Archive for April, 2011
U.S. Ranks Dead Last In Overall Social Spending
Ray Medeiros writes on PoliticusUSA:
This report from the OECD and The Business Insider, could not have come at a more crucial time in our national debate regarding the federal budget and the course the Republicans have chosen to take.
The conservative pundits are trying to frame this debate along the lines that the deficit and debt of the United States was created by the liberal, nanny state programs. This is an outright lie they have drummed into the heads of the American people. Unfortunately, some of the pundits are trusted sources of information for millions of people.
The United States currently ranks thirty-fourth(34th) out of the thirty-four members of the OECD in regards to spending on social programs, DEAD LAST.
The amount the United States spends is currently only 7.2% of our gross domestic product on programs that make up our social contract with the American people.
“Emergency Manager” Replaces Elected Officials in Michigan Town
Lighthouse of Benton Harbor, MI. Photo: Russell Sekeet (CC)
Santiago Esparza writes in the Detroit News
Benton Harbor — In a move believed to be the first under sweeping new state legislation, Emergency Manager Joseph Harris suspended decision-making powers of city officials Friday.
Officials only can call meetings to order, adjourn them and approve minutes of meetings as part of the order issued Friday.
The action is likely the first since Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law in March a new statute that grants more powers to emergency managers appointed by the Treasury Department to take over distressed schools and communities.
At least one elected Benton Harbor official was sanguine about the order. “It doesn’t bother me,” said City Commissioner Bryan Joseph. “I’m in favor of it.” Joseph said he has watched financial mismanagement for decades, which was one of the reasons he ran for election in 2008.
“This is sad news for democracy in Michigan,”…
Virgin Galactic Posts Help Wanted For Astronauts
Justin Hyde writes for Jalopink:
With NASA mothballing shuttles, and the Soviets auctioning seats on Soyuz capsules for millions of rubles, how are spunky American pilots supposed to prove they have the right stuff? By answering a want ad for astronauts from Richard Branson.
The crazy billionaire’s space tourism business, Virgin Galactic, has posted openings for “pilot-astronauts” to begin work in June. Virgin Galactic is still doing test flights of its Burt Ruttan-designed ships, but expects to launch the first “customer-astronauts” in two years from its spaceport in New Mexico, for the everyday low price of $200,000.
Virgin Galactic wants pilot-astronauts to have a minimum of 3,000 hours of flight experience in a variety of aircraft and help set the rules for future recruits. The other big hurdle? “Prior spaceflight experience is an advantage.”
Democracy Needs Reform: We Are the Unsatisfied Lead by the Unqualified
Malcolm Fraser: “There aren’t enough people who have done something before they got into Parliament.” (ABC Radio, 9 April 2011)
The above is a comment made by former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser on ABC radio about the important of having quality people in a political system. One need just to browse through the events that have taken place in Australia politics (Federal and States) over the last few months will be able to understand why Australians are so frustrated with the lack of deep thinkers and serious policy makers in our political establishment.
Quality of leaders is not a problem in good time
In normal time when the world economy is booming, despite wide spread incompetency amongst the political leaderships, Australia is blessed by its natural resources and are able to flow along with the world trend of economic prosperity. Therefore, the issue of political incompetency within our current system of government has not…
FBI Reveals Documents In Biggie Smalls Death Probe
Composite sketch of the suspect in the Christopher Wallace shooting.
View the documents in the FBI’s Vault, a new website for records never before released to the public. Via CNN:
The 1997 murder of Christopher Wallace, the rapper also known as The Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, remains an unsolved crime despite Los Angeles police and FBI investigations that lasted for years.
The FBI, which joined the case five years after the shooting, opened up its files this week by publishing hundreds of pages of investigation reports and notes from its probe on the agencies website.
Readers get a behind-the-scenes look at the FBI and LAPD’s work, but the documents are heavily redacted, hiding the names of sources, investigators and suspects.
The drive-by shooting, in front of dozens of witnesses who were leaving a music industry party in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997, spurred several conspiracy theories, but no arrests.
Smalls, 24, was killed six…
Scientists Find First Evidence Climate Affects Tectonic Plate Movement
Via Discover:
Geologists have known for years that tectonic plates affect climate patterns. Now they say that the opposite is also true, finding that intensifying climate events can move tectonic plates. Using models based on known monsoonal and plate movement patterns, geologists say that the Indian Plate has accelerated by about 20% over the past 10 million years. “The significance of this finding lies in recognising for the first time that long-term climate changes have the potential to act as a force and influence the motion of tectonic plates,” Australian National University researcher Giampiero Iaffaldano told COSMOS.
The researchers plugged information from research on monsoonal patterns and the Indian Plate’s movement into a model, which indicated that the monsoonal erosion that has battered the eastern Himalaya Mountains for the past 10 million years erodes enough material to account for the plate’s counter-clockwise rotation. By gradually shaving off rocks from the eastern flank and…
ChristWire: ‘Coachella is a Festival of Disease and Sin. Your Children Most Likely Will Die.’
