Dry-eye disease occurs when a person’s eyes fail to produce enough tears. Staring at a screen means your eyes blink less, leading your tear film to evaporate more quickly. This causes your eyes to become swollen, red and irritated. While this is most often seen in older people, experts believe the problem is underdiagnosed in children.

People blink every three to four seconds under normal conditions; this grows to once every 10 to 12 seconds when looking at electronic screens. Using smartphones close to the face is even worse, as their small print forces the eyes to work even harder.

In the study, 916 Korean children who were between 7 and 12 years old were given eye exams. Of the 6.6 percent who met the criteria for dry-eye disease, 97 percent said they used smartphones for an average of 3.2 hours per day. Meanwhile, those who did not have symptoms of the problem averaged 37 minutes per day.

This is supported by a 2014 American Optometric Association survey that revealed that four fifths of children noted itchy, burning or tired eyes after prolonged electronic device use.

Another problem caused by smartphone use is digital eye strain. This is a type of physical discomfort that people note after spending two hours or longer in front of digital screens. The Vision Council reports that 31 percent of Americans say they experience eye strain, while 22 percent experience dry eyes, and 22.1 percent report blurred vision.

Interestingly, more than 30 percent of parents who claim to be concerned about how digital devices will affect their children’s eyes nevertheless allow them to spend more than three hours per day looking at screens. This is something that needs to change immediately if parents want to preserve their children’s eye health.

Less time with screens, more time outdoors

Children who are glued to screens all day also spend less time outdoors, which compounds vision problems. According to an Ulster University study, short-sightedness rates among young people have doubled in the last 50 years, with nearly a quarter of British 12- and 13-year-olds suffering from myopia. In East Asia, 90 percent of children have the condition, and this rise is being blamed in part on a lack of daylight exposure. A Chinese study found that spending an extra 40 minutes outdoors each day could reduce myopia in children.

With the average child between the ages of 8 and 11 spending 4.5 hours each day in front a screen, and the average teen spending 6.5 hours a day doing the same, this epidemic is only likely to grow.

How can you prevent smartphone-related eye problems?

The most obvious solution here is to curb your smartphone use and insist that your children do the same. A diet rich in carotenoids can help boost eye functioning, so be sure to eat plenty of foods like sweet potatoes, carrots, spinach, pumpkins, broccoli, cantaloupe and goji berries. (Learn about other healthy foods and superfoods at Fresh.news) However, diet alone is not likely to counteract the bad effects of these devices. There are plenty of other reasons to eschew smartphone use, from sleep disruptions to privacy concerns, to the dangers of cell phone radiation.

If you must use a smartphone, limit yourself to shorter periods of time and follow the 20-20-20 rule: Give your eyes a rest by looking at something that is situated 20 feet off into the distance for 20 seconds after every 20 minutes of screen use. The Vision Council recommends using eyewear that can filter out the blue light responsible for much of the harm that comes from using smartphones. They also suggest reducing any overhead lighting to keep screen glare to a minimum, and staying at least an arm’s distance away from the screen.

Sources include:

Independent.co.uk

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

TheVisionCouncil.org

(Article by Jack Perry from LewRockwell.com)

The motive is perfectly clear: Oil. You see, Russia has already eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the world’s biggest oil producer. This means the big Saudi oil fields are drying up. And the government knows that, but they can’t tell us this because it’ll create a panic. One would think this would motivate the United States to get cozier with Russia. However, what the United States government fears is that if we do that, Russia will twig to the motive for it, and realize it has the United States over a barrel. An oil barrel. At which point the price goes up. Not to mention extracting concessions in the global sphere of influence.

Thus, what the United States is playing at here is trying to install a different “regime” in Russia. That being, one that Vladimir Putin does not control or have any influence over. This is easier said than done and the United States knows this. But the stakes are quite a bit higher than controlling the dwindling oil supply in the Middle East. Russia is obviously in control of most of the world’s remaining oil reserves. The United States needs a puppet regime in Russia to have access to that oil without paying the correct market price for it.

At some point, this gambit will fail. Russia is not the Middle East. A war with Russia cannot be won or cease-fired out of. Nor can a United States-backed “regime change” succeed over there. This is not the 1990s Russia of Boris Yeltsin. The United States, however, cannot come clean with the truth to the American people. The reason is because if the American people knew the truth, they’d never sleep nights anymore. The truth is this: Our entire economic system is based on petroleum and low-cost petroleum at that. But the actual nightmare is that our entire agricultural system is based on cheap oil.

The United States diet, especially for average Americans, is based on only three crops: Corn, wheat, and soy. Every processed food you see is based on fractions of those three staples. Meat is fed those three staples, even the farm-raised salmon you see in the store. Without those three crops, the United States would undergo a famine not seen in the United States ever at any point. The United States cannot feed itself without those three crops. What’s more, many large parts of the world depend on those three crops exported from the United States to feed themselves, too. Therefore, without them, the famine would turn into a runaway famine of global proportions.

