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PARIS - Lovers of turbo-neoliberalism, rejoice - and take your bottles of Moet to a prime ringside seat; there won't be a nastier catfight this summer than the opening rounds opposing two Western giants. Forget about the Pentagon "pivoting" to Asia without ever abandoning the Middle East; nothing compares with this voyage in the entrails of turbo-capitalism, worthy of a neo-Balzac. We're talking about a new Holy Grail - a free-market deal between the United States and the European Union; the advent of a giant, internal transatlantic market (25% of global exports, 31% of global imports, 57% of foreign investment), where goods and services (but not people) will "freely" circulate, something that in theory will lead Europe out of its current funk. The problem is that to reach this Brave New World presided by the Market Goddess, Europe will have to renounce some of its quite complex juridical, environmental, cultural and health norms. In that Kafkaesque/Orwellian bureaucratic paradise also known as Brussels, hordes of faceless equivalents of the bowler hat men in a Magritte painting openly complain about this "adventure"; there's a growing consensus Europe has everything to lose and little to gain out of it, in contrast with the much-derided enemies of the European integration, as in the fanatics of an "pro-American" and "ultra-liberal" Europe. That yellow peril again It gets curioser and curioser when one observes that the great majority of European nations actually have wanted a free-market deal for quite a while, unlike the much more protectionist US. By now, at least officially, not a single EU nation is opposed to the deal. Here's the non-official reason; none can afford to be blamed an enemy of the United States. The European Commission (EC) estimates that the gross national product growth of the EU as a whole will grow by 0.5% - not exactly a Chinese target. The Americans, on the other hand, are way more excited; the US Senate estimates that without custom duties, US exports to Europe will grow by almost 20%. The meat of the matter in clinching the deal will be harmonizing rules that are blamed for blocking the much-vaunted totally free circulation of goods. "Harmonizing" means diluting European rules. And there's the rub; Washington does not want just a transatlantic deal. The final countdown is to set in stone a global free for all that would later be imposed everywhere; that's code for totally opening the Chinese market, with absolutely no restrictions, for Western corporations. The German Marshall Fund of the United States goes straight to the point; Western capitalism must remain the universal norm, against the "threat" of state-managed Chinese capitalism. Reduced to ashes is the irony that Chinese capitalism has been - and will continue to be - the savior in the massive ongoing crisis of Western capitalism. The US-EU deal is also supposed to be the icing on a cake of deals already being struck by the US with individual nations in Asia. There's absolutely no question about who the stronger side is. US President Barack Obama is already engaged in high-stakes PR, spinning on every possible occasion that Europe has been in trouble trying to find a recipe for growth. And the US may count on fifth column elements such as the European Commissioner for Commerce, Karel De Gucht, for whom the French - who defend a lot of exceptions - are already isolated. Make no mistake; Washington will go for broke, Iron Man 3-style - as in smashing European norms of sanitation and phyto-sanitation, and "liberalizing" food, everything genetically modified from meat enhanced with hormones to chlorine chicken. The pesky rules established by the faceless men in Brussels have been routinely derided in Washington as "non-scientific", unlike the American non-rules....

Men who are physically strong are more likely to have right wing political views Weaker men more likely to support welfare state and wealth redistribution Link may reflect psychological traits that evolved in our ancestors Strength was a proxy for ability to defend or acquire resources There is no link between women's physical strength and political views By Daily Mail Reporter PUBLISHED: 05:21 EST, 16 May 2013 | UPDATED: 19:39 EST, 16 May 2013 Comments (620) Share Men who are strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state, researchers claim. Their study discovered a link between a man’s upper-body strength and their political views. Scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark collected data on bicep size, socio-economic status and support for economic redistribution from hundreds in America, Argentina and Denmark. Men who are physically strong - like Arnold Schwarzenegger - are more likely to take a right wing political stance The figures revealed that men with higher upper-body strength were less likely to support left-wing policies on the redistribution of wealth. Men with less upper body strength are more likely to support the welfare state - like Labour leader Ed Miliband But men with low upper-body strength were more likely to put their own self-interest aside and support a welfare state. The researchers found no link between upper-body strength and redistribution opinions among women. Professor Michael Petersen said: ‘In all three countries, physically strong males consistently pursued the self-interested position on redistribution. ‘However physically weak males were more reluctant to assert their self-interest – just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation between individuals. ‘While many people think of politics as a modern phenomenon, it has, in a sense, always been with our species. ‘Political views are designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.’ The findings were published in the journal Psychological Science. Professor Petersen added: ‘Many previous studies have shown that people's political views cannot be predicted by standard economic models. ‘This is among the first studies to show that political views may be rational in another sense, in that they're designed by natural selection to function in the conditions recurrent over human evolutionary history.’ Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/ar...#ixzz2TZGvBtoU Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

