January 4, 2012

Police Think Poisoned Cat Meat Killed China Tycoon

Note: my reason for posting this is because a billionaire seems to have been killed by poisoning, not the whole China/Cat thing. It appears that one of the 1% just got killed apparently by another of the 1% (or a politician, who knows?).

(Ayn Rand's) Atlas just facepalmed.


http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/police-poisoned-cat-meat-killed-china-tycoon-15284374

Police Think Poisoned Cat Meat Killed China Tycoon

BEIJING January 4, 2012 (AP)
The sudden death of a billionaire in southern China is causing police to ask: Was it murder by cat meat?

Long Liyuan, 49, died on Dec. 23 in wealthy Guangdong province after sharing a dish of slow boiled cat meat stew, a southern delicacy, with two men over a business lunch.

One of the men, local official Huang Guang, was arrested by police on Friday on suspicion of poisoning the hotpot with a toxic herb. Police say Huang and Long had economic disputes.

Huang, deputy director of agriculture in Guangdong's Bajia township, is suspected of poisoning the hotpot with the herb Gelsemium elegans, according to a statement on the microblog of the investigating police. The poisonous plant is found in forests in parts of China.

January 4, 2012

Dear Free Traders: How much lower should our standard of living go?

Have we given up enough yet?

Does the fact that more Americans are having problems finding food than Chinese people, count?

How low should we go?


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http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/formerly-great-cities-all-over-america-are-turning-into-open-festering-sores

[quote]Formerly Great Cities All Over America Are Turning Into Open, Festering Sores

Once upon a time, the people of the United States constructed beautiful, shiny cities from coast to coast that were the envy of the entire globe. We had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen and life was quite good in America. But now all of our prosperity is coming crashing down and many of our formerly great cities are turning into open, festering sores. Unfortunately, we are drowning in so much debt that we can barely even slow down the shocking decline of our cities. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of manufacturing facilities and millions of good jobs have been shipped out of the United States. As our economic infrastructure has been ripped out right in front of our eyes, an atmosphere of unemployment, poverty and despair has descended on many of our major cities like a soaking wet blanket. Today, many of our cities that once were considered to be some of the greatest in the world have been transformed into rotting, post-apocalyptic hellholes. When you visit many of these cities and look into the sunken eyes of the residents, you almost get the feeling that something has sucked all of the hope and all of the life right out of them. For a while, large numbers of Americans still believed that the right politician would bring them "hope" and "change", but now crushing despair is giving way to absolute desperation for millions of people. Desperate people do desperate things, and as our major cities continue to decay they are going to become very dangerous places to be.

Even in some of our most "prosperous cities" there are areas that closely resemble third world conditions. For example, in San Francisco there is an area known as "Hunter's Point" that is a complete and utter nightmare. In Hunter's Point, more than half of the population lives in poverty and more than half of all children live in a home where there is no father present. The following is what one reporter found on a visit to Hunter's Point....[/quote]

http://blogs.cfed.org/cfed_news_clips/2011/10/more-americans-than-chinese-st.html

[quote]More Americans than Chinese struggling to put food on the table: Gallup Poll
By CFED on October 13, 2011 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
The Huffington Post
October 13, 2011

More Americans than Chinese struggling to put food on the table: Gallup Poll

Millions of Americans are currently weathering the effects of a slow economic recovery. Many Chinese, meanwhile, find themselves struggling less to keep their families fed, according to a recent Gallup report.

Nearly 20 percent of Americans say they've had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 months, up from nine percent in 2008, the Gallup report found. That's compared to six percent of Chinese respondents, down from 16 percent in 2008.

Though the U.S. economy is technically in a recovery, Americans' incomes have declined more since the recession's end than they did during the downturn. Nine in 10 Americans say they don't expect to get a raise that will be enough to compensate for the rising cost of food and fuel, according to an American Pulse survey.

At the same time, the Chinese middle class has been on the rise since the late 1990s. The middle-class explosion has been most prominent in the country's largest cities and government policies have helped to aid it along. Businesses are responding too: U.S. hotel companies are launching modestly-priced hotel chains in the country in hopes of attracting some of the scores of new middle class travelers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And while the Chinese middle class is growing, the ranks of the U.S. poor are swelling. The nation's poverty rate jumped to 15.1 percent in 2010, the Cenus Bureau announced last month, as the total number of Americans in poverty grew to 46.2 million.

There's one area where Americans are struggling less: Eleven percent of Americans said they had trouble affording housing in the last 12 months, compared to 16 percent of Chinese, according to Gallup. Still, the share of Americans struggling to find housing is growing; in 2008, five percent of Americans said they struggled to pay for adequate housing.[/quote]

January 4, 2012

KKK store gets a new landlord. If you click this and die laughing DON'T BLAME ME!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/judge-black-church-rightful-owner-kkk-store-174103559.html

Judge: Black church rightful owner of KKK store

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — After a lengthy legal battle between a black South Carolina church and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a judge has ruled that the church owns a building where KKK robes and T-shirts are sold.

A circuit judge ruled last month that New Beginnings Baptist Church is the rightful owner of the building that houses the Redneck Shop, which operates a so-called Klan museum and sells Klan robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. The judge ordered the shop's proprietor to pay the church's legal bills of more than $3,300.

Since 1996, the Redneck Shop has operated in an old movie theater in Laurens, a city about 70 miles northwest from Columbia that was named after 18th century slave trader Henry Laurens.

January 2, 2012

18 million empty homes. 3.5 million homeless. Move the homeless in! Overwhelm the police gangs!

Perhaps we should start moving the homeless into empty houses and force the cops to waste their time going after them.

Overload the courts. Every homeless person demands a jury trial. Cops either give up or consign themselves to overloading our already overcrowded prisons (like in California, where judges have forced prisons to let go of 40,000 prisoners!) by providing them with 3 hots and a cot at taxpayer expense. Taxpayers will revolt. The system will utterly crash.

Are there even enough police to handle such a mass movement???

January 2, 2012

Check in if you plan on doing something to make 2012 better

Me: Donating, manning the phone banks for Obama, whatever other major, minor or quick task I can get my grubby little hands on.

You...?

January 2, 2012

Elizabeth Warren / Paul Krugman 2016?

Just wondering.