September 18, 2013

Near-Toothless Man Guilty Of Biting Off Neighbor's Penis

The tooth can hurt.

An English man with only a couple of teeth was found guilty this week of biting -- or should we saw gumming -- off his neighbor's penis, Kent Online reported.

Jason Martin, 41, got into an altercation with 39-year-old Richard Henderson in their Kent neighborhood in July after Henderson sent Martin a text message asking him to turn down his music, according to the Daily Mail.

Martin bit down on Henderson's penis through his pajamas so forcefully that it became detached, according to the Metro. It was later reattached with stitches. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/jason-martin-toothless-man-bites-off-penis_n_3941110.html

September 18, 2013

EU Parliament Furious about NSA Bank Spying

from Der Spiegel:



Revelations the US is spying on international bank transfers has angered European parliamentarians. Some are calling for the suspension of the SWIFT deal between the EU and US. "Washington must make clear where it stands," says one.

The recent revelations regarding the degree to which the US intelligence agency NSA monitors bank data in the European Union has infuriated many in Europe. "Now that we know that which we had long been suspected, we have to protest loudly and clearly," Jan Philipp Albrecht, a legal expert for the Green Party in the European Parliament, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. He is demanding a suspension of the SWIFT agreement, which governs the transfer of some bank data from the EU to anti-terror authorities in the United States.

On Monday, SPIEGEL reported that the NSA monitors a significant share of international money transfers, including bank and credit card transactions. The information comes from documents in the possession of whistleblower Edward Snowden that SPIEGEL has been able to see. "Follow the Money" is the name of the NSA branch that handles the surveillance. Information obtained by "Follow the Money" then flows into a financial database known as Tracfin. In 2011, Tracfin had 180 million datasets -- 84 percent of which are comprised of credit card data.

But data from the SWIFT network, headquartered in Brussels, also ends up on Tracfin. SWIFT, which handles international transfers among thousands of banks, is identified by the NSA as a "target" according to the Snowden documents. They also show that the NSA monitors SWIFT on several different levels, with the NSA department for "tailored access operations" also being involved. Among other methods, the documents note that the NSA has the ability to read "SWIFT printer traffic from numerous banks." .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/nsa-spying-european-parliamentarians-call-for-swift-suspension-a-922920.html

September 18, 2013

NRA admirers (cartoon)

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/high_five_20130917/

September 17, 2013

Green Eggs and Oxycotin ...... Three Little Racist Pigs?

Rush Limbaugh has a children’s book coming: FAQ
By Erik Wemple, Published: September 5 at 6:58 pm


Rush Limbaugh announced today on his radio show that he has a book on the way this fall (Oct. 29): “Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.”

OK, that’s not the most self-explanatory book title in literary history, so let’s do a little FAQ here:

Q: Who is “Rush Revere”?

A: That would be the Rush Limbaugh character that fronts the radio host’s outfit Two If By Tea. Here’s the full explanation from the Two If By Tea website: “Rush Revere is a modern-day Paul Revere who rides around America espousing fundamental American values.
He is a close friend of Rush Limbaugh who sounds the alarm that The Liberals Are Coming!™ Dressed in attire from the American Revolution he recalls the early days of the new Republic. An illustration capturing Rush Revere on his horse graces every bottle of Two If By Tea®.” ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/09/05/rush-limbaugh-has-a-childrens-book-coming-faq/

September 17, 2013

Act Erratically and the Police Will Shoot You

Act Erratically and the Police Will Shoot You

Tuesday, 17 September 2013 10:15
By Kristina Chew, Care2 | Report


Display unusual behavior and, although unarmed, you could be shot by a police officer.

That is precisely what happened to two men, in two different states, over the past weekend.

Officer Shoots Unarmed Man Fatally in North Carolina

Early on Saturday morning, 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell, a former Florida A & M football player, was shot and killed by Officer Randall Kerrick of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina, says the Charlotte Observer. After being a car crash severe enough that he apparently had to crawl out the back window, Ferrell walked about a half-mile to the nearest residence.