Those three crops require large inputs of oil to grow, maintain, fertilize, and harvest. The corn alone depletes the soil to the extent synthetic fertilizer made by the Haber Process is an absolute requirement. That synthetic fertilizer requires oil to produce. The tractors and combines to plant and harvest these crops run on oil. All the transportation involved runs on oil. People have been led to believe we’ve discovered domestic oil reserves that will give us self-sufficiency. Who’s telling us this? The oil companies who are in bed with the government. The fact is, if we have to rely on these reserves alone, they will need to be devoted to agriculture alone. Or we won’t eat.

At some point, the oil is going to dwindle. It may have already begun, which is the entire motive for trying to isolate Russia. See, we think the sanctions will create economic hardships that will topple Putin. Then we can install “our guy” (probably being groomed in Ukraine) to run the show and give us access to those last reserves at the price we want to pay. But if that doesn’t happen, and it probably won’t, we better start thinking about the fact food is about to get a lot more expensive. The days of .99 cent super bags of corn chips are about to come to an end. Soon.

Keep in mind that the government heavily subsidizes those three crops as it is. Otherwise, food would be a LOT more expensive. Understand this: We are all on food stamps because the government subsidizes corn, wheat, and soy. If they did not, many people would not be able to afford food at all. What you see in the store is not the real and actual cost of that food. You’re seeing it after the government paid up to half (or more) of the cost to grow that corn, wheat, and soy. Including that which was fed to animals, we eat. Meaning, if you think beef is expensive at $6.99 a pound, the actual cost is $15.99 a pound if the government did not subsidize the corn fed to that cattle.

That can only take place because the oil is relatively cheap. Were the oil not cheap and the government still had to subsidize the food crops, the money will probably have to be diverted from Social Security, interstate highways, and the military budget. So you can see the corner the government has painted themselves into. They can’t afford to do nothing but they can’t afford to get into an actual war with Russia, either. However, the steps they are taking carry the very real seeds of a war, but the government is willing to risk that, gambling a certain future of food riots against the possibility of a war. It’s a lose-lose proposition, but the government and Wall Street are stubbornly refusing to own up to the truth. They have staked “growth” of the economy on the price of oil. We are in a suicide pact with them right now.

Oil is a finite thing. It will run out. This is a fact. Now, the cheap oil has led up to more food grown and, as a result, more people born because we had the available food to feed them. These people, in turn, have increased the demand for more oil. Hence, the consumption of oil goes up each year. Meaning, the oil supply (being finite) gets lower and lower but the demand for it goes higher and higher. In truth, this means the oil will run out faster than any predictions made based upon world population numbers of even ten years ago. Every person who comes into the world, whether that person drives a car or not, has a demand upon the oil supply. Why? Because oil is the only reason food can be grown in any industrialized nation. It isn’t the cars, folks. It’s the food.

Go to your supermarket and start reading the ingredient lists of the processed foods people have come to rely upon. You will find that corn, wheat, and soy are in all of them. The entire meat department relies upon corn and soy to feed those animals. The entire dairy department relies upon those cows being fed corn and soy. Yes, there is rice and potatoes. But those two crops will not make up the deficit in the public diet if we lose just corn alone. This entire system is a house of cards built upon corn which, in turn, is teetering precariously on a barrel of oil.

My prediction? I’d say if Russia refuses to play ball with the United States, we will begin to see oil prices quietly going up. One day, some major oilfield is going to dry up completely and the price will quadruple overnight. Any corn out to harvest will see the projected cost to harvest it skyrocket. The trains to transport it may be in control of railroads without the available capital funds to pay for the diesel. Remember, this country runs on credit, not cash. Credit will not be worth squat in the coming economy of low oil availability and food scarcity as a result. We may see entire fields of corn rot for lack of oil to harvest and transport it while entire cities see supermarket shelves bare.

This is the “end game”. This is the future. There can be no other reason the United States is willing to risk war with Russia. Oil is always the reason the United States goes to war since the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo showed us how vulnerable we really are. But this time, we’ve got a “false prosperity” and millions of people born solely because of the cheap food brought to us by cheap oil. When that oil is gone, guess what? We will not be able to feed all those people born because cheap oil made feeding them possible. You do the math on what that means.

Read more at: lewrockwell.com

Stay informed about the coming collapse at Collapse.news

As reported by True Activist, about six years ago NBC Nightly News made a bold prediction: That by 2017, all Americans would be fitted with a radio frequency identifier (RFID) chip so that all of us could be tracked by the government in real time (except for the elites doing the tracking, of course). That prediction doesn’t appear to have come true—and with Hillary Clinton soundly defeated Nov. 8, it doesn’t look like it will happen anytime soon.

