August 27, 2013

Air Force Bans Greek Yogurt With Hemp Seeds Over Anti-Drug Policy Concerns

The Air Force warned personnel over the weekend to steer clear of a specific flavor of Chobani Greek yogurt that includes hemp seeds.

Hemp contains trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive ingredient also found in marijuana, classified alongside heroin and LSD as a Schedule I drug under federal law. The Air Force, as part of its anti-drug policy, added hemp seed oil products and hemp seed to a list of forbidden substances in 1999, over concerns that they could confuse the results of drug tests regularly given to service members.

Chobani's Blueberry Power Flip is the latest victim of that prohibition. The Air Force made clear that yogurt flavors without hemp were still fine to eat.

“The Air Force has not restricted military members from consuming Chobani Greek yogurt; rather, only Chobani yogurt that contains hemp seed or hemp seed oil is prohibited, just as any product which contains or is derived from hemp seed or hemp seed oil is prohibited,” said Capt. Adam Koudelka, the legal adviser for the Air Force Drug Testing Laboratory at the Air Force Medical Operations Agency at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, according to the Air Force Times. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/air-force-hemp-yogurt_n_3819257.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037

August 26, 2013

The droppings don't fall far from the asshole.......

U.S. Senate candidate Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) made her presence felt at a Tea Party function on Saturday, revealing some thoughts on mosques and terrorism in America.

The Casper Star-Tribune reports that Cheney appeared at an event in Emblem, Wyo., where those two topics emerged into the conversation. According to the paper, Fox News terrorism analyst Wayne Simmons made comments earlier in the event suggesting that growth of mosques in America is leading to more recruitment outlets for terror groups.

“I do think that we know that recruitment goes on through mosques,” Cheney said in response, the Star-Tribune reported. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/26/liz-cheney-terrorists_n_3816610.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037

August 26, 2013

Paul B. Farrell: Silicon Valley can’t save America’s dying economy

Silicon Valley can’t save America’s dying economy
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch


SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Warning: Silicon Valley is fighting a no-win battle against six fatal headwinds — cultural, political and ideological trends that have become hard wired within America’s collective brain, psyche, soul.

These headwinds are making it virtually impossible for our best ’n’ brightest innovation and technology geniuses to save America from becoming a second-rate superpower trapped in a no-growth economy.

OK, so you don’t believe it? You’re a Silicon Valley superoptimist? Got lots of tech stocks? Believe technology is already building a new world? Saving the future? You’re convinced our best ’n’ brightest innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists will save us, the whole world, civilization, the planet?

Wrong. High-tech solutions cannot and will not prevent America’s economic growth’s collapsing from an average of greater than 2% GDP growth beginning in 1750, with the Industrial Revolution, but ending a generation ago. America’s GDP is already collapsing. Now, growth is a weak 1.8% on average. Worse, America’s GDP is predicted to sink much further — down near the no-growth 0.2% GDP common on the planet for the years and centuries prior to 1750.

New Silicon Valley innovations can’t stop a collapsing economy

The clear message in economist Robert Gordon’s must-read National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Is U.S. Economic Growth over?” is that Silicon Valley can’t maintain the economy on its own. His paper is guaranteed to make investors lapse into denial if not cardiac arrest, especially hard-core high-tech fans convinced that technology is indeed the miracle worker that can solve all problems and will save the world. ...........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/silicon-valley-cant-save-americas-dying-economy-2013-08-24?link=home_carousel

August 25, 2013

NY Observer: Vanity Project: Why Fancy Architecture Won’t Save Penn Station

Vanity Project: Why Fancy Architecture Won’t Save Penn Station
By Stephen Jacob Smith 8/13 7:40pm


Descending into Penn Station, it’s not hard to see why New York City’s civic fathers are so embarrassed by the nation’s busiest train station. The station sits bracketed by the Garment District and Chelsea, in the cheapest corner of Midtown, more than half a mile from the gleaming skyscrapers with triple-digit annual per-square-foot rents. The neighborhood (which used to be called the Tenderloin) may be classier than it was when the station was built 100 years ago, but that’s about the only thing that can be said for it.

