Did You Know
Did You Know
Chemical Madness!
Robert Hunziker: All of humanity currently risks exposure to toxic chemicals all over creation in a similar vein to the Mad Hatter of Alice in Wonderland fame. And, maybe, as a result, goin’ kinda looney and getting horribly, dreadfully sick! ... Unwittingly, society is poisoning itself. ... Anecdotal evidence alone is reason enough for alarm, but of more concern, several scientific studies show real, actual, direct links of pesticides to human chronic diseases. Regrettably, chronic disease is already at severe epidemic levels never before witnessed! ... When using chemicals to kill specific pests, does it also make sense to collaterally kill bees, earthworms, butterflies, and other wildlife that form and create the backbone of ecosystems vital to human food, health, and well being?...
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Apr 23, 2018, 3:17pm
Did You Know
This App Can Tell You the Indigenous History of the Land You Live On
Chelsey Luger: Enter your ZIP code into the Native Lands App and an interactive map will tell you the area’s original language and tribal ties. ... You cannot find a corner of this continent that does not hold ancient history, Indigenous value, and pre-colonial place names and stories. And every place we occupy was once the homeland for other people, most of whom didn’t leave willingly. ... Whose land are you on? Start with a visit to native-land.ca. Native Land is both a website and an app that seeks to map Indigenous languages, treaties, and territories across Turtle Island...
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Apr 18, 2018, 4:58pm
Did You Know
Revealed: Secret Rightwing Strategy to Discredit Teacher Strikes
Ed Pilkington, Guardian UK: Manual provides ‘dos and don’ts’ for how to smear the strikes A nationwide network of rightwing thinktanks is launching a PR counteroffensive against the teachers’ strikes that are sweeping the country, circulating a “messaging guide” for anti-union activists that portrays the walkouts as harmful to low-income parents and their children. ... The new rightwing strategy to discredit the strikes that have erupted in protest against cuts in education funding and poor teacher pay is contained in a three-page document obtained by the Guardian. Titled “How to talk about teacher strikes”, it provides a “dos and don’ts” manual for how to smear the strikers....
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Apr 14, 2018, 10:50am
Did You Know
Lying Is a Fundamental Part of American Police Culture
Kali Holloway: Police officers lie under oath in court so often that they’ve even given the practice a nickname. “Behind closed doors, we call it testilying,” New York City police officer Pedro Serrano told the New York Times. “You take the truth and stretch it out a little bit.” ... “Every lawyer who practices in the criminal courts knows that police perjury is commonplace,” former New York State criminal court judge, U.S. attorney and NYU law professor Irving Younger wrote in the Nation in 1967. ... And even if his lies are exposed in the courtroom, the policeman is as likely to be indicted for perjury by his co‑worker, the prosecutor, as he is to be struck down by thunderbolts from an avenging heaven.”...
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Mar 27, 2018, 11:45am
Did You Know
Trump's CIA Is Using Hit Squads
Aram Roston: “Small teams are locating and killing bad guys. That’s what we are doing.” The official in charge of the hit teams was a senior aide to CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who Trump just nominated to be secretary of state. ... The Special Activities Center is now led by a former commando at the agency. BuzzFeed News is withholding his name at the request of the CIA. Until this spring, he was a senior aide to Pompeo, and before that, he served under John Brennan, Pompeo’s predecessor. He was, according to a source who knows him, a vocal proponent of more aggressive and audacious operations, and he pushed for the use of the SAC to kill terrorists...
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Mar 16, 2018, 3:33pm
Did You Know
Gun Control Legislation Is Constitutional
Miles Mogulescu: In its 2008 decision, District of Columbia v Heller, the Supreme Court held for the first time since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1789 , that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to possess a handgun at home for self-defense, separate from participation in a militia. (In my view, Heller was wrongly decided by a 5-4 vote , ignoring the Second Amendment’s injunction that the right to bear arms exists in the context of a “well regulated Militia.”) ... Heller did not confer on individual citizens the constitutional “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” ... The Supreme Court held that laws banning “dangerous and unusual weapons” such as an M-16 and other firearms most useful in military service are consistent with the Second Amendment...
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Mar 1, 2018, 4:18pm
Did You Know
Koch Document Reveals Laundry List of Policy Victories Extracted from the Trump Administration
Lee Fang, Nick Surgey: The donors have pumped campaign contributions not only to GOP lawmakers, but also to an array of third-party organizations that have pressured officials to act swiftly to roll back limits on pollution, approve new pipeline projects, and extend the largest set of upper-income tax breaks in generations. ... The Koch brothers are also hoping to fundamentally reshape other aspects of American society, including labor unions and the judiciary. ... “We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the last 50,” Charles Koch reportedly said. “The capabilities we have now can take us to a whole new level.”...
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Feb 26, 2018, 11:02am
Did You Know
The Peace Symbol at Sixty
Bill Berkowitz: The peace symbol, now ubiquitous throughout the world, was created on February 21, 1958, and was first seen in public on Good Friday of that year – which fell on April 4 -- when thousands of British anti-nuclear campaigners – organized by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War (DAC) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) -- marched 52 miles from London's Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. ... Gerald Holtom, a British artists and designer, and World War II conscientious objector, created the peace symbol out of feelings of deep despair. In an interview with Peace News, Holtom said: "I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle round it." ...
