Crystal Lee Sutton

UK Anti-Piracy Plans Cost More Than Music Industry ‘Losses’

by enigmax

As the UK file-sharing debate reaches fever pitch, with opinionated artists being shipped in by the bus load to condemn it, inevitably attention is turning to the costs associated with trying to end it. According to a boss at ISP BT, not only are the government's plans doomed to fail, but could end up costing ISPs a staggering £1m a day.

As Lily Allen leads a procession of artists showing a united front against online music piracy and calls ever louder for the government to do something about it, the cold light of day has kicked in. Just how much is the hoped-for crackdown on illicit file-sharers going to cost?

Yesterday, speaking with the UK's The Mirror, John Petter, boss of ISP BT's consumer division, said that measures to tackle Internet piracy will be costly.

Noting that ISP profit margins are already small, Petter said he fears that the process could cost ISPs a staggering £365m a year.

However, according to Jupiter Reseach, whose figures the BPI uses when trying to convince others how much money they lose, the British music industry will lose £200m worth of business to online piracy in 2009.

If the BPI's 'losses' figures are to be believed (and we have to go along with the ridiculous premise of 1 download = 1 lost sale in order to do so), saving £200m worth of business will end up costing ISPs almost double that amount.

"Their [music industry] claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense," said Petter, adding that laws are already in place to deal with illicit file-sharing, but the industry doesn't want to use those particular ones because it would hurt their public image.

Petter's final point is possibly the most important one. He believes that the war against file-sharing will lead to a technological arms race as Internet users find new ways to hide their activities.

Indeed, by spending a measly £3.00 per month on a cheapo VPN service from the likes of SwissVPN, it's possible for any user to tunnel right out of the UK and no-one in the country will have a clue what they are doing on their connection. Not the BPI, not ISPs, not the government.

That's around 10p per day to defeat a £1m a day system that isn't even in place yet. Something doesn't add up.

http://torrentfreak.com/uk-anti-piracy-plans-cost-more-than-music-industry-losses-090922/

A nasty acorn

ACORN: The Most Cost-Effective Investment the Government (and Foundations) Have Ever Made

The real purpose of the right's attacks on ACORN is to destroy a remarkably successful 50-year-old grassroots model for defending the poor and workers.

By David Morris

To understand the current attacks on ACORN, and the organization itself, we need to go back more than 60 years, to the 1930s and the New Deal, when for the first time, the federal government accepted responsibility for directly helping the non-working poor.

These programs were expanded in the 1940s, but in the 1950s, a backlash erupted against the poor, driven by several factors.

The postwar prosperity dramatically reduced the number of poor families, and an increasing number of black women were added to the welfare rolls, injecting race into the debate.

Meanwhile, a Republican White House mostly left welfare matters to the states.

The myth of welfare recipients as lazy, immoral chiselers began to circulate. States adopted punitive laws to reduce welfare rolls. Special units of welfare departments conducted "midnight raids" to see if the recipients were involved in a relationship with a man, something that would result in a cut-off of benefits. The average grant declined.

In desperation, low-income mothers in dozens of big cities organized for survival. They came together to collectively negotiate not only with welfare offices for benefits, but with utilities to eliminate deposits required from low-income households and with the post office to install locks on mailboxes in apartment houses to prevent the theft of welfare checks.

Several veterans of the civil rights movement worked to bring local welfare-rights organizations together into a national organization.

In June 1966, a coordinated national day of action brought tens of thousands of people into the streets in 16 major cities. Two months later, representatives of 75 local welfare-rights organizations convened in Chicago to create the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Led by George Wiley, a Ph.D. chemist and leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, NWRO was an unusual organization. It was a federation of local groups that coordinated local and national actions. Black women comprised a majority of its leadership.

NWRO's successes led to rapid growth. By 1969, it boasted over 500 chapters with 22,500 dues-paying families.

In the late 1960s, a growing number of people looked to create a broad-based anti-poverty movement, an idea embraced by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Poor People's Campaign, in which NWRO played an important role.

In 1972, when Wiley left NWRO, he told the New York Times, "The welfare-rights movement created a political and economic crisis around the issue of welfare which could have led to reform or repression. What we are witnessing is repression, and we need a broad, organized movement to counter it."

Wiley wanted to use the NWRO model to build a coalition of the working poor, unemployed, seniors and the lower middle class around issues such as national health insurance, consumer rights, housing and tax reform.

After a tragic accident took Wiley's life in 1973, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, created by two former NWRO organizers Wiley had sent to Little Rock, Ark., in 1970, became the primary vehicle for implementing his vision.

Led by Wade Rathke, ACORN had affiliates in 20 cities by 1980. Today, it has about 400,000 low- and moderate-income members in more than 100 cities in 40 states.

ACORN is one of the few grassroots neighborhood organizations capable of wielding power on a national scale.

It is unique in the combination of strategies it uses: organizing, direct action, lawsuits, lobbying and the provision of direct services.

That ACORN is a federation of self-governing locals with a national board comprised largely of poor people seems to both amaze and gall the right.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/142812/acorn:_the_most_cost-effective_investment_the_government_%28and_foundations%29_have_ever_made

ACORN could have gotten away with it if they said this

Drunk, near-naked Yeltsin found hunting pizza near White House

Boris Yeltsin's drinking 'almost created an international incident', according to Bill Clinton.

Russian leader Boris Yeltsin was once found near the White House late at night dressed in his underwear, seemingly drunk and looking for pizza, according to a new book detailing Bill Clinton's presidency.

