Collapse
Ocean Collapse
[Has The Sea Given Up Its Bounty?]
http://www.rense.com/general39/bounty.htm
Complete Marine Collapse
[Marine Food Chain A Smorgasbord For Man]
http://www.rense.com/general40/chain.htm
Aral Sea Collapse
[South Aral Sea 'gone in 15 years']
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993947
More Aral Collapse
[Satellite shows dramatic Aral loss]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3107915.stm
Still More Aral Collapse
[Portrait Of A Doomed Sea]
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/earth-03v.html
North Sea Collapse
[North Sea Facing Collapse Of Its Ecosystem
Fish Stocks And Sea Bird Numbers Plummet As Soaring
Water Temperatures Kill Off Vital Plankton]
http://www.rense.com/general43/eco.htm
Dead Sea Collapse
[The Dead Sea Is Dying]
http://www.rense.com/general44/deads.htm
Phyto Collapse
[Decline in oceans' phytoplankton alarms scientists Experts pondering whether reduction of marine plant life is linked to warming of the seas]
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/06/MN31432.DTL
Whale Collapse
[Whales Once Numbered In The Millions]
http://www.rense.com/general39/whales.htm
Shark Collapse
[Alert over vanishing sharks]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2661419.stm
Cod Collapse
[Cod's warning from Newfoundland]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2580733.stm
Euro Cod Collapse
[North Sea cod at crisis point]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2987682.stm
Blue Fin Tuna Collapse
[Bluefin Tuna Under Threat As Fishermen Exploit Quota Loophole]
http://www.rense.com/general44/blue.htm
Coral Collapse
[World's Coral Reefs Dying]
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2003/18.html
Deep Coral Collapse
[Coral's deep secrets]
http://www.oregonlive.com/science/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/science/1058962282244461.xml
More Coral Collapse
[Coral nears the crisis point]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3151585.stm
Sea Mount Collapse
[Lost Worlds Of The Ocean Threatened By Trawlers]
http://www.rense.com/general40/lost.htm
Antarctic Predator Collapse
[Unique Antarctic Sea Life At Risk]
http://www.rense.com/general39/nique.htm
Tuvalu Collapse
[Islanders Consider Exodus As Sea Level Rises
Tuvalu Leaders Look for a New Home Before Waves Wash Their Low-Lying Country Away]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0719-09.htm
Alps Collapse
[Decades of Devastation Ahead as Global Warming Melts the Alps]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0720-03.htm
Alaska Collapse
[Alaskan Warming is Disturbing Preview of What's to Come, Scientists Say]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0731-04.htm
Forest Collapse
[Deforestation Could Wipe Out 1/5 Of All Species]
http://www.rense.com/general39/defor.htm
Banana Collapse
[Bananas' Days May Be Numbered ]
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2058060
Banana Collapse
[Yes, We'll Have No Bananas - Thanks to Selective Breeding, our Favourite Fruit can Neither Reproduce nor Defend Itself from Disease]
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0719-02.htm
Tasmanian Devil Collapse
[Search for what in the Tasmanian devil is killing them]
“>http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/13/1065917349653.html
Downward Spiral Collapse
[Recent Warming Of Arctic May Affect Worldwide Climate]
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/arctic-03f.html
Dollar Collapse
[US Dollar 'Could Collapse At Any Moment]
http://www.rense.com/general41/usvo.htm
Old Man Collapse
[New Hampshire's 'Old Man of the Mountain' Collapses]
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2678297
Internet Collapse
[Risk of internet collapse rising]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/2514651.stm
[It would probably be cheaper in the long run to pay them nt to fish, or to pay them to take care of the islands or something like that.]
Environmental disaster is looming in the Galapagos Islands, the Pacific archipelago whose unique wildlife inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Already under pressure from a rapidly growing population and mass tourism, the waters around the Galapagos face being devastated by one of the world's most wildlife-damaging fishing methods.
The Galapagos have been officially protected for nearly 20 years and form part of the Galapagos World Heritage Site. But now the islands' 1,000 fishermen want to introduce long-lining - a technique involving lines many miles long holding hundreds of thousands of baited hooks, which catch and kill as many birds and animals as the fish that are targeted.
Conservationists fear that the species-rich marine ecosystem of the islands, governed by Ecuador, which is 600 miles to the east, will be cut to pieces.
Sea lions, dolphins, turtles, sharks, penguins, albatrosses and many other seabirds, all of which are major tourist attractions, are all likely to fall victim to the hooks.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sdlg.htm
The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure. The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.
"Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," it says.
http://www.rense.com/general63/twothirdsofworlds.htm
A steep decline in Puget Sound-area herring, a critical food source for larger fish, marine mammals and sea birds, has scientists mystified.
Not only are adult herring dying earlier than normal, but some fear that a stock that used to be one of the largest in Washington's inland marine waters could go extinct.
The 30-year decline in the small silvery fish has far-reaching implications, said Jim West, a Washington State Fish and Wildlife Department research scientist who found high concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls and other toxic substances in herring in south Puget Sound.
http://www.rense.com/general63/pllg.htm
Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation's richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050328/lf_afp/kyrgyzstanpolitics_050328194347
A team of research scientists says it has conclusively linked the transmission of lethal sea lice from farmed to wild salmon, a finding that raises questions about the future of B.C.'s $400-million salmon farming industry.
The report, to be published today in the journal of the Royal Society, in Britain, shows how one salmon farm on the B.C. coast caused an explosion of sea lice that spread to juvenile salmon migrating past. The lice then multiplied on the wild fish, leading to a secondary outbreak that spread to other salmon up to 30 kilometres from the farm.
"This is the smoking gun," said one of the scientists, John Volpe, of the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. "There is no ambiguity in the data whatsoever. It's very, very definitive... it's clean and it's conclusive."
http://www.rense.com/general63/lethal.htm
Late last year, in the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, I was contacted by someone close to the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq.
There was a growing concern inside the Bush administration, this source said, about the direction the occupation was
going.
The Bush administration was keen on achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq before June 2005, I was told.
When I asked why that date, the source dropped the bombshell: because that was when the Pentagon was told to be prepared to launch a massive aerial attack against Iran, Iraq's neighbour to the east, in order to destroy the
Iranian nuclear programme.
Why June 2005?, I asked. 'The Israelis are concerned that if the Iranians get their nuclear enrichment programme up
and running, then there will be no way to stop the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. June 2005 is seen as the decisive date.'
To be clear, the source did not say that President Bush had approved plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, as has been widely reported.
The President had reviewed plans being prepared by the Pentagon to have the military capability in place by June 2005 for such an attack, if the President ordered.
http://english.aljazeera.net/english/Templates/YourComments.aspx?NRORIGINALURL=%2fNR%2fexeres%2f1B5FCF4A-FBF6-443A-93A9-5E37C43FDE0B%2ehtm&FRAMELESS=false&NRNODEGUID=%7b1B5FCF4A-FBF6-443A-93A9-5E37C43FDE0B%7d&NRCACHEHINT=Guest
[As ye sow, so shall ye reap.]
Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar's account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests.
The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition.
In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar's lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies.
The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar's deportation order was signed.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/033005Z.shtml
[Imagine if we had actually had a war with the Russians. We would have been screwed. Good luck hiding in the basement of the post office while the nuclear bombs are dropping like snowflakes. We really think those mail bags and cinder block walls were going to keep you safe? Even the tanks aren’t that sturdy.]
The U.S. military's Abrams tank, designed during the Cold War to withstand the fiercest blows from the best Soviet tanks, is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades of Iraqi insurgents.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-03-29-abrams-tank-a_x.htm?POE=click-refer
[I have said it before, secrecy kills. Back when China was keeping its SARS epidemic under wraps people were dropping dead over it. Now maybe we will see something similar with NK.]
We do not know how extensively the bird flu, H5N1, is in North Korea. As we know, North Korea at first refused to admit bird flu had broken out...which may well have allowed H5N1 to spread even more.
I also wonder why NO ONE is bringing up the fact that the WSN/33 human influenza genes have been found in pigs in South Korea.
IF H5N1 spreads south into South Korea and hits the WSN/33 infected pigs, the pandemic might begin.
The World Health Organization has NOT made a determination on the WSN/33 pigs.
http://www.rense.com/1.imagesG/nkk.htm
[This is a sham publicity stunt operation to take the air out of the Minute man project. The Minute Man people wil have their press conferences and then the government will say, “Hey look, there’s no problem here. We’re already addressing the situation.”
Then as soon as the cameras look away all these extra agents will disappear.]
The U.S. government will launch a multi-million dollar security initiative along a 370-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border Wednesday in an effort to shut down the main artery for illegal immigration into the United States and secure an area thought to be vulnerable to terrorist infiltration, MSNBC.com has learned.
The operation, run by the Customs and Border Protection unit of the Department of Homeland Security, will increase the number of agents in the region by 25 percent, to over 2,500. The initiative, the second phase of an operation begun last year, is scheduled to be formally announced Wednesday.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7317822/
This has some interesting photos of Mars.
http://www.rense.com/general63/surb.htm
[I like how Einstein is referred to as a “dangerous pacifist”. “Look out! He doesn’t have a gun! Eveyone run for it!”]
ISRAELI WHISTLEBLOWER VANUNU FACES NEW CHARGES
Mordechai Vanunu, who was released from an Israeli prison last
April after serving 18 years for disclosing secret information on
Israel's nuclear weapons program and who has been seeking to leave
that country, now faces new charges of violating a gag order
prohibiting foreign press interviews.
