uh.., you don't pay us enough to get mixed up in this medieval isht...,

militarytimes | To the list of skeptics who question the need for air strikes against Syria, add an another unlikely group — many U.S. troops.

“I haven’t heard one single person be supportive of it,” said an Army staff sergeant at Fort Hood who asked not to be identified by name.

A Military Times survey of more than 750 active-duty troops this week found service members oppose military action in Syria by a margin of about three to one.

 

The survey conducted online Monday and Tuesday found that about 75 percent of troops are not in favor of air strikes in response to reports that the Syrian government used chemical weapons to kill civilians in that country.

A higher percentage of troops, about 80 percent, say they do not believe getting involved in the two-year-old civil war is in the U.S. national interest.

The results suggest that opposition inside the military may be more intense than among the U.S. population at large. About 64 percent of Americans oppose air strikes, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll published Monday.

The Military Times survey is an unscientific sampling of Military Times readers and reflects the views of many career enlisted members and officers.

For many troops, money is a key consideration. Troops question the cost of bombing Syria at a time when budget cuts are shrinking their pay raises, putting their benefits package at risk and forcing some of their friends to separate involuntarily.

“We don’t have money for anything else but we have a couple hundred million dollars to lob some Tomahawks and mount an expensive campaign in Syria?” said Army Sgt. 1st Class Chris Larue, a 39-year-old maintenance expert at Fort Eustis, Va., referring to the precision-guided missiles that are likely to be used in any strike.

The debate about striking Syria is also revealing a strain of isolationism growing inside a battle-weary military that has spent more than a decade supporting high-tempo war operations overseas.

“People are just sick of it,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Harvey, a nuclear-trained officer who works at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia.

“It’s like the old pre-World War II isolationism, I hear grumblings of that. People would rather withdraw all our troops and let the rest of the world figure out what to do. I think there is a lot of credence to that argument.”

drug war discloses sheer moral horror at the heart of this allegedly "free society"...,

wakingtimes | In 2011 the federal government decreed that marijuana had no accepted medical use use and should remain classified as a highly dangerous drug like heroin. Accepting and promoting the powerful health benefits of marijuana would instantly cut huge profits geared towards cancer treatment and the U.S. would have to admit it imprisons the population for no cause. Nearly half of all drug arrests in the United States are for marijuana.

According to MarijuanaNews.com editor Richard Cowan, the answer is because it is a threat to cannabis prohibition “…there really is massive proof that the suppression of medical cannabis represents the greatest failure of the institutions of a free society, medicine, journalism, science, and our fundamental values,” Cowan notes.

While Colorado and Washington have not yet set up their regulatory systems, both states will likely sell licenses to farmers who want to grow marijuana as well as to manufacturing plants and retail sellers. The marijuana will also likely be taxed at each stage of its growth, processing, and sale.

“In both Colorado and Washington, legalization was done by citizens with no participation by elected representatives until they had to pass laws to comply with the initiative. In other initiative states I would expect such measures – I would expect a new one in California, for instance – and roughly half the states permit this and the rest don’t.

“In the states that do have initiatives I expect efforts to get it on the ballot. The other half it will be much tougher. It’s hard to get elected representatives to do this,” Collins said.

Armantano is more optimistic about the spread of legalized pot. He compared the DOJ’s announcement to the federal government’s actions toward the end of alcohol prohibition in America a century ago, when states decided to stop following the federal ban on alcohol sales and the federal government said it would not step in and prosecute crimes.

“For first time we now have clear message from fed government saying they will not stand in way of states that wish to implement alternative regulatory schemes in lieu of federal prohibition,” Armantano said.

He predicted that within the next one to three years, five or six other states may join Colorado and Washington in legalizing the drug, setting the stage for the rest of the country to follow.

The Age of Deception is Ending 

In 2003, the U.S. Government as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services filed for, and was awarded a patent on cannabinoids. The reason? Because research into cannabinoids allowed pharmaceutical companies to acquire practical knowledge on one of the most powerful antioxidants and neuroprotectants known to the natural world.

The U.S. Patent 6630507 was specifically initiated when researchers found that cannabinoids had specific antioxidant properties making them useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia. Nonpsychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidoil, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in the method of the present invention.

Besides the top 10 health benefits below, findings published in the journalPLoS ONE, researchers have now have now discovered that marijuana-like chemicals trigger receptors on human immune cells that can directly inhibit a type of human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) found in late-stage AIDS.

Recent studies have even shown it to be an effective atypical anti-psychotic in treating schizophrenia, a disease many other studies have inconsistently found it causing.

tired of waiting?

you remember chase and payton?

Chase and Payton when it was news.

truthout | Berwyn Heights officer Amir Johnson knew this was his mayor’s house, but had no idea what the commotion was about because the Prince George’s County Police Department hadn’t bothered to contact the Berwyn Heights police chief, as they were required to do under a memorandum of understanding between the two agencies. Johnson told the Washington Post that an officer at the scene told him, “The guy in there is crazy. He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

Johnson replied, “That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

Johnson then called Berwyn Heights police chief Patrick Murphy. Eventually, Murphy was put in touch with the supervising officer, Det. Sgt. David Martini. Murphy recounted the conversation to the Post: “Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them,” Murphy recalled. “And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot.”

If that indeed was what Martini told Murphy, he was either lying or repeating a lie told to him by one of his subordinates. There was never any further mention of Calvo shutting the door on the SWAT team - because it never happened. Calvo later had his dogs autopsied - the trajectories the bullets took through the dogs’ bodies weren’t consistent with the SWAT team’s story.

