NORTH KOREA'S STARVING PEOPLE EATING CHILDREN (CANABALISM & COMMUNISM)

NORTH KOREA'S STARVING PEOPLE ARE EATING THEIR CHILDREN (COMMUNISM):

NORTH KOREAN CHILDREN DYING FROM MALNUTRITION & BEING EATEN BY STARVING ADULTS.

AMERICA REMAINS FREE YET SILENT.

OTTO WARMBIER'S MURDER EXPOSED NORTH KOREA'S COLD HEART.

WHERE IS AMERICA'S HUMANITARIAN RELIEF??

PLEASE PRAY FOR THE PEOPLE OF NORTH KOREA.


Sources: Washington Post


***** The Cannibals of North Korea


There were times and places in North Korea in the mid-1990s, as a great famine wiped out perhaps 10 percent of the population, that children feared to sleep in the open. Some of them had wandered in from the countryside to places like Chongjin, an industrial town on the coast, where they lived on streets and in railroad stations. It wasn't unusual for people to disappear; they were dying by the thousands, maybe millions. But dark rumors were spreading, too horrifying to believe, too persistent to ignore.

"Don't buy any meat if you don't know where it comes from," one Chongjin woman whispered to a friend, who later defected and recounted the conversation to the reporter Barbara Demick for her book, "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea." Fear of cannibalism, like the famine supposedly driving it, spread. People avoided the meat in streetside soup vendors and warned children not to be alone at night. At least one person in Chongjin was arrested and executed for eating human flesh.

The panic, Demick concludes, may have exceeded the actual threat. "It does not seem," she writes, "that the practice was widespread." But it does appear to have happened.

One defected military officer, who fled with his family into China, repeated the horror story that had long followed mass famines. "People are going insane with hunger. They even kill and eat their own infants. This kind of thing is happening in many places," he said, according to the North Korea-focused postscript to Jasper Becker's history of the famine that wracked China 30 years earlier, in which reports of cannibalism were widespread.

North Korea's famine is over, but the stories of desperate men and women, driven so insane by starvation that they consume their own children, have resurfaced. Last week, Asia Press published a report alleging that thousands recently died of starvation in a North Korean province, a trend that is sometimes called a micro-famine. The story was sourced to Rimjingang, a collection of underground North Korean journalists whose work is generally considered reputable. According to Rimjingang's sources, the famine, like others before it, had led to cannibalism. One man, they said, had been arrested and executed for killing and eating his children.

The story of that man has swept through the Western media, a harrowing tale of the horrors still unfolding behind North Korea's largely closed borders. But is it true? Could something so awful still be happening?

The simple answer is that we don't, and can't, know for sure. North Korea-watchers seem skeptical about this one, sensational report, but they often point out that stories of micro-famine and cannibalism are coming at a worryingly regular pace. Joshua Stanton, who runs the site One Free Korea, wrote in May, the last time that stories of cannibalism leaked out of North Korea, "My first reaction to these reports years ago was skepticism, but if you hear enough people say the same thing (see here and here), you start to think they can’t all be lying."

And yet micro-famines are still possible, or at least plausible, in North Korea. The government can't bring itself to surrender control over food. Though agricultural trade has more flexibility now than it did 15 or 20 years ago, it is still one of the world's most rigidly controlled. With a weak secondary market and virtually no social safety net, it's not difficult to imagine local North Korean communities facing the sort of brief but deadly famines that the rest of the world has largely learned to avoid. Unlike in places such as East Africa, where thousands died of hunger last year, the primary causes are not environmental but human.

The regime needs the secondary food trade to prevent mass starvation, but it appears to fear these markets as threats to its power. There is likely an ongoing cat-and-mouse game, with the state working to keep farmers sufficiently weak, and the secondary markets sufficiently spare, that everyone still relies on the regime to feed themselves. It's about power and control, and it places North Korean families at real risk.

Recently, members of China's sympathetic state-run media were allowed to visit a special "economic zone" across the border, a commune of thousands of North Koreans who grew their own food. During the tour, the North Korean minders let slip that all 13,000 residents would be forcibly relocated and replaced by new workers, a disturbing policy that seems meant to secure state control over food at the risk of its continued production.

State-run "collectivist" food distribution systems have always failed, leading to some of the greatest humanitarian catastrophesof the last century. North Korea's failed catastrophically in the 1990s, and though the system has changed significantly since then, it's difficult to know the degree to which informal markets and private plots are tolerated.

In an arbitrary and closed system, the state's approach might vary from place to place and time to time. Kim Jong Eun has worked aggressively to consolidate his power since taking over a year ago, a campaign that might well extend to the agricultural sector.

