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I somewhat infrequently read Dmitri Orlov. He’s Russian born, but moved to the US as a child, was educated here and wrote a book called Reinventing Collapse which I found illuminating. He recently penned a piece about our indelicate handling of the rest of the world, taken from his Russian perspective. I don’t necessarily share all of Dmitri’s beliefs, but I do think it important to understand how the world looks from the vantage points of others. How to start a war and lose an empire. I was the subject of a radio interview a week or so ago, just before the release of the movie, Kill the Messenger, about the late Gary Webb. Listen to the interview here. Watch this movie.
WARNING: Below, you will be exposed to toxic thinking and noxious conclusions from right-wing partisans. A Level Four HazMat suit is recommended. The CDC will NOT be available for protection. You have been warned. Proceed with caution. Should you experience nausea, vomiting, tearing eyes, a rise in blood pressure SHUT DOWN YOUR BROWSER IMMEDIATELY and seek expert medical attention from Doctors Jack Daniels or Jim Beam. The Ebola crisis is, in point of fact, a manufactured crisis. Media outlets, tired of covering insipid and meaningless political horse races found a sexy and dangerous news item and not only ran with it, but decided to tie it into the politics of the day. The prevailing wisdom, of course, is this crisis reflects badly on the CDC. I suppose when you push a false narrative, it has to. After all, the CDC is supposed to be on top of “crises” like these, and handle them with aplomb. The Voice of America, By Scott Bobb, October 19 Suruc, Turkey -The offensive by Islamic State militants against the northern Syrian city of Kobani has caused hundreds of thousands of residents to flee to Turkey. They receive help from Turkish authorities and individuals, but say much more is needed. Morning in Suruc, southeastern Turkey. Rojava camp – one of several in this town of 20,000 – is a new neighborhood of refugees who arrived following the seizure of parts of Kobani by the Islamic State, or IS. Some 400,000 people from Kobani and its surrounding villages, mostly Kurds, fled after IS militants executed hundreds of local residents saying they were infidels, according to Shaheen, a farmer who will give only his first name out of fear of reprisals against relatives still inside. “They bombed and destroyed everything. They executed my cousin then they shared the photo of his head on Facebook. His name was Zuhir,” he said. McClatchy, By Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor, October 16 A soon-to-be released Senate report on the CIA doesn’t assess the responsibility of former President George W. Bush or his top aides for any of the abuses of the agency’s detention and interrogation program, avoiding a full public accounting of one of the darkest chapters of the war on terror. “This report is not about the White House. It’s not about the president. It’s not about criminal liability. It’s about the CIA’s actions or inactions,” said a person familiar with the document, who asked not to be further identified because the executive summary – the only part to that will be made public – still is in the final stages of declassification. The Senate Intelligence Committee report also didn’t examine the responsibility of top Bush administration lawyers in crafting the legal framework that permitted the CIA to use simulated drowning called waterboarding and other interrogation methods widely described as torture, McClatchy has learned. “It does not look at the Bush administration’s lawyers to see if they were trying to literally do an end run around justice and the law,” the person said. The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics Blog, By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, October 16 Chelsea, MA —Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen on Thursday visited a nonprofit group here that helps unemployed people find work, and posed a question at the heart of the central bank’s debate over when to start raising interest rates. “I’d be interested in any observations about what happened when you looked for jobs,” Ms. Yellen told current and former participants of the group’s programs. “Is it that you just couldn’t find things that were available, that the job market seemed weak, or is it particularly that your skills or things that you felt you needed to do in order to qualify for jobs that were there?” Don’t they have an army of statisticians looking into this? Ms. Yellen – have you no training in optics? Resolution holds that presidents have 60-day window to conduct hostilities without an act of Congress blessing the conflict The Guardian, By Spencer Ackerman, October 16 New York – The White House on Wednesday said a timetable that expired over a week ago limiting its ability to continue a war unauthorized by Congress does not apply to the operation against the Islamic State (Isis) militant group. The 1973 War Powers Resolution holds that presidents have a 60-day window to conduct hostilities without an act of Congress blessing the conflict. Absent such an explicit authorization, wars are supposed to lose their legal force. The White House repeatedly cited the War Powers Resolution throughout the summer, as it notified Congress about troop deployments and airstrikes that inaugurated the war. Initial troop deployments for the war began in mid-June, although some legal scholars doubted that the ostensibly non-combat deployments started the clock. Guardian – The US Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked key parts of a 2013 law in Texas that had closed all but eight facilities providing abortions in America’s second most-populous state. In an unsigned order, the justices sided with abortion rights advocates and health care providers in suspending an October 2 ruling by a panel of the New Orleans-based US 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that Texas could immediately apply a rule that would force abortion clinics statewide to spend millions of dollars on hospital-level upgrades. Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented. Friday’s Jukebox early… NYT – For the first time, researchers have created what they call Alzheimer’s in a Dish — a petri dish with human brain cells that develop the telltale structures of Alzheimer’s disease. In doing so, they resolved a longstanding problem of how to study Alzheimer’s and search for drugs to treat it; the best they had until now were mice that developed an imperfect form of the disease. The key to their success, said the lead researcher, Rudolph E. Tanzi of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was a suggestion by his colleague Doo Yeon Kim to grow human brain cells in a gel, where they formed networks as in an actual brain. They gave the neurons genes for Alzheimer’s disease. Within weeks they saw the hard Brillo-like clumps known as plaques and then the twisted spaghetti-like coils known as tangles — the defining features of Alzheimer’s disease. The work, which also offers strong support for an old idea about how the disease progresses, was published in Nature on Sunday. BBC, October 12 Flights were cancelled amid pounding winds and rain, while hundreds of thousands had to evacuate their homes. The storm is due to make landfall on Kyushu island on Monday morning. Kyushu’s bullet train services were suspended on Sunday due to the wind.
A mass evacuation is taking place in India’s south-eastern coast a day before Cyclone Hudhud is expected to hit land. Around 150,000 people have already left their homes in the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh. The cyclone, classed as “very severe” by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), is expected to hit Orissa and Andhra Pradesh states on Sunday. The IMD predicts the storm will bring winds of up to 195km/h (120mph). * * * * * A powerful cyclone crashed against the eastern coast of India on Sunday, uprooting trees, lashing the area with heavy rain and wind, and disrupting power and communication lines.Close to 300,000 people were evacuated from their homes in parts of the states of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh as of Sunday evening, according to disaster and relief officials in each state. Consumerist, By Laura Northrup, October 10 Let’s say that you’re a brand, like Nabisco or the North Face, and you want to see what people are saying about you online. You could do a text search of Facebook and Twitter, but that’s soooo 2009, and you can’t guarantee that people will always label the photos they take. Instead, third-party companies are slurping up every public photo that you upload online and scanning them to see what you’re eating, drinking, and wearing. Last week’s theme sank like a stone….time to give imitation a shot. Part of this week’s theme is from an old Guardian “readers recommend” list – they have hundreds. (extra points for not using that as a crutch). Or post any song that you can’t keep out of your head…
Betty Wright: “The Cleanup Woman” |
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