But the lies, obfuscations, and stonewalling were only beginning.

The police department would first claim that they had obtained a no-knock warrant for the raid. They then backtracked and blamed Calvo’s mother-in-law, arguing that when her scream blew their cover, they were no longer obligated to knock and announce themselves. (This was an interesting theory, given that the knock-and-announce requirement, by definition, would have required them to blow their own cover. That’s the point of the requirement.) Maj. Mark Magaw, commander of the Prince George’s County narcotics enforcement division, claimed that the SWAT team couldn’t have obtained a no-knock warrant if they had wanted to, because the state of Maryland doesn’t allow them. This too was false. The state had passed a bill allowing for no-knock warrants in 2005. It’s the sort of law that one would think would have a day-to-day impact on the drug unit of a police department that conducts several raids each week. Yet the head narcotics unit in Prince George’s County was completely ignorant of it. Three years later, Magaw would be promoted to Prince George’s County police chief.

The affidavit for the search warrant was prepared by Det. Shawn Scarlata. It is incredibly thin. In a few paragraphs, Scarlata relates that he intercepted a FedEx package containing thirty-two pounds of marijuana at one of the company’s warehouses. The package was addressed to Trinity Tomsic at her home address. A police officer disguised as a delivery man then took the package to Calvo’s house, where it was accepted by Georgia Porter. There was also a one-paragraph description of Calvo’s home. That’s the only information in the warrant specific to Calvo and his family. The remainder of the six-page affidavit is a cut-and-paste recitation of Scarlata’s training, qualifications, and assumptions he felt he could make based on his experience as a narcotics officer. As Calvo described the warrant in an online chat, “It talks about all the stuff a drug trafficker should have in his or her home and then says something like, ‘Although we know that the police have no evidence of these things, they can be inferred from the very nature of the charge.’ It is circular reasoning that says because we are suspicious of you, there must be evidence of your guilt.”

On August 7, police arrested a FedEx driver and an accomplice and charged them with various crimes related to drug trafficking. Trinity Tomsic was never supposed to receive that package of marijuana. A drug distributor in Arizona had used her address to get the package into the general Prince George’s County area, at which point an accomplice working for the delivery company was supposed to intercept it. The police had found several similar packages. Worse, county police knew the scheme was going on and knew some packages had been delivered to residences unbeknownst to the people who lived in them. The Washington Post reported a couple of months later on cases in which innocent people had been arrested. “Defense lawyers who practice in the county said authorities appear to arrest and charge anyone who picks up a package containing marijuana without conducting a further investigation,” the Post reported. “The more I think about that, the angrier I get,” Calvo later told Post columnist Marc Fisher. “They knew this scheme was going on, yet it never occurred to them from the moment they found out about that package that we were anything but drug dealers.”

Stepin Fetchit and Muhammad Ali...,

NYTimes | Loosely inspired by an actual friendship between the two men, the play explores how each dealt with the pressure of being a black public figure trying to shape his identity in the face of outside forces. Fetchit became Hollywood’s first black star, but only by embodying a demeaning stereotype of black men as lazy and shiftless. Despite Ali’s new fame as a boxing champ, his alliance with the Nation of Islam made him controversial. Mr. Power’s play suggests that while Fetchit became indelibly associated with racial prejudice, and Ali with black pride, their divergent stories may have had more to do with the eras in which they were born than the characters of the men themselves. 

The play takes place primarily in Lewiston, Me., in 1965, where Ali is preparing for a rematch with Sonny Liston, whom he had beaten the year before to take the heavyweight title. The atmosphere is fraught, since the recent assassination of Malcolm X has put a spotlight on Ali’s relations with the Nation of Islam. (That group, which Malcolm X had left, was rumored to be behind the killing.) The remote Lewiston was selected for the fight because no more prominent city would host it after rumors began that allies of Malcolm X would be gunning — literally — for Ali. 

In this tense atmosphere, Ali (Ray Fisher) turns to Fetchit (K. Todd Freeman) for informal advice. He knows that Fetchit was an intimate friend of the great black fighter Jack Johnson, and despite his preening egoism, Ali wouldn’t mind having an ace in the hole: knowledge of a legendary maneuver called the “anchor punch” that he believes might have been entrusted to Fetchit. 

Fetchit claims to know nothing of this secret weapon but is eager to rehabilitate his image by linking himself with a figure who embodies self-determination. (In the scene of their first meeting, Ali teasingly calls him “a traitor to their race.”) Having established the reason for their alliance, however, Mr. Power cannot make it a convincing focus of the narrative, so the play bobs and weaves among a host of subplots. 

Flashbacks to Hollywood in the 1920s depict Fetchit — his real name was Lincoln Perry — shrewdly negotiating his contract with the paternalistic studio chief William Fox (a feisty Richard Masur). A star of the vaudeville circuit with a huge following, Fetchit knows his value, and manages to secure highly favorable terms — albeit only by inventing a fictional white lawyer to blame for his demands.

it's all about strengthening the fourth...,

npr | We've all had the experience of watching a great athletic performance — from gymnast Mary Lou Retton defying gravity to Michael Jordan sinking a mind-blowing turnaround jumper — and wondered: Were they born with that talent or can you get there with hard work and practice?

