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Depression up 25 percent on Gulf after oil

Jay Reeves
Associated Press
Tue, 28 Sep 2010 12:41 UTC
oil spill depression
© AP
In this Sept. 15, 2010 photo, Margaret Carruth sits on the tailgate of her pickup truck going through.

Orange Beach, Alabama - Before the BP oil spill, the Gulf Coast was a place of abundant shrimping, tourist-filled beaches and a happy if humble lifestyle. Now, it's home to depression, worry and sadness for many.

A Gallup survey released Tuesday of almost 2,600 coastal residents showed that depression cases are up more than 25 percent since an explosion killed 11 people and unleashed a three-month gusher of crude into the Gulf in April that ruined many livelihoods. The conclusions were consistent with trends seen in smaller studies and witnessed by mental health workers.

People just aren't as happy as they used to be despite palm trees and warm weather. A "well-being index" included in the Gallup study said many coastal residents are stressed out, worried and sad more often than people living inland, an indication that the spill's emotional toll lingers even if most of the oil has vanished from view.

Margaret Carruth is among those fighting to hang on.
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USA

It Is Official: The US Is A Police State

Paul Craig Roberts
Sott.net
Sun, 26 Sep 2010 14:11 UTC
Image
© Unknown
On September 24, Jason Ditz reported on Antiwar.com that "the FBI is confirming that this morning they began a number of raids against the homes of antiwar activists in Illinois, Minneapolis, Michigan, and North Carolina, claiming that they are 'seeking evidence relating to activities concerning the material support of terrorism.'"

Now we know what Homeland Security (sic) secretary Janet Napolitano meant when she said on September 10: "The old view that 'if we fight the terrorists abroad, we won't have to fight them here' is just that--the old view." The new view, Napolitano said, is "to counter violent extremism right here at home."

"Violent extremism" is one of those undefined police state terms that will mean whatever the government wants it to mean. In this morning's FBI's foray into the homes of American citizens of conscience, it means antiwar activists, whose activities are equated with "the material support of terrorism," just as conservatives equated Vietnam era anti-war protesters with giving material support to communism.
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Better Earth

"Dramatically Poisonous" Economy Heading to "Catastrophic" Collapse, Says Acclaimed Economist


ActivistPost.com
Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:47 UTC
The economy is to serve the people, not the people to serve the economy -- Manfred Max-Neef

Acclaimed economist Manfred Max-Neef, author of the award-winning book From the Outside Looking in: Experiences in 'Barefoot Economics' recently appeared in a must-see interview on Democracy Now where he says a second, more catastrophic crisis is unavoidable because our economic model is "dramatically poisonous." Max-Neef explains that "Greed is the dominant value today in the world and as long as that persists, we're done!" But he doesn't just mean done economically, he means done as a species.

Going beyond facts and figures to describe economics, his philosophy is based on a macro-world view, where he accounts for the biosphere, human creativity, security and happiness, and life in all of its manifestations. He reveals that the majority of economists have great knowledge, more than ever before, but they lack understanding. The two differ as, "knowledge is a function of science, whereas understanding is holistic," explained Max-Neef. Using the metaphor of love to simplify: we may read and accumulate great knowledge about love, but we can never fully understand it until we fall in love and experience it.

His philosophy of humanizing economics, or "Barefoot Economics," stems from spending years living in and studying the culture of poverty to better understand the economics of it. He concludes that the poverty culture has entirely different principles than our modern culture, where they must depend on enormous creativity, cooperation and solidarity of people. In poverty, "you cannot be an idiot if you want to survive," he quipped.
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USA

The Indispensable People? The Collapse of Western Morality

Paul Craig Roberts
CounterPunch
Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:30 UTC
kill indians
Yes, I know, as many readers will be quick to inform me, the West never had any morality. Nevertheless things have gotten worse.

In hopes that I will be permitted to make a point, permit me to acknowledge that the US dropped nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, fire-bombed Tokyo, that Great Britain and the US fire-bombed Dresden and a number of other German cities, expending more destructive force, according to some historians, against the civilian German population than against the German armies, that President Grant and his Civil War war criminals, Generals Sherman and Sheridan, committed genocide against the Plains Indians, that the US today enables Israel's genocidal policies against the Palestinians, policies that one Israeli official has compared to 19th century US genocidal policies against the American Indians, that the US in the new 21st century invaded Iraq and Afghanistan on contrived pretenses, murdering countless numbers of civilians, and that British prime minister Tony Blair lent the British army to his American masters, as did other NATO countries, all of whom find themselves committing war crimes under the Nuremberg standard in lands in which they have no national interests, but for which they receive an American pay check.

I don't mean these few examples to be exhaustive. I know the list goes on and on. Still, despite the long list of horrors, moral degradation is reaching new lows. The US now routinely tortures prisoners, despite its strict illegality under US and international law, and a recent poll shows that the percentage of Americans who approve of torture is rising. Indeed, it is quite high, though still just below a majority.
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Star of David

UN panel: Israel broke international laws in deadly flotilla raid


CNN.com
Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:44 UTC
Image

The aid ship the Mavi Maramara was brutally attacked by Israeli soldiers on May 31st 2010
The United Nations' Human Rights Council concluded Wednesday that Israeli forces committed serious violations of international law when they conducted a mid-sea interception of a humanitarian aid flotilla in an incident that left nine people dead.

"The fact-finding mission concluded that a series of violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law, were committed by the Israeli forces," said the 56-page report.

The report described the circumstances of the deaths of "at least six of the passengers" as being "consistent with ... an arbitrary and summary execution."

