Maybe the “99%” are right. Maybe we should take all the money from the richest 1%.

Perhaps, however, the protesters don’t go far enough. We should then find the most beautiful 1% and scar their faces with box cutters. Then we should find the smartest 1% and damage their brains. We should find the most athletic 1% and break their legs. We should find the healthiest 1% and feed them poison. (Read more)

I love the beginning of this video. Favorite moment at @ 5:45 – “Polysyllabic, masturbatory wack-jobbery!”

Current and former U.S. officials concede that CIA suffered difficult blow; sources say Lebanon informants were compromised by meeting CIA agents at a Beirut Pizza Hut.

Dozens of spies working for the CIA were captured recently in Lebanon and Iran, current and former U.S. officials told The Associated Press and ABC News on Monday.

The CIA’s operations in Lebanon have been badly damaged after Hezbollah identified and captured a number of the U.S. spies, officials told The Associated Press.

Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, boasted on television in June that he had rooted out at least two CIA spies who had infiltrated the ranks of Hezbollah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist group closely allied with Iran. Though the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon officially denied the accusation, current and former officials concede that it happened and the damage has spread even further.

According to a report by ABC News, there were two distinct espionage rings targeting Iran and Hezbollah in which spies were recruited by the CIA.

Current and former U.S. officials said the two different spy rings were discovered separately but both caused a significant setback in U.S. efforts to track Iran’s nuclear activities and Hezbollah actions against Israel. (Read more)

Last Friday, a group of Jewish public figures and intellectuals paid a visit to the leadership of the Greek Orthodox Church in Jerusalem with one simple goal in mind, asking for forgiveness. The group took the step following a report in Haaretz about two weeks ago describing the practice of some ultra-Orthodox Jewish young people of spitting when passing church clergy on the street. (Read more)

Meir Ettinger, 19, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar and grandson of late Rabbi Kahane, says goal of Hebrew Labor project is ‘to warn the public’ against buying from businesses that employ Arabs.

About 10 days ago, a fish merchant in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda outdoor market noticed a young man with sidelocks and a skullcap trying to determine which of the stalls employ Arabs. The merchant, Saleh, called the police, who detained the man for questioning on suspicion that he was planning a terror attack.

But the interrogation revealed that Meir Ettinger, 19, had a completely different goal in mind. Ettinger, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar and a grandson of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, said he was investigating on behalf of a project called Hebrew Labor, whose goal is “to warn the public” against buying from businesses that employ Arabs. (Read more)

The following psychopaths have sponsored the bill:

Mark Amodei [R-NV2]
John Barrow [D-GA12]
Karen Bass [D-CA33]
Howard Berman [D-CA28]
Marsha Blackburn [R-TN7]
Mary Bono Mack [R-CA45]
John Carter [R-TX31]
Steven Chabot [R-OH1]
John Conyers [D-MI14]
Ted Deutch [D-FL19]
Elton Gallegly [R-CA24]
Robert Goodlatte [R-VA6]
Tim Griffin [R-AR2]
Peter King [R-NY3]
Ben Luján [D-NM3]
Thomas Marino [R-PA10]
Alan Nunnelee [R-MS1]
William Owens [D-NY23]
Dennis Ross [R-FL12]
Steve Scalise [R-LA1]
Adam Schiff [D-CA29]
Lee Terry [R-NE2]
Debbie Wasserman Schultz [D-FL20]
Melvin Watt [D-NC12]
Introduced by: Lamar Smith [R-TX]

The following companies support it:

adidas/Nike/Reebok, Autodesk, Bose, Caterpillar, CBS/NBC, Comcast, CVS, Dolby, EA/Nintendo, Ford, GMAT, L’Oréal, MLB/NBA/NFL/NHL/UFC, Monster cable (overpriced junk anyways), Oakley, Pfizer, Rite Aid, Rolex, Rosetta Stone, McGraw-Hill, Sony, Wal-Mart, Xerox, The Timberland Company, Walt Disney, Tiffany & Co. and, of course, MPAA/RIAA/Viacom/Time Warner (among others)

Wary Of SOPA, Reddit Users Aim To Build A New, Censorship-Free Internet
Users of the social news and community site Reddit don’t like the way the government seems to be muscling in on the Internet. So they plan to build a new one.

Redditors have flocked over the last week to a new subgroup on Reddit.com they’re calling the Darknet Plan–or sometimes Meshnet, as the name seems to still be in flux–with the aim of building a mesh-based version of the Internet that wouldn’t be subject to the control of any corporation or government, with a focus on anonymity, peer-to-peer architecture and strong resistance to censorship.