Sports Illustrated senior writer David Epstein says scientists are learning a lot more about the role of genetics in athletic performance. In his new book, The Sports Gene, he looks at whether big league hitters have naturally faster reflexes, whether some people are born with speed and that delicate question of whether African-Americans are better athletes than whites. Epstein says that science now has answers, or at least insights, into all those questions. He joins Fresh Air's Dave Davies to talk about the secret to hitting a fastball and why slow dogs win the Iditarod.

---

Interview Highlights

On the truth about baseball and softball hitter reflexes

"Going into it, I figured that they would have these superhuman reaction speeds because they face 100-mile-an-hour pitches everyday, and [softball pitcher] Jennie Finch's fastballs take exactly the amount of time as a mid-'90s baseball does. So the baseball comes at 60 feet 6 inches, 95 miles an hour; Jennie Finch throws from about 43 feet at about 65 miles an hour. Same exact time and the ball is bigger and yet they couldn't hit it all. It turns out that even the best hitters in the world have perfectly pedestrian reaction times."

On how, then, hitters manage to hit the ball

"They pick up on cues from the players' bodies before their pitch. So for a pitcher, without knowing it, the hitters are actually focusing in on the motion of the pitcher's shoulder and the pitcher's torso and hand. And then, as soon as the ball is released, [hitters focus] on what is called the flicker, which is a flashing pattern that the [ball's] red seams make as they rotate. And it's only picking up those anticipatory cues that allows the hitter to hit the ball.

"... This is a learned perceptual skill. And in fact, if you do a digital simulation, which some scientists have done, where you delete the pitcher's shoulder, [the Los Angeles Angels'] Albert Pujols becomes me, basically. You have to delete a little more than the shoulder to get him to that novice level, but he basically becomes a novice if you do that. And you can do the same thing with tennis players."

On breeding sled dogs for the Iditarod

"As I write in the book, it's not the fastest dogs that win. So sled dogs, when they were first bred for racing, the mushers bred for speed traits, and the idea was to race between checkpoints in the Iditarod very, very quickly, and they topped out in their top speed. And then what became popular because of [four-time Iditarod champion] Lance Mackey, who I write about, who couldn't afford to breed fast dogs, he had to breed instead dogs that were slower but would just go and go and go, and had a drive to pull the sled all the time and never wanted to stop. And it turns out — and scientists look at some of those sled dogs — they've actually been bred for motivation, they've been bred for work ethic. And the speeds of the Iditarod races are getting faster because the dogs are pulling longer, not faster."

On the question of whether African-Americans are predisposed for athletics

"Most of our ancestry as humans has occurred in Africa, so people have been in Africa for far longer than they've been outside of Africa. So genes for hundreds of thousands of years were evolving, changing inside of Africa, and then just a tiny group of people — maybe no more than 150 people, or a small group — left East Africa en route to populating the rest of the world. At each stop, their genes changed to accommodate their environments and sometimes just by random chance. ... But what this means is that most of the genetic differences that have been built up in our history are all still in Africa. All of us outside of Africa are just tiny subsets of a tiny subset that left Africa. So if you got rid of everyone in the world outside of Africa you would lose a little, but you would preserve most of the genetic variation for all of humanity.

"... [For] a particular trait, you might find the most diversity within an African population, as opposed to comparing someone in an African population and someone in a European population. So you might find the fastest 10 runners and the slowest 10 runners. But nobody is looking for the slowest 10 runners."

the enduring false narratives of segregation...,

theatlantic | The September issue of The Atlantic, now available online, includes a "Chartist" feature that graphically synthesizes some of the research we've covered at Cities on the changing shape of segregation in America since the 1960s, its consequences and its costs for everyone.

Several people helped me pull together some of the data points mentioned in the magazine, notably the University of California Berkeley's Rucker Johnson, who has done extensive work on the life outcomes of children who attend segregated schools, and Robert Bullard, who has amassed a frightening collection of research on the health hazards of living in minority communities.

I wanted to share a few more findings that we couldn't squeeze onto the page in the magazine and then throw out some broader questions about why all of these trends persist. First, a few more data points on what segregation means today, even for middle-class minority families:

• On average, affluent blacks and Hispanics live in neighborhoods with fewer resources than poor whites do.
• Census data from 2000, for example, showed that the average black household making more than $60,000 lived in a neighborhood with a higher poverty rate than the average white household earning less than $20,000.
• A longitudinal study run from 1968-2005 found that the average black child spent one-quarter of his or her childhood living in a high-poverty neighborhood. For the average white child, that number is 3 percent.
• The black child poverty rate in 1968 was 35 percent; it is the same today.
• Minorities make up 56 percent of the population living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation's commercial hazardous waste facilities.
• Middle-income blacks (with household incomes between $50,000-$60,000) live in neighborhoods that are on average more polluted than the average neighborhood where white households making less than $10,000 live.

Segregation still matters because segregated neighborhoods are associated with worse outcomes for health, educational attainment, imprisonment, access to jobs and more. In the magazine, we tried to walk through some of these consequences in terms of the economic growth of whole metropolitan areas.

But one issue we did not get into is why such stark segregation persists, now two full generations after the civil rights era. NYU sociologist Patrick Sharkey discussed this question recently with Richard Florida, drawing on the findings of his recent book, Stuck in Place.

We often blame poor people for their own poverty, and blame whole neighborhoods for the fact that government has systematically failed to invest in them – as the comments on this story recently reminded me. This narrative suggests that everyone would leave segregated, high-poverty, polluted neighborhoods if they just had the money to move out, and that people who don't live in such places arrived where they are through their own hard work and responsibility.