Israel has maintained its troops used force on the activists in May after they were attacked by those on board one boat. Soldiers were attacked with knives, metal poles and other objects, Israeli officials have said.

But passengers on board the boat insist Israeli troops fired on them without provocation.

Comment: Read the full report here

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Heart - Black

Doctors, police officers, sheriff's deputies, school teachers, government agents, attorneys and church preachers... the real terrorists amongst us: authorities bust huge child porn ring

Isaac Wolf
ABC15
Wed, 22 Sep 2010 13:39 UTC
Image
© Robert Hare PhD
The must-read book about humanity's intra-species predator
A four-year international investigation into the backers of hundreds of child pornography websites has identified 30,000 customers in 132 countries, led to hundreds of American convictions, and landed the ring running the sites in Eastern European jails.

Law enforcement officials from around the world pulled back the curtain on the previously undisclosed probe in extraordinary detail for Scripps Howard News Service.

The agents revealed the workings of what they call the most significant commercial child porn bust in the Internet's history, in which multiple authorities from the United States, Canada, England, Italy, Belarus, Ukraine, Australia, and other countries, plus Interpol and Europol banded together to close down 230 websites, dismantling what is believed to be the most sophisticated commercial child porn operation to date.

Since the websites -- with names like "Excited Angels" and "Boys Say Go" -- went offline in January, the number of active commercial child porn sites has nosedived from perhaps 300 to the single digits, said Matt Dunn, of the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Custom's Enforcement (ICE), which was the lead law enforcement agency.

"You've taken an organization that was distributing large scale child porn and removed them," said Dunn, of the Child Exploitation Section of ICE's Cyber Crimes Center.

FBI special agent Michael Dzielak investigated the ring with Dunn and other international partners. Like Dunn, he believes the bust has dealt a fatal blow to the child-porn-for-money market -- at least for now.
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Bad Guys

Monsanto, Blackwater, and GM Crop Saboteurs

Rady Ananda
Dissident Voice
Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:43 UTC
Image
© whistleblower.org
Agribusiness giant Monsanto, which genetically modifies plants to exude or tolerate pesticide or to produce nonviable seed, hired the services of the mercenary firm, Blackwater, to spy on activists, Jeremy Scahill reports. A death-tech firm weds a hit squad.

This is no doubt in response to a decade of GM crop sabotage efforts around the globe. Since the publicly-announced introduction of GM crops in 1996, concerned citizens have vandalized such crops every single year somewhere on the planet. Several thousand GM plants have been partially or wholly destroyed.

Blackwater is most notorious for its Nisour Square Massacre in 2007. Seventeen innocent civilians died when Blackwater goons opened fire in a busy market square. The hit team was later acquitted in a U.S. court.

Scahill reports that through its web of companies, Blackwater (now Xe Services) spied on and/or infilitrated groups opposing Monsanto in 2008 through early 2010. He writes:
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Coffee

The Angry Rich

Paul Krugman
New York Times
Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:06 UTC
Ponerology
© SOTT.net
Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, not something that characterizes most of our fellow citizens. But the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they're out for revenge.

No, I'm not talking about the Tea Partiers. I'm talking about the rich.

These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. Young people can't find jobs; laid-off 50-somethings fear that they'll never work again.

Yet if you want to find real political rage - the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason - you won't find it among these suffering Americans. You'll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don't have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.
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Eye 2

Israeli-linked organ dealers busted in South Africa's largest healthcare firm


Press TV
Sat, 18 Sep 2010 16:25 UTC
Image
© n/a
South Africa's biggest healthcare company Netcare has been implicated in Israel's international organ trafficking racket
The biggest health care firm in South Africa has been charged with cooperating with an Israeli-linked organ trafficking syndicate.

The South African government said that the head of the Netcare company and a director of the St. Augustine's Hospital in Durban, Richard Friedland, had been aware of illegal kidney trade at the hospital, but "nevertheless permitted these operations" to take place, South African daily The Times reported on Wednesday.

The police said that wealthy Israelis paid organ dealers between 2001 and 2003, the year when the ring was exposed, the German Press Agency (DPA) reported.

"Israeli citizens in need of kidney transplants would be brought to South Africa for transplants at St. Augustine's Hospital," read the charge sheet.

Comment: U.S. Hospitals Secretly Promote Black Market Trading of Harvested Organs for Transplants

Another organ trafficking ring surfaces in Israel

Jenny Tonge: Investigate IDF stealing organs in Haiti

Hamas to take Israel to court over organ thefts

Is Israel a State or An Organ-Stealing Mafia?

Top Pathologist Says Doctors Also Involved in Organ Stealing - Israeli Video Confirms Theft of Palestinian Organs

Ukrainian Kids, New Victims of Israeli "Organ Theft"

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Light Saber

BOYCOTT ISRAEL! Netherlands cancels tour by Israeli mayors over settlers' presence

Jonathan Lis
Haaretz.com
Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:15 UTC
Image
© Unknown
Dutch Foreign Ministry cancels tour because participant list includes settlement representatives.

The Netherlands on Sunday cancelled a tour of the country by a forum of Israeli mayors because their group included representatives of West Bank settlements.

The professional delegation, funded by the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish-American charity, was supposed to fly to the Netherlands next month to study public policy and local governance.

But when the Dutch Foreign Ministry found out that regional council heads from the Judea and Samaria regions - including from the West bank settlements Efrat and Kiryat Arba - were due to participate, they decided to cancel the tour.
      Read More...
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