The claim comes in a 700-page expose, parsed from hours of secret recordings made by the former US president and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch, excerpts of which were published in USA Today.

Clinton "relayed how Boris Yeltsin's late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident" Taylor told the paper.

Yeltsin had been staying at Blair House, metres from the White House, when he was discovered roaming by secret service agents. When confronted trying to hail a taxi, the former president slurred that he was looking for pizza.

Yeltsin, who died in 2007, is remembered for embarrassing drunken incidents, once seizing the baton from a bandmaster in Germany to conduct and playing the spoons on the president of Kyrgyzstan's bald head.

The book, by a long-time Clinton friend, also details the then president's views of candidates vying to succeed him. In Clinton's view George W Bush "was unqualified to be president ... but he had shrewd campaign instincts".

John McCain, who would eventually lose to Bush and again to Barack Obama in 2008, "might make a good president, but he had no idea how to run."

The book, released next week, is based on 79 taped interviews, which where kept largely secret from Clinton's staff, despite being conducted in the Treaty Room and other locations around the White House.

The tapes were apparently hidden in Clinton's sock drawer.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/drunk-nearnaked-yeltsin-found-hunting-pizza-near-white-house-20090923-g0vv.html

Zen GPS

Dick: the secret house organ of the Republican Party

 

Everyone seems to be agreeing with Bin Laden these days

 

Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message that we're losing Afghanistan

by Robert Fisk

Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president's critics – indeed, for many critics of the West's military occupation of Afghanistan – are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama's (and their) greatest enemy.

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates – once more the Secretary of Defence – and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military "surges" appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address "the American people" this week. "You are waging a hopeless and losing war," he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. "The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby." There was no more talk of Obama as a "house Negro" although it was his "weakness", bin Laden contended, that prevented him from closing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, Muslim fighters wold wear down the US-led coalition in Afghanistan "like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed". Funny, that. It's exactly what bin Laden told me personally in Afghanistan – four years before 9/11 and the start of America's 2001 adventure south of the Amu Darya river.

Almost on cue this week came those in North America who agree with Obama – albeit they would never associate themselves with the Evil One, let alone dare question Israel's cheerleading for the Iraqi war. "I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan," announces Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the senate intelligence committee. "I believe it will remain a tribal entity." And Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, does not believe "there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan".

Colin Kenny, chair of Canada's senate committee on national security and defence, said this week that "what we hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan has proved to be impossible. We are hurtling towards a Vietnam ending".

Close your eyes and pretend those last words came from the al-Qa'ida cave. Not difficult to believe, is it? Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-everyone-seems-to-be-agreeing-with-bin-laden-these-days-1790058.html

British army "widespreadly torture Iraqi civilians"

 

British army used widespread torture methods in Iraq, a British government lawyer said on Monday in an aknowledgement on a public inquiry into the 2003 death of hotel receptionist Baha Mousa.

The British soldiers responsible for the death of Baha Mousa were "not just a few bad apples," Singh told the inquiry. "There is something rotten in the whole barrel," he said.

Baha Mousa, a 26-year old Iraqi, was beaten and killed in the custody of British troops following a raid on his hotel in the southern Iraq city of Basra in September 2003.

He died after suffering up to 100 injuries in the course of 36 hours of beating during which he screamed constantly, the inquiry heard.

British troops in Iraq routinely used harsh interrogation methods banned by the government in 1972 after they were used against civilians in Northern Ireland and clearly did not think they were doing anything illegal, Rabinder Singh, a lawyer for the Mousa family said.

An autopsy concluded that Mousa died of asphyxia, caused by a stress position that soldiers forced him to maintain.

In 2006, British army corporal Donald Payne was convicted of a war crime after pleading guilty to torturing civilians at a court martial.

Six soldiers were cleared of wrongdoing at a court martial in 2007, but a seventh pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating Iraqi civilians and was jailed and dismissed from the military.

Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has apologized for the death and last year agreed to pay 2.83 million pounds (4.58 million dollars) in compensation to the families of Mousa and nine other men.

David Barr, counsel for the MoD, said "The brutality was completely unacceptable. It has stained the reputation of the British army.

Singh said the inquiry should determine why and on whose authority previously banned interrogation techniques were used against Iraqi civilians.

 

http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=47510

Obama Foreign Policy Advisor Calls For US to Shoot Down Israeli Jets

Last year Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to former US president Jimmy Carter, described the Bush administration's policy of maintaining the option of military action against Iran as "counterproductive."

Now Brzezinski, who advises Obama on foreign policy, is calling for the US to shoot down Israeli jets.
Brzezinski is known to be anti-Israel.
The Weekly Standard Blog reported:

In a little noticed interview with the Daily Beast (presumably little noticed because serious people don't read the Daily Beast), Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Barack Obama do more than just refuse to support an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites -- the American president must give the order to shoot down Israeli aircraft as they cross Iraqi airspace:

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America's worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

No wonder the Iranian regime is so impressed with Brzezinski.

 

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/obama-foreign-policy-advisor-calls-for.html

On Paywall Issue, Combatants Basically Agree

By paulgillin

 

Mark Glaser invites two big thinkers on opposite sides of the micropayment debate – Techdirt's Mike Masnick and The New York Times' David Carr – to spar with each other and try to reach some common ground. The result is what you'd expect when you put two talented writers into competition with each other: Great wordplay and eventual meeting in the middle.

