Cat hunting
Silicon Valley chip maker AGEIA(TM) Technologies, Inc., a company dedicated to delivering pervasive interactive reality to next-generation games, today at the Game Developers Conference introduced a new category of semiconductor -- the Physics Processing Unit, or PPU. The company's debut product, the AGEIA PhysX(TM) chip, will be the first dedicated physics semiconductor chip to be used in next-generation game platforms.
The current trend among game developers is to use software-based physics engines to enable objects and characters to interact in a real-world manner and provide some of the industry's most stunning effects. However, without dedicated physics hardware game developers are unable to fully unleash the power of physics on today's platforms
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050308/sftu104_1.html
The fur is going to fly when cat lovers hear about Mark Smith's idea.
The Wisconsin hunter and firefighter wants stray cats classified as an "unprotected species" that could be shot by anyone with a small-game license.
Smith welcomes wild birds onto his property, but if he sees a cat, he thinks the "invasive" animal should be considered fair game.
The 48-year-old firefighter from La Crosse, Wis., has proposed that hunters in Wisconsin make free-roaming domestic cats an "unprotected species" that could be shot at will by anyone with a small-game license.
Hunters will vote on the proposal on April 11 during hearings for the Wisconsin Conservation Congress across the state. The congress advises state officials on natural resource issues.
Smith said free-roaming cats are an invasive species that attack wild birds.
Smith's proposal has horrified cat lovers.
http://www.nbc4.com/family/4258907/detail.html
[I again recommend to your attention “The Futurological Congress” by Stanislaw Lem which hit this very nail on the head I think 30 years ago.
As don’t have that much ‘X’ some kind of synthetic chemical say. But why do you have ANY? AT ALL? This is the quesiton they should be answering for. People have things intheir blood or their bodies that don’t occur in nature in any concentration. Why should government and industry be able to get away with that?]
An estimated 35,000 chemicals are in commercial use in Canada and more than twice as many in the United States. The national American government registers an average of 2,000 newly synthesized chemicals each year.
Cosmetics have at least 5,000 chemicals; more than 3,200 are added to food. As many as 1,010 chemicals are used in the production of 11,700 consumer products, and about 500 chemicals are used as active ingredients in pesticides, according to Environmental Protection Agency data cited by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, D.C.
...
In one, researchers found at an average of 91 "industrial compounds, pollutants and chemicals" in the blood and urine of nine volunteers and a total of 167 chemicals in the group. According to the research, conducted by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York with the Environmental Working Group, "76 cause cancer in humans or animals, 94 are toxic to the brain or nervous system, and 79 cause birth defects or abnormal development." None of the people tested worked with chemicals or lived near an industrial facility.
"I expected to find many different chemicals," Ms. Houlihan says. "But to actually see the numbers roll out that show that one person has 100 chemicals in their blood at one time. It's pretty powerful."
http://www.rense.com/general63/pol.htm
Maybe we should remember these words:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
The Rev. Martin Niemoller wrote those words in Germany in 1945. An early supporter of Adolph Hitler, he realized, too late, his terrible error
[I wonder in what way this will be strongly resistant to terrorist exploitation. I seem to recall reading just recently that someone had figured out yet another way to hack bluetooth enabled devices, and everyone who wants to know how to read anrfid from a distance already can do that. this souds more like the leave the front door open for terrorist id reform process.]
The DAC, which stands for Department of Homeland Security Access Card, will carry a digital copy of its bearer's fingerprint and other personally identifiable information. It will use radio-frequency identification and Bluetooth technologies to communicate with reader devices at the department's offices.
...
The DHS is just one of many departments (the Department of Defense is another) responding to a White House directive calling for new ID cards that are "strongly resistant" to terrorist exploitation and "can be rapidly authenticated electronically."
...
DAC carriers may also be targeted by identity thieves.
RFID tags, the small chip-and-antenna combinations used in wireless toll-pay systems and payment devices such as the ExxonMobile Speedpass key-chain tag, can be hacked by someone "with moderate technical expertise," said Thomas O'Flaherty, principal associate at Input, a consulting firm for government contractors.
http://www.rense.com/general63/rf.htm
Increasing numbers of Americans say the U.S. government is involved in immoral and illegal wars around the world and are refusing to support this with their tax money. The invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the indiscriminate killing of civilians, for example, are outlawed by international law.
