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Podcast News Updates

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There’s been another string of relevant news podcasts in the past few days so it’s time for another roundup post.

Last week Rob Kall of OpEdnews.cominterviewed Peter Ludlow a professor of linguistics and philosophy, on topics including systemic evil, whistleblowers and hacktivism:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rob-kall-bottom-up-radio-show/id359765013

On Friday, Abby Martin of Breaking the Set did an excellent job deconstructing the corporatocracy on Coast to Coast AM with John Wells:

http://www.mediaroots.org/abby-martin-deconstructs-the-corporatocracy-on-coast-to-coast-am/

On Monday Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report covered a wide range of important topics including an update on the corporate plan for Detroit (an American apartheid), the struggle to raise the minimum wage in Seattle, and Dave Swanson’s (of WarIsACrime.org) analysis of the multitude of lies in Obama’s recent UN speech : Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 9/30/13.

From Traces of Reality there were two great consecutive shows. On 9/30 host Guillermo Jimenez interviewed Kevin Gallagher, director of Free Barrett Brown.  Brown is the journalist who faces a 105 year sentence, the bulk of which is related to charges associated with pasting a link in a chat room. On the 10/1 episode, Guillermo is joined by Vice President of The Future of Freedom Foundation, Sheldon Richman. They cover topics including the “government shutdown”, the national debt, taxation, private property, the “social contract,” and the fallacy of the “consent of the governed.”:

9/30

10/1

Government Shutdown: Hate the Players, Hate the Game

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Today marks the first day of the latest government shutdown due to failure of the House and Senate to agree on a spending bill. The main point of contention was Obamacare, which Republicans fought to repeal or delay. This conflict can be seen as a symptom of political polarization which, as multiple studies have shown, increases as economic inequality increases. This might seem counter-intuitive to those aware of how both parties receive money from the same corporations. Still, they get paid varying amounts from different corporations and they need to at least appear to be responsive to needs of constituents. Differences between the majority of Democrat and Republican representatives are analogous to differences between neoliberals and neoconservatives. There’s subtle differences in approach and emphasis but both ultimately serve the corporate-security state.

Many will blame the shutdown on Republicans who oppose Obamacare, but will it really increase access to affordable healthcare? It may have been better to delay implementation in order to work out glitches in the bureaucracy and computer systems. Obamacare has already had the unfortunate side-effect of businesses replacing full-time positions with part-time positions, and without any controls over the rising cost of premiums we should expect to see further rate increases. There may be minor improvements but far less than what would have been provided through single-payer and public option alternatives. If we had a Medicare-for-all system as Green Party candidate Jill Stein proposed, we’d have a system people already support providing comprehensive coverage with far less bureaucratic waste and at a fraction of the cost.

One of the many sickening aspects of the government shutdown is that government agencies that truly need to be shutdown, like the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., remain essentially untouched. What will be shutdown or reduced are services related to health, work safety, food assistance, housing, education, parks and museums, regulatory agencies, and labor. Once again, money junkies in power have demonstrated their incompetence at doing things they care little about (ie. providing jobs and services that actually help poor and working class people). However, they have proven to be extremely good at funneling more money to themselves and their cronies while consolidating power. On the surface, the shutdown may appear self-defeating, but both parties can benefit by blaming the other side and can more easily push through questionable legislation in an atmosphere of crisis. Just like the sequestration last Spring, it’s a form of austerity which benefits big banks while screwing over average citizens.

Crossed Cloned Cow Cripples Creator in Korea

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Prof. Park Se-pill of Jeju National University poses with attacker in 2009. Photo: Korea Times file

Prof. Park Se-pill of Jeju National University poses with his attacker in 2009. Photo: Korea Times

Via Slate:

In an event ripped straight of the gothic horror novel Frankenstein, a renowned embryologist was reportedly attacked by one of his cloned creations recently. The beast in this case, though, wasn’t a monster pieced together from the bodies of other animals—no, it was an 800-kilogram, black cow.

“Prof. Park Se-pill at Jeju National University had five of his ribs broken and injured his spine in the Sept. 15 attack,” reports the Korea Times. “Park was video-recording a black cow, which he cloned from species indigenous to Jeju four years ago, and all of a sudden, it charged and attacked him for 15 minutes,” a school official said. The embryologist will need eight weeks of medical treatment for his injuries.

The bovine made headlines in 2009 when Park successfully cloned it using a frozen cell taken from a deceased animal. This means the black cow is, in a sense, a “revival” of the cow that the cell was harvested from. Like a phoenix reborn after it dies—but rather than emerging from ashes, the cow originated from a test-tube.