That story, which focuses on the faults and skills of individual people, ignores the fact that we've arrived at this picture of segregation for a lot of complicated, long-running, systemic reasons that are so much bigger than individual families (and whether they have dads or not). For decades, policies around who is eligible for home loans, where we pave highways, and what kinds of houses can be built in some communities have encouraged middle-class whites to leave the city and move into the suburbs. At the same time, ill-fated government ideas about public housing clustered low-income blacks in high-rise housing projects. Mass incarceration further weakened minority communities.

And as Sharkey points out, in the midst of all this, the changing economy also decimated the very same good industrial jobs that drew many blacks to northern cities during the Great Migration in the first place.

All of which is to say that the responsibility for lessening the consequences of segregation does not solely fall on the people who experience it.

the third wave - crashed and still crashing...,

NYTimes | In many northern cities, the 1974 United States Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley killed any hopes of integrating the public schools. That ruling, involving Detroit and its suburbs, said that a mandatory plan to achieve integration by busing black children from Detroit across district lines to mainly white suburbs was unconstitutional. The result accelerated white flight to the suburbs, leaving the schools in urban centers even more segregated than they had been. 

Most famously, this happened in Boston, where court-ordered integration resulted in a busing plan that wound up mainly moving children of color around the city. 

But busing had greater success in some places, particularly those where the plans were carried out countywide, reducing the chances of white flight. They included Louisville-Jefferson County, Raleigh-Wake County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. 

This week’s Retro Report video, “The Battle for Busing,” follows the story of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which became a national model for racial integration for 30 years only to resegregate about a decade ago, after a court ruling lifted the mandatory integration plan.

When the Charlotte busing plan began in 1971, there were whites who threatened to go to jail before they would let their children attend schools with blacks. The open racism voiced by whites in the Retro Report’s archival footage is vicious and ugly; students were injured when fistfights broke out between whites and blacks. 

But by 1974, the district was being singled out in the news media as a national model, particularly West Charlotte High, which had previously been all black. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were renovated. 

Over the years, researchers like Prof. Roslyn Mickelson at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, conducted studies concluding that children of any race who attended diverse schools were more likely to succeed, in areas like graduating, avoiding crime and attending college. 

But in the end, the same federal courts that had ushered in integration helped kill it. In the late 1990s, Judge Robert D. Potter of Federal District Court essentially said that the Charlotte district had met its constitutional duty by successfully creating a single school system serving all children regardless of race and that no more need be done.

In a few years’ time, West Charlotte High, which had been roughly 40 percent black and 60 percent white in the 1970s, became 88 percent black and 1 percent white. And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Today, nearly two-thirds of the school districts that had been ordered to desegregate are no longer required to do so, including Seminole County, Fla. (2006); Little Rock, Ark. (2007); and Galveston County, Tex. (2009). 

The New York City system is more segregated than it was in the 1980s: half the schools are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. For more about the nation’s “steady and massive resegregation,” see this Reporter’s Notebook from Retro Report. 

This week’s Retro Report is the 10th in our documentary project, which was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report has a staff of 12 journalists and 6 contributors led by Kyra Darnton. It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. The videos are typically 10 to 12 minutes long.

the second wave of winning hearts and minds?

henrymakow | FLASHBACK TO 1976 by Nancy Borman Reprinted from the Village Voice May 21, 1979, pp. 117-122. Abridged by Henry Makow

At Random House on March 15, 1976, "Feminist Revolution" was just another women's book in production. It consisted of a multifaceted analysis of the women's liberation movement edited by members of Redstockings, an early radical feminist group. A self-published edition released the previous fall had stirred up controversy with its indictment of liberals, lesbian pseudo-leftists, and foundation grant feminists. 5000 copies had sold out.

Part of the book-some say the most interesting part-was titled "Agents, Opportunists and Fools." It attempted to link the CIA and the corporate establishment to several individuals and institutions connected with Ms. Magazine... Feminist Revolution had passed an initial libel reading by Random House's legal department on March 2nd, and a contract was signed in the office that March morning. 20,000 copies of the book were scheduled to hit the stores in June.

That afternoon, an unannounced visitor appeared in the citadel of the free press. A presumably angry Gloria Steinem asked to see Random House president Robert Bernstein. She was there to hand-deliver a letter from her attorney threatening to sue for libel unless the chapter on the CIA was removed from the book.

No one knows what Steinem and Bernstein said in their private meeting, and it may have been just coincidence that, within weeks Random House was blitzed with similar threats from other people and groups mentioned in the CIA chapter: Clay Felker, Women's Action AlIiance, Warner Communications, Franklin Thomas, the Overseas Education Fund of the League of Women Voters, and Katherine Graham.

But, in any case, publication of Feminist Revolution was delayed nearly 3 years; the printing run was cut to 12,500, despite 13,000 advance orders; and when the book was finally released last month, the chapter on Gloria Steinem and the CIA had been deleted in its entirety. Somehow, the word "abridged" on the cover fails to answer the question: What happened?

the first wave of winning hearts and minds...,

HuffPo | Comedian and "The Talk" co-host Sheryl Underwood is apologizing for comments she made about natural black hair.

On Friday, Aug. 31, a re-run episode of CBS' "The Talk" featured the ladies discussing what supermodel Heidi Klum does with her biracial sons' shorn hair, Mediate first reported. (In a previous interview with Your Tango, Klum had detailed how she kept sons Henry's and Johan's hair after shaving their afros and made art out of the pieces.)

Underwood, apparently, couldn't understand.