"Of every tax dollar paid, more than 50 cents goes to pay for past, present and future military expenses. The military budget for the Department of Defense alone for 2005 will be close to $500 billion. Our payment of federal taxes enables the government to carry on a continuing program of illegal military activities," wrote Glen Milner, a member of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Wash., in a recent opinion piece in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"International laws and agreements support and encourage citizens to resist their government when it is engaged in illegal acts," Milner added.
http://www.rense.com/general63/grpw.htm
It is rare for the Bush White House to offer a correct assessment of anything that has happened in Iraq. But White House communications director Dan Bartlett could not have been more right when he acknowledged that the wounding of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena - and the killing of an Italian secret service agent who shielded her from a spray of bullets fired by U.S. troops - was "horrific."
Nearly 500,000 pro-Syrian protesters waved flags and chanted anti-American slogans in a central Beirut square Tuesday, answering a nationwide call by the militant Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group for a demonstration to counter weeks of rallies demanding Syrian forces leave Lebanon.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7023538/
As this writer has previously reported, during the early 1980s, a number of naval officers were implicated in a child pornography ring that extended from Oregon to the San Francisco Bay area and to Chicago and Washington, DC. The story about that ring was covered up by then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman who engaged in similar cover-ups of the Navy's "Tailhook" scandal involving the sexual assault by naval aviators of women, including at least one underage teen, and the gun turret explosion on the USS Iowa, originally and erroneously blamed by Navy investigators on a despondent gay sailor. The GOP appointed Lehman to the 9-11 Commission, which issued a final report that many victims' families and investigators determined was a whitewash.
The fact that Gannon/Guckert, a male escort who adopted a military theme for his clientele, was made privy to classified information involving CIA covert agent Valerie Plame and her husband's (former Ambassador Joseph Wilson) trip to Niger to investigate possible uranium shipments, has a precedent with prior GOP illegal sexcapades involving national security breaches. The Franklin pedophile cover-up was mirrored by the Navy pedophile affair that also breached national security during the height of the Cold War. The cover-up of the pedophile ring involving senior naval personnel ran right up the chain-of-command to the Pentagon offices of then-Secretary of the Navy Lehman, Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the White House offices of Vice President George H. W. Bush, and Reagan Chief of Staff and close Bush confidant James Baker III.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/030305Madsen/030305madsen.html
The Yahoo photo caption says:
An Iraqi driver stands near his damaged vehicle at the site of the kidnapping of an Italian journalist outside al-Nahrain University in central Baghdad, February 4, 2005.... Gunmen pulled up alongside her vehicle, forced her driver and an Iraqi journalist with her out of the vehicle at gunpoint and then drove off with Sgrena, the sources said.
The driver said that the gunmen hit his car as they were rushing away
from the scene following the kidnapping. (Akram Saleh/Reuters)
Tracking back the "car photo" story through blogs --which credited each other as the tale passed around, the feeding chain included thepoliticalteen.net, sayanythingblog.com, [also 1 2] and the source of it all littlegreenfootballs.com.
You will gain some insight into the political flavor of littlegreenfootballs.com -the blog which started the fake story- from this comment in a related thread on the blog:
"Journalists writing for commie rags are not impervious to bullets if they disregard the American military in a war zone. One would think Sgrena would be more cautious having just been released as a hostage."
Here, at even as the story continued to ooze across the blogsphere, the source of it all: littlegreenfootballs.com had already retracted their claim it was Sgrena's car.
And they were blaming Associated Press for it all, because in the AP video, the car clip from the February 5th, kidnapping was misleading synchronized with the voice-over describing the Baghdad airport shooting of Sgrena:
"[The video has] a medium shot of this car, changing to a closeup, as the voice-over says, “Coalition forces fired on a vehicle that was approaching a checkpoint at a high rate of speed.” ...So we apparently have a false alarm here, triggered by a highly misleading AP video. This is not a photo of the car that ran the checkpoint. [source]
But even as one piece of disinfo is retracted that last sentence sows another:
"This is not a photo of the car that ran the checkpoint."
