Immediately and forever
[This is true.]
A former American government packing plant veterinarian says the United States government is hiding cases of mad cow disease.
Dr. Lester Friedlander said Wednesday that colleagues with the United States Department of Agriculture have told him of cases that the USDA has chosen not to announce.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mdcc.htm
[I’m not sure it is fair to say no one expected this stuff to kill amphibians.]
The herbicide Roundup. is widely used to eradicate weeds. But a study published today by a University of Pittsburgh researcher finds that the chemical may be eradicating much more than that.
Pitt assistant professor of biology Rick Relyea found that Roundup., the second most commonly applied herbicide in the United States, is "extremely lethal" to amphibians. This field experiment is one of the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting, and the results may provide a key link to global amphibian declines.
.....
"We've repeated the experiment, so we're confident that this is, in fact, a repeatable result that we see," said Relyea. "It's fair to say that nobody would have guessed Roundup. was going to be so lethal to amphibians.
http://www.rense.com/general63/leth.htm
A conservative Christian believes that his own soul is not imperiled if other people down the street decide to do some sinning. A conservative Christian recognizes that he is commanded to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and comfort the sick and dying. He is not commanded to shift this responsibility to government. He is not commanded to judge other people's lives and to regulate their behavior. A conservative Christian recognizes that something does not have to be illegal in order for him to refrain from doing it.
A conservative believes in the real, traditional values of this country: courage, hard work, self-reliance, frugality, chastity before marriage, faithfulness after marriage, loyalty to family and loyalty to the Constitution. Loyalty to a political party or to a politician is profoundly un-American
http://www.rense.com/general63/coser.htm
Most of the public attention given to RFID has focused on the retail supply chain, especially Wal-Mart's 2005 mandate to its top 100 suppliers. But the U.S. Department of Defense is also mandating its use in 2005 -- not to merely 100, but to all of its 43,000+ suppliers. Add to that the needs of the aerospace industry, particularly the two giant aircraft makers, Boeing and Airbus, and the shape of a massive vertical RFID market emerges.
http://www.rense.com/general63/rrfig.htm
[As ye sow, so shall ye reap. We ll had no problem letting the government make all this VX nerve gas, despite the fact that it is has no legitimate use. Now we will get poisoned by it.]
The U.S. Army's plan to destroy VX nerve agent stockpiled in Indiana and ship the chemical byproduct to New Jersey to be dumped in the Delaware River may not completely remove all traces of the deadly chemical, the government says.
http://www.rense.com/general63/agen.htm
Two major data brokers, a California elementary school and Google's Gmail service are leading contenders for the Big Brother Awards -- a dubious prize spotlighting organizations with egregious privacy practices.
Award recipients will receive a statue of a golden boot stomping on a human head.
The nominees were among those on a list made public Wednesday by Privacy International, the British watchdog group that runs the annual U.S. Big Brother Awards. The group plans to announce winners on April 14.
Simon Davies, Privacy International's director, predicts that this will be an extraordinarily difficult year for selecting a winner, given that there are so many strong candidates.
http://www.rense.com/general63/choice.htm
The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust's varying thickness.
http://www.rense.com/general63/moho.htm
Until now, most of the infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA have shown up in hospitals.
But up to 20 percent of such infections may have come from the community, Fridkin said in a telephone interview.
"We were surprised to find it that high," he said. The group had expected the rate to be close to zero at the start of the study in 2001.
"It wasn't there a decade ago, but it's there now."
The second study, led by Loren Miller of Harbor-University of California Los Angeles Medical Center in California, found that some cases of flesh-eating bacteria are caused by methicillin-resistant staph.
http://www.rense.com/general63/drugrel.htm
Two new cases of human mad cow disease were detected in France, raising the total number of cases in that country to 11, health officials said.
http://www.rense.com/general63/2hum.htm
Witness accounts have described patterned overflights of low-flying aircraft and on some occasions have even seen a 'white rain' of chemicals being sprayed downward from nozzles located under the wings of certain types of aircraft (I have personally witnessed this). After these flights, witnesses report respiratory problems, allergies, high blood pressure and palpitations - which gradually improve until the next round of spraying...different chemicals causing differing health effects.
http://www.rense.com/general63/orcit.htm
Three more captive deer in New York have tested positive for chronic wasting disease.
Agricultural officials say the three deer belonged to the same Oneida County herd that yielded the first positive last week. There are now five deer in New York with confirmed cases of C-W-D. All of the cases come from captive herds -- though state officials are checking to see if the deadly disease spread into the wild.
http://www.rense.com/general63/deerd.htm
Let's face the facts. The game is over and we -- the "reality-based community," the believers in genuine democracy and law, the heirs of Jefferson and Madison, Emerson and Thoreau, the toilers and dreamers, all those who seek to rise above the beast within and shape the brutal chaos of existence into something higher, richer and imbued with meaning -- have lost. The better world we thought had been won out of the blood and horror of history -- a realm of enlightenment that often found its best embodiment in the ideals and aspirations of the American Republic -- is gone. It's been swallowed by darkness, by ravening greed, by bestial spirits and by willful primitives who now possess overwhelming instruments of power and dominion.
A gang of such spirits seized control of the U.S. government by illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant electoral corruption in 2004. The re-election of President George W. Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final results - gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds. Indeed, a panel of statisticians said last week that the odds of such a discrepancy occurring naturally were 959,000 to 1, the Akron Beacon-Journal reported.
http://www.rense.com/general63/fix.htm
The Greatest War Movie Ever?
by Douglas Herman
“The fighting man receives tokens—medals, ribbons, badges, promotions, combat pay, abrogation of taxes—worthless bits of nothing, as valuable as smoke.” ~ Anthony Swofford, Jarhead
Before deploying to Kuwait , in the build up to the First Gulf War, Swofford and his fellow Marines watched a war movie marathon, he said, watching whatever videotape they could find. Endless war movies for these young, would-be warriors; "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket," "Hamburger Hill" and "The Sands of Iwo Jima"; every movie they watched was studied from a soldier’s perspective.
We tend to see war movies differently, not only from the perspective of age but also from our current position in life. Civilians see things differently than veterans. Combat veterans see things differently than peacetime servicemen or reservists. Men see things far differently than women, and young men see things differently than old.
A movie that may have once been only a wonderfully adventurous war movie to a young man (myself) of sixteen--"The Sand Pebbles"-- becomes far more powerful to an older and wiser man of fifty-five who better recognizes the subtle nuances under-lying that war film.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/herman/herman11.html
The four countries neighbouring Angola have been put on alert for Marburg haemorrhagic fever by the World Health Organization - the death toll from the virus has now reached 174.
The Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia and Zambia were told to be on alert by WHO officials on Friday, who say the world's worst outbreak of Marburg has yet to peak. "Everybody should be on alert in Angola and its neighbouring countries," said top WHO communicable diseases official, Anarfi Asamoa-Baah, to a French news agency. "It's going to get worse before it gets better," he added.
http://www.rense.com/general63/alert.htm
Essential oils have a very long history and several have very effective anti-bacterial and anti-fungal capacity. Herbs used throughout thousands of years have this same capacity as well.