But what if it did? What if somehow some of us began to be “chipped,” sold to us as a way to ‘enhance public safety’ (which is always the excuse government uses to take away our rights and freedoms)?

Don’t look now, but it just happened.

The government will decide who is ‘mentally unfit’ and must be tracked

As noted by the Daily Caller, in recent days the U.S. House of Representatives “overwhelmingly” passed a bill that would require the U.S. attorney general to provide grants to local law enforcement agencies so they can create, establish and operate “locative tracking technology programs.”

In other words, the legislation—known as Kevin and Avonte’s Law—makes it “legal” for police to track certain U.S. citizens, despite the fact that their privacy is guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment.

The program, which many have likened to the opening of a Pandora’s Box of wider tracking in the future, gives local police the authority to use technology to locate “individuals with forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, or children with developmental disabilities, such as autism, who have wandered from safe environments.”

Advocates of the legislation, including Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., say the measure can help police intervene to avert tragedies through the use of location technology before the mentally disabled wander into trouble. But opponents, like Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, see it as a way for government to broadly interpret how it uses the technology.

“While this initiative may have noble intentions, ‘small and temporary’ programs in the name of safety and security often evolve into permanent and enlarged bureaucracies that infringe on the American people’s freedoms,” he said. That is exactly what we have here. A safety problem exists for people with Alzheimer’s, autism and other mental health issues, so the fix, we are told, is to have the Department of Justice start a tracking program so we can use some device or method to track these individuals 24/7.”

Later, Gohmert said the bill’s sponsors implore lawmakers and the American people not to worry because it has language saying that any tracking device cannot be invasive and is totally voluntary.

What’s to stop some future authoritarian from widening a tracking program?

But he added that he was confused as to why Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress—the party historically at odds with big government and the massive federal bureaucracy—would be taken in and fooled into approving yet another massive, invasive government program.

He was also astounded that the GOP-controlled Congress would allow the tracking of people with “developmental disabilities”—a term that could have very broad applications—but not approve any tracking of illegal aliens, criminals and other malcontents.

Therein lies the rub: Who gets to define “mentally incapacitated?” And is that description only limited to persons who have been medically, clinically diagnosed with a “mental” problem?

Because in the recent past, Left-wing activists, politicians and academics have accused alternative media types of being mentally deranged and “propagandists.” Should alternative media journalists be tracked, for the public’s safety?

It’s not that farfetched anymore to think that could happen someday, especially when a “program” establishing ‘official’ tracking of ‘certain’ persons has already been implemented.

Sources:

TrueActivist.com

DailyCaller.com

AnotherDayInTheEmpire.com

Irradiation of localized tissues increases risk for leukemia and brain or testicular cancer

Traffic radar guns emit microwave radiation at frequencies between 10.5 GHz and 36 GHz, with enough intensity to enhance tumor growth by several different means. The radiation is capable of disrupting immune function and enhancing the absorption of carcinogenic substances into cells, so although the radar gun itself may not be directly causing cancer, the microwave radiation is indirectly modifying gene expression and increasing cell proliferation rates, according to scientific research, thus leading to increased risk of cancer. Police officers who rest their active radar guns against their chest, next to their head, or in their lap are irradiating localized tissues.

“Radar guns can affect the health if they are not used properly,” says Johnny Mercer, a motorcycle cop who taught police radar for years, and who says that keeping the gun next to the body for long periods of time increases the risk of cancer, like smokers who get lung cancer after years of tugging back on cigarettes. Mercer also compared the radar gun’s radiation emissions to that of microwave ovens, which have been revealed to adversely affect human blood, heart rate, and heart rate variations when people stand within 3 feet of a running “nuker.”

Hampton, Virginia police prefer to set their radar guns in a bracket attached to the dashboard and are no longer allowed to keep the gun across their lap due to its “devastating effects on health, according to the police Chief there. The Virginia State Police troopers mount their guns outside the car, and they too have been instructed by the Norfolk and Virginia Beach police officials to limit their contact with radiation-emitting radar guns.

National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health warns of radar gun dangers

Officials at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health are advising police departments to have regular check ups of their radar guns for radiation leakage, and they have advised the cops to mount the units on the outside of patrol cars whenever they can. The guns have been declared unsafe by one radar manufacturing company based out of Kansas called Kustom Signals, Inc.

Of course, the US government and the military downplayed the dangers of the radar guns saying that there was “no problem,” and academic groups said that research was “incomplete” but that the police should “use caution.” That doesn’t change the fact that several police officers are being injured and some are dying who kept the guns in their laps for years. In fact, out of 340 officers, the six cases of testicular cancer all came from officers who said they kept the guns near their family jewels.