Y writes from Jerusalem:
"You've probably heard that Mordechai Vanunu has been charged with
violating the restrictions placed on him when he was freed from
prison. The charges list 21 interviews he has given to the foreign
media [...]. The restrictions were due to expire on April 21, but
now the new charges and the pending trial will prevent him from
leaving the country. Mordechai has hired Avigdor Feldman and
Michael Sfard to defend him in this case. (The other day Daniel
Ellsberg, Vanunu's longtime ardent supporter, was here and spoke
at a press conference and on Israeli television. Very
impressive.)"
"I should point out that where the media refer to the restrictions
as the terms of Vanunu's parole, they are mistaken. Vanunu is not
on parole - he served his sentence in full. The restrictions
derive from a British Mandatory state-of-emergency regulation."
"Moreover, not a single word in any of the interviews went further
- in terms of information re Dimona [an Israeli nuclear facility]
etc - than the revelations he made to the Sunday Times in 1986, so
they can hardly be said to affect Israel's security in 2005."
"Some supporters (and Mordechai's brother Meir) advised him to keep
quiet after his release, but Mordechai is not the sort of person
who bends under pressure. I personally think that he was right to
do what he did. If he'd kept shtum [silent] the government could
have said, 'Aha, he's quiet here because he wants to leave, but if
we let him out he'll start giving interviews all over the place
and god knows what he'll say...' - So long as the vindictive
impulse continues to animate the system, Mordechai can't win."
During World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany sought to curtail
foreign travel by dissidents such as Albert Einstein, among others.
Historian Fritz Stern writes that German authorities imposed the
travel barriers on Einstein because they feared him as "a dangerous
pacifist with international commitments and friendships."
(Einstein's German World, Princeton Univ Press, 1999, p. 116)
We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.
We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan.
Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president's father in reprisal for Pakistan's development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China.
The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan's strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Yet Pakistan's ruling generals could be excused for believing that Washington is not seriously concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How else to explain invading a country -- Iraq -- that didn't possess nukes, didn't sell nuclear technology to unstable nations and didn't maintain an unholy alliance with Al Qaeda -- and then turning around and giving the plum prizes of U.S. military ingenuity to the country that did?
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0329-26.htm
[Profiting from misery, impoverishment, and nuclear armageddon.]
India and Pakistan are already among the biggest spenders on defense in the world. In a superb analysis in the South Asian Journal last year
(available at www.southasianmedia.net/Magazine/Journal/indopak_defence.htm), C. Rammanohar Reddy pointed out that India has the third largest defense budget on the planet, calculated in terms of the purchasing power of its currency. India currently spends more than $100 billion on defense every year, taking into account expenditures such as defense-related nuclear and space spending, armed forces pensions, and public-sector munitions manufacturers. Pakistan's defense spending, albeit smaller in total terms, is bigger per person and as a share of its economy, making it the fifteenth-biggest defense spender in the world.
The rankings of the two countries on international comparisons of social well-being is not quite so high, however. The United Nations Development Program's 2004 Human Development Report (hdr.undp.org) places India at number 127 out of a total of 177 nations, while Pakistan is at an even more dismal 142. I could cite a litany of depressing statistics from the report on the achievements (or lack, thereof) of both nations on the education, health care, nutrition, and sanitation fronts, but I won't. It suffices to say that they don't make pleasant reading. And this is what the Bush Administration comes up with: An offer to sell F-16s costing between $30 million and $40 million.
...
And these are only the short-term casualties. "There is also the loss of key social and physical networks that make daily life possible: families and neighborhoods would be devastated, factories, shops, electricity, and water systems demolished; hospitals, schools, and other government offices destroyed," the authors write. "Nothing would ever be the same again." Why would the United States knowingly increase the chances of a nuclear holocaust?
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0330-27.htm
[Back in the old daysi n the Soviet Union they had these things they called “Potemkin villages”. These were clean, tidy, progressive, happy little communist villages that the Soviet leadership would take foreigners to so they could see how wonderfully well the communist revolution was going in the USSR. The only slight problem with these villages was that they were not real. They were fake villages taffed by actors whose whole job was to make people think they were real socialists of the future working for the good of the international communist revolution or whatever.
It seems the USG has done the Soviets one better. they don’t even have to go the trouble of putting up fake villages. They can just put fake villages on TV and get the same effect for a fraciton of the cost. Then they just pocket the difference. So everyone wins.]
Despite a rising chorus of condemnation from journalists and media critics, the George W. Bush administration shows no signs of abandoning its distribution of taxpayer-funded ”news” to U.S. newspapers, radio and television stations.
Free press advocates are up in arms about what they say is the covert dissemination of propaganda by government agencies.
The 'video news releases' put out by the U.S. government are pernicious because the TV broadcasts often do not tell the viewers that the government is funding and controlling those supposed 'news' reports.
In one case, the administration -- seeking to build support among black families for its education reform plans -- paid a prominent African American pundit, Armstrong Williams, 240,000 dollars to promote the ”No Child Left Behind” law on his nationally syndicated television show and through his newspaper column, and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
Two other nationally known journalists, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus, have also admitted accepting thousands of dollars to endorse government programs.
Since 2001, the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service has fielded 40 reporters, producers and public affairs specialists to create ”good military news” to be beamed to home audiences via local news stations. The service's ”good news” segments have reportedly reached 41 million Americans via local newscasts -- in most cases, without the station acknowledging their source.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0329-12.htm
[I don’t believe all these military types who claim they didn’t know they were violating the Geneva Convetions or whatever else. Like that guy Charles Grainer. I remember when I was in High School, and we were working on round one of the on-going war to destroy Iraq, one of my teachers went and fought in the against Iraq.
And he came back and we had class after class where he told us in mind-numbing detail all the things the Army had told him about the Geneva Conventions and war crimes and the rules of war and bla bla bla.
Now all of a sudden I am supposed to believe that between 1991 and 2003 the Pentagon went form having people virtually memorize the Geneva Conventions to not even telling them that such things existed? Eveni f that were tue, there are still plenty of people in the military today who must have gotten the same spiel my old teacher got. Did they all get together and conspire to keep that info from the new guys?]
A newly released memo shows the top US commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation techniques that violated Geneva Conventions, the American Civil Liberties Union said.
The September 2003 memo signed by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez has been discussed previously in testimony and official reports on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal but had not been made public previously.
"General Sanchez authorized interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards," ACLU attorney Amrit Singh charged in a statement.
"He and other high-ranking officials who bear responsibility for the widespread abuse of detainees must be held accountable," he said.
The ACLU, which sued to obtain the release of government documents on detainees held oversees, said the Pentagon initially withheld the memo on national security grounds but released it March 25 after a legal challenge by the civil rights group.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0330-09.htm
The U.S. government's oversight of whistleblower protection policies at some of the world's most influential financial powerhouses is inadequate to protect those who risk their careers by calling attention to corruption and irregularities, a leading watchdog group said Tuesday.
The Washington-based Government Accountability Project (GAP), a whistleblower support organization, was responding to a report by the U.S. Treasury that came out on Mar. 25 evaluating transparency reforms, including whistleblower protection, at the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs).
”In terms of whistleblower policies at the banks, so far Treasury has been satisfied with too little,” said GAP legal director Tom Devine. ”The good news is that Treasury is using its bully pulpit to press for change. The bad news is so far the reality is not close to the rhetoric.”
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0330-05.htm
Palestinian sources report that Israel Defense Forces tanks stationed close to the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip fired a number of outlawed Flachette shells Friday evening at a soccer field in the eastern section of the camp. Children and adults were playing there at the time, continued the sources, and nine Palestinians were injured.
The sources said the IDF tanks fired two volleys at the area, with a number of shells hitting the playing field while others fell in adjacent fruit groves. The nine injured, they said, included three individuals who were moderately hurt - Asalam Sabah, 10, Ismail Hamed, 12, and Balal Alarizi, 25. The three were initially treated at a clinic in the Jabalya camp and later transferred to Shifa Hospital in the Strip.
...
The IDF Spokesman's Office confirmed the use of the Flachette shells on Friday, noting that the shells had been fired into an open area and not at a residential district. The spokesman's office added that "IDF forces spotted a cell of three terrorists who were planning to launch Kassam rockets at Israeli territory."
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=258785&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
Nazi Racial Science
http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/racial/right.htm
[Remember this phrase
“Gene Line Cleansing”
I have never heard it before, but having heard it, now I can hear it ringing down from the future.
Let me tell you what I think is wrong with this genetic notion of obesity.
I read somewhere once that over the first 200 or so years that this country existed, doctors consistently found that the obese made up around 3% of the population. This 3% figure persisted for generations. I think it is fair to say those people were gentically obese.
But whether that story is true or not, look at the demographics of obesity of this country over say the last 30 years or 50 or whatever.
It is plain to see, and has been reported virtually everywhere that all of a sudden we have been facing an “epidemic” of obesity over about the last 10 or 15 years. So say since about 1990.
Before that I can personally recall people not being nearly as fat as they are now. Even people I knew then an still know now were not as fat back then.
So now somehow this is supposed to be “genetic”.
Now think about how the genetic characteristics of a big population such as we have in the US can change.
One way is through natural genetic variation from one generation to the next.
