Category: News

Mother Jones – by Kevin Drum

Wired – by Keith Barry

A new Norwegian ship aims to counteract rough seas by making its own waves with internal water tanks.

The so-called “hotel ship” is being built for marine services provider Østensjø, and is designed to accommodate workers servicing offshore oil platforms. It’s 500 feet long and has room to house and entertain 800 workers, complete with a gym, sauna, two pools, and office space. And those accommodations should be comfortable no matter how high the seas get, thanks to U-shaped water tanks integrated into the ship’s hull that create waves to stabilize the vessel.   Continue reading “New Ship Makes Its Own Waves to Stay Stable”

Missourian

KANSAS CITY — Thieves are using aluminum foil to block satellite dish transmissions in a scheme that allows them to run up huge bills on fake or stolen credit cards without being detected, Kansas City police said.

Common Dreams – by Abby Zimet

Fitzgerald and Hemingway were both right. Rich people, and most notably CEOs of rapacious companies, are different from us: They have not just more money, but more arrogance, grandiosity, moral blindness and self-delusion. Thus do we have Robert Benmosche, the CEO who took over AIG after it helped crash the global economy and then got bailed out by $700 billion from taxpayers, telling the Wall Street Journal that the uproar over insane bonuses to executives despite their utter incompetence was “just as bad and just as wrong” as lynching blacks in the South, and why were all those people “out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses” calling them bad names which is pretty much the same as being brutally murdered.    Continue reading “AIG CEO Says Getting Yelled At On Blogs For Obscene Bonuses Is Just Like Getting Hanged From A Tree By Your Neck Till You’re Dead”

Common Dreams – by Sarah Lazare

In a furious critique that opened the UN’s General Assembly meeting Tuesday immediately before President Obama took the podium, Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff blasted U.S. secret surveillance programs for violating her country’s national sovereignty, attacking its democracy, and infringing on the human rights of its citizens.

“In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy,” she declared in her strongest statements yet in the fallout following revelations that the NSA had directly spied on Rousseff. “In the absence of the respect for sovereignty, there is no basis for the relationship among nations.” Continue reading “In Stinging Rebuke at UN, Brazilian President Rails Against NSA Spying”

The Oregonian – by Jeff Mapes

A second California county bordering Oregon has voted to secede and form a new state of Jefferson in the border region.

Modoc County supervisors voted to join Siskiyou County in passing a resolution calling for secession, according to the Redding Record-Searchlight.  The resolution cites the “increasing tendency by the State of California to exercise legislative and fiscal malfeasance” and “assaults upon Second Amendment rights.”   Continue reading “Modoc County joins Siskiyou County in voting to secede from California”

Bacon and Eggs

I found a good starting place for those of you who want to learn to dehydrate veggies.  Please note that dehydrators and methods for dehydrating vary. Vegetables may be dehydrated at temperatures starting at 100 degrees ranging up to 140 degrees. The higher the temperature the shorter the dehydration time. Also, with higher temperatures it is possible to cause case hardening of the vegetable. Case hardening occurs when the exterior of the vegetable dries too rapidly creating a seal that retains moisture in the center. When this occurs the food will spoil from the inside out.   Continue reading “Dehydrating Instructions For Vegetables”

The Common Sense Show – by Dave Hodges

As a nation, we can afford bouts of economic downturns, civil strife and even some degree of political mistrust of our leaders. A nation can take definitive steps to recover these maladies. However, the one thing that America cannot tolerate is the compromising of our military, and since Obama has been president, the effectiveness of our military has been greatly compromised.   Continue reading “Treason or Stupidity?”

CNN – by Holly Yan and Alan Duke

(CNN) — They were civilians and contractors, just starting their day at a massive military compound that’s normally a bastion of safety.

But for reasons that may never be known, a former Navy reservistcut their lives short when he went on a shooting rampage at Washington’s Navy Yard on Monday. Twelve families were left anguished.   Continue reading “CNN’s List of Victims of the Navy Yard Shooting”

CT Post – by JENNIFER PELTZ

NEW YORK (AP) — New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is offering European cities millions of dollars to be government groundbreakers, tapping his personal fortune to extend his cities-as-civic-laboratories campaign overseas as the end of his own tenure nears.

The billionaire businessman-turned-politician invited about 600 sizeable European cities Tuesday to compete for 9 million euros — about $12 million — in prizes, from his personal foundation, for novel plans to improve urban life.   Continue reading “NYC’s Bloomberg launches European city contest”

The Blaze – by Jason Howerton

The man who caught a police officer on camera removing his pro-Second Amendment sign from his front yard says his “First Amendment rights are being stifled” — and he takes his constitutional rights very seriously.

