Trick question: How do you offset the whirlwinds, windmills, and tornadoes of lies from a Republican presidential candidate, running mate, and from all members of their party -- people who hate 'Gummint,' want to drown it in a bathtub, yet are desperate, just dying to run the whole show, including YOUR life?
Trick answer: You bring in bigger, bolder, brighter, and broader lies for distraction and comparative perspective -- you bring in religion and other such long-inflamed sores and assorted soreheads for diversion.
Now, before you light up like the Griswold's house finally does in National Lampoon's "Christmas Vacation," imperiling resources at the regional nuclear plant, most people -- even your idiot servant here -- acknowledge some creative force in the universe larger than themselves.
Alex Baer: The Crux and Craters of Colliding Creeds, Campaigns, & Controls
Are US drone strikes a war crime?
Earlier this year, Ben Emmerson, the United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terror operations, warned that the US may have committed war crimes with drone strikes that have killed civilians in Pakistan. On Thursday, he announced that a special investigations unit is being established to look into the legality of such strikes.
But all evidence suggests that far from being concerned, the Obama administration is actually increasing the ferocity of what it calls a "targeted killing programme".
The Washington Post has revealed that the US government has compiled a database called the 'disposition matrix' to "augment" the existing "kill lists", which will focus on suspects beyond the reach of American drones.
Sensata outsourcing rattles Illinois community: 'Jobs need to stay here'
Workers residents have held protests to prevent vehicles shipping parts destined for China from Bain-owned company.
At the age of 86 retired plumber Paul Holz has just been arrested for the first time in his long life. Clutching an American flag, the elderly resident of Freeport, Illinois, was handcuffed by police outside a Sensata car parts plant which is shipping jobs to China and has become a national symbol for the outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs abroad.
Fracking Fukushima Batman—Is that a Natural Gas Well Near a Nuclear Power Plant?
On Oct. 3, Chesapeake Energy was issued a permit by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to drill for natural gas by fracking one mile from the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.
This is disturbing news considering in January evidence proved that Ohio earthquakes were caused by a fracking wastewater injection well.
Alex Baer: Rise of the Little Hairs, Redux
Anyone else plagued by a persistent, deep foreboding... the sense that the fix is in?
This sensation's become the occasional, droning companion to my thoughts, a mosquito I can hear but somehow not quite swat. It is not yet an epic tale, but it feels like we're getting there, we're getting there.
Closest I can come to explaining the goose-bumped phenomenon: It's akin to The Feeling That Descended Like a Cloud of Ice Fog in 2000, when SCOTUS suspended the Constitution, and Our Democracy, and installed its own choice of president to power.
We yawned, shrugged, scratched, stretched, and embraced that decision -- which should have been cause for another round of hair-raising alerts. It was suddenly clear that we would accept anything.
Prairie2: Tell and Adult
Eighty big corporate CEOs are issuing joint statements through Murdoch's Wall Street Journal about the dangers from Congressional inaction on the fiscal 'crisis'. They talk down the economy, they are making announcements about layoffs, highlighting below expectation earnings, and generally spreading panic based on Congressional inaction on the 'fiscal cliff'.
Just before the election, coincidence? Probably not. Nothing about the 'fiscal cliff' requires immediate action, they aren't laying off people because of it, if they are really laying off people at all. Demand creates jobs, not corporate CEOs.
It doesn't matter what the 'lame duck' Congress or the President does right now about any of 'fiscal cliff' items. The Republicans demanded it be set up this way, when they were holding the country hostage over the debt ceiling.
Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations
Around the clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or land at a U.S. military base here, the combat hub for the Obama administration’s counterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
Some of the unmanned aircraft are bound for Somalia, the collapsed state whose border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. Most of the armed drones, however, veer north across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, another unstable country where they are being used in an increasingly deadly war with an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the United States.
Radiation still leaking into nearby Japanese waters 18 months after quake, tsunami
More than 18 months after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, 40-foot tsunami and nuclear power plant woes that struck Japan starting March 11, 2011, levels of radioactive cesium 134 and cesium 137 originating from the crippled Fukushima-Daiichi plant remain elevated in some fish and seafood in nearby waters.
That suggests that radiation from the plant is still being released into the ocean, wrote Ken Buesseler, a marine of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass., in a perspective article in Friday's edition of the journal Nature.
Alex Baer: Nice to Know Some Sanity Checks Never Bounce
.. If it makes any difference at all, it's probably not the Halloween stuff at the stores and at home, even though the kids always go nuts for this "creep out" stuff. More and more adults, too, looks like -- some say it's the second-biggest holiday of the year, if not THE biggest.
Ca-Ching, goes the cash register, and another angel costume gets its wings bent, straight out of the box -- isn't that how that one goes, from that "It's a Dunderheaded Life" movie they always play this time of year?
Sorry, I know what it's really called, it's just that life has pretty weird lately, and you know how we always joked around about movie titles, like the...
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