Naomi Klein: Daylight Robbery, Meet Nighttime Robbery

Naomi Klein | August 16, 2011

http://www.thenation.com/article/162809/daylight-robbery-meet-nighttime-robbery

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities—window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion—a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and British Prime Minister David Cameron is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.

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"Julianne Escobedo Shepherd" - This is Real: GOP So Afraid of Public Outrage, They're Charging You to Ask Them Questions

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | Sourced from AlterNet

Posted at August 16, 2011, 8:52 am

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/651214/this_is_real%3A_gop_so_afraid_of_public_outrage%2C_they%27re_charging_you_to_ask_them_questions/#paragraph2

When Congress takes a break this August, don't plan on asking Paul Ryan any questions if you're broke. For the entire month, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee will only answer questions for $15 a pop, effectively shielding him from any of the Americans he helped disenfranchise last session with the debt-ceiling standoff and the draconian GOP budget bill. Its legality is dubious, but the fact that he's charging for questions is the starkest evidence of our plutocracy yet. One expects Ryan to open the next Budget Committee meeting with the declaration that we should all just eat cake. (Or, at the very least, ketchup.)

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FOX NEWS: Half of Americans Have Chronic Disease, Survey Says

FOX NEWS  August 16, 2011 | NewsCore

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/08/16/half-americans-have-chronic-disease-survey-says/

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More than half of Americans have at least one chronic disease, according to research published Tuesday.

Some 55 percent of people in the U.S. said that they were diagnosed with one or more chronic conditions, compared to 41 percent of people in the UK and 52 percent of Canadians, the results of a survey conducted by business-services firm Deloitte showed.

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Frank Viviano: Is Democracy as We Know It on Its Way Out?

By Frank Viviano, New America Media
Posted on August 15, 2011, Printed on August 17, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152027/is_democracy_as_we_know_it_on_its_way_out

 Is Western democracy coming apart at the seams? A decade ago, only paranoid alarmists would have posed that question.

Today, it may be an expression of cold, brutal realism. 

On both sides of the Atlantic -- from the fires that raged in large stretches of London, to the political chicanery that brought the U.S. economy to its knees in early August -- the institutional framework that came to define modern democracy in the 19th century is in deep trouble. 

The principal organs of financial oversight and management are in tatters. Ferociously xenophobic political movements, an entire constellation of Tea Parties, now play important roles in nearly every European nation, as well as the United States. 

Faith in elected leaders and legislatures, the central and defining institutions of democracy, has never been lower.

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Jon Stewart: 'Pretending Ron Paul Doesn't Exist' In GOP Race

"Oliver Lee" - Monsanto's 5 Most Dubious Contributions to the Planet

By Oliver Lee, Take Part
Posted on August 12, 2011, Printed on August 17, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152006/monsanto%27s_5_most_dubious_contributions_to_the_planet

Oh, Monsanto, you sly dog.

You keep trying to make us believe you are "committed to sustainable agriculture" with your canny advertisments on American Public Media, even as you force-feed farmers your lab-grown Frankenseeds that expire every year (which are, let's be honest, opposite of sustainable).

But we shouldn't be surprised by the mixed message, should we? After all, you've been doing this for decades. With long-running corporate sponsorships, like Disney's Tomorrowland, building reserves of goodwill as you spray us with DDT, it's clear you're entitled to send out products into the world with nary an environmental or health concern—just as long as you spend a bit of that hard-earned cash convincing us otherwise.

On that note, let's take a quick look at some of the biotech giant's most dubious contributions to society over their past century in business.

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"Lois Rain" - Cancer Research For 10 Yrs Useless: Fraud, Says Mayo Clinic

Submitted by Lois Rain on August 14, 2011 –

http://healthfreedoms.org/2011/08/14/cancer-research-for-10-yrs-useless-fraud-says-mayo-clinic/

JAMA’s editor calls fraudulent medical research a ‘scar on the moral body of science’. But it’s really just part of an entire system of fraud in medicine.Medical science is rampant with fraud. At the Mayo Clinic, ten years of research that appeared to be leading towards harnessing the immune system to fight cancer is worthless because of fraudulent studies and later research based on the fraudulent ones.