Seriously hoping to at least have one response, I am saddened to say that not one reply has ever been received.
One would now have to ask the question: What drives these health professionals to so totally disregard non-traditional treatment possibilities?
Today, I am placing my challenge on the table.
Doctors, if you are truly interested in treating and curing this problem, my protocols await.
http://www.rense.com/general63/fleshet.htm
[Overseas fighting to not have your votes counted.]
The votes of at least 1 in 4 U.S. soldiers and overseas voters in last fall's election never were counted.
That's the conclusion of a recent report by the National Defense Committee, a private, pro-military organization that surveyed local election offices across the country about the number of absentee votes cast and counted in the Nov. 3 election.
In all, more than 30,000 of the 131,000 absentee ballots sent by troops and expatriates to 760 local elections offices around the country were not counted, the report found. Those offices represent about 10 percent of the 7,800 offices nationwide.
http://www.rense.com/general63/ovrse.htm
The marsupial lion, one the greatest carnivores to roam Australia, had the most powerful bite of any mammal species - living or extinct.
The assessment comes from scientists who have compared the heads of all manner of beasts, from dogs to bears.
None had the ability to bite down on its prey with quite the same force, say Dr Stephen Wroe and colleagues
The assessment comes from scientists who have compared the heads of all manner of beasts, from dogs to bears.
None had the ability to bite down on its prey with quite the same force, say Dr Stephen Wroe and colleagues”>The marsupial lion, one the greatest carnivores to roam Australia, had the most powerful bite of any mammal species - living or extinct.
The assessment comes from scientists who have compared the heads of all manner of beasts, from dogs to bears.
None had the ability to bite down on its prey with quite the same force, say Dr Stephen Wroe and colleagues
It sounded like a crackpot idea to the political and cultural elite.
Hundreds of citizens, angry about the effects of illegal immigration on our country, would travel down to the Mexican border and do something about it.
The Minuteman Project would attract kooks, said the naysayers. It would encourage racism, they moaned. It would be divisive, others whined. It would provoke violence, some claimed. It would be vigilantism, cried some, including the president of the United States.
Now that we've seen the Minuteman Project in action, we all know it did none of those things.
What it did was shut down 27 miles of border that had previously been used as a veritable freeway for illegal aliens and smugglers.
The Minutemen, about 1,000 strong, helped catch some invaders. But their presence served as a major deterrent to many others, who decided to wait until things calm down in Arizona.
I hope it never calms down.
http://www.rense.com/general63/minute.htm
US Senate Appropriation Committee unanimously approved $5 million funding for "advancing democracy" in Belarus.
According to RIA Novosti, this money bill will be considered in the session of the Senate on Monday. The Appropriation Committee recommends spending at least $2 millions of the allocated sum on the direct support of "democratic political parties and processes" in Belarus.
http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/04/08/59064.html
There is no definitive objective set of criteria to determine who has ADD/ADHD and who does not. Rather, instead, there are a loose set of behaviors (hyperactivity, distractibility, and impulsivity) that combine in different ways to give rise to the "disorder." These behaviors are highly context-dependent. A child may be hyperactive while seated at a desk doing a boring worksheet, but not necessarily while singing in a school musical. These behaviors are also very general in nature and give no clue as to their real origins. A child can be hyperactive because he's bored, depressed, anxious, allergic to milk, creative, a hands-on learner, has a difficult temperament, is stressed out, is driven by a media-mad culture, or any number of other possible causes. The tests that have been used to determine if someone has ADD/ADHD are either artificially objective and remote from the lives of real children (in one test, a child is asked to press a button every time he sees a 1 followed by a 9 on a computer screen) , or hopelessly subjective (many rating scales ask parents and teachers to score a child's behavior on a scale from 1 to 5: these scores depend upon the subjective attitudes more than the actual behaviors of the children involved)
http://www.rense.com/general63/ADD.htm
I, _________________________ (fill in the blank), being of sound
mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by
artificial means. Under no circumstances should my fate be put in
the hands of spineless politicians who couldn't pass ninth-grade
biology if their lives depended on it.
If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to sit up and
check my email, weed my garden, or read the newspaper comics,
it should be presumed that I won't ever get better.
When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my
spouse, children, and/or attending physicians to pull the plug, reel
in the tubes, and call it a day. If they won't do it, go out on the
street and get some random passerby.
Under no circumstances shall the members of the Legislature
enact a special law to keep me on life-support machinery. I don't
care how many fundamentalist votes they're trying to scrounge for
their run for the presidency; they should play politics with someone
else's life and leave me alone to die in peace.
It is my wish that these boneheads mind their own damn
business, and pay attention instead to the health, education, and
future of the millions of Americans who aren't in a permanent coma.
It just goes to show you how sick you have to be in this country to
get Congress to pay attention to your health care.
I couldn't care less if a hundred thousand religious zealots
send e-mails to legislators in which they pretend to care about me
or demonstrate outside my hospital with their bleeding Jesuses and
sandwiches with Mary's face on them. I don't know these people,
and I certainly haven't authorized them to preach and crusade on my
behalf. And the (new) Pope, as well as Mel Gibson, should mind their
own friggin' business, too.
And if any of my family goes against my wishes and tries to
turn my case into a political cause, I hereby promise to come back
from the grave and make his or her existence a living hell.
______________________________________
Signature
______________________________________
A 23-year-old Central Florida woman has been charged with making false statements about a rape that left Rollins College students scared to walk the campus, according to WKMG-TV in Orlando.
In November, Desiree Nall, (pictured, left) told Winter Park police that she was raped by two men in a Rollins College bathroom.
Investigators told WKMG-TV that Nall confessed to making up the story.
Nall is the president of the Brevard Chapter of the National Organization for Women, Local 6 News reported. Police said she may have been trying to make a statement when she lied about the rape.
http://www.news4jax.com/news/4359657/detail.html
After the first ambush we were in, Lt. Fick and I were discussing this book and how today's guys have no problem firing their weapons. For instance, Fick remarked after a firefight, "Did you see what they did to that town, they fucking destroyed it." Cpl. Trombley, the machine gunner who was next to me in that ambush, he'd even been sort of ecstatic, comparing it to Grand Theft Auto, the video game.
Is it true that you were in the most forward vehicle of your battalion?
It's funny, because it almost sounds like bragging, but I spent much of the war in the lead vehicle of the entire US invasion of central Iraq. It's a strange historical fact, but Lt. Fick, the platoon commander of the unit I was with used to joke that the only way I could have been closer up in the invasion was to be in the front seat rather than the back seat of the Humvee I was in. There was nobody in front of us through much of it.
Your unit rode into Iraq in an unarmored Humvee, yet suffered very few casualties. The American military overall, during the invasion, suffered relatively few casualties. I've always found that amazing. How do you account for that?
