His eyes are dead:

“No one has bought me, No. 1,” Menendez said last spring. “No one, ever. In the 20 years I’ve been in Congress, never has it been suggested that that could even be possible. Never in 40 years of public life. So I’m not going to reach this moment in my life to make that a possibility.”
JewishVoiceNY
-
Castillo called the allegations part of a “diabolical plot” orchestrated to discredit Melgen, who owns a company with a lucrative contract with the Dominican government to provide X-ray machines at ports. The machines would be used to scan shipping containers to look for contraband and illegal drugs.
Miami Herald
-
“He treated me well,” she said. “He had money. He was very generous.”
-
Carl Hiaasen(Miami Herald) on Menendez/Melgen
-
Prominent Dominican lawyer Vinicio Castillo on Monday said allegations that linked U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez to sex parties with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic were part of a “dirty campaign” aimed at discrediting his cousin, a Florida eye doctor who has a stalled multimillion-dollar contract for security at Dominican ports.
                                                               ***
The contract was originally signed with the Dominican government a decade ago. Two years ago, Melgen bought out the company that had signed the contract.
That contract has raised controversy due to its cost — an estimated $500 million to $1 billion over 20 years. And the machines have not been installed.
Menendez, who has received healthy campaign contributions from the doctor, in a July Senate hearing peppered Obama officials about what they were doing to help U.S. business interests in the Dominican Republic. He specifically mentioned the contract for X-ray equipment at the ports.
Castillo’s father, Vinicio “Vincho” Castillo, the government’s drug czar and Melgen’s uncle, has also spoken about the need for the machines.
Fieser/Miami Herald
-
They all started to come to light Tuesday and Wednesday when the FBI raided the South Florida offices of Menendez’s friend and donor, Dr. Salomon Melgen, accused in the emails of flying the New Jersey Democrat to the Dominican Republic for the trysts.
Menendez called the claims “fallacious allegations.”
Caputo/Miami Herald
-
Menendez trove at the Daily Caller

___

Okay. A brief defense of hater sites and wingnut web presence.
The mindset of counter-MSM journalism, essentially the left/liberal channel on the net, is so timid and knee-jerk partisan you can get most of the two "sides" to any serious issue from scanning FOXNews and the Daily Kos.
The polarized scornful dismissal of non-liberal non-progressive but non-mainsream whatever, means that any info not acceptable to either the MSM or the counterMSM has no validity. It's not going to show up in acceptable channels.
Partisan news is just team playing, and there's always only two teams.
If you want to get at what's really happening you'll have to dig through a lot of shit, and you'll need inspired guidance. There's a lot of shit out there.
But the truth is out there as well.
The Daily Caller has no standing with Gawker. Xymphora's on the ADL's hatewatch menu.
My stance, such as it is, is that I'll read anything by anybody. And make my own mind up.
-
So, the biggest bankers in Ecuador rip off the little Ecuadoran checking and savings folks and flee to the US, while the little Ecuadoran folks lose their money in the failure of Filanbanco, biggest bank in Ecuador - money which the Isaias bros now have for their very own, to live largely upon.
Menendez has their backs. Seriously has their backs.
Melgen the Opthalmologist's uncle is the drug czar of the Dominican Republic.
Melgen the Opthalmologist buys a company lined up to run X-ray scanners at major shipping ports in Dominican Republic. Playing a central role in whether or not illegal drugs are moving through D.R.
Menendez godfathers Melgen's business interest in Dominican homeland security through the various USgovernment avenues necessary.
Melgen takes Menendez to D.R., more than twice, for what an anonymous tipster says is sex vacation party fun, with underage hookers.
Neighbors in D.C. say Menendez is an at-home sex-party fool.
The math is pretty easy.
Menendez is a sex addict, vulnerable to all kinds of blackmail pressure and entrapment/enticement because of that.
Corruption is the place this thing breeds and reproduces itself.
Sex and drugs are used to corrupt individuals, money is used to corrupt individuals and the system.
Miami.
Menendez is Cuban.
What makes it hang together is the Lansky connection to pre-revolution Cuba, and Lansky's spiritual grandchildren in the "Kosher Nostra". An invisible organization which dominates international illegal drug trafficking. Most Americans think the int'l drug biz is run by the producers of the drugs themselves, which is absurd.
The control of US foreign policy by Jews - Senator "We Own You Bob" Menendez is Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee - accounts for, among other seriously bad-for-US policy decisions, the otherwise senseless continued presence of US military in Afghanistan. The world's biggest source of pre-heroin opium, Afghanistan. Which has just produced its largest opium crop ever, during an occupation by the most powerful military force in the world.
But you have to have that initial hypothesis working, that the international illegal drug industry's being run by Jewish gangsters.
And without solid evidence for that, the allegation just means you're anti-Semitic, willing to believe anything that makes Jews look bad.
Of course if you did have solid evidence for that, the depth and breadth of it are so global, and the ruthlessness of the main players so implacably vicious, your life wouldn't be worth a dime bag of street-cut skag.
And it would be pretty hard to find a safe place to hide out in long enough to get that info to anyone who could do something with it. And who would that be anyway?
Probably not the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Dear neighbor…

