ANNIE-ROSE STRASSER, - Think Progress
Stephan: The DEA and the ATF are out of control government agencies whose very existence depends on the continuation of the War on Drugs. The measure of their corruption can be seen in this report. Clearly they will do anything to keep the money for their budgets flowing.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) has coerced mentally disabled people into unwitting participation in undercover stings, and later arrested them for the actions performed during those stings, according to a new investigation released Monday by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
In several cities across the United States, the Sentinel found that ATF repeatedly used questionable tactics to try to further their investigations. A few of these involved paying or training mentally disabled people to involve themselves in crimes. For example, a man agents described as ‘slow-headed,” with an IQ in the 50s, was hired to work in a fake storefront set up by ATF. Undercover agents then encouraged by him to try to go out and find guns to buy. When he found them some, they arrested him, on over 100 counts of being a felon in possession of a gun.
ATF agents also once taught a man how to saw off a shotgun so that they could charge him with a more serious crime, and another time hired a felon to buy guns in a pawn shop, despite it being illegal for someone to knowingly sell a gun to a felon. And those are just some of the stories […]
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Stephan: Here is some very good news about AIDS and HIV. I have lost six friends to this disease and, I know, many of my readers have similar stories. Good news on this subject is always welcome.
The rate of HIV infections diagnosed in the United States has fallen by a third over the past decade, researchers say.
After examining cases from all 50 states, the study found that the diagnosis rate fell to 16.1 per 100,000 people in 2011 from 24.1 in 2002.
Experts celebrated the findings as a hopeful sign that the Aids epidemic may be slowing in the country.
However, there was a rise in new cases of HIV among gay and bisexual men aged under 24 and over 45.
HIV is the virus that causes Aids, a disease which destroys the immune system.
The World Health Organization estimates 35 million people globally have the virus. More than 1 million people in the US are thought to be infected, with 18% unaware of their infections.
From 2002 to 2011, 493,372 people were diagnosed with HIV in the US, researchers said.
As well as an overall decline, declines were also seen in the rates for men, women, whites, blacks, Hispanics, heterosexuals, injection drug users and most age groups.
Researchers said the only group in which diagnoses increased was gay and bisexual men.
“Among men who have sex with men, unprotected risk behaviours in the presence of high prevalence and unsuppressed viral load may continue […]
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JANET ALLON, - Reader Supported News/Alternet
Stephan: I am not a big fan of Obamacare; I thought we should have gone to a single payer system with national wellness as its first priority. It would have saved hundreds of billions of dollars and given us a real healthcare system, instead of an illness profit system. However, America is too much in the throes of vampire capitalism for that so we got Obamacare. It is hardly perfect but it is certainly an improvement. Yet the media hardly covers its successes. Paul Krugman explains why.
n immense policy success is slipping under the radar.
Paul Krugman proposes an interesting theory in today’s column about why the success of Obamacare is a story that is mostly being ignored by the media, and therefore kept from the American public. In fact, he suspects the mainstream news media does not even know how successful the Affordable Care Act is proving to be. Not that there is any excuse for that ignorance. How do they manage to stay so ignorant? Krugman thinks it may be because many of the people who work in media-especially the pundit class-are well enough off that they don’t need Obamacare, and these media elites seldom cover poor people or even talk to them much.
So, no excuses really. Why has the media been able to get away with getting the health reform story so wrong?
“Think relentless negativity without accountability,” Krugman writes:
The Affordable Care Act has faced nonstop attacks from partisans and right-wing media, with mainstream news also tending to harp on the act’s troubles. Many of the attacks have involved predictions of disaster, none of which have come true. But absence of disaster doesn’t make a compelling headline, and the people who […]
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CHRISTINA SARICH, - Nation of Change
Stephan: The contempt the morons of Congress show for the people who elected them I find one of the more bizarre aspects of 21st century American. Ninety percent of the population may want to do something, but the Congress, owned as it is by corporations and the uber-rich pays not the least attention.
Now here’s a pot calling a kettle black. Congress members declared outright and out loud that they believe Americans are too stupid to read GMO labels were they to be mandatory. This was an important “conclusion’ made at the close of a meeting of the House Agriculture Committee this past week.
It wasn’t just a few folks who think Americans aren’t bright enough to read a label. Members of the subcommittee on Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture, as well as their four experts said that the efforts of biotech to supply GMO crops to the world were successful, and that American people over-react to food which has been called “unhealthy.’
If this doesn’t get you steaming mad enough to write some letters to your Congress members with some very fierce vocabulary words that few of them likely understand – like “carcinogenic proclivity’, or “plurality of diseases and environmental damage’, or try this one on for size, “unconstitutionality of poisoning masses of the proletariat’ – then I don’t know what will.
Apparently those who want GMO labeling are alarmists, fear-mongering halfwits, and people who thrive on greed and fear. Sounds to me like some of the largest pesticide and seed making companies in […]
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TINA CASEY, - Clean Technica
Stephan: Here is some very exciting news about a non-carbon energy source that we don't hear much about.
Natural gas has been having a field day in the US energy profile for the past dozen years or so, but it looks like the sleeping giant of US geothermal power is being nudged out of its stupor. Yesterday, the Energy Department announced that it is plunking down $31 million to rev up a cutting edge geothermal demo project that could enable the US to tap into an estimated 100 gigawatts of geothermal power.
The new geothermal project, called FORGE for Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, is just one of a package of clean energy investments that President Obama has been rolling out in recent days.
US geothermal FORGE project
‘Virtual reservoir,” US geothermal FORGE project (cropped) courtesy of US DOE.
US Geothermal vs. Natural Gas
Earlier this week the US Energy Information Agency released a new futurecast in which the base scenario calls for almost 75% of all new generating capacity to be from gas-fired power plants. In consideration of the new geothermal announcement, which comes on top of stunning gains in wind and solar power, it looks like EIA has a bit of revising to do.
Here’s the Energy Department enthusing over FORGE:
The FORGE initiative is […]
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