Coachella 2010. Photo: Dmgultekin (CC)
Certainly Christwire is pulling no punches with this “report”. (Did they have Jack Chick ghost-write this article? : ) If you’ve attended (or not) free feel to comment.
Coachella is a concert event for neo hippies, naked beer drinkers and drug addicts. Each year the event grows in numbers and so do its cases of rape, murder and cases of teenage runways. No were else are so many drugs taken, orgies performed and victimaztion of America’s young daughters.
Take a look at what happen to Kings of Leon when they played Coachella. Satan himself entered the body of their lead singer.
What Goes On? Drugs, rape and music. What a perfect combination! The festival is a huge mask to make it seem like it is about music, but it is only about sex. Boys use drugs to make girls pass out or to make them not have the ability to fight back…
A Novel Starring The IRS? David Foster Wallace’s Posthumous Jest
David Foster Wallace. Photo: Steve Rhodes (CC)
There’s no doubt that The Pale King, the new, posthumous novel by David Foster Wallace about the lives of workers at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, has generated more interest from reviewers than almost anything else of recent vintage. There are reviews in almost every publication that’s ever run a book review.
Foster Wallace’s publishers timed the publication to coincide with the American tax filing date of April 15th, and certainly it’s a good hook for many reviewers. In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section there are three separate pieces devoted to the book, but the review that’s attracted the most attention from the media, if not necessarily with readers, is Jonathan Franzen’s for The New Yorker.
For some reason it has royally p*ssed off other lit mags and blogs that The New Yorker decided to make the review available only to people who “like” its Facebook…
Stephen Fry Pledges to Go To Prison Over ‘Twitter Joke’ Trial
Via BBC News:
Comedian Stephen Fry has said he is “prepared to go to prison” over the “Twitter joke” trial.
Fry was at a benefit gig for a man who is appealing against his conviction for sending a menacing communication. Paul Chambers had tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week… otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”
Fry argued that Chambers’ tweet was an example of Britain’s tradition of self-deprecating humour and banter.
Chambers’ case has become a cause celebre on Twitter, with hundreds of people reposting his original comments in protest at the conviction.
“This [verdict] must not be allowed to stand in law,” Fry said, adding that he would continue to repeat Chambers’ message and face prison “if that’s what it takes”.
Glenn Beck Dons Freemasonic Patch During Broadcast (Video)
Regardless of how you feel about Alex Jones and company, this does come off as odd. Via Prison Planet:
It was on his Friday, April 1, program, but it was no joke. Glenn Beck, who has announced he will leave Fox News, was blatantly wearing a masonic emblem over his grey sweater, quite a conspicuous clothing accessory.
Included in the imagery is a Mason’s compass, a skull, a scroll & pen, and what appears to be 1681, a possible reference to the year Freemason William Penn founded Philadelphia (later the first capital of the United States) and Pennsylvania. Why would Beck choose this apparel? Is it an obscure reference to colonial founders or a tip-off that his allegiances lie with the secret society-elites who have long wielded power?
China’s Ghost Cities And Malls (Video)
SBS Dateline reports:
Vast new cities of apartments and shops are being built across China at a rate of ten a year, but they remain almost completely uninhabited ghost towns. It’s all part of the government’s efforts to keep the economy booming, and there are many people who would love to move in, but it’s simply too expensive for most.
Video journalist Adrian Brown wanders through malls of vacant shops, and roads lined with empty apartment buildings … 64 million apartments are said to be empty across the country and one of the few shop owners says he once didn’t sell anything for four or five days.
So are the efforts to boost the economy going to end up having the opposite effect and creating a financial crisis for China?
Are Your Values Right or Left? The Answer Is More Literal Than You Think
M.C. Escher, "Drawing Hands", 1948.
ScienceDaily reports:
Up equals good, happy, optimistic; down the opposite. Right is honest and trustworthy. Left, not so much. That’s what language and culture tell us. “We use mental metaphors to structure our thinking about abstract things,” says psychologist Daniel Casasanto, “One of those metaphors is space.”But we don’t all think right is right, Casasanto has found. Rather, “people associate goodness with the side they can act more fluently on.” Right-handed people prefer the product, job applicant, or extraterrestrial positioned to their right. Lefties march to a left-handed drummer. And those linguistic tropes? They probably “enshrine the preferences of the right-handed majority.”
Casasanto, of The New School for Social Research, and Evangelia G. Chrysikou, of the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to find the causes of these correlations. Does motor experience “give rise to these preferences, or are they hardwired in the brain?” If the former, “how flexible are these…
Constitutional Lawyer Drafts Obama Impeachment
Ben Smith writes for Politico:
A prominent libertarian constitutional lawyer and civil libertarian has drafted an article of impeachment against President Obama over his attack on Libya, throwing down a legal gauntlet that could be picked up by some Congressional Republicans.