Icelanders aren’t accustomed to unemployment

the opposite of terrorism:

The number of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico has plunged to its lowest level since studies began in 1993. A report released on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2014 by the World Wildlife Fund, Mexico’s Environment Department and the Natural Protected Areas Commission blames the dramatic decline on the insect's loss of habitat due to illegal logging in Mexico’s mountaintop forests and the massive displacement of its food source, the milkweed plant.

SFGate

Jewish girls are magic:

Beyond getting controversial with the abortion issue, the Jesus in Silverman's routine says the unspeakable “F-word” as well.
some website
-
O’Reilly called the video “very offensive” before playing the “people are people” excerpt.
Then, as soon as it was over, he said, “Boy, I’d like to hit her with a pie. …Bang!”
“Oh, yeah, that’d be good,” Ingraham replied.
newshounds

-
Jesus: "People who believe fertilized eggs are people are people too."
Actual quote from actual Sarah Silverman video

“To understand the universe at the deepest level, we have to understand why is there something rather than nothing. I believe the answer to all of these things is M-theory.”

Stephen Hawking

-
Thank you, Stephen
Love, M

doves are not peaceful birds to begin with:

Two white doves that were released by children standing alongside Pope Francis as a peace gesture have been attacked by other birds.

As tens of thousands of people watched in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, a seagull and a large black crow swept down on the doves right after they were set free from an open window of the Apostolic Palace.

One dove lost some feathers as it broke free from the gull. But the crow pecked repeatedly at the other dove.

-
Despite their photogenic qualities, and pleasant burbly sound, doves are like pit bulls with feathers. Perfectly understandable products of their evolution, but not at all "peaceful".
Anymore than crows and ravens, in this case seagulls as well, are mean and nasty.
Doves look peaceful.
But looks aren't everything.

As we approach Burns Night worth remembering while it is legal to buy an assault gun in the US it is illegal to import or sell haggis.
— mark perkins (@normanmonkey) January 24, 2013

This is important

Neil Young is getting heat for things that aren't central to what he's saying.
So that the controversy slides into being about how much fuel he uses, and whether or not there's beauty in Ft McMurray. And of course there is. I could get some photographers together and we could go anywhere on this planet, anywhere, Somalia, the scene of a cartel massacre in Mexico, the strip malls outside USmilitary bases on Okinawa, sewer-dwellings of the homeless in NYC, any place the default reaction of normal decent folks is "That's ugly!" There's beauty everywhere.
His Hiroshima comment was specifically about the industrial presence of tar-sands extraction in treaty-protected Alberta. All the lovely nature that's viewable around that ruinous landscape doesn't change a thing. It actually makes his point.
The snark about consumption - "Al Gore has 3000 light bulbs! And they're always on!" - isn't heartfelt. It's adolescent bitterness. The immune system of the power that's causing the havoc.
Someone steps up, in the midst of a lemming-rush toward oblivion, and if they aren't Jesus or Ghandi, they're crucified for hypocrisy.
But no one else is capable of figure-heading an opposition. You have to be a figurehead to do that. You can't be a figurehead in the modern world without having an exceptional lifestyle.
No profile for the saints. A little cave in the desert, the hermit fed by birds and selfless nuns. No voice though, because no media presence.
So any figurehead who isn't a champion of raw greedy selfishness is a hypocrite, because any normal life will not be saintly, but normal, even the abnormal lifestyle of someone like Young is normal that way.
Long time ago conversation about petrochemical/gasoline consumption:
If you don't use it you won't be able to vocally oppose it, unless you huddle in some urban hive.
But that will mean a collective urban lifestyle.
So anarchy and anonymous and OWC and yeah.
But that won't work for northern Alberta.
It's either Neil Young talking about it, giving a voice where voice has been denied for a long time, or some media event, usually destructive, and the consequent reactive war against destructive actions and actors.
He's the nice part of the resistance, peace-loving, relatively sane, with a sensible presentation. And his main point is the illegal dishonoring of legal treaties with the First Nations people.
If you want hypocrisy in this matter, look to the p.r. campaign of "energy independence" by greedy little shitheads who intend to sell that oil to China. Or anyone else with the big $$ to spend.

