It's an interesting phenomenon: You have a tiny shard of the U.S. population holding itself, and the world, hostage via the Shutdown-Blowdown-Blowup fever dreams of a handful of boneheads who dress up like Constitutional preservationists and protectionists -- while those same boneheads betray the very document they themselves claim to be supporting and providing safe harbor, all while using that same document as a handy club on all who dare disagree with them.
It's interesting, all right -- and in the same twisted, horrific, hold-your-breath-way that it's interesting to consider what happens, say, when a freight train filled with 13 million gallons of molasses and Super Glue piles into an oncoming train loaded down with 42 tons of high grit sandpaper and radioactive goose feathers .
Alex Baer: Tri-Corner Logic: Easy as 1-2-3
IAEA team in Japan to check on Fukushima cleanup
A team of experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) met Japanese government officials in Tokyo Monday as part of a mission to check on progress in the cleanup at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which repeatedly leaked radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean after a 2011 earthquake and subsequent meltdowns.
The Japanese government has been stepping up efforts to allow international help after Tokyo was criticized for its perceived reluctance to accept foreign expertise in handling the situation.
What archaeology tells us about the Bible
For the past 20 years, a battle has been waged with spades and scientific tracts over just how mighty David and the Israelites were. A string of archaeologists and Bible scholars, building on critical scholarship from the 1970s and '80s, has argued that David and his son Solomon were the product of a literary tradition that at best exaggerated their rule and perhaps fabricated their existence altogether.
For some, the finds at Qeiyafa have tilted the evidence against such skeptical views of the Bible. Garfinkel says his work here bolsters the argument for a regional government at the time of David – with fortified cities, central taxation, international trade, and distinct religious traditions in the Judean hills. He says it refutes the portrayal by other scholars of an agrarian society in which David was nothing more than a "Bedouin sheikh in a tent."
How the World Health Organisation covered up Iraq's nuclear nightmare
Last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published a long awaited document summarising the findings of an in-depth investigation into the prevalence of congenital birth defects (CBD) in Iraq, which many experts believe is linked to the use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions by Allied forces. According to the 'summary report':
"The rates for spontaneous abortion, stillbirths and congenital birth defects found in the study are consistent with or even lower than international estimates. The study provides no clear evidence to suggest an unusually high rate of congenital birth defects in Iraq."
Letters detail punitive tactics used on Guantánamo hunger strikers
The US military secretly used a variety of tactics to break the resolve of the Guantánamo Bay hunger strikers, including placing them in solitary confinement if they continued to refuse food, newly declassified interviews with detainees reveal.
One prisoner also said that the last British resident held inside the camp, Shaker Aamer, had been targeted and humiliated by the authorities to the point where it became impossible for the 44-year-old to continue his protest.
Toyota announces recall of 10,000 cars
Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp. said it is recalling about 10,000 model year 2013 and 2014 cars to replace faulty windshield wiper switches.
The recall involves the 2013-14 Camry and Camry Hybrid, the 2013 Avalon and Avalon Hybrid and the 2014 Corolla, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
Mother Dies Amid Abuses in $110 Billion U.S. Stent Assembly Line
Najam Azmat snaked a catheter on a guide wire into Judi Gary’s groin as he tried to insert a stent in an artery supplying blood to her pelvis and right leg.
On an X-ray monitor near where Gary lay, nurses saw blood leakages. The wire seemed to be in the wrong place, nurse Evan Gourley told Azmat. Everything was fine, the vascular surgeon replied. It wasn’t.
Azmat tore Gary’s aorta during the December 2005 procedure, according to documents filed with a U.S. Justice Department civil complaint. Nurses asked another surgeon to step in. Gourley left in disgust. Later, he went to administrators at Satilla Regional Medical Center in Waycross, Georgia, with a warning about Azmat.
Bob Alexander: Too Stupid To Live
Here’s the way it shakes out. Paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek, Slovene philosopher and cultural critic:
Of these three features:
personal honesty,
intelligence,
and sincere support of Republican policies,
it is only possible to combine two, never all three of these attributes.
If one is honest and supportive … one is not very bright.
If one is bright and supportive … one is not honest.
And if one is honest and bright … one can not be supportive.
There’s no such thing as a smart, honest, Republican. I challenge anyone to find this elusive creature. The odds are you’ll stumble across the Loch Ness Monster and the Abominable Snowman playing cribbage in The Vatican before you’ll be able to snap a couple shots of a smart, honest, Republican.
Prairie 2: Hobbling the Four Horses of the Apocalypse
New unemployment claims jumped by 66,000 last week to 374,000 after months settling down toward 300,000. This doesn't begin to show the real effects of the government shutdown as contractors are only now beginning to kick people to the curb. The effect this will have on the rest of economy will begin to show soon as the lack of spending by those affected by the shutdown starts to mushroom into a reduction in US GDP. This is one of those self reinforcing feedback loops that are commonly referred to as a 'death spiral'.
You see, the problem isn't confined to the simple math of less spending, but is actually multiplied by the fact that the natural mitigators of an economic downturn that we commonly refer to as 'government safety nets' are also being removed. State run programs are running out of 'pass through' money, and the charities will be affected soon. Right wingers are always saying churches could care for the poor better and somehow do it at no cost, but the christian charities get 2/3 of their money from the Feds. With Uncle Sam out the picture, their private donations will dry up too.
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