Friday, August 17th, 2012
STEPHEN DINAN, - The Washington Times
Stephan: In its own way this is good news. It shows a certain decency. And this kind of technology is irresistible in the current culture. We are moving toward a soft police state.
I found it interesting that the only place that featured this story was the deeply conservative Washington Times.
The nation’s police chiefs have adopted a code of conduct for their use of drones, including letting any images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, be open to inspection by the public, and that the images not be stored unless they are evidence of a crime or part of an ongoing investigation.
The chiefs also said that if they plan to fly drones over an area where they are likely to spot criminal activity and where they would be intruding on someone’s ‘reasonable expectations of privacy,
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Friday, August 17th, 2012
TIFFANY HSU, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: One of the unintended consequences of the recession and the great transition the U.S. is going through is that our birthrate is dropping like a rock. How ironic that the Rightists, amongst whose members is a significant population of white racists are creating the very conditions that assure the white portion of the American population will shrink.
As the Economist noted, 'in 2011 America's fertility rate was below replacement level and below that of some large European countries. The American rate is now 1.9 and falling. France's is 2.0 and stable. The rate in England is 2.0 and rising slightly.
The tough economy and high unemployment have young people hesitant to reproduce, with the U.S. fertility rate expected to fall to a quarter-century low this year even though the number of women in prime childbearing age is swelling.
The average woman will have 1.87 children in 2012, according to the U.S. Fertility Forecast from Demographic Intelligence. That’s 12% below the 2007 high of 2.12 children per woman.
By next year, the rate will hit 1.86. Fertility has declined most among Latinas and those with less education; births have risen for Asians and college-educated parents.
Birthing rates haven’t been this low since the 1980s. Researchers blame the recession and its aftermath, which have hit young people especially hard.
Fertility fell most among women younger than 30, down 6% in five years among potential mothers ages 25 to 29. That’s the generation slammed by steep unemployment – 12.8% for 18-to-29-year-olds – along with weighty student loans and a shaky housing market for first-timers.
Bringing children into the picture is pricey. The average child now costs $234,900 to raise – up 3.5% from 2010 and not including college. A report last year found that 23% of young Americans said they’re holding off on starting a family specifically because […]
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Friday, August 17th, 2012
Stephan: I think this has enormous potential. It would allow neighborhoods within cities, or villages to become largely food independent, without great land costs. Food is going to be an issue.
Daiwa House, Japan’s largest homebuilder, has introduced a line of prefabricated hydroponic vegetable factories, aimed at housing complexes, hotels, and top-end restaurants. Called the Agri-Cube, these units are touted by Daiwa as the first step in the industrialization of agriculture, to be located in and amongst the places where people live, work, and play.
More and more people desire sustainable, organic produce for their own use, and are turning to urban farming in an effort to insure the highest degree of freshness. However, some municipalities, neighborhoods, and homeowners associations have rules that effectively block such endeavors in areas under their sway. Add drought and pest control to the picture, and suddenly urban farming may seem more trouble than it is worth. There is a growing need for local supplies of freshly grown produce that avoids the difficulties presented by conventional small farms and gardens.
This is where the Agri-Cube comes in. Measuring less than five meters (about 16 feet) in length and 2.5 meters (about 8 feet) wide, Daiwa’s Agri-Cubes are smaller than a twenty-foot equivalent shipping container. An Agri-Cube can be brought to an installation site on the bed of a light heavy-duty truck. A concrete foundation about 10 square meters […]
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Thursday, August 16th, 2012
PETER SCHWEIZER, - Daily Beast
Stephan: Here is another rather seedy Holder report. I think he has been a very poor Attorney General, as the marijuana story and this one demonstrate. The failure to prosecute the rapist capitalists responsible for the crash is a major part of what has made citizens so disgusted and distrustful of government. It is always a mistake to so blatantly favor the rich, as Holder has done.
Peter Schweizer is the president of the Government Accountability Institute and the William J. Casey Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 2008-09 he served as a consultant to the White House Office of Presidential Speechwriting and he is a former consultant to NBC News. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. His new book is Throw Them All Out.
The Justice Department’s decision not to prosecute Goldman Sachs in a financial-fraud probe is another sign of the cronyism that has kept Attorney General Eric Holder from taking action against other big Wall Street firms, says Peter Schweizer.
On Thursday the Department of Justice announced it will not prosecute Goldman Sachs or any of its employees in a financial-fraud probe.
The news is likely to raise the ire of the political left and right, both of which have highlighted one of the most inconvenient facts of Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department: despite the Obama administration’s promises to clean up Wall Street in the wake of America’s worst financial crisis, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.
Why is that? In a word: cronyism.
Take Goldman Sachs, for example. Thursday’s announcement that there will be no prosecutions should hardly come as a surprise. In 2008, Goldman Sachs employees were among Barack Obama’s top campaign contributors, giving a combined $1,013,091. Eric Holder’s former law firm, Covington & Burling, also counts Goldman Sachs as one of its clients. Furthermore, in April 2011, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued […]
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Thursday, August 16th, 2012
MARTIN A. LEE, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: I cannot ascertain if this is entirely accurate, but I will say it is a well researched, plausible, and coherent narrative of the weird about face of the Obama Administration concerning medical marijuana. Nothing I have seen contradicts it. It is so cynical it makes you want to throw up.
Martin A. Lee's newest book is Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana (Scribner, August 2012). He is the cofounder of the media watch group FAIR, director of Project CBD, and a contributor to BeyondTHC.com.
Eric Holder, Obama’s embattled attorney general, was under mounting pressure from Congress to explain the botched ‘Fast and Furious’ sting operation, in which 2,000 assault rifles and other firearms were sold to suspected traffickers for the Mexican drug cartels. It was intended as an intelligence-gathering ploy, but U.S. agents lost track of most of these weapons.
A drug war covert operation run by the Phoenix branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Fast and Furious remained a secret until the murder of an American border patrol agent in December 2010. Two guns found at the scene of the murder had been sold during the Fast and Furious operation. Arms from the same misbegotten cache were subsequently linked to many other crimes.
For several months Holder stonewalled, disavowing any knowledge of the caper despite documentation showing that high-level Justice Department officials aided the surveillance mission. The fact that Fast and Furious had its roots in a similar Bush-era ATF operation mattered little to GOP Rep. Darrell Issa, the grandstanding chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who went so far as to accuse the Obama administration of purposely allowing the guns to escape as part of a […]
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