The Bushevik war on public knowledge along with scientific inquiry and data as a benchmark for sound policy plows on…

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun closing its nationwide network of scientific libraries, effectively preventing EPA scientists and the public from accessing vast amounts of data and information on issues from toxicology to pollution. Several libraries have already been dismantled, with their contents either destroyed or shipped to repositories where they are uncataloged and inaccessible.

The scientific information contained in the EPA libraries is essential to the agency’s ability to make fully informed decisions that carry out its mission of protecting human health and the environment. Members of Congress have asked the EPA to cease and desist dismantling these libraries.

Please call EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson at (202) 564-4700 either today or Monday and tell him how much scientists rely on data and literature. Urge him to immediately halt the dismantling of the library system until Congress approves the EPA budget and all materials are readily available online.

Sincerely,

Michael Halpern
National Field Organizer
Scientific Integrity Program

The Age of Reason is over. As much as I admire the effort to call Mr. Johnson to pressure him to change this course of action, the fact that we are not living in a democratic republic, but rather are subjects of a corporate state, makes such actions seem next to useless. Mr. Johnson doesn’t take his marching orders from “We The People”, unfortunately.

Go to The Union of Concerned Scientists for more.

This is interesting.

As the country attended memorials and revisited painful memories of 9/11, the reflection also opened our collective mind once again to the many unanswered questions, legitimate concerns and conflicting evidence in the official description of those events.

For us at the Daily Tidings the event served to open discussion among us about this complex subject, about the conspiracy theories that abound in Internet chats, blogs and so-called investigative reports and most importantly, the questions regarding the media’s role in this ongoing issue.

A month later we have found very little we all agreed on. We especially disagree on the role of the media. Since the Tidings doesn’t cover New York City, Washington, D.C. or the federal government, the ambiguity is shaded with absolution.

Nevertheless we are each members of the fourth estate, an essential conglomeration of individuals who adhere to professional guidelines, and who care passionately about this demanding and often thankless opus. With that membership — we can all agree on some level — comes a responsibility to giving the public the accurate information it needs to make informed decisions. Thus, somewhere in all the banter, we stumbled on one thing we at the Tidings’ truly can agree on.

Regardless of one’s take on the veracity of the questions regarding the attacks of September 11th - who perpetrated them, how, why - I believe most rationale people who study the issue will agree that the fact that so many questions regarding this seminal event is shameful, and that the nation needs a truly independent and qualified investigation into all aspects of this, regardless of the political consequences of where it leads and who it may touch.

Read The Complete Editorial from the Ashland Daily Tidings

We hardly knew ya, old buddy…

Quite a report, and an clearly drawn indictment of the true costs of modern consumerism.

Think of it as a vast experiment in human biology. Put millions of people in a limited space, then crank a few levers: increase the hours they work, and increase the distance they have to travel; tempt them with material goods but undermine their sense of security about the future; allow them almost unlimited access to food, but subtly direct their choice by making grease and sugar most accessible. See what happens.

The results are nearly in. Half a century of postwar growth - driven by escalating production, and flavoured by hard-core consumption and mass migration to cities - is yielding a consistent global pattern.

The population’s physical health is starting to degrade. The body, overfed and under-exercised, stacks on weight; those extra kilograms turn on their owners, unlocking diabetes, kidney disease and cancers from a genome that evolved with little experience of carrying fat. Psychiatric illness increases as unbarred competition between individuals excludes and denigrates the more vulnerable.

Weight gain, says Dr Michael Booth, is a physical portrait of consumerism, an externalisation of our value system. “We do need to do something about ‘I will give myself pleasure whenever and however I please and not think about the consequences,”‘ he says. “It’s a problem that comes with greater and greater wealth. We see the world as the range of things available to us. Virtually anything is there for the taking. We’ve lost the notion that we should be denied anything.”

Read The Full Article

I guess this is one way to tell the lying sacks of shit who are manipulating you in your name to go to hell.

Budepest, Hungary - Protesters clashed with police and stormed the headquarters of Hungarian state television early Tuesday in an explosion of anger over a leaked recording of the prime minister admitting his government had “lied morning, evening and night” about the economy.
- Fox News, 9/19/06

The Hungarians certainly don’t need this crap. They put up with nothing but abject lies, delusionary propaganda and social deprivation for 40 years, and it looks like they aren’t too happy about the prospect of being used the same way again. I spent a few weeks in Hungary back in the 80s, while the Russians were still there, and it was an experience. I certainly carried the pretension that there is no way our society could ever become so blatantly corrupt and oppressive as like that under Soviet domination. Of course, I never imagined the rise of the neo-cons and severly ‘misunderestimated’ the depth of ideological depravity that is the Busheviks.

The Australian reports…

Hungary’s left-of-centre leadership was on the verge of collapse today after a public radio station broadcast the Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, admitting that he had lied repeatedly about the state of the economy.

