For those of you like me...

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This just keeps getting wierder.

Blaming the Victim: Greece is a Nation Under Occupation
by Andrew Gavin Marshall / July 16th, 2015

In the early hours of Thursday morning, July 16, the Greek Parliament passed a host of austerity measures in order to begin talks on a potential third bailout of 86 billion euros. The austerity measures were pushed onto the Parliament by Greece’s six-month-old leftist government of Syriza, elected in late January with a single mandate to oppose austerity. So what exactly happened over the past six months that the first anti-austerity government elected in Europe has now passed a law implementing further austerity measures?

One cannot properly assess the political gymnastics being exercised within Greece’s ruling Syriza party without placing events in their proper context. It is inaccurate to mistake the actions and decisions of the Greek government with those taken by an independent, sovereign and democratic country. Greece is not a free and sovereign nation. Greece is an occupied nation.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/07/blaming-the-victim-greece-is-a-nation-under-occupation/

The US can't even protect workers living in a US territory, Saipan. The is no damn way a trade agreement is going to protect workers in Vietnam.

Sorry, I could not hold it any longer.

Peace.

Source: Chinadaily.com.

MUNICH - The leaders of Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine aim to hold a summit over Ukraine crisis in Minsk on Wednesday, officials in Germany and France said Sunday.

The plan for a meeting Wednesday in the Belarusian capital emerged from a phone call between German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, described the call as "intensive."

The aim is to draw up a package of measures that breathes new life into a much-violated September peace plan. Seibert and the French government said preparations for the summit will take place Monday in Berlin, without elaborating.

There will also be a meeting in Minsk by Wednesday of the signatories to last September's accord, including Russia, Ukraine and representatives of the independent-seeking insurgency, they said.



Read more: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2015-02/08/content_19523382.htm

Better version.

Old version but it's not the same? Both are fun so...

In fact, except for the debilitating effects of poverty, our public school system may be the best in the world.

The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reveal that the U.S. ranked high, relative to other OECD countries, in reading, math, and science (especially in reading, and in all areas better in 4th grade than in 8th grade). Some U.S. private schools were included, but a separate evaluation was done for Florida, in public schools only, and their results were higher than the U.S. average.

Perhaps most significant in the NCES reading results is that schools with less than 25% free-lunch eligibility scored higher than the average in ALL OTHER COUNTRIES.

The Obvious: Reduce Poverty and Improve Education

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/12/more-evidence-public-beats-private-education

Protesters occupied the chambers of the Vermont Statehouse Thursday afternoon, saying they refuse to leave until legislators meet their demands to respect the first-ever U.S. law for universal, publicly-funded health care, won by grassroots movements nearly four years ago yet stymied by the governor last month.

The demonstration is a response to the mid-December announcement by Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin that he seeks to unilaterally abandon the universal health care plan, passed into law in 2011 under Act 48 and named Green Mountain Care, even though the governor used the groundbreaking legislation to bolster his election.

Timed to coincide with Shumlin's re-inauguration, Thursday's sit-in—still ongoing at the time of publication—was staged by approximately 30 people, with "many supporters" rallying nearby, Keith Brunner of the Vermont Workers' Center, the organization that coordinates the state-wide "Health Care Is A Human Right" campaign, told Common Dreams over the phone.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/01/08/we-wont-back-down-vermonters-launch-sit-statehouse-demanding-universal-health-care

In the fresh light of dawn one hundred years ago today, German and Allied soldiers were dug into their opposing trenches on the Western Front in Belgium and France when they defied their superiors to declare a truce.

In dropping their weapons, they frightened the world’s war makers, providing a glimpse of the power that people without rank and privilege have to determine their own destinies.

It was only the fifth month of what was then known simply as the Great War. Both sides longed for home. The men felt death looming in the trenches where they watched their friends die. The soldiers wielded monstrous weapons: flamethrowers, chlorine and mustard gas, machine guns that could shoot 500 rounds a minute. More than one million lay dead already.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/the-christmas-truce/