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Court Denies Asylum to Home-Schooling German Family By BEN WALDRON | ABC News – Wed, May 15, 2013 View PhotoABC News - Court Denies Asylum to Home-Schooling German Family (ABC News) A German family that fled to the United States in 2008 to home school their children is on the verge of deportation after a Tennessee appeals court denied a request for asylum. Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, devout Christians from the southwest of Germany who now have six children, came to the United States in 2008 after the German government threatened them with legal action for home-schooling their children, which is banned in Germany. They were initially granted asylum by a US judge who believed Germany had restricted their religious freedom. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, however, ruled this week in favor of the Obama administration, which challenged the family's asylum on the grounds that Germany's ban on home-schooling did not constitute persecution and thus could not be used as a basis for political asylum in the United States. "We are very disappointed in the decision by the Sixth Circuit to deny political asylum to the Romeike family who wants the freedom to home-school their children," said Michael Farris, the Romeike family's attorney and the chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, in a statement emailed to ABC News. "The decision of the court fails to even discuss the unchallenged evidence of Germany's motive in banning homeschooling. The German Supreme Court says that they want to suppress religious and philosophical minorities," the statement read. "I can't think of any reason other than bias against Christians and homeschoolers [for the decision]," Farris told ABC News. "I have vowed to fight to the very end on this, this is an injustice of a significant magnitude," he said. Farris also expressed frustration over what he perceives as the Obama administration singling out the Romeike family for deportation, despite its support of a Senate bill that would potentially legalize 11 million estimated unlawful immigrants currently residing in the United States. "You can't look at the lenient attitude to 11 million people who came here for economic opportunity, why we would not treat people who come here for economic freedom on par with people who came here for religious freedom I don't understand," said Farris. Michael Donnelly, an attorney for the Romeike family, told ABC News the family remains hopeful. "They feel very comfortable that, in the end, things are going to work out for them," he said. "There is a lot of support for this family in Congress, it is possible that Congress might take some action." Farris said the family is planning to appeal the decision first to the entire Sixth Circuit Court and to the Supreme Court, if necessary. The Justice Department did not immediately comment. Immigration and Customs Enforcement cited a policy not to comment on litigation pending in federal court. Home schooling has been illegal in Germany since 1918, when school attendance was made compulsory. Parents who choose to home-school anyway face financial penalties and legal consequences, including the potential loss of custody of their children. U.S. law says that individuals can qualify for asylum if they can prove they are being persecuted because of their religion or because they are members of a particular "social group." "They are trying to establish that they are eligible for asylum under the social group category, which is a difficult group to prove, in the first place," Karla McKanders, an asylum and refugee law specialist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, told ABC News. McKanders added that public policy implications as far as the United States' relationship with Germany could also be in play in this case, and that immigration officials may be wary of setting a precedent that establishes home schooling as a means for asylum. "They don't want to open up the floodgates for similar asylum claims based on these grounds," she said. Recent changes in immigration enforcement policy are also in play. In 2011 the Obama administration initiated a new policy called "prosecutorial discretion" that gives the government broad power to pursue only high-priority cases. The policy was designed to give Department of Homeland Security the power to decide which deportation proceedings it wishes to pursue. "This case would probably fall under one of those cases that should be a low priority, because you have a family that is fleeing based on their own beliefs," McKanders said. "They, of course, do not have a criminal background, so it should be one of those cases where they are not spending a lot of resources, but it's not." "The attorney general has the authority at any point in time to grant the family asylum," said Donnelly, who added that he hoped that eventually would be what happens. "These folks should be allowed to stay, they meet the standard." Farris has also petitioned the White House to allow the Romeike family to remain in the country. "Every state in the United States of America recognizes the right to home school, and the U.S. has the world's largest and most vibrant home school community," read the formal petition on the White House website. "Regrettably, this family faces deportation in spite of the persecution they will suffer in Germany. The Romeikes hope for the same freedom our forefathers sought."

The middle class American worker is in danger of becoming an endangered species. The politicians are not telling you the truth, and the mainstream media is certainly not telling you the truth, but the reality is that there is nothing but bad news on the horizon for workers in the United States. In the old days, when the big corporations that dominate our society did well, that also meant good things for American workers since those corporations would need more of us to work for them. But in the emerging one world economic system that our economy is being merged into, those corporations have other choices now. For instance, the big corporations can now choose to limit the number of "expensive" American workers that they employ by shipping millions of jobs to the other side of the world. And from their perspective, it makes perfect sense. They can make much bigger profits by hiring people on the other side of the planet to work for them for less than a dollar an hour. If they can get good production out of those people, then why should they hire Americans for ten to twenty times as much, plus have to give those Americans health insurance and other benefits? Another major factor in the slow, agonizing death of the American worker is technology. We live during a period when technology is advancing at a pace that is almost unimaginable at the same time that it is steadily becoming cheaper and cheaper. That means that it is going to become easier and easier for companies to replace workers with robots and computers. As I have written about previously, it is being projected that our economy will lose millions of jobs to technology in the coming years. Yes, some of us will still be needed to help build the robots and the computers, but not all of us will. And of course the overall general weakness of the economy is not helping matters either. The American people inherited the greatest economic machine in the history of the world, and we have wrecked it. Decades of very foolish decisions have resulted in the period of steady economic decline that we are experiencing now. America is simply not the economic powerhouse that it once was. Back in 2001, the U.S. economy accounted for 31.8 percent of global GDP. By 2011, the U.S. economy only accounted for 21.6 percent of global GDP. That is a collapse any way that you want to look at it. Today, American workers are living in an economy that is rapidly declining, and their jobs are steadily being stolen by robots, computers and foreign workers that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages. Politicians from both political parties refuse to do anything to stop the bleeding because they think that the status quo is working just great. So don't expect things to get better any time soon. The following are 10 amazing charts that demonstrate the slow, agonizing death of the American worker...

This Is G-r-e-a-t! Watch Video! General Jimmy Doolittle's granddaughter with what really did happen to the planes that bombed Japan in 1942. Lest we forget…… Jimmy Doolittle's granddaughter has documented the famous Doolittle Raid in April 1942, in which America struck back at Japan for the first time after the Pearl Harbor attack of the previous December 7th. Here, she puts it all into perspective, and corrects Hollywood's miscues. The reminder at the end is especially cogent: WE must write our history, and not let show business do it for us....