 Daily Headlines
Activists must continue to demonstrate, petition their representatives, and make speeches condemning injustice even though the police will attempt to stifle their voices. Activists should continue to violate the law if accepting personal risks of severe reprisals from an NDAA-empowered presidency remains a personal moral obligation in response to immorality and injustice.
This belief in the unfettered legal and moral right of the US to use force anywhere in the world for any reason it wants is sustained only by this belief in objective US superiority, this myth of American exceptionalism. And the results are exactly what one would expect from an approach grounded in a belief system so patently irrational.
More than 45,000 protesters surround the White House in a demonstration demanding real action on climate change. On the back of Obama's State of the Union and arrests earlier in the week. "We have one demand; Obama stop," said Harris Mud.
We mustn't allow campaign finance reform to slip to the bottom of our priorities. With all the other GOP election tricks, and with a favorable Democratic election in 2012, Citizens United runs the chance of being ignored. If so, Democrats and progressives will likely pay a heavy price.
The bombing attack was certainly a slap in the face to Assad, but not the first, and seems less directed at the Damascus regime than adding yet another ingredient to the witch's brew of chaos that is rapidly engulfing Syria and the surrounding countries. And chaos and division in the region have always been Israel's allies. Divide and conquer is an old colonial tactic dating back to the Roman Empire.
By David Swanson
Hubris Isn't the Half of It As our government was making a fraudulent case to attack Iraq in 2002-2003, the MSNBC television network was doing everything it could to help, including booting Phil Donahue and Jeff Cohen off the air.
For years as a police officer and Navy reservist, Christopher Dorner was what the NRA would call "a good guy with a gun," but something snapped when he was fired from the LAPD, transforming him into "a bad guy with a gun," an important new argument for gun control.
By Thomas Farrell
Was the Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello Murdered in the U.S. 25 Years Ago? (BOOK REVIEW) Was the Indian Jesuit spiritual writer and speaker Anthony de Mello (1931-1987) murdered in the Jesuit residence at Fordham University in the Bronx 25 years ago? Bill deMello's biography of his older brother Tony describes in detail the suspicious circumstances of Tony's death. Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was another Catholic spiritual author whose suspicious death in Bangkok, Thailand, has also raised questions.
Big news in the search for dark matter may be coming in about two weeks, the leader of a space-based particle physics experiment said Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That's when the first paper of results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle collector mounted on the outside of the International Space Station, will be submitted to a scientific journal, said MIT physicist Samuel Ting, AMS principle investigator. Regardless of whether AMS has found dark matter yet, the scientists said they expected the question of dark matter's origin to become clearer soon. "We believe we're on the threshold of discovery," Turner said. "We believe this will be the decade of the WIMP."
At some level, the brain is a kind of computer. It takes in information, combines new information with previously acquired information, and performs actions based on the results of those computations. Yet we know remarkably little about how the brain performs its computations and how those computations relate to behavior, especially in comparison to what we know about computers. By some counts (though the exact number remains elusive), there are hundreds of different kinds of neurons, each with different physical properties and ways of interacting with other neurons. And we know very little about how the brain's basic units organize into larger-scale circuits, and how those circuits, often in physically disparate parts of the brain, work together to produce unified behavior. We need an understanding of how brain circuits work and how the brain uses language to encode information.
By William Bike
Obama and Newt are Wrong: Hillary Doesn't Have 2016 in the Bag Many politics watchers believe that Hillary Clinton already has the 2016 presidential election sewn up. Not so, says William S. Bike, author of the book "Winning Political Campaigns: A Comprehensive Guide to Electoral Success."
By Jon McGoran
GMO Labeling Gets Local in Pennsylvania A national GMO labeling law would be ideal, but 50 statewide fights could have unexpected benefits as well...
By Brian Lynch
The Falsely Convicted Spend Years In Jail Before Exonerations, And They Are the Lucky Ones. 
"Exoneration," is a legal concept that a defendant who was convicted of a crime was later relieved of all legal consequences of that conviction through a decision by a prosecutor, a governor or a court, after new evidence of his or her innocence was discovered. As you will see in this report, the number of exonerations in the United States is not a good measure of how often our justice system produces false convictions.
