Global
Observers of developments in the Middle East have long taken it as a given that the United States and Israel are seeking for an excuse to attack Iran. The recently terminated conference in Warsaw had that objective, which was clearly expressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it failed to rally European and Middle Eastern states to support the cause. On the contrary, there was strong sentiment coming from Europe in particular that normalizing relations with Iran within the context of the 2015 multi party nuclear agreement is the preferred way to go both to avoid a major war and to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation.
BREAKING OVERNIGHT
OIL TANKERS ATTACKED
SAUDI ARABIA CLAIMS SHIP HEADING TO US SABOTAGED
– ABC News on-screen headline, May 13, 2019
BREAKING OVERNIGHT
SAUDI OIL TANKERS ATTACKED
ENERGY MINISTER SAYS SHIPS WERE TARGETED IN “SABOTAGE ATTACK”
–CBS News on-screen headline, May 13, 2019
hese network stories are examples of fake news at its most dangerous, when it plays into the dishonest manipulations of an administration beating the drums for a war against Iran that has no reasonable basis. Not only do the networks and mainstream media generally fail to question the administration’s rush to war, they also fail to do basic journalism by independently confirming whether a particular story is true or not.
A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.
One of the groups displaying is the Ohio LEGO Users Group (OhioLUG). They are Adult Fans of LEGO, referred to as "AFOLs", who build, play, and display creations built with LEGO bricks. There are currently over 300 LEGO Users Group for Adult Fans of LEGO around the world. In 2010, The LEGO Company estimated that there were around 40,000 AFOLs in the world. That number has dramatically increased with estimates from 200,000 to over 1,000,000. Famous AFOLs include David Beckham, Ed Sheeran, and Britney Spears who have all publicly talked about their affection for LEGO.
As the nuke power industry slumps toward oblivion, two huge reactors are shutting in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
The shutdowns are a body blow to atomic energy. The soaring costs of the decayed US reactor fleet have forced them to beg gerrymandered state legislatures for huge bailouts.
Just two US reactors are still being built. Stuffed with $12 billion in interest-free federal loans, Georgia’s Vogtle is nearing a staggering $30 billion in cost. Years behind schedule, the lowest possible costs of whatever electricity the two reactors there might produce already far exceed wind and solar.
Virtually none of the 98 US reactors now operating can compete with wind, solar, or methane. All but one are more than twenty years old, with serious issues of obsolescence and decay; some are more than forty, operating far behind their original design life.
Four decrepit, money-losing, upstate New York State reactors still run because Governor Andrew Cuomo is handing them $7.6 billion in bailouts. This year’s price tag jumped more than $50 million, despite Cuomo’s promise it would drop. Safe energy/consumer groups are fighting him in court.
If Iran had spent the last few decades lying about and threatening the United States, and had attacked and built military bases in Canada and Mexico, and had imposed sanctions on the United States that were creating great suffering, and then a lying scheming war-crazed Iranian official announced that he believed the United States had put some missiles on some fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay, would you believe that . . .
a) The United States was a dangerous rogue state threatening Iran with imminent destruction?
b) Whether or not to bomb U.S. cities really depended on exactly what kind of missiles were on those fishing boats?
c) The sanctions were clearly not severe enough?
or
d) All of the above?
Explaining, with easy-to-understand charts, why Autism Spectrum Disorders could soon reach an incidence of 50% among fully-vaccinated children in America (and some of the other half of the over-vaccinated children are at risk of developing the already escalating vaccine-induced disorders such as Autoimmune Disorders, Asthma, Allergies, the ASIA Syndrome, Macrophagic Myofasciitis and Type I Diabetes Mellitus.
The time-honored (by the vaccine industry, that is) metallic vaccine ingredients, aluminum and mercury (thimerosal), are both recognized as highly toxic substances when they are allowed to come in contact with human tissue. Among other toxicities, they are known to be poisonous to mitochondria and genetic material.
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
15 May 19
hile the politicians dither over universal health care versus single payer versus the current Republican prescription for all non-millionaires (Get Sick & Die Quick), medical debt is still the number one cause of American family bankruptcies.
Throughout the US, people are forced every day to choose between medical care and food, shelter, and supporting their children.
At this point there’s no indication there’ll be an easy victory to bring the US in sync with the rest of the civilized world in providing decent health coverage.
Do you have a guilty pleasure? Mine is reading tabloidy tell-all books about the private lives of geniuses. Reading these literary invasions of privacy - such as Francoise Gilot’s blabby book about Picasso or May Pang’s salacious saga about John Lennon - helped pass the time while on long haul flights from Guam to New York or L.A. to Switzerland or Tahiti, etc. So when I heard about Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando I set out to Santa Monica Playhouse see this one-man show by Champ Clark ASAP (although by car, not jet).
Marlon Brando, the star of classics such as Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, Viva Zapata, On the Waterfront, Burn!, Last Tango in Paris, etc., is my favorite thespian. The Method actor’s life offstage and offscreen has been as colorful and dramatic as any of his plays or movies. What’s probably the most tragic part of Marlon’s life deals with his daughter Cheyenne and son, Christian, who is depicted by a smoldering John Mese in this one-act play, based on Clark’s audiotaped interviews with the eldest child of the star of The Godfather, who had about nine children from various marriages and liaisons.
Like many people who have struggled to understand why human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history, which now threatens imminent human extinction as well, over many decades I have explored the research and efforts of a great many activists and scholars to secure this understanding. However, with many competing ideas from the fields of politics, economics, sociology and psychology, among others, this understanding has proved elusive. Nevertheless, I have reached an understanding that I find compelling: Human beings are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history because of the disintegrated nature of the human mind.
While the expression ‘mental disintegration’ has been used in a number of contexts previously, for the purpose of my discussion in this article I am going to redefine it, explain how it originates, describe several ways in which it manifests behaviorally and the profoundly dysfunctional outcomes this generates, and suggest what we can do about it.