There was no checkpoint. Sgrena recounts that a patrol fired on their car within sight of the terminal building at the airport
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/03/right-wing-bloggers-fake-sgrena-car.html
The Chinese spy reported by Curtis was eventually indicted and pled guilty to espionage charges (see this previous BRAD BLOG report for more details). For their part, YEI was recently found -- in the IG's final report begun by Lemme in 2001 and finally released in February 2005 -- to have billed FDOT for more than $300,000 in "questionable charges" (see this recent BRAD BLOG report for more info on that)
http://www.bradblog.com/
The Senate defeated dueling proposals Monday to raise the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage one backed by organized labor, the other salted with pro-business provisions in a day of skirmishing that reflected Republican gains in last fall's elections.
Both plans fell well short of the 60 votes needed to advance, and signaled that prospects for raising the federal wage floor, unchanged since 1996, are remote during the current two-year Congress.
"I believe that anyone who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year should not live in poverty in the richest country in the world," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., arguing for the Democratic proposal to increase the minimum wage by $2.10 over the next 26 months.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=560837
Working stealthily BIG PHARMA has rapidly pushed their legislative program (Codex Alimentaris) in Europe that will eliminate the free choice Americans now have to purchase vitamins, herbs, minerals, homeopathic remedies, aminoacids and nutritional supplements. This elimination of all competition for the pharmaceutical industry will produce an enormous increase in the already exorbitant profits earned by the pharmaceutical firms. Of even greater significance the lack of free choice to stay well by taking effective nutritional substances will promptly be followed by a sharp increase in illnesses that will only be treated in the future with pharmaceutical drugs.
...
The features of Codex Alimentaris are:
•
No supplements can be sold for preventative or therapeutic use.
•
Any potency higher than RDA levels (pathetically low) is a drug that requires a prescription and must be produced by drug companies.
•
Codex regulations are binding internationally
•
New supplements are banned unless given Codex testing and approval (certain to expensive and lacking in scientific merit). Norway and Germany are already operating under the new Codex regulations. The price of zinc tablets has gone from $4 to $52. Echinacea has risen from $14 to $153.
•
Codex regulations are not based on science or research findings. These regulations were developed by 11 appointed persons. Guess who appointed them?
Why Haven't I Heard About This?
The controlled press has been instructed to avoid commenting on this issue until it becomes a fait accomplis. At that time your congressional legislators will say they are sorry but there is nothing they can do to reverse the Codex. The truth is they were, all but a few, bought and paid for back when the World Trade Organization was ratified by the U.S. Congress.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james24.htm
Against the euro, the dollar slid to $1.3335, its weakest since Jan. 4, at 12:01 p.m. in New York, from $1.3214 late yesterday, according to electronic currency-dealing system EBS. The dollar fell to 104.57 yen, from 105.18.
The dollar dropped versus the yen after a government report showed the number of Japanese full-time workers increased for the first time since 1997, boosting optimism the world's second- biggest economy will pull out of last year's recession.
The U.S. currency also weakened against the South African rand and the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollars, so- called commodity currencies. Commodity prices reached a 24-year high today, according to the Reuters-CRB index.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aSg3PWqmJwoU&refer=top_world_news
The U.S. military lost its dominance in Iraq shortly after its invasion in 2003, a study concluded.
A report by the U.S. Army official historian said the military was hampered by the failure to occupy and stabilize Iraq in 2003. As a result, the military lost its dominance by July 2003 and has yet to regain that position.
"In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative gained over an off-balanced enemy," the report said. "The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since."
[You may recall the governor of New jersy put his Israeli homosexual lover in charge of “homeland security” in New jersy at around the same time that Chertoff’s wife was hitting up DC for “homeland security” money for NJ. Just a little memory refresher.]
In the wake of 9/11, as Michael Chertoff, was working to ferret out other potential terrorists and developing cross-agency information sharing and multi-agency collaboration to detect and disrupt terrorist operations, his wife Meryl was equally busy in her role as director of the State of New Jersey’s Washington, DC, office, strategizing ways to get congressional lawmakers and the executive branch to fund homeland security projects for the state.
http://www.gsnmagazine.com/feb_05_03/chertoff_chertoff.html
They have been called the Third House and their ranks are rife with former legislators, political party powerhouses and former aides to legislative leaders and governors.
They use freebies and friendship, information and campaign contributions to influence Florida lawmaking, even writing bills and amendments themselves.
And when the state's 160 legislators convene in their annual session today, this lobbyist army that can reach 2,000 will likely outnumber legislators by 12 to 1.