So put that up against a “genetic epidemic” over the course of 15 years. If this epidemic only applied to people under 15 [or say 20, to allow time to recognize an uptick in obesity, childhood obesity seems to be easy to diagnose, so I woudn’t allow much more than 5 years extra] that would at least not disprove a genetic notion. BUT, it seems people of many ages well above 15 are virtually getting fatter by the day, so this would seem to argue against natural genetic variation from one generation to the next.
But then also consider, what if it this epidemic only did apply to people born since the epidemic started? How to account for such a radical change?
Could it be that only fat people were having children? Were fat people 20 years ago having less trouble than people of normal weights finding mates and raising large numbers of children? Were they in fact so successful that their children have essentially replaced all the other genetic lines of inheritance in the country?
This seems unlikely at best. If it is true, I think it ought to be a bigger story than the obesity epidemic.
So what could be another way for the genetic make-up of the country to change to radically over such a short period of time?
Super-large scale immigration could quickly change the genetic make-up of a population. For example, if you were to come to Boston in say 1620 and do a genetic profile of the community it would look however an Indian genetic profile would look. But if you came back 15 or 20 years later and did another profile, there would be virtually no genetic evidence of the Indians left, even though you were in the very same area.
Well, so we know there has been a lot of immigration over the past 15 years, but if this were the source of the epidemic, it should be present almost exclusively in the immigrant populations, with the rest of the population going on more or less as it had been before.
But in fact, we see the opposite is true. Most immigrants come here skinny, and then either get fat themselves, or else their kids do.
I invite you to take the case of Ozzy Osbourne and his family. We know both Ozzy and his wife are English and grew up there. If you look at them, you will see they appear to be what was once considered normally proportioned.
If you look at their kids, who were raised in the US, you can see they are both kind of chunky. Now we know precisely where both kids got their genes from. We know what those genes look like in the parents. How can we account for the difference in appearance between the parents and the children? Is it genetic? That seems unlikely.
The last way that I can think of that the population of the US might undergo a radical genetic change over such a short period of time is by some kind of mass exposure to some agent of mutation, which coincidentally seems to cause most people to put on weight.
Given the witches brew of industrial chemicals all of us Americans have running through our veins, I can not dismiss this hypothesis outright. But again it seems a bit unlikely. If it is a correct hypothesis, I would again submit that it is a bigger news story than the obesity epidemic.
Well, so those are the main possibilities I can think of for how a massive genetic tidal wve of change could have washed across virtually all the ethnic and racial groups in the US simultaneously say 15 or 20 years ago.
I am not going to explicitly offer an alertnative hypothesis. But I would like to point out that when I was a kid, if you went to a gas station, for example, they sold gas, some otehr car related stuff, and cigarrettes. If they sold any food at all it was little shrink wrapped packages of bright orange crakers with peanut butter or something like that.
Now if you go to most gas stations they have a wide variety of high calorie, low nutrition foods for sale, often at very low prices. When you stand outside at the gas pumps there are often speakers or signs encouraging you to go inside and buy food.
If you do buy food, most of it now seems to be more highly processed, and have a higher level of calories per whatever unit of meaure you want to use. Per package, per ounce, per square inch.
I read something recently about some new Starbucks drink that has as many calories as a Big Mac hamburger. Now there is nothing to stop you from drinking that drink, and actually eating a Big Mac hamburger. So there in one meal you will have taken in enough calories to support two ordinary Third World people for a whole day. And chances are you will eat two more meals besides that one before the day is out. How many days can you do something like that before the firemen have to cut the wall off your house to bring you to the hospital?
A lot of people DO eat fast food and have super high calorie drinks every day or almost every day of the week.
Everyone of us is faced with a non-stop barrage of admonitions to eat more eat more eat more. And what people are eating more of is higher in calories and more processed than ever before. I have even read that apple growers are doing market research studies on pre-sliced, plastic wrapped apples and sugared apple slices for convenience stores and vending machines to get people to guy more apples. It is little wonder that people are fatter now than they used to be.
The fault lies not in your genes, but in your society.
Well so if that is true, why would the media constantly be trumpeting the notion that the obesity epidemic is genetic.
One word- MONEY. Every time you pay someone to cut up your apple for you, that is money in someone’s pocket. Every time you pay someone to cut up your pickles for you, that is money in someone’s pocket. Every time you pay someone to put the milk and sugar in your coffee for you, that is money in someone’s pocket. Every tie you pay someone to put the ketchup and mustard and mayonnaisse on your hamburger, that is money in someone’s pocket.
But wait! you say. I’m packing on the pounds. I have to stop all this.
No, no they say. It’s GENETIC. You can’t help it. You just keep right on doing what you’re doing. Just so long as what you are doing is shovelling money into someone else’s pockets.
I can tell you as someone who has tried my hand at making my own food, the food industry is a gold mine. A 5 oz bag of potato chips is equal to one medium sized potato plus a little bit of the cheapest vegetable oil they can possibly find.
A few weeks ago at the Super 88 Supermarket I was able to buy a 5 pound bag of potatos for 59 cents. In other words, 5 ounces of potato cost me about 4 cents, and I was not getting the potatos wholesale.
Now a 5 ounce bag of ordinary, salted potato chips will run you anywhere for 80 cents to over a dollar. So say they spent 4 cents on potato. And say they spent as much as another 4 cents on the oil to fry it in. Say they spent as much as 10 cents between the bag and the salt. Say they charged as little as 80 cents for the bag.
That leaves them 62 cents per bag to cover the rest of their costs and then turn them a profit.
And this is if they don’t use cheap fillers. Did you know many many ground meat products in this country are now cut with cheap soy protein?
As long as people in America keep stuffing their faces these people are going to stay rich rich rich.
This is why the obesity empidemic is “genetic”.
Not that I am offering a theory or anything.
To get back to this article, if there is no “genetic epidemic” then what is the purpose of this program of “gene line cleansing”? Why must they even go after sperm that might be cryongenically preserved somewhere? Why must such preservation even be outlawed?
Yes grasshopper. Think about that one for a while.]
Beginning last November, the city of San Francisco began a program whereupon clinically obese men between the ages of 18 and 55 could undergo a procedure whereupon approximately 1/2 an inch is removed from each vas and the ends are sealed - commonly referred to as a vasectomy - completely free of charge. The overwhelming turnout led the State of California to follow suit, and now California is the first state in the Union to offer state-funded vasectomies to men who have been diagnosed as obese.
Why would a state adopt such a controversial program? The basis is simple: vasectomy is a popular method of birth control (in 1983, figures showed that approximately 10 million men had been sterilized in the U.S. since 1969). By offering such a highly effective form of birth control freely to men who, by clinical diagnosis, have been deemed genetically inferior to the normalized median of homo sapien development, such a gene line would effectively be eliminated.
The program's roots began in countries such as India and China , where the respective governments of those countries are attempting to stem the tide of overpopulation. Sums of money are paid to men who submit to voluntary vasectomy. The program is highly effective, given that the incentives for action are both a limit to overcrowding (societal concern) and monetary gain (personal concern). Given the effectiveness, The San Francisco Medical Society took note and took action.
Nationally recognized geneticist William A. Doty and clinician Joseph Peacock began a program in private practice whereupon overweight men in the Bay Area could receive vasectomies free of charge. Their philosophy: When engaging in clinical decision making, physicians tend to value primarily information about the effect of treatments on physiological functioning and disease progression, rather than information about the impact on the patient's quality of life [9-11]. By focusing on the quality of life of future generations, we greatly improve the psychological impact of genetics on the human condition. The response was positive, and they published the results of the clinical trials in the San Francisco Medical Society's Journal. Soon, other private care physicians spoke in favor of Doty's controversial new theory on the cure for obesity, which led to the program's establishment as a city-funded project and eventually lead to the State of California 's Committee for Exploratory Medicine to set aside funds to trial the project on a State level.
...
When establishing such a program, simple concerns still remain, such as the possibility that those undergoing vasectomy for reasons of obesity and gene-line cleansing might have preserved their fertility by depositing semen in sperm banks. Such semen samples are frozen in liquid nitrogen below -300°F (-185°F) and are considered to be viable for an indefinite period. However, there is considerable debate over the scientific and ethical aspects of sperm freezing, and the practice is still considered experimental. To truly cure the epidemic of obesity through this manner, the community at large would need to properly motivate our representative lobbyists in Washington to make such a practice illegal.
http://www.pnmj.org/0032205_curing_obesity.asp
With more consumers switching to diet soft drinks, NutraSweet Co., a leading producer of aspartame, plans to restart a mothballed production line at a Georgia plant this year to satisfy increased demand for the sugar substitute.
...
NutraSweet is a privately held company, with most of the shares in the hands of Boston-based J.W. Childs Associates LP.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBUVD41Y6E.html
[I predict an agent provacateur will shoot [or try to shoot] someone who either is an illegal immigrant, or ideally, who is actually an American citizen from the middle of one of these Minute Man patrols.
Then the beefed up law enforcement presence will swoop down on the whole bunch and lock them up as some kind of crminal syndicate or criminal conspiracy or something along those lines. The prosecutor will set out to smash the invidious Minute man organization to prevent any future bllod shed.
Why do I make this prediction?
1. The government dislikes organized groups of any kind that are not under government control. It especially idslikes organized groups where people might possibly be carrying guns.
2. GWB and a variety of other big shots of American society publically support essentially unlimited immigration into the country, even though most American oppose it. They need to have some kind of smear to put on the American people to shut them up, because the “racism” smear is wearing thin. If they can equate “anti-illegal immigration” with “blood thirsty crackpot” they will be well on their way to shutting people up again.
