Jonathan Cook - Israel’s grand hypocrisy

Netanyahu slams ‘anti-liberal’ Arab Spring

By Jonathan Cook

Global Research, December 1, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27973

As protests raged again across the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, offered his assessment of the Arab Spring last week. It was, he said, an “Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave”, adding that Israel’s Arab neighbours were “moving not forwards, but backwards”.

It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s rightwing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.

Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.

Click to read more ...

Adrian Salbuchi - George Orwell’s Guide to the News

By Adrian Salbuchi

Global Research, December 1, 2011

Russia Today

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27971

The Western mainstream media falsifies the news resorting to euphemisms, half-truths and lies in the best (worst) style of George Orwell’s novel 1984. We all live in the unreal world of “Newspeak” used by the Global Power Elite to control our minds.

Man gets confused when things that happen around him and to him, or which are done in his name, cannot be properly grasped, understood or made sense of. Normally, such confusion leads to inaction. If you’re lost at night in the middle of a forest but you can still see the stars, then a bit of astronomical knowledge will at least quickly tell you which way is north. But if it’s cloudy or you’re ignorant of the constellations in starry heaven, then you might as well light up a fire and do nothing until dawn…. You’re Lost!

Click to read more ...

Food Freedom - Sebelius-backed biotech firm reorganizing under criminal probe

Food Freedom on May 3, 2011 

http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/sebelius-backed-biotech-firm-reorganizing-under-criminal-probe/

By Rady Ananda

The head of Health and Human Services not only denies that Americans have a right to bodily health and food of their choice, but Kathleen Sebelius is hell bent on spending taxpayer money to promote genetically modified food and drugs. One of her projects, Kansas Bioscience Authority, a publicly funded venture enterprise developed to promote biotechnology, is currently under criminal investigation. CEO Tom Thornton has resigned.

KBA also lobbied the Dept. of Homeland Security for the highly controversial bioweapons and cattle disease lab in the state, along with former Governor Sebelius, now President Obama’s Cabinet Secretary. Under her governorship and full support, the Kansas Economic Growth Act of 2004 passed, funding KBA’s mission with $581 million in tax revenue to develop a bioscience industry in Kansas.

Click to read more ...

Jim Garrison - Arab Spring, American Fall

HUFFINGTON POST: 11/30/11

Jim Garrison, President, State of the World Forum

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-garrison/arab-spring-american-fall_b_1120902.html

With the elimination of the Los Angeles and Philadelphia Occupy sites, the Federal Government, in partnership with mayors across the U.S., has essentially closed down most of the Occupy sites across the nation, replacing protestors representing the 99 percent with police occupations protecting the 1 percent. Simultaneously, Tahrir Square in Cairo has been reoccupied by activists as the first more or less free election in Egyptian history gets underway, guarded by a military that is not really sure democracy is a good idea.

There are important distinctions in these diverse and politically loaded arenas in which democratic insurgents clash with state power. What ignited in Tunis and Egypt in the Spring catalyzed a global conflagration of activism both fed up with the inequalities of the current economic and political systems and desperately seeking to wake the wider public up to the scope of what is essentially a crisis of governance. In Tunis and Egypt, this concerned protesting dictatorships that had infested the polity virtually unopposed for decades. In the U.S., it concerns protesting the rapaciousness of the financial elites who are throttling the American middle class and destroying the economy.

Click to read more ...

Alliance for Natural Health - What’s Next? Starting Children on Drugs the Moment They’re Born?

Alliance for Natural Health On November 29, 2011 

http://www.anh-usa.org/starting-children-on-drugs/

That seems to be the path a new recommendation is putting us on.

An expert panel appointed by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, is now urging cholesterol screening for all children between ages 9 and 11 [1]—before puberty, when cholesterol temporarily dips—and again between ages 17 and 21. News accounts discuss a family who put their daughter on cholesterol-lowering medicines when she was 5 (“that gives me hope that she’ll be healthy”) and a doctor at Johns Hopkins who thinks his 12-year-old son should be tested “because he has a cousin with very high ‘bad’ cholesterol.”

What is “bad” cholesterol, anyway? Conventional medicine says HDL cholesterol is good, and LDL is bad. But scientists at Texas A&M University have found that LDL cholesterol is actually needed by the body to build new muscle [2]—a finding that is particularly important both for kids and for the rest of us as we get older and lose muscle more rapidly. It also helps get vitamin D [3] around our body.

Moreover, as we reported last year [4], people with high cholesterol live the longest. Dr. Harlan Krumholz of Yale’s Department of Cardiovascular Medicine found that old people with low cholesterol died twice as often from a heart attack as did old people with high cholesterol. Many studies have found that low cholesterol is in one respect or another worse than high cholesterol. A review of nineteen large studies of more than 68,000 deaths by the Division of Epidemiology at the University of Minnesota found that low cholesterol predicted an increased risk of dying from gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases.

Click to read more ...