These guys from small town America, what they're being told to do-they didn't learn that in Sunday school. They've got to throw all that out.
Everyone talks about the high-tech weaponry, but really it's a testament to the marksmanship of the Marines. At night the Americans have the advantage of the night vision goggles, but in a lot of the heavy engagements and ambushes, we were ambushed in daylight, and we were ambushed by greater numbers of enemy troops who had the element of surprise, and they often had heavier weapons-rocket-propelled grenades, which is a really ingenious weapon. The Iraqis had all these advantages and the Marines came through slaughtering them. Why? These were old-fashioned gun fights and the Marines were better marksmen. I saw in that first engagement in Al-Gharraf, I remember thinking wow, these guys can outshoot the enemy and I hope it stays that way.
...
But then he said, that priest-and the word he used was MF, the MF word-that MF priest I talked to, he said "He told me killing is OK, for a purpose. Where in the bible does it say that? Where did Jesus say you can kill people for a purpose? Then he said, isn't there a rule where we can't put man's law above God's law, and he added, "As soon as the priest told me I could kill with a purpose," he said, "there was nothing he could tell me after that, because he lost all credibility with me." I love Espera, he lives near me, and we talk all the time. That was his view.
http://www.rense.com/general63/genkill.htm
[It almost doesn’t make sense to say something is “immoral” in the US today. But I would characterize this video game review as immoral, and to the extent that it accurately portrays the game it is reviewing, I would say the game is also immoral.
An interesting side note, this review appeared in the Boston Herald which likes to make itself out to be a “conservative” newspaper. Yet it regularly runs claptrap like this. Another thingthey do from time to time in the editorial pages is lament the lack of easily available drugs and prostitutes in Boston.
Ahh to be a conservative.]
Hello, cruel world - 'God of War' a bloody good time
By Doug Elfman/ The Game Dork
Friday, April 8, 2005 - Updated: 11:08 AM EST
``God of War'' is one of the most brutal games ever. It's not the attempted
suicide of the main character that throws it over the top. It's the human
sacrifice that I, the video gamer, must carry out.
``God of War'' also is one of the best games ever. But I'll tell you why
after we discuss the killings and the naked women.
I play as Kratos. I used to be a vicious Spartan leader until I traded my
soul to Ares, the ancient god of war. But I've been enlisted by the good gods to
murder Ares, because he's destroying Athens with his big, smelly feet.
The human sacrifice comes in the middle of this PlayStation 2 game. I must
open a concrete door to continue my noble quest, but to lift a curse on the
door, I have to drag a caged soldier to a fiery room and roast him.
``Free me! You must set me free,'' the caged man begs while kicking against
cold, steel bars. ``No further, please, are you mad?''
This goes on for about five minutes until, poof, up in smoke he goes,
screaming all the while. The door unlocks. I move on.
Kratos enjoys this season for cruelty. After I, as Kratos, pull the eyeball
out of a sea snake, which is roughly the size of football field, I jump inside
the snake's mouth to save a ship captain who is trapped in there.
The captain thanks me, but I steal his necklace and say, ``I didn't come
back for you,'' then I toss him back into the still-bubbling belly of the
serpent.
I'm not just an unpleasant Spartan, I'm a ladies' man, as bald and
muscle-bound as any movie action star. I'm shirtless, and I'm not alone in that
respect.
In fact, I have a threesome for 15 seconds, not very impressive, with two
topless nymphomaniacs, although the sex is off camera. On camera is the bedside
table, shaking.
Most of the women are topless. Sirens. Medusa, the frozen-haired
snake-lady. And my oracle guide. They're all topless or wearing see-through
nighties and thongs. Athens, apparently, is like the opposite of a
museum: Only the female statues wear shirts.
It's not the sex and violence that make ``God of War'' an almost peerless
game. It has everything a classic needs. It's very fun, cinematic, creative on
many levels and easy to learn if you're not a novice, it takes double-digit
hours to finish, and it's just plain cool. [continue]
The creatures range from angry cyclopses to horn-headed axmen. I kill them using
dozens of entertaining warrior moves, like shoving a fiery sword into a
monster's mouth. One of my knife blades is longer than my body.
The action is accompanied by the sound of operatic choirs, and the story
line takes me on a huge journey, from a dank, wooden ship to the ``Indiana
Jones''-like ``Pandora's Temple'' and Zeus Mountain.
It just happens that I destroy everything in my path, if righteously. I
even break planters to increase my fighting power. At one point, my basically
topless oracle says, ``I will show you how to murder a god,'' meaning
smelly-footed Ares.
But first, I have to bust some flowerpots. I am that mean.
``God of War'' for PS2 - Plays very fun. Looks great. Challenging. Rated M.
http://business.bostonherald.com/reviews/view.bg?articleid=77550
[I don’t know how much more obvious their intention to set up a military dictatorship could possibly be.
People in DC are always denying they are involved in conspiracies. That is because they frequently are not. People are just too stupid to realize what is going on.]
Pentagon planners are proposing that military commanders be authorized to declare someone an enemy combatant and detain him if he belongs to any of hundreds of suspected terrorist organizations, a human rights group said on Thursday.
The extensive list of groups suspected of terrorism is part of a 142-page draft proposal to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that is intended to provide an all-inclusive guide for military commanders on their obligations and authority for detaining people.
John Sifton, a senior official of Human Rights Watch who provided the document, said it was a radical departure for the government to assert that membership in such a broad range of groups could qualify a person to be deemed an enemy combatant, a term that has previously been used mostly for members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/politics/08joint.html?pagewanted=all&oref=login
[This is easily the stupidest thing I have read all week. Anyone who has even glanced through this blog will know that China is in a position to essentially hold the US economy hostage as a result of its enormous US dollar holdings.
You have to be something beyond the realm of ordinary idiocy to propose a bill that basically would allow private actors in the US to try annoy the Chinese government into doing what we want.]
Currency manipulation will be an unfair trade practice under a proposed law allowing US manufacturers to directly challenge for the first time China's fixed yuan, lawmakers said.
The "Chinese Currency Act of 2005" is the latest of a series of bills filed in Congress against China's currency peg linking the yuan to the US dollar, which critics say has left the yuan vastly undervalued at the expense of US industry.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific_business/view/141573/1/.html
The above detail demonstrates why the Marburg outbreak will not be quickly contained. The outbreak originated in Uige, where there are the most cases and the largest number being monitored. However, the virus has radiated out from Uige, and there is little monitoring in the outlying regions. Thus, the monitoring is chasing the virus, which continues to transmit ahead of the monitoring.
Warnings last week indicated Uige was the Marburg epicenter, and all cases originated in Uige. This week warnings have gone out to countries adjacent to Angola (Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, and Zambia), warning that Angola is the epicenter. There are already reports of suspect cases in South Africa, including one death.
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04080501/Marburg_Zaire.html
The 1,130 soup kitchen guests, as they're respectfully called, began gathering outside the church doors an hour early, curling around the corner in a long line to await a free main meal - their safety-net highlight in another day of being down and out, part of the working poor, or surviving somewhere in between.