[By the way, I was reading “The Man WHo Would be King” by Rudyard Kipling today. In the story a couple of English hobos in India decide they are going to go get themselves their own kigndom in the savage, heathen wastes of Central Asia.
So off they go with some guns and sure enough they get a few villages under their thumbs. Well how do they keep the villages once they have got them?
Would you believe the heathen savages are freemasons? And the two hobos are a higher level of freemasons than any of the local savages. So they are able to cement their high position they bought with their guns by setting thmselves up as freemason lodge masters.]
The government tonight suffered a major blow to its anti-terrorism bill when the House of Lords voted to ensure that all control orders should be made by a judge rather than the home secretary.
Peers - believed to have included the former Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine - voted to ensure the orders would be made by a judge and not the home secretary, Charles Clarke.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/attacks/story/0,1320,1432442,00.html
Amr Salah, a United States citizen living in Massachusetts asks for your help in demanding a formal investigation into the deaths of his father and brother at the hands of 1,000 Israeli troops. Dr. Khalid Salah, age 51, and his 16 year old son, Mohammed were shot and killed by Israeli Defense Forces on July 6, 2004 in their home in the city of Nablus in the Israeli Occupied West Bank. Throughout the hours of assault the Salahs were huddled together in a corner of the apartment, contacting relatives on a mobile phone for help. Despite an urgent call to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, Consul General David Pearce nor anyone else at the consulate intervened.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3666.shtml
Jim Murphy is a "counter-recruiter," one of a small but growing number of opponents of the Iraq war who say they want to compete with military recruiters for the hearts and minds of young people.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-07-counter-recruiters_x.htm
"Everything in society we cherish ended when the blackout (of August 2003) came," Simmons states. "If that wasn't a fire drill for how important energy actually is ... but people didn't get it. I don't think we actually learned a thing from it."
Indeed, as other speakers make clear, rather than deal with these issues, we simply elect politicians who aid and abet our refusal to get real.
Their argument is simple: suburbia couldn't exist without cars, and people couldn't afford to drive those cars without endless cheap gas. As they also make clear, the amount of oil pumped out of the ground is expected to peak sometime between now and 2010 at the latest. After that, every gallon of gas grows more and more expensive, rendering auto-based sprawl obsolete.
The current trend among game developers is to use software-based physics engines to enable objects and characters to interact in a real-world manner and provide some of the industry's most stunning effects. However, without dedicated physics hardware game developers are unable to fully unleash the power of physics on today's platforms
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050308/sftu104_1.html
The fur is going to fly when cat lovers hear about Mark Smith's idea.
The Wisconsin hunter and firefighter wants stray cats classified as an "unprotected species" that could be shot by anyone with a small-game license.
Smith welcomes wild birds onto his property, but if he sees a cat, he thinks the "invasive" animal should be considered fair game.
The 48-year-old firefighter from La Crosse, Wis., has proposed that hunters in Wisconsin make free-roaming domestic cats an "unprotected species" that could be shot at will by anyone with a small-game license.
Hunters will vote on the proposal on April 11 during hearings for the Wisconsin Conservation Congress across the state. The congress advises state officials on natural resource issues.
Smith said free-roaming cats are an invasive species that attack wild birds.
Smith's proposal has horrified cat lovers.
http://www.nbc4.com/family/4258907/detail.html
[I again recommend to your attention “The Futurological Congress” by Stanislaw Lem which hit this very nail on the head I think 30 years ago.
As don’t have that much ‘X’ some kind of synthetic chemical say. But why do you have ANY? AT ALL? This is the quesiton they should be answering for. People have things intheir blood or their bodies that don’t occur in nature in any concentration. Why should government and industry be able to get away with that?]
An estimated 35,000 chemicals are in commercial use in Canada and more than twice as many in the United States. The national American government registers an average of 2,000 newly synthesized chemicals each year.
Cosmetics have at least 5,000 chemicals; more than 3,200 are added to food. As many as 1,010 chemicals are used in the production of 11,700 consumer products, and about 500 chemicals are used as active ingredients in pesticides, according to Environmental Protection Agency data cited by the Environmental Working Group, based in Washington, D.C.
...
In one, researchers found at an average of 91 "industrial compounds, pollutants and chemicals" in the blood and urine of nine volunteers and a total of 167 chemicals in the group. According to the research, conducted by Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York with the Environmental Working Group, "76 cause cancer in humans or animals, 94 are toxic to the brain or nervous system, and 79 cause birth defects or abnormal development." None of the people tested worked with chemicals or lived near an industrial facility.