Maybe the stories of cannibalism are nothing more than that; rumors, stories from two decades prior that devolved into folklore. But cannibalism, for all the voyeuristic horror it inspires, is a symptom of something much worse: starvation and social breakdown, the conditions for which remain in North Korea. Perhaps most telling is that North Koreans themselves still seem to consider it possible, the defectors and underground reports still whispering of starvation and worse, a medieval horror in the 21st century.

"The Road We've Traveled" Pres. Obama's 17-Minute Campaign Documentary

Sources: Barack Obama.com, Youtube

Joseph Kony's Crimes No Surprise To American Black Community

I don't understand why everyone is so riled up over Joseph Kony's Atrocities against his OWN people.
This kind of stuff has been occurring in Africa & America for Decades.
Even in the 21st Century BLACK People are still Using & Harming other BLACK People for Personal Gain.
Most WHITE people will run to Africa in a New York Minute to help "Save Africans", while Killing & Imprisoning American BLACKS everyday.





Joseph Kony: Brutal warlord who shocked world


If Joseph Kony wasn't the most wanted man in the world, he may be now.

In the past week, a documentary detailing accusations of vile acts committed by the Ugandan warlord has spread like wildfire on social media (at the time of writing it has had more than 50 million views), prompting international outrage and a groundswell of support for his capture.

In the documentary, "Kony 2012," which was posted online by the U.S.-based group Invisible Children, the tales of atrocities are horrifying: armed supporters force abducted children to kill their own parents, brutal mutilations include the hacking off of lips and limbs, and the sexual slavery of young girls stolen from their families. The group says its aim is to raise awareness and bring Kony to justice.

While some critics question whether the film captures the full scope of the conflict, one matter is without debate: Kony now ranks as one of the International Criminal Court's most wanted men, facing arrest on charges of crimes against humanity after a 26-year campaign of brutality in his failed bid to overthrow the Ugandan government.

How did Kony rise to power?

Kony, a former altar boy, was a young man in his early 20s when he was caught in the storm of violence that marked the final years of Milton Obote's presidency.

Obote was deposed in a military coup in 1985, and soon after Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army (NRA) seized power. Kony's Lord's Resistance Army was among those who rose up against Museveni's NRA.

Kony was a spiritual leader, known as a healer among the Acholi people. He inherited a powerful support base from Alice Lakwena, a spirit-medium.

Lakwena's followers would "daub themselves in shea butter crosses which they believed would protect them from bullets and they believed that stones would explode like grenades," explains Matthew Green, author of "The Wizard of the Nile - The Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted," about Kony.

"It was a mystical rebellion," Green says, adding that Kony "was very much an inheritor of her mantle." Lakwena fled to Kenya after Museveni's forces launched a brutal attack on her and her followers.

Staying in northern Uganda, Kony rallied Lakwena's remaining supporters and recruited more with a powerful mix of mythical claims, charisma and unconscionable violence.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What is Kony like?

Green describes being one of the few journalists to ever meet Kony when the rebel leader briefly emerged from his jungle hideout in 2006.

"Although he was surrounded by phalanxes of child soldiers with Kalashnikov rifles and bayonets fixed to them, he actually looked terrified of meeting strangers," Green said.

Despite Kony's apparent fear and paranoia, Green says the rebel leader was charismatic and clearly a "very powerful orator" when speaking to his people.

"He had an almost musical voice as he spoke in his Acholi language and you could see that the people listening were completely captivated."

What are Kony's tactics?

If Kony attracted supporters through his "mystical powers" and charisma, he kept them through fear.

"Certainly the violence is what made his movement so terrifying," Green says. "These attacks were carried out often with machetes or clubs and the violence was designed with a very clear political purpose.

It was designed to illustrate to the people in northern Uganda that the government of President Museveni could not protect them."
Kony's forces are believed to have abducted thousands of children to join his cause -- however the exact number is unconfirmed.

At the height of the violence during the mid-2000s, parents tried to protect their children from harm by sending them to sleep in towns, away from Kony's ruthless kidnappers.

Brutal punishments were inflicted on those who were accused of disloyalty by an increasingly paranoid leader, Green says. "Kony once gave an order that anyone caught riding a bicycle should have their legs cut off.

Bicycles were a very common means of transport in rural areas and he was worried that informers, if they saw the rebels, would rapidly pedal away and alert the nearest army post."

And similarly he would cut off people's hands as a kind of warning not to raise any hands against the rebels," Green adds.

How organized is the Lord's Resistance Army?