The repast, at 2,500 calories a serving, steamed aromatically: chicken à la king, rice, buttered spinach, peaches. A staff member in the nave of the building, the Church of the Holy Apostles, cued dozens of volunteer helpers: "Ladies and gentlemen, it's showtime. Thanks be to God." And from Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, the diners flowed in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/opinion/08fri3.html?ex=1113624000&en=88ad4b7130add481&ei=5070
Amid all the criticism of the US's faulty intelligence-gathering, a new concern is surfacing about America's premier national-security agencies - their vulnerability to counterespionage.
Because the US has reached such lone, superpower status, government officials say, at least 90 countries - in addition to Al Qaeda - are attempting to steal some of the nation's most sacred secrets.
Members of terror groups or nations that are adversaries of the US, but friends as well. The top five countries trying to snoop on US plans and cutting-edge technology, according to an official who works closely with the FBI on this issue, are China, Russia, Israel, France, and North Korea. Others running close behind: Cuba, Pakistan, and India.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0408/p01s01-usfp.html
With such a simple policy to fund its deficit for another year, it's no wonder the United States can get by without any brain power at the Treasury Department. In effect, the US and its Gulf Arab allies just pulled off the biggest central-bank heist in the history of the world. The price of oil just went up 60% or more, which really cuts down to size that $3.4 trillion of net foreign holdings of US financial assets. As a loyal American, one would like to cheer one's government's deft move to pick the pockets of our trading and financing partners. Moreover, the US gets the Arabs to fund a large share of our deficit, subsidize our interest rates, and help keep our taxes low for another year. Surely I can afford to buy another gas-guzzling sport-ute, get a rifle, and wave a flag.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/GD09Dk01.html
Sorry, all you corporate serfs. Step aside, Charles and Camilla. The brief respite from extreme executive compensation is over.
A new era of royal CEO pay is under way.
After several years in which the weak economy and Enron-inspired corruption convinced most CEOs to lie low, top corporate managers once again are commanding jumbo-sized salaries, bonuses and perks on par with the runaway-pay days of the late 1990s.
http://stpetetimes.com/2005/04/06/Columns/CEOs_return_to_days_o.shtml
[A series of isolated incidents. Each more isolated than the last.]
Another isolated incident?
http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/JoshMarshall/040705.html
Over their heads flew the Iraqi flag, banners of Shiite Muslim saints and a portrait of their leader, Moqtada Sadr -- symbols of their militia, the Mahdi Army, twice subdued by the U.S. military last year but now openly displaying its strength in parts of the south.
"At your service, Sadr! At your service, Moqtada!" the men chanted in formation. "We hear a voice calling us!"
"The tanks do not terrify us," others joined in. "We're resisting! We're resisting!"
The military parade this week lasted an hour, long enough for 700 men brandishing swords, machetes and not a few guns to pass a viewing stand of turbaned clerics and townspeople gathered in front of low-slung brick buildings.
...
The crowd erupted, fists in the air: "No to the occupier! No to terrorism! No to the devil!"
"Wherever America is present, then there is terrorism," Saadi said. "When they ask the terrorists why they're here, they say we came to fight America. If America leaves, there would be no terrorism. Terrorism would leave with it."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35586-2005Apr7?language=printer
[Now that GM is on the ropes again, I’m sure not advertising will be a big help.]
General Motors Corp. has pulled its advertising from Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, according to a media report Thursday.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?guid=%7B0CB44413-7AA5-4AE4-8276-E4263EC30993%7D&siteid=myyahoo&dist=myyahoo
Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, a “socialist” and spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints.
In those days, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from taking the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers whose role models are celebrated captains of piracy. Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America’s business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era.
Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education.
...
Meanwhile, American economics study has increasingly become a pseudoscience of mathematical formula manipulation that is devoid of humanity. This economics has conquered America’s business education and become fused with the robber baron culture of greed supremacy. American MBAs are taught to treat ordinary employees as disposable costs and to swallow uncritically the gospel that corporations exist only to reward abstract stockholders. MBAs are taught the pretend-science of manipulating accounting, finance, employees, customers, and stock prices. Financial games and hostile takeovers of competitors are taught to accomplish corporations’ sole objective—to make money and manipulate stock prices. Such a mistaken view of corporations has caused the dismal decline of American auto manufacturers while Toyota and Honda widen their market shares and profits in America, pursuing their goals of expanding employment and technological innovations.
To justify the robber baron culture, America’s business educators and economists falsely cite their demigod of laissez-faire market economics, Adam Smith. Little do they know that Adam Smith in fact scathingly castigated Bush’s type of government: business collusion and unfair taxes, Wal-Mart’s exploitations of labor and communities, and robber barons’ hubris. Nowhere in his 900-page book, The Wealth of Nations, does Smith even imply that those who knowingly harm others and society in their pursuit of personal greed also benefit their society. He rejects the notion that a corporation exists to make money without ethical constraints.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=506836
Successive Israeli governments did not establish 200 settlements because of security. Nor did they build a massive infrastructure of Israeli-only highways that link the settlement blocs irreversibly into Israel for security reasons. Nor can the route of the Separation Barrier, nor the policy of expropriating Palestinian land and systematically demolishing Palestinian homes be explained by “security.” They all derive from one central goal: to claim the entire country for Israel. Period.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/e1.html
This is part and parcel of the growing pattern of extremism that seems to be imprinting itself on every aspect of Israeli life, one that has not gone entirely unnoticed in the Western media. PBS ran a fascinating documentary the other day, positing that Israel's next war may be against its own ultra-Zionist fanatics, who are intent on sabotaging the peace process and instituting an authoritarian-militarist state. The powerful and motivated extreme-right wing of the ruling Likud party refuses to give up the original Zionist dream of a "Greater Israel." I have covered the alarming uptick in extremist activity, both in Israel and the U.S., in this space, but the "honoring" of a terrorist gang by the Israeli government frightens the bejesus out of me – especially in view of the Israeli government's recent announcement that they will be carrying out assassinations wherever and whenever they choose, including on American soil.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5495
"A path breaking study by Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and Kent Smetters, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury —commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill— estimated a $44 trillion fiscal gap. It laid out a few painful options on how to meet the liabilities:
More than double the payroll tax, immediately and forever, from 15.3 percent of wages to nearly 32 percent;
Raise income taxes by two thirds (roughly 78%), immediately and forever;
Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45 percent, immediately and forever;
Or eliminate forever all discretionary spending, which includes the military, homeland security, highways, courts, national parks and most of what the federal government does outside of the transfer of payments to the elderly."
http://www.newswithviews.com/Devvy/kidd97.htm
1,047 Israelis and 3,596 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/
A former American government packing plant veterinarian says the United States government is hiding cases of mad cow disease.
Dr. Lester Friedlander said Wednesday that colleagues with the United States Department of Agriculture have told him of cases that the USDA has chosen not to announce.
http://www.rense.com/general63/mdcc.htm
[I’m not sure it is fair to say no one expected this stuff to kill amphibians.]