According to the Government Accounting Office the Federal Government fails to collect about $450 billion in tax revenue per year. Uniform tax collection is at the heart of a fair tax system. This article is an excerpt from the GAO report.
Silicon Valley firms shelter assets overseas, avoid billions in U.S. taxes | Center for Investigative Reporting
The largest tech companies in the Bay Area have avoided paying federal taxes on more than $225 billion they have accumulated through foreign subsidiaries, documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show.
By John Spritzler
The Despicable Values in Obama's State-of-the-Union Speech This is a critique of the fundamental values underlying President Obama's State-of-the-Union Speech.
By Sheila Parks
Scandal ABC - Defiance Lives: Secrets and Betrayals I like David and love the role he is playing. I also cannot help but wonder, however, why with such a diverse and interesting cast, there is still a straight white man playing the hero here, the one who is going to help save the world by exposing the rigged election -- as is usually the case on TV, radio, film and everywhere else.
By Stephen Lendman
Israel's Racist of the Year Award Israeli racism is longstanding. It's institutionalized. Imagine honoring it. Israel did so. It finds new ways of reaching new lows. It disgraces itself in the process.
By Zin Linn
Burma President must fight against corruption, in favor of reforms Burma remains one of the world's least developed countries, and was ranked 149 out of 187 countries in the 2011 UN's Human Development Index. The HDI represents a push for a broader definition of well-being and provides a composite measure of three basic dimensions of human development: health, education and income.
In assessing murky terrorism cases in the Middle East, one must take into account the political pressures on investigators and journalists to push the conclusion in a favored direction. That truism has surfaced again in a bombing at the Bulgarian resort of Burgas.
By WILLIAM FISHER
Bahrain: Will Dialogue Bring Peace? Watch the behaviour of the King of Bahrain and his minions as they ponder just how much freedom they're willing to surrender in the interests of peace.
A different kind of protest is being planned in cities around the US next Saturday by a different group of activists. These folks don't seek environmental protection as much as the right to carry military assault rifles on the streets of their home towns and "stand their ground" with lethal force if they feel the slightest threatened.
Wages rose at the ridiculously paltry rate of 0.5 percent, seasonally adjusted for three months and for the year; compensation rose only 1.9%. A desert sheik should run such a frugal household. At 1.9% wage growth, any plans for an economic recovery should be placed well off into the far distant future.
By Tom Engelhardt
Greg Grandin, Why Latin America Didn't Join Washington's Counterterrorism Posse There was a scarcely noted but classic moment in the Senate hearings on the nomination of John Brennan, the president's counterterrorism "tsar," to become CIA director. When Senator Carl Levin pressed him on whether waterboarding was torture, he ended his reply: "I have a personal opinion that waterboarding is reprehensible and should not be done. And again, I am not a lawyer, senator, and I can't address that question." Latest Articles
Two Major Parties -- One Wretched Government
With the Democrat elected representation's progressive -- make that unprogressive -- drift to the right, it seems to matter less and less which political party wins elections only to represent big-money advantages at the expense of the people's best interests.
The Problem With Press Releases
My take on biased press releases.
Despite police harassment the champions of liberty saved many guns from destruction at the Bensalem, PA gun buyback. This happened on February 16, 2013 in Bucks County near Philadelphia.
The Importance of Shtupping
A satirical look at the Manti Te'o generation.
Obama = Anti-Christ! Gun Control Is Evil! Gays Will Eat Your Children!! So what else is new under the paranoid skies of the U.S.? More importantly, where is it going?
DJesus vs Rambo Jesus. Fake blasphemy vs. real blasphemy. Parody vs indignation. It's all here in the latest SNL controversy. Who will stand and who will fold?
West Bank Village Struggles to Survive
Batir is special. Its heritage is longstanding. It's been that way for centuries. It's one of Palestine's most beautiful villages.
Culpa Innata is a well written, imaginative, and realistic dystopian novel set in the future and taking place in Eastern Europe. It paints a picture of what a New World Order might look like following a great economic meltdown, worldwide riots, globalisation, and some affluent trillionaires buying the worldwide debt to introduce a new system in their own vision, a vision where mega-corporations control the world.