Penn is clearly subservient to Madison Square Garden, which sits atop it. It was built in the 1960s, at a time when trains were thought to be on their way out, and it shows. The concourse is oppressively low-ceilinged and totally devoid of natural light, and the clear sightlines of the old Penn Station have been replaced with a warren of hallways with an almost airport-like inscrutability. The platforms are narrow and quick to fill up, leading some to call it unsafe—an exaggeration, but not by much.

Penn Station has been a thorn in the side of planners for decades, but in many ways, it’s a fittingly decrepit gateway to a city where politics mire the most minor of railway upgrades.

There are efforts afoot to fix the station, and the lines that run below it. Amtrak is pushing a plan ($800 million) for a new headhouse across Eighth Avenue as well as a new tunnel beneath the Hudson and a full-block station for New Jersey Transit across 31st Street ($15 billion). ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://observer.com/2013/08/vanity-project/

August 25, 2013

Things to Know as Collapse Becomes Hip

Things to Know as Collapse Becomes Hip

Saturday, 24 August 2013 01:43
By Jan Lundberg, Truthout | Op-Ed


A consensus seems to be building toward anticipating collapse. So what's your flavor? Financial meltdown with chaos? Petrocollapse? Climate extinction? The contributing crises are seemingly diverse, including Fukushima's mounting radioactive releases into the Pacific, the growing plastic plague and creeping GMO contamination. If none of those are your thing, you can acknowledge accelerating bee colony collapse.

You may feel the days of "innocence" have receded in the rear-view mirror as we drive off the ecological cliff like motorized lemmings. Even so, maybe you see such resilience in the corporate state and its war machine that you anticipate dictatorship à la Children of Men, the ominous film set in 2027.

It appears that things must get worse before they get better. The United States has become especially absurd with its intensifying mess of debt and flailing leadership. If a major event in the Persian Gulf or China can trigger the toppling of the US House of Cards, increased consumer vulnerability must be the order of the day. It is surprising to some that total collapse has not yet happened, but news such as record new car sales in July suggests the entire system can keep on going indefinitely. Such news supplies happy-talk for the embattled corporate agenda.

A more disturbing and shocking statistic than car sales going in the wrong direction for Mother Earth:

"Four out of five US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream." (Associated Press, July 28, 2013)

Is this a wake-up call or just part of the relentless barrage of disillusion? What about things the four-fifths can do now that they are not doing? Are they - we - helpless victims? We'll need to do more than wait for the next election, write to Congress or demonstrate in the streets against economic hardship and mismanagement. Yet many of the four-fifths still assume that they can rise above any temporary period of struggling and that money will solve their problems. Meanwhile, the holy grail of national Recovery beckons without arriving. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18217-things-to-know-as-collapse-becomes-hip

August 25, 2013

Dean Baker: AP Goes Off The Deep End With Deficit Scold David Walker

AP Goes Off The Deep End With Deficit Scold David Walker

Saturday, 24 August 2013 11:39
By Dean Baker, Campaign for America's Future | Op-Ed


On Wednesday the Associated Press fielded its entry in the classics in bad reporting on economic policy contest: a profile it did of David Walker, the former head of the Government Accountability Office and also former president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The piece presented everything that Walker said at face value, making no effort to put his scare story in any context nor to verify his assertions.

The AP entry starts out strong with the third paragraph telling readers:

“Next month, he will present a major report for the nonprofit he founded, the Comeback America Initiative, whose purpose is to raise awareness about the federal government’s swelling debt. It’s a chasm that isn’t top of mind for most Americans, he knows. But Walker, 61, wants it to be.”

Note the use of “swelling” instead of a more neutral term or maybe no adjective at all. Then we get the term “chasm” as opposed to a term like “issue.”

Then we are told that Walker passes around fake trillion bills because, quoting Walker:

““Washington spends a trillion dollars like it’s nothing.”