"I expected to find many different chemicals," Ms. Houlihan says. "But to actually see the numbers roll out that show that one person has 100 chemicals in their blood at one time. It's pretty powerful."
http://www.rense.com/general63/pol.htm
Maybe we should remember these words:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
The Rev. Martin Niemoller wrote those words in Germany in 1945. An early supporter of Adolph Hitler, he realized, too late, his terrible error
[I wonder in what way this will be strongly resistant to terrorist exploitation. I seem to recall reading just recently that someone had figured out yet another way to hack bluetooth enabled devices, and everyone who wants to know how to read anrfid from a distance already can do that. this souds more like the leave the front door open for terrorist id reform process.]
The DAC, which stands for Department of Homeland Security Access Card, will carry a digital copy of its bearer's fingerprint and other personally identifiable information. It will use radio-frequency identification and Bluetooth technologies to communicate with reader devices at the department's offices.
...
The DHS is just one of many departments (the Department of Defense is another) responding to a White House directive calling for new ID cards that are "strongly resistant" to terrorist exploitation and "can be rapidly authenticated electronically."
...
DAC carriers may also be targeted by identity thieves.
RFID tags, the small chip-and-antenna combinations used in wireless toll-pay systems and payment devices such as the ExxonMobile Speedpass key-chain tag, can be hacked by someone "with moderate technical expertise," said Thomas O'Flaherty, principal associate at Input, a consulting firm for government contractors.
http://www.rense.com/general63/rf.htm
Increasing numbers of Americans say the U.S. government is involved in immoral and illegal wars around the world and are refusing to support this with their tax money. The invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the indiscriminate killing of civilians, for example, are outlawed by international law.
"Of every tax dollar paid, more than 50 cents goes to pay for past, present and future military expenses. The military budget for the Department of Defense alone for 2005 will be close to $500 billion. Our payment of federal taxes enables the government to carry on a continuing program of illegal military activities," wrote Glen Milner, a member of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo, Wash., in a recent opinion piece in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"International laws and agreements support and encourage citizens to resist their government when it is engaged in illegal acts," Milner added.
http://www.rense.com/general63/grpw.htm
It is rare for the Bush White House to offer a correct assessment of anything that has happened in Iraq. But White House communications director Dan Bartlett could not have been more right when he acknowledged that the wounding of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena - and the killing of an Italian secret service agent who shielded her from a spray of bullets fired by U.S. troops - was "horrific."
Nearly 500,000 pro-Syrian protesters waved flags and chanted anti-American slogans in a central Beirut square Tuesday, answering a nationwide call by the militant Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group for a demonstration to counter weeks of rallies demanding Syrian forces leave Lebanon.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7023538/
As this writer has previously reported, during the early 1980s, a number of naval officers were implicated in a child pornography ring that extended from Oregon to the San Francisco Bay area and to Chicago and Washington, DC. The story about that ring was covered up by then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman who engaged in similar cover-ups of the Navy's "Tailhook" scandal involving the sexual assault by naval aviators of women, including at least one underage teen, and the gun turret explosion on the USS Iowa, originally and erroneously blamed by Navy investigators on a despondent gay sailor. The GOP appointed Lehman to the 9-11 Commission, which issued a final report that many victims' families and investigators determined was a whitewash.
The fact that Gannon/Guckert, a male escort who adopted a military theme for his clientele, was made privy to classified information involving CIA covert agent Valerie Plame and her husband's (former Ambassador Joseph Wilson) trip to Niger to investigate possible uranium shipments, has a precedent with prior GOP illegal sexcapades involving national security breaches. The Franklin pedophile cover-up was mirrored by the Navy pedophile affair that also breached national security during the height of the Cold War. The cover-up of the pedophile ring involving senior naval personnel ran right up the chain-of-command to the Pentagon offices of then-Secretary of the Navy Lehman, Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle, and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and the White House offices of Vice President George H. W. Bush, and Reagan Chief of Staff and close Bush confidant James Baker III.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/030305Madsen/030305madsen.html
The Yahoo photo caption says:
An Iraqi driver stands near his damaged vehicle at the site of the kidnapping of an Italian journalist outside al-Nahrain University in central Baghdad, February 4, 2005.... Gunmen pulled up alongside her vehicle, forced her driver and an Iraqi journalist with her out of the vehicle at gunpoint and then drove off with Sgrena, the sources said.
