Archive for December, 2011
What The Government Told Gizmodo About Osama Bin Laden’s Body
Amazing read. Sam Biddle writes on Gizmodo:
Months ago, I asked the Pentagon for its visual records of Osama bin Laden’s sea burial under the Freedom of Information Act. Today, I received a thick packet of No— a complete denial that any records exist. Read it.
The core of the response is this: the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Special Operations Command, and the Department of the Navy all had their records searched. Nothing. Admiral Mike Mullen’s email was scanned. Nothing. The Pentagon claims not a single person aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where Bin Laden’s remains were disposed of, took a single picture. Not a single email from the ship makes reference to photo or video. Essentially: nobody in the military has evidence. So did these things ever exist? If so, they’re in a filing cabinet at the CIA, where they’ll be safe for the rest of time.
The Power of The Powerless (Video)
Václav Havel died on Sunday, ironically while the U.S. news media is focused on Kim il-Jong’s death. Here’s an excerpt from a documentary that may be of interest:
Mystery Kidney Disease Epidemic in Central America
Kate Sheehy reports for PRI’s The World:
In the western lowlands of Nicaragua, in a region of vast sugarcane fields, sits the tiny community of La Isla.The small houses are a patchwork of concrete and wood. Pieces of cloth serve as doors.
Maudiel Martinez emerges from his house to greet me. He’s pale, and his cheekbones protrude from his face. He hunches over like an old man — but he is only 19-years-old.
“The way this sickness is — you see me now, but in a month I could be gone. It can take you down all of a sudden,” he says. Maudiel’s kidneys are failing. They do not perform the essential function of filtering waste from his body. He’s being poisoned from the inside. When he got ill two years ago, he was already familiar with this disease and how it might end. “I thought about my father and grandfather,” he says.…
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly Laughs at #OWS Police Brutality Accountability (Video)
Via We Are Change:
We Are Change randomly meets up NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly on the streets on NYC and asks him about the numerous incidents of police brutality during Occupy Wall Street. Recorded 12/16/11:
D17: Protests Mark The Third Anniversary of OccupyWallStreet Movement Puts On A “Why I Occupy” Show in Times Square
Saturday marked the third month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. It was also Bradley Manning’s Birthday. It was one of those days that confirmed the validity of the chant: “All Day, All Week, Occupy Wall Street”.
Ok, maybe, it wasn’t a whole week but Saturday felt like a week in one day. The plan for the day, as announced, was to gather at Duarte Park at 6th Avenue and Canal Street to attempt a RE-Occupation of vacant land owned by Trinity Church, more of a real estate company than a house of worship.
For a few weeks, the Occupy Movement had been demanding that the church allow the movement to take “sanctuary” on that land. There were earlier protests and even a hunger strike that made page one of the New York Times. Police in riot gear had ousted the occupiers the last time they tried to take over the space a…
River Of Blood Flows In China
When researching your local natural environs involves a DVD of The Shining…Via the International Business Times:
The Jian River in Luoyang, China had become a “river of blood”…Locals were subject to the water’s eerie, blood-like color for several days before government officials tracked the source of the color not to a Moses-like End Times but to two small chemical plants.
Although media outlets were alerted to the spill by citizens’ panicked calls, others who live neat the water are unsurprised, saying the water changes color often due to the various pollutants dumped into or along the river on a weekly basis. Some Chinese locals report that the river has turned dark green in the past.
Rick Santorum’s Unfortunate Photograph
This is why running for president in 2012 requires a basic literacy of memes. Witness Republican hopeful and all-around awful person Rick Santorum, unaware of the commonly-held meaning of his name, destroying his campaign and his dignity forever by being photographed holding this sign after it was handed to him.
Indefinite Detention Isn’t the Only Troubling Thing About NDAA
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 breezed through Congress and headed to the White House, even though public opposition to parts of the bill, now directed at President Obama in the hope of a hail Mary veto, remains strong. The most troubling aspects of the bill violate fundamental rights provided in the U.S. Constitution to American citizens by giving the government sweeping power to indefinitely detain citizens without trial. Like many other pieces of legislation, this year’s NDAA is another push in a long series of movements marching the U.S. Towards a hard right, nearly fascist state.
