by Jason Miller

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances……

Contemplating the words of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, that imperfect yet powerful piece of parchment that ostensibly bestows all humans in the US with a set of basic rights enshrined and protected by the legal system, demands that we ask ourselves if we are going to continue apathetically allowing corporations and plutocrats to wrest those rights from us.

Written for TvNewsLIES.org by H.P. Albarelli Jr.

I don’t like having to write this article. I don’t like even thinking about it, but over the past few months its subject has come up repeatedly. Many television and radio hosts who have interviewed me about my new book, A TERRIBLE MISTAKE: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, have, on their own, brought up the subject of AIDS and Fort Detrick and the connection between the two. Nearly the entire ten years I worked on the book, this subject consistently loomed in the background like some malevolent poltergeist, and was essentially considered unspeakable by practically everyone I interviewed. Now things are different.

Originally featured on the Mike Malloy Radio show and posted at Superbeans.com.

by Bob Alexander

In 1992 I read a feature in our local Sunday paper called, “Will You Adopt This Child?” That week’s article profiled a four year old boy who was blind, could feed himself, use the bathroom, brush his teeth and put his clothes on. The article went on to say the little boy was classified as being “Profoundly Retarded.”

After reading the piece I thought, “Now there’s a tough sell.” Here’s a little kid who is going to need a lot of care … forever. I also thought about my own son. He was nine years old at the time and I wished he was as accomplished as the little kid in the article. He has Cerebral Palsy and though he could feed himself, he still needed help doing everything else.

It was the first time I’d come across the phrase “Profoundly Retarded.” It made me wonder how my son would be classified since he couldn’t do 75% of what the little boy in the article could. It took a long time but eventually my son made it to the level of the child I had read about so many years before. He lives in a group home now that provides 24-hour supervised residential care. He is forever … 3 years old.

I‘m not trying to inject an element of pathos here … I just want to make it clear that I know what the term “Profoundly Retarded” means.

by Jason Miller

Our dominant culture, in which I fully admit to participating (despite my significant efforts to minimize my involvement) is wreaking havoc on this “pale blue dot” we call Earth. Climate change, scarce and tainted water, devastating levels of toxins in the environment, rampant consumerism that generates truckloads of fetid refuse per second, massive deforestation, and the Sixth Extinction[1] implicate humanity, and our socioeconomic/cultural construct we euphemistically call “civilization,” as nothing short of the living embodiment of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.