Kony created the Lord's Resistance Army with the intention to lead, based on his version of the Ten Commandments. Since then it has grown into a "disciplined fighting force," says Green, explaining that its members occupy a rank and are rewarded for loyalty.

Kony has been able to maintain his hold over them with his mix of self-proclaimed spiritual powers and military strategy, Ned Dalby, Central Africa researcher with the International Crisis Group, said in a 2011 interview with CNN.

"He cultivates this image of himself as a medium for the power of the spirit and at other times, he presents himself as a ruthless military leader. So he's able to maintain cohesion as a group and maintain the loyalty of his fighters," Dalby said.

He noted that some former LRA fighters from northern Uganda have given clues as to why some outside the group stayed loyal to Kony. "They expressed the feeling that because they were given a rank, they were given a certain purpose, and respect and authority," Dalby says. "And then, once they're outside the LRA, they find they've become just another poor person, trying to survive."

Where is Kony now?

"Kony fled back into Sudan probably in late 2005, 2006 and he has not been back into Uganda since, as far as we know," Green said.

He is believed to be accompanied by a small band of supporters, though his followers are still said to be terrorizing people elsewhere on the continent.

"The mass abduction of Ugandan children and the terrible atrocities, the massacres that Kony committed have not occurred for some years now," added Green. "However, his forces are still on the loose in places like Central African Republic and Eastern Congo, and they still retain the capacity to kill large numbers of civilians. So although they're not a threat to Uganda now, they certainly are a threat to the region."

The U.S. has listed the LRA as a terrorist group and in October, Washington authorized up to 100 U.S. Special Operations trainers and military advisers to assist African forces searching for Kony and other leaders of the LRA.

The activities of the group are tracked on a website that uses information from the Invisible Children's Early Warning Radio Network, U.N. agencies and local NGOs to map and document recent crimes.



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Sources: CNN, KONY 2012, MSNBC, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

Gerrymandering 101: Its Fraud! No Longer Needed!

The Top Ten Most Gerrymandered Congressional Districts In The United States



(10.) North Carolina-12

This is what most people imagine when they think of a gerrymandered district — what I call “Gerrymander Classic.” NC-12 looks very much like the gerrymandered districts of the 19th century, but taken to extremes. As bad as it is, NC-12 at least looks like a congressional district, with meandering lines, consistent width, and hand-drawn appearance. As we’ll soon see, modern gerrymandering is often another animal altogether, with jarring shapes and artificial boundaries that are not just offensive to the eye but somehow feel like an insult to rationality.


(9.) Florida-20

This is what gerrymandering looks like in the modern era: ugly. Gone are any attempts at aesthetics. In the old days, redistricters at least tried to disguise their gerrymandering by drawing district lines that looked almost kinda sorta reasonable. No more. Nowadays many districts, with FL-20 being a good example, seem to be the result of computer algorithms with no regard whatsoever for human or natural boundaries. Needless to say, all sense of “community” within a congressional is out the window altogether when it is shaped like this, with jagged tendrils reaching out every which way to gobble up the desired demographic.


(8.) Pennsylvania-12

PA-12 is a rare example of “packing” (jamming as many opposition voters as possible into one district) that backfired. This district was created to be a Democratic stronghold formerly held by Congressman Jack Murtha, who was assumed to have a lock on the district. At the last redistricting in 2000, the Republicans in charge gave up on the area, which is solidly unionized, and decided to “pack” Murtha’s new district with as many Democrats as possible, to allow the remaining districts in the region a chance to have slim Republican majorities. But in the intervening ten years everything has changed: the area grew more and more conservative, and the locally popular Murtha died, opening up the seat to possible challengers.

In the 2010 election, PA-12 barely remained Democratic with Mark Critz winning by a hairsbreadth 50.8%-49.2% margin — while most of the surrounding districts overwhelmingly went Republican. Thus, if the foolish 2000 Republican redistricters had not consciously set out to create a “packed” Democratic district, and had instead just drawn the boundaries at random, they could have easily won all the races in the area, instead of losing this one (and the adjacent PA-4) by the slimmest of margins. Note to gerrymanderers: THINGS CHANGE. What may appear to be a wise gerrymander maneuver today may blow up in your face sometime in the future.


(7.) North Carolina-6

I have included NC-6 as a perfect example of “inverse gerrymandering,” a district that is partly hollowed out internally by a different gerrymandered district — in this case, the northern end of NC-12, our first example above. NC-6 is a stark reminder that no gerrymander is freestanding: all congressional districts are interlocked like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and every time you enclose any area by some outrageous boundary line, you are disincluding that same area from some surrounding district. So for every gerrymander you create, you are likely to also have a less-noticeable but just as offensive inverse gerrymander next door.