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Feb 21, 2018, 12:30pm
Did You Know
Yes, Deniers, Millions of Americans are Among the Poorest People in the World
Paul Buchheit: In 2015 it was reported that up to 50 million American adults had negative wealth and thus numbered among the poorest 10% of the world's adults. ... Our poorest citizens may not be living in a farming village where they eat millet soup and walk a mile for water. But they have to deal with homelessness, alcoholism, mental health disease, opioid addiction, stress-inducing indebtedness and inequality, and pollution levels that are the highest in the developed world. All of that makes for rock-bottom living standards. ... Poverty is the stress of overwhelming debt; the inability to pay for medical treatment during years of declining health; the lack of community support as part of a true safety net; the near-absence of retirement savings for over half the population; the steady decline of jobs that pay enough to support a family; the well-documented impact of America's inequality on its citizens' physical and mental well-being...
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Feb 13, 2018, 11:56am
Did You Know
How Cannabis Cleans Up Nuclear Radiation And Toxic Soil
Chris Roberts: Industrial hemp has been used to clean up deadly pollutants before, perhaps most famously near the site of the deadly nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine (and where, it should not go unstated, thousands of people are still at work at the power station, which produces six percent of the nation’s electricity). In the mid-1990s, a company called Phytotech worked with researchers and a Ukraine-based seed bank to plant thousands of hemp plants in and around Chernobyl. ... hemp is extremely effective in removing from soils the toxic element cadmium—which is convenient, because cadmium contamination is everywhere. It’s seen in fossil fuels, old-school pesticides and many other byproducts of human civilization...
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Feb 10, 2018, 2:37pm
Did You Know
Will Trump’s Judges Set Back Voting Rights?
Sean Steinberg: Democracy in the US is facing a relentless assault from state governments intent on staying in power by redrawing districts and suppressing the vote. In many cases, the only thing that stands in their way are federal courts fairly applying the law. But that could soon change. ... President Donald Trump, with an assist from the GOP-controlled Senate, has been highly effective in stacking federal courts with conservative judges. ... In his first year alone, he added nearly two dozen judges with lifetime appointments to the nation’s highest courts — one to the Supreme Court, 12 to appellate courts, and 10 to district courts. ... This came about because of an unusually large number of openings on the federal bench — a direct result of the Republican-led Senate blocking many of President Barack Obama’s nominees...
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Feb 8, 2018, 3:32pm
Did You Know
No, Big Corporations Shouldn’t Get Tax Breaks to Create Jobs
Jim Hightower: Governors and mayors insist that giving our tax dollars to corporations to lure them to move to our cities is good public policy. The corporations create jobs, those workers pay taxes, and — voila! — the giveaway pays for itself! ... Does it really work that way? Unfortunately, no. ... Good Jobs First tracked the 386 incentive deals since 1976 that gave at least $50 million to a corporation, then tallied the number of jobs created. The average cost per job was $658,427 — each! ... The rosy job-creation claims by incentive dealmakers also tend to be bogus, because they don’t subtract the number of jobs lost as a result of these deals....
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Feb 2, 2018, 1:27pm
Did You Know
Remember the Bear River Massacre, Climax of the American Holocaust
Sarah Sunshine Manning: On Jan. 29, 1863, United States Col. Patrick Connor and California volunteers attacked approximately 500 Northwestern Shoshone Indians, leaving them bloodied and frozen in the snow, or floating down the crimson red and half-frozen Bear River in southeastern Idaho. ... The American Holocaust is forgotten, and forgotten by design. ... You see, hunting down human beings—men, women, children and infants—at dawn, and because they were Indian and less worthy of life, because they were an obstacle to settler colonialism, simply does not fit into the lily-white narrative of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism. Acknowledging its own genocide of indigenous peoples just does not sit well with America, overall...
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Jan 30, 2018, 4:04pm
Did You Know
Meet the CIA: Guns, Drugs and Money
Jeffrey St. Clair - Alexander Cockburn: The Central Intelligence Agency is exactly what one would expect of an organization with a mandate stretching from the collection and analysis of intelligence data to the undertaking of subversion, manipulation of elections, assassination and the running of secret wars. Lying is part of the job description at the CIA, where falsehoods are regularly peddled to allies, the press, other federal agencies and Congress. “We’d go down and lie to them consistently,” says former CIA officer Ralph McGehee. “In my 25 years, I have never seen the agency tell the truth to a congressional committee.” ... Organizations such as the CIA require immersion in criminal milieus, virtually unlimited supplies of “black” or laundered money and a long-term cadre of entirely ruthless executives (some of them not averse to making personal fortunes from their covert activities). The drug trade is an integral part of such a world...
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Jan 27, 2018, 1:11pm
Did You Know
GI Coffeehouses Recalled
Fred Gardner: The New York Times has published an op-ed piece by historian David Parsons about the coffeehouses started near US bases during the War in Vietnam. Parsons had interviewed me and I must have been the source of the details he got wrong. (He got the big picture right.) ... Most of all, he wanted to find a way to reach out to disaffected young G.I.s, to show them that there was a whole community of antiwar activists and organizers who were on their side. He finally settled on an idea: opening a network of youth-culture-oriented coffeehouses, just like the ones in North Beach, in towns outside military bases around the country. ... The unprecedented eruption of resistance and activism by American troops is critical to understanding the history of the Vietnam War. The G.I. movement and related phenomenon created a significant crisis for the American military...
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Jan 16, 2018, 11:32am
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