In addition to this, the NDAA also contains troubling language regarding Department of Defense interests in Iran, China, Wikileaks, defense contractors and more. A report from a conference on the NDAA contains tough talk in respect to both China and Iran. Considering the amount of saber rattling many warhawks have already…
North Koreans’ Mass Weeping For The Death Of Kim Jong-Il
What happens when your godlike, iron-fisted leader ceases to exist? Mass weeping, collapsing, and hysteria in public. Extremely disturbing scenes of existential confusion sweeping the streets of North Korea, providing a lesson in the psychology of totalitarianism. I could seriously imagine this leading to mass suicide:
Thirty Percent Of Americans Arrested By Age 23
I’m sure “they” won’t rest until the percentage is 99% … From NPR:
There’s been a sharp increase in recent decades in the number of young Americans who report they’ve been arrested at least once, researchers report in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
While in the mid-1960s about 22 percent of Americans reported having been arrested by the time they turned 23, researchers estimate that the “prevalence rate” for arrests by that age now lies “between 30.2 percent and 41.4 percent.”
Increasingly, “arrest is a pretty common experience,” Robert Brame, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and one of the study’s authors, tells USA Today.
According to ABC News, “Brame and his colleagues analyzed responses to a national survey of more than 7,000 young people between 1997 and 2008. … Not all of the young people remained in the study for all 11 years, accounting for the uncertainty…
North Korean Leader Kim Jong-il Dead
Reports David Chance and Jack Kim of Reuters:
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack while on a train trip, state media reported on Monday, sparking immediate concern over who is in control of the reclusive state and its nuclear program.
A tearful television announcer dressed in black said the 69-year old had died on Saturday of physical and mental over-work on his way to give “field guidance” — a reference to advice dispensed by the “Dear Leader” on his trips to factories, farms and military bases.
Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s youngest son, was named by North Korea’s official news agency KCNA as the “great successor” to his father, which lauded him as “the outstanding leader of our party, army and people.”
Marijuana Use At 30-Year High Among U.S. Teenagers
Anahad O’Connor reports in the NY Times:
One out of every 15 high school students smokes marijuana on a near daily basis, a figure that has reached a 30-year peak even as use of alcohol, cigarettes and cocaine among teenagers continues a slow decline, according to a new government report.
The popularity of marijuana, which is now more prevalent among 10th graders than cigarette smoking, reflects what researchers and drug officials say is a growing perception among teenagers that habitual marijuana use carries little risk of harm. That perception, experts say, is fueled in part by wider familiarity with medicinal marijuana and greater ease in obtaining it.
Although it is difficult to track the numbers, “we’re clearly seeing an increase in teenage marijuana use that corresponds pretty clearly in time with the increase in medical marijuana use,” said Dr. Christian Thurstone, medical director of the adolescent substance abuse treatment program at Denver Health…
The Little Lama from Columbia Heights, Minnesota
Allie Shah writes in the Star Tribune:
It’s morning time and a little boy with a shaved head and a face shaped like the moon chants a Tibetan prayer.
His high-pitched voice echoes inside the Columbia Heights bedroom that his father has transformed into a lavish prayer room. In here, the 4-year-old forsakes his cartoons and toys to study scripture and learn to pray the Buddhist way.
Big for his age, he looks bigger still perched on an ornate chair draped in crimson and saffron robes. “Only for lamas,” explains his father, Dorje Tsegyal, sitting cross-legged on the floor at his son’s feet.
Jalue Dorjee, you see, is believed to be no ordinary boy.
The Road to the Iraq War Will Happen Again
The power of the corporate media to deceive the people is simply astonishing, but, mind you, it depends on an already distracted, ignorant, semi-passive multitude whose marching values have been carefully cultivated.
In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.
Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior. With a straight face the official voices declared that those who…
Occupy Wukan? or A Chinese Spring
The village of Wukan in Guangdong province has staged a massive protest over local officials seizing land without compensation for development projects. This type of issue has been sticky in China for quite some time, similar to eminent domain in the U.S. but without much recourse or a court to appeal to. Here is a video posted on YouTube, its in Mandarin but the images are worth it:
The Financial Times also has a decent article and video.
Missouri is the U.S. Meth Capital, Again
Walter White has some serious competition. Chad Garrison writes in the Riverfront Times:
Missouri has once again been ranked as the nation’s biggest meth-producing state based on the number of drug labs busted last year.
According to Missouri Highway Patrol figures published in the Post-Dispatch, law enforcement seized 1,774 meth labs in 2009 — up 20 percent from the 1,487 confiscated in 2008.
Missouri outpaced the No. 2 state — Indiana — which had 1,096 meth lab busts in 2009. Jefferson County, Missouri, led the state with 227 labs confiscated last year.
The news comes as Missouri legislature considers a bill that would require pseudoephedrine — the key ingredient for meth — to be sold only as a prescription.
