EpiphaNation: Real. World. News.

This Is the Way He Ball: Jahil Carson Hoopin' It Up (Dunk Mele)

2010-11-13T17:48:00.000-08:00

As part of an ever-growing league of freakishly talented players arriving on the basketball scenes across the world, this particular player has shown he has the jumping capabilities the soar above the vast majority.

Jahil Carson

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Murmurs of a Copyright Police State Surface

2010-08-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

---From torrentfreak.com

MPAA and RIAA Call for Copyright Police State

Written by Ernesto on April 15, 2010

Just days after the U.S Government acknowledged that the entertainment industries have misled the authorities with bogus piracy reports, the RIAA and MPAA are using those same statistics to convince the copyright czar to transform the Internet into a copyright police state.

The PRO-IP Act is a United States law that aims to toughen current anti-piracy measures.

As part of the Act, President Obama appointed Victoria Espinel as the new copyright czar last year. Espinel announced a public consultation a few months ago, looking for comments and suggestions from the U.S. public on how to deal with piracy.

For this consultation the RIAA and MPAA have now jointly submitted (pdf) their suggestions, calling for a future without piracy.

As expected, the submission starts with bitter complaints about the massive losses the entertainment industries have to endure because of online piracy. The same old bogus studies and reports are cited, publications that were heavily criticized and labeled as inaccurate by the U.S. Government earlier this week.

What follows are a set of recommendations that, if they become law, would turn the Internet into a copyright police state. The EFF has cherry picked some of the most draconian recommendations in a recent blog post, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. We highlight some of the suggestions below.

If the RIAA and MPAA had their way…

- The public would be encouraged to install anti-piracy software on their computers which would monitor their network for copyright-infringing materials. They are most likely referring to the Digital File Check application that they’ve been plugging for a while.

- Internet service providers would have to allow third parties to spy on the files that are transferred by their customers and check them against a reference database of “fingerprints” to check whether the files are infringing copyright or not.

- Torrent sites and file-hosters would have to preemptively filter content that is uploaded to or indexed by their sites. The reasoning behind this suggestion is that the regular notice and takedown procedures are time consuming and ineffective because content quickly reappears.

- Search engines, hosting companies, payment processors, advertising agencies, social networking sites and domain registrars would be encouraged to team up with copyright holders in order to prevent online piracy. The purpose of this collaboration would be to cut off sites that ‘facilitate’ copyright infringement.

- Consumers and websites that repeatedly infringe on the rights of copyright holders would lose their Internet access.

These are just a few of the recommendations that are listed in the submission. It is quite clear that the copyright industries want full control over the Internet by building a copyright police state. Let’s hope that the politicians responsible for drafting the legislation will use their brains, instead of blindly accepting such proposals. ----

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A Touching Account of Hurricane Katrina

2010-08-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

This account of the tragic hurricane, that destroyed many homes and altered many lives, gets an understandably personal feel when hearing it firsthand.

Let us never allow this to happen again.

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Sarah Palin Tweets: "Don't retreat...reload!" After Dr.'s Racist Rant

2010-08-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin has tweeted some words of advice for Dr. Laura Schlessinger: "Don't retreat...reload!"

Dr. Laura ending radio show following N-word rant

Schlessinger — who announced on Tuesday's Larry King Live that she will end her radio program at the end of the year following her N-word rant last week — was pressured to step aside, Palin tweeted in Internet speak, because "her 1st Amend.rights ceased 2exist thx 2activists trying 2silence" her. The former Alaskan governor added that the situation "isn't American [and] not fair."

"Dr.Laura=even more powerful & effective w/out the shackles, so watch out Constitutional obstructionists," Palin tweeted. "And b thankful 4 her voice,America!"

Schlessinger used the N-word 11 times in five minutes during a call last Tuesday with a black woman asking how to handle racist comments. She later apologized for the "horrible mistake," but told King she decided to retire because she wants to regain her First Amendment rights.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger apologizes for saying N-word on the air

"I want to be able to say what's on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors," she said. "I'm sort of done with that." ----

Is this passive violence promoted by Palin??? Interesting choice of words huh?...