(6.) Florida-3

Florida has more than its fair share of gerrymandering nightmares. But while many of the state’s districts were admittedly drawn to favor Republican candidates, FL-3 is instead a federally mandated “minority-majority” district gerrymandered to give Black Voters a voice:

[FL-3] was drawn in 1992 to be North Florida’s black-majority seat and Democrats were shifted from the surrounding districts to make the surrounding districts more Republican. It currently stretches from Jacksonville’s downtown in the north to Orlando’s in the south, and stretches east and west to include other largely minority and Democratic areas such as Gainesville, Sanford and Eatonville.

As a result of this gerrymandering, the district is strongly Democratic with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of D +18 and gave Obama 73% of its vote in the 2008 election. It is 50.9% black and 35.4% white. …

The 3rd District is at the center of the debate over the potential impact of the FairDistricts initiative. Due to its shape, the 3rd is one of several districts that violate restrictions in the initiative which require compact districts that conform to geographical and political boundaries. On the other hand, the 3rd District is protected by the Voting Rights Act and a non-compact shape may be necessary to ensure it remains an effective African-American seat.

The “FairDistricts Initiative,” ballot proposals designed to finally make Florida’s redistricting theoretically nonpartisan, was finally approved by voters this year on November 2 — but was immediately challenged in court not by the Republicans as you might imagine but by none other than Corrine Brown, the representative of FL-3! Why? Because the new law stipulates that districts be geographically compact, which would eliminate her voting bloc and most likely her seat in Congress, when FL-3 is totally reconfigured next year. Which is ironic, because Republicans also view the new law with disdain, seeing it as a plot to swing the redistricting advantage back to the Democrats. Sigh. Can’t we all just get along?
(Answer: NO!)



(5.) Illinois-17

Political scientists love to cite IL-17 as the prototypical gerrymandered district, and you are likely to see IL-17 used as the illustration in many academic treatises about redistricting. And we can see why here. Its shape has often been described as “a rabbit on a skateboard,” though to me it looks more like an embryonic ichneumon wasp with a pancreatic cyst.

We saw above how PA-12 was a gerrymandering blunder by the Republicans; IL-17 is the opposite, a gerrymandered district created by Democrats to ensure themselves a seat in western Illinois — but which this year was snatched from their grasp by Tea Party candidate and now congressman-elect Bobby Schilling. Ooops! The Democrats went out on a limb when drawing IL-17 — several limbs, by the looks of it — but the wave election of 2010 changed the electoral landscape. Let me repeat my warning to over-confident redistricters next year: THINGS CHANGE. Gerrymander at your own risk.


(4.) Florida-22

Florida-22 isn’t a congressional district: it’s series of random lines generated by a malfunctioning dot-matrix printer. What else could explain the sheer purposelessness of the innumerable jagged ins and outs of a district so thin that in a few places you could run across it in under a minute? All of this to achieve — what? A district that is almost perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. Couldn’t the same result have been effected a little more simply, perhaps by circling some random part of a Florida map with a felt pen?

But all is forgiven, Florida-22, because on November 2 you elected as your representative Allen West MFC (My Favorite Congressman), quite obviously the next President of the United States.


(3.) Arizona-2


Arizona’s second district is the one most likely to make people burst out laughing. I mean, c’mon. And the explanation for this atrocity only makes it seem worse:

The odd shape of the district is indicative of the use of gerrymandering in its construction. The unusual division was not, however, drawn to favor politicians.

Owing to historic tensions between the Hopi and the Navajo Native American tribes and since tribal boundary disputes are a federal matter, it was thought inappropriate that both tribes should be represented in the U.S. House of Representatives by the same member. Since the Hopi reservation is completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation, and in order to comply with current Arizona redistricting laws, some means of connection was required that avoided including large portions of Navajo land, hence the narrow riverine connection.

So, the district was drawn this way so that Hopis and Navajos don’t give each other “electoral cooties” by having to vote for the same congressman? What — is America now a 3rd-grade playground? Imagine how Republicans in Nancy Pelosi’s district feel, or Democrats in rural Texas. All across America people have to line up at polling places alongside people whom they despise.
Get over it!


(2.) Maryland-3

Maryland-3 is the poster child for the lunacy that is gerrymandering. And the funniest part? The Democratic politicians who created it deny that it’s gerrymandered at all:

The new district was concocted after the 2000 Census when Maryland, like all states, drew up new congressional and state legislative district boundaries to reflect changes in the population.