Pew Charitable Research - More Now Disagree with Tea Party – Even in Tea Party Districts

Pew Charitable Research

Released: November 29, 2011

http://www.people-press.org/2011/11/29/more-now-disagree-with-tea-party-%E2%80%93-even-in-tea-party-districts/?src=prc-headline

Since the 2010 midterm elections, the Tea Party has not only lost support nationwide, but also in the congressional districts represented by members of the House Tea Party Caucus. And this year, the image of the Republican Party has declined even more sharply in these GOP-controlled districts than across the country at large.

Click to read more ...

Andrew Levine - The Lessons of Obamamania

November 30, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/30/the-lessons-of-obamamania/

by ANDREW LEVINE

Ten years ago in America, War Party fervor was on the rise, the media was in tow, and many a liberal was on board.  Thus began the Bush-Cheney era, one of the darkest moments in American history.  Those years seem like only yesterday, probably because on matters of substance – keeping the perpetual war machine going, undermining personal freedoms and the rule of law, encouraging environmental indifference while courting ecological disaster, and making the world safe for the corporate “persons” who own our duopoly party system — the Obama administration has been more or less continuous with George W. Bush’s.

What seems unreal was that brief interlude, begun just four winters ago as the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries loomed, and lasting into the summer of 2009, when liberal hearts and minds succumbed to the belief that Barack Obama would put an end to decades of Reaganite (neolibleral) depredations, and that we could then take up where the New Deal and Great Society left off.  That Obamamaniacal moment now seems a lifetime away.

Obamamania was always an illusion in Freud’s sense, an expression of an unconscious wish.  Freud also spoke of delusions, illusions held in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  Before Election Day 2008, Obamamania was only an ordinary illusion to which liberals, trade unionists and, of course, persons of color were especially susceptible.   By Inauguration Day, as the President-elect’s choices for top positions became known, Obamamania took on a more delusional aspect.

Click to read more ...

John Feffer - Occupy Foreign Affairs

Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/30-5

by John Feffer

It's not the topic of George Packer’s latest essay that's particularly surprising. Inequality, he writes, is undermining democracy. Progressives have been hammering home this message for years if not decades.

Nor is the choice of publication necessarily a shocker. Foreign Affairs is the flagship publication of the elite that runs American foreign policy. But it is no longer the exclusively center-right publication of the Cold War years. After all, it has published the likes of former Institute for Policy Studies staffers Michael Klare and Julia Sweig as well as my predecessor at Foreign Policy In Focus John Gershman.

No, it’s the prominent placement of the Packer essay that merits attention. It's the lead article of the November/December issue. And it comes with the bold headline, “Is America Over?"

Click to read more ...

Matthew Rothschild - McCain says American Citizens Can Be Sent to Guantanamo

Published on Wednesday, November 30, 2011 by The Progressive

http://www.progressive.org/mccain_says_american_citizens_can_be_sent_to_guantanamo.html

by Matthew Rothschild

U.S. citizens beware: A bill being debated on the Senate floor this week is likely to pass, and if it becomes law, you could be sent to Guantanamo Bay.

The bill is the National Defense Authorization Act, S. 1867. Section 1031 of the bill gives the President and the Armed Forces enormous power to detain people they believe were involved in the attacks of Sept. 11 or supported Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or “associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

Guantanamo BayThat section empowers the President to detain such persons indefinitely without trial or to try them before a military court or to transfer them “to the custody or control of the person's country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity.”

Sen. Mark Udall introduced an amendment to modify this section, and his amendment was voted down on Tuesday.

Sen. Rand Paul has introduced an amendment to delete this section entirely, and on Tuesday, he had the following exchange with Sen. John McCain, who is co-sponsoring the bill.

Sen. Paul: “My question would be under the provisions would it be possible that an American citizen then could be declared an enemy combatant and sent to Guantanamo Bay and detained indefinitely.”

Sen. McCain: “I think that as long as that individual, no matter who they are, if they pose a threat to the security of the United States of America, should not be allowed to continue that threat.”

There has been some confusion on the Internet as to whether the National Defense Authorization Act really applies to U.S. citizens. But Sen. McCain’s answer should clarify that once and for all.

Click to read more ...

AP - Report: 1 in 5 of US adults on behavioral meds

(AP) – Nov 16, 2011 

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iLia5HoxTG-hBfhXqlXWc3PuL8Yw?docId=5d910e48c6e9426c8ed7923981c9ed4e

NEW YORK (AP) — More than 20 percent of American adults took at least one drug for conditions like anxiety and depression in 2010, according to an analysis of prescription data, including more than one in four women.

The report, released Wednesday by pharmacy benefits manager Medco Health Solutions Inc., found that use of drugs for psychiatric and behavioral disorders rose 22 percent from 2001. The medications are most often prescribed to women aged 45 and older, but their use among men and in younger adults climbed sharply. In adults 20 to 44, use of antipsychotic drugs and treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder more than tripled, and use of anti-anxiety drugs like Xanax, Valium and Ativan rose 30 percent from a decade ago.

The statistics were taken from Medco's database of prescriptions and is based on 2.5 million patients with 24 months of continuous prescription drug insurance and eligibility.

Click to read more ...