.......(snip).......

Two Bystanders Shot By Police Pursuing Unarmed Man

On Saturday night in New York City’s Times Square, police also fired at an unarmed African-American man, says the Guardian. Two bystanders, including a woman using a walker, were wounded as people ran for cover. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/18879-act-erratically-and-the-police-will-shoot-you

September 17, 2013

USDA Seeks to Expand Pilot Program Which Leaves Meat Contaminated With Fecal Matter

(Truthout) Is there poop in your pork and poultry? It’s a serious question.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has plans to expand a privatized meat inspection model that has been in place for 14 years at five hog plants in the United States and which has been found to fail time and time again at preventing contamination of meat - with fecal matter.

The program, known as the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point-Based Inspection Models Project - or HIMP - has been in place since the late 1990s and its expansion would replace almost half the USDA Food Safety Service inspectors in industrial meat plants with inspectors employed by those very same companies. It would reportedly speed up production lines by as much as 20 percent.

But a recent article in The Washington Post, reports that three out of the five pilot HIMP plants were among the 10 worst health and safety violators in the country, according to a spring report by the USDA inspector general. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/18866-usda-seeks-to-expand-pilot-program-which-leaves-meat-contaminated-with-fecal-matter

September 17, 2013

Quelle surprise!: Michelle Rhee says Philly schools on the right track, as the district gets wrecked

Former Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools Michelle Rhee hosted a "Teacher Town Hall" event in Philadelphia Monday night. Rhee joined CNN contributor and Capital Prep Magnet School Principal Dr. Steve Perry and former Washington Teachers Union President George Parker in the hopes of engaging in "an open, honest conversation on ed reform specifically with educators."

During Michelle Rhee's three-year tenure as Chancellor of the Washington, D.C., school district, she ignored teacher-seniority provisions, implemented a generous merit-pay system and caught the attention of the national spotlight as DC's standardized test scores skyrocketed in her first few years on the job.

Soon though, reports of test cheating tainted Rhee's reputation, and by 2010, with the election of a new mayor, she resigned. Some who've followed Rhee's reign closely say she left DC schools in worse shape than when she came. Rhee disagrees, and now advocates for her brand of education reform on the national stage.

Speaking at Temple University's student center Monday night, Rhee, Perry and Parker sought to quell fears about what they called the "misinformation" surrounding the reform conversation. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/item/59871-former-dc-schools-chancellor-rhee-says-hite-is-on-the-right-track-to-ed-reform

September 17, 2013

Walmart’s threat to our food, freedom, and democracy

By TOM GEIGER
Special to The Stand


You’ve probably heard how Walmart pays low wages and meager benefits and how they erode local businesses in small town America. But you might not be as familiar with their massive new plan to come into the urban markets of cities across the nation, how they’ve become the largest retailer of food in the country, or how their money is being used to influence laws that affect us all.

If not reined in, Walmart is on track to control our food supply, our freedom, and the very democracy upon which our nation is built.

As Walmart begins its serious attempt to expand into Puget Sound cities and other cities across the country, they face a growing tide of opposition to this urban expansion, and to their destructive business model and corporate secrecy. Walmart appears to be willing to say and pay just about anything to get what it wants. Walmart’s Public Relations machine puts it differently: the company’s senior community affairs director Steve Restivo was quoted in the The Seattle Times (6.24.12): “We didn’t do a very good job telling our story, and we let others manage it. That’s not undone overnight.”

Of course it would be easier for Mr. Restivo to “undo” Walmart’s image problem if that’s all it was. But their dilemma is far from superficial. Indeed it seems to be rooted at the very core of the corporation itself with a business model of “growth at any cost.” This drive toward relentless growth is increasingly a threat to the values held dear in local communities and around the globe. Whether Walmart can succeed in glossing over and covering up its dangers is yet to be known. What is sure is that those dangers are real and go far beyond just how they mistreat workers. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thestand.org/2012/07/a-threat-to-our-food-freedom-democracy/

September 17, 2013

Chris Hedges: The Dead Rhetoric of War

The Dead Rhetoric of War

Posted on Sep 16, 2013
By Chris Hedges

A French-language version of this article was published Monday in the newspaper
Le Monde.