If this prediction is not correct, that is fine with me. I do not have a problem with being wrong.
This is kind of an obscure place to put this, but I keep forgetting to write it in. The problem with everyone really, but in this case with the anti-immigration types, is that they do not really have any kind of positive program.
Basically they say they want the illegals to stay home, and they are willing to go down and stand on the border and glare at them, or whatever they plan on doing.
Well that is fine, but it fails to address most of the problem.
Problem #1 is the demand side here in the US. People are not sneaking in here for no reason. They are coming because they know they are going to either get paid or more or at least have to take less money out of their own pockets if they come here to live. This happens because American businesses have an apparently insatiable appetite for more or less completely unskilled laborers who will work for peanuts, and because the government hacks are very free with our money when people come asking for it.
You almost never see people sneaking into Haiti or Cuba. Why? Because people know they would just be screwing themselves if they did something as foolish as that. Everyone knows even the Haitians can hardly get a job in Haiti, and if you get sick or something you can basically just kiss your life goodbye because you are all done with it.
Problem #2, or I should say unaddressed problems 1 and 2, problem 2 is the supply side in the rest of the world. Our government has gone out of its way over the last 50 or 60 years to see that the rest of the world is as stunted economically, politically, morally, and every other way as they can arrange to make it. We overthrew the democratic government in Iran way back in the 50s. We turned Guatemala into a criminal hell hole. We supported every non-communist dictatorship in the world for as long as it could possibly hold out, no matter whether that dictatorship was running its country into the ground or not.
At the same time we have been putting out the propaganda trumpet of how great and rich and wonderful the US is. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you run down every other country in the world and talk up your own, people are going to put some time and effort into getting into your country.
This guy Frosty Woodbridge or whoever who I have quoted fairly often on here talks about the dangers of creeping Third World-ization or whatever. We have had every opportunity in the world over the last 50 or 60 years to roll back the Third World and help get people on their feet. In virtually every instance the greed and hunger for power of our own leaders has led us to shun those opportunities and at all costs expand the Third World.
And now we find the Third World is washing over us here at home.
As I say often on this page, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap”. And we continue to sow like that, so I can know without looking that we will continue to reap the same harvest.
Problem #3 is that the more closely controlled border schemes, which I agree with, do not address the tens of millions of illegals that are already in the country.
This guy Frosty correctly points out that they are bringing stupid and counter-productive Third World behaviors into our country. But it seems to me most people already know that. His appeal is that he is saying things people already know, but won’t talk about.
The problem is that he only offers the problem, as do most people [am I doing that myself right here?], he doesn’t offer any solutions. Stopping someone in AZ from getting over the border is not doing anything about the illegal guy with the illegal cockfighting operation who has already been in Denver for 5 or 10 yeas driving without a licence, showing his disdain for the law, littering, and bla bla bla.
Old Mayor Daly in Chicago used to always yell at the people who would come in and say like “don’t have the cops go around beating people up” or “don’t rig the elections” or “don’t run a highway through this neighborhood” or whatever else.
He would always say to them, well you don’t want me to do this or that, but what SHOULD I be doing? And the protesters would kind of hem and haw, and he would tell them to get out and bad mouth them because they have no program.
Now I think Daly was kind of jerk, but he was the mayor because had programs, and they were protesters because they didn’t like his programs. No one gets to be mayor based on the fact that they have no plans and aren’t going to do anything and they are just going to tell other people not to do things they want to do. That is just for protesters and government bureaucrats.
So with that in mind I would sketch out the broad outlines of an actual immigration control program. The easiest step would be a kind of education campaign for immigrants. I would sit down and figure out what are the vital things immigrants need to understand do to fit into our society without driving people up the walls. For example, maybe “don’t litter”, “respect the law”, “drive in a courteous manner”, “don’t torture animals”, “there is a free, democratic society and this is our history bla bla bla” or whatever else. Then I would have someone work up some snappy campaigns on these subjects and you could put them on the ethnic radio stations, in the papers, maybe you could have paid tv programs or cartoons on the non-English TV stations, etc etc.
These would have the added benefit that if they were any good they could be exported back to whatever country these people came from, and maybe it would do some good over there.
The second step would be to address the demand side here at home. It is not hard to figure out which big/small businesses get the most mileage out of hiring illegals, which of course draws more here, knowing that the ones who came in before were able to find jobs. Again I would have a multi-media campaign, informing people by radio or newspaper or whatever that so and so company had a practice of hiring illegals and what bad effects this was having on the community and the listeners in particular and so on and encouraging people to yell at the company or not patronize them or whatever else seemed suitable.
The third step would be the most difficult. That would be to try to get those jackals down in DC to actually enforce immigration controls, and at the same time get them to be more even-handed and, dare I say it?, even helpful to people in other countries to reduce the supply of people who feel the need to abandon their whole lives and move to another country where they don’t speak the language and no one likes them.
Basically the goal would be the decrease the desire to leave, and increase the nuisance they would have to go through if they did sneak in, up to the point where they would judge it not to be worth their while.
This Minuteman thing, even if it was entirely successful would only increase the nuisance factor, it wouldn’t address any of these other issues as far as I can tell.]
Hundreds of volunteers, some of them armed, are expected to take up positions along the Mexican border Friday and begin patrolling for illegal immigrants - an exercise some fear could attract racist crackpots and lead to vigilante violence.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBZ6SY0Y6E.html
American International Group Inc., the world's largest insurer, said an array of accounting errors over 14 years may have inflated its net worth by as much as $1.7 billion.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aTN00AMaCxXM&refer=top_world_news
THE Israeli army uses ambulances to move troops and weapons in operations against Palestinians, a violation of the Geneva Conventions, according to a private television station.
The 10 station's report today included interviews with several reserve soldiers whose faces were blocked out to protect their identity.
"I and other members of my unit saw soldiers with their weapons, bulletproof vests and helmets climbing into military ambulances," one of the reservists said.
"The use of ambulances is against the Geneva Convention which Israel has signed. Moreover, once ambulances are used for military objectives they become a legitimate target," said Doctor Rafi Waldman, a member of the organisation Doctors for Human Rights.
...
In the past, Israel has accused the Palestinians of using ambulances to transport fighters.
Last October Israeli authorities released footage of what they said was Palestinian militants loading a rocket launcher onto a United Nations ambulance.
They later had to admit the alleged weapons were actually stretchers.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12698897%5E1702,00.html
The Israeli Ambassador to Ethiopia was found shot in his apartment in the Addis Ababa Hilton, the Foreign Ministry announced shortly after 12:30 Wednesday afternoon.
Doron Grossman was found by his bodyguard on Tuesday.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1112152821128
According†to†a†study,†the†new†currency†will†be†the†world?s†most†important†currency†union†after†the†euro.
The†GCC†currency†will†have†far-reaching†implications,†including†a†big†boost†to†inter-GCC†trade,†and†could†help†the†region?s†countries†diversify†their†economic†base†away†from†hydrocarbons,†said†the†study†prepared†by†the†Dubai-based†Gulf†Research†Center†(GRC).
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=6§ion=0&article=61225&d=29&m=3&y=2005
[Coincidentally the Greek Orthodox Church is in the middle of a bunch of scandals at the moment. I believe I have put a link on this blog somewhere concerning that.
Here is a quote from that story:
“Recorded conversations of eminent clerics engaging in 'love talk' have been broadcast on television, secret bank accounts revealed, and malfeasance unearthed, with priests emerging as central players in activities as disparate as trial-fixing, antiquities smuggling and election rigging. Highlighting a raft of lurid sexual claims, one newspaper splashed what was purported to be a 91-year-old priest in bed with a woman across its front page”
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1441811,00.html
Maybe they need the money to pay off their accusers?
I feel compelled to point out once again how often the word “coincidentally” comes up in the course of linkng these news articles.]
The fight centres on a large, ramshackle Palestinian hotel inside the Christian Arab Quarter.
It is built on a site owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the largest private landowners in this region. The hotel - the Imperial - is run by Abu Walid Dajani.
A few days ago he got a phone call from an Israeli newspaper. Mr Dajani was told that the land under his hotel had just been sold to an unknown Israeli investor.
And in this part of town, that matters.
