I believe this is an extremely important issue. Because it’s not possible to present all the information in a short song, I sincerely hope that those who have not already done so will look into this matter more deeply.
Here are some links to get you started:

http://www.theshotheardroundtheworld….
http://www.davidicke.com/content/blog…
http://www.wholetruthcoalition.org/

In a speech broadcast on Canadian television Tuesday, Michael Moore savaged the Democrats’ healthcare bill, calling it a gift to the health insurance industry, which he argues will make $70 billion more as a result of mandated health insurance.

“The health insurance companies are going to make an extra $70 billion dollars as a result of Americans being forced to buy their health insurance,” Moore quipped. “What company wouldn’t love this bill?”

Recently both Russia and China have claimed to be able to use cloud seeding to increase rainfall and snowfall, or change the location of where it falls. In the past, snow-making experiments have been carried out in North American ski resorts in the past with little evidence of success. So how have the Russian and Chinese scientists achieved this feat and what evidence is there that it is in fact due to cloud seeding?

The seeding method used is to add tiny particles of silver iodide to the clouds and there is solid science behind this method. At temperatures a few degrees below zero degrees centigrade, clouds consist mainly of supercooled water droplets. These clouds can be quite stable, but silver iodide has an ice-like structure and it will cause a few of these water droplets to freeze. Once you have ice particles mixed in with the supercooled droplets, these crystals grow rapidly to form snowflakes, causing the cloud to precipitate. The effect is that the water is released from the cloud.

[Read more at The Independent]

Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.

The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.

Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found.

Experts are critical, warning heavy drinking can increase the risk of other diseases, with alcohol responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally per year.

The study was conducted in Spain, a country with relatively high rates of alcohol consumption and low rates of coronary heart disease.

The research involved men and women aged between 29 and 69, who were asked to document their lifetime drinking habits and followed for 10 years.

Crucially the research team claim to have eliminated the “sick abstainers” risk by differentiating between those who had never drunk and those whom ill-health had forced to quit. This has been used in the past to explain fewer heart-related deaths among drinkers on the basis that those who are unhealthy to start with are less likely to drink.

Read more at [BBC News]

President Barack Obama’s job approval rating has dipped below 50 percent nationally for the first time, as Americans worry about the war in Afghanistan, a new poll released Wednesday found.

The Quinnipiac University poll showed 48 percent of Americans approve of the way Obama is handling his job as president, compared to 42 percent who disapprove. The president also scored low marks from Americans on his handling of the situation in Afghanistan, with just 38 percent saying they approved of his approach.

New fossils unearthed in what is now the Sahara desert reveal a once-swampy world

divided up among a half-dozen species of unusual and perhaps intelligent crocodiles, researchers reported on Thursday.

They have given some of the new species snappy names — BoarCroc, RatCroc, DogCroc, DuckCroc and PancakeCroc — but say their findings help build an understanding of how crocodilians were and remain such a successful life form.

They lived during the Cretaceous period 145 million to 65 million years ago, when the continents were closer together and the world warmer and wetter than it is now.

“We were surprised to find so many species from the same time in the same place,” said paleontologist Hans Larsson of McGill University in Montreal who worked on the study.

“Each of the crocs apparently had different diets, different behaviors. It appears they had divided up the ecosystem, each species taking advantage of it in its own way.”

“Some of the old-timers at Disney came up to me and said, ‘this is actually what it felt like in the old days, when Walt was around.’”

Ironically, the movie’s special effects weren’t nominated for an Academy award “because they said we cheated when we used computers.” But the film singlehandedly spawned the CGI business as well as the merging of movies and video games. (”I don’t even think there’s a line there, anymore…”)

Now 27 years later, the new TRON reflects more than a quarter century of change. “[I]t’s a little like cyberspace is the same, but it’s moved on from being a frontier to a place where civilization really exists.”

The original “Subversive Element” and one of AboveTopSecret.com’s original founding members, “William One Sac,” who is now in the battle of his life with cancer, recounts his first-hand experiences as he explored, photographed, and learned about the mysteries, stories, and hidden features of Camp Hero in Montauk, NY.

The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection,” Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.

In the Philippines, small brothels usually pop up near the coastal areas where many women perform sexual services for transient seafarers. Often, these prostitutes are ferried to bigger ships by their pimps.

Every news organization makes mistakes. But when Fox News makes mistakes, they seem to tilt in a suspiciously consistent direction, favoring Republicans and conservatives over Democrats and liberals.