“no greater ally on earth.”

Thing is, it's true. If "ally" is limited to states and nations, who else? Canada? UK? South Korea?

You're the picture of innocence:

The man, who asked to remain anonymous, said that about an hour into a 19:45 EST showing of ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,’ a man who flashed an official-looking badge “yank[ed] the Google Glass” off his face, asking him to exit the theater. The man was attending the film with his wife at the AMC theater at Easton Town Center.
Two officers then ordered him to hand over his wallet and both his work and personal cell phones, according to tech site The Gadgeteer. The man said he was questioned for 20 or 30 minutes on why he was attempting to record the film. Because he had recently added prescription lenses to his Google Glass, the 35-year-old man wore them into the movie. The device has a voice-activated computer and does have an attached camera.
“I said, ‘Want me to prove I’m not recording the movie? It’s very easy,’”

-
No no, look, can't you see?
We're not enabling,willingly and actively co-operating with the Panopticon!
The Panopticon is picking on us, because it thinks we're pirates.

they're doing this just for me:

For the first time, astronomers were able to see a string of hot gas known as a filament that is thought to be part of the mysterious underlying structure that dictates the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe.

All you need to know about the state of the world today is in this sentence:

Madonna is spending some time with her loved ones following her controversial use of the N-word.

.

turtles all the way:

"The origin of consciousness reflects our place in the universe, the nature of our existence. Did consciousness evolve from complex computations among brain neurons, as most scientists assert? Or has consciousness, in some sense, been here all along, as spiritual approaches maintain?" ask Hameroff and Penrose in the current review. "This opens a potential Pandora's Box, but our theory accommodates both these views, suggesting consciousness derives from quantum vibrations in microtubules, protein polymers inside brain neurons, which both govern neuronal and synaptic function, and connect brain processes to self-organizing processes in the fine scale, 'proto-conscious' quantum structure of reality."

ScienceDaily 16.Jan.14

A giant sponge making the ocean fall and rise

yonder stands your orphan, with his gun:

Greenwald is now calling for the release from prison of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in North Carolina and he is appearing on the Israeli media to make his case...

-
crying like a fire in the sun:

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published documents leaked by Edward Snowden that revealed the scope of U.S. spying worldwide, said the documents contain additional information about U.S. surveillance of Israel that has not yet been published.

He also said the continued imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard attests to the hypocrisy of the U.S. administration.
...
It’s proper to raise Pollard’s case in the context of U.S. spying on its Israeli ally, he continued, because that underscores the hypocrisy of what the U.S. itself is doing. The U.S. government, Greenwald charged, does exactly what it accuses its enemies of doing, and no country has the right to say other countries shouldn’t do something while it is secretly violating that very same taboo.

ha'aretz  07.Jan.14
-
The depth of absurdity in this now becomes so compelling it creates its own gravity, you can feel it pulling at your legs, shoes slippery with whatever darkness that is that's staining the sloping floor, everything tilted just enough you can still stand, still walk, but all the real power's headed one way, the natural flow is down toward that sucking maw of the unthinkable, and like gravity, it's completely invisible except by its effects.
Manning, Chelsea Manning. If you can't bring yourself to participate in the changeover, you can say "the former Bradley Manning". You can talk about Assange. Hammond.
Sarah Harrison's waking to a cold room now.
And instead, Greenwald's advocating for Pollard.
Jesus bloody Christ.

