Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Attacks on freedom of speech on the internet based on the theory that linking is publishing.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The national average of gas prices hits $3.01 as money leaks from Bernanke's radically expanded monetary base into the economy, but he think inflation is a good thing. Don't worry about being forced to spend more of your money on gas, which makes you poorer. There's nothing to see here. Move along.

HEALTH CARE:

WikiLeaks blows whistle on US government pushing GMO foods and other food abuses.

"If you go to the website of the FDA, you will note its newly-created “Office of Foods.” This, along with the food “safety” bill, will give the Feds unprecedented power over the food and agricultural industry. The Food Czar is none other than Michael R. Taylor, Obama’s point man for securing profits for the Big Agra-Manufactured Food Complex. Taylor, in case you don’t know, is a former Vice President and Chief Lobbyist for Monsanto. Taylor began his career as a lawyer with the FDA, and from there he went to King & Spalding, a law firm that represented Monsanto. He then went back to the FDA as a deputy commissioner for policy so that he could oversee the FDA’s approval of Monsanto’s BGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone). Taylor then moved to the USDA. Then he was off to Monsanto.

Note that Monsanto’s top rBGH scientist, Margaret Miller, also moved on to the FDA where she, along with Taylor, moved the FDA forward to approve Posilac, Monsanto Corporation’s formulation of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rbST or rBGH). Miller, while working for Monsanto, had submitted the Monsanto scientific report to the FDA for approval, and she went to the FDA prior to the approval. Her first task at the FDA was to approve her own scientific report she had prepared for Monsanto. Both her and Taylor were subjects of a GAO (General Accounting Office) investigation for their role in the approval, yet the GAO Report ended up dismissing any financial impropriety."

You can't make this stuff up.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Senior Republican Congressman in committee makes the case that man-made CO2 will not destroy the earth because God said so in the bible. This guys gives skeptics a bad name.

POLICE STATE:

Does this sound familiar?

"One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does.  Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that "knowledge is power," this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless."

It's also why the aristocrats are frantically trying to seize control of the internet. They keep floating proposal after proposal, and the public rejects them all. But after years being unable to gin up support for their schemes, they decided to go ahead with net neutrality anyway.

"At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository controlled by people who work in a top-secret vault on the fourth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington. This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor."

This is scary.

"To understand the breadth of the Surveillance State, recall this sentence from the original Priest/Arkin article:  "Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."  As Arkin and Priest document today, there are few safeguards on how all this data is used and abused."

Government safeguards are meaningless anyway. The government does not acknowledge any limits on its power, and it does not bother to obey the law. Any purported safeguards are tools to fool the people into believing otherwise. Here's how the US government views WikiLeaks:

"In the WikiLeaks case, a fringe group led primarily by foreign nationals operating abroad is illegally obtaining, reviewing and disseminating American intelligence information with the stated intent of hurting the United States (WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange himself made this declaration). That not only meets the definition of aggressive, hostile and war-like activity, but squarely targets America's diplomatic positions and intelligence interests while inflicting collateral damage against our financial institutions and service providers who cut-off their relationship with WikiLeaks. This, folks, is war."

Don't let that foreign part fool you. Obama has already claimed the power to assassinate Americans as a war power. Any American doing something similar as WikiLeaks will be treated as an enemy combatant too.

"That's the mindset of the U.S. Government:  everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes.  And what's most remarkable about this -- though, given the full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising -- is how eagerly submissive much of the citizenry is to this imbalance.  Many Americans plead with their Government in unison:  we demand that you know everything about us but that you keep us ignorant about what you do and punish those who reveal it to us."

True and depressingly sad.

"But the imbalance has become so extreme -- the Government now watches much of the citizenry behind a fully opaque one-way mirror -- that the dangers should be obvious.  And this is all supposed to be the other way around:  it's government officials who are supposed to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy.  Yet we've reversed that dynamic almost completely."

Great observation.

Here's a story to remind everybody that TSA nor government in general give a damn about the safety of the people. It's all a scam. It's a protection racket that dwarfs in size, scope and the money it steals anything the mafia could put together.

"Many experts are skeptical that the TSA's new backscatter pornoscanner machines are safe, but even the experts who endorse them are careful to bracket their reassurances with certain caveats: the safety of the machines depends heavily on their being properly maintained, regularly tested, and expertly operated. Whether or not you're comfortable with the intended radiation emissions from the scanners, no one in their right mind would argue that a broken machine that lovingly lingers over your reproductive organs and infuses them with 10,000 or 100,000 times the normal dosage is desirable.

But when Andrew Schneider, AOL's public health correspondent, contacted the TSA to find out what maintenance and testing is in place to ensure the safe operation of the scanners, he discovered that the TSA appears to have no regime at all to ensure that they are functioning within normal parameters. While the TSA claims that entities like the FDA, the US Army and Johns Hopkins all regularly inspect their machines, none of these groups agrees, and they all disavow any role in regularly maintaining and testing the TSA's equipment (the Army has tested machines in three airports, but has not conducted any further testing). And Johns Hopkins denies that it has certified the machines as safe for operation in the first place -- let alone taking on any ongoing testing and certification program."

They only care about us as money-providers, the way ranchers care about cattle. Have you noticed that our government controlled health care industry treats us that way? A person looks sick, they shove a bunch of drugs up our behinds, just like they do cows. They don't care about healing us, they just treat the symptoms

WAR:

Anybody who thought repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell would lead to more tolerance in the military was sadly mistaken as now personnel can be kicked out of the military for disagreeing with the policy. This is an important example that no matter what, government is always divisive.

LOCAL:

Everyday somebody is dying on I-75 around Dayton. Today a wreck knocked a barrier into southbound I-75. I-75 between Cincinnati and Dayton has been under construction for over 10 years straight, and there's no sign that it will ever end. The plans are for more construction for the better part of this decade, and you know there will be delays and overruns and at some point they'll have to start tearing up what they've already put down. Government has turned this stretch of highway into a death trap.