In the last few days, about 10,000 users have joined the group, and about 200,000 have visited, according to Chris Bresee, the 17-year old Vermonter who founded the project and goes by the name “Wolfeater” on the site. Bresee, a high school senior, created the Darknet Plan more than a year ago, but he attributes the sudden spike in interest to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the awareness of the possibilities of government censorship that the bill has created: If passed in its current form, SOPA would use Domain Name System filtering to effectively disappear infringing sites from the Internet. “I would say the Darknet Plan is driven almost in its entirety by fear of censorship coming out of Congress,” says Bresee, whose Vermont senator Patrick Leahy introduced the precursor to SOPA known as Protect-IP.”That’s what’s driven me, and I think that’s what’s driven the other ten thousand users to join.” (Read more)

The U.S. joins China in censoring the Internet
The Senate passed an act recently called the Protect IP Act but then, just as quickly, a Senator from Oregon, Ron Wyden, put the bill on hold because as he said, it would “muzzle speech and stifle innovation and economic growth.”

The latest piece of internet blacklist legislation, known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives, was introduced by the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) who claims it is for the purpose of shutting down foreign sites that post intellectual property created by U.S. firms, goes even further than the Protect IP Act.

The act would allow the US Justice Department powers to punish and shut down websites, both in the U.S. and anywhere in the world and go after companies that provide support for them, either technically or through payment systems

The US and the West have long criticized China for stifling dissent and for censorship but now they are not only joining China but they are taking censorship even further and attempting to censor the whole world.

The international implications of SOPA are worrying for as experts claim: it appears that the US is taking control of the entire world. The definitions written in the bill are so broad that any US user who uses a website overseas immediately gives the US the power to potentially take action against it and enable them to force ISPs to DNS-block any foreign site.

On a global scale it grants the U.S. Government far-reaching powers to go after Web sites which it claims are hosting copyrighted content. (Read more)

I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

. . . .

The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena’s melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. “She’s looking at you,” Dowd said.

As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. Each arm has more than two hundred of them.

. . . .

Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.

When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth. This, I learned, is a sign of a relaxed octopus. An agitated giant Pacific octopus turns red, its skin gets pimply, and it erects two papillae over the eyes, which some divers say look like horns. One name for the species is “devil fish.” With sharp, parrotlike beaks, octopuses can bite, and most have neurotoxic, flesh-dissolving venom.

. . . .

Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone. One of Athena’s predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer. Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance. Later, she quit her volunteer position for college. But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again.

. . . .

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

“Meeting an octopus,” writes Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.” Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom—until it swims away.

(Read more from Orion Magazine)

The European Union issued a ruling this week that bans X-ray body scanners in all European airports. According to the European Commission, the agency charged with enforcing the ruling across the EU’s 27 member nations, the prohibition is necessary “in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens’ health and safety.”

X-ray body scanners, which use “backscatter” ionized radiation technology, emit enough radiation to theoretically damage DNA and cause cancer. (Read more)

Imagine I walk across the street and buy a loaf of bread from a baker. I hand money and wanted bread, so I am happy. The baker had bread and wanted money, so he is happy. The world has become a better place with more people having had their more urgent needs satisfied.

This explanation should be identical if the street happens to be, say the U.S.-Canadian border. Alas, it is not. Suddenly macro-economists in both governments either rejoice or grieve, for a trade deficit and a trade surplus of $2.99 has been created.

Of course, this is macro-economic nonsense. It stems from a collection of fallacies, starting with they fallacy that countries trade. They don’t. A country is a collection of people held together at gun point and forced (also at gun point) to pay taxes to the same group of criminals. Countries don’t trade, individuals do.

ECONOMISTS are constantly urging governments to adopt policies that would reduce global imbalances—which, in crude terms, means that China should slash its current-account surplus and America its deficit. Yet they ignore the biggest imbalance of all: the current-account surplus that planet Earth appears to run with extraterrestrials. In theory, countries’ current-account balances should all sum to zero because one country’s export is another’s import. However, if you add up all countries’ reported current-account transactions (exports minus imports of goods and services, net investment income, workers’ remittances and other transfers), the world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. The fund forecasts that the global current-account surplus will rise to almost $700 billion by 2014. (Read more)

It is a system flooded with low-level drug offenders like Mack, who was sentenced to 20 years behind bars after pleading guilty to selling $10 worth of crack cocaine to an undercover cop in 2009.
. . . .

Yet even in a nation that has little to boast about in terms of prison efficiency and quality, Alabama stands out for what appears to be the sheer brutality and freewheeling nature of its corrections system.

Starved of funds, the state’s aging prisons suffer from the worst overcrowding in the nation, operating at an average of 190 percent of their design capacity. Ventress Correctional Facility, where Mack died, is an outlier even by this standard. Built in 1990 and designed to accommodate just 650 men, the facility now holds 1,665 prisoners — more than 255 percent of its capacity.

Alabama has not ignored Mack’s death. Last month, more than a year after it occurred, the Alabama attorney general charged the ranking officer at the scene, Lt. Michael A. Smith, with intentional murder for the beating.

