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Wednesday, 10 April 2013


Daily Headlines

Obama's Gambling Problem; Social Security Sell-out is a Follow-up to his Sequester Sell-out-- Both Failed Bets

By Norman Solomon
Time to Bell the Obama Cat
In recent days, the big cat in the White House has provoked denunciations from groups that have rarely crossed him. They're upset about his decision to push for cuts in Social Security benefits. "Progressive outrage has reached a boiling point," the online juggernaut MoveOn declared a few days ago.

This is from Michael Hudson's book on privatization, written some 15 years ago.

By Stephen Lendman
Obama's War on Social America
Obama, Republicans and most democrats are in lockstep. They claim Medicare and Social Security are going broke. They lie saying so. When properly administered, both programs are sound. Modest adjustments only are needed to assure it.
Democratic activists say that, no matter what happens this year, it "wouldn't be fair" to characterize them as Social Security cutters or the relentlessly hostile Republicans as its defenders. If we're being completely fair, it's not altogether unreasonable to think of someone who voted to cut Social Security benefits as...well, as someone who voted to cut Social Security benefits.

Don't think that our government is in any way dreading an attack from North Korea. The fact is" this would play right into the hands of the American Empire. While the United States is not publically supporting any provocations against the North Korean regime right now, they did send nuclear-capable B2 Bombers from the US to fly over the Korean Peninsula. This provocation really started the ball rolling.

Unfortunately, many liberal journalists who were vocal about war, human rights and civil liberties during the Bush era lost their voices as Obama continued and, in some cases, expanded Bush's "War on Terror" policies. And it says something about mainstream TV that the toughest, most consistent questioners of militarism and defenders of civil liberties are not on a news channel -- they're on the comedy channel.

Until Scott Walker became governor, Wisconsin had one of the strongest Medicaid programs in the nation. But when the Supreme Court ruled states could opt out of Medicaid expansion, it gave right-wing governors -- especially those like Scott Walker considering a run for the presidency in 2016 -- a chance to sabotage the number-one benefit of Obamacare: providing coverage to the working poor who earn too much to get Medicaid.

By David Glenn Cox
The Invisible Class
One million American men, not just unemployed or discouraged workers, but men no longer counted as in the labor force in a single year. Rather than fix the economy, they just said they fixed the economy and the media aped along.

According to an #AumfHungerStrike activist 99% of Americans have no idea they can be detained indefinitely without charge under NDAA 2012 Section 1021, and then executed without trial under AUMF 2001.

A harmless but useful and informative exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, generated an uproar. It became a huge media event when headline writers dubbed the exhibit "Jew in a Box."

Fitz was living in Boston when his father came through and arranged for him to meet Mellie. It seems to me that it is no accident that of all the cities in the world, Scandal has Fitz living in Boston, nudging us to think about John Kerry.

In recent months, more than 1,000 starving baby sea lions have been found on Southern California beaches, from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just declared the crisis an "unusual mortality event." On a recent early morning, Peter Wallerstein is on the job on a beach near Marina del Rey, Calif. His white truck is a familiar sight along this coastline. Next to him, a small blond dog named Pumpkin rides shotgun. Wallerstein, the Marine Animal Rescue director for Friends of Animals, gets a call. A woman tells him she spotted a sea lion at the Fisherman's Wharf at Cabrillo. "He's just laying there; he doesn't look good," she says. The phone rings every five minutes, and it's always about the same thing. There's another call. This time, it's a man telling Wallerstein that there's a sea mammal that looks hurt.

"Spooky" quantum entanglement connects two particles so that actions performed on one reflect on the other. Now, scientists propose testing entanglement over the greatest distance yet via an experiment on the International Space Station. Until now, entanglement has been established on relatively small scales in labs on Earth. But now physicists propose sending half of an entangled particle pair to the space station, which orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the planet. "According to quantum physics, entanglement is independent of distance," physicist Rupert Ursin said in a statement. "Our proposed Bell-type experiment will show that particles are entangled, over large distances - around 500 kilometers - for the very first time in an experiment." "Our experiments will also enable us to test potential effects gravity may have on quantum entanglement."

Once upon a time the nightly appearance of the star-filled sky was a part of our shared human experience. The stars inspired art, science, religion, and more. With the rise of cities and electric lighting the glow of civilization has been slowly removing the stars from our hearts and minds. This artificial brightening of the night sky is called light pollution. Because of it two thirds of the population can no longer see our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The glow of the cities is so bright that even when viewed from space, city light far outshines starlight. The glow that now pervades the night has done more than remove the stars from the sky. It wastes energy and dollars; harms wildlife; and can cause long-term health problems. International Dark Sky Week (IDSW) is currently underway (April 5-11). It was created to help draw attention to the widespread problems of light pollution...

