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05-16-09

• Military-Industrial Profiteers - Criminal to the Core:
• Rumsfeld's Renegade Unit Blamed for Afghan Deaths - Special Forces group implicated in three incidents that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians (independent)
• Barack McSame Obama (salon - nytimes) "The president's recent decisions on detainee abuse photos and tribunals have put him more in line with his predecessor, despite pledges of a new direction."
• Rightwing Christians usually lie like a rug to try to justify their hateful, homophobic bigotry:
• Anti-gay bigots caught lying again (americablog) - Lost In Homophobic Translation (sobeale)
• Ex-Archbishop of Milwaukee Speaks About Catholic Church and Homosexuality (nytimes) "If we say our God is an all-loving god,” he said, “how do you explain that at any given time probably 400 million living on the planet at one time would be gay? Are the religions of the world, as does Catholicism, saying to those hundreds of millions of people, you have to pass your whole life without any physical, genital expression of that love?"
• Battling Runaway Corporatist Scams:
• Michael Pollan’s New Advice on Buying Food: “Don’t Buy Any Food You’ve Ever Seen Advertised” (democracynow)
• Atlantis and Hubble Side by Side (apod)
  

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05-15-09

• Seeing the Matrix:
• Paul Craig Roberts: Who Rules America? (informationclearinghouse) "A president who does a good job for the ruling interest groups is paid off with remunerative corporate directorships, outrageous speaking fees, and a lucrative book contract. If he is young when he assumes office, like Bill Clinton and Obama, it means a long life of luxurious leisure. Fighting the special interests doesn’t pay and doesn’t succeed."
• The Curious Case of the Establishment Liberal: Condemning Torture, Condoning Mass Murder (strike-the-root)
• Obama Following the Reagan/Bush Playbook:
• Obama Nominates Superfund Polluter Lawyer To Run DOJ Environment Division (thinkprogress) Moreno is now general counsel for GE, which "has been a leader in the effort to roll back the Superfund law and stave off any requirements for full cleanup and restoration of sites they helped create."
• Military-Industrial Profiteers:
• Jeremy Scahill: Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama (alternet)
• Ray McGovern: 'Ugly' Questions for Gen. Myers (commondreams)
• Why Doesn't Obama Want Us to See What's in the Photos? (mcclatchy) (google images)
• Wilkerson: Cheney Ordered Torture of al-Libi to Produce Iraq Link (firedoglake)
• Former Blackwater Guards Doing the Same Murderous Thing in Afghanistan (wsj)
• The Biggest Theft in History:
• Lendman: Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part V (sjlendman) -- See entry on 05-13 for part IV (Lendman: Reviewing Ellen . . .).
• Man-Made Diseases:
• Tamiflu Developer: Swine Flu Could Have Come From Bio-Experiment Lab (abcnews) -- I suspect that this notable researcher is parsing his words carefully so as to not say the virus was deliberately released in a town in nowhere, Mexico, where people are reluctant to go to doctors until their illnesses become critical, near a swine farm that could be later conveniently be blamed for being the source, even though WHO had not had ANY reports of sick swine until a swine herd in Canada was given the flu by a human.
• M97: The Owl Nebula (apod)
  

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05-14-09

• Name That GOP Scam:
• Robert Reich: The Truth Behind the Social Security and Medicare Alarm Bells (robertreich) "Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one, but the problem is not really Medicare; it's quickly rising health-care costs. Look more closely and the real problem isn't even health-care costs; it's a system that pushes up costs by rewarding inefficiency . . . ."
• Elusive Jellyfish Nebula (apod)
  

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05-13-09

• The Biggest Theft in History:
• Lendman: Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt:" Part IV (sjlendman) -- See entry on 05-12 for part III (Lendman: Reviewing Ellen . . .).
• Killing Off the Rule of Law:
• Greenwald: Obama's latest effort to conceal evidence of Bush era crimes (salon) Obama is guilty of war crimes by covering up Bush's war crimes, refusing to prosecute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them. These acts in themselves are violations of the Geneva and the UN Convention, and that makes Obama just one more war criminal NOW.
• The Bush Crime Family:
• Family of Secrets - Guns and Butter, broadcast May 6, 2009, with Author Russ Baker (informationclearinghouse 60-minute audio) "'Family of Secrets', The Bush Dynasty, The Powerful Forces That Put It In The White House, and What Their Influence Means For America"
• A Space Shuttle Before Dawn (apod)
  