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Hungarian parliament building in Budapest demanding the resignation of Mr Gyurcsany after he acknowledged that a tape recording broadcast yesterday was genuine. President Laszlo Solyom said the country was in “moral crisis”.

Can you imagine how they would have reacted had they been told lies, not about the economy, but about sending their soldiers off to war under false premises? Or would have had information and evidence as to the governments role in handling such catastrophes like 9/11 or Katrina covered up or distorted?

Now they are attacking TV stations? I guess that is one way to challenge the corrupt media.

Infowars has a report on this as well Here

The secretary of the Air Force wants to make US citizens his weapons guinea pigs.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” said Wynne. “(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

Read The Full CNN Report Here

But this isn’t really new as you can see Here. They used to use ‘volunteers’ for this kind of thing. What is new is the live fire testing application proposition that Gen. Buck Turgidson is recommending here.

And that is the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Here is another exhibit in the courtroom of reality.

Is the world finally waking up a bit about GM crops not being the promised panacea that they were claimed to be?

By 2004, the GM cotton farmers were using just as much pesticide as their conventional counterparts and were spending far more because GM cotton seed is three times the price of conventional cotton seed.

The findings will undermine claims by the biotechnology industry that GM technology can boost food production without necessarily damaging the environment with pesticides.

Scientists from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, carried out the study which involved interviews with hundreds of Chinese farmers who had switched to cotton that had been genetically modified with a gene for a bacterial toxin.

The toxin - known as Bt - is secreted by the GM cotton plant and is highly effective at stopping the growth of bollworm, a major pest of the crop that can cause millions of pounds worth of damage.

Read The Complete Independent U.K. Article Here

Some interesting news from The Guardian

The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, has made a rare admission of failure by selling its hypermarket chain in Germany at a loss of $1bn (£530m) after failing to convert the country’s shoppers and regulators to its low-price, American-style trading.

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But the setback, which comes two months after a similar withdrawal from South Korea, is a blow to Wal-Mart’s broader ambition to spread its phenomenally successful retailing format around the globe.

Shortly after its arrival in Germany, Wal-Mart faced accusations that it was using short-term predatory pricing to put small shopkeepers out of business. Regulators ordered it to raise the price of basic foods such as milk, flour and butter.

Read The Full Article Here

The information is spreading.

Reynolds, the former director of the Criminal Justice Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the ex-top economist for George W. Bush’s Labor Department, charged the Bush administration with gross malfeasance, and proposed the prosecution of top administration officials.

He charges the Bush administration with orchestrating the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for launching a preplanned “long war” in the Middle East, rolling back our civil liberties, and massively increasing military spending.

Go here to read the complete news article.

For those who may think this is tinfoil hat wacko conspiracy theory, I would recommend checking out the film “Loose Change.” It does good work in presenting some serious questions about the facts surrounding the attacks on Sept. 11th, though it certainly has it’s share of flaws (particularly in that it becomes a little overly enthusiastic at trying to fill those many questions with specific answers). However, it does expose some truths about what really happened on 9-11, and it makes a pretty compelling case. There is a reason this information is spreading like wildfire. Being the most watched video on Google Video, it is also likely the reason why reactionary forces in the government are pushing dictatorial authoritarianism as hard as they are right now. They need to put in place the mechanisms for as much control as possible over the means of public discussion (monitoring phones and internet, controlling information content, consolidating all media into a few hands, etc…) before this kind of information reaches critical mass in the public discussion.

An here is another interesting video provided by From The Wilderness. Make of it what you will.

Cass Sunstein at the Washington Post asks some pretty good questions here.

If we can fund the war in Iraq, why can’t we fund the Kyoto Protocol?

For the United States, the cost of the Iraq war will soon exceed the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement designed to control greenhouse gases. For both, the cost is somewhere in excess of $300 billion.

These numbers show that the Bush administration was unrealistically optimistic in its prewar prediction that the total cost would be about $50 billion.

And the same numbers raise questions about the Bush administration’s claim that the cost of the Kyoto Protocol would be prohibitive, causing (in President Bush’s own words) “serious harm to the US economy.”

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The central point remains. For the United States, the economic burden of the Iraq war is on the verge of exceeding the total anticipated burden of the Kyoto Protocol. Because the price of the war increases every day, its total cost, for America as well as the world, will soon dwarf the expected cost of a remarkably ambitious effort to control the problem of climate change.

But that is assuming that climate change is actually happening, and we know the corporations getting rich off the current parasitic model of economics we operate on have their own (don’t)think tank prostitutes to tell you whatever you pay them enough to hear.

Analysts projected the cost of fully complying with Kyoto to be $325 billion over many decades, yet we have already spent more than $300 billion on the Iraq war. And that is only in three years. We won’t even begin to get into the topic of the real, human costs involved in this. The Corporateers certainly don’t in their ‘cost/price’ studies.

Go to the original WaPo article here