Changes to their surroundings can trigger "rapid evolution" in species as they adopt traits to help them survive in the new conditions, a study shows. Studying soil mites in a laboratory, researchers found that the invertebrates' age of maturity almost doubled in just 20-or-so generations. It had been assumed that evolutionary change only occurred over a much longer timescale. The findings have been published in the journal Ecology Letters. "What this study shows for the first time is that evolution and ecology go hand-in-hand." "The implicit assumption has always been, from Darwin onwards, that evolution works on long timescale and ecology works on short timescales. "The thinking was that if you squash a population or you change the environment then nothing will happen from an evolutionary point-of-view for generations and generations, for centuries."

With upwards of 100 million Americans struggling with with sleep disorders, it stands to reason that science will need to come up with new sleep treatments that challenge the 4.5 billion dollar sleeping pill industry.

"Based on intelligence we and the Americans have collected, it's highly likely that North Korea will launch a missile," Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se of South Korea told a parliamentary hearing on Wednesday, adding that such a test would violate United Nations resolutions banning the country from testing ballistic missiles. "Such a possibility could materialize at any time from now." The American and South Korean troops raised their "Watchcon" level of vigilance, stepping up monitoring and intelligence-gathering activities.

Margaret Thatcher's Criminal Legacy
She will be remembered for colluding with the most reactionary elements of Rupert Murdoch's squalid media empire to launch a war over the Malvinas Islands in 1982, a war that caused hundreds of lives and involved the gratuitous sinking of an Argentine warship, the Belgrano,
President Barack Obama's coming push for less generous increases in Social Security benefits is angering his party and perplexing economists, many of whom question why he'd replace one ineffective measure with another. Obama will propose to shelve the standard measure of inflation, the consumer price index calculated by the Labor Department, as the basis for automatically adjusting the size of Social Security checks.

A federal judge has ruled the Obama administration broke the law when it issued oil leases in central California without fully weighing the environmental impact of "fracking," a setback for companies seeking to exploit the region's enormous energy resources. The decision, made public on Monday, effectively bars for the time being any drilling on two tracts of land comprising 2,500 acres leased for oil and gas development in 2011 by the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management in Monterey County.

Moniz has come under fire for his outspoken support of nuclear power,hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") for shale gas and the overarching "all-of-the-above" energy policy advocated by both President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent in the last election, Mitt Romney. Watchdogs have also discovered that Moniz has worked as a long-time corporate consultant for BP. He has also received the " frackademic" label for his time spent at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At his MIT job, Moniz regularly accepted millions of dollars from the oil and gas industry to sponsor studies under the auspices of The MIT Energy Initiative, which has received over $145 million over its seven-year history from the oil and gas industry.

Iraq's impunity rate, or the degree to which perpetrators have escaped prosecution for killing journalists, is the worst in the world at 100 percent. Even today, as Iraq has moved beyond the US conflict, both Iraqi and US governmental authorities have shown no interest in investigating these murders.

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr., fresh from his botched prosecution of sexual predator doninique Strauss-Kahn, sits in the nation's financial capital. He had finally gone after a bank, but instead of one of the four "too-big-too-fail" banks what are headquartered in his jurisdiction, he has indicted one of the smallest banks in the city, Chinatown's Abacus Bank, writes TCBH! journalist Dave Lindorff. Such courage!

There's an attitude that you don't speak ill of the dead. I don't agree.

It shouldn't surprise. It's already policy. Market analyst Graham Summers explained. Depositor theft is coming. Europe is banker occupied territory. So is America.

N.Korea's newest leader Kim Jong Un has been making "threatening" comments this past month about sending missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland & the U.S. has reacted with predictable alarm. But Un like his predecessors is all bluster & bravado. The idea that N. Korea would preemptively launch a nuclear strike aimed @ the U.S. knowing his country would be incinerated in retaliation makes the idea absurd. It won't happen.

On the Background check for gun purchasing

The young Kim Jong-un, 30, is matchless in the boys with toys department; he can play with loads of missiles, the fourth largest army in the world at 1.1 million (75 percent of them stationed within 100km of the DMZ) and, to top it off, a whole country. But as much as the real military powers behind the throne, he is not suicidal.



Latest Articles
Is the hatred leveled at Margaret Thatcher the same as the hatred leveled at Rick Warren? Is any of it legitimate?

Lay Off Iran
No more wars for America in the Middle East
Thatcherism
Thatcherism represents Chicago School fundamentalism writ large. She's gone. She won't be missed.

Best News Links from the Web
Several Senate Republicans on Tuesday came out publicly against filibustering the first major gun control legislation since 1993 before it is even brought up for debate on the Senate floor, as advocates inched toward breaking a conservative blockade of the measure. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said he would schedule a showdown vote for Thursday. His comments came as lobbying on gun control stepped up on Capitol Hill, with the families of children killed in Newtown, Conn., four months ago fanning out across the Senate to personally appeal to lawmakers to vote "yes."

One of the greatest mysteries is how the Universe began -- and also how and why does it appear to be ever-expanding? CERN physicist Tom Whyntie shows how cosmologists and particle physicists are exploring these questions by replicating the heat, energy, and activity of the first few seconds of our Universe, from right after the Big Bang.
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