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"Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced 35 articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush. Not surprisingly, the major U.S. news media, which has never taken Bush’s abuses of power too seriously, largely ignored Kucinich’s act. Given that vacuum – and the seriousness of Bush’s offenses – we are publishing excerpts from an interview between Kucinich and 'Flashpoints' host Dennis Bernstein...."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/061708c.html
"The Court found serious defects in the military commission process that the government created to decide which prisoners are designated as enemy combatants. This designation is important because it could lead to indefinite confinement. The Court found the alternative procedure to be inadequate because the detainee has limited means to present evidence and is often not even aware of the allegations relied upon by the government. "
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2239
"Well below the radar screen for most Americans, a major and unexpected resistance movement has emerged in the Czech Republic in opposition to the U.S. military radar base. Although polls show that 70% of the population opposes the base, the Czech government might have been able to ignore the wishes of its own people had it not been for the emergence of active resistance. Recently, this resistance was dramatically strengthened by the three-week hunger strike of two Czech peace activists."
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5302
"What the respondents appear to want is an unlimited download service free of DRM that could be legally accessed for a monthly fee, something that doesn't yet exist. ... People were quite clear that an on-demand over-the-web streaming service like Last.fm won't cut it; they want to own and control their music."
"Now that US imports exceed US industrial production, it is unlikely that the US trade deficit can be closed except by a sharp reduction in US consumption, which implies a drop in US living standards. If the dollar loses its reserve currency status, the US government will not be able to finance its budget and trade deficits. Where is the hope when Obama endorses a foreign policy that benefits only Israeli territorial expansion and an economic policy that benefits only multimillionaires and billionaires?"
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06162008.html
"Congressional Democrats, Turley went on, knew about surveillance and torture programs, but were politically unable to oppose them at the same time they were touting themselves to the public as defenders of civil liberties. The bill, he said, is part of a campaign of collusion between Congress and the Bush administration, immunizing not only the telecommunications companies, but the administration and any members of Congress, on either side of the aisle, that may have been involved."
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Turley_FISA_bill_is_evisceration_of_0619.html
"They shamelessly tried to set up a system in which kangaroo courts could brand suspects “enemy combatants,” after which they might be held incommunicado for the duration of an endless and ambiguous 'war on terror.' That this administration would even entertain the thought of doing that demonstrates a level of cynicism and disdain for hard-fought principles of freedom that should make us shudder. The next time President Bush and his band of rogue operatives pontificate about democracy and freedom, remember what they tried to get away with here."
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0806e.asp
"How does the government know that you're guilty? Is it possible that the government has made a mistake and that you're innocent? This is usually determined only after the government presents its evidence and then charges someone with a crime. Then that person gets to defend himself. That's the purpose of habeas corpus."
http://www.antiwar.com/henderson/?articleid=13013
"Ah, but the state will come down quicker if more individuals refuse to cooperate with their extortion schemes. They cannot survive without money, and taxation is the primary means by which they get it. Thus, I submit that the more we engage in voluntary, nontaxed economic exchanges, the more we help bring down the state."
http://www.sunnimaravillosa.com/node/1398
"A California judge ruled that parents without teaching credentials cannot legally homeschool their children, and then asserted, 'Parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children'."
http://thatotherpaper.com/austin/drooling_homeschooling_ruling
"Good stuff on video...."
http://www.bradspangler.com/blog/archives/1002
"The only change we can expect from any new president is a continuation, perhaps at an accelerated rate, toward totalitarianism. The people who make changes in government policy and basic philosophy are behind the scenes. We are treated (if that’s the word) to the spectacle of political campaigns as part of a psychological exercise whose purpose is to provide the illusion of choice. This culminates in an election in which people pick a president, senator, etc. But the outcome is unimportant, in almost all cases, because any of the candidates is acceptable to the government’s owners and operators."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hein/hein190.html
"The Wisconsin troop withdrawal votes were a best case example of 'municipal foreign policy'—the practice of local communities and state governments taking on matters of national and global import. Wisconsinites revived their Progressive-era municipal direct legislation law—allowing citizens to initiate popular referenda on ordinances, resolutions, and other legislative matters—to put the war on the ballot."
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=2699
"Amid all this confusion, one thing is clear: An extraordinary number of European citizens feel alienated from the Brussels juggernaut even if they enjoy, and benefit from, the freedom of circulation and trade in Europe."
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2240
"Jonathan Zittrain wants to save the good chaos of the Internet and separate it from the bad chaos that will stomp on everything."
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=174083
"Economies of scale in semiconductor manufacturing mean that the future belongs to processors and coprocessors that have been designed for the mass market first and adapted for use in HPC [high-performance computing]."