Jon Gibson, of Lake Lincolndale, N.Y., told TheBlaze in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that he has retained an attorney and they are “considering our options moving forward.” His attorney, Richard Bombardo, said there is a potential case for “criminal trespassing, vandalism and larceny,” pending additional findings.   Continue reading “Meet the Man Who Caught Cop on Camera Forcibly Removing His Pro-Gun Sign…and Why His Attorney Says it could be a “Really Big Deal””

Paul Craig Roberts

The war criminal barack obama has declared his “outrage” over the 62 deaths associated with the takeover of a Nairobi, Kenya, shopping mall by al-Shabaab fighters. But the attack on the shopping mall was obama’s fault. Al Shabaab spokesmen said that the attack on the Nairobi mall was a retaliatory response to the Kenyan troops sent to fight against them in Somalia. The Kenyan troops, of course, were sent to Somalia as a result of pressure from Washington.

Just as the outbreak of violence in Mali resulted from the fighters that obama used against Gaddafi moving into Mali, Washington’s violence against Somalia has resulted in the terrorist attack on the Nairobi mall.   Continue reading “Washington’s Tyranny”

Cracked – by David Christopher Bell

Everybody knows that power corrupts, but we all tend to forget that even the tiniest scrap of power can turn you into an A-plus dickhead. No better reminder of this is the fact that, in the last month alone, four totally unrelated American cities used what little administrative power they had to pull colossal dick moves on their citizens. And the worst part? It’s all infuriatingly legal.   Continue reading “4 U.S. Cities That Are Sadistically Screwing With Residents”

Max Velocity Tactical

I received the following comment on my recent post ‘There Will Be No Theme Music‘ from Mt. Top Patriot (MTP):

Amongst all the outstanding education and wisdom’s, the experience and examples you extend, to an inexperienced civilian such as myself, there is one aspect to effective fighting with a rifle in small unit techniques that is becoming evident to me that is essential to dominating and dictating the course of a firefight.   Continue reading “Using the Flank”

The Guardian -by Julian Borger

Brazil‘s president, Dilma Rousseff, has launched a blistering attack on US espionage at the UN general assembly, accusing the NSA of violating international law by its indiscriminate collection of personal information of Brazilian citizens and economic espionage targeted on the country’s strategic industries.

Rousseff’s angry speech was a direct challenge to President Barack Obama, who was waiting in the wings to deliver his own address to the UN general assembly, and represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.   Continue reading “Brazilian president: US surveillance a ‘breach of international law’”

Fox News

Secretary of State John Kerry plans to sign a controversial U.N. treaty on arms regulation on Wednesday, a senior State Department official told Fox News — despite warnings from lawmakers that the Senate will not ratify the agreement.

A State official said the treaty would “reduce the risk that international transfers of conventional arms will be used to carry out the world’s worst crimes,” while protecting gun rights.    Continue reading “Kerry to sign UN arms treaty, despite senators’ opposition”

TruthDig – by Chris Hedges

I have spent time with mass killers, warlords and death squad leaders as a reporter in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Some are psychopaths who relish acts of sadism, torture and murder. But others, maybe most, see killing as a job, a profession, good for their careers and status. They enjoy playing God. They revel in the hypermasculine world of force where theft and rape are perks. They proudly refine the techniques of murder to snuff out one life after another, largely numb to the terror and cruelty they inflict. And, when they are not killing, they can sometimes be disarmingly charming and gracious. Some are decent fathers and sentimental with their wives and mistresses. Some dote on their pets.   Continue reading “The Act of Killing”

The Guardian – by Glenn Greenwald

I’m still working at trying to get the next set of NSA stories published. That, combined with a rapidly approaching book deadline, will make non-NSA-article postings difficult for the next couple of weeks. Until then, here are a few items to note regarding a point I have often tried to make: namely, one of the most overlooked aspects of the NSA reporting in the US has been just how global of a story this has become:

(1) Last week it was revealed that Belgium’s largest telecom, Belgacom, was the victim of a massive hacking attack which systematically compromised its system for as long as two years. Media outlets suspected that the NSA was behind it, and the country’s Prime Minister condemned the attack as a “violation of a public company’s integrity.”   Continue reading “Various items: NSA stories around the world”