Former Secretary of State John T. Willis, who was in charge of the redistricting as chairman of the Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Committee, said the committee did not mean for the 3rd District to look like it does. That’s just how the numbers worked out, he said.

“It’s a very complex situation, and population is the No. 1 driving characteristic,” Willis said.

The final plan, Willis noted proudly, created eight congressional districts that had almost exactly the same number of people in them.

“All of our congressional districts don’t deviate by more than one person,” he said.
But Rascovar said that no matter how the committee “painted it”, the new boundaries were drawn to favor Democratic candidates in the 2nd District.

“They needed ‘x’ number of votes . . . what you end up doing is juggling these neighborhood votes, and it becomes absurd,” Rascovar said.

“The most absurd is that the politicians drawing up these districts are no longer concerned with the neighborhoods,” he said. “All they care is, ‘How many loyal Democrats can I get in this district?’ ”

Willis disagreed. Although the interests of incumbent representatives were taken into consideration, he said, no single district was favored.


(1.) Illinois-4

Here it is: The most ridiculous congressional district in the entire country. No, you’re not looking at two districts; IL-4 has two absurdly gerrymandered halves held together by a thin strip of land at its western edge that is nothing more than the median strip along Interstate Highway 294. The end result is a gerrymandered gerrymander, a complete mockery of what congressional representation is even supposed to be. As with AZ-2, the intention behind IL-4 was to create an ethnic enclave, in this case an Hispanic-majority district within an otherwise overwhelmingly non-Hispanic Chicago. Problem is, Chicago has two completely distinct and geographically separate Hispanic neighborhoods — one Puerto Rican, the other Mexican — but neither is large enough to constitute a district majority on its own. Solution? Lump all Hispanics together into a supposedly coherent cultural grouping, and then carefully draw a line surrounding every single Hispanic household in Chicago, linking the two distant neighborhoods by means of an uninhabited highway margin. Voila! One Hispanic congressperson, by design. And as a side-effect, the most preposterous congressional district in the United States.

But wait — our gerrymander tour isn’t over. If you think those ten were bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. While they may have indeed been the ten most gerrymandered districts in the nation, at least they shared something admirable in common: They were legal. The same cannot be said about our next ten districts, which may not be as crazily shaped as the ones above, but which are in one crucial aspect far worse: they’re noncontiguous.

The whole reason gerrymandering even exists as a practice in the first place is to overcome the requirement that each congressional district be contiguous — in other words, a unified single enclosed area, however strangely shaped it may be. This self-evident need to create contiguous districts is the whole reason why gerrymandered district boundaries wander all over the landscape, so as to enclose certain sought-after voters while still keeping them geographically connected to the rest of the district. Without the requirement to have each district be contiguous, politicians could easily have created a new level of fantasmagorial gerrymandering in which demographic groupings are enclosed without any regard to where they might be located on a map, forging “districts” out of disconnected topological islands.

Thank heavens that can never happen, right? Right?

Wrong.

The politicians in charge of redistricting are so brazen in some states that they seem to have gotten drunk on gerrymander wine, tossing caution to the wind and cavalierly creating noncontiguous congressional districts with portions completely cut off from the rest of the voters. How in the world they got away with this, I have no idea — apparently, if you have the hubris to create gerrymandered districts in the first place, it’s not so big a step to cross the invisible boundary between unethical and illegal.

That said, I am unaware of any federal law stipulating that districts be contiguous; it seems to be legislated on a state-by-state basis. And it could very well be that certain states intentionally fail to pass or enforce such a law, if it serves a political purpose to violate it. After all, who’s going to prosecute the redistricters? Themselves?

If this trend continues, perhaps the time has come to enact nationwide guidelines expressly prohibiting noncontiguous congressional districts.


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Sources: Pajamas Media, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps

Malcolm X Documentary: "Make It Plain" (Videos)

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Sources: Youtube, Google Maps

Jeff Corwin's "100 Heartbeats"...Animal Documentary

Sources: MSNBC, Youtube

Sarah Palin Slams Everyone in New Documentary! Media, Bloggers, Obama, McCain, Fey, Couric, etc.,

Once again Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is talking. This time she expresses her true views in an upcoming documentary called "Media Malpractice", in which she slams and blames everyone for her failures.

The Media, Bloggers, the McCain Campaign, Katie Couric, Tina Fey, Obama, Caroline Kennedy, etc.,

Poor Sarah.....Waah! Waah! Waah!



Sources: Youtube, Howobamagotelected.com, Flickr, Blogger