Bruce Fein, a former Reagan administration official in the Department of Justice and chairman of American Freedom Agenda writes in his 15-page argument of Obama’s course that “Barack Hussein Obama has mocked the rule of law, endangered the very existence of the Republic and the liberties of the people, and perpetrated an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor.”
Fein is a small-government conservative who worked on the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and also called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, and his work doesn’t represent the Republican Party line. But it comes as some Republicans on the Hill, led by Senator Rand Paul, object vociferously…
Media Roots Radio: Two Active Duty Soldiers Speak Out
Via Media Roots:
This is a special Media Roots Radio interview conducted by Abby and Robbie Martin with two active duty soldiers in the army: Malcolm and Yossarian. Malcolm is a soldier enlisted in the US Army and serves as an aviation mechanic. Yossarian is an Apache helicopter pilot and military aviator in the US Army. They are both stationed abroad right now but were gracious enough to take some time out of their schedule to sit down on Skype for an interview with Media Roots. They talk about why they enlisted, how they woke up and give their perspectives on Bradley Manning, US foreign policy and 9/11 while expressing grave concerns for the future of this country.
They are also both contributing writers for Media Roots. Check out their op-ed writings in the Soldier’s Corner of the site. If you would like to directly download the podcast click the down arrow icon on the right of the soundcloud display. To hide the comments to enable easier rewind and fast forward, click on the icon on the very bottom right.
YouTube Punishes Copyright Offenders With Animated Pirate Cat
Thursday YouTube announced a new program which requires copyright offenders to watch an animated cartoon starring a pirate cat. “In an adjustment to it’s three-strikes-and-your-banned-for life policy, the site is now requiring alleged offenders to watch a four minute ‘re-education’ movie featuring an animated cat, then complete a four-question multiple choice exam,” YouTube explained on their site. “Only then can the user upload clips again…”
The cartoon — entitled “Happy Tree Friends” — features singing animals who demonstrate the difference between uploading an infringing video and creating original content. (”YouTube has decided the solution is to patronize those users,” jokes one technology blog.) “Because copyright law can be complicated, education is critical to ensure that our users understand the rules and continue to play by them,” YouTube said in Thursday’s announcement. And some users who complete the YouTube “Copyright School” can also have copyright strikes removed from their account.
Half Of Supermarket Meat Contains Drug-Resistant Bacteria
WebMD’s Brenda Goodman reports on this shocking new study:
There’s a new reason to be careful when handling raw meat at mealtimes.
Researchers testing raw turkey, pork, beef, and chicken purchased at grocery stores in five different cities across the U.S. say that roughly one in four of those samples tested positive for a multidrug antibiotic-resistant “superbug” bacterium.
“The findings were pretty shocking,” says study researcher Lance B. Price, PhD, director of the Center of Food Microbiology and Environmental Health at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff, Ariz. “We found that 47% of the samples were contaminated with Staph aureus, and more than half of those strains were multidrug resistant, or resistant to three or more antibiotics.”
The presence of drug-resistant staph bacteria, a category that includes methicillin-resistant Staphylococccus aureus (MRSA), in farm animals and food has been a closely watched problem in Europe, where it has been traced to outbreaks of human…
Inside The Sad World Of Standardized Test Essay-Scoring
Minneapolis’s City Paper delves into a dark corner of the education system: the ever-growing test-scoring industry. Every day, armies of underpaid, disenchanted, hungover slacker-temps slave away in private essay-grading mills, slapping on arbitrary scores which determine whether schools across the country will receive funding and whether students will graduate:
Eventually, DiMaggio got used to not asking questions. He got used to skimming the essays as fast as possible, glancing over the responses for about two minutes apiece before clicking a score.
Every so often, though, his thoughts would drift to the school in Arkansas or Ohio or Pennsylvania. If they only knew what was going on behind the scenes. “The legitimacy of testing is being taken for granted,” he says. “It’s a farce.”
DiMaggio had good reason to worry. His score could determine whether the school was deemed adequate or failing—whether it received government funding or got shut down.
Though the efficacy of standardized testing…
Here’s The Setup For The Con Of The Decade
Tyler Durden posts on Zero Hedge (originally on Of Two Minds):
The Con of the Decade, which I described last July, is being set up nicely.
I described The Con of the Decade last July (2010). The Con makes me a heretic in the cult religion of Hyperinflation. I consider myself an agnostic about the destruction of the U.S. dollar and hyperinflation (basically the same thing), but my idea that hyperinflation is fundamantally a political process makes me a heretic. I skimmed a few of the dozens of comments posted on Rick’s Picks and Zero Hedge after they posted one of my expositions on this dynamic, and didn’t see even one comment in favor of this perspective.
The Con is being set up right now, and the outlines are clearly visible. The Con works like this:
1. The Financial Elites/Oligarchy raked in billions in private profit from the orgy of leverage, credit expansion, fraud, embezzlement…
