Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
ZACK KALDVEER, - AlterNet
Stephan: This is what comes of making policy out of fear. We sold our civil rights to Osama bin Laden. It was an alchemical transaction. It cost him $500,000 and 19 followers. It has cost us trillions, untold lives, and our civil rights. The Founders would be appalled. This trend is so clear yet seems of so little interest. Probably because it is so profitable for the few and involves only a tiny percentage of the many.
Note also the reference to the Weiner Miasma that has dominated the last week's news cycle.
Zack Kaldveer is the Communications Director of the Consumer Federation of California, a non-profit advocacy organization. CFC campaigns for state and federal laws that place consumer protection ahead of corporate profit. Each year, CFC testifies before the California legislature on dozens of bills that affect millions of our state's consumers. CFC also appears before state agencies in support of consumer regulations. Recent CFC legislative issues include: protecting consumer financial privacy, advocating for single payer health care, supporting public financing of elections, cracking down on predatory mortgage and payday lenders, implementing an extraction tax on Big Oil, prohibiting manufacturers from keeping secret vital safety information about defective products, repealing California's anti-democratic two-thirds budget and tax rule, enacting cell phone users rights, and strengthening food safety laws. Zack also authors the blog Privacy Revolt..
With the stroke of an autopen, the once articulate critic of the Patriot Act signed a four year extension of the most dangerous assault on American civil liberties in US history without a single additional privacy protection.
One would think that this reauthorization would have incited vigorous debate in the halls of Congress and at least a fraction of the breathless 24/7 media coverage allotted the Anthony Weiner ‘sexting
No Comments
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
CHIP WARD, - Mother Jones
Stephan: If you have friends in the West, as I do, you have probably been hearing for some time about the drought and, now, the fires. I believe there is going to be a migration out of the Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico because of heat, fires, and a lack of water. Years ago I did a remote viewing project in the Egyptian desert -- go to my personal website and download the Marea paper you will find there -- and learned a powerful lesson about heat. At 114° the Bedouin lay down their tools. People who have lived in the desert for millennia go inside.
And that's just part of it. By the time water and electric bills get to $1,000 a month each I think you will be seeing a significant number of people moving out of those states.
There is a kind of weird reality going on. Human mediated climate change is occurring and there is a collective expression of denial that it is not happening.
A former grassroots organizer and librarian, Chip Ward, TomDispatch regular, writes from Torrey, Utah. He is the author of two books, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. His essays can be found by clicking here. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses global 'weirding,' click here, or download it to your iPod here. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It’s happening right here, right now.
Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained ‘zero contained’ for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not […]
No Comments
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
MICHAEL MCCARTHY, Environment Editor - The Independent (U.K.)
Stephan: This is part of what is coming. The sheeple just can't seem to muster the political will to realize their own self-interest is at risk, and to do something about it. Nothing short of millions of people on the Mall is going to get the attention of the media and the politicians. And I don't think that is going to happen either.
The world’s oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory, a major report suggests today. The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing.
The coming together of these factors is now threatening the marine environment with a catastrophe ‘unprecedented in human history’, according to the report, from a panel of leading marine scientists brought together in Oxford earlier this year by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
The stark suggestion made by the panel is that the potential extinction of species, from large fish at one end of the scale to tiny corals at the other, is directly comparable to the five great mass extinctions in the geological record, during each of which much of the world’s life died out. They range from the Ordovician-Silurian ‘event’ of 450 million years ago, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction of 65 million years ago, which is believed to have wiped out the […]
No Comments
ZAID JILANI, - truthout.org/Think Progress
Stephan: Osama bin Laden's plan, as he explicitly spelled it out, was to do to the United States what he had successfully done to the Soviet Union: to use the natural inclinations of the neocons, then in power -- and subsequently continued by the Obama Administration -- to bankrupt and disrupt the United States. Look at this list and ask yourself: Who's the winner here?
And this assessment doesn't take into consideration the hundreds of billions spent on Iraq, Libya, Yemen, or the insanities of Homeland Security.
President Obama is expected to announce within a week if and how many combat troops he plans to withdraw from the war in Afghanistan. Some of those who will be most impacted by the decision are U.S. soldiers and their families and Afghans who have been dealing with the ramifications of the war for nearly a decade.
Yet the war is affecting more than just Western soldiers and their families and Afghan citizens. It has become a costly drain on our nation’s treasury; the money that is being spent on the war represents resources that are being drained away from important domestic priorities in a nation with sky-high unemployment and crumbling infrastructure.
Using data from the National Priorities Project, ThinkProgress calculated ten investments America could’ve afforded if it didn’t spend $113 billion – the allotment made in Fiscal Year 2011 – on the war in Afghanistan. Each one of these policy options represents an equivalent $113 billion cost:
– Provide 57.5 Million Children With Low-Income Health Care For 2011
– Provide 23 Million People With Low-Income Health Coverage In 2011
– Give 20.2 Million $5,500 Pell Grants To Students In 2011
[…]
No Comments
CATHERINE PADDOCK, PHD, - University of Leeds - Mayo Clinic
Stephan: Perhaps the beginning of the beginning of the end of this largely culturally mediated disease.
Thanks to Damien Broderick, PhD.
SOURCE: 'Broad antigenic coverage induced by vaccination with virus-based cDNA libraries cures established tumors.'
Timothy Kottke, Fiona Errington, Jose Pulido, Feorillo Galivo, Jill Thompson, Phonphimon Wongthida, Rosa Maria Diaz, Heung Chong, Elizabeth Ilett, John Chester, Hardev Pandha, Kevin Harrington, Peter Selby, Alan Melcher & Richard Vile.
Nature Medicine, Published online: 19 June 2011
DOI:10.1038/nm.2390
An experimental human vaccine that uses a ‘library of DNA’ to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer cells without harming healthy cells, cured well-established prostate tumors in mice with no apparent side effects, wrote US and UK researchers in a study published this week in the journal Nature Medicine. The hope is that one day patients will receive such a vaccine without chemotherapy or radiotherapy and thus become tumor free while avoiding the toxic side effects of current treatments.
Lead author Dr Richard Vile, an immunologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, US, told the press that:
‘We are hopeful that this will overcome some of the major hurdles which we have seen with immunotherapy cancer research.’
He said clinical trials could be under way within the next two years.
Immunotherapy or ‘vaccines’ for cancer are not like conventional vaccines that aim to prevent disease: the aim is to wipe out already established disease or stop it spreading.
The holy grail of researchers in this new field is to stimulate the immune system to attack only the diseased part of an organ, without triggering a response that is so strong that it also attacks healthy tissue, as in an autoimmune disease.
The challenge is […]
No Comments