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Castro Gives Bilderberg Conspiracy Worldwide Attention

2010-08-19T15:58:00.000-07:00

Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club

----By WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press Writer Will Weissert, Associated Press Writer – Wed Aug 18, 2:52 pm ET

HAVANA – Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.

The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.

Estulin's work, "The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club," argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.

Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a "fantastic story."

Estulin's book, as quoted by Castro, described "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self."

The Bilderberg group's website says its members have "nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern" once a year, but the group does nothing else.

It said the meetings were meant to encourage people to work together on major policy issues.

The prominence of the group is what alarms critics. It often includes members of the Rockefeller family, Henry Kissinger, senior U.S. and European officials and major international business and media executives.

The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to "control the masses" by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.

"The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself," the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.

"In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population," the excerpt said.

Castro — who had an inside seat to the Cold War — has long expressed suspicions of back-room plots. He has raised questions about whether the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government to stoke military budgets and, more recently suggested that Washington was behind the March sinking of a South Korean ship blamed on North Korea.

Estulin's own website suggests that the 9/11 attacks were likely caused by small nuclear devices, and that the CIA and drug traffickers were behind the 1988 downing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that was blamed on Libya.

The Bilderberg conspiracy theory has been popular on both extremes of the ideological spectrum, even if they disagree on just what the group wants to do. Leftists accuse the group of promoting capitalist domination, while some right-wing websites argue that the Bilderberg club has imposed Barack Obama on the United States to advance socialism.

Some of Estulin's work builds on reports by Big Jim Tucker, a researcher on the Bilderberg Group who publishes on right-wing websites.

"It's great Hollywood material ... 15 people sitting in a room sitting in a room determining the fate of mankind," said Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan policy think tank in New York.

"As someone who doesn't come out of the Oliver Stone school of conspiracy, I have a hard time believing it," London added.

A call to a Virginia number for the American Friends of Bilderberg rang unanswered Wednesday and the group's website lists no contact numbers.

Castro, who underwent emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006 and stepped down as president in February 2008, has suddenly begun popping up everywhere recently, addressing Cuba's parliament on the threat of a nuclear war, meeting with island ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry, writing a book and even attending the dolphin show at the Havana aquarium. ----

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"The Mentality of the Occupier"

2010-08-17T15:09:00.000-07:00

On Facebook: Israeli soldier posed with bound Arab

From AP -Associated Press

--- By DIAA HADID, Associated Press Writer Diaa Hadid, Associated Press Writer – Mon Aug 16, 7:41 pm ET

JERUSALEM – A former Israeli soldier posted photos on Facebook of herself in uniform smiling beside bound and blindfolded Palestinian prisoners, drawing sharp criticism Monday from the Israeli military and Palestinian officials.

Israeli news websites and blogs showed two photographs of the woman. In one, she is sitting legs crossed beside a blindfolded Palestinian man who is slumped against a concrete barrier. His face is turned downwards, while she leans toward him with her face upturned. Another shows her smiling at the camera with three Palestinian men with bound hands and blindfolds behind her.

The incident was a reminder of the fraught relations between Israeli soldiers and the West Bank Palestinians under their control.

Israeli soldiers have run into trouble on the social media sites like Facebook and YouTube before. Most recently a group of combat soldiers were reprimanded for breaking into choreographed dance moves while on patrol in the West Bank town of Hebron. The dance featured prominently on YouTube.

Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib condemned the photos and said they pointed to a deeper malaise — how Israel's 43-year-old occupation of Palestinians has affected the Israelis who enforce it.

"This shows the mentality of the occupier," Khatib said, "to be proud of humiliating Palestinians. The occupation is unjust, immoral and, as these pictures show, corrupting."

The Israeli military also criticized the young woman, who Israeli news media and bloggers identified from her Facebook page as Eden Aberjil of the southern Israeli port town of Ashdod. No official confirmed her identity.

"These are disgraceful photos," said Capt. Barak Raz, an Israeli military spokesman. "Aside from matters of information security, we are talking about a serious violation of our morals and our ethical code and should this soldier be serving in active duty today, I would imagine that no doubt she would be court-martialed immediately," he told Associated Press Television News.

It was not clear whether the army could punish the woman, because she has finished her compulsory military service.