Both combatants agree that putting paywalls in front of existing content is suicidal, although Carr believes that citizens will shell out once they realize that the alternative is cacophony. Masnick wins the award for best imagery: Paywalls are "putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth," he writes. He sees no merit in paywalls whatsoever, while Carr believes they can work in some scenarios.

Carr suggests that micropayments should be looked upon "as payments for news applications instead." In fact, the Times' media columnist never suggests that charging readers for what they now get for free is a viable strategy. But since the status quo is no longer viable, shouldn't publishers experiment aggressively with hybrid models?

In the end, that's where the debaters end up. Both agree that blended paid and ad-supported models have the greatest chance of success. And if you re-read the first part of the two part series, you see that both basically suggested that approach at the outset. So maybe the "debate" was a bit of a fabrication to begin with, but at least it got our attention. And isn't that the goal after all?

Media Employment Trend Not All Bleak

Over at BusinessWeek, Michael Mandel is looking at employment in US information industries. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, he finds evidence that "someone is hiring out there," but it isn't newspapers, which have seen employment fall by about 40% since 1990. Mandel's analysis goes beyond newspaper employment to look at job trends in broadcast, Internet and "other information services." What's interesting is the growth in the "other" category. It's the only segment of the market that's above Internet bubble employment levels (although the actual numbers are quite small). Mandel promises more analysis in future posts.

Jeff Jarvis takes issue with Mandel's whole premise, calling it "measuring the wrong economy: the old, centralized, big economy. In both cases, he misses new value elsewhere in the small economy of entrepreneurs and the noneconomy of volunteers." In Jarvis's view, media isn't dying so much as restructuring itself in a "post-industry" model characterized by vastly more efficient means of production, a distributed workforce and a decentralized approach to nearly everything. Innovation hasn't left the building, he says, it has merely left the buildings where priesthoods dwell. To see the new media economy taking shape, you have to look at Wikipedia and eBay for guidance, not The New York Times and Macy's.

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/on-paywall-issue-combatants-basically-agree.html

What do we call insurance that's mandatory?

They Might Be Giants - Science is Real

AIG's Payback to Taxpayers in Doubt

Government Watchdog Says Disgraced Insurance Giant AIG May Not Repay All of Its $182B Taxpayer Tab

By MATTHEW JAFFE

 

One year after the biggest corporate bailout in the country's history, a government watchdog office Monday warned that American taxpayers may not recoup the full $182 billion given to embattled insurance giant American International Group.

One year after the biggest corporate bailout in the country's history, a government watchdog Monday warned that American taxpayers may not recoup the full $182 billion given to insurance giant AIG.

"AIG's ability to restructure its business and repay the government is unclear at this time," the Government Accountability Office said in a new report released Monday.

As of the start of September, the company's outstanding balance of taxpayer aid was $120 billion.

It was a year ago this month that AIG received the first chunk of a government bailout that has since grown to $182 billion. The federal money, noted the GAO, has since helped stabilize the insurance giant, which this year posted a $1.8 billion second-quarter profit, its first profit since 2007.

However, the GAO said that the company still relies heavily on government help as its source of liquidity and capital.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/aigs-payback-taxpayers-doubt/story?id=8632375

Cannabis Cancer Treatment Successes Being Ignored. Why?

Posted by hempnewstv

The healing properties of cannabis have long been touted amongst the British cannabis community, who have done everything in their power to bring word of the cancer curing properties of cannabis to a wider audience. And at face value it would be fair to expect the worlds press to get pretty excited over even 'a suspicion' of a cure for cancer, a disease which will strike down almost 1 in every 2 people.

Cannabis can cure certain types of cancer. So why are we not researching it further? Because the pharma industry cannot get a patent on a plant so law enforcement holds the patent whilst the pharma's try to build a chemical version..and that's no longer good enough to keep it outlawed.

Unfortunately that's not the case. Cancer is on the rise statistically, yet the people who control health issues at a national and international level (the pharmaceutical industry), are simply not prepared to let it be known that people can cure their own ailments, as it would cost them trillions of dollars in over-the-counter pain-relief sales, amongst a great many other products which cannabis has been proven as a safe, natural alternative.

Indeed Canadian Rick Simpson went one further. Instead of telling people about it, he started to use a cannabis-derived oil to cure his own skin-cancer. A cancer his doctor had attempted (and failed) to cure using more mainstream methods like strong drugs and surgery.

Its a truly mind-blowing story which explains in laymans terms the lengths which the establishment surrounding pharmaceutical drugs, will go to stop news of this getting out. Even going so far as to close down a Canadian Legion office and sacking the entire management team for promoting Rick Simpsons marijuana based hemp-oil.

Rumour has it the pharmaceutical industry is attempting to synthesise the active ingredients in cannabis so they may make use of its healing properties whilst at the same time, keeping it firmly outlawed, to stop people treating themselves. Just another conspiracy theory?

http://hempnewstv.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/cannabis-cancer-treatment-successes-being-ignored-why/

IAEA denies report it is sure Iran is seeking bomb

VIENNA — The UN atomic watchdog said Thursday it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapons programme in Iran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency rejected a US media report which claimed its experts believed Tehran had the ability to make a nuclear bomb and was on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead.

"With respect to a recent media report, the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran," a statement said.

According to the media report, the proof was contained in a so-called "secret annex" to the IAEA's latest report on Iran, but was deliberately being withheld by the agency's director general Mohamed ElBaradei.