For all those concerned now about microwave ovens, in comparison to radar guns, typical kitchen “nukers” produce an average of 2.4 GHz, less than 1/12th that of some radar guns, yet are still capable of causing immediate and drastic changes to the human heart from just three feet away, and with the door closed. According to Dr. Magda Havas of Trent University, people exposed to radiation for just three minutes at 2.4-GHz can experience severe reactions in heart rate changes and altered heart rate variations, indicating an alarm response to stress, also called electrohypersensitivity (EHS) or rapid aging syndrome. This has been studied for decades, as opposed to the police radar guns that are just beginning to “sound the alarms” about cancer (pardon the pun).

Maybe the police need to also get their doctors to check them for heart palpitations, clumping of red blood cells and fluctuations of the parasympathetic nervous system – typical symptoms of radiation exposure from microwave ovens, and not just the radar guns.

Sources:

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

PhonesCauseBrainCancer.com

Articles.Courant.com

Articles.DailyPress.com

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

NaturalNews.com

As reported by EnGadget, police in Arkansas want to know if one of Amazon’s Echo devices, which are constantly connected to the Internet and listening for the sound of voice commands and questions, might have overheard something that can help them solve a murder case.

Only, they will have to get a court—or Amazon, voluntarily—to allow them access to loads of information in addition to whatever the device might have “overheard” and, thus, stored.

The report said that police in Bentonville, home to retail giant Walmart, have issued a warrant to Amazon, ordering the company to turn over any audio or other records from an Echo that belongs to James Andrew Bates; he is set to go to trial for first-degree murder for the death of Victor Collins next year.

So far, Amazon has declined to give police specifics on the information that the Bates Echo device logged on its servers, but the company has turned over information regarding Bates’ account info and purchases. And cops say they’ve managed to pull data off of the speaker, though it is not clear what they were able to access.

Always on, always ‘listening’ and tracking and recording…

Because the device is always “on” and connected to the Internet, police say they are looking for any audio that the speaker may have picked up the night of the alleged murder. Though the device is activated by keywords, it is not uncommon for the IoT gadget to be alerted to listen in by accident.

Or, maybe, even by design.

Police said that Bates had a number of other smart home devices, including a water meter, which showed that 140 gallons of water had been used between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. the night Collins was found dead in Bates’ hot tub. And who says there is nothing invasive about smart meters?

Anyway, investigators have theorized that Bates used the water to wash away evidence of what happened on his patio. But retrieving the data from the smart meter and request for additional data from the Echo is raising major issues about privacy, which seems to be all but gone in the Digital Age.

Frankly, at a time when there are any number of devices tracking and automating our habits—at home, at work, in public—should that data be available for the taking by law enforcement for use in criminal cases? Some, especially the government, believes it should be; but privacy experts and civil libertarians think that any information not immediately pertinent to such investigations should remain off-limits, as the founders intended.

Look for more attempts in the future by police and federal authorities to get their hands on as much of our personal information as possible.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for Natural News and News Target, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

EnGadget.com

NaturalNews.com

Fitness trackers and smart watches, which are sold by companies including Fitbit, Apple, Jawbone, Misfit and Samsung, collect a wide range of personal, physical and health data about users. Companies could sell this information to advertisers, or even to your employer or health insurance provider. Users could suffer consequences ranging from targeted advertising to raised insurance premiums to job discrimination or even identity theft.

On top of which, there’s no evidence that the devices actually improve people’s health.

Treasure trove of data

The wearable devices monitor everything from physical activity to heart rate, sleep, stress levels and calorie consumption. As devices get more advanced, the information they collect becomes more and more valuable to malicious actors.

“Biosensors will routinely be able to capture not only an individual’s heart rate, body temperature, and movement, but also brain activity, moods, and emotions,” the report warns. “These data can, in turn, be combined with personal information from other sources—including health-care providers and drug companies—raising such potential harms as discriminatory profiling, manipulative marketing, and security breaches.”

The companies admit to collecting and analyzing user data — it’s part of the “service” provided — and to sharing it with third-party apps that users sign up for. Those third parties, in turn, may also pass along your data.

The first and most likely place for your data to end up is in the hands of advertisers. Targeted advertising using personal data has become big business in the age of the Internet. But there is also nothing to stop companies from selling your data to your health insurance company, which could use it to calculate increased premiums.

In fact, the list of companies and groups in the market for your private information is nearly endless.

The information collected by these devices “could enable profiling and discrimination—based on ethnicity, age, gender, medical condition, and other information—across a spectrum of fields, such as employment, education, insurance, finance, criminal justice, and social services, affecting not only individuals but also groups and society at large,” the report warns.

Even if a company promises never to share your data, the information could still be compromised by a cyber attack. Databases containing large amounts of diverse information, such as health care records, are now one of the favorite targets of malicious hackers.

“The opportunities for data breaches will increase, with hackers accessing medical and health information at insurance companies, retail chains, and other businesses,” the report says.