The herbicide Roundup. is widely used to eradicate weeds. But a study published today by a University of Pittsburgh researcher finds that the chemical may be eradicating much more than that.
Pitt assistant professor of biology Rick Relyea found that Roundup., the second most commonly applied herbicide in the United States, is "extremely lethal" to amphibians. This field experiment is one of the most extensive studies on the effects of pesticides on nontarget organisms in a natural setting, and the results may provide a key link to global amphibian declines.
.....
"We've repeated the experiment, so we're confident that this is, in fact, a repeatable result that we see," said Relyea. "It's fair to say that nobody would have guessed Roundup. was going to be so lethal to amphibians.
http://www.rense.com/general63/leth.htm
A conservative Christian believes that his own soul is not imperiled if other people down the street decide to do some sinning. A conservative Christian recognizes that he is commanded to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and comfort the sick and dying. He is not commanded to shift this responsibility to government. He is not commanded to judge other people's lives and to regulate their behavior. A conservative Christian recognizes that something does not have to be illegal in order for him to refrain from doing it.
A conservative believes in the real, traditional values of this country: courage, hard work, self-reliance, frugality, chastity before marriage, faithfulness after marriage, loyalty to family and loyalty to the Constitution. Loyalty to a political party or to a politician is profoundly un-American
http://www.rense.com/general63/coser.htm
Most of the public attention given to RFID has focused on the retail supply chain, especially Wal-Mart's 2005 mandate to its top 100 suppliers. But the U.S. Department of Defense is also mandating its use in 2005 -- not to merely 100, but to all of its 43,000+ suppliers. Add to that the needs of the aerospace industry, particularly the two giant aircraft makers, Boeing and Airbus, and the shape of a massive vertical RFID market emerges.
http://www.rense.com/general63/rrfig.htm
[As ye sow, so shall ye reap. We ll had no problem letting the government make all this VX nerve gas, despite the fact that it is has no legitimate use. Now we will get poisoned by it.]
The U.S. Army's plan to destroy VX nerve agent stockpiled in Indiana and ship the chemical byproduct to New Jersey to be dumped in the Delaware River may not completely remove all traces of the deadly chemical, the government says.
http://www.rense.com/general63/agen.htm
Two major data brokers, a California elementary school and Google's Gmail service are leading contenders for the Big Brother Awards -- a dubious prize spotlighting organizations with egregious privacy practices.
Award recipients will receive a statue of a golden boot stomping on a human head.
The nominees were among those on a list made public Wednesday by Privacy International, the British watchdog group that runs the annual U.S. Big Brother Awards. The group plans to announce winners on April 14.
Simon Davies, Privacy International's director, predicts that this will be an extraordinarily difficult year for selecting a winner, given that there are so many strong candidates.
http://www.rense.com/general63/choice.htm
The depth of the Moho varies. This latest effort, which drilled 4,644 feet (1,416 meters) below the ocean seafloor, appears to have been 1,000 feet off to the side of where it needed to be to pierce the Moho, according to one reading of seismic data used to map the crust's varying thickness.
http://www.rense.com/general63/moho.htm
Until now, most of the infections caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA have shown up in hospitals.
But up to 20 percent of such infections may have come from the community, Fridkin said in a telephone interview.
"We were surprised to find it that high," he said. The group had expected the rate to be close to zero at the start of the study in 2001.
"It wasn't there a decade ago, but it's there now."
The second study, led by Loren Miller of Harbor-University of California Los Angeles Medical Center in California, found that some cases of flesh-eating bacteria are caused by methicillin-resistant staph.
http://www.rense.com/general63/drugrel.htm
Two new cases of human mad cow disease were detected in France, raising the total number of cases in that country to 11, health officials said.
http://www.rense.com/general63/2hum.htm
Witness accounts have described patterned overflights of low-flying aircraft and on some occasions have even seen a 'white rain' of chemicals being sprayed downward from nozzles located under the wings of certain types of aircraft (I have personally witnessed this). After these flights, witnesses report respiratory problems, allergies, high blood pressure and palpitations - which gradually improve until the next round of spraying...different chemicals causing differing health effects.
http://www.rense.com/general63/orcit.htm
Three more captive deer in New York have tested positive for chronic wasting disease.
Agricultural officials say the three deer belonged to the same Oneida County herd that yielded the first positive last week. There are now five deer in New York with confirmed cases of C-W-D. All of the cases come from captive herds -- though state officials are checking to see if the deadly disease spread into the wild.
http://www.rense.com/general63/deerd.htm
Let's face the facts. The game is over and we -- the "reality-based community," the believers in genuine democracy and law, the heirs of Jefferson and Madison, Emerson and Thoreau, the toilers and dreamers, all those who seek to rise above the beast within and shape the brutal chaos of existence into something higher, richer and imbued with meaning -- have lost. The better world we thought had been won out of the blood and horror of history -- a realm of enlightenment that often found its best embodiment in the ideals and aspirations of the American Republic -- is gone. It's been swallowed by darkness, by ravening greed, by bestial spirits and by willful primitives who now possess overwhelming instruments of power and dominion.
A gang of such spirits seized control of the U.S. government by illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant electoral corruption in 2004. The re-election of President George W. Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final results - gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds. Indeed, a panel of statisticians said last week that the odds of such a discrepancy occurring naturally were 959,000 to 1, the Akron Beacon-Journal reported.
http://www.rense.com/general63/fix.htm
The Greatest War Movie Ever?
by Douglas Herman
“The fighting man receives tokens—medals, ribbons, badges, promotions, combat pay, abrogation of taxes—worthless bits of nothing, as valuable as smoke.” ~ Anthony Swofford, Jarhead
Before deploying to Kuwait , in the build up to the First Gulf War, Swofford and his fellow Marines watched a war movie marathon, he said, watching whatever videotape they could find. Endless war movies for these young, would-be warriors; "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket," "Hamburger Hill" and "The Sands of Iwo Jima"; every movie they watched was studied from a soldier’s perspective.
We tend to see war movies differently, not only from the perspective of age but also from our current position in life. Civilians see things differently than veterans. Combat veterans see things differently than peacetime servicemen or reservists. Men see things far differently than women, and young men see things differently than old.
A movie that may have once been only a wonderfully adventurous war movie to a young man (myself) of sixteen--"The Sand Pebbles"-- becomes far more powerful to an older and wiser man of fifty-five who better recognizes the subtle nuances under-lying that war film.
http://www.strike-the-root.com/51/herman/herman11.html
The four countries neighbouring Angola have been put on alert for Marburg haemorrhagic fever by the World Health Organization - the death toll from the virus has now reached 174.
The Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia and Zambia were told to be on alert by WHO officials on Friday, who say the world's worst outbreak of Marburg has yet to peak. "Everybody should be on alert in Angola and its neighbouring countries," said top WHO communicable diseases official, Anarfi Asamoa-Baah, to a French news agency. "It's going to get worse before it gets better," he added.
http://www.rense.com/general63/alert.htm
Essential oils have a very long history and several have very effective anti-bacterial and anti-fungal capacity. Herbs used throughout thousands of years have this same capacity as well.