"At the board of governors meeting on September 9, Director General ElBaradei warned that continuing allegations that the IAEA was withholding information on Iran are politically motivated and totally baseless," it said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hpiOh8HRiFE6Sa_idQiCow5EBu1A

Barack Obama ready to slash US nuclear arsenal

Pentagon told to map out radical cuts as president prepares to chair UN talks

 

by Julian Borger

President Obama's decision to order a review comes as he takes the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council. Photograph: Reuters

Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country's arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.

'A multilateral process in which weapons states agree to radical disarmament': Julian Borger Link to this audio

Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.

Those options include:

• Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads.

• Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.

• Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads.

The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: "Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."

The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.

That bargain is at the heart of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which is up for review next year amid signs it is unraveling in the face of Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/20/barack-obama-us-nuclear-weapons

Yes Men: “We’re Screwed”

From The Yes Men:

"We're Screwed": Media Heist Blankets City with
"Special Edition" New York Post

---

---

PRESS RELEASE: September 21, 2009
Tabloid Tells Truth About Climate Change and How It Will Affect City, World

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a "special edition" New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report.

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."

The fake Post's cover story ("We're Screwed") reports the frightening conclusions of a blue-ribbon panel of scientists commissioned by the mayor's office to determine the potential effects of climate change on the City. That report was released in February of this year, but received very little press at the time.

Other lead articles describe the Pentagon's alarmed response to global warming ("Clear & Present Disaster"), the U.S. government's sadly minuscule response to the crisis ("Congress Cops Out on Climate"), China's alternative energy program ("China's Green Leap Forward Overtakes U.S."), and how if the US doesn't quickly pass a strong climate bill, the crucial Copenhagen climate talks this December could be a "Flopenhagen."

The paper includes original investigative reporting as well. One article ("Carbon counter counts New Yorkers as fools") reveals that Deutsche Bank – which erected a seven-story "carbon counter" in central Manhattan – not only invests heavily in coal-mining companies worldwide, but has recently entered the business of coal trading itself.

The paper has the world's gloomiest weather page, covering the next 70 years rather than just 7 days. The "Around the World" section describes the disproportionate effects of climate change on poorer parts of the world, including extreme droughts, floods, famines, water shortages, mass migrations and conflicts. Developing countries will bear the brunt of climate change effects even though they have done very little to cause the problem.

But the paper isn't all doom and gloom. An article called "New York Fights Back" notes that the carbon emissions of Big Apple residents are only one third the national average, and that the city is building 1800 miles of bike paths, planting one million trees, and replacing its fleet of police cars with hybrids. There's also a page of black-humor cartoons (in one, Charlie Brown finds Snoopy drowned), a gossip section that takes no prisoners, and a number of truly cheerful ads – for sex ("Awesome. No carbon emissions."), tote bags, bicycles, and tap water
("Literally comes right out of your faucet!").

Another ad promotes civil disobedience, encouraging readers to visit http://BeyondTalk.net and pledge to risk arrest in a planned global action November 30, just before the conference in Copenhagen.

"We need strong action on climate change," said David Solnit of Mobilization for Climate Justice West, one of the partners in BeyondTalk.net. "But history shows that leaders act only when people take to the streets to demand it. That's what needs to happen now."

This paper is one of 2500 initiatives taking place in more than 130 countries as a response to the "Global Wake-up Call" on climate change. For more information, visit www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup.

Contact:

The Yes Men tabloid@theyesmen.org, 347-254-7054, 646-220-4137

Fake New York Post

 

http://artoftheprank.com/2009/09/21/yes-men-were-screwed/

You're The Principal - Start The Semester With A New Playbook

by Marilynn Preston

It was a recent Sunday morning, and I was exercising my brain in front of the morning news shows. This edition of "Meet the Press" featured Katherine Sebelius, our secretary of health and human services. She spent most of her time serving up lackluster answers about health care reform, but at the end of the segment, host David Gregory mentioned swine flu and the millions of kids at risk as they go back to school. He asked Sebelius how kids could best protect themselves.

Her answer gave me sharp, shooting pains. Kids have to wash their hands often, she said first — familiar advice and absolutely essential. And then she advised them to sneeze into their sleeve instead of blowing the germs into the air.

Sneeze into their sleeves! This is a sickening back-to-school tip and does not reflect the current thinking among health care specialists who prefer children sneeze into ... what? Their jeans? Sneezing into their neighbor's hair has also been put forward as a way to keep your child healthier, and happier, but it is not what I am suggesting here.

Here are three more back-to-school tips for parents, who are, after all, their kids' No. 1 teachers when it comes to healthy lifestyle:

This semester, insist on a sport. Don't take klutz for an answer. There is a sport or physical activity for every girl and boy, and you get a gold star if you help your child discover what it is.

Look around. It may not be the obvious schoolyard stuff — basketball, soccer ... God-forbid, football. One of my favorite youngsters lucked into a passion for Irish dancing. Another young man I know — overweight and insecure, a miserable combo — came to love his judo practice. As his strength and confidence grew, he lost the extra weight without even trying.

Your job as a parent is to teach your little one to try, try and try again, until she finds a sport or game that brings joy. Encourage participation and detach from results. Win or lose, playing sports builds character, teaches team play and gives a kid a perfectly good excuse for not smoking, drinking, snorting or sneezing into his shirt sleeve.

Don't cheat on breakfast and lunch. The research is in: Hearty and healthy breakfasts and lunches are basic to your child's performance in school.