Do they even help?

Furthermore, studies now suggest that fitness trackers don’t actually lead to much improvement in exercise behaviors.

One study, published in the journal Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, found that people who used a Fitbit Zip for a year did show sustained increases in activity level, but only by an average of 16 minutes a week. This was “probably not enough to generate noticeable improvements in any health outcomes,” the researchers wrote.

It takes very little exercise — about 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three to five times a week — to dramatically improve your health profile. That is, 90 to 150 minutes a week. An extra 16 minutes isn’t enough to make much difference.

The researchers found no evidence that Fitbit wearers were any more likely to lose weight or improve cardiorespiratory fitness or blood pressure.

Another recent study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that people using wearable devices lose less weight than those using standard weight loss techniques.

Sources:

TheSun.co.uk

TheSun.co.uk

NaturalNews.com

While the entire fakestream media was arrogantly reporting that Hillary Clinton had already won well before election day, I knew that was a lie. I knew everything was rigged and even wrote a popular article listing all the things that were rigged, including the polls, the news, the DNC and the voting machines in Democrat-controlled voting areas.

Now, as readers are asking me what to expect for 2017, I’ve spent most of the Christmas and New Year’s break pondering the best way to share that insight with you. At first, I thought about putting together a list of 25 bold predictions for 2017, but in the end I realized only one prediction really matters. It makes everything else almost irrelevant.

The era of cheap money and free debt is going to come to a catastrophic end

To understand the implications of this one prediction, you need to grasp the reality that we are approaching the end of the era of cheap money, endless debt and fiat currency money creation. I don’t have the time to go into all the details of why, but the upshot is that the “experts” running the Fed are delusional. They are wrong. The de-coupling of the U.S. dollar from gold in 1971 by Richard Nixon set into motion an inevitable dollar collapse and economic apocalypse.

Since that day, the dollar has existed in a state of eventual demise, with no question whatsoever that the currency would one day collapse. For decades, presidents and central bankers kicked the can down the road, printed new fiat currency and spent the nation into financial oblivion. President Obama, America’s first Muslim President, doubled the federal debt in just eight years, spending insane amounts of money on left-wing handouts and boondoggles designed to win political allies and voter loyalty.

Now, with Trump getting sworn into office on January 20, 2017, the globalists no longer want to prevent the debt collapse from taking place. Instead, they are taking steps to make sure it happens during President Trump’s first term. As the engineered crash unfolds, they will use it to discredit Republicans, fiscal conservatives and Trump in particular while unleashing massive social chaos, riots and even the threat of starvation across America’s inner cities.

The only way this can be delayed is if Trump sells out to the globalist banksters. There are indications that Goldman Sachs may already be a little too cozy with the Trump administration, but we’ll have to see how that plays out. If Trump defies the global banking order, they will either “JFK” him with a lone assassin or destroy his administration with the planned economic apocalypse described here.

Unless Trump caves to the globalists, the economic sabotage will be unleashed during his first term

The goal of Obama and the globalists — if Trump doesn’t agree to play ball — is to “poison pill” America and thrust President Trump into the most catastrophic economic nightmare imaginable. Obama, a malicious enemy of America, has already begun to put plans into motion to gut the economy and plant “political landmines” across the bureaucracy that will blow up in Donald Trump’s face. Obama is the first soon-to-be ex-U.S. President who literally seeks to sabotage the country on his way out of office.

The timing of all this is during Trump’s first four years. The plans will be set into motion in early 2017, and the mechanisms for engineering a crash will be initiated almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration. The effects of those actions, however, will take time to wreak havoc in their intended way. Importantly, no one can accurately predict the timing of when those actions will release the avalanche of global debt collapse. This is because no one can predict so-called “emergent properties” of vast, highly complex economic interactions. No human mind (or even a supercomputer) is capable of accurately simulating all the variables, but what we do know is that once the avalanche begins, it will be unstoppable until it hits bottom.

A good metaphor to understand all this is to imagine someone running around with a concrete drill, trying to bring down a large skyscraper building by drilling holes in the large support pillars of the building’s foundation. The saboteur can drill large numbers of holes — perhaps tens of thousands — and the building still stands. No one knows exactly how many holes will cause the building to crumble, but at some point, one more hole becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back… and the entire building catastrophically collapses.

It’s impossible to predict which hole will unleash the collapse, just as it’s impossible to predict which additional snowflake will unleash an avalanche on the side of a snow packed mountain. But we do know that a massive, catastrophic event is inevitable if the deliberate sabotage doesn’t stop. That’s where we all sit right now in terms of the global debt avalanche that’s poised to occur. The timing is impossible to predict, but the inevitability of it is easy to predict.