The intoxication of war, fueled by the euphoric nationalism that swept through the country like a plague following the attacks of 9/11, is a spent force in the United States. The high-blown rhetoric of patriotism and national destiny, of the sacred duty to reshape the world through violence, to liberate the enslaved and implant democracy in the Middle East, has finally been exposed as empty and meaningless. The war machine has tried all the old tricks. It trotted out the requisite footage of atrocities. It issued the histrionic warnings that the evil dictator will turn his weapons of mass destruction against us if we do not bomb and “degrade” his military. It appealed to the nation’s noble sacrifice in World War II, with the Secretary of State John Kerry calling the present situation a “Munich moment.” But none of it worked. It was only an offhand remark by Kerry that opened the door to a Russian initiative, providing the Obama administration a swift exit from its mindless bellicosity and what would have been a humiliating domestic defeat. Twelve long years of fruitless war in Afghanistan and another 10 in Iraq have left the public wary of the lies of politicians, sick of the endless violence of empire and unwilling to continue to pump trillions of dollars into a war machine that has made a small cabal of defense contractors and arms manufacturers such as Raytheon and Halliburton huge profits while we are economically and politically hollowed out from the inside. The party is over.

The myth of war, as each generation discovers over the corpses of its young and the looting of its national treasury by war profiteers, is a lie. War is no longer able to divert Americans from the economic and political decay that is rapidly turning the nation into a corporate oligarchy, a nation where “the consent of the governed” is a cruel joke. War cannot hide what we have become. War has made us a nation that openly tortures and holds people indefinitely in our archipelago of offshore penal colonies. War has unleashed death squads—known as special operations forces—to assassinate our enemies around the globe, even American citizens. War has seen us terrorize whole populations, including populations with which we are not officially at war, with armed drones that circle night and day above mud-walled villages in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. War has shredded, in the name of national security, our most basic civil liberties. War has turned us into the most spied-upon, monitored, eavesdropped and photographed population in human history. War has seen our most courageous dissidents and whistle-blowers—those who warned us of the crimes of war and empire, from Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning to Edward Snowden—become persecuted political prisoners or the hunted. War has made a few very rich, as it always does, as our schools, libraries and firehouses are closed in the name of fiscal austerity, basic social service programs for children and the elderly are shut down, cities such as Detroit declare bankruptcy, and chronic underemployment and unemployment hover at 15 percent, perhaps 20. No one knows the truth anymore about America. The vast Potemkin village we have become, the monstrous lie that is America, includes the willful manipulation of financial and official statistics from Wall Street and Washington. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dead_rhetoric_of_war_20130916/

September 17, 2013

We've Had So Many Mass Shootings In The U.S., We've Had To Redefine The Term

(HuffPost) A heavily armed shooter entered the Navy Yard in Washington on Monday and opened fire, killing at least 12 people before being shot to death by authorities.

The killings brought the horror of mass shootings back into the national spotlight, as President Barack Obama condemned the "cowardly act" and honored the victims during an address.

Monday's violence marked the sixth mass shooting since the one in Newtown, Conn., in December. It was also the first publicly recognized by Obama since the elementary school massacre, which claimed the lives of 27, including 20 children.

.....(snip).....

The growing number of mass killings over the past five years left the country in search of a term that would distinguish mass murder by gun from those using other weapons. Mass shooting has gained favor as the obvious choice. Though the FBI doesn't specifically define mass shooting, it does define mass murder, calling it a single incident in which a perpetrator kills four or more people, not including himself or herself. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/mass-shootings-us_n_3935978.html?ncid=txtlnkushpmg00000037