell you how long records are kept universally."

To great fanfare last month, the Obama administration unveiled a proposal to end the NSA's bulk collection of millions of records of phone calls. But the announcement glossed over key practical issues in implementing the new procedures.

The potential gap in records for flat-rate subscribers, as well as the telecommunications companies' strong opposition to onerous data retention requirements, underscores the still-fluid nature of the NSA reforms.

"We applaud these proposals to end Section 215 bulk collection, but feel that it is critical to get the details of this important effort right," Verizon Communications Inc General Counsel Randal Milch said in a blog post last week, referring to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the law that authorized the NSA program.

"At this early point in the process, we propose this basic principle that should guide the effort: the reformed collection process should not require companies to store data for longer than, or in formats that differ from, what they already do for business purposes," Milch wrote.

Obama's proposal, whose full details have yet to be formally released, is a response to public outcry over revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the spy agency's bulk collection of phone records.

A senior Obama administration official said: "As questions arise with respect to the proposal, we look forward to working through them with Congress and relevant stakeholders."

-----------------------------

US Secretly Created 'Cuban Twitter' to Stir Unrest

From the Associated Press:

By DESMOND BUTLER, JACK GILLUM and ALBERTO ARCE

— Apr. 3, 2014 4:48 PM EDT

WASHINGTON (AP) — In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a U.S. government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government.

McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the U.S. government.

McSpedon didn't work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in U.S. humanitarian aid.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter," using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet.

Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content": news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."

At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.

------------------------------------------------

Destabilization at work. Just turn the tables here for a bit: Imagine China sets up a social network in the United States to subvert the government. How would the White House react? So why is it okay for the U.S. to do this?

AA

Report: EPA tested deadly pollutants on humans to push Obama admin’s agenda

From DailyCaller:

11:53 AM 04/02/2014
  
By Michael Bastasch

The Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting dangerous experiments on humans over the past few years in order to justify more onerous clean air regulations.

The agency conducted tests on people with health issues and the elderly, exposing them to high levels of potentially lethal pollutants, without disclosing the risks of cancer and death, according to a newly released government report.

These experiments exposed people, including those with asthma and heart problems, to dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants, including diesel fumes, reads a EPA inspector general report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The EPA also exposed people with health issues to levels of pollutants up to 50 times greater than the agency says is safe for humans.

The EPA conducted five experiments in 2010 and 2011 to look at the health effects of particulate matter, or PM, and diesel exhaust on humans. The IG’s report found that the EPA did get consent forms from 81 people in five studies. But the IG also found that “exposure risks were not always consistently represented.”

“Further, the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms,” the IG’s report noted. “An EPA manager considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures” but “human subjects were not informed of this risk in the consent form.”

According to the IG’s report, “only one of five studies’ consent forms provided the subject with information on the upper range of the pollutant” they would be exposed to, but even more alarming is that only “two of five alerted study subjects to the risk of death for older individuals with cardiovascular disease.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/02/report-epa-tested-deadly-pollutants-on-humans-to-push-obama-admins-agenda/#ixzz2xkscOgVd

Turmeric Beats Ibuprofen for Arthritis of the Knee

From GreenMedInfo.com:

Posted on: 

Monday, March 31st 2014 at 12:00 pm

Written By: 

Sayer Ji, Founder

An exciting new clinical trial published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine has revealed that an effective natural alternative to the exceedingly popular pharmaceutical painkiller ibuprofen exists for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis (OA), and it is a familiar kitchen spice known to be far superior both in safety and the number of side benefits it confers to any drug in the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID) drug class.
Last year, in a Lancet review on the topic, ibuprofen was identified to be as toxic to the heart as the banned anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx, likely contributing to tens of thousands of deaths from cardiovascular disease each year. This is one of the reasons why evidence-based natural alternatives are extremely important, especially when they involve culinary spices that are already known to be safe, affordable, accessible and time-tested.
Titled, "Efficacy and Safety of Curcuma domestica Extracts in Patients with Knee Osteoarthritis,"[i] the multi-center trial was conducted with 109 patients with primary knee osteoarthritis who were randomized to receive either ibuprofen 800 mg day ibuprofen (55 patients) or 2,000 mg turmeric (Curcuma domestica) per day (52 patients), for 6 weeks.  The ibuprofen was divided into 2 doses of 400mg daily, and the turmeric into 4 doses of 500 mg daily.
The researchers measured pain on level walking, pain on stairs, and functions of knee assessed by time spent during 100-m walk and going up and down a flight of stairs, as the primary outcomes.
After six weeks, significant improvements were observed in both groups, with all primary outcomes similar, except the turmeric group showed slightly better performance on the 100-m walk and less self-reported pain going up and down a flight of stairs.  Also, the turmeric group showed less adverse events.  Also, the subjects rated themselves to have higher satisfaction with the treatment results in the turmeric group (91.1%) versus the ibuprofen group (80.4%).
While the researchers acknowledged the limitations of their study – no double-blind protocol, the need for a higher dose in the placebo group, and the need for a larger patient sample size – they concluded that "C. domestica extracts seem to be efficacious and safe for the treatment of knee OA similarly to ibuprofen."
They also pointed out that while some patients in the ibuprofen group rated themselves as having little satisfaction or no satisfaction (10.9% and 2.2%, respectively), not a single patient in the turmeric group reported being unsatisfied.
Finally, they observed a distinct trend towards a greater effect in patients receiving turmeric an ibuprofen.
The form of turmeric used in the study was manufactured by the Thai Government Pharmaceutical Organization. Its preparation was described as follows:
"The preparations were made under the Good Manufacturing Procedures Standard.