"OK, I'm sorry, but why would you save afro hair?" Underwood asked. “You can’t weave afro hair. You never see us at the hair place going ‘Look, here, what I need here is, I need those curly, nappy beads.' That just seems nasty.”

When Sara Gilbert admitted to keeping some of her own son's hair, Underwood interjected saying, "Which is probably some beautiful, long, silky stuff."

Twitter exploded with critics blasting Underwood for her insensitive comments, The Root noted.

On Wednesday morning, Underwood called into Steve Harvey's radio show to apologize. Harvey defended his friend, saying "we all make mistakes." He also gave her the chance to read a prepared statement:

I want to apologize for my recent attempt at humor that missed the target and hit my people squarely in the heart. To all of you I say, I’m very sorry for my failed attempt at humor surrounding something that’s very sensitive to us: our hair. I could use this time to try to explain the intent of what I said, but misunderstanding aside, the way the joke came out offended my people and my community, which was not my intent.

Underwood thanked those who called her out on her comments and asked for forgiveness.

Prior to this apology, she spoke with natural hair blogger Curly Nikki about the incident, saying she was "misunderstood." She said it was a "bad choice of words" to juxtapose descriptions about the "nappy" afro hair of a black boy with the "silky" hair of a white boy. She admitted it was a mistake.

"I am going to make mistakes, because I’m human," she added. "And I’m sorry for what my words inferred, but it doesn’t call my Blackness into question. My Blackness comes out in other ways, subtle ways. On the show, when they refer to him as simply, ‘Obama’, I straighten them up and remind them that he ain’t your boy, he’s the president. President Obama. I’m learning lessons, and I cannot evolve if I’m not allowed to be empowering."

sammy sosa is a vampire...,

inquistr | Sammy Sosa may be best known for being a major league baseball player but we now have photographic evidence of his other occupation: Blood sucker. Yes, it appears that Sammy Sosa is a vampire. 

Don’t believe me? OK, let’s do a little test. 

Close your eyes and picture a vampire. Do you see a man with a sickly white face? A large widow’s peak hanging down from a carefully sculpted oily mas of slicked back hair? A tailored suit with a blood red tie? Is your vampire standing next to an unsuspecting pretty woman? OK, now check out the photo of Sammy Sosa courtesy of Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan. 

 Widow’s peak? Check. Pale face? Check. Tailored suit? Blood red tie? Unsuspecting victim? Check, check check. Sammy Sosa is a vampire. There’s just no other explanation. Except for this one: NESN reports that Sosa has been experimenting with “skin conditioning” procedures since 2009 to give himself lighter skin. The good news is that the process seems to be working. The bad news is that it has made Sosa looking like a vampire.

 The former Cubs slugger has kept himself out of the spotlight since he retired in 2007. Some people speculate that Sosa has avoided the spotlight because of the steroid issues that stained his career. But I think we all know the real reason: He’ll turn to stone if he’s hit with direct light.

Sammy Sosa may be best known for being a major league baseball player but we now have photographic evidence of his other occupation: Blood sucker. Yes, it appears that Sammy Sosa is a vampire. Don’t believe me? OK, let’s do a little test. Close your eyes and picture a vampire. Do you see a man with a sickly white face? A large widow’s peak hanging down from a carefully sculpted oily mas of slicked back hair? A tailored suit with a blood red tie? Is your vampire standing next to an unsuspecting pretty woman? OK, now check out the photo of Sammy Sosa courtesy of Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan. Widow’s peak? Check. Pale face? Check. Tailored suit? Blood red tie? Unsuspecting victim? Check, check check. Sammy Sosa is a vampire. There’s just no other explanation. Except for this one: NESN reports that Sosa has been experimenting with “skin conditioning” procedures since 2009 to give himself lighter skin. The good news is that the process seems to be working. The bad news is that it has made Sosa looking like a vampire. The former Cubs slugger has kept himself out of the spotlight since he retired in 2007. Some people speculate that Sosa has avoided the spotlight because of the steroid issues that stained his career. But I think we all know the real reason: He’ll turn to stone if he’s hit with direct light.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/946021/sammy-sosa-is-a-vampire/#Bqm4Juu2xcVyRDuY.99

Sammy Sosa may be best known for being a major league baseball player but we now have photographic evidence of his other occupation: Blood sucker. Yes, it appears that Sammy Sosa is a vampire. Don’t believe me? OK, let’s do a little test. Close your eyes and picture a vampire. Do you see a man with a sickly white face? A large widow’s peak hanging down from a carefully sculpted oily mas of slicked back hair? A tailored suit with a blood red tie? Is your vampire standing next to an unsuspecting pretty woman? OK, now check out the photo of Sammy Sosa courtesy of Yahoo!’s Jeff Passan. Widow’s peak? Check. Pale face? Check. Tailored suit? Blood red tie? Unsuspecting victim? Check, check check. Sammy Sosa is a vampire. There’s just no other explanation. Except for this one: NESN reports that Sosa has been experimenting with “skin conditioning” procedures since 2009 to give himself lighter skin. The good news is that the process seems to be working. The bad news is that it has made Sosa looking like a vampire. The former Cubs slugger has kept himself out of the spotlight since he retired in 2007. Some people speculate that Sosa has avoided the spotlight because of the steroid issues that stained his career. But I think we all know the real reason: He’ll turn to stone if he’s hit with direct light.
Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/946021/sammy-sosa-is-a-vampire/#Bqm4Juu2xcVyRDuY.99

the long-legged mack daddy imperative...,

pcr | support behind the liar obama is feeble and limited. The ability of the Western countries to dominate international politics came to an end at the G20 meeting. The moral authority of the West is completely gone, shattered and eroded by countless lies and shameless acts of aggression based on nothing but lies and self-interests. Nothing remains of the West’s “moral authority,” which was never anything but a cover for self-interest, murder, and genocide.