NOTE: One thing that could delay the collapse of the U.S. system is if the European Union crumbles first. As the EU collapses and the ECB freaks out, flight capital will flee to U.S. shores, dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. This will be a “mini bubble” and it will be short lived. But as it takes place, Republicans will herald the “Trumponomics revolution” with no regard to the real reason why it’s happening. Before long, the EU crash ripple effects will strangle U.S. markets as well, and then it’s game over until the correction hits bottom.

Once it happens, President Trump will have little choice but to declare martial law and roll out an expanded police state

Now here’s where all this gets interesting (and more than a little disturbing). As the debt collapse unfolds, we’re going to see the freezing of banking transactions, government payments and food stamp debit cards. The stock market will collapse (or be frozen), pensions will collapse, many banks will implode, the FDIC will go bankrupt, real estate will collapse, international banks will save themselves with “bail ins” and so on. It’s going to be financial Armageddon on a scale no living person has ever witnessed before.

Should all this unfold, President Trump will fight the deliberate sabotage by invoking all the emergency measures of Government that President Obama signed into law as executive orders.

Very few Americans realize, for example, that executive orders are right now on the books that will allow President Trump, with a simple signature, to seize all gold, dollars and financial assets of every American.

In addition, Obama also signed executive orders that would allow FEMA to confiscate all food, seeds, fuel, tractors, livestock and farmland from every American, all across the nation. That order was signed on March 16, 2012. I’ve covered the details of it in this Natural News article.

In case you’re so uninformed that you think I’m making this up, you can read the White House announcement of this executive order at this link. (And stop being naive. I don’t make things up. That’s the job of the Washington Post.)

In essence, Obama laid out a blueprint for the totalitarian rise of a police state federal government to be invoked during times of emergency.

What I’m telling you now — and this is the single most important prediction for 2017 and the rest of Trump’s first term — is that President Trump will invoke these emergency orders out of a desperate need for self-preservation of the U.S. government.

Obama created the perfect police state, thinking Clinton was going to inherit it

Every piece of tyranny and overbearing government control that Obama signed into law — incorrectly believing Hillary Clinton would inherit the new police state powers — will soon reside in the executive portfolio of President Trump. What’s crucial to understand here is that even if Trump believes in democracy, liberty and American patriotism, he will have no choice but to unleash a police state response to the social chaos and subterfuge being set into motion by Obama and the globalists… all enemies of Donald Trump.

In essence, you should get ready to live under temporary martial law and a federally run police state dictatorship. You should understand that governments always use crisis to ratchet up their power, invoking the “emergency” of the day to radically expand their power and reach over the citizenry. (It’s called “Shock Doctrine.”) Even more astonishingly, realize that even you will beg for martial law because the violence, looting and social chaos being pursued by the lawless left will be so outrageously out of control that you’ll gladly give up more liberty in exchange for the promise of security.

I hope at this point you understand the real danger in all this. The danger is not the martial law in and of itself. The danger is not the government responding to the chaos with force. The danger is that the police state expansions never end. Because the more the radical left resists the initial police state actions, the more quickly this all descends into a left-wing armed rebellion that forever justifies a militant police state run by the government to enforce “security.”

Governments rarely give up power voluntarily

The real danger in all this, you see, is that President Trump’s inevitable response of martial law and police state tactics is so effective at clamping down on the left-wing violence that it becomes a permanent fixture of American society. The danger is that we wake up and find ourselves living in the totalitarian police state system described by John. W. Whitehead in his must-read book, Battlefield America.

Government habitually ratchets up its power during times of crisis, but it is very slow to let go of that newfound power as circumstances settle down. Once we have an effective, high-security police state under President Trump that stops the left-wing violence and looting, how do we ever return to a society that’s no longer functioning in a state of martial law?

If the police start to back down, the violent, insane leftists start looting everything in sight. They may even be joined by all the tens of millions of former government workers who will one day wake up and realize their pensions have been obliterated. If they take to the streets as well, we’ve got the makings of a real uprising / popular revolt on our hands… and that’s exactly what justifies an expansion of the police state. (I wouldn’t even be surprised if many left-wing bombings turn out to be false flags carried out by those who stand to benefit the most from a totalitarian police state society.)

Make no mistake: President Trump is extremely capable of making the kind of tough military-style decisions necessary to protect his administration from attempted uprisings. He’s got highly capable military generals abundantly represented in his cabinet, for one thing, and these are true American patriots who aren’t going to let anarchists destroy the Trump administration. But that’s not the real question in all this. The real question is how much liberty will we have remaining after the uprising is smashed?

If Trump abandons the liberty principles that got him elected, it will rapidly escalate the anti-government rebellion across all political lines

Will the Trump administration, under extreme pressure from citizens in cities being devastated by violence and chaos, eventually attempt radical, anti-liberty actions under the cover of a “national emergency” such as banning the Second Amendment? If so, that would put the government in a state of war with most patriots, effectively escalating a state of war with the very same people who got Trump elected.