The charge, which could put Smith behind bars for life, is unusual. Even when excessive force is alleged after an inmate death, prosecutors rarely bring charges above manslaughter or negligent homicide, according to Gene Atherton, a former prison administrator and consultant on use of force in prisons and jails. (Read more)

From Open Europe‘s news summary of November 22nd:

Commission wants right to intervene directly in member states’ budgets;
German government: Eurobonds no “panacea” for eurozone crisis
In an interview with FTD, EU Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs Olli Rehn argues for “the functioning of the eurozone to be improved through better coordination and tighter fiscal surveillance”, which would include having to clear national budgets in Brussels in order to ensure that rules on budgetary stability are adhered to. According to a draft copy of the Commission’s legislative package seen by Süddeutsche Zeitung, member states would have to submit their draft budgets to Brussels by April 15 in order for the Commission to provide comments and suggestions. The budget would then be discussed nationally and resubmitted by October 15 in order to get the Commission’s final approval. Rehn argues that the Treaty changes urged by Germany would not be necessary to achieve this, although he added that the Commission did not exclude this possibility. Handelsblatt reports that a source close to German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that her goal is a Treaty amendment which allows for similar budgetary intervention and an enforcement role for the European Court of Justice, and according to experts, such a change can be achieved through a protocol added to the EU Treaties.

Commentary by Patrick Barron:

The crisis in Europe is a textbook example (Austrian economics textbook, that is…) of how the adverse consequence of one failed market intervention leads to another and another until the state, or in this case the European Union super state, controls all economic life at the expense of personal liberty.

The failed attempt at establishing a common currency has created a tragedy of the commons (see Philipp Bagus’ excellent book The Tragedy of the Euro), whereby the most irresponsible nations are rewarded for their irresponsibility. Now, instead of simply abandoning the failed project and considering something with a real track record–dare I say “gold standard” or money freely chosen by the market?–the elitists of Europe plan to move to the next step of trying to run the supposedly independent and sovereign countries that comprise the European Monetary Union from their cushy desks in Brussels.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Energy Secretary Steven Chu should resign as a result of the disastrous decision to guarantee $537 million in loans to failed solar panel manufacturer Solyndra.

The federal government’s rush to guarantee the loans despite numerous warning signs threatens to cost taxpayers more than $500 million. Career government employees repeatedly warned that this “investment” was flawed from the beginning. Not only was Solyndra betting on an unproven “thin film” technology, but it was trying to compete with a cost structure that was uneconomical even under optimistic assumptions.

Regardless of your position on the merits of government investments in green energy, you should insist on Chu’s resignation.
Click here to find out more!

As a skeptic, I’m horrified but not surprised at a massive loss of public money in a badly managed firm. But if you think green energy investments are a good idea in general, you should be furious over Solyndra.

Not only did the company hand out $37,000 to $60,000 bonuses to its managers as it spiraled into bankruptcy this summer. Solyndra built a brand-new facility in one of the highest cost locations in America rather than recycling an existing building in a cheaper location, ordered expensive robots that whistled Disney tunes rather than focusing its spending on production, and paid investors dividends even as the company ran short of cash.

As Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., noted, putting taxpayer money in such a firm was “felony dumb.”

Worse, there is little doubt that the decision to guarantee the loans was politicized. The email trail uncovered by congressional investigators demonstrates considerable political pressure from the White House to approve the guarantees, leading some to speculate it was due to the Solyndra connections of Obama donor George Kaiser and his George Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser was a key fundraiser for Obama’s presidential campaign, hosting a 2007 fundraiser at his home that raised more than $250,000. Kaiser’s foundation (which had nearly $4 billion in assets in 2009) was a key investor in Solyndra.

. . . .

Again, Solyndra appears to be just the tip of the iceberg as we learn of more green energy firms with political connections that have received federal loan guarantees and other subsidies.

(Read more)

What is really amazing to me is not this debacle, but the fact that so many seemingly intelligent people really believe that government keeps our food safe.

How did we get to the point that bureaucrats in Washington DC are telling the rest of us what is or is not a vegetable?

Congress passed a revised agriculture appropriations bill last week, essentially making it easier to count pizza sauce as a serving of vegetables. The move has drawn widespread outrage from consumer advocates and pundits, who see “pizza is a vegetable.” as outlandish.

There’s just one little misperception: Congress didn’t declare pizza to be a vegetable. And, from a strictly nutritional standpoint, there’s decent evidence that lawmakers didn’t exactly bungle this decision.

Let’s revisit the facts: Despite what one might expect from the headlines, if you scour the agriculture appropriations bill, referenced in numerous stories, you won’t find a single mention of the word “pizza,” or even “vegetable,” for that matter.

This is not a fight over pizza. It is, instead, a fight about tomato paste. Specifically, it’s a fight about how much of the product counts as one serving of vegetables.

Right now, tomato paste gets a sort of special treatment under school lunch regulations. Just “an eighth of a cup of tomato paste is credited with as much nutritional value as half a cup of vegetables,” my colleague Dina ElBoghdady explained last week. (Read more)