The West has been destroyed by its own governments, who have told too many self-serving lies, and by its capitalist corporations, who offshored the West’s jobs and technology to China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil, depriving the Western governments of a tax base and the support of its citizens.

It is difficult to know whether citizens in the West hate their corrupt governments any less than do Muslims, whose lives and countries have been devastated by Western aggression, or than do citizens of third world countries who have been impoverished by being looted by predatory First World financial organizations.

The idiot Western governments have pissed away their clout. There is no prospect whatsoever of the neoconservative fantasy of US hegemony being exercised over Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South America, Iran. These countries can establish their own system of international payments and finance and leave the dollar standard whenever they wish. One wonders why they wait. The US dollar is being printed in unbelievable quantities and is no longer qualified to be the world reserve currency. The US dollar is on the verge of total worthlessness.

The G20 Summit made it clear that the world is no longer willing to go along with the West’s lies and murderous ways. The world has caught on to the West. Every country now understands that the bailouts offered by the West are merely mechanisms for looting the bailed-out countries and impoverishing the people.

In the 21st century Washington has treated its own citizens the way it treats citizens of third world countries. Untold trillions of dollars have been lavished on a handful of banks, while the banks threw millions of Americans out of their homes and seized any remaining assets of the broken families.

US corporations had their taxes cut to practically nothing, with few paying any taxes at all, while the corporations gave the jobs and careers of millions of Americans to the Chinese and Indians. With those jobs went US GDP, tax base, and economic power, leaving Americans with massive budget deficits, a debased currency, and bankrupt cities, such as Detroit, which once was the manufacturing powerhouse of the world.

How long before Washington shoots down its own homeless, hungry, and protesting citizens in the streets?

Washington represents Israel and a handful of powerful organized private interests. Washington represents no one else. Washington is a plague upon the American people and a plague upon the world.

the farcical emperor is naked...,

asiatimes | Then there's the ''credibility'' farce. The Obama administration has convoluted the whole world in its own self-spun net, insisting that the responsibility for the ''red line'' recklessly drawn by the president is in fact global. Yet the pesky ''world'' is not buying it.

The Arab street doesn't buy it because they clearly see through the hypocrisy; the desperate rush to ''punish'' the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria while justifying everything the apartheid state of Israel perpetrates in occupied Palestine.

The Muslim world doesn't buy it because it clearly sees the demonization only applies to Muslims - from Arafat to bin Laden to Saddam to Gaddafi and now Assad. It would never apply to the military junta in Myanmar, which was clever enough to engineer an ''opening''; the next day Westerners were lining up to kiss the hem of Burmese longyis.

It would never apply to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan because ''we'' always need to seduce him as one of our bastards away from Russia and China.

It eventually applies, on and off, to the Kim dynasty in North Korea, but with no consequences - because these are badass Asians who can actually respond to an US attack.

Informed public opinion across the developing world does not buy it because they clearly see, examining the historical record, that Washington would never really be bothered with the sorry spectacle of Arabs killing Arabs, or Muslims killing Muslims, non-stop. The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war is a prime piece of evidence.

At the Group of 20 summit last week, the BRICS group of emerging powers - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - as well as Indonesia and Argentina, clearly stressed that a war on Syria without UN Security Council approval would qualify Obama as a war criminal.

Even among the European poodles ''support'' for the White House is extremely qualified. Germany's Angela Merkel and even France's attack dog Francois Hollande said the primacy is with the UN. The European Union as a whole wants a political solution. It's enlightening to remember that the EU in Brussels can issue arrest warrants for heads of EU governments guilty of war crimes. Someone in Paris must have warned attack dog Hollande that he would not welcome the prospect of slammer time.

''Evil'' as a political category is something worthy of the brain dead. The key question now revolves around the axis of warmongers - Washington, Israel and the House of Saud. Will the Israel lobby, the more discreet but no less powerful Saudi lobby, and the Return of the Living Dead neo-cons convince the US Congress to fight their war?

And then there's the curioser and curioser case of al-Qaeda - essentially the Arabic denomination for a CIA database of US-Pakistani-Saudi trained mujahideen during the 1980s: the oh so convenient transnational bogeyman that ''legitimized'' the Global War On Terror (GWOT) of the George W Bush years; the ''opening'' for al-Qaeda to move to Iraq; and now, no middle men; the CIA and the Obama administration fighting side-by-side with al-Qaeda in Syria. No wonder the denomination ''al-CIAeda'' has gone viral.

With farce after farce after farce piling up in their own Tower of Babel, the much-vaunted ''US credibility'' is in itself the biggest farce of all. Politically, no one knows how the vacuum will be filled. It won't be via the UN. It won't be via the BRICS. It won't be via the G-20 - which is seriously divided; at least new multipolar players are carrying way more weight than US poodles.

never forget that civilization is only six meals thick...,

theatlantic | Syria has been convulsed by civil war since climate change came to Syria with a vengeance. Drought devastated the country from 2006 to 2011.  Rainfall in most of the country fell below eight inches (20 cm) a year, the absolute minimum needed to sustain un-irrigated farming. Desperate for water, farmers began to tap aquifers with tens of thousands of new well.  But, as they did, the water table quickly dropped to a level below which their pumps could lift it. 