If this is news to you, give yourself an F in parenting and sign up for a tutor. Real food in appropriate amounts energizes the brain in a measured way. Sugar donuts and sweetened cola drinks force it to spike and plummet, and fight against calmness and clarity. So does text messaging during class, but please don't get me started.

The lesson here is simple: involve yourself in school food reform. It's one of the real success stories of the last 20 years — new laws poised and ready to require schools to stop fattening our little ones with toxic food and drinks.

The change will take time to spread, but it is happening. If it's not happening for your kids, at your school, starting this semester, find out why.

In the meantime, reform your habits at home. Send your kids to school with lunches that nourish instead of numbify. And enforce the Eat Breakfast rule to the best of your ability. No excuses, no drama, no fake food. If you have reached this point in the article and do not know what a healthy breakfast consists of, time for you to hit the books.

Treat your child for MPA. Swine flu may come and go, but Mobile Phone Addiction is here to stay, I fear. It's especially dangerous to our little ones with thin skulls and vulnerable brains. In several European countries where the negative effects of mobile phone radiation are less hidden, parents are advised to restrict kids' cell phone use to emergencies. What if every cell phone had to carry a little sticker that read, "This Cell Phone May Cause Brain Cancer, Eye Cancer and Other Nasties"? Would parents stop buying them for their kids? Cut down their own use? It's a question for the final exam, that's for sure.

http://www.creators.com/health/marilynn-preston-energy-express/you-re-the-principal-start-the-semester-with-a-new-playbook.html

Heads I Win, Tails I'm Bailed Out

by Froma Harrop

President Obama was on Wall Street, calling for a new regulatory regime to prevent a financial panic like the one set off a year ago. "We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis," he said.

But there are doubters. Far from the granite canyons of southern Manhattan comes sharp criticism about the plans for new regulations and, not unrelated, who would do the regulating. The skeptics argue that the too-big-to-fail philosophy that saved the hides of CitiGroup, Bank of America and AIG remains in force and will make another meltdown inevitable.

The president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, Thomas Hoenig, turned heads last June when he characterized the lack of action in addressing this fundamental weakness as "regulatory malpractice."

And he warned, "If we hesitate to make needed changes, we will perpetuate an oligarchy of interest." In other words, the financial Mr. Bigs will be running everything from their East Coast party circuit.

On Wall Street, Obama outlined some fine reforms, but he gave only lip service to ending the assumption that some institutions are too big to fail. He mainly said that stockholders in these financial companies would have to bear the cost of their poor management.

Well, stockholders already do. The crisis sent their shares plunging to single digits. (Your writer speaks from sad experience.) The bailout did stop the stock prices from going to zero and enabled a partial recovery of their earlier value, but believe me, the shareholders didn't get away with much.

The big bucks went to the executives who vanished with their kingly bonuses and let others clean up the mess made by their reckless risk-taking. I don't recall their reimbursing the taxpayers.

If anything, the government's response over the last year has made the players more smug. The proven deal is "heads I win, tails I'm bailed out."

And that's Hoenig's point.

When the feds stepped in to save the largest institutions, the argument went that America was facing a financial Armageddon. Their collapse would have unleashed another Great Depression.

But Hoenig doesn't endorse letting big banks go splat on the pavement, but rather letting them fail in an orderly manner. That could mean putting them under new ownership or closing them by stages. There are ways to do it.

Instead, sick banks were merged into larger ones. That made the big banks bigger. The top 20 banks now own 70 percent of banks' assets. Therefore, they would expose the system to even more risk if they should get into trouble.

As already noted, banks deemed too big to fail enjoy an implied subsidy. They get sweeter terms from lenders and investors, who know that however badly the companies are managed, the government won't let them go under. That sends money flowing not to the safer banks but to the bigger ones.

http://www.creators.com/liberal/froma-harrop/-heads-i-win-tails-i-m-bailed-out.html

Policy advice from Fox News

Obama's plan to give everyone a free Maserati

Why haven't any Wall Street tycoons been sent to the slammer?

By Kevin G. Hall

WASHINGTON — More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.

What they haven't seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.

There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.

There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren't among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.

"A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process," said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

The absence of what many would call justice stands out all the more because past financial crises always had their villains. The depression-era had electricity and railroad magnate Samuel Insull, who partly inspired the movie "Citizen Kane." The savings and loan crisis of the 1980's had banker Charles Keating. Energy giant Enron Corp.'s spectacular collapse offered the late CEO Kenneth Lay, a Texas crony of President George W. Bush.

Yet there's no such poster child for the Great Recession, as today's crisis is now called.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/75720.html

I'mma let you finish

The 9/11 Commission Rejects own Report as Based on Government Lies

by Gordon Duff

How long have we watered the Tree of Deceit with the blood of patriots?

John Farmer's book: "The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11″

(CINCINNATI, Ohio) - In John Farmer's book: "The Ground Truth: The Story Behind America's Defense on 9/11″, the author builds the inescapably convincing case that the official version... is almost entirely untrue...

The 9/11 Commission now tells us that the official version of 9/11 was based on false testimony and documents and is almost entirely untrue. The details of this massive cover-up are carefully outlined in a book by John Farmer, who was the Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission.

Farmer, Dean of Rutger Universities' School of Law and former Attorney General of New Jersey, was responsible for drafting the original flawed 9/11 report.