Seriously hoping to at least have one response, I am saddened to say that not one reply has ever been received.
One would now have to ask the question: What drives these health professionals to so totally disregard non-traditional treatment possibilities?
Today, I am placing my challenge on the table.
Doctors, if you are truly interested in treating and curing this problem, my protocols await.
http://www.rense.com/general63/fleshet.htm
[Overseas fighting to not have your votes counted.]
The votes of at least 1 in 4 U.S. soldiers and overseas voters in last fall's election never were counted.
That's the conclusion of a recent report by the National Defense Committee, a private, pro-military organization that surveyed local election offices across the country about the number of absentee votes cast and counted in the Nov. 3 election.
In all, more than 30,000 of the 131,000 absentee ballots sent by troops and expatriates to 760 local elections offices around the country were not counted, the report found. Those offices represent about 10 percent of the 7,800 offices nationwide.
http://www.rense.com/general63/ovrse.htm
The marsupial lion, one the greatest carnivores to roam Australia, had the most powerful bite of any mammal species - living or extinct.
The assessment comes from scientists who have compared the heads of all manner of beasts, from dogs to bears.
None had the ability to bite down on its prey with quite the same force, say Dr Stephen Wroe and colleagues
The assessment comes from scientists who have compared the heads of all manner of beasts, from dogs to bears.
None had the ability to bite down on its prey with quite the same force, say Dr Stephen Wroe and colleagues”>The marsupial lion, one the greatest carnivores to roam Australia, had the most powerful bite of any mammal species - living or extinct.
The assessment comes from scientists who have compared the heads of all manner of beasts, from dogs to bears.
None had the ability to bite down on its prey with quite the same force, say Dr Stephen Wroe and colleagues
It sounded like a crackpot idea to the political and cultural elite.
Hundreds of citizens, angry about the effects of illegal immigration on our country, would travel down to the Mexican border and do something about it.
The Minuteman Project would attract kooks, said the naysayers. It would encourage racism, they moaned. It would be divisive, others whined. It would provoke violence, some claimed. It would be vigilantism, cried some, including the president of the United States.
Now that we've seen the Minuteman Project in action, we all know it did none of those things.
What it did was shut down 27 miles of border that had previously been used as a veritable freeway for illegal aliens and smugglers.
The Minutemen, about 1,000 strong, helped catch some invaders. But their presence served as a major deterrent to many others, who decided to wait until things calm down in Arizona.
I hope it never calms down.
http://www.rense.com/general63/minute.htm
US Senate Appropriation Committee unanimously approved $5 million funding for "advancing democracy" in Belarus.
According to RIA Novosti, this money bill will be considered in the session of the Senate on Monday. The Appropriation Committee recommends spending at least $2 millions of the allocated sum on the direct support of "democratic political parties and processes" in Belarus.
http://newsfromrussia.com/world/2005/04/08/59064.html
There is no definitive objective set of criteria to determine who has ADD/ADHD and who does not. Rather, instead, there are a loose set of behaviors (hyperactivity, distractibility, and impulsivity) that combine in different ways to give rise to the "disorder." These behaviors are highly context-dependent. A child may be hyperactive while seated at a desk doing a boring worksheet, but not necessarily while singing in a school musical. These behaviors are also very general in nature and give no clue as to their real origins. A child can be hyperactive because he's bored, depressed, anxious, allergic to milk, creative, a hands-on learner, has a difficult temperament, is stressed out, is driven by a media-mad culture, or any number of other possible causes. The tests that have been used to determine if someone has ADD/ADHD are either artificially objective and remote from the lives of real children (in one test, a child is asked to press a button every time he sees a 1 followed by a 9 on a computer screen) , or hopelessly subjective (many rating scales ask parents and teachers to score a child's behavior on a scale from 1 to 5: these scores depend upon the subjective attitudes more than the actual behaviors of the children involved)
http://www.rense.com/general63/ADD.htm
I, _________________________ (fill in the blank), being of sound
mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by
artificial means. Under no circumstances should my fate be put in
the hands of spineless politicians who couldn't pass ninth-grade
biology if their lives depended on it.
If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to sit up and
check my email, weed my garden, or read the newspaper comics,
it should be presumed that I won't ever get better.
When such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my
spouse, children, and/or attending physicians to pull the plug, reel
in the tubes, and call it a day. If they won't do it, go out on the
street and get some random passerby.
Under no circumstances shall the members of the Legislature
enact a special law to keep me on life-support machinery. I don't
care how many fundamentalist votes they're trying to scrounge for
their run for the presidency; they should play politics with someone
else's life and leave me alone to die in peace.
It is my wish that these boneheads mind their own damn
business, and pay attention instead to the health, education, and
future of the millions of Americans who aren't in a permanent coma.
It just goes to show you how sick you have to be in this country to
get Congress to pay attention to your health care.
I couldn't care less if a hundred thousand religious zealots
send e-mails to legislators in which they pretend to care about me
or demonstrate outside my hospital with their bleeding Jesuses and
sandwiches with Mary's face on them. I don't know these people,
and I certainly haven't authorized them to preach and crusade on my
behalf. And the (new) Pope, as well as Mel Gibson, should mind their
own friggin' business, too.
And if any of my family goes against my wishes and tries to
turn my case into a political cause, I hereby promise to come back
from the grave and make his or her existence a living hell.
______________________________________
Signature
______________________________________
A 23-year-old Central Florida woman has been charged with making false statements about a rape that left Rollins College students scared to walk the campus, according to WKMG-TV in Orlando.
In November, Desiree Nall, (pictured, left) told Winter Park police that she was raped by two men in a Rollins College bathroom.
Investigators told WKMG-TV that Nall confessed to making up the story.
Nall is the president of the Brevard Chapter of the National Organization for Women, Local 6 News reported. Police said she may have been trying to make a statement when she lied about the rape.
http://www.news4jax.com/news/4359657/detail.html
After the first ambush we were in, Lt. Fick and I were discussing this book and how today's guys have no problem firing their weapons. For instance, Fick remarked after a firefight, "Did you see what they did to that town, they fucking destroyed it." Cpl. Trombley, the machine gunner who was next to me in that ambush, he'd even been sort of ecstatic, comparing it to Grand Theft Auto, the video game.
Is it true that you were in the most forward vehicle of your battalion?
It's funny, because it almost sounds like bragging, but I spent much of the war in the lead vehicle of the entire US invasion of central Iraq. It's a strange historical fact, but Lt. Fick, the platoon commander of the unit I was with used to joke that the only way I could have been closer up in the invasion was to be in the front seat rather than the back seat of the Humvee I was in. There was nobody in front of us through much of it.
Your unit rode into Iraq in an unarmored Humvee, yet suffered very few casualties. The American military overall, during the invasion, suffered relatively few casualties. I've always found that amazing. How do you account for that?