In some areas, all agriculture ceased.  In others crop failures reached 75%.  And generally as much as 85% of livestock died of thirst or hunger.  Hundreds of thousands  of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms and fled to the cities and towns in search of almost non-existent jobs and severely short food supplies.  Outside observers including UN experts estimated that between 2 and 3  million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”

The domestic Syrian refugees immediately found that they had to compete not only with one another for scarce food, water and jobs, but also with the already existing foreign refugee population.  Syria already was a refuge for quarter of a million Palestinians and about a hundred thousand people who had fled the war and occupation of Iraq.  Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers.  And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

            Survival was the key issue.  The senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in Syria turned to the USAID program for help. Terming the situation “a perfect storm,” in November 2008, he warned  that Syria faced “social destruction.” He noted that the Syrian Minister of Agriculture had “stated publicly that [the]  economic and social fallout from the drought was ‘beyond our capacity as a country to deal with.’”  But, his appeal fell on deaf ears:  the USAID director commented that “we question whether limited USG resources should be directed toward this appeal at this time.”  (reported on November 26, 2008 in cable 08DAMASCUS847_a to Washington and “leaked” to Wikileaks )

            Whether or not this was a wise decision, we now know that the Syrian government made the situation much worse by its next action. Lured by the high price of wheat on the world market, it sold its reserves. In 2006, according to the US Department of Agriculture, it sold 1,500,000 metric tons or twice as much as in the previous year.  The next year it had little left to export; in 2008 and for the rest of the drought years it had to import enough wheat to keep its citizens alive.

            So tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry and impoverished former farmers flooded constituted a “tinder” that was ready to catch fire.  The spark was struck on March 15, 2011  when a relatively small group gathered in the town of Daraa to protest against government failure to help them.  Instead of meeting with the protestors and at least hearing their complaints, the government cracked down on them as subversives.  The Assads, who had ruled the country since 1971,  were not known for political openness or popular sensitivity.   And their action backfired.  Riots broke out all over the country,  As they did, the Assads attempted to quell them with military force.  They failed to do so and, as outside help – money from the Gulf states and Muslim “freedom fighters” from  the rest of the world – poured into the country, the government lost control over 30% of the country’s rural areas and perhaps half of its population.  By the spring of 2013, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), upwards of 100,000 people had been killed in the fighting, perhaps 2 million have lost their homes and upwards of 2 million have fled abroad.  Additionally, vast amounts of infrastructure, virtually whole cities like Aleppo, have been destroyed. 

Despite these tragic losses, the war is now thought to be stalemated: the government cannot be destroyed and the rebels cannot be defeated.  The reasons are not only military: they are partly economic-- there is little to which the rebels could return;  partly political – the government has managed to retain the loyalty of a large part of the majority Muslim community which comprises the bulk of its army and civil service whereas the rebels, as I have mentioned, are fractured into many mutually hostile groups;  and partly administrative  -- by and large the government’s  structure has held together and functions satisfactorily whereas the rebels have no single government.

the one who is unwilling to work shall not eat!

NYTimes | As a self-described “true Southern man” — and reluctant recipient of food stamps — Dustin Rigsby, a struggling mechanic, hunts deer, doves and squirrels to help feed his family. He shops for grocery bargains, cooks budget-stretching stews and limits himself to one meal a day. 

Tarnisha Adams, who left her job skinning hogs at a slaughterhouse when she became ill with cancer, gets $352 a month in food stamps for herself and three college-age sons. She buys discount meat and canned vegetables, cheaper than fresh. Like Mr. Rigsby, she eats once a day — “if I eat,” she said.

When Congress officially returns to Washington next week, the diets of families like the Rigsbys and the Adamses will be caught up in a debate over deficit reduction. Republicans, alarmed by a rise in food stamp enrollment, are pushing to revamp and scale down the program. Democrats are resisting the cuts. 

No matter what Congress decides, benefits will be reduced in November, when a provision in the 2009 stimulus bill expires. 

Yet as lawmakers cast the fight in terms of spending, nonpartisan budget analysts and hunger relief advocates warn of a spike in “food insecurity” among Americans who, as Mr. Rigsby said recently, “look like we are fine,” but live on the edge of poverty, skipping meals and rationing food. 

Surrounded by corn and soybean farms — including one owned by the local Republican congressman, Representative Stephen Fincher — Dyersburg, about 75 miles north of Memphis, provides an eye-opening view into Washington’s food stamp debate. Mr. Fincher, who was elected in 2010 on a Tea Party wave and collected nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government from 1999 to 2012, recently voted for a farm bill that omitted food stamps. 

“The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country,” Mr. Fincher, whose office did not respond to interview requests, said after his vote in May. In response to a Democrat who invoked the Bible during the food stamp debate in Congress, Mr. Fincher cited his own biblical phrase. “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” he said. 

On Wednesday, the Department of Agriculture released a 2012 survey showing that nearly 49 million Americans were living in “food insecure” households — meaning, in the bureaucratic language of the agency, that some family members lacked “consistent access throughout the year to adequate food.” In short, many Americans went hungry. The agency found the figures essentially unchanged since the economic downturn began in 2008, but substantially higher than during the previous decade.