The driver said that the gunmen hit his car as they were rushing away
from the scene following the kidnapping. (Akram Saleh/Reuters)
Tracking back the "car photo" story through blogs --which credited each other as the tale passed around, the feeding chain included thepoliticalteen.net, sayanythingblog.com, [also 1 2] and the source of it all littlegreenfootballs.com.
You will gain some insight into the political flavor of littlegreenfootballs.com -the blog which started the fake story- from this comment in a related thread on the blog:
"Journalists writing for commie rags are not impervious to bullets if they disregard the American military in a war zone. One would think Sgrena would be more cautious having just been released as a hostage."
Here, at even as the story continued to ooze across the blogsphere, the source of it all: littlegreenfootballs.com had already retracted their claim it was Sgrena's car.
And they were blaming Associated Press for it all, because in the AP video, the car clip from the February 5th, kidnapping was misleading synchronized with the voice-over describing the Baghdad airport shooting of Sgrena:
"[The video has] a medium shot of this car, changing to a closeup, as the voice-over says, “Coalition forces fired on a vehicle that was approaching a checkpoint at a high rate of speed.” ...So we apparently have a false alarm here, triggered by a highly misleading AP video. This is not a photo of the car that ran the checkpoint. [source]
But even as one piece of disinfo is retracted that last sentence sows another:
"This is not a photo of the car that ran the checkpoint."
There was no checkpoint. Sgrena recounts that a patrol fired on their car within sight of the terminal building at the airport
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/03/right-wing-bloggers-fake-sgrena-car.html
The Chinese spy reported by Curtis was eventually indicted and pled guilty to espionage charges (see this previous BRAD BLOG report for more details). For their part, YEI was recently found -- in the IG's final report begun by Lemme in 2001 and finally released in February 2005 -- to have billed FDOT for more than $300,000 in "questionable charges" (see this recent BRAD BLOG report for more info on that)
http://www.bradblog.com/
The Senate defeated dueling proposals Monday to raise the $5.15-an-hour minimum wage one backed by organized labor, the other salted with pro-business provisions in a day of skirmishing that reflected Republican gains in last fall's elections.
Both plans fell well short of the 60 votes needed to advance, and signaled that prospects for raising the federal wage floor, unchanged since 1996, are remote during the current two-year Congress.
"I believe that anyone who works 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year should not live in poverty in the richest country in the world," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., arguing for the Democratic proposal to increase the minimum wage by $2.10 over the next 26 months.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=560837
Working stealthily BIG PHARMA has rapidly pushed their legislative program (Codex Alimentaris) in Europe that will eliminate the free choice Americans now have to purchase vitamins, herbs, minerals, homeopathic remedies, aminoacids and nutritional supplements. This elimination of all competition for the pharmaceutical industry will produce an enormous increase in the already exorbitant profits earned by the pharmaceutical firms. Of even greater significance the lack of free choice to stay well by taking effective nutritional substances will promptly be followed by a sharp increase in illnesses that will only be treated in the future with pharmaceutical drugs.
...
The features of Codex Alimentaris are:
•
No supplements can be sold for preventative or therapeutic use.
•
Any potency higher than RDA levels (pathetically low) is a drug that requires a prescription and must be produced by drug companies.
•
Codex regulations are binding internationally
•
New supplements are banned unless given Codex testing and approval (certain to expensive and lacking in scientific merit). Norway and Germany are already operating under the new Codex regulations. The price of zinc tablets has gone from $4 to $52. Echinacea has risen from $14 to $153.
•
Codex regulations are not based on science or research findings. These regulations were developed by 11 appointed persons. Guess who appointed them?
Why Haven't I Heard About This?
The controlled press has been instructed to avoid commenting on this issue until it becomes a fait accomplis. At that time your congressional legislators will say they are sorry but there is nothing they can do to reverse the Codex. The truth is they were, all but a few, bought and paid for back when the World Trade Organization was ratified by the U.S. Congress.
http://www.newswithviews.com/Howenstine/james24.htm
Against the euro, the dollar slid to $1.3335, its weakest since Jan. 4, at 12:01 p.m. in New York, from $1.3214 late yesterday, according to electronic currency-dealing system EBS. The dollar fell to 104.57 yen, from 105.18.
