Nov 09 2015
I’ve noticed over the years how Republicans like to complain about American foreign aid programs. Yet, if you look at the map you’ll notice one very interesting fact: The top two recipients of American largess aren’t exactly poor countries and the next three Afghanistan. Jordan and Pakistan receive aid not to help their …
Dec 22 2014
So, I have 2 articles for you this morning and then a quiz my sister and I put together last night!
First, a sliver of hope for justice:
A Startling Admission By The Ferguson Prosecutor Could Restart The Case Against Darren Wilson
In intentionally presenting false testimony to the grand jury, McCulloch may have committed a serious ethical breach. Under the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct, lawyers are prohibited from offering “evidence that the lawyer knows to be false.”
McCulloch justified his actions by asserting that the grand jury gave no credence at all to McElroy’s testimony. But this is speculation. Under Missouri law, the grand jury deliberations are secret and McCulloch is not allowed to be present.
A Missouri lawmaker, Karla May, called Friday for a legislative investigation of McCulloch’s conduct. May said that there is evidence to suggest that McCulloch “manipulated the grand jury process from the beginning to ensure that Officer Wilson would not be indicted.”
Even before Friday’s interview, many legal experts were highly critical McCulloch’s use of the grand jury. Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, said she believed McCulloch “did not want an indictment” of Darren Wilson and turned the grand jury process on its head, acting as an advocate for the defense.
Jump!
Nov 05 2012
The count of 2,375 distinct fauna species of Gir includes about 38 species of mammals, around 300 species of birds, 37 species of reptiles and more than 2,000 species of insects.
The carnivores group mainly comprises Asiatic lions, Indian Leopards, Sloth bears, Indian Cobras, Jungle cats, Striped Hyenas, Golden Jackals, Indian Mongoose, Indian Palm Civets, and Ratels. Desert cats and Rusty-spotted cats exist but are rarely seen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G…
As usual, the very careless Wikipedia neglected to mention one extremely rare semi-carnivore in Gir:
Gujarat Elections 2012: Polling station to be set up for one voterNEW DELHI: When Gujarat goes to polls in December, a polling booth will be set up for just one voter.
The booth to be manned by at least five polling staff will be set up deep inside the Gir forest, which is famous for Asiatic Lion.
http://articles.economictimes….
By comparison certain elected officials in Montana are endangered by the inability to set up polling stations within a hundred miles of the poorest of the poor living on American Indian reservations with only rarely available mechanical means of transportation for lack of funds.
Obviously those AmerIndians should go back to wherever the hell they came from if they won’t take the trouble to vote, thus leaving America to real Americans. After all, America is terribly short of money and needs to give whatever it can borrow to give to rich and middle class elites so they can shower their blessings on the vast bulk of the rest of us should they take a notion to do so.
Best, Terry
Jul 17 2011
As US pharmaceutical companies move their operations abroad, India has become a testing ground for trial medicines.
Instead of testing trial medicines on Americans, more and more of these tests are being carried out on poor people in faraway places. Russia, China, Brazil, Poland, Uganda and Romania are all hot spots for what is called clinical research or clinical trials.Now employing CROs – or clinical research organisations – the industry is big business, worth as much as $30bn today.
One country has experienced a boom like no other in this industry – India. Spoken English, an established medical infrastructure, welcoming attitudes toward foreign industry and, most importantly, legions of poor, illiterate test subjects that are willing to try out new drugs have transformed the Indian landscape into a massive testing ground for pharmaceuticals.
Fault Lines’ Zeina Awad travels to India to see what the clinical research practices look like on the ground. What role are the US regulatory bodies playing in overseeing the trials? Are participants aware that they are taking part in a clinical trial? Is the testing being held up against international ethical standards?
Apr 18 2011
The other day, on April 15, veteran journalist, war correspondent and truthdig.com columnist Chris Hedges was interviewed on RT News about the state of American society, repeating his oft stated warnings about the long corporate assault on and takeover of politics, the seeming death of reason and critical thinking in public discourse, and the development of a feudalistic “totalitarian democracy” in which the vast majority of the population is reduced through a media manufactured state of ignorance, inability to think clearly, and entertainment dazed complacence to a state of serfdom as a renewable ‘resource’ for a capitalism defined by American and multinational big business, and critiquing from this perspective the US budget developments of the past few days.