These guys from small town America, what they're being told to do-they didn't learn that in Sunday school. They've got to throw all that out.
Everyone talks about the high-tech weaponry, but really it's a testament to the marksmanship of the Marines. At night the Americans have the advantage of the night vision goggles, but in a lot of the heavy engagements and ambushes, we were ambushed in daylight, and we were ambushed by greater numbers of enemy troops who had the element of surprise, and they often had heavier weapons-rocket-propelled grenades, which is a really ingenious weapon. The Iraqis had all these advantages and the Marines came through slaughtering them. Why? These were old-fashioned gun fights and the Marines were better marksmen. I saw in that first engagement in Al-Gharraf, I remember thinking wow, these guys can outshoot the enemy and I hope it stays that way.
...
But then he said, that priest-and the word he used was MF, the MF word-that MF priest I talked to, he said "He told me killing is OK, for a purpose. Where in the bible does it say that? Where did Jesus say you can kill people for a purpose? Then he said, isn't there a rule where we can't put man's law above God's law, and he added, "As soon as the priest told me I could kill with a purpose," he said, "there was nothing he could tell me after that, because he lost all credibility with me." I love Espera, he lives near me, and we talk all the time. That was his view.
http://www.rense.com/general63/genkill.htm
[It almost doesn’t make sense to say something is “immoral” in the US today. But I would characterize this video game review as immoral, and to the extent that it accurately portrays the game it is reviewing, I would say the game is also immoral.
An interesting side note, this review appeared in the Boston Herald which likes to make itself out to be a “conservative” newspaper. Yet it regularly runs claptrap like this. Another thingthey do from time to time in the editorial pages is lament the lack of easily available drugs and prostitutes in Boston.
Ahh to be a conservative.]
Hello, cruel world - 'God of War' a bloody good time
By Doug Elfman/ The Game Dork
Friday, April 8, 2005 - Updated: 11:08 AM EST
``God of War'' is one of the most brutal games ever. It's not the attempted
suicide of the main character that throws it over the top. It's the human
sacrifice that I, the video gamer, must carry out.
``God of War'' also is one of the best games ever. But I'll tell you why
after we discuss the killings and the naked women.
I play as Kratos. I used to be a vicious Spartan leader until I traded my
soul to Ares, the ancient god of war. But I've been enlisted by the good gods to
murder Ares, because he's destroying Athens with his big, smelly feet.
The human sacrifice comes in the middle of this PlayStation 2 game. I must
open a concrete door to continue my noble quest, but to lift a curse on the
door, I have to drag a caged soldier to a fiery room and roast him.
``Free me! You must set me free,'' the caged man begs while kicking against
cold, steel bars. ``No further, please, are you mad?''
This goes on for about five minutes until, poof, up in smoke he goes,
screaming all the while. The door unlocks. I move on.
Kratos enjoys this season for cruelty. After I, as Kratos, pull the eyeball
out of a sea snake, which is roughly the size of football field, I jump inside
the snake's mouth to save a ship captain who is trapped in there.
The captain thanks me, but I steal his necklace and say, ``I didn't come
back for you,'' then I toss him back into the still-bubbling belly of the
serpent.
I'm not just an unpleasant Spartan, I'm a ladies' man, as bald and
muscle-bound as any movie action star. I'm shirtless, and I'm not alone in that
respect.
In fact, I have a threesome for 15 seconds, not very impressive, with two
topless nymphomaniacs, although the sex is off camera. On camera is the bedside
table, shaking.
Most of the women are topless. Sirens. Medusa, the frozen-haired
snake-lady. And my oracle guide. They're all topless or wearing see-through
nighties and thongs. Athens, apparently, is like the opposite of a
museum: Only the female statues wear shirts.
It's not the sex and violence that make ``God of War'' an almost peerless
game. It has everything a classic needs. It's very fun, cinematic, creative on
many levels and easy to learn if you're not a novice, it takes double-digit
hours to finish, and it's just plain cool. [continue]
The creatures range from angry cyclopses to horn-headed axmen. I kill them using
dozens of entertaining warrior moves, like shoving a fiery sword into a
monster's mouth. One of my knife blades is longer than my body.
The action is accompanied by the sound of operatic choirs, and the story
line takes me on a huge journey, from a dank, wooden ship to the ``Indiana
Jones''-like ``Pandora's Temple'' and Zeus Mountain.
It just happens that I destroy everything in my path, if righteously. I
even break planters to increase my fighting power. At one point, my basically
topless oracle says, ``I will show you how to murder a god,'' meaning
smelly-footed Ares.
But first, I have to bust some flowerpots. I am that mean.
``God of War'' for PS2 - Plays very fun. Looks great. Challenging. Rated M.
http://business.bostonherald.com/reviews/view.bg?articleid=77550
[I don’t know how much more obvious their intention to set up a military dictatorship could possibly be.
People in DC are always denying they are involved in conspiracies. That is because they frequently are not. People are just too stupid to realize what is going on.]
Pentagon planners are proposing that military commanders be authorized to declare someone an enemy combatant and detain him if he belongs to any of hundreds of suspected terrorist organizations, a human rights group said on Thursday.
The extensive list of groups suspected of terrorism is part of a 142-page draft proposal to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that is intended to provide an all-inclusive guide for military commanders on their obligations and authority for detaining people.
John Sifton, a senior official of Human Rights Watch who provided the document, said it was a radical departure for the government to assert that membership in such a broad range of groups could qualify a person to be deemed an enemy combatant, a term that has previously been used mostly for members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/politics/08joint.html?pagewanted=all&oref=login
[This is easily the stupidest thing I have read all week. Anyone who has even glanced through this blog will know that China is in a position to essentially hold the US economy hostage as a result of its enormous US dollar holdings.
You have to be something beyond the realm of ordinary idiocy to propose a bill that basically would allow private actors in the US to try annoy the Chinese government into doing what we want.]
Currency manipulation will be an unfair trade practice under a proposed law allowing US manufacturers to directly challenge for the first time China's fixed yuan, lawmakers said.
The "Chinese Currency Act of 2005" is the latest of a series of bills filed in Congress against China's currency peg linking the yuan to the US dollar, which critics say has left the yuan vastly undervalued at the expense of US industry.
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific_business/view/141573/1/.html
The above detail demonstrates why the Marburg outbreak will not be quickly contained. The outbreak originated in Uige, where there are the most cases and the largest number being monitored. However, the virus has radiated out from Uige, and there is little monitoring in the outlying regions. Thus, the monitoring is chasing the virus, which continues to transmit ahead of the monitoring.
Warnings last week indicated Uige was the Marburg epicenter, and all cases originated in Uige. This week warnings have gone out to countries adjacent to Angola (Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, and Zambia), warning that Angola is the epicenter. There are already reports of suspect cases in South Africa, including one death.
http://www.recombinomics.com/News/04080501/Marburg_Zaire.html
The 1,130 soup kitchen guests, as they're respectfully called, began gathering outside the church doors an hour early, curling around the corner in a long line to await a free main meal - their safety-net highlight in another day of being down and out, part of the working poor, or surviving somewhere in between.