Will President Trump radically expand police powers in order to quell inner city protests? For example, could he authorize the rounding up of protesters and securing them in FEMA camps while they await prosecution? (Hey, we finally figured out how to use those FEMA camps!)

Could police forces throughout the United States be given authorization to shoot protesters on sight? If so, that would place the United States government into essentially a state of kinetic warfare against the mostly left-wing citizens of high population cities. None of the aftermath scenarios in that circumstance are desirable.

Very few people think about how this all plays out. Most Americans are hardly capable of thinking just one move ahead on the chessboard. But people like myself — the true remaining independent journalists of America — think five or six moves ahead, which is exactly why we’ve been so correct on our predictions about what you’re seeing unfold right now. (There wasn’t a single mainstream media journalist who predicted a Trump victory. They all got it wrong.)

Donald Trump is not to blame… he’s being positioned as a scapegoat by Obama and the globalists

What my strategic mind is screaming at me right now is that we will all face the rise of aggressive police state government as President Trump responds to the coming collapse of social order (caused by a combination of economic collapse and the rise of radical leftist anti-government forces). For the record, this is not a criticism of Trump. He is not the person who put all this in place… he’s being positioned as the scapegoat to blame for what unfolds.

It’s actually Obama and the globalists who have engineered this situation with malicious intent. They’ve rigged everything to thrust Trump into a scenario that’s almost impossible to survive without invoking a police state response. They’ve backed him into a corner, leaving him no options but to invoke emergency powers. Once he does that, the fakestream media will pounce on him and label him a “dictator” with all the usual comparisons to Adolf Hitler.

Yet, one ray of good news in all this is that Donald Trump has already proven he is extraordinarily clever and resilient. He may yet maneuver a way out of this that the globalists did not foresee. After all, Trump survived the Republican primary and the brutal presidential campaign. He has proven that he’s very, very hard to defeat. That may work in our favor as Trump faces the greatest challenge of any President in United States history: the engineered collapse of the nation’s currency and debt.

If Trump can survive all that and still avoid radically expanding the police state powers of the federal government, it will be, simply put, the most extraordinary political victory in our nation’s history… and it would make President Trump the greatest leader our nation has known since George Washington.

Can he succeed in all this? I can’t predict that yet. There aren’t enough data points to plan that far ahead. But whether he succeeds or fails, 2017 is the year you’d better be ready to survive the most radical and unpredictable scenarios ever considered.

Stay informed at Natural News, where our intelligent analysis is obviously vastly more informed than anything you’ll ever see from the fakestream media.

From Eyra’s website Horus.tech, “Horus is a wearable device that observes, understands and describes the environment to the person using it, providing useful information with the right timing and in a discreet way using bone conduction. Horus is able to read texts, to recognize faces, objects and much more.

“Thanks to the latest advances in artificial intelligence, Horus is able to describe what the cameras are seeing. Whether it is a postcard, a photograph or a landscape, the device provides a short description of what is in front of it.”

Here are some details about the mechanisms that bring ‘sight’ to the blind:

Text recognition

Horus can recognize and read aloud printed texts, including on curved surfaces. When Horus acquires the targeted text, it will begin to recite, and at that point it is not required that the camera remain directed at the text. Horus also gives audible cues to the user to keep the text properly framed.

Face recognition

Utilizing facial feature metrics, Horus can learn an unknown face within seconds and add that person into its database, upon spoken request. After a face is learned, and upon subsequently detecting that face, Horus will at once notify the user.

Object recognition

If the user simply rotates the item in front of the cameras, Horus can perceive an object’s appearance and shape in three dimensions. Since Horus can identify an object from various angles, it can help the user recognize similarly shaped objects. As with text recognition, if needed, Horus will prompt the user to move the object into the cameras’ view.

Mobility assistance

When moving along a path, the user will be warned by Horus of any obstacles, via an alert sound. Its pitch, intensity, 3D positioning, and frequency of repetition will differ, depending on the object’s location and distance.

Tech website Engadget states:

“The startup was created by a pair of students from the University of Genoa who were looking to develop a computer vision system. While their research was centered around enabling robots to navigate, they found the technology had other applications. In the subsequent two years, they’ve been working on producing a portable version of the gear, and think that they’re getting close to completion. In the future, the device is also expected to offer up scene description that’ll offer users a greater ability to ‘see.’

“Should the pair secure the necessary funding, Horus will be released at some point in the near future, although it’ll be pretty pricey. The creators feel like the device will retail for something between €1,500 and €2,000 Euro, although if it can deliver on its promise, it may be money well spent.”