The comments by the woman and her friend in an exchange below one photograph suggested how casually the picture was treated, including jokes and sexual innuendoes.

"You're the sexiest like that," her friend wrote.

"I wonder if he's got Facebook!" the woman in the photograph responded. "I have to tag him in the picture!"

Aberjil did not respond to reporters' questions Monday.

The photographs were a reminder of snapshots taken in 2003 by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that showed Iraqi detainees naked, humiliated and terrified. In that case, some soldiers went to prison after the photos came to light.

The photographs of the Israeli soldier and the Palestinians, by contrast, show no overt physical abuse or coercion of the prisoners, although they are ridiculed in the comments between the soldier and her friends.

Palestinians are routinely handcuffed and blindfolded when they are arrested to stop them from trying to flee. ---

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Is This News Or Propaganda??? If yes, what kinda ganda???

2010-08-03T02:58:00.000-07:00

A recent news feed on July 25 reads:

{ Michael Jackson said to have secretly collected Nazi films

Michael Jackson had a secret collection of Nazi documentaries, it emerged yesterday.

The late King of Pop hunted out specialist video sellers who were able to discreetly sell him hard-to-find films and documentaries.

Alarmingly, given the child sex allegations against him, these included TV specials and dramas depicting troubled boys in dysfunctional families.

But most shockingly they also included a thirst for information depicting the horrific Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

Seller Norman Scherer says he helped Jacko form "a really good collection" and adds he provided him with titles like, 'Nazis: Of Pure Blood', 'Oasis of the Zombies' and 'Hitler's Children'.

He says Jackson then displayed the tapes along the walls of his video vault at the Neverland ranch.

"Michael Jackson was a very special client to me," insisted Scherer, who owned a videotape distribution company in the 1990s.

He says in 1995 that he was approached by a New Yorker looking to place big orders for a "famous" client. He was told the deal could only work if he vowed to be discreet.

Jackson's former personal assistant, Scott Schaffer, had hunted him down and acted as the go-between.

"I knew what [Jackson] wanted," Schaffer said.

Asked about the Hitler videos, Scherer says he assumed that the singer just loved the military uniforms, and the lockstep marching.
... }

Read the entire article-----------------> [Here]<--- : : : :
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I want to place a finger on the pulse of the public on this one. What do you think is the purpose of this article? Does the propaganda behind the story outweigh it? Does it have merit at all?

Your comments are needed and greatly appreciated.

U.S. Troops Fire on Innocent Iraqi Reporters and Children [armed with CAMERAS]

2010-04-07T16:34:00.000-07:00

This is why we should all hate wars. Enough said.

[About 12 innocent reporters and children were killed, including two Reuters news staff, who were mistaken for insurgents after their camera was thought to be a rocket propelled grenade launcher.

The gunsight video contains audio of a conversation between the pilots, saying: "Let us shoot!"]

"Pointless wars have senseless casualties."- Mr. Common S.

Rapper Briscoe gets robbed at barbershop

2009-08-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

Miami rapper Briscoe was robbed at gunpoint while getting a haircut at a local barbershop when 4 gunmen barged through the door stealing their jewelry, money, and vehicle.

The job looks like an inside one as a man i seen on his cell phone in the barbershop before the men come in. After the deed is done, one of the perps taps the man and they leave together. No suspects have been found so far but this is rediculous.

AND listen to the statement made by the policeman. Is he serious?? Should he be disciplined for his sarcastic public statement about a serious crime? Probably.

Little MJ?

2009-07-30T13:28:00.000-07:00

Meet Michael Jackson's fourth child...

Well sort of...

His name is a Omer Bhatti, a 25 year old Norwegian who sat front row at MJ's funeral.
Apparently he met MJ back in the 90's claiming himself as the son of MJ.

He then lived at Neverland Ranch for 8 YEARS but for some reason this has slipped under the radar somewhat. Joe Jackson was asked if Omer was his son and he replied being surprised it took so long to come out.

Still the media insists this isn't true. But I wouldn't be quick to take their side on this one. He LOOKS more like MJ than any of the others. I wonder.

scary???

2009-07-29T20:08:00.000-07:00

is it just me or is this kangaroo a little spooky?

spooky kangaroo