The repast, at 2,500 calories a serving, steamed aromatically: chicken à la king, rice, buttered spinach, peaches. A staff member in the nave of the building, the Church of the Holy Apostles, cued dozens of volunteer helpers: "Ladies and gentlemen, it's showtime. Thanks be to God." And from Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, the diners flowed in.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/opinion/08fri3.html?ex=1113624000&en=88ad4b7130add481&ei=5070
Amid all the criticism of the US's faulty intelligence-gathering, a new concern is surfacing about America's premier national-security agencies - their vulnerability to counterespionage.
Because the US has reached such lone, superpower status, government officials say, at least 90 countries - in addition to Al Qaeda - are attempting to steal some of the nation's most sacred secrets.
Members of terror groups or nations that are adversaries of the US, but friends as well. The top five countries trying to snoop on US plans and cutting-edge technology, according to an official who works closely with the FBI on this issue, are China, Russia, Israel, France, and North Korea. Others running close behind: Cuba, Pakistan, and India.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0408/p01s01-usfp.html
With such a simple policy to fund its deficit for another year, it's no wonder the United States can get by without any brain power at the Treasury Department. In effect, the US and its Gulf Arab allies just pulled off the biggest central-bank heist in the history of the world. The price of oil just went up 60% or more, which really cuts down to size that $3.4 trillion of net foreign holdings of US financial assets. As a loyal American, one would like to cheer one's government's deft move to pick the pockets of our trading and financing partners. Moreover, the US gets the Arabs to fund a large share of our deficit, subsidize our interest rates, and help keep our taxes low for another year. Surely I can afford to buy another gas-guzzling sport-ute, get a rifle, and wave a flag.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Asian_Economy/GD09Dk01.html
Sorry, all you corporate serfs. Step aside, Charles and Camilla. The brief respite from extreme executive compensation is over.
A new era of royal CEO pay is under way.
After several years in which the weak economy and Enron-inspired corruption convinced most CEOs to lie low, top corporate managers once again are commanding jumbo-sized salaries, bonuses and perks on par with the runaway-pay days of the late 1990s.
http://stpetetimes.com/2005/04/06/Columns/CEOs_return_to_days_o.shtml
[A series of isolated incidents. Each more isolated than the last.]
Another isolated incident?
http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/JoshMarshall/040705.html
Over their heads flew the Iraqi flag, banners of Shiite Muslim saints and a portrait of their leader, Moqtada Sadr -- symbols of their militia, the Mahdi Army, twice subdued by the U.S. military last year but now openly displaying its strength in parts of the south.
"At your service, Sadr! At your service, Moqtada!" the men chanted in formation. "We hear a voice calling us!"
"The tanks do not terrify us," others joined in. "We're resisting! We're resisting!"
The military parade this week lasted an hour, long enough for 700 men brandishing swords, machetes and not a few guns to pass a viewing stand of turbaned clerics and townspeople gathered in front of low-slung brick buildings.
...
The crowd erupted, fists in the air: "No to the occupier! No to terrorism! No to the devil!"
"Wherever America is present, then there is terrorism," Saadi said. "When they ask the terrorists why they're here, they say we came to fight America. If America leaves, there would be no terrorism. Terrorism would leave with it."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35586-2005Apr7?language=printer
[Now that GM is on the ropes again, I’m sure not advertising will be a big help.]
General Motors Corp. has pulled its advertising from Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times, according to a media report Thursday.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/yhoo/story.asp?guid=%7B0CB44413-7AA5-4AE4-8276-E4263EC30993%7D&siteid=myyahoo&dist=myyahoo
Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, a “socialist” and spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints.
In those days, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from taking the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers whose role models are celebrated captains of piracy. Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America’s business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era.
Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education.
...
Meanwhile, American economics study has increasingly become a pseudoscience of mathematical formula manipulation that is devoid of humanity. This economics has conquered America’s business education and become fused with the robber baron culture of greed supremacy. American MBAs are taught to treat ordinary employees as disposable costs and to swallow uncritically the gospel that corporations exist only to reward abstract stockholders. MBAs are taught the pretend-science of manipulating accounting, finance, employees, customers, and stock prices. Financial games and hostile takeovers of competitors are taught to accomplish corporations’ sole objective—to make money and manipulate stock prices. Such a mistaken view of corporations has caused the dismal decline of American auto manufacturers while Toyota and Honda widen their market shares and profits in America, pursuing their goals of expanding employment and technological innovations.
To justify the robber baron culture, America’s business educators and economists falsely cite their demigod of laissez-faire market economics, Adam Smith. Little do they know that Adam Smith in fact scathingly castigated Bush’s type of government: business collusion and unfair taxes, Wal-Mart’s exploitations of labor and communities, and robber barons’ hubris. Nowhere in his 900-page book, The Wealth of Nations, does Smith even imply that those who knowingly harm others and society in their pursuit of personal greed also benefit their society. He rejects the notion that a corporation exists to make money without ethical constraints.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=506836
Successive Israeli governments did not establish 200 settlements because of security. Nor did they build a massive infrastructure of Israeli-only highways that link the settlement blocs irreversibly into Israel for security reasons. Nor can the route of the Separation Barrier, nor the policy of expropriating Palestinian land and systematically demolishing Palestinian homes be explained by “security.” They all derive from one central goal: to claim the entire country for Israel. Period.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/e1.html
This is part and parcel of the growing pattern of extremism that seems to be imprinting itself on every aspect of Israeli life, one that has not gone entirely unnoticed in the Western media. PBS ran a fascinating documentary the other day, positing that Israel's next war may be against its own ultra-Zionist fanatics, who are intent on sabotaging the peace process and instituting an authoritarian-militarist state. The powerful and motivated extreme-right wing of the ruling Likud party refuses to give up the original Zionist dream of a "Greater Israel." I have covered the alarming uptick in extremist activity, both in Israel and the U.S., in this space, but the "honoring" of a terrorist gang by the Israeli government frightens the bejesus out of me – especially in view of the Israeli government's recent announcement that they will be carrying out assassinations wherever and whenever they choose, including on American soil.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=5495
"A path breaking study by Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and Kent Smetters, a former deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury —commissioned by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill— estimated a $44 trillion fiscal gap. It laid out a few painful options on how to meet the liabilities:
More than double the payroll tax, immediately and forever, from 15.3 percent of wages to nearly 32 percent;
Raise income taxes by two thirds (roughly 78%), immediately and forever;
Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 45 percent, immediately and forever;
Or eliminate forever all discretionary spending, which includes the military, homeland security, highways, courts, national parks and most of what the federal government does outside of the transfer of payments to the elderly."
http://www.newswithviews.com/Devvy/kidd97.htm
1,047 Israelis and 3,596 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000.
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/
posted by abu nakba at 4/08/2005 08:00:00 PM
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