Does Farmer have cooperation and agreement from other members of the Commission? Yes. Did they say Bush ordered 9/11? No. Do they say that the 9/11 Commission was lied to by the FBI, CIA, Whitehouse and NORAD? Yes. Is there full documentary proof of this? Yes.

Farmer states..."at some level of the government, at some point in time…there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened... I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described …. The [Norad air defense] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. This is not spin."

The 9/11 Commission head, Thomas Kean, was the Republican governor of New Jersey. He had the following to say... "We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth. . . " When Bush's own handpicked commission failed to go along with the cover up and requested a criminal investigation, why was nothing done?

9/11 Commission member and former US Senator, Bob Kerrey, says, "No one is more qualified to write the definitive book about the tragedy of 9/11 than John Farmer. Fortunately, he has done so. Even more fortunately the language is clear, alive and instructive for anyone who wants to make certain this never happens again."

With the only "official" 9/11 report now totally false, where do we go from here? Who is hurt by these lies? The families of the victims of 9/11 have fought, for years, to get to the truth. For years, our government has hidden behind lies and secrecy to deny them closure.

In 2006, The Washington Post reported..."Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission..."

What does Farmer's book tell us? Farmer offers no solutions, only a total and full rejection of what was told and his own his own ideas concerning the total failure of honesty on the part of the government, a government with something to hide.

Farmer never tells us what. Nobody could keep a job in the public sector speaking out more than Farmer has. What were Farmer's omissions? There are some. Now that we know that intelligence given the 9/11 Commission wasn't just lies from our own government but based on testimony coerced through torture from informants forced to back up a cover story now proven false, a pattern emerges.

We know that, immediately after 9/11, many more potential suspects and informants were flown directly to Saudi Arabia by Presidential order than were ever detained and questioned. We will never know what they could have said. Their testimony would have been vital to any real investigation were they not put beyond the reach of even Congress and the FBI.

Putting aside all other questions of recent evidence of CIA involvement with bin Laden prior to 9/11 or altered physical evidence involving the Pentagon attack, any failure to call to account the systematic perjury committed by dozens of top government officials, now exposed as a certainty is an offense to every American.

What do we know? We know the conjecture about 9/11 still stands but for certain, we know we were lied to, not in a minor way, but systematically as part of a plot covering up government involvement at nearly every level, perhaps gross negligence, perhaps something with darker intent.

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/september112009/911_truth_9-11-09.php

Video Shows Price of Cheap Eggs: Chicks Ground Up Alive

by Martha Rosenberg

This screen grab from Mercy for Animals' YouTube video shows chicks on a conveyor belt. (Photo: Mercy for Animals)

    The "food units" cascading down the conveyor in the video are sorted like apples, fine grade, rejects.

    Except that the kinetic yellow balls - an undulating fuzzy mass - are not pears or peppers, but newborn chicks. And they're being sorted into male, female and deformed - with male and deformed destined for death.

    A video just released by Mercy For Animals from Hy-Line Hatchery in Spencer, Iowa, the largest hatchery for egg-laying breed chicks in the US, confirms what has been rumored for years about the egg industry: that newborn males, which are worthless to the industry, are ground up alive in chopping machines called macerators.

    Video from a hidden camera clearly shows healthy male chicks, peeping and bouncing as they greet the world, fed into the blades of the macerator like so much litter. Hello! Goodbye!

    "I saw a bloody slush coming out of the bottom of the grinder," writes the MFA investigator, who worked in the Hy-Line "transfer room" and on the cleaning crew during May and June. "The plant manager told me that the ground-up male chicks were used in dog food and fertilizer."

    Also shown in the Mercy For Animals video is the debeaking procedure in which chicks are inserted en masse into a laser cutter where they dangle by their beaks, struggling, while burns are inflicted that make part of their beak fall off in a week.

    Nor does the egg industry want to waste any time letting a chick peck its way out of its shell to start its tour of duty on the egg farm, if it's female.

    The hatchery's "separator" machine efficiently disconnects newborns from their shells at the price of the few, which fall to the ground or get caught in the machine and "washed" along with the equipment.

(Illustration: Martha Rosenberg)

    Asked about the panting, damp newborns on the floor, half born and half dead, a worker tells the MFA investigator, "Some of them get on the floor and get wet and then they're no good."

    Like veal calves on dairy farms, egg industry chicks experience no moments with their mothers despite their innate biological urges. Their first memories will be of blades, pain and terror, not of a mother in the mechanized hell the egg industry has devised to bring cheap product to the market.

http://www.truthout.org/090309C?n

Wingnuts United for Shouting

Health Insurers Consider A Caesarean-Section Pregnancy A Pre-Existing Condition

Earlier this week, the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim reported on the fact that in seven states plus the District of Columbia, "getting beaten up by your spouse is a pre-existing condition." The insurance industry figures that if "you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you're more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure," but what it really does is punish these victims for something that wasn't their fault.

But that isn't the only policy that health insurers have that primarily discriminate against women. First of all, most individual health insurance markets don't cover maternity care. In fact, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 14 states have a requirement for such coverage, and the number of plans without maternity coverage continues to rise dramatically. Why? Anthem Blue Cross — which has been actively fighting health care reform — considers pregnancy optional and therefore not necessary to insure:

"The point of insurance is to insure against catastrophic care costs. That's what you're trying to aggregate and pool for such things as heart attacks and cancer," said an Anthem Blue Cross spokesman. "Having a child is a matter of choice. Dealing with an adult onset illness, such as diabetes, heart disease breast or prostate cancer, is not a matter of choice."