Dried rhizomes of C. domestica were grounded into powder. The turmeric powder was extracted with ethanol andthen evaporated at low pressure to obtain ethanolic extracts containing oil and curcuminoids. The oil part was then removed in order to have curcuminoids extracts. Each capsule of C. domestica extracts contained 250 mg of curcuminoids."

The primary curcuminoid known to science is curcumin, and is the polyphenol in turmeric that gives the spice its radiant golden hue. Turmeric powder contains approximately 2-4% curcumin by weight. Curcumin has been studied to have over 600 health benefits. To view the first-hand research establishing its value, view our biomedical database on the topic: Curcumin Health Benefits.
For additional research on natural interventions for knee osteoarthritis view our database on the topic:Natural Knee Osteoarthritis Interventions

55 Things About America You May Not Know

From endoftheamericandream.com:
By Michael Snyder, on March 10th, 2014

#1 We are supposed to have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but only 25 percent of all Americans know how long U.S. Senators are elected for (6 years), and only 20 percent of all Americans know how many U.S. senators there are.

#2 Americans spend more on health care per capita than anyone else in the world by far, and yet we only rank 35th in life expectancy.

#3 Only one state in the entire country has an obesity rate of under 20 percent.  11 states have an obesity rate of over 30 percent.

#4 Of all the major industrialized nations, America is the most obese.  Mexico is #2.

#5 Back in 1962, only 13 percent of all Americans were obese, but it is being projected that 42 percent of all Americans could be obese by the year 2030.

#6 According to a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 31 percent of all food in the United States gets wasted.  In case you were wondering, that amounts to approximately 133 billion pounds of food a year.

#7 America has the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prison population in the entire world by a wide margin.

#8 In America, we even put 81-year-old women in prison for feeding the birds.

#9 According to a Newsweek survey taken a few years ago, 29 percent of all Americans could not even name the vice president.

#10 Americans spend more time sitting in traffic than anyone else in the world.

#11 60 percent of Americans report feeling “angry or irritable”.  Two years ago that number was at 50 percent.

#12 36 percent of Americans admit that they have yelled at a customer service agent during the past year.

#13 Incredibly, one survey found that 30 percent of all Americans cannot remember in what year the 9/11 attacks happened.

#14 There are more “deaths by reptile” in America than anywhere else in the world.

#15 Right now, 29 percent of all Americans under the age of 35 are living with their parents.

#16 Average SAT scores have been falling for years, and the level of education that our kids are receiving in most of our public schools is a total joke.

#17 According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug.  An astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs.

#18 Americans spend more than 280 billion dollars on prescription drugs each year.

#19 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors in the United States write more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants each year.

#20 Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants than children in Europe are.

#21 In the United States today, prescription painkillers kill more Americans than heroin and cocaine combined.

#22 America has the highest rate of illegal drug use on the entire planet.

#23 According to the federal government, the number of heroin addicts in the United States has more than doubled since 2002.

#24 It is hard to believe, but 56 percent of all Americans now have “subprime credit”.

#25 America exports more weapons to other countries than anyone else in the world.

#26 The United States has the most complicated tax system on the entire planet.

#27 Corruption is rampant throughout our society.  In fact, America leads the world in money given to fake charities.

#28 America leads the world in soft drink consumption by a wide margin.  Today, the average American drinks more than 600 sodas a year.

#29 In 2008, 53 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be “middle class”.  In 2014, only 44 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be “middle class”.

#30 70 percent of Americans do not “feel engaged or inspired at their jobs”.

#31 40 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968 after you account for inflation.

#32 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps.  Today, about one out of every 6 Americans is on food stamps.

#33 The marriage rate in the United States has fallen to an all-time low.  Right now it is sitting at a yearly rate of 6.8 marriages per 1000 people.

#34 In the United States today, more than half of all couples “move in together” before they get married.

#35 America has the highest divorce rate in the world by a good margin.

#36 America has the highest percentage of one person households on the entire planet.

#37 100 years ago, 4.52 were living in the average U.S. household, but now the average U.S. household only consists of 2.59 people.

#38 According to the Pew Research Center, only 51 percent of all American adults are currently married.  Back in 1960, 72 percent of all adults in the United States were married.

#39 For women under the age of 30 in the United States, more than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock.

#40 At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.

#41 In 1970, the average woman had her first child when she was 21.4 years old.  Now the average woman has her first child when she is 25.6 years old.

#42 America has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world by a very wide margin.

#43 Approximately one out of every four teen girls in the United States has at least one sexually transmitted disease.

#44 America has the highest STD infection rate in the entire industrialized world.

#45 According to the latest figures released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, there are 20 million new sexually-transmitted infections in the United States every single year, and Americans in the 15 to 24-year-old age range account for approximately 50 percent of those new sexually-transmitted infections.

#46 As I wrote about recently, there are 747,408 registered sex offendersin the U.S. according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

#47 America produces more pornography than any other nation in the world.

#48 America has the most lawyers per capita in the entire world.

#49 If you choose to be a “Constitutionalist” in America today, you may get labeled as a potential terrorist by the U.S. government.

#50 America has the largest national debt in the history of the world.  Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars.  Today, it is over 17 trillion dollars.

#51 According to the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments on the national debt will nearly quadruple over the next ten years.

#52 Americans spend more money on elections than anyone else does in the world by a very wide margin.

#53 65 percent of Americans are dissatisfied “with the U.S. system of government and its effectiveness”.  That is the highest level of dissatisfaction that Gallup has ever recorded.

#54 Only 8 percent of Americans believe that Congress is doing a “good” or “excellent” job.

#55 70 percent of Americans do not have confidence that the federal government will “make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014.”

Paint Thinner in Children's Cereal Exposed