Updated:Greenwald evidently was played into what was not even closely a statement but an inferred, implied, you know, where it's "Wait I didn't say that!" and then that truthish bit-bite was delivered as the full meal.
And I bought it because of knee-jerk 'noias about all things contemporary involving the usual players. Which is a disservice to everyone trying real hard to nail what's really happening, including me.
So no, it was a set-up, a milking operation, and Greenwald's dubious stature as truth-bringing Prometheus of Secret Data was used by cynical users to brand their p.r. for Pollard as coming from the same health-seeking area as Snowden's still-veiled "revelations".
Possibly similar knee-jerking response to this:
Kerry responds forcefully to Israeli insults.
We'll see. I'm on my best toes.

raw materials of I told you so:

DEA as thug enforcement agency
-
vision of "tomorrow" as longevity-toward-immortality

drug poop scoop digby

Neil Young’s Honor the Treaties Tour

“How would I know if a guy sent me a picture where he had Photoshopped himself standing next to him?”

The native band’s battle with industry’s expansion in its traditional territory struck a chord with the Canadian-born icon, who lashed out at environmental degradation in the oilsands during a news conference the following week in Washington. Likening the landscape in northern Alberta to Hiroshima, Young made splashy headlines across the country...
-
“The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying. The fuels all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”

Go here, and at the end where it says "Comments on this entry are closed." put this:

Just to be clear, the Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea
Yeah sure it did. And, just to be even more clear, North Korea and South Korea came into their unique separate geographical existences on the back of a giant red-crowned heron around 17,000 years ago.
Alternatively - the division of Korea, a distinct unified geo-political entity, with a single language and culture, invaded by Japan pre-WW2, then invaded in turn by the victorious insert-epithet-here Allies post WW2, was accomplished entirely from outside Korea, a devastated nation thus easily broken into two tidy controllable pieces, by people who didn't give a damn about Korea or Koreans, but were heavily invested in the poisonous football game that became the Cold War.
It is an egregious bit of prevaricating nonsense to elide how freshly-minted the line between the two "countries" was.
Short, easy, clear, simple version:
North Korea invaded nothing. Korea invaded itself. Because the North/South division was a Western fiction, imposed by victorious thugs who had just defeated, and replaced, the previous (20th c.) invaders of Korea, the Japanese.

The thing is, that that was written while the comments were still open.
They closed out when I went to publish or "submit".
No big deal. Happens.
Sure it does. And back in the previous decade the number of times web sites crashed right after I put up a comment? You have an accurate count on that?
No you do not.
The owners not so concerned with who'd last written something, but just the fact of the crash itself, which on at least two occasions took my comment and everything else right on out. For keeps.
Once the doors of cowardice are opened, the stairs go straight down to the Satanic throne.
And us little pilgrims with our sandals and our cheap road sandwiches, we get to burn up lots of energy trying to figure out if it's pigs, or coincidence, or coincidence plus pigs.

"We are at the forefront of a momentous wave of innovation... The incredible growth that emerging product categories such as Ultra HDTV, wearable electronics and 3D printers will experience this year underscores the significant role new technologies play in the total consumer electronics story."

the memory of all the light he cast

Lenny Bruce is smiling on you:

French court lifts ban on show by controversial comic
  A French judge on Thursday ordered authorities in Nantes to lift a ban on controversial comic Dieudonne performing in the western city. The ruling means Dieudonne, whose act has been widely condemned as anti-Semitic, is free to perform the opening show of a planned nationwide tour...
-
'Anti-semitic' comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala has his show cancelled in ...
-
French court scraps ban on Dieudonne show
-
French comic Dieudonne: Show ban reinstated in France
-
Anti-Semitic Quenelle Comedian Dieudonné Allowed to Perform in Nantes
-
Joke is on Dieudonne as French cities ban his show
-
French court suspends ban on Dieudonné M'bala M'bala shows
-
France's top court reinstates ban on comic Dieudonne
-
Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala's shows can be banned due to perceived anti-Semitism, French official says
-
French Court Rules Controversial Comedian's Show Can Go Ahead
-
Court reinstates ban on French comic
Court suspends ban on a show by French comic
......
......
.
.

Moving_to_the_rhythm_of_the_Sun:

Scientists from the Ulysses mission have proven that sounds generated deep inside the Sun cause the Earth to shake and vibrate in sympathy. 

-
a previously unknown particle emitted by the sun
-
via Washington's blog

I recognize the futility of doing this with our senior Senator, Dianne Feinstein:

Despite all that, I've made a resolution for 2014. It is to do whatever I can to reverse my country's trajectory toward being a surveillance state, and to push as hard as possible for a truly open internet.