It happened again Wednesday, when host Gregg Jarrett, introducing a segment on Happening Now, described the “huge crowds” that were turning out to greet Sarah Palin on the promotional tour for her book, Going Rogue. “These are some of the pictures just coming into us,” Jarrett said as images of Palin surrounded by throngs of supporters flashed across the screen.

While Palin may indeed be drawing big crowds, it didn’t take long for liberal watchdog blogs like Think Progress and Media Matters to point out that the masses Jarrett touted on Happening Now had nothing to do with Palin’s book; the footage was from a 2008 campaign rally. Called on the switcheroo, Fox blamed it on a “production error” and issued an on-air apology.

The whole thing might have gone unnoticed had it not been for an eerily similar incident last week in a much more prominent venue, Sean Hannity’s primetime show…

[continues at Daily Finance]

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month — February — the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival:

Read the full letter (and transcript) on Letters of Note

Here’s a new way to think about the U.S. government’s epic borrowing: More than half of the $9 trillion in debt that Uncle Sam is expected to build up over the next decade will be interest.

More than half. In fact, $4.8 trillion.

If that’s hard to grasp, here’s another way to look at why that’s a problem.

In 2015 alone, the estimated interest due — $533 billion — is equal to a third of the federal income taxes expected to be paid that year, said Charles Konigsberg, chief budget counsel of the Concord Coalition, a deficit watchdog group.

More on CNNMoney.com

Chris Good writes on the Atlantic:

Don’t rule it out, because apparently Palin wouldn’t either in an interview with Newsmax:

Palin initially chuckled when Newsmax broached the idea. But then she had some serious words of praise for the popular Fox personality.

“I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I’m not there yet,” Palin tells Newsmax. “But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He’s a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he’s so bold — I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he’s very, very, very effective.”

This is an interesting thing to think about. Palin/Beck could unite the conservative anti-Obama movement and basically form a Tea Party ticket that would vent the anti-stimulus, anti-Democratic health care reform, anti-cap-and-trade, sentiment that’s been brewing with a firestorm of angry, populist rallies. It would basically double the phenomenon that happened at Palin’s rallies on the trail for McCain.

Then again, Palin not ruling it out isn’t exactly a big deal: it’s pretty improbable that she would come out and say, “No, I would not run with Glenn Beck.” No reason to disappoint their shared supporters.

More on the Atlantic

The chief federal oversight official for the stimulus program said in a letter Wednesday that he can’t certify whether the number of jobs “created or saved” by stimulus funds is accurate.

Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney was responding to a request for information by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In a letter to Issa dated Nov. 17, Devaney wrote, “Your letter specifically asks if I am able to certify that the number of jobs reported as created/saved on Recovery.gov is accurate and auditable. No, I am not able to make this certification.”

The Obama administration claimed that it saved or created at least 1 million jobs this year. But errors in the stimulus job creation data have become a political hot potato, as the administration has been hit by news reports revealing that data it posted on recovery.gov includes jobs allegedly created in congressional districts that don’t exist.

Read more: Politico

Is this taking the whole Star Trek thing a teensie weensie bit too far? d’Armond Speers spoke only Klingon to his child for the first three years of its life.

Klingon? Not Spanish, French, Mandarin? Not some gutteral genuflecting concoction from the deepest recesses of Borneo? Klingon? You heard it right. (And if you don’t know about the Klingon Empire, look it up.)

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

And get this, Speers says he isn’t really a huge Star Trek fan.

Read more: Minneapolis / St. Paul City Pages

A new day, a new H1N1 conspiracy theory! But this one is special. Ken Welch says on his blog, before treating us to an extremely detailed analysis:

We’ve recently learned the secret behind the Swine Flu Vaccine that is being pushed so strongly on the public. While the vaccine may make you sick, its real purpose is to greatly increase the fast-kill mechanism of the pandemic still to come. Worse yet, the vaccine is being used to target specific groups of people who are simply not welcome in our brave new world.

In the USA these include Blacks, American Indians, and Baby Boomers.

Read the whole thing from Ken Welch.

A “saber-toothed cat in armor” and a pancake-shaped predator are among the strange crocodile cousins whose bones have been found beneath the windswept dunes of the Sahara, archaeologists say.

The diverse menagerie of reptiles ruled Gondwana — a landmass that later broke up into the southern continents— about a hundred million years ago, during the Cretaceous period.

“There’s an entire croc world brewing in Africa that we really had only an inkling about before,” said Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and leader of a new study.

“We knew about SuperCroc, the titan of all crocs, but we didn’t have quite an idea of what existed in the shadows of the Cretaceous,” he said.

More on National Geographic

In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

[Read more at New York Times]

However, anyone hoping that the machine will become a powerful new weapon could be disappointed, scientists have only proven the effect on worms.