The budget is closing American schools and libraries across the country while firing teachers and taking away collective bargaining rights, Hedges notes, while banks and the largest corporations are not paying any taxes, including Bank of America, Exxon Mobil, and GE. Protesters gathered on Saturday April 17 at New York City’s Union Square for the Sound of Resistance protests, part of the US Uncut tax weekend protests challenging the banks, most notably Bank of America, for avoiding paying taxes.
usuncut.org’s about page states that:
US Uncut is a grassroots movement taking direct action against corporate tax cheats and unnecessary and unfair public service cuts across the U.S. Washington’s proposed budget for the coming year sends a clear message: The wrath of budget cuts will fall upon the shoulders of hard-working Americans. That’s unacceptable.
Obama seeks to trim $1.1 trillion from the budget in the next ten years by cutting or eliminating over 200 federal programs, many dedicated to social services and education. For instance, it cuts in half funding to subsidize heating for low-income Americans; limits an expansion of the Pell grant program for students; and decreases Environmental Protection Agency funding by over 12%.
Meanwhile, Republicans are using their new House majority to slash spending even more brutally. The GOP has made it clear that they are bent on raiding funds for Social Security, Medicare, education; determined to kill health care reform; and gut needed investments in infrastructure, climate change and job creation, at a time when America needs it most.
These cuts will come on top of very painful austerity measures made at the state-level across our nation–worth hundreds of billions–since the recession began.
In short, budget cuts demonstrate that Washington has abandoned ordinary Americans.
What is making the situation worse is the ignorance of politicians and others leaping around he fringes. Hedges also reminds that the US is the only industrialized nation in the world that argues over the existence of evolution. Magical thinking, combined with a military superpower, is frightening, he says. “We invest emotional energy on the ridiculous and the sublime… the liberal class has been decimated… what used to be unconstitutional is now legal“, he says, pointing to illegal searches under the Patriot Act and corporate bailouts under the health care legislation. The rights and needs of citizens are being ignored in favor of corporations.
Whither America?
While all across the blogosphere and in mainstream media I watch people argue about which faction of the ‘corporatist party’ to elect in 2012, I’m reminded strongly here of something Chris Floyd wrote nearly four years ago, in September 2007:
Mar 31 2011
Ronald Reagan once claimed that “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’
But of course that senile stooge for Big Money got it wrong. The nine most terrifying words in any language are…
“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”
My update of the Reagan Doctrine (insofar as that senile stooge ever had a “doctrine,” or even an idea, except stooging for Big Money) occurred to me when Baghdad was selected as the worst city in the world on the Mercer 2010 Quality of Life Survey.
After seven years of beneficent American occupation!
And Baghdad had to beat out some real humdingers among messed up cities to win that prize!
More messed up than Khartoum?
You betcha!
This was reminiscent of some recent headlines from Afghanistan, selected by Save the Children as the worst place in the world to be born. The worst place to be a mother! The worst place to be a child!
After nine long years of American “assistance!”
And now it’s Libya’s turn to hear those terrifying words…
“I’m from America, and I’m here to help you.”
And isn’t it just too fucking perfect that Obama can send that message from everybody’s favorite guided missile destroyer… the USS Barry!
The guided-missile destroyer USS Barry launches a Tomahawk cruise missile from the ship’s bow in the Mediterranean Sea on March 29. Barry is currently supporting Joint Task Force (JTF) Odyssey Dawn as part of the international response to the unrest in Libya.
Mar 06 2011
The extraordinary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are the initial high tides of an eventual tsunami that will impact the world that globalists have so fervently promoted for decades, in ways not necessarily to their liking. The first wave has struck and is now retreating from the shore, but will shortly return with redoubled force, and what and who will be swept away and what will be left standing is anyone’s guess.
[snip]In the United States, 48 years after Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his stirring “I have a dream” speech at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, 45 percent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, $1 billion a year, a thoughtful American can only expect the mass protests against cuts in services and jobs in Wisconsin to spread.