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05-12-09

• The Biggest Theft in History:
• Lendman: Reviewing Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt" (sjlendman Part III) -- See entry on 05-09 for parts I and II (Lendman: Reviewing Ellen . . .).
• A Complete Solar Cycle from SOHO (apod)
  

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05-11-09

• Military-Industrial Profiteers -- Seeing the Matrix for What It Is:
• What is the difference between a Middle Eastern terrorist (therefore worthy of prison and torture) and a U.S. soldier fighting in the Middle East (a hero)? One thing only: institutionalized government backing. Many of the so-called terrorists who were tortured in Gitmo and secret prisons were merely Taliban fighters picked up as they tried to escape across the mountains to Pakistan - not even necessarily caught in an act of aggression against U.S. forces. Some were merely non-combatant men against whom their captors or accusers had personal grudges to settle, and along the the way, collect a bounty for their contribution to fighting the 'war on terror'. Bush and the dutiful lapdog U.S. press dubbed them 'terrorists', even though they would never think of dubbing a captured U.S. bomber pilot or captured U.S. soldier on the ground a terrorist. If a U.S. soldier were captured, s/he would be expected to be designated a 'prisoner of war' and receive the full protections of the Geneva Conventions. As the opponent with the world's biggest arsenal of WMD's and biggest bully pulpit, this distinction should make us really proud of ourselves, right? Why could they possibly hate us?
• DADT - Shameful, Expensive, Wasteful Institutionalized Bigotry: SLDN accuses Obama of caving to religious right on military ban (americablog - sldn) -- Do I smell a Clintonesque sellout brewing?
• Pakistani President Zadari: Osama Was an Operator for the United States And Has Been Dead for Some Time (youtube)
• “America’s Disappeared”: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison (informationclearinghouse) The man "whose claim that Saddam Hussein had been involved in training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons was used to justify the invasion of Iraq — has died in a Libyan jail" -- How convenient for Bush and his Gang. Isn't it curious that so many key witnesses and players in Bush's crimes have somehow ended up dead before they could testify?
• Forty Thousand Meteor Origins Across the Sky (apod)
  

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05-10-09

• The Biggest Theft in History:
• The Depression that Hayek Built (firedoglake) -- Click here to enlarge the graphic.
• The Flu - Let's All Be Scared to Death:
• Top flu expert warns of a swine flu-bird flu mix (washingtonpost) "Bird flu kills more than 60 percent of its human victims, but doesn't easily pass from person to person. Swine flu can be spread with a sneeze or handshake, but kills only a small fraction of the people it infects. So what happens if they mix?" -- There is a bit of evidence out there that suggests that the A-H1N1 may be a bio-engineered flu virus. Is this the ultimate way the good folks who may have created it planned all the time to use it. What an answer to the man-made global broiling problem! Consider a world with a billion or two fewer people demanding products and services that require the emission of global warming gases to produce them. Actually, while horrible, a billion or two would not be a extremely large number when compared to the scope of the global broiling catastrophe -- and the fact that the world's population has lately been doubling about every forty years. But it could buy the super-elites in charge a little time to work on the global warming emissions problem in a way that might actually prevent the destruction of all terrestrial species in the next one to two hundred years, which seems to be the way we're now headed. After all, if the super-elite want to rule the world with the new world order they've been pushing for years, they have to have a world of people left to rule. -- If it happens, just like the poor people of New Orleans, we're going to be on our own. Get prepared to be on your own for weeks or months. If it is severe enough, essential services will shut down because of lack of manpower. That even includes groceries, gasoline stations, electricity, water supply, and possibly others. Get real. Get prepared. It's something we all should have been preparing for all along in anticipation for the possible development of a bird flu pandemic.
• Epidemic Influenza And Vitamin D (medicalnewstoday) "All of the patients on my ward had been taking 2,000 units of vitamin D every day for several months or longer. Could that be the reason none of my patients caught the flu?" -- I think he's talking about a garden-variety flu strain, not a bio-engineered version. Even so, who knows what benefit such steps might help, including being up to date on one's pneumonia vaccinations, since pneumonia produces so many of the fatalities in ordinary flu rampages?
• Will Summer Weather Suppress Swine Flu? (washingtonpost)
• Links: Flu Wiki Forum, a source of flu information from around the world. - PandemicFlu.gov has lots of ideas about preparing for it. But don't trust them when they say to store a week or two of water and food. Multiply that several times. - Flutrackers.com has the growing series of 'Flu and You' articles from DemFromCT (part 8 up at Daily KOS today). - Getpandemicready for 3-months of preparation suggestions.
• M31: The Andromeda Galaxy (apod) -- The largest and most distant object you can see with the naked eye.