Palestinian anger
For the Palestinians, selling a plot of Jerusalem land to Israel means losing a piece of their future capital.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4391323.stm
Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA's special unit targeting bin Laden, is right: the Iraq war has proved a boon to the worldwide Islamist insurgency that is rising even as I write. This, and not the Ba'athist remnant in Iraq (or Syria), is the real enemy, one that is recruiting hand-over-fist in the Mesopotamian killing fields. Iraq has become a vast training camp for al-Qaeda and its imitators, and what they are training for is another strike on their ultimate target – the continental United States. That is the real danger, one that is only increased by our stubborn refusal to recognize the colossal mistake we made in Iraq. While Bush is bringing the light of "democracy" to the Middle East and beyond, the forces of darkness are aiming at the soft underbelly of the American giant – and sharpening their blades on the battlefields of Iraq.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5378
[Has The Sea Given Up Its Bounty?]
http://www.rense.com/general39/bounty.htm
Complete Marine Collapse
[Marine Food Chain A Smorgasbord For Man]
http://www.rense.com/general40/chain.htm
Aral Sea Collapse
[South Aral Sea 'gone in 15 years']
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993947
More Aral Collapse
[Satellite shows dramatic Aral loss]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3107915.stm
Still More Aral Collapse
[Portrait Of A Doomed Sea]
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/earth-03v.html
North Sea Collapse
[North Sea Facing Collapse Of Its Ecosystem
Fish Stocks And Sea Bird Numbers Plummet As Soaring
Water Temperatures Kill Off Vital Plankton]
http://www.rense.com/general43/eco.htm
Dead Sea Collapse
[The Dead Sea Is Dying]
http://www.rense.com/general44/deads.htm
Phyto Collapse
[Decline in oceans' phytoplankton alarms scientists Experts pondering whether reduction of marine plant life is linked to warming of the seas]
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/10/06/MN31432.DTL
Whale Collapse
[Whales Once Numbered In The Millions]
http://www.rense.com/general39/whales.htm
Shark Collapse
[Alert over vanishing sharks]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2661419.stm
Cod Collapse
[Cod's warning from Newfoundland]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2580733.stm
Euro Cod Collapse
[North Sea cod at crisis point]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2987682.stm
Blue Fin Tuna Collapse
[Bluefin Tuna Under Threat As Fishermen Exploit Quota Loophole]
http://www.rense.com/general44/blue.htm
Coral Collapse
[World's Coral Reefs Dying]
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2003/18.html
Deep Coral Collapse
[Coral's deep secrets]
http://www.oregonlive.com/science/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/science/1058962282244461.xml
More Coral Collapse
[Coral nears the crisis point]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3151585.stm
Sea Mount Collapse
[Lost Worlds Of The Ocean Threatened By Trawlers]
http://www.rense.com/general40/lost.htm
Antarctic Predator Collapse
[Unique Antarctic Sea Life At Risk]
http://www.rense.com/general39/nique.htm
Tuvalu Collapse
[Islanders Consider Exodus As Sea Level Rises
Tuvalu Leaders Look for a New Home Before Waves Wash Their Low-Lying Country Away]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0719-09.htm
Alps Collapse
[Decades of Devastation Ahead as Global Warming Melts the Alps]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0720-03.htm
Alaska Collapse
[Alaskan Warming is Disturbing Preview of What's to Come, Scientists Say]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0731-04.htm
Forest Collapse
[Deforestation Could Wipe Out 1/5 Of All Species]
http://www.rense.com/general39/defor.htm
Banana Collapse
[Bananas' Days May Be Numbered ]
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNews&storyID=2058060
Banana Collapse
[Yes, We'll Have No Bananas - Thanks to Selective Breeding, our Favourite Fruit can Neither Reproduce nor Defend Itself from Disease]
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0719-02.htm
Tasmanian Devil Collapse
[Search for what in the Tasmanian devil is killing them]
“>http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/13/1065917349653.html
Downward Spiral Collapse
[Recent Warming Of Arctic May Affect Worldwide Climate]
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/arctic-03f.html
Dollar Collapse
[US Dollar 'Could Collapse At Any Moment]
http://www.rense.com/general41/usvo.htm
Old Man Collapse
[New Hampshire's 'Old Man of the Mountain' Collapses]
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2678297
Internet Collapse
[Risk of internet collapse rising]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/2514651.stm
[It would probably be cheaper in the long run to pay them nt to fish, or to pay them to take care of the islands or something like that.]
Environmental disaster is looming in the Galapagos Islands, the Pacific archipelago whose unique wildlife inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Already under pressure from a rapidly growing population and mass tourism, the waters around the Galapagos face being devastated by one of the world's most wildlife-damaging fishing methods.
The Galapagos have been officially protected for nearly 20 years and form part of the Galapagos World Heritage Site. But now the islands' 1,000 fishermen want to introduce long-lining - a technique involving lines many miles long holding hundreds of thousands of baited hooks, which catch and kill as many birds and animals as the fish that are targeted.
Conservationists fear that the species-rich marine ecosystem of the islands, governed by Ecuador, which is 600 miles to the east, will be cut to pieces.
Sea lions, dolphins, turtles, sharks, penguins, albatrosses and many other seabirds, all of which are major tourist attractions, are all likely to fall victim to the hooks.
http://www.rense.com/general63/sdlg.htm
The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure. The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.
"Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," it says.
http://www.rense.com/general63/twothirdsofworlds.htm
A steep decline in Puget Sound-area herring, a critical food source for larger fish, marine mammals and sea birds, has scientists mystified.
Not only are adult herring dying earlier than normal, but some fear that a stock that used to be one of the largest in Washington's inland marine waters could go extinct.
The 30-year decline in the small silvery fish has far-reaching implications, said Jim West, a Washington State Fish and Wildlife Department research scientist who found high concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls and other toxic substances in herring in south Puget Sound.
http://www.rense.com/general63/pllg.htm
Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation's richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050328/lf_afp/kyrgyzstanpolitics_050328194347
A team of research scientists says it has conclusively linked the transmission of lethal sea lice from farmed to wild salmon, a finding that raises questions about the future of B.C.'s $400-million salmon farming industry.
The report, to be published today in the journal of the Royal Society, in Britain, shows how one salmon farm on the B.C. coast caused an explosion of sea lice that spread to juvenile salmon migrating past. The lice then multiplied on the wild fish, leading to a secondary outbreak that spread to other salmon up to 30 kilometres from the farm.
"This is the smoking gun," said one of the scientists, John Volpe, of the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. "There is no ambiguity in the data whatsoever. It's very, very definitive... it's clean and it's conclusive."
http://www.rense.com/general63/lethal.htm
Late last year, in the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, I was contacted by someone close to the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq.
There was a growing concern inside the Bush administration, this source said, about the direction the occupation was
going.
The Bush administration was keen on achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq before June 2005, I was told.
When I asked why that date, the source dropped the bombshell: because that was when the Pentagon was told to be prepared to launch a massive aerial attack against Iran, Iraq's neighbour to the east, in order to destroy the
Iranian nuclear programme.
Why June 2005?, I asked. 'The Israelis are concerned that if the Iranians get their nuclear enrichment programme up
and running, then there will be no way to stop the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon. June 2005 is seen as the decisive date.'
To be clear, the source did not say that President Bush had approved plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, as has been widely reported.
The President had reviewed plans being prepared by the Pentagon to have the military capability in place by June 2005 for such an attack, if the President ordered.
http://english.aljazeera.net/english/Templates/YourComments.aspx?NRORIGINALURL=%2fNR%2fexeres%2f1B5FCF4A-FBF6-443A-93A9-5E37C43FDE0B%2ehtm&FRAMELESS=false&NRNODEGUID=%7b1B5FCF4A-FBF6-443A-93A9-5E37C43FDE0B%7d&NRCACHEHINT=Guest
[As ye sow, so shall ye reap.]
Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar's account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests.
The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition.
In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar's lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies.
The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar's deportation order was signed.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/033005Z.shtml
[Imagine if we had actually had a war with the Russians. We would have been screwed. Good luck hiding in the basement of the post office while the nuclear bombs are dropping like snowflakes. We really think those mail bags and cinder block walls were going to keep you safe? Even the tanks aren’t that sturdy.]
The U.S. military's Abrams tank, designed during the Cold War to withstand the fiercest blows from the best Soviet tanks, is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades of Iraqi insurgents.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2005-03-29-abrams-tank-a_x.htm?POE=click-refer
[I have said it before, secrecy kills. Back when China was keeping its SARS epidemic under wraps people were dropping dead over it. Now maybe we will see something similar with NK.]
We do not know how extensively the bird flu, H5N1, is in North Korea. As we know, North Korea at first refused to admit bird flu had broken out...which may well have allowed H5N1 to spread even more.
I also wonder why NO ONE is bringing up the fact that the WSN/33 human influenza genes have been found in pigs in South Korea.
IF H5N1 spreads south into South Korea and hits the WSN/33 infected pigs, the pandemic might begin.
The World Health Organization has NOT made a determination on the WSN/33 pigs.
http://www.rense.com/1.imagesG/nkk.htm
[This is a sham publicity stunt operation to take the air out of the Minute man project. The Minute Man people wil have their press conferences and then the government will say, “Hey look, there’s no problem here. We’re already addressing the situation.”
Then as soon as the cameras look away all these extra agents will disappear.]
The U.S. government will launch a multi-million dollar security initiative along a 370-mile stretch of the Arizona-Mexico border Wednesday in an effort to shut down the main artery for illegal immigration into the United States and secure an area thought to be vulnerable to terrorist infiltration, MSNBC.com has learned.
The operation, run by the Customs and Border Protection unit of the Department of Homeland Security, will increase the number of agents in the region by 25 percent, to over 2,500. The initiative, the second phase of an operation begun last year, is scheduled to be formally announced Wednesday.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7317822/
This has some interesting photos of Mars.
http://www.rense.com/general63/surb.htm
[I like how Einstein is referred to as a “dangerous pacifist”. “Look out! He doesn’t have a gun! Eveyone run for it!”]
ISRAELI WHISTLEBLOWER VANUNU FACES NEW CHARGES
Mordechai Vanunu, who was released from an Israeli prison last
April after serving 18 years for disclosing secret information on
Israel's nuclear weapons program and who has been seeking to leave
that country, now faces new charges of violating a gag order
prohibiting foreign press interviews.
Y writes from Jerusalem:
"You've probably heard that Mordechai Vanunu has been charged with
violating the restrictions placed on him when he was freed from
prison. The charges list 21 interviews he has given to the foreign
media [...]. The restrictions were due to expire on April 21, but
now the new charges and the pending trial will prevent him from
leaving the country. Mordechai has hired Avigdor Feldman and
Michael Sfard to defend him in this case. (The other day Daniel
Ellsberg, Vanunu's longtime ardent supporter, was here and spoke
at a press conference and on Israeli television. Very
impressive.)"