A bright future

Today’s world is in some ways negatively impacted by technology, as with ever-encroaching police state technocracy and breaches of privacy. But in many ways our lives are enhanced beyond any historical comparison. For example, the average working class person in the developed world, even those below the poverty level, has a higher standard of living than many kings of eras past. A word to the wise: be wary of present dangers to our freedoms and independence, but be ever hopeful of a better future, thanks to humanity’s propensity for technological advances that will make our lives vastly more enriched and livable.

Sources:

Horus.tech

Engadget.com

It’s already illegal to use any hand-held device for talking or texting while driving in the U.K., although many motorists there apparently ignore the law, which is why authorities are evidently seeking a way to jam cell phones altogether.

The only exceptions are for calling the British equivalent of 911 in case of an emergency or when a car is parked.

According to a 2014 report, distracted driving accidents were already on track to be the major cause of death on U.K. roads and to exceed drunk-driving-related fatalities.

Here in the U.S., the laws aren’t as strict as in Britain, but about 3,000 deaths and 431,000 injuries were attributed to distracted driver-related car crashes in 2014, according to the latest statistics published by the U.S. government’s Distraction.gov website. Moreover, 10 percent of all drivers 15 to 19 years old involved in fatal crashes were reported as distracted at the time of the accidents. Motorists in the age-20 cohort constituted 38 percent of the distracted drivers using cellphones when fatal crashes occurred, the website added.

Distracted walking is also an increasing danger, Natural News previously explained. Texting while walking is a major contributor to the deaths of pedestrians in traffic accidents, according to an August 2015 report by the U.S. Governors Highway Safety Association.

The Independent of London explains what regulators have in mind for smartphones, or what they call mobile phones in the U.K.

“Mobile phones could be set to automatically stop working in moving cars, making it impossible for drivers to text, call, or send emails at the wheel. The Department for Transport (DfT) is reportedly considering implementing new technology that would block phone signal for drivers. The software would make mobiles virtually useless by disabling any function that requires internet access or connection to a telephone network.”

Government officials plan to sit down with car makers and handset manufacturers in 2017 to explore various options, one of which could be a “drive safe” app on phones (equivalent to airplane mode) to disable distractions such as incoming calls, voicemail, texts, and email. According to The Car Connection, this kind of app in theory is a good idea but “in practice, it’s unlikely that consumers will use the software unless it’s automated or at least easy to activate.”

A new survey suggests that a majority of U.K. drivers are actually okay with potential regulations that would allow government to impose restrictions on cell phone use in cars. “Two-thirds of motorists think the Government should use technology to disable mobile phones in cars, research reveals. Half admit they cannot resist looking at their device in stationary or slow-moving traffic. And terrifyingly, reading texts or emails and checking social media are now more common than taking or making a phone call,” The Sun of London claimed.

If distracted driving accidents continue to rise, the next step — requiring automakers to install jamming devices in every new car off the assembly line — “would be a fairly foolproof way of addressing the problem. That said, many would see such an extreme move as a massive overreach by the government and an invasion of civil rights,” The Car Connection added.

The overall goal, according to one official, is to render smartphone use behind the wheel “as unacceptable as not wearing a seat belt or [drunk] driving.”

For better or worse, in general the mere threat of government intrusion is often enough for industry to make changes.

Sources:

Gov.UK

FleetNews.co.uk

Distraction.Gov

NaturalNews.com

Independent.co.uk

TheCarConnection.com

TheSun.co.uk

IBM will begin hacking four BMW i8 hybrid sports cars. The vehicles will be turned into prototype solutions which will run on IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. There are many efforts underway across the industry to build self-driving cars, but this is more about determining the best way to build systems in vehicles to make them work better. IBM is not very interested in replacing humans with autonomous cars at the moment.

Watson showcases machine learning to create new solutions, this is what caught the attention of BMW, attracting them into collaborating with IBM. Machine learning can pick up on driver habits and customize the driver experience accordingly. Watson can also integrate the driver’s manual, allowing owners to ask questions directly to the vehicle, and receive a response.

6,000 companies, across an array of industries, are currently looking for ways to work with Watson. As for the BMW project, there are six distinct areas of focus where BMW and IBM feel that useful data can be used from the driving experience. The most impressive service will be self-healing, where the car will be able to diagnose and fix itself.

The artificial intelligence of self-diagnostics and repair is by far the most impressive area of focus; however, other features will be utilized which can be used to communicate with other vehicles, give advice on driving and maintenance, connect to other devices, store driver preferences, or go fully autonomous.

Soon, IBM will start working with its Weather Company division to look at ways to pick up more weather data through vehicle sensors. This is in addition to a previously announced project where sensors will collect traffic data on BMW’s, Daimler’s, and Audi’s. The three auto-makers co-own the mapping company, and plan to use the data to enhance its dataset and services.

The companies did not comment on whether they would roll out the experiments commercially, but hinted at a long-term intention for the project.

Sources:

TechCrunch.com

CNet.com