While Park’s incident is unfortunate, it’s hard not to think of the real life allusions between the attack and Frankenstein. Perhaps if the cow could talk it would have quoted a famous line from the novel in which the monster exclaims to Dr. Frankenstein: “You are my creator, but I am your master—obey!”

Prof. Park is recovering at at Jeju National University and said he wishes to continue his study even if he has to be in a wheelchair. He reported the cow is now in a barn and no special measure will be taken despite the incident. This is some background of Park and his research from the Korea Times article that was cited:

Park has been recognized as one of the world’s leading cloning scientists since 2000 when he successfully took out human stem cell lines from embryos for the third time in history.

In particular, his team developed technologies using frozen eggs for cloning experiments _ the procedure that created the four-year-old cloned cow that gave him global recognition.

Taking advantage of his expertise, Park hoped to become the first scientist to establish stem cell batches from cloned human embryos by 2015 to help cure such degenerative diseases as diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

What Park vies to achieve is the same as what former Seoul National University Prof. Hwang Woo-suk claimed to have done in 2004 and 2005 ㅡ his feats later proved to have been falsified.

The Hwang case prompted the government to ban research with fresh human eggs in response to the ethical debate in the aftermath.

Instead, scientists have had to depend on a roundabout way of thawing frozen ova, typically leftovers after artificial insemination.

The government is unlikely to lift the restriction on the use of fresh eggs, which are deemed most suitable for therapeutic cloning research, in the near future.

Against this backdrop, Park and his team relied on their knowhow of the freeze-and-thaw process to extract stem cell lines from cloned human embryos.

American Apartheid Starts in Detroit

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A recent op-ed from Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, describes the situation in Detroit as the nexus of a new American apartheid in which inhabitants of largely Black urban centers are denied meaningful votes and ability to defend collective and individual property from the wealthy elite. In reaction to this alarming trend, on October 5 and 6, the International People’s Assembly will hold a conference, Against Banks and Against Austerity, in Detroit. Ford describes the goals of the conference in greater detail in this excerpt:

The International Peoples Assembly conference demands that the so-called debt to the banks be canceled – not just for Detroit, which supposedly owes Wall Street $22 billion, but for cities, school systems, states and countries around the world that have been purposely made into debt slaves for the rich. Workers pensions and jobs, and the vital services they provide to the community, must be guaranteed. This is a critical demand, since the emergency management regime in Pontiac, Michigan, has stripped the municipal workforce down to only 20 people for a city of 60,000. The unemployed must be put back to work repairing the damage inflicted on Detroit by the bankers’ foreclosure and disinvestment policies. Public education, which is rapidly being privatized, must be restored to the public sphere and fully funded.

Read the full article here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/detroit-nexus-new-american-apartheid

For those not familiar with the “emergency management regime” Ford referenced, it has been a topic of intense debate in Michigan for at least the past couple of years. The so-called emergency management legislation first introduced in 2011, was supposedly designed to help local government survive financial crises but also removed all powers from democratically elected officials and transferred governing power, including the power to make local laws, to appointed emergency managers (who are not required to obey local laws such as city charters or ordinances). Though the law was voted down by Michigan voters, a revised version was passed in December of 2012 during a lame duck session.

More details about Michigan’s “emergency manager” law here:

http://sugarlaw.org/projects/democracy-emergency/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-alexander-bullock/detroit-elections_b_1442049.html

This past September 11th, citizens of Detroit experienced a harmful consequence of the emergency management powers when the city lost power during a heat wave that week. As described by Randa Morris at Addicting Info.:

In the city of Detroit, power outages left people stranded in elevators, trapped four hours in the blistering heat. Hundreds were evacuated from buildings in the downtown area, traffic lights did not function, public transportation was disabled and 1,400 sites across the city were without power. Wayne State University and other key buildings still remained closed, the following day. All of this after the city’s power supply supposedly failed.

…The problem is that the city’s power supply never failed.

On September 12th, 2013, Bill Nowling casually stated that the city’s power outages were intentional. Officials and citizens working in the city were given no warning before the electricity was cut off. Law enforcement officials working in the Hall of Justice had no time to prepare. Senior citizens and disabled citizens using elevators in the city’s downtown district had no way to know what was coming. The entire criminal justice system was shut down without notice. Wayne State University Campus was just one of many sites evacuated under emergency conditions. Traffic lights across the city stopped working. 1,400 public and private locations were left without power. And the entire thing was intentional, to “send a message” to the people of Detroit. Bill Nowling works in the office of Kevyn Orr, Detroit’s Emergency Manager.