"The Bush regime has created enormous hatred and disrespect for the United States. A recent world wide poll found that George W. Bush ranks at the bottom of world leaders as one of the least trusted along with US Pakistani puppet Musharraf and the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, who has the disadvantage of being the victim of demonization by the US and European corporate-controlled media, which serves as ministries of propaganda for the governments that control their broadcast licenses. The American and European media lie for their living."
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts06212008.html
"We are well on our way to consolidating a hereditary warrior class, the future Praetorian Guards of the American empire – although, if we keep spending at this rate, it's likely to be one of the shortest-lived empires in the history of the world."
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13018
"[T]he U.S. wanted complete sovereignty over the Iraqi skies and complete immunity for all U.S. soldiers and contractors for crimes committed against Iraqis. On top of that, the United States wanted the freedom to arrest any Iraqi without ever having to turn them over to the Iraqis. Even though the opening position of the American delegation into the negotiations may have been to obtain maximum leverage from the Iraqis, it smells of arrogance worthy of an empire. How can such a position be compatible with our claims of liberating Iraq and putting Iraq on the road to democratic freedom?"
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5317
"Floor debate on the measure, which expands executive branch surveillance authority and provides retroactive amnesty for telecoms implicated in warrantless NSA wiretapping, consisted largely of mutual congratulation."
"To me, this pitfall was summed up by one of my fellow anti-war protesters at the weekly vigil near my home. He was a dogmatic progressive-liberal, and he was responding to my disappointment that Ron Paul’s radio commercials had not mentioned the war or the 1 million dead Iraqi casualties, only the U.S. soldiers. His answer was frighteningly perceptive: 'Maybe they knew their constituency'."
Part One:
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/ludlow/ludlow4.html
Part Two:
http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/ludlow/ludlow5.html
"The foregone nomination of Barack Obama, which, according to one breathless commentator, 'marks a truly exciting and historic moment in US history,' is a product of the new delusion. Actually, it just seems new. Truly exciting and historic moments have been fabricated around US presidential campaigns for as long as I can recall, generating what can only be described as bullshit on a grand scale."
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/in-the-great-tradition-obama-is-a-hawk/
"On Sunday, in the first story to throw serious doubt on John McCain's rhetoric, McClatchy Newspapers published the results of an eight-month investigation into the stories of 66 of the 501 prisoners released from Guantánamo, which demonstrated why the Supreme Court was correct to intervene in the cases of the prisoners."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/worthington.php?articleid=13015
"[W]hy should anyone assume that the new legislative edict demanding that the President obey the law will get any more respect than the old one, which established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as the “exclusive” means for authorizing electronic spying? It wasn’t that Bush and his team didn’t understand the old law’s language; they simply believed they could violate the law without consequence, under the radical theory that at a time of war – even one as vaguely defined as the 'war on terror' – the President’s powers trump all laws as well as the constitutional rights of citizens."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/062008.html
"The bottom line is that there should not be any 'official' money. Based on thousands of years of history we can be very confident that if left to its own devices the market will choose gold, or the combination of gold and silver, as money, but the main point is that the market must be left to its own devices."
http://www.safehaven.com/article-10537.htm
"Research on the Murchison meteor, which landed in Australia in 1969, has found that the rock carried the building blocks of DNA on board. The finding puts panspermia firmly in the spotlight as a possible origin for life on Earth, and makes a lot more sense than that old tale of thunderstorms and arm-waving."
http://io9.com/5016804/proto+dna-from-meteorites-kick+started-life-on-earth
"The open-source web browser is the fastest and most secure version of Firefox yet. Significant improvements have been made to the way it uses your computer’s resources, so the memory leaks and other performance problems found in Firefox 2 have been stamped out. Text and image rendering have also been improved, and the underlying code for Gecko, the engine that draws the actual web pages on the screen, has been updated. There are also heaps of useful features that have been added for both power users and newcomers alike."
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Why_You_Should_Download_Firefox_3_Right_Now
"A cure for cancer teems through our veins, but the trick is harnessing the immune system's tumour-destroying cells, say doctors. Now, a US team has developed a new way to turn a patient's T-cells against a deadly, metastasised skin cancer. A 55-year old man who received the immune boost lives tumour-free, more than two years after treatment."
"Transit agencies that want to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions should focus on increasing bus loads or reducing the size of their buses. The average Metro bus has 39 seats, yet averages less than 10 passengers. Concentrating service in areas where loads are higher, and using smaller buses in areas or times of day where loads are lower, will do far more to save energy than building rail transit."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9473
"Oil supplies are severely constrained. Dollar supplies aren’t. Perhaps these related facts are what inspired Alexey Miller, the CEO of Russia’s oil giant, Gazprom to predict that oil would rise to $250 a barrel in 'the foreseeable future.' The Fed can 'talk' a strong dollar all it wants, but as long as the supply of dollars and dollar-denominated credit continues to grow, the oil price will continue to climb."
