Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
Psychologist Who Developed U.S. Torture Program Receives $31 Million No-Bid Contract
October 17th, 2010Here’s another one for your bulging Hope and Change file folder. Via: Salon: The Army earlier this year steered a $31 million contract to a psychologist whose work formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration’s torture program. The Army awarded the “sole source” contract in February to the University of Pennsylvania for resilience training, […]
Family Farm Ordered to Destroy 50,000 Pounds of Cheese
October 15th, 2010Via: Poor Richard’s Blog: Morningland Dairy is the latest attempt by the FDA to fulfill the Healthy People 2020 objective to kill raw dairy. Morningland is owned by Joseph and Denise Dixon, who operate the cheese plant and make raw cheese from cows kept right on the property and managed by one of their eldest […]
Canada: Secret Cold War Plan Included Mass Detentions
October 14th, 2010Via: CBC: At the height of the Cold War, the Canadian government crafted a top-secret plan to detain thousands of citizens with Communist links in the event of a national security threat, according to a joint CBC/Radio-Canada investigation. The secret contingency plan, called PROFUNC, allowed police to round up and indefinitely detain Canadians believed to […]
China Stakes Claim to South Texas Oil, Gas
October 12th, 2010Via: Houston Chronicle: State-owned Chinese energy giant CNOOC is buying a multibillion-dollar stake in 600,000 acres of South Texas oil and gas fields, potentially testing the political waters for further expansion into U.S. energy reserves. With the announcement Monday that it would pay up to $2.2 billion for a one-third stake in Chesapeake Energy assets, […]
Incarceration’s Impact on Society
October 12th, 2010Via: McClatchy DC: You won’t need a calculator, but get ready to decipher a bunch of numbers — data that ought to make Americans feel both sadness and shame. … While the costs of housing prisoners — $50 billion annually for state correctional costs alone — should be enough to cause us to rethink our […]
Surprise — The Very Dark Side of U.S. History
October 11th, 2010Via: Alternet: There is a dark — seldom acknowledged — thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic. This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests […]
Hal Lewis: My Resignation From the American Physical Society; Global Warming, “Is the Greatest and Most Successful Pseudoscientific Fraud I Have Seen in My Long Life as a Physicist”
October 11th, 2010Via: The Global Warming Policy Foundation: From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society 6 October 2010 Dear Curt: When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the […]
‘Dying Communities See Salvation in New Prisons’
October 10th, 2010Hope and Change: Replacing collapsed industries with prisons. Via: AP: Mike Secinore is pinning his hopes on prison. Fresh with a criminal justice degree from the local community college, the 20-year-old Berlin native plans to apply for a corrections officer job at the federal prison expected to open in the city next summer. There aren’t […]
Tom Donilon: Obama’s New National Security Adviser and Fannie Mae Fraud
October 10th, 2010Via: Politico: To many in the foreign policy community, Tom Donilon’s selection Friday as national security adviser to President Barack Obama was a deserving reward for a consummate professional, a corporate lawyer who worked his way up through the foreign policy ranks over the years and is credited with holding the National Security Council together […]
Has Obama Ever Met an Industrial Food Shill He Didn’t Appoint?
October 9th, 2010Via: Grist: Earlier this month, Congress approved Obama’s nomination of Catherine Woteki, the USDA’s undersecretary for research, education, and economics. The appointment drew little attention in the press, including the sustainable-food blogosphere. That’s surprising, because Woteki comes to her new position after a five-year stint as global director of scientific affairs for Mars, Inc., the […]