Dan Gillmor/Guardian

Coetzee on Mandela in the NYRB

before and after mission statements of the FBI:

Instead of declaring "law enforcement" as its "primary function," as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists "national security" as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities.
[...]
"Violent crime, property crime and white-collar crime: All those things had reductions in the number of people available to investigate them," former FBI agent Brad Garrett told Foreign Policy. "Are there cases they missed? Probably."

John Hudson/ForeignPolicy 05.Jan.14
-
Despite the history-of-things television has been giving us for lots of many years, the FBI started out as a babycakes next-gen federal version of the private sector Pinkertons, themselves a kind of hybrid aboveground version of the age-old indeed ancient tradition of the rich and powerful defending themselves through the proxy of thugs-on-a-leash.
The Pinkertons came out of the Chicago-ish wet dreams of heavy capitalist-splooge-tycoons enabled by the meat slaughtering biz and the smokestacks of 19th. commercial resource forges, plus railroads plus banks plus whadelsyagot?
They weren't about solving crime originally, they were about protecting highly successful criminals who'd made it through the membrane threshold of legal/illegal into legal all the way, because rich.
It became about solving crime only because that's what they called it when anyone tried to take away what the tycoons had amassed through chicanery and rigging whatever they could.
We'll just ignore the crimes that got you that there pile, Mr. Stack, sir. And see that these evildoers are apprehended, even if we have to blow the arms off their moms with phosphor bombs.
The confusion is well, property crimes, those are committed against the plutocrats, right?
Well, on TV yeahsure, but the pound for pound of American property crime, white-collar crime, is committed from above, on those below. In the sense that the loss is measurably of greater, far greater impact - read hurt - on the unders.
So, it isn't really a jump away from mission direction for the Hooveroids to ease up from crime-preventioning to (national - hmmf!) security, it's a return to origin for thugs-on-a-leash. They came into being as yard-dogs for the rich, stands to reason they'd return to that.
Back to their roots and all.

Sigmund says:

We can't want peace and we can't want democracy and we can't want an orderly government and stability...

John Kerry, who just happens to be the US Secretary of State, in Reuters

The opium war that never ended, a truth mash-up:

The White House's push for another 10 years (at least) in Afghanistan — already the nation's longest war — could make waves.
The administration is pushing for a security deal with the Afghan government that would allow U.S. troops to stay there until "2024 and beyond."
-
Afghanistan's booming narcotics trade risks splintering the country into a "fragmented criminal state" if the government and its western allies do not step up efforts to tackle opium production, a senior UN official has warned.
Opium farming in Afghanistan, the world's main producer of the drug, hit a record high this year, with farmers harvesting a crop worth nearly $1bn (£610m) to them, and far more to the traffickers who take about four-fifths of the profit.
-
By any definition, this is 10 more years of war, no matter what the White House says. If President Barack Obama proposed sending 8,000 troops to Syria, where they would carry out combat operations, any rational person would rightly see that as launching a war.
-
Jean-Luc Lemahieu, outgoing head of the UN office on drugs and crime in Afghanistan, believes opium production is likely to soar beyond this year's record levels before it falls – and that the transformation of the country's corrupt economy will take up to two decades.
"If we are not careful then Afghanistan has a real risk of becoming a fragmented criminal state," Lemahieu told the Guardian after five years grappling with corruption and neglect of the narcotics problem in Afghanistan.
-
The war in Afghanistan is extremely unpopular: The share of Americans who think the war wasn't worth it reached 67 percent in a July Washington Post-ABC News poll. During seven years under President George W. Bush, 630 Americans were killed in Afghanistan. During Obama's presidency, 1,671 troops have been killed, 127 of them this year — even as the war was supposedly winding down. That's more than any year but one under Bush.
And the war's goals remain unclear. White House press secretary Jay Carney said in 2012, "The reason why U.S. troops are in Afghanistan in the first place is to disrupt, dismantle and ultimately defeat al-Qaida." But when I asked the Defense Department, in March of that year, about the last time U.S. forces killed an al-Qaida affiliate, the answer was 10 months prior.
-
"This is about the illicit economy taking over the future of a country in which you have invested 12 years," Lemahieu said.
"You cannot separate this out as something from one side or another. Not all in the Taliban are happy about the drug business, but undeniably many of them are involved. Not all in the government applaud the corruption and the drug business, but undeniably many are involved. And the ones who are involved on both sides know each others' phone numbers, they find each other."

