Every four years, like clockwork, two enormous trucks back up to the public troughs. One slaps in various slime and slop, while the other one glops in some assorted goo and gorp. Then, diners are left to choose between the two evils.
Oh, sure -- there are some sweet, well-intentioned people who drop by now and again to offer a bucket or two of much fresher food that's far better looking, smelling, and tasting. But everyone knows a bucket or two won't stretch very far, not up against these industrial-strength, corporate sludge movers that deal in mountains and not mole hills to fill public troughs.
Alex Baer: Boilerplate for the Utopian Ant
Does the Romney Family Now Own Your e-Vote?
Will you cast your vote this fall on a faulty electronic machine that's partly owned by the Romney Family? Will that machine decide whether Romney will then inherit the White House?
Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.
In a warming Arctic, U.S. faces new security and safety concerns
In past years, these remote gray waters of the Alaskan Arctic saw little more than the occasional cargo barge and Eskimo whaling boat. No more.
This summer, when the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bertholf was monitoring shipping traffic along the desolate tundra coast, its radar displays were often brightly lighted with mysterious targets.
ACLU fights the good fight to stop government surveillance of our citizens
Are you, a US citizen, calling cousin Ivor in Budapest, or reaching out to your old pen pal Yasmeen in Sydney? The National Security Agency (NSA) can listen in on your personal cellphone or read what you might be emailing him or her from your personal computer without telling you.
In 2008, the US Senate voted to let the NSA wiretap any US citizens' emails and phone calls internationally in the interest of national security so long as the government's purpose was to collect "foreign intelligence information". In 45 minutes, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought a constitutional challenge to the Fisa Amendments Act. As the Director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, Jameel Jaffer, pointed out, the amendments:
Leaked Report Suggests Long-Known Flood Threat To Nuclear Plants, Safety Advocates Say
An un-redacted version of a recently released Nuclear Regulatory Commission report highlights the threat that flooding poses to nuclear power plants located near large dams -- and suggests that the NRC has misled the public for years about the severity of the threat, according to engineers and nuclear safety advocates.
"The redacted information shows that the NRC is lying to the American public about the safety of U.S. reactors," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer and safety advocate with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Alex Baer: Let Them Eat Slippers? Zap My Pants? Celebrity-what?
Reality is confused enough these days. Perhaps if we try to overload it, and blow all its fuses and circuit breakers, we'll pop clear out at the other end, in some sort of sane, prosperous, sensible nirvana.
Let's give it a nudge and try this one: Yes, someone paid $65,600 for a pair of Marie Antoinette's slippers. Green and pink silk.
They fetched five times more than auctioneers thought they would get. They were flooded with bids from around the world -- which should give you some indication of the number of people sitting on oversized piles of cash who are hopelessly clueless about what might be constructively done instead with any of those Scrooge McDuck, dollar-sign-sporting, canvas-bag heaps they're using for sofas.
WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says
A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.
The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.
British engineers produce amazing 'petrol from air' technology
A small company in the north of England has developed the “air capture” technology to create synthetic petrol using only air and electricity. Experts tonight hailed the astonishing breakthrough as a potential “game-changer” in the battle against climate change and a saviour for the world’s energy crisis.
The technology, presented to a London engineering conference this week, removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The “petrol from air” technology involves taking sodium hydroxide and mixing it with carbon dioxide before "electrolysing" the sodium carbonate that it produces to form pure carbon dioxide.
Appeals court rules Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional
A federal appeals court in Manhattan today struck down the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, becoming the second such court to do so and making it that much more likely that the issue will be decided by the Supreme Court sooner than later.
The Associated Press: The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling Thursday. The decision upholds a lower court judge who ruled that the 1996 law that defines marriage as involving a man and a woman was unconstitutional. The three-judge panel says the law violates equal protection. A federal appeals court in Boston earlier this year also found it unconstitutional.
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