"I should point out that where the media refer to the restrictions
as the terms of Vanunu's parole, they are mistaken. Vanunu is not
on parole - he served his sentence in full. The restrictions
derive from a British Mandatory state-of-emergency regulation."
"Moreover, not a single word in any of the interviews went further
- in terms of information re Dimona [an Israeli nuclear facility]
etc - than the revelations he made to the Sunday Times in 1986, so
they can hardly be said to affect Israel's security in 2005."
"Some supporters (and Mordechai's brother Meir) advised him to keep
quiet after his release, but Mordechai is not the sort of person
who bends under pressure. I personally think that he was right to
do what he did. If he'd kept shtum [silent] the government could
have said, 'Aha, he's quiet here because he wants to leave, but if
we let him out he'll start giving interviews all over the place
and god knows what he'll say...' - So long as the vindictive
impulse continues to animate the system, Mordechai can't win."
During World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany sought to curtail
foreign travel by dissidents such as Albert Einstein, among others.
Historian Fritz Stern writes that German authorities imposed the
travel barriers on Einstein because they feared him as "a dangerous
pacifist with international commitments and friendships."
(Einstein's German World, Princeton Univ Press, 1999, p. 116)
We have cozied up to Pakistan for more than three years as it freely allowed the operation of the most extravagantly irresponsible nuclear arms bazaar the world has ever seen.
We sabotaged negotiations with North Korea by telling allies that Pyongyang had supplied nuclear material to Libya, even though the Bush administration knew that the country of origin of those shipments was our "ally," Pakistan.
Now, Lockheed Martin has been saved from closing its F-16 production line by the White House decision to lift the arms embargo on Pakistan and allow the sale. The decision, which ends a 1990 embargo put in place by the president's father in reprisal for Pakistan's development of a nuclear arsenal, is especially odd at a time when we are berating European nations for considering lifting their arms embargo on China.
The White House says the F-16s are a reward to Islamabad for its help in disrupting terrorism networks, despite a decade of Pakistan's strong support of Al Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
Yet Pakistan's ruling generals could be excused for believing that Washington is not seriously concerned about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. How else to explain invading a country -- Iraq -- that didn't possess nukes, didn't sell nuclear technology to unstable nations and didn't maintain an unholy alliance with Al Qaeda -- and then turning around and giving the plum prizes of U.S. military ingenuity to the country that did?
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0329-26.htm
[Profiting from misery, impoverishment, and nuclear armageddon.]
India and Pakistan are already among the biggest spenders on defense in the world. In a superb analysis in the South Asian Journal last year
(available at www.southasianmedia.net/Magazine/Journal/indopak_defence.htm), C. Rammanohar Reddy pointed out that India has the third largest defense budget on the planet, calculated in terms of the purchasing power of its currency. India currently spends more than $100 billion on defense every year, taking into account expenditures such as defense-related nuclear and space spending, armed forces pensions, and public-sector munitions manufacturers. Pakistan's defense spending, albeit smaller in total terms, is bigger per person and as a share of its economy, making it the fifteenth-biggest defense spender in the world.
The rankings of the two countries on international comparisons of social well-being is not quite so high, however. The United Nations Development Program's 2004 Human Development Report (hdr.undp.org) places India at number 127 out of a total of 177 nations, while Pakistan is at an even more dismal 142. I could cite a litany of depressing statistics from the report on the achievements (or lack, thereof) of both nations on the education, health care, nutrition, and sanitation fronts, but I won't. It suffices to say that they don't make pleasant reading. And this is what the Bush Administration comes up with: An offer to sell F-16s costing between $30 million and $40 million.
...
And these are only the short-term casualties. "There is also the loss of key social and physical networks that make daily life possible: families and neighborhoods would be devastated, factories, shops, electricity, and water systems demolished; hospitals, schools, and other government offices destroyed," the authors write. "Nothing would ever be the same again." Why would the United States knowingly increase the chances of a nuclear holocaust?
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0330-27.htm
[Back in the old daysi n the Soviet Union they had these things they called “Potemkin villages”. These were clean, tidy, progressive, happy little communist villages that the Soviet leadership would take foreigners to so they could see how wonderfully well the communist revolution was going in the USSR. The only slight problem with these villages was that they were not real. They were fake villages taffed by actors whose whole job was to make people think they were real socialists of the future working for the good of the international communist revolution or whatever.
It seems the USG has done the Soviets one better. they don’t even have to go the trouble of putting up fake villages. They can just put fake villages on TV and get the same effect for a fraciton of the cost. Then they just pocket the difference. So everyone wins.]
Despite a rising chorus of condemnation from journalists and media critics, the George W. Bush administration shows no signs of abandoning its distribution of taxpayer-funded ”news” to U.S. newspapers, radio and television stations.
Free press advocates are up in arms about what they say is the covert dissemination of propaganda by government agencies.
The 'video news releases' put out by the U.S. government are pernicious because the TV broadcasts often do not tell the viewers that the government is funding and controlling those supposed 'news' reports.
In one case, the administration -- seeking to build support among black families for its education reform plans -- paid a prominent African American pundit, Armstrong Williams, 240,000 dollars to promote the ”No Child Left Behind” law on his nationally syndicated television show and through his newspaper column, and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
Two other nationally known journalists, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus, have also admitted accepting thousands of dollars to endorse government programs.
Since 2001, the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service has fielded 40 reporters, producers and public affairs specialists to create ”good military news” to be beamed to home audiences via local news stations. The service's ”good news” segments have reportedly reached 41 million Americans via local newscasts -- in most cases, without the station acknowledging their source.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0329-12.htm
[I don’t believe all these military types who claim they didn’t know they were violating the Geneva Convetions or whatever else. Like that guy Charles Grainer. I remember when I was in High School, and we were working on round one of the on-going war to destroy Iraq, one of my teachers went and fought in the against Iraq.
And he came back and we had class after class where he told us in mind-numbing detail all the things the Army had told him about the Geneva Conventions and war crimes and the rules of war and bla bla bla.
Now all of a sudden I am supposed to believe that between 1991 and 2003 the Pentagon went form having people virtually memorize the Geneva Conventions to not even telling them that such things existed? Eveni f that were tue, there are still plenty of people in the military today who must have gotten the same spiel my old teacher got. Did they all get together and conspire to keep that info from the new guys?]
A newly released memo shows the top US commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation techniques that violated Geneva Conventions, the American Civil Liberties Union said.
The September 2003 memo signed by Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez has been discussed previously in testimony and official reports on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal but had not been made public previously.
"General Sanchez authorized interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards," ACLU attorney Amrit Singh charged in a statement.
"He and other high-ranking officials who bear responsibility for the widespread abuse of detainees must be held accountable," he said.
The ACLU, which sued to obtain the release of government documents on detainees held oversees, said the Pentagon initially withheld the memo on national security grounds but released it March 25 after a legal challenge by the civil rights group.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0330-09.htm
The U.S. government's oversight of whistleblower protection policies at some of the world's most influential financial powerhouses is inadequate to protect those who risk their careers by calling attention to corruption and irregularities, a leading watchdog group said Tuesday.
The Washington-based Government Accountability Project (GAP), a whistleblower support organization, was responding to a report by the U.S. Treasury that came out on Mar. 25 evaluating transparency reforms, including whistleblower protection, at the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs).
”In terms of whistleblower policies at the banks, so far Treasury has been satisfied with too little,” said GAP legal director Tom Devine. ”The good news is that Treasury is using its bully pulpit to press for change. The bad news is so far the reality is not close to the rhetoric.”
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0330-05.htm
Palestinian sources report that Israel Defense Forces tanks stationed close to the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip fired a number of outlawed Flachette shells Friday evening at a soccer field in the eastern section of the camp. Children and adults were playing there at the time, continued the sources, and nine Palestinians were injured.
The sources said the IDF tanks fired two volleys at the area, with a number of shells hitting the playing field while others fell in adjacent fruit groves. The nine injured, they said, included three individuals who were moderately hurt - Asalam Sabah, 10, Ismail Hamed, 12, and Balal Alarizi, 25. The three were initially treated at a clinic in the Jabalya camp and later transferred to Shifa Hospital in the Strip.
...
The IDF Spokesman's Office confirmed the use of the Flachette shells on Friday, noting that the shells had been fired into an open area and not at a residential district. The spokesman's office added that "IDF forces spotted a cell of three terrorists who were planning to launch Kassam rockets at Israeli territory."
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=258785&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
Nazi Racial Science
http://www.ushmm.org/research/library/bibliography/racial/right.htm
[Remember this phrase
“Gene Line Cleansing”
I have never heard it before, but having heard it, now I can hear it ringing down from the future.
Let me tell you what I think is wrong with this genetic notion of obesity.
I read somewhere once that over the first 200 or so years that this country existed, doctors consistently found that the obese made up around 3% of the population. This 3% figure persisted for generations. I think it is fair to say those people were gentically obese.
But whether that story is true or not, look at the demographics of obesity of this country over say the last 30 years or 50 or whatever.
It is plain to see, and has been reported virtually everywhere that all of a sudden we have been facing an “epidemic” of obesity over about the last 10 or 15 years. So say since about 1990.