sources respectively:
George Zornick/ChicagoTribune 02.Jan.14
-
Emma Graham-Harrison/The Guardian 05.Jan.14
-
As a puzzle it looks pretty straightforward, like with El Busho's "Mission Accomplished", the puzzle there is the absurd nonsensicality of the statement in light of what was happening. So Bush was an idiot and nothing he was saying had any value, truthwise. Puzzle solved.
Unless, oh, unless it really was an accomplished mission, whatever the whole picture, in Iraq, then and now, that that was what was intended. Then yes, accomplished mission. But that requires a cynicism that's too dark for most of the hopeful, and it leads to really uncomfortable questions. But, you know, maybe that's the job.
So, the puzzle of Afghanistan is solvable if we consider intentional the present state of things. All that's required is an assumption that the same background players are operating in both puzzles. Doing what they're doing for themselves at the expense of everyone else, who they have no respect for, no fellowship with, seeing only pawns and tokens, from the junkies on the street to the soldiers in the body bags, from the children watching drones above them while they work in the fields of necessity in Afghanistan, to the mothers of radiation mutated infants in Fallujah. The decisions that are causing this inhuman wreckage are being made by creatures who don't have a sense of shared humanity with the victims of their decisions.
Solves the puzzle of what the hell is this shit, but doesn't solve the more pressing question of what to do about it. Besides talking about it as honestly as possible, even if it hurts and scares you.

when he was forced to the pavement:

The pressure that Aaron was under was not unique. In 2008, Jonathan James, the juvenile hacker Heymann had convicted in 2000 at the age of 16, found himself again under suspicion. At the time, Heymann was leading an investigation into the largest identity-theft ring in U.S. history, and James was implicated. He was never charged, but Secret Service agents ransacked his home and put a tracking device on his car.
On May 18 of that year, he was found dead in his home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In his suicide note, he wrote that he’d become convinced that he would be scapegoated as a key member of the hacker ring because of his past conviction.
“The feds play dirty,” he wrote.

Janelle Nanos|Boston Magazin  January 2014

blowing dusts:

Mercury wafting out of oilsands operations is impacting an area – or “bull’s-eye” — that extends for about 19,000 square kilometres in northeast Alberta, according to federal scientists.

Levels of the potent neurotoxin found near the massive industrial operation have been found to be up to 16 times higher than “background” levels for the region, says Environment Canada researcher Jane Kirk, who recently reported the findings at an international toxicology conference.

MARGARET MUNRO, POSTMEDIA NEWS/canada.com
-
idiots who think it's okay to ignore scientists who are forced by the integrity of their profession to say 'we don't know', don't know jack shit about science.

hang on:

More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.

Tara Parker-Pope/nytimes 02.May.13

"Next to this example, what were the three days of Christ on Calvary as a symbol of human sacrifice down through the centuries?"

Why not be our governor?

The rushed campaign to insert Stanley Fischer straight from his position leading Israel's central bank into the number two spot at the Federal Reserve has allowed little time for research into the appointee's career or for informed public debate about his record. Like the failed recent Obama administration-Israel lobby pincer move to ram approval for U.S. military strikes on Syria through Congress, avoiding such due diligence through velocity may actually be the only means for successful Senate confirmation.
[...]
If Americans were ever polled on it—and they never are—the majority who now object to increasing aid to Israel would also likely object to quasi-governmental and governmental positions being staffed by people who—by citizenship or sheer strength of identity politics—are primarily occupied with advancing Israeli interests rather than those of the United States. It is obvious that the real reason AIPAC and its economic luminaries such as Fischer never substantiate any of the advertised benefits the U.S.-Israel "special relationship" delivers to America in return for all of the costs is simple—there simply aren't any.
As greater numbers of Americans become aware that the entire "special relationship" framework is sustained by nothing more than Israel lobby campaign-finance and propaganda networks, the harder the lobby will have to work to forcibly wedge operatives like Fischer into positions where they can thwart growing public opposition—whether it takes the form of boycotts or grassroots opposition to the U.S. fighting more wars for Israel.
In the very short term, Americans can only fight such undue Israel lobby influence by again—like during the drive to attack Syria—staging a mass action to demand their senators reject Stanley Fischer's nomination.

Grant Smith/IRmep
via Phil Weiss

a truth-seeking missile

friction with the Knights Templar

“no Israeli children come into contact with the military court system"