http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/Archives/2008/20080616.html
"When you divide one quadrillion dollars by the measly 100 million workers in the USA who have a non-government job (and thus are the only ones capable of turning a profit through high value-added work), this comes to the amazing sum of $10,000,000.00 for each American worker! Bets are made that total 10 million bucks per private sector worker! How the hell can such bets pay off? Hell, for the derivatives market to make a profit of 1% is equivalent to $1 million per worker! Hahahaha! It's so insane that it doesn't make any sense, and that is why you soon find your brain whirling, whirling, whirling and you whimper and cry in terror of the unknown and the terrifying unknowable."
http://www.safehaven.com/article-10544.htm
"[L]ast week the AP declared all of its content, even one-sentence snippets, off limits to bloggers. Every comma, every semi colon, every quote mark inside an AP story is covered by their copyright."
http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/06/bloggers_to_ap.html
"In fact, the notion that you can "privatize" war is ludicrous. Only states have the economic wherewithal, the rallying force, the compulsive power, the legal immunity, and, of course, the incentive to wage wars. You don't see Microsoft and Apple, or Nintendo and Sony, or AT&T and Sprint, or universities or bakeries or gas stations or whatever, waging wars on each other in the streets of the nation."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/votlucka.php?articleid=13004
"That the respectable interpretation of 9/11 remains respectable in so many important places should not obscure the fact that it is a paranoid fantasy of the first order - one as utterly unhinged from reality as the most extravagant imaginings of the 9/11 Truthers."
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jun/18/campos-very-serious-911-untruths/
"With the rise of the corporate state comes the rise of the security state: the Patriot Act and its renewal, the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of 'extraordinary rendition,' the warrantless wiretapping on American citizens, and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. It is not about terrorism or national security. It is about their control of us. ... A state of fear engenders cruelty. Without change, we will see visited upon us the evils we visit on others. For the primary instrument of tyranny and empire is war and war is a poison; it can kill us."
http://www.progress.org/2008/fascism.htm
"The number of Americans who believe that the war in Iraq was a mistake has surpassed the number who felt the same way about Vietnam during that war. At the same time, a much quieter U.S. military build-up is underway on another continent. The ultimate objective of the two efforts is the same: securing Big Oil’s access to the regions’ oil. The impact in Africa will likely be the same as in Iraq: perpetual occupation, instability, and growing anti-Americanism."
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5301
"Sixty years ago the 'modern computer' was born in a lab in Manchester. The Small Scale Experimental Machine, or 'Baby', was the first to contain memory which could store a program."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7465115.stm
"Month after month from 1953 to 1969 I.F. Stone’s Weekly (biweekly through 1971) exposed deceptions as fast as governments could spin them. His timely and timeless dispatches are gathered in an exceptional paperback, The Best of I.F. Stone." [Though I rarely agreed with I.F.Stone on all details, I greatly enjoyed his weekly back then.]
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/izzy-stone-patron-saint-of-bloggers/
"Eratosthenes was an all-around guy, a Renaissance man centuries before the Renaissance. Some contemporaries called him Pentathalos, a champion of multiple skills. The breadth of his knowledge made him a natural for the post of librarian of the library of Alexandria, Egypt, the greatest repository of classical knowledge."
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/06/dayintech_0619
"Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once. In computer science terms, you could do a 'logical OR' operation. This ability of the system to sort and link prompted Douglas Engelbart in 1962 to suggest these cards could impliement part of the Memex vision of hypertext."
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/06/one_dead_media.php
"By preventing the war in 1939, Chamberlain would have saved the Jews of Western Europe and remained a World Power. By agreeing to peace in 1940, Churchill would have preserved his Empire and allowed Germany to fortify in the East."
http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2977
"That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. Mein Kampf is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust. Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll. "
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=13021
"South Korea is not the only wealthy U.S. ally to reap the rewards of a U.S. security guarantee, while not fully opening its market to the United States. Japan and most of the European NATO allies also do the same. The foolish U.S. policy of continuing to subsidize the defense of these now rich countries—all economic competitors of the United States—allows them to reduce the drag that added defense expenditures would impose on their economies. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has to bear the costs of defending the world.
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2238
"Military alliances are always sold as things that produce security. In practice they tend to do the opposite."
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5303
"The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/06/18/cnrbs118.xml
"The classic idea of a platform is hardware combined with an operating system that would accommodate programs that would run under and utilize the functionality of the operating system on which it ran. Apple's Mac, for example, is an obvious platform, as is Windows. However, even Microsoft realized (or feared) some years back that a platform could stem from a sub-platform and somehow evolve into its own platform."
