TV News LIES

The Republicans have trotted out an old talking point that you don't hear them use much with their taxes so low, but they think that you peasants should pay all the taxes. So here goes, "Say I start a business and so does my friend. His business fails and I succeed. Why should I be penalized for my success by paying income taxes, while he pays none?"

This almost sounds reasonable, and the knee jerk reaction is to try to justify taxes for all the good reasons we pay taxes. This is entirely wrong, that's what they want you to waste time on, while the basis of their argument continues to stand.

A number of current and former US intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Israel is the top threat for CIA’s Near East Division which undertakes Washington’s espionage activities across the Middle East, the Associated Press reported on Saturday.

The report comes on the heels of a new revelation by the White House that the houses of several CIA agents in Israel have been recently broken into.

But today, Jackson County, Oregon says it owns YOUR rainwater, and the county has sentenced a man to 30 days in jail and fined him over $1500, for the supposed "crime" of collecting rainwater on his own property.

Much like California, Oregon is increasingly becoming a collectivist state. You didn't build that! The government built that! You don't own that! The government owns that! That rainwater that just fell on your land? That's the government's rainwater, and you're going to jail if you try to steal from the government!

A lot of the world's misery can be traced to people who lack the wiring for empathy. What can we do to contain the damage they cause?

Did you know that roughly one person in a hundred is clinically a  psychopath?  These individuals are either born with an emotional deficiency that keeps them from feeling bad about hurting others, or they are traumatized early in life in a manner that causes them to become this way. With more than 7 billion people on the planet that means there are as many as 70,000,000 psychopaths alive today. These people are more likely to be risk takers, opportunists motivated by self-interest and greed, and inclined to dominate or subjugate those around them through manipulative means.

One of the most significant political developments in recent US history has been the virtually unchallenged rise of the police state. Despite the vast expansion of the police powers of the Executive Branch of government, the extraordinary growth of an entire panoply of repressive agencies, with hundreds of thousands of personnel, and enormous public and secret budgets and the vast scope of police state surveillance, including the acknowledged monitoring of over 40 million US citizens and residents, no mass pro-democracy movement has emerged to confront the powers and prerogatives or even protest the investigations of the police state.

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.

Has there ever been a Middle Eastern war of such hypocrisy? A war of such cowardice and such mean morality, of such false rhetoric and such public humiliation? I'm not talking about the physical victims of the Syrian tragedy.

I'm referring to the utter lies and mendacity of our masters and our own public opinion – eastern as well as western – in response to the slaughter, a vicious pantomime more worthy of Swiftian satire than Tolstoy or Shakespeare.

The United States is now well on its way to a renewables-crushing, decades-long shale-gas bridge with an economic commitment to exporting this non-renewable domestic fuel and, absent dramatic market changes, there’s not much Congressman Markey or anyone else can do to stop it.

Given that this gas rush has been lent credibility by some sectors of academia, it is good that you bring up the topic of potential conflicts of interest in academia related to the issues surrounding shale gas.