And America’s propensity for eventual chaos is far higher than the Middle East, demonized in the press as a violent region, when one considers that America’s 300 million citizens have between 238 million and 276 million privately owned firearms.
As a prescient 23-year old from Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan warned an earlier generation 47 years ago about to embark on its misguided mission to safeguard and democratize in Vietnam, “There’s a battle outside and it is raging, It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin’.”
America has older prophets on the current situation – as Thomas Jefferson observed, “A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.”
Take heed, Governor Walker of Wisconsin and all the rest of you political leaders in Washington DC – or fuel up your learjets and head for the Cayman Islands.
The Extraordinary Events in the Middle East and the Coming Global Tsunami
By John C.K. Daly for the Global Intelligence Report
Jan 18 2011
Ya know how sometimes you’re just driving in your car, thinking, and you see something out of the corner of your eye, you’re supposed to be paying attention, ya know, you’re driving, but it’s a Stop Sign and you glance over to the right and you see a “hobo” (okay homeless man, but the kids call ’em hobo’s) takin’ a swig off his jug of MadDog and its noon and his shopping cart and his dog are just waiting there patiently beside him, and you’re driving so you can’t really look and you don’t really wanna look but you do and it just… All… Hits you … all at once. And all you really want to do is just curl up into the fetal position and cry.
But you’re driving. There’s no cars coming so you proceed through the little intersection in your little corner of your little section of town in your big city and you just. keep. going.
But somehow you find yourself inexplicably…. singing:
My country,’ tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!
No? That never happens to you? Well. That’s what happened to me today.
What have we come to? How could we have allowed this to happen?
My country. My people. Who are we?
And who have we become?
Jan 18 2011
Ya know how sometimes you’re just driving in your car, thinking, and you see something out of the corner of your eye, you’re supposed to be paying attention, ya know, you’re driving, but it’s a Stop Sign and you glance over to the right and you see a “hobo” (okay homeless man, but the kids call ’em hobo’s) takin’ a swig off his jug of MadDog and its noon and his shopping cart and his dog are just waiting there patiently beside him, and you’re driving so you can’t really look and you don’t really wanna look but you do and it just… All… Hits you … all at once. And all you really want to do is just curl up into the fetal position and bawl.
But you’re driving. There’s no cars coming so you proceed through the little intersection in your little corner of your little section of town in your big city and you just. keep. going.
But somehow you find yourself inexplicably…. singing:
My country,’ tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!
No? That never happens to you? Well. That’s what happened to me today.
What have we come to? How could we have allowed this to happen?
My country. My people. Who are we?
And who have we become?
Jan 18 2011
Ya know how sometimes you’re just driving in your car, thinking, and you see something out of the corner of your eye, you’re supposed to be paying attention, ya know, you’re driving, but it’s a Stop Sign and you glance over to the right and you see a “hobo” (okay homeless man, but the kids call ’em hobo’s) takin’ a swig off his jug of MadDog and its noon and his shopping cart and his dog are just waiting there patiently beside him, and you’re driving so you can’t really look and you don’t really wanna look but you do and it just… All… Hits you … all at once. And all you really want to do is just curl up into the fetal position and bawl.
But you’re driving. There’s no cars coming so you proceed through the little intersection in your little corner of your little section of town in your big city and you just. keep. going.
But somehow you find yourself inexplicably…. singing:
My country,’ tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!
No? That never happens to you? Well. That’s what happened to me today.
What have we come to? How could we have allowed this to happen?
My country. My people. Who are we?
And who have we become?
Jan 15 2011
So why are 200,000 American soldiers still serving long rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan?
If you look through the images on sites controlled by the Department of Defense, it’s obvious enough.
Playing pattycake!
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.
Bake me a cake as fast as you can;
Pat it and prick it and mark it with B,
Put it in the oven for baby and me.
Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.
Bake me a cake as fast as you can;
Roll it up, roll it up;
And throw it in a pan!
Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.
Jan 10 2011
Second thoughts about the Arizona shooting from Jakie’s Excellent Adventures at the Wall Street Journal…