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,2320317,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03079TX1K0000584
"Craig Venter, who led the charge to decypher human DNA, is now on the green hunt. According to Treehugger he's looking for a double-wammy: take CO2 in the atmosphere and convert it into fuel (rather than fuel creating CO2 as is mostly the case today)."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13641_3-9972800-44.html
"You see, that price of $850 marked the bottom of gold’s fast & furious sell-off in March. It was also the previous bull market’s top, hit just as Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan on January 21, 1980. So a return to prices below that level might actually signal a longer-term drop. If the price is to push higher from here instead, a drop below $850 might be a long time in coming."
http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/Archives/2008/20080619.html
"Good Night, and Good Luck functions on several levels. It is a cautionary tale about unrestrained political power and its use of public hysteria. It is also a tribute to the power of a dissenting media to expose and correct injustice. As such, the movie reproaches today’s journalism that embraces safety."
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0803g.asp
"If you want to save the world, you should study worst-case scenarios for the future, according to 20,000 science fiction fans. The Sci Fi Channel did an online poll, through its Visions For Tomorrow initiative, to find out the top "things to read, watch and do to save the world." And the winners were dark tales of a world gone to hell...."
http://io9.com/5016913/dystopian-science-fiction-can-save-the-world-according-to-you
"Show co-creators Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch will revisit their deliriously demented video tutorials, which feature miserable office drone (and photo-editing expert) Donnie Hoyle delivering caustic, bite-size lessons in layering effects, clone stamping and the quickest route to getting fired."
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/06/demented-photos.html
"The development troubles for Lionsgate's planned adaptation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged continue with the reported departure of filmmaker Vadim Perelman."
http://movies.ign.com/articles/883/883052p1.html?RSSwhen2008-06-19_162400
Three frame cartoon
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-06-18/
"It's an outrage that cookies are no longer the number one snack for children under six. Fruit is un-American."
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=174545
"According to witnesses, former New York City mayor and one-time favorite for the Republican presidential nomination Rudolph Giuliani was seen slumped over and asleep on the Coney Island-bound F train late Tuesday night, as well as on the return Queens-bound F train early Wednesday morning."
http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/giuliani_spotted_sleeping
"After Donnie Hoyle reveals the dark truth about Peopleburg, Sn4tchbuckl3r must face his demons and find the true hero within."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7tjcpduBw0
"It is representative of the sharp division that exists between establishment, mainstream media journalists, and those who have opted for the joy and integrity that accompanies the hard work of digging out truth. The likes of H.L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock have their modern counterparts in a number of journalists and commentators who insist upon working outside the towers and chambers they are to investigate. Such people would consider it a slur upon a noble profession to be "embedded" with generals and admirals or Daddy Warbucks as sources upon which to depend for their writings."
http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer175.html
"Devaluation of the currency gives rise to a general increase in prices, inflation in the popular sense. General price inflation is, everywhere and always, a monetary phenomenon, as stated by various economists, including central bankers. That means that a general increase in prices cannot arise from an increase in the prices of gasoline, food or any other commodity, the mythical 'cost-push inflation.' The monetary phenomenon that the money specialists talk about is the increase in the money supply by the bankers."
"There is plenty of evidence that natural cycles, not human activities, are the 'principal' cause of climate change. And there is no evidence at all – because we can’t get data from the future – that the current climate change will be a catastrophe. For some, climate change may produce major problems: sea levels will rise if warming resumes, for example, but sea levels have been rising ever since the latest glaciation ended 15,000 years ago, and at times the seas rose much, much faster than today’s increase of about an inch or two a century. We can handle this."
http://www.quebecoislibre.org/08/080615-12.htm
"Yes, if the price of next month's oil futures goes up, that can encourage producers to slow their sales on the spot market. And a higher price for next month's oil can encourage refiners to buy more now rather than later. Both reactions could push the cash price up. But they would also cause oil inventories to rise. And rising inventories always bring the price back down. Yet US oil inventories appear modest at present - so there's little evidence that speculation had much to do with recent prices (aside from one-day spikes from scary rumors or news)."
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9479
"The Fed lowers the interest rate by increasing the supply of money that banks have to lend; to unload it, banks charge borrowers less interest. To start, the Fed buys U.S. Treasury bonds from the public. The Fed pays for the bonds not by using old money it has lying around but by increasing the reserves held by the banks in their accounts at their local Federal Reserve Bank then using that new money. This increase in reserves or bank funds is a creation of money out of nothing. Actually, this does not violate the law of conservation, because this creation of money is at the expense of the value of all other money holdings. Every extra dollar created by the Fed decreases the value of the dollars you hold by a tiny amount. "
http://www.progress.org/2008/fold564.htm
"Not only nature, but the Technium too abhors a vacuum."
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/06/machine_fecundi.php
"A strong cup of coffee in the morning can feel like a life saver. Now, one of the largest and longest studies of coffee drinking suggests that coffee may indeed boost your lifespan – providing you drink enough of the stuff, that is."
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/
dn14151-guzzling-coffee-may-cut-heart-disease.html
"Why does hot relate to looks?"
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