Retraction of medical research papers is at an all-time high. Though error was cited at a 3 to 1 rate over fraud, one must seriously question whether simple error is the primary reason. After all, these studies are peer-reviewed. They are supposed to have passed rigorous examination. But, what’s the reality?

Of course, as Gaia Health readers have seen over and over, the reality is that flaws in much of medical research are blatant. Often, merely examining a study, instead of taking it at face value, demonstrates that the conclusions are not supported by the evidence.

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Times of India: The nano effect of homeopathy

Times of India | Aug 12, 2011, 06.10PM IST

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health/The-nano-effect-of-homeopathy/articleshow/9580370.cms

Homeo drugs are active even in infinitesimally diluted solutions, find Indian researchers...

The more you dilute a potion, the more potent it becomes, this perhaps is the corner stone of homeopathy system of medicine. The most powerful homeo medicines do have the highest dilution factors. While this enormous dilution principle remained the pillar of this 18th century healing science which seeks to deal with the disease holistically rather than addressing the manifesting symptoms, it also proved to be the Achille's heel for its detractors.

If you go on diluting a solution containing hundred per cent of the material further and further, there won't be any of the particles from original material left in the remaining solution beyond of point of dilution. Homeo remedies come through the process of `infinitesimal dilutions'. How can a 'drug' without any active substance evoke a therapeutic response, skeptics ask benchmarking with the principles of modern allopathic medicine which relies on dose- related response of medications. No active ingredient in a formulation means that the pill or liquid can be nothing more than a placebo. And the high potent homeo drugs, which are usually the extremely diluted versions of the starting substances, could be nothing more than that.

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"Ethan A. Huff" - Monsanto preys on popularity of omega-3s by developing GMO soybean that produces fake fish oil

by Ethan A. Huff, NaturalNews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/033305_GMO_soybeans_fish_oil.html

(NaturalNews) Leave it to Monsanto to take a good thing and corrupt it for financial gain. According to a recent report in Forbes, the multinational biotechnology-slash-agriculture-manipulating monolith has developed a new genetically-modified (GM) soybean that artificially produces stearidonic acid, a type of omega-3 fatty acid -- and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve the "frankenbean" sometime this year.

Monsanto appears to be introducing the omega-3 enhanced GM soybean oil, called Soymega or "stearidonic acid soybean oil" (SDA oil), at a craftily strategic time when much of the world is still reeling from the Fukushima Daiichi mega-disaster, which left ocean waters ridden with radioactive isotopes. And since omega-3s just happen to be most readily found in fatty ocean fish, the perpetual fear over radioactive and other poisons that may be lurking in such fish could drive many to embrace Monsanto's fake fish oil instead.

According to an FDA letter responding to Monsanto's request to have SDA oil approved for use as a food additive and acknowledged as being "generally recognized as safe" (GRAS), the FDA noted that Monsanto intends to use its omega-3-enhanced oil in a variety of food applications. These include baked goods, breakfast cereals, fish products, frozen dairy desserts, cheeses, grains and pastas, gravies, nuts, poultry, fruit juices, processed vegetable products, and soups -- yes, basically every processed food product in existence.

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ScienceDaily: Scientists Highlight Link Between Stress and Appetite

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110812213034.htm

ScienceDaily (Aug. 13, 2011) — Researchers in the Hotchkiss Brain Institute (HBI) at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine have uncovered a mechanism by which stress increases food drive in rats. This new discovery, published online this week in the journal Neuron, could provide important insight into why stress is thought to be one of the underlying contributors to obesity.

Normally, the brain produces neurotransmitters (chemicals responsible for how cells communicate in the brain) called endocannabinoids that send signals to control appetite. In this study, the researchers found that when food is not present, a stress response occurs that temporarily causes a functional re-wiring in the brain. This re-wiring may impair the endocannabinoids' ability to regulate food intake and could contribute to enhanced food drive.

The researchers also discovered that when they blocked the effects of stress hormones in the brain, the absence of food caused no change in the neural circuitry.

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