A phaser traditionally emits a beam capable of stunning or killing an enemy.

Researchers have now found a way to paralyse tiny worms when they expose them to ultraviolet light.

Even when the ultraviolet light was turned off the animals stayed stunned.

However, if they were subsequently exposed to a different form of light they recovered again and were able to move.

[Read more at the Telegraph]

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.”

[go to ABC News for a video report]

A US judge has ruled that negligence by the US Army Corps of Engineers led to massive floods in parts of New Orleans as Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

The court upheld complaints by six residents and a business against the Corps over its maintenance of a navigational channel.

They were awarded damages totalling $720,000 (£431,000), and the ruling could lead to thousands more claims.

About 80% of New Orleans was flooded by Hurricane Katrina.

More than 1,800 people died on the US Gulf coast in the devastating storms.

The Corps is responsible for maintaining a system of canals and earthworks that protect New Orleans from storm surges.

US district judge Stanwood Duval ruled “negligent failure” to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet – a shipping channel – had led to flooding in the city’s Lower 9th Ward and nearby St Bernard Parish.

[Read more at BBC News]

“An unusual coalition of progressive economists, labor leaders, and bloggers has decided to fight back against a congressional amendment that would allow the Federal Reserve to continue operating in secrecy.”

November 18, 2009

House Financial Services Committee
2129 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515

Dear Chairman Frank, Ranking Member Bachus, and Members of the Committee,

During the past two years, the Federal Reserve dramatically changed its operating procedures. Instead of simply setting interest rates to influence macroeconomic conditions, it rapidly acquired a wide variety of private assets and extended massive secret bailouts to major financial institutions.

There are still many questions about the Fed’s behavior in these new activities, including potential cronyism and favoritism in its distribution of many trillions of dollars. As the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Assets Relief Program recently wrote about their bailout of AIG, the Fed’s “strategy to pursue concessions from counterparties offered little opportunity for success, even in light of the willingness of one counterparty to agree to concessions.”

The Federal Reserve balance sheet expanded to more than $2 trillion, along with implied and explicit backstops to Wall Street firms that could cost even more. Who received the money? Against what collateral? On what terms and conditions? The only way to find out is through a complete audit of the Federal Reserve. That’s why we support the Paul-Grayson amendment requiring a complete audit.

The Watt amendment does not repeal the existing provisions that prohibit a GAO audit of the Federal Reserve. In fact, it adds entirely new additional categories of restrictions. Instead of opening up the Fed’s secretive activities to public inspection, the Watt amendment cloaks it in further secrecy.

A vote for the Watt amendment is a vote for more secret bailouts. We urge you to support Paul-Grayson instead.

Sincerely,

Dean Baker, Economist, Center for Economic Policy Research
William Black, Professor of Economics and Law
Tyler Durden, Blogger, Zero Hedge
Thomas Ferguson, Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts, Boston
James K. Galbraith, Economist, University of Texas
Leo Gerard, President, United Steelworkers Union
Jane Hamsher, Blogger, Firedoglake.com
Rob Johnson, Economist
Naomi Klein, Author, No Logo and The Shock Doctrine
Yves Smith, Blogger, Naked Capitalism
Andrew Stern, President, SEIU
Richard Trumka, President, AFL-CIO
L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics, Center for Full Employment and Price Stability

If you step out of your house late Thursday night, you’ll witness an overwhelming scene. At 12:01 a.m., movie theaters will release “New Moon,” the next film in the “Twilight” series. Anxious viewers will finally discover whether mortal Bella Swan will choose Jacob’s werewolf den over Edward’s sparkly coffin. Clearly, creatures of the night have returned to societal consciousness.

As a testament to their adaptability, vampires are front and center on the pop-culture stage. Television shows such as “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries” feature titillating exchanges between fanged supermodels. Movies like “Twilight,” “Let the Right One In” and “Blood: The Last Vampire” explore vampirism through teenage, independent and gore-tinted lenses, respectively. Even the BBC can’t withstand Bram Stoker’s lure, and has come up with “Being Human,” a show that focuses on three housemates who happen to be ghost, werewolf and vampire.

What accounts for this 21st-century obsession? Less than 30 years ago, dealing with blood was considered a risky and unclean business as society encountered the AIDS-laced transfusions of the 1980s. And even though those fears have mostly abated, having blood drawn at the doctor’s office is still enough to bring out the squeamish adolescent in all of us. How, then, have vampires been able to influence cultural discourse without activating our gag reflex?

Sex plays a part, undoubtedly—today’s pop culture champions infinitely virile vampires who resemble Abercrombie & Fitch models…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]