Even Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) spoke an unintentional truth when he said of his parents: "When they arrived in Baton Rouge, my mother was already four-and-a-half-months pregnant. I was what folks in the insurance industry now call a pre-existing condition."

When a woman isn't currently pregnant, she often still cannot get coverage. Many insurers consider a Caesarean-section pregnancy a pre-existing condition and refuse to cover women who have had the procedure.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/09/17/csection-preexisting/

Strange & Fantastic Buildings Architecture

01. Device to Root Out Evil (Vancouver, Canada)

02. The Crooked House (Sopot, Poland)



03. Museum of Contemporary Art (Niteroi, Brazil)



04. ING Headquarters (Amsterdam, Netherlands)



05. Experience Music Project (Seattle, Washington, USA)




06. Dancing Building (Prague, Czech Republic)



07. Druzhba Holiday Center (Yalta, Ukraine)



08. Lotus Temple (Delhi, India)



09. Forest Spiral Building (Darmstadt, Germany)



10. The Torre Galatea Figueras (Spain)



http://www.instantshift.com/2009/02/19/80-strange-and-fantastic-buildings-architecture/

Colbert Goes There - Only Media Figure In America To Openly Discuss Corporate Control Of Gov't

by dday

The Colbert Report last night featured one of the most subversive and brutally honest half-hours of television in recent memory.  It's a sad commentary that it takes a comedy program to provide more news and information on one of the most critical subjects in American politics that anywhere else in our broken media and political landscape, but I'll take this argument wherever I can get it.

• dday's diary :: ::

Colbert spent two full segments of his show focusing on the Citizens United Supreme Court case, which could - and probably will - lead to deregulating the entire campaign finance process, allowing corporations to give unlimited money to any candidate of their choosing.  This severe step backwards with enormous implications has been barely discussed in any traditional media setting, but Colbert went after it vigorously, discussing the consequences and even the flawed legal rationale, a true third rail of American politics, corporate personhood.  Colbert explained that the 1886 case (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad) that conferred 14th Amendment equal protection rights onto corporations wasn't even in the original ruling.  But when the Chief Justice made an off-hand comment that the Court wouldn't hear an argument on whether the 14th Amendment applied to these corporations (saying, "We are all of the opinion that it does"), the court reporter wrote it into the ruling opinion, and the precedent has held ever since.  And that reporter of the Supreme Court didn't only have ties to the railroad barons, he used to run one.

These are subjects you just never hear about in the American media, precisely because the American media is owned by giant multinational corporations, who benefit from the corporate personhood rule and would stand to benefit more from deregulating elections so they could use their "speech" to buy candidates and fund their own with unlimited resources.  And despite being on a Viacom-owned network, Colbert says, skewering the immorality and psychopathology of the corporation, "Corporations are legally people... they do everything people do, except breathe, die, and go to jail for dumping 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson River."

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/16/782917/-Colbert-Goes-ThereOnly-Media-Figure-In-America-To-Openly-Discuss-Corporate-Control-Of-Govt

Google Releases A Nuke. Apple Won’t Win This Fight.

 

by Michael Arrington

Well, something clearly broke down behind the scenes in the ongoing Apple/Google negotiations over Google Voice on the iPhone, because Google released one of two nukes it has been holding back. In a letter to the FCC today, Google disclosed previously unpublished information about Apple's rejection of their Google Voice application.

There's no longer any question – either Google or Apple is flat out lying to the FCC:

Apple: "Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it."

Google: "Apple representatives informed Google that the Google Voice application was rejected because Apple believed the application duplicated the core dialer functionality of the iPhone"

Our position is that Apple is the one full of it, which we stated way before this new information from Google. And it isn't just he said/she said – Apple's story doesn't add up.

But Apple is standing firm, and even today told press that they haven't rejected the Google Voice application, despite what Google says.

This doesn't end here. As we've speculated, Apple will capitulate and accept the application with a few minor tweaks to save face. Because if they don't we've heard Google has yet another nuke waiting on the sidelines – a screen shot of the actual rejection notice via the iPhone developers admin with the formal rejection. At that point, Apple will no longer be able to rely on nuances and misdirection. The FCC and everyone else will know that they lied in a government investigation.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/google-releases-a-nuke-apple-wont-win-this-fight/

Author of Time's Beck profile digs a deeper hole

by Jamison Foser

Charles Kaiser offers this pitch-perfect description of Time's profile of Glenn Beck: "Von Drehle's piece is so humiliating on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin."

Kaiser interviewed Von Drehle about the Beck profile, with hilarious results.  Like this, from Kaiser's Full Court Press post:

Von Drehle identified the boycott as "a boon" to Beck's ratings; but he didn't say that it now includes more than sixty corporations, including Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble.   

FCP asked Von Drehle if sixty wasn't a rather large number-one perhaps worth mentioning in his piece.  "Well," he replied.  "There are millions of companies."

See, Von Drehle didn't mention the fact that 60 companies are boycotting Beck's show because there are millions of other companies that aren't.  Got it?  Millions of companies that have never advertised on Glenn Beck's show make the fact that 60 companies that used to do so now refuse to meaningless.  