Before that I can personally recall people not being nearly as fat as they are now. Even people I knew then an still know now were not as fat back then.
So now somehow this is supposed to be “genetic”.
Now think about how the genetic characteristics of a big population such as we have in the US can change.
One way is through natural genetic variation from one generation to the next.
So put that up against a “genetic epidemic” over the course of 15 years. If this epidemic only applied to people under 15 [or say 20, to allow time to recognize an uptick in obesity, childhood obesity seems to be easy to diagnose, so I woudn’t allow much more than 5 years extra] that would at least not disprove a genetic notion. BUT, it seems people of many ages well above 15 are virtually getting fatter by the day, so this would seem to argue against natural genetic variation from one generation to the next.
But then also consider, what if it this epidemic only did apply to people born since the epidemic started? How to account for such a radical change?
Could it be that only fat people were having children? Were fat people 20 years ago having less trouble than people of normal weights finding mates and raising large numbers of children? Were they in fact so successful that their children have essentially replaced all the other genetic lines of inheritance in the country?
This seems unlikely at best. If it is true, I think it ought to be a bigger story than the obesity epidemic.
So what could be another way for the genetic make-up of the country to change to radically over such a short period of time?
Super-large scale immigration could quickly change the genetic make-up of a population. For example, if you were to come to Boston in say 1620 and do a genetic profile of the community it would look however an Indian genetic profile would look. But if you came back 15 or 20 years later and did another profile, there would be virtually no genetic evidence of the Indians left, even though you were in the very same area.
Well, so we know there has been a lot of immigration over the past 15 years, but if this were the source of the epidemic, it should be present almost exclusively in the immigrant populations, with the rest of the population going on more or less as it had been before.
But in fact, we see the opposite is true. Most immigrants come here skinny, and then either get fat themselves, or else their kids do.
I invite you to take the case of Ozzy Osbourne and his family. We know both Ozzy and his wife are English and grew up there. If you look at them, you will see they appear to be what was once considered normally proportioned.
If you look at their kids, who were raised in the US, you can see they are both kind of chunky. Now we know precisely where both kids got their genes from. We know what those genes look like in the parents. How can we account for the difference in appearance between the parents and the children? Is it genetic? That seems unlikely.
The last way that I can think of that the population of the US might undergo a radical genetic change over such a short period of time is by some kind of mass exposure to some agent of mutation, which coincidentally seems to cause most people to put on weight.
Given the witches brew of industrial chemicals all of us Americans have running through our veins, I can not dismiss this hypothesis outright. But again it seems a bit unlikely. If it is a correct hypothesis, I would again submit that it is a bigger news story than the obesity epidemic.
Well, so those are the main possibilities I can think of for how a massive genetic tidal wve of change could have washed across virtually all the ethnic and racial groups in the US simultaneously say 15 or 20 years ago.
I am not going to explicitly offer an alertnative hypothesis. But I would like to point out that when I was a kid, if you went to a gas station, for example, they sold gas, some otehr car related stuff, and cigarrettes. If they sold any food at all it was little shrink wrapped packages of bright orange crakers with peanut butter or something like that.
Now if you go to most gas stations they have a wide variety of high calorie, low nutrition foods for sale, often at very low prices. When you stand outside at the gas pumps there are often speakers or signs encouraging you to go inside and buy food.
If you do buy food, most of it now seems to be more highly processed, and have a higher level of calories per whatever unit of meaure you want to use. Per package, per ounce, per square inch.
I read something recently about some new Starbucks drink that has as many calories as a Big Mac hamburger. Now there is nothing to stop you from drinking that drink, and actually eating a Big Mac hamburger. So there in one meal you will have taken in enough calories to support two ordinary Third World people for a whole day. And chances are you will eat two more meals besides that one before the day is out. How many days can you do something like that before the firemen have to cut the wall off your house to bring you to the hospital?
A lot of people DO eat fast food and have super high calorie drinks every day or almost every day of the week.
Everyone of us is faced with a non-stop barrage of admonitions to eat more eat more eat more. And what people are eating more of is higher in calories and more processed than ever before. I have even read that apple growers are doing market research studies on pre-sliced, plastic wrapped apples and sugared apple slices for convenience stores and vending machines to get people to guy more apples. It is little wonder that people are fatter now than they used to be.
The fault lies not in your genes, but in your society.
Well so if that is true, why would the media constantly be trumpeting the notion that the obesity epidemic is genetic.
One word- MONEY. Every time you pay someone to cut up your apple for you, that is money in someone’s pocket. Every time you pay someone to cut up your pickles for you, that is money in someone’s pocket. Every time you pay someone to put the milk and sugar in your coffee for you, that is money in someone’s pocket. Every tie you pay someone to put the ketchup and mustard and mayonnaisse on your hamburger, that is money in someone’s pocket.
But wait! you say. I’m packing on the pounds. I have to stop all this.
No, no they say. It’s GENETIC. You can’t help it. You just keep right on doing what you’re doing. Just so long as what you are doing is shovelling money into someone else’s pockets.
I can tell you as someone who has tried my hand at making my own food, the food industry is a gold mine. A 5 oz bag of potato chips is equal to one medium sized potato plus a little bit of the cheapest vegetable oil they can possibly find.
A few weeks ago at the Super 88 Supermarket I was able to buy a 5 pound bag of potatos for 59 cents. In other words, 5 ounces of potato cost me about 4 cents, and I was not getting the potatos wholesale.
Now a 5 ounce bag of ordinary, salted potato chips will run you anywhere for 80 cents to over a dollar. So say they spent 4 cents on potato. And say they spent as much as another 4 cents on the oil to fry it in. Say they spent as much as 10 cents between the bag and the salt. Say they charged as little as 80 cents for the bag.
That leaves them 62 cents per bag to cover the rest of their costs and then turn them a profit.
And this is if they don’t use cheap fillers. Did you know many many ground meat products in this country are now cut with cheap soy protein?
As long as people in America keep stuffing their faces these people are going to stay rich rich rich.
This is why the obesity empidemic is “genetic”.
Not that I am offering a theory or anything.
To get back to this article, if there is no “genetic epidemic” then what is the purpose of this program of “gene line cleansing”? Why must they even go after sperm that might be cryongenically preserved somewhere? Why must such preservation even be outlawed?
Yes grasshopper. Think about that one for a while.]
Beginning last November, the city of San Francisco began a program whereupon clinically obese men between the ages of 18 and 55 could undergo a procedure whereupon approximately 1/2 an inch is removed from each vas and the ends are sealed - commonly referred to as a vasectomy - completely free of charge. The overwhelming turnout led the State of California to follow suit, and now California is the first state in the Union to offer state-funded vasectomies to men who have been diagnosed as obese.
Why would a state adopt such a controversial program? The basis is simple: vasectomy is a popular method of birth control (in 1983, figures showed that approximately 10 million men had been sterilized in the U.S. since 1969). By offering such a highly effective form of birth control freely to men who, by clinical diagnosis, have been deemed genetically inferior to the normalized median of homo sapien development, such a gene line would effectively be eliminated.
The program's roots began in countries such as India and China , where the respective governments of those countries are attempting to stem the tide of overpopulation. Sums of money are paid to men who submit to voluntary vasectomy. The program is highly effective, given that the incentives for action are both a limit to overcrowding (societal concern) and monetary gain (personal concern). Given the effectiveness, The San Francisco Medical Society took note and took action.
Nationally recognized geneticist William A. Doty and clinician Joseph Peacock began a program in private practice whereupon overweight men in the Bay Area could receive vasectomies free of charge. Their philosophy: When engaging in clinical decision making, physicians tend to value primarily information about the effect of treatments on physiological functioning and disease progression, rather than information about the impact on the patient's quality of life [9-11]. By focusing on the quality of life of future generations, we greatly improve the psychological impact of genetics on the human condition. The response was positive, and they published the results of the clinical trials in the San Francisco Medical Society's Journal. Soon, other private care physicians spoke in favor of Doty's controversial new theory on the cure for obesity, which led to the program's establishment as a city-funded project and eventually lead to the State of California 's Committee for Exploratory Medicine to set aside funds to trial the project on a State level.
...
When establishing such a program, simple concerns still remain, such as the possibility that those undergoing vasectomy for reasons of obesity and gene-line cleansing might have preserved their fertility by depositing semen in sperm banks. Such semen samples are frozen in liquid nitrogen below -300°F (-185°F) and are considered to be viable for an indefinite period. However, there is considerable debate over the scientific and ethical aspects of sperm freezing, and the practice is still considered experimental. To truly cure the epidemic of obesity through this manner, the community at large would need to properly motivate our representative lobbyists in Washington to make such a practice illegal.
http://www.pnmj.org/0032205_curing_obesity.asp
With more consumers switching to diet soft drinks, NutraSweet Co., a leading producer of aspartame, plans to restart a mothballed production line at a Georgia plant this year to satisfy increased demand for the sugar substitute.
...
NutraSweet is a privately held company, with most of the shares in the hands of Boston-based J.W. Childs Associates LP.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBUVD41Y6E.html
[I predict an agent provacateur will shoot [or try to shoot] someone who either is an illegal immigrant, or ideally, who is actually an American citizen from the middle of one of these Minute Man patrols.
Then the beefed up law enforcement presence will swoop down on the whole bunch and lock them up as some kind of crminal syndicate or criminal conspiracy or something along those lines. The prosecutor will set out to smash the invidious Minute man organization to prevent any future bllod shed.
Why do I make this prediction?