The dollar dropped versus the yen after a government report showed the number of Japanese full-time workers increased for the first time since 1997, boosting optimism the world's second- biggest economy will pull out of last year's recession.
The U.S. currency also weakened against the South African rand and the Canadian, Australian and New Zealand dollars, so- called commodity currencies. Commodity prices reached a 24-year high today, according to the Reuters-CRB index.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aSg3PWqmJwoU&refer=top_world_news
The U.S. military lost its dominance in Iraq shortly after its invasion in 2003, a study concluded.
A report by the U.S. Army official historian said the military was hampered by the failure to occupy and stabilize Iraq in 2003. As a result, the military lost its dominance by July 2003 and has yet to regain that position.
"In the two to three months of ambiguous transition, U.S. forces slowly lost the momentum and the initiative gained over an off-balanced enemy," the report said. "The United States, its Army and its coalition of the willing have been playing catch-up ever since."
[You may recall the governor of New jersy put his Israeli homosexual lover in charge of “homeland security” in New jersy at around the same time that Chertoff’s wife was hitting up DC for “homeland security” money for NJ. Just a little memory refresher.]
In the wake of 9/11, as Michael Chertoff, was working to ferret out other potential terrorists and developing cross-agency information sharing and multi-agency collaboration to detect and disrupt terrorist operations, his wife Meryl was equally busy in her role as director of the State of New Jersey’s Washington, DC, office, strategizing ways to get congressional lawmakers and the executive branch to fund homeland security projects for the state.
http://www.gsnmagazine.com/feb_05_03/chertoff_chertoff.html
They have been called the Third House and their ranks are rife with former legislators, political party powerhouses and former aides to legislative leaders and governors.
They use freebies and friendship, information and campaign contributions to influence Florida lawmaking, even writing bills and amendments themselves.
And when the state's 160 legislators convene in their annual session today, this lobbyist army that can reach 2,000 will likely outnumber legislators by 12 to 1.
[By the way, I was reading “The Man WHo Would be King” by Rudyard Kipling today. In the story a couple of English hobos in India decide they are going to go get themselves their own kigndom in the savage, heathen wastes of Central Asia.
So off they go with some guns and sure enough they get a few villages under their thumbs. Well how do they keep the villages once they have got them?
Would you believe the heathen savages are freemasons? And the two hobos are a higher level of freemasons than any of the local savages. So they are able to cement their high position they bought with their guns by setting thmselves up as freemason lodge masters.]
The government tonight suffered a major blow to its anti-terrorism bill when the House of Lords voted to ensure that all control orders should be made by a judge rather than the home secretary.
Peers - believed to have included the former Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine - voted to ensure the orders would be made by a judge and not the home secretary, Charles Clarke.
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/attacks/story/0,1320,1432442,00.html
Amr Salah, a United States citizen living in Massachusetts asks for your help in demanding a formal investigation into the deaths of his father and brother at the hands of 1,000 Israeli troops. Dr. Khalid Salah, age 51, and his 16 year old son, Mohammed were shot and killed by Israeli Defense Forces on July 6, 2004 in their home in the city of Nablus in the Israeli Occupied West Bank. Throughout the hours of assault the Salahs were huddled together in a corner of the apartment, contacting relatives on a mobile phone for help. Despite an urgent call to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, Consul General David Pearce nor anyone else at the consulate intervened.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3666.shtml
Jim Murphy is a "counter-recruiter," one of a small but growing number of opponents of the Iraq war who say they want to compete with military recruiters for the hearts and minds of young people.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-07-counter-recruiters_x.htm
"Everything in society we cherish ended when the blackout (of August 2003) came," Simmons states. "If that wasn't a fire drill for how important energy actually is ... but people didn't get it. I don't think we actually learned a thing from it."
Indeed, as other speakers make clear, rather than deal with these issues, we simply elect politicians who aid and abet our refusal to get real.
Their argument is simple: suburbia couldn't exist without cars, and people couldn't afford to drive those cars without endless cheap gas. As they also make clear, the amount of oil pumped out of the ground is expected to peak sometime between now and 2010 at the latest. After that, every gallon of gas grows more and more expensive, rendering auto-based sprawl obsolete.
posted by abu nakba at 3/09/2005 09:11:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home