Oh, and Detroit automakers are doing just fine. Sure, they've lost a lot of customers over the years -- but literally billions of people haven't stopped buying their cars!  Bonuses all around!

http://mediamatters.org/blog/200909180007

The Final Option

$30 billion home loan time bomb set for 2010

Thousands of Bay Area homes have a ticking time bomb embedded in their mortgage. The homes were purchased with loans known as option ARMs, short for adjustable rate mortgages.

by Carolyn Said

Next year, many option ARM payments will begin to readjust, slamming borrowers with dramatically higher monthly mortgage bills. Analysts say that could unleash the next big wave of foreclosures - and home-loan data show that the risky loans were heavily used in the Bay Area.

From 2004 to 2008, "one in five people who took out a mortgage loan (for both purchases and refinancing) in the San Francisco metropolitan region (San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin and San Mateo counties) got an option ARM," said Bob Visini, senior director of marketing in San Francisco at First American CoreLogic, a mortgage research firm. "That's more than twice the national average.

"People think option ARMs (will be) a national crisis," he said. "That's not really true. It's just in higher-cost areas like California where you see their prevalence."

Of the 10 metro areas nationwide with the most option ARMs, three are in the Bay Area, according to Fitch Ratings, a New York research firm. They are the East Bay counties of Alameda and Contra Costa, the South Bay area of Santa Clara and San Benito counties, and the counties of San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo.

Together, these areas account for the second-most option ARMs in the country, although they are still far behind the greater Los Angeles area (including Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties), according to Fitch data.

Understated data

First American shows more than 54,000 option ARMs issued here with a value of about $30.9 billion. Fitch shows more than 47,000 option ARMs here with a value of about $28 billion. Both say their data underestimate the totals.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/20/MNOR19N2B1.DTL#ixzz0RlMiGdAr

Welcome to the National Asylum

by Alexander Cockburn

     Was there ever a society so saturated with lunacy as ours? One expects modulated nuttiness from the better element, particularly those inhabiting the corporate and legislative spheres, but these days, insanity is pervasive, spreading through all classes and walks of life. For years, we have been treated to pinstriped fugitives from the asylum like Pete Peterson urging the nation into ruin by slashing the deficit, but on Monday, there in Washington in tens of thousands were the sans-culottes screaming for fiscal propriety as though channeling the ruinous orthodoxies of Montagu Norman or Andrew Mellon.

     Many among these Glenn Beck legions were surely one stroke or tumor away from financial ruin, yet are still ready to tear any advocates of publicly funded health insurance in tiny pieces as though they were hawking the Communist Manifesto at a revival meeting. Inspiring, was it not, to see such self-abnegation on the part of so many people prepared to die in the name of free enterprise!

     Many of the Glenn Beckers are "Birthers," too, making delusional forays into the supposedly dubious documentation of Barack Obama's delivery in a hospital in Hawaii. Sometimes I think that the White House should knock these surmises on the head by releasing all relevant documents and testimonies. But of course, this would merely throw napalm on the flames.

     Once, when writing some caustic remarks about the occupants of another ward in the national asylum, the 9/11 Truthers, I suggested that the "missing people" on the plane that hit the Pentagon had been kidnapped at an earlier stage in the operation, and flown to an airbase in Louisiana -- the very self-same airbase where George Bush briefly touched down in his erratic flight from Florida on 9/11/2001. George Bush then personally executed the captives.

     It was a satirical sally. But I swiftly received serious letters from people vexed by the lack of detail. Where had Bush shot them? With what type of weapon? A summary burst from a machine gun? Or a .22 bullet behind the ear?

     For all too many on the left, the so-called 9/11 conspiracy still remains the magic key. If it can be turned, then history at its present impasse will be unlocked and we can move on. For those on the racist right, aghast at the reality of a black man (actually a half-white, half-black) in the White House, the magic key to reversing this unpleasing development is Obama's allegedly fake Hawaiian birth certificate. Their suppositions and claims shift, but the essence is always the same: He's alien. He has no right to be president. And as with the Truthers, the provision of evidence rebutting their claims is merely fuel piled on the bonfire of their insanity.

     From the nuttiness of his detractors to the madness of Great Ones, in this case of President Obama. His rhetoric is decorous, but the delusions are just as ripe and far more lethal than those of the Glenn Beck demonstrators under his window. How is one supposed to rate the rationality of a person who wins the White House in large measure because of popular outrage at the disastrous war in Iraq and who then instantly ratchets up another war in Afghanistan -- an enterprise for whose utter futility history, both ancient and modern, offers copious testimonies?

     From time to time, one meets a madman in a shopping mall or at a bus stop who approaches one with discreet confidences about his mother, the Queen of England, or about the messages beamed through the fillings in his teeth that warn him of CIA surveillance from the plane flying 30,000 feet above his head. It's an effort of will to remind oneself that this is a person in disheveled mental condition and it would be unwise to be drawn into protracted discussion of royal lineage tracked through the Almanach de Gotha or to peer into jaws suddenly opened for one's inspection.

     Similarly, with Obama, he advances ridiculous propositions with nutty aplomb, as when he claimed in his speech to Congress last week that his plan was deficit neutral. Why does he expose himself thus to well-merited derision? Is it that Obama simply cannot bear to displease anyone -- unless they are far away in places like Afghanistan?

     Indeed the president reached the apex of lunatic effrontery when he caused the assembled legislators to leap to their feet in stormy applause by pledging that "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits." This is the same president, these are the same legislators, who are committing billions in red ink for the war in Afghanistan and the continued U.S. presence in Iraq.

http://www.truthout.org/092009E?n

Baucus Health Care!