Experts say the problem is particularly acute in rural regions like Dyersburg, a city of 17,000 on the banks of the Forked Deer River in West Tennessee. More than half the counties with the highest concentration of food insecurity are rural, according to an analysis by Feeding America, the nation’s largest network of food banks. In Dyer County, it found, 19.4 percent of residents were “food insecure” in 2011, compared with 16.4 percent nationwide.

states where the most people go hungry

247wallst | The states with the lowest food security, not surprisingly, are among the poorest in the country. In all 10 states, the median household income was less than the national median of $50,502. In Mississippi and Arkansas, the two worst states for food security, median income was less than $40,000. Of the 10 states with the lowest food security, eight had the highest poverty rates in the country.

Ross Fraser, spokesperson for hunger-relief charity Feeding America, explained that having low food security does not necessarily mean families are starving. While people may feel full after eating, nutritious food is expensive. “Often, people have to make unfortunate choices about what they put in their stomachs.” Fraser added.

Indeed, according to a 2012 Gallup-Healthways survey, people in nine of the 10 states were less likely to eat healthily on a daily basis than the nation as a whole. Missouri and Tennessee were third and second worst in the country by this measure.

It may surprise some that, in fact, the majority of the 10 states with food access problems have higher-than-average obesity rates. Mississippi and Arkansas had the second and third highest obesity rates in the country in 2012. “The lack of healthy food among families in these states,” explained Fraser, “is one of the reasons you have very poor people who are obese. It is because they’re not able to afford nutritious and high protein food.”

Based on a three-year average between 2010 and 2012, the USDA‘s report, Household Food Security in the United States in 2012, identifies the states with the highest proportion of residents who had low or very low food security. The report measures how many households have low food security — defined as being able to eat three square meals a day, but forced to reduce the quality of the food they eat — and very low food security — defined as having food intake reduced and eating patterns disrupted because of a lack of affordability. The 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 averages also were considered. 24/7 Wall St. also reviewed poverty, income, education and food stamp recipiency data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey, as well as the obesity and access to food data for 2012 from the Gallup-Healthways 2012 Well-Being Index.

These are the states where the most people go hungry.

why it's vitally important to find something useful and valuable to do, and do it with excellence...,

datamining | Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localized positions) within social space. We argue for more research on: (a) the basic ecological processes that link organizations, associations, cultural communities, social movements, and many other social forms; (b) the impact of multiplex ties on the patterns of homophily; and (c) the dynamics of network change over time through which networks and other social entities co-evolve. Fist tap Dale.

people whose full-time professional focus is on race, politics, and history - consider Double-0 racist...,

the root | Last week, in his remarks commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, President Obama did what many would argue has become a signature move in his speeches to black audiences: In the midst of a professorial history recap featuring paragraphs of his characteristic soaring rhetoric, he slipped in several hundred words about cultural pathology.

Specifically, he primarily blamed African Americans for the way "progress stalled" after the civil rights activism that was being celebrated. "The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots. Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior," he said. He chastised those who he said acted "as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself."

Some called it "tough love." Not surprisingly, people like conservative pundit Bill O'Reilly ate it up.

But from the point of view of plenty of black observers -- people whose full-time professional focus is on race, politics and history -- the commentary amounted to unhelpful and ahistorical victim blaming: inappropriate at best and a cynical version of Bill Cosby-level armchair sociology at worst. And they weren't alone. Mother Jones' Lauren Williams reported on the immediate post-speech reactions of listeners on Twitter, who were, to put it mildly, ticked off.

It's worth noting that we've been here before. The response to this chunk of the president's speech was not unlike the reception to his commencement address at Morehouse College, in which he made the perplexing choice to lecture men graduating from a top HBCU about making excuses. (Is it that any remarks to African Americans, no matter how successful they may be, demand a personal-responsibility theme?) Even the first lady has followed this pattern, conjuring an unfounded myth at Bowie State's graduation when she referred to "the slander that says a black child with a book is trying to act white," and lamenting that "too many of our young people" aim to be "a baller or a rapper."

But guess what? As the dust settles around the latest iteration of this now pretty predictable commentary, I'm almost looking forward to when the president does it again.

To be clear, it's not because I agree with him. Not at all. In fact, as I listened last week from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was full of dread at the idea of hearing a distorted and painfully oversimplified message.

is crime and poverty data-aggregation racist?

theatlantic | A service called "Ghetto Tracker" appeared online at the beginning of this week and quickly drew criticism for its racist and classist overtones. Shortly after, the site was renamed "Good Part of Town." Its creator, who would only identify himself as a 30-something-year-old in Tallahassee, told Gawker: "This was originally seriously developed as a travel tool and the name 'Ghetto Tracker' was meant to be something that people would remember."

The basic premise of Ghetto Tracker/Good Part of Town -- to crowdsource travel advice – actually isn’t so outrageous, but the framing, even without the word "Ghetto" in the name, and the intention -- to label whole geographic areas as "good" or "bad," "safe" and "unsafe" -- make the operation distasteful.

Yet in the growing field of geo-web applications, incorporating safety judgments into navigational aids is becoming increasingly common. Accusations of reinforcing racist or classist stereotypes could be lobbed at any of those apps. "In any form," writes Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities, "this idea toes a touchy line between a utilitarian application of open data and a sly wink toward people who just want to steer clear of 'those kinds of neighborhoods.'"

So how should we think about these apps? When does technology step over that line from being merely useful to becoming insidiously stereotype-enforcing?

Anyone can investigate a neighborhood by looking up local crime rates, median income, and demographics online – not to mention the information gleaned from word-of-mouth reports. To perform such research and then make a decision about traveling to a particular area involves critical thinking, which is hardly objectionable. The ethical problem occurs when your mobile device takes over that thinking for you. Fist tap Dale.

the fourth is very strong in this one...,