Is that true? I recall big debates in the last few weeks over spending $40 billion on food stamps over the next decade. We’ve had big debates over the $250 million (1/4,000th of a trillion) [number corrected] spent each year on public broadcasting. In fact, John McCain made a big issue in his 2008 presidential campaign over spending $1 million (one millionth of a trillion) on a Woodstock museum. There seem to be lots of very big debates in Washington on spending sums that are way smaller than $1 trillion. ............................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/18378-ap-goes-off-the-deep-end-with-deficit-scold-david-walker

August 24, 2013

Keiser Report: US High Cathedral of Fraud

Published on Aug 20, 2013

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss Mom and Pop investors taken out on a slab and their wealth burnt to a crisp by the high cathedral of fraud that is the New York Stock Exchange and its degenerate priests of high finance. Max proposes a scheme of mortgages collateralized by food stamps. In the second half, Max talks to Owen Jones, a columnist at the Independent and author of Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, about the prejudice of George Osborne's policies which takes nearly £12 billion from housing benefit for the poor and shifts it to property speculation schemes for the middle class.

August 24, 2013

Keiser Report: NSA-spread Digital AIDS

Published on Aug 22, 2013

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the fact that banks are lobbying to force credit unions to become banks in order to destroy the Move Your Money competitive threat. They also discuss frontrunning the NSA and the digital AIDS they've spread. In the second half, Max talks to former government official, Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari.com about extricating yourself from the tapeworm economy.

August 24, 2013

Abracadabra: You’re a Part-Timer

from TomDispatch:



Abracadabra: You’re a Part-Timer
How Corporate America Used the Great Recession to Turn Good Jobs Into Bad Ones

By Barbara Garson


Watch closely: I’m about to demystify the sleight-of-hand by which good jobs were transformed into bad jobs, full-time workers with benefits into freelancers with nothing, during the dark days of the Great Recession.

First, be aware of what a weird economic downturn and recovery this has been. From the end of an “average” American recession, it ordinarily takes slightly less than a year to reach or surpass the previous employment peak. But in June 2013 -- four full years after the official end of the Great Recession -- we had recovered only 6.6 million jobs, or just three-quarters of the 8.7 million jobs we lost.

Here’s the truly mysterious aspect of this “recovery”: 21% of the jobs lost during the Great Recession were low wage, meaning they paid $13.83 an hour or less. But 58% of the jobs regained fall into that category. A common explanation for that startling statistic is that the bad jobs are coming back first and the good jobs will follow.

But let me suggest another explanation: the good jobs are here among us right now -- it’s just their wages, their benefits, and the long-term security that have vanished. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175738/tomgram%3A_barbara_garson%2C_how_to_become_a_part-time_worker_without_really_trying/#more

August 24, 2013

Bayard Rustin: the gay black pacifist at the heart of the March on Washington

Bayard Rustin: the gay black pacifist at the heart of the March on Washington
Though he was chief strategist for King's march, Rustin was kept in the background as some organizers considered him a liability. He died in 1987, and is sometimes forgotten in civil rights history


Gary Younge
theguardian.com, Friday 23 August 2013 15.00 EDT


When civil rights leaders met at the Roosevelt Hotel in Harlem in early July 1963 to hammer out the ground rules by which they would work together to organise the March on Washington there was really only one main sticking point: Bayard Rustin.

Rustin, a formidable organiser and central figure in the civil rights movement, was a complex and compelling figure. Raised a Quaker, his political development would take him through pacifism, communism, socialism and into the civil rights movement in dramatic fashion. In 1944, after refusing to fight in World War Two, he had been jailed as a conscientious objector. It was primarily through him that the leadership would adopt non-violent direct action not only as a strategy but a principle. "The only weapons we have is our bodies," he once said. "And we have to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn."

Rustin was also openly gay, an attribute which was regarded as a liability in the early sixties in a movement dominated by clerics. His position became particularly vulnerable following his arrest in Pasadena, in 1953, when he was caught having sex with two men in a parked car. Charged with lewd vagrancy he plead out to a lesser 'morals charge' and was sent to jail for 60 days.

Some in the room that day believed all this made him too great a liability to be associated with such a high profile event. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, was candid. "I don't want you leading that march on Washington, because you know I don't give a damn about what they say, but publicly I don't want to have to defend the draft dodging," he said. "I know you're a Quaker, but that's not what I'll have to defend. I'll have to defend draft dodging. I'll have to defend promiscuity. The question is never going to be homosexuality, it's going to be promiscuity and I can't defend that. And the fact is that you were a member of the Young Communist League. And I don't care what you say, I can't defend that." ........................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/bayard-rustin-march-on-washington