1. The government dislikes organized groups of any kind that are not under government control. It especially idslikes organized groups where people might possibly be carrying guns.
2. GWB and a variety of other big shots of American society publically support essentially unlimited immigration into the country, even though most American oppose it. They need to have some kind of smear to put on the American people to shut them up, because the “racism” smear is wearing thin. If they can equate “anti-illegal immigration” with “blood thirsty crackpot” they will be well on their way to shutting people up again.
If this prediction is not correct, that is fine with me. I do not have a problem with being wrong.
This is kind of an obscure place to put this, but I keep forgetting to write it in. The problem with everyone really, but in this case with the anti-immigration types, is that they do not really have any kind of positive program.
Basically they say they want the illegals to stay home, and they are willing to go down and stand on the border and glare at them, or whatever they plan on doing.
Well that is fine, but it fails to address most of the problem.
Problem #1 is the demand side here in the US. People are not sneaking in here for no reason. They are coming because they know they are going to either get paid or more or at least have to take less money out of their own pockets if they come here to live. This happens because American businesses have an apparently insatiable appetite for more or less completely unskilled laborers who will work for peanuts, and because the government hacks are very free with our money when people come asking for it.
You almost never see people sneaking into Haiti or Cuba. Why? Because people know they would just be screwing themselves if they did something as foolish as that. Everyone knows even the Haitians can hardly get a job in Haiti, and if you get sick or something you can basically just kiss your life goodbye because you are all done with it.
Problem #2, or I should say unaddressed problems 1 and 2, problem 2 is the supply side in the rest of the world. Our government has gone out of its way over the last 50 or 60 years to see that the rest of the world is as stunted economically, politically, morally, and every other way as they can arrange to make it. We overthrew the democratic government in Iran way back in the 50s. We turned Guatemala into a criminal hell hole. We supported every non-communist dictatorship in the world for as long as it could possibly hold out, no matter whether that dictatorship was running its country into the ground or not.
At the same time we have been putting out the propaganda trumpet of how great and rich and wonderful the US is. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that if you run down every other country in the world and talk up your own, people are going to put some time and effort into getting into your country.
This guy Frosty Woodbridge or whoever who I have quoted fairly often on here talks about the dangers of creeping Third World-ization or whatever. We have had every opportunity in the world over the last 50 or 60 years to roll back the Third World and help get people on their feet. In virtually every instance the greed and hunger for power of our own leaders has led us to shun those opportunities and at all costs expand the Third World.
And now we find the Third World is washing over us here at home.
As I say often on this page, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap”. And we continue to sow like that, so I can know without looking that we will continue to reap the same harvest.
Problem #3 is that the more closely controlled border schemes, which I agree with, do not address the tens of millions of illegals that are already in the country.
This guy Frosty correctly points out that they are bringing stupid and counter-productive Third World behaviors into our country. But it seems to me most people already know that. His appeal is that he is saying things people already know, but won’t talk about.
The problem is that he only offers the problem, as do most people [am I doing that myself right here?], he doesn’t offer any solutions. Stopping someone in AZ from getting over the border is not doing anything about the illegal guy with the illegal cockfighting operation who has already been in Denver for 5 or 10 yeas driving without a licence, showing his disdain for the law, littering, and bla bla bla.
Old Mayor Daly in Chicago used to always yell at the people who would come in and say like “don’t have the cops go around beating people up” or “don’t rig the elections” or “don’t run a highway through this neighborhood” or whatever else.
He would always say to them, well you don’t want me to do this or that, but what SHOULD I be doing? And the protesters would kind of hem and haw, and he would tell them to get out and bad mouth them because they have no program.
Now I think Daly was kind of jerk, but he was the mayor because had programs, and they were protesters because they didn’t like his programs. No one gets to be mayor based on the fact that they have no plans and aren’t going to do anything and they are just going to tell other people not to do things they want to do. That is just for protesters and government bureaucrats.
So with that in mind I would sketch out the broad outlines of an actual immigration control program. The easiest step would be a kind of education campaign for immigrants. I would sit down and figure out what are the vital things immigrants need to understand do to fit into our society without driving people up the walls. For example, maybe “don’t litter”, “respect the law”, “drive in a courteous manner”, “don’t torture animals”, “there is a free, democratic society and this is our history bla bla bla” or whatever else. Then I would have someone work up some snappy campaigns on these subjects and you could put them on the ethnic radio stations, in the papers, maybe you could have paid tv programs or cartoons on the non-English TV stations, etc etc.
These would have the added benefit that if they were any good they could be exported back to whatever country these people came from, and maybe it would do some good over there.
The second step would be to address the demand side here at home. It is not hard to figure out which big/small businesses get the most mileage out of hiring illegals, which of course draws more here, knowing that the ones who came in before were able to find jobs. Again I would have a multi-media campaign, informing people by radio or newspaper or whatever that so and so company had a practice of hiring illegals and what bad effects this was having on the community and the listeners in particular and so on and encouraging people to yell at the company or not patronize them or whatever else seemed suitable.
The third step would be the most difficult. That would be to try to get those jackals down in DC to actually enforce immigration controls, and at the same time get them to be more even-handed and, dare I say it?, even helpful to people in other countries to reduce the supply of people who feel the need to abandon their whole lives and move to another country where they don’t speak the language and no one likes them.
Basically the goal would be the decrease the desire to leave, and increase the nuisance they would have to go through if they did sneak in, up to the point where they would judge it not to be worth their while.
This Minuteman thing, even if it was entirely successful would only increase the nuisance factor, it wouldn’t address any of these other issues as far as I can tell.]
Hundreds of volunteers, some of them armed, are expected to take up positions along the Mexican border Friday and begin patrolling for illegal immigrants - an exercise some fear could attract racist crackpots and lead to vigilante violence.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBZ6SY0Y6E.html
American International Group Inc., the world's largest insurer, said an array of accounting errors over 14 years may have inflated its net worth by as much as $1.7 billion.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aTN00AMaCxXM&refer=top_world_news
THE Israeli army uses ambulances to move troops and weapons in operations against Palestinians, a violation of the Geneva Conventions, according to a private television station.
The 10 station's report today included interviews with several reserve soldiers whose faces were blocked out to protect their identity.
"I and other members of my unit saw soldiers with their weapons, bulletproof vests and helmets climbing into military ambulances," one of the reservists said.
"The use of ambulances is against the Geneva Convention which Israel has signed. Moreover, once ambulances are used for military objectives they become a legitimate target," said Doctor Rafi Waldman, a member of the organisation Doctors for Human Rights.
...
In the past, Israel has accused the Palestinians of using ambulances to transport fighters.
Last October Israeli authorities released footage of what they said was Palestinian militants loading a rocket launcher onto a United Nations ambulance.
They later had to admit the alleged weapons were actually stretchers.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12698897%5E1702,00.html
The Israeli Ambassador to Ethiopia was found shot in his apartment in the Addis Ababa Hilton, the Foreign Ministry announced shortly after 12:30 Wednesday afternoon.
Doron Grossman was found by his bodyguard on Tuesday.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1112152821128
According†to†a†study,†the†new†currency†will†be†the†world?s†most†important†currency†union†after†the†euro.
The†GCC†currency†will†have†far-reaching†implications,†including†a†big†boost†to†inter-GCC†trade,†and†could†help†the†region?s†countries†diversify†their†economic†base†away†from†hydrocarbons,†said†the†study†prepared†by†the†Dubai-based†Gulf†Research†Center†(GRC).
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=6§ion=0&article=61225&d=29&m=3&y=2005
[Coincidentally the Greek Orthodox Church is in the middle of a bunch of scandals at the moment. I believe I have put a link on this blog somewhere concerning that.
Here is a quote from that story:
“Recorded conversations of eminent clerics engaging in 'love talk' have been broadcast on television, secret bank accounts revealed, and malfeasance unearthed, with priests emerging as central players in activities as disparate as trial-fixing, antiquities smuggling and election rigging. Highlighting a raft of lurid sexual claims, one newspaper splashed what was purported to be a 91-year-old priest in bed with a woman across its front page”
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1441811,00.html
Maybe they need the money to pay off their accusers?
I feel compelled to point out once again how often the word “coincidentally” comes up in the course of linkng these news articles.]
The fight centres on a large, ramshackle Palestinian hotel inside the Christian Arab Quarter.
It is built on a site owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the largest private landowners in this region. The hotel - the Imperial - is run by Abu Walid Dajani.
A few days ago he got a phone call from an Israeli newspaper. Mr Dajani was told that the land under his hotel had just been sold to an unknown Israeli investor.
And in this part of town, that matters.
Palestinian anger
For the Palestinians, selling a plot of Jerusalem land to Israel means losing a piece of their future capital.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4391323.stm
Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA's special unit targeting bin Laden, is right: the Iraq war has proved a boon to the worldwide Islamist insurgency that is rising even as I write. This, and not the Ba'athist remnant in Iraq (or Syria), is the real enemy, one that is recruiting hand-over-fist in the Mesopotamian killing fields. Iraq has become a vast training camp for al-Qaeda and its imitators, and what they are training for is another strike on their ultimate target – the continental United States. That is the real danger, one that is only increased by our stubborn refusal to recognize the colossal mistake we made in Iraq. While Bush is bringing the light of "democracy" to the Middle East and beyond, the forces of darkness are aiming at the soft underbelly of the American giant – and sharpening their blades on the battlefields of Iraq.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5378
posted by abu nakba at 3/31/2005 07:22:00 AM
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