Read the full story here: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/09/14/detroit-blackout/

So this unannounced power shutdown which endangered the health and safety of an entire city can be attributed to a single individual only accountable to Governor Rick Snyder, who appointed him as Emergency Manager in March. And what are Kevyn Orr’s credentials? He was the lead attorney who collected over a million dollars representing Chrysler during its bankruptcy proceedings in 2009. Private emails uncovered by labor activist Robert Davis indicate that Orr stood to make millions more in legal fees by facilitating Detroit’s bankruptcy which was filed on July 18, 2013. Orr has also been behind efforts to privatize Detroit’s energy grid according to this WSWS.org article by Khara Sikhan:

The Detroit Public Lighting Department (DPLD), has been systematically defunded for decades, and Democratic Mayor Dave Bing proposed to fully privatize the lighting department in 2012.

In mid-August, Kevyn Orr fired DPLD director Richard Tenney as part of his plan to restructure the city government. Orr announced in June that the city would sell off the public lighting grid to DTE Energy, in line with Bing’s proposal.

The drive to privatize the city’s lighting department, far from benefiting the city’s residents, would be only another means of extracting profit from the city.

Read the full article here: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/14/powe-s14.html?view=print

Suppressed Details of Navy Yard Shooting

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Much information has already come out indicating the recent DC Navy Yard shooting follows a repeating pattern for such events including:

Other anomalies and discrepancies are noted at James Tracy’s “The Memory Hole” blog: http://memoryholeblog.com/2013/09/18/artifacts-from-the-dc-navy-yard-shooting/

A recent Washington Post article reported how shortly after Aaron Alexis started hearing voices and feeling vibrations sent through his hotel-room walls, :

On Aug. 23, he went to a VA hospital in Providence. Five days later, he went to another one in Washington, seeking a refill of the medication he had been prescribed in Rhode Island, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

In both cases, doctors sent Alexis home with the medication, identified by law enforcement officials as Trazodone, a generic antidepressant that is widely prescribed for insomnia.

What are some of the side-effects of Trazodone listed at Drugs.com ?:

  • Burning, crawling, itching, numbness, prickling, “pins and needles”, or tingling feelings
  • confusion about identity, place, and time
  • trouble with sleeping
  • continuing ringing or buzzing or other unexplained noise in the ears

More troubling is the drug’s psychiatric warning:

Psychiatric side effects have been reported and include mania, paranoia, hypomania (during and following therapy), increased libido, delirium, agitation, psychosis, hallucinations and self- destructive behavior.

Though it seems adverse reactions to Trazodone may have been one factor leading to the shooting, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of electronic harassment (which may create similar symptoms) nor explain the para-political aspects of the case. To take us further down the rabbit hole, there’s this interesting piece by Clyde Lewis: http://www.groundzeromedia.org/away-team-the-cosmic-suicide-trope/

The shooter’s purported Facebook page mentioned in the article:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Aaron-Alexis/488209661277662

Whether or not the profile was created by Aaron Alexis, it’s extremely odd. If it was created by someone other than Alexis, whether a handler or hoaxer, it reflects a pretty twisted mind not only for the cryptic poem, but because info on the site indicates it was created on April 15 in Boston, the day of the marathon bombing.

Belated Dose of Patriotism

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Because I tuned out all corporate media yesterday I completely forgot about showing my quota of patriotism (now a required and integral part of annual 9/11 observances).

To make up for that, here’s possibly the most patriotic music video ever made:

In case that expression of patriotism was too unsubtle, here’s something a little more abstract (hint: think of Frank Pacholski as a personification of U.S. political leadership):

Hastings Suspected Car Tampering

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“Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

-Kurt Cobain (paraphrasing  Joseph Heller)

Via: La Weekly:

He came to believe his Mercedes was being tampered with. “Nothing I could say could console him,” Thigpen says.

One night in June, he came to Thigpen’s apartment after midnight and urgently asked to borrow her Volvo. He said he was afraid to drive his own car. She declined, telling him her car was having mechanical problems.

“He was scared, and he wanted to leave town,” she says.

The next day, around 11:15 a.m., she got a call from her landlord, who told her Hastings had died early that morning. His car had crashed into a palm tree at 75 mph and exploded in a ball of fire.

Read the full story here: http://www.laweekly.com/2013-08-22/news/michael-hastings-crash/