Strangers in Paradise
An essay about clear-thinking individuals' escape from a mind-conditioned mankind.
Droning On and On and On and On and On....
This was something I starting writing a few weeks back and never got back to it. My point is always how this stuff gets by us. We allow it to get by us. Any time they try telling us it's basically for our own good you know it's nonsense. They want more of your "rights." But like George Carlin once observed, "They're not really 'rights' if they can be taken away. They're 'privileges.'" Truth.
You're starting to see a lot of ink getting spilled on the pages of magazines about the generational conflict. Generally the articles are so vague they are useless. However, there is one common thread they all talk about: the economy and who has it tougher.
Chavez Returns
He's home. He arrived on February 18 at 2:30AM Caracas time. He announced his arrival via Twitter.  Best News Links from the Web
Russia, the largest oil producer, and China, the world's largest oil importer, are hoarding gold, and there is evidence they intend to trade oil for gold in the future, instead of US currency. The Federal Reserve's out-of-control money printing has made the dollar unstable, and it is no longer useful for pegging the international price of oil, but the biggest impact of this change will be a dramatic rise in demand for, and thus the price of gold.
How dangerous is driving stoned? A report from KIRO in jolly Washington State
Smoking a little pop didn't cause troubles. But after smoking a lot of marijuana, the drivers had trouble.
That alternate universe would be "much more boring," Lykken said. Which led him to ask a philosophical question: "Why do we live in a universe that's just on the edge of stability?" He wondered whether a universe has to be near the danger zone to produce galaxies, stars, planets ... and life. Even Hill found it interesting that the parameters of particle physics put our universe right along the critical line. "That's something new, which we didn't know before, and which leads some of us to that there's something else coming," Hill said. When Hill referred to "something else," he was talking about new discoveries in physics -- not the end of the world. Lykken emphasized that it would be at least tens of billions of years before vacuum instability took hold. "To get the exact number, we need more funding," he joked.
Rejecting a push by Britain, European governments on Monday decided against providing weapons to Syrian rebel forces, expressing fears that more arms would only lead to more bloodshed in a conflict that already has taken nearly 70,000 lives. The decision, by European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels, illustrates the difficulty that Europe and the United States have had in dealing with the two-year-old Syrian civil war despite their unanimous condemnation of President Bashar al-Assad and his ruthless battle to remain in power.
President Hugo Chavez made a surprise return to Venezuela on Monday, 10 weeks after leaving for cancer surgery in Cuba, sparking celebration among his supporters. The government has never said what type of cancer Chavez has or where exactly in his body it occurred, although it has said that his recent surgery, his fourth since June 2011, was followed by complications, including bleeding and a severe lung infection.
What happens when you give 1,000,000 particles their own gravity and spring repulsion and send them out to play? Watch the video and find out. This was created by David Moore, a self-taught computer programmer, aspiring physicist and student at San Diego Miramar College. It's a custom code made with SDL/C++ and 8 days of render time. According to David there's a bug at the end "where particles can get arbitrarily high energy" but before that it's very physically accurate!" It's fascinating to watch the attraction process take place -- one might envision a similar process occurring in the early Universe with the formation of the first galaxies and galactic clusters out of a hot, uniform state. Plus it's great to see young talented minds like David's working on such projects for fun! There just might be hope for us after all.
The samples should have been bone-dry, Hui said, but "somehow we still detect this amount of water, so that makes things interesting." Based on their measurements, the researchers estimated that the early moon's magma ocean could have contained up to 320 parts per million of water. Once that ocean mostly crystallized, the remaining residues could have had as much as 1.4% water. That could explain the measured water content in lunar rocks, Hui said.The findings could have interesting implications for theories about how the moon came to be. The findings also have implications for the moon's geological evolution; scientists may need to reevaluate some of those ideas. Knowing how much water there is could be handy for future explorers. "Someday, when we put men on the moon in a more permanent way, we might need that water."
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it's all about. --Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
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Everyday of Freedom is an Act of Faith for my writings ============> http://robertoscaruffi.blogspot.com for something on religions ===> http://scaruffi1.blogspot.com
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
