From the WSJ: WASHINGTON—A federal judge on Monday ruled against the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records, saying the program “almost certainly does violate” the Constitution. However, the ruling will have little immediate effect and faces a lengthy future of court proceedings. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, who was nominated to the Washington, D.C.,…

Anonymous sourcing is far too common in major media.  Usually, when unsourced comments appear in articles about controversial subjects to do with government, the source is providing officially sanctioned disinformation, imho. As a way in to this issue, the WP is talking about the cockamamie excuses that sources have given for refusing to allow publication…

Pam Weintraub, editor of Discover Magazine, has an in-depth piece on problems with commonly used drugs on the ExperienceLife website.   The acid blockers (proton pump inhibitors like Prilosec or Nexium), sold over-the-counter or by prescription, can cause a variety of problems from long-term use.  Getting off them can be a challenge, because a hyperacidity…

For 60 years, US factory farms have included broad-spectrum antibiotics in the feed for livestock. It is said to promote growth. It also promotes antibiotic resistance.  Fully 80% (30 million pounds) of the antibiotics used in the US are fed to animals who provide our meat and dairy products. In 1977, FDA announced it planned…

Are the Intelligence Committees Being Blackmailed? During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on two prominent politicians – Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker – as well as critics of government policy Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, and a Washington Post humorist. A recently declassified history written by the NSA itself called the effort “disreputable if not…

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Howard McKeon, (R-California), speaks to reporters following a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, May 21, 2013. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta From Wired: An excerpt, but suggest you read the whole story and see where your rep fell. The numbers tell the story — in votes and…

Although Secretary of State Kerry said there were multiple nations with whom the US was negotiating to take and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons, none took him up on the offer. So the US, working with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, plans to take a US cargo ship and turn it into a…

The risk of narcolepsy was 13 times higher among those given the Pandemrix vacciney Ireland’s Health Services (HSE) wrote to families of children with narcolepsy with the threat to withhold health benefits from Pandemrix vaccine-induced narcolepsy sufferers if they sued for benefits.  Sufferers went to court today to quash the health system’s order. In response, HSE’s…

Hersh has written an in-depth piece on the intelligence about Syria’s chemical weapons attack in the London Review of Books, suggesting parallels with the justifications created for the war on Iraq in 2003. His final two paragraphs note that Al-Nusra rebels may be the only group left with access to sarin in Syria soon: The…

http://www.gocomics.com/stevebenson/2013/09/08#.UqKtwmRDsrd Steve Benson by Steve Benson September 08, 2013 Previous feature Next feature Current

How do governments do business with each other?  Of course they often share goals, and may benefit jointly from certain actions.  But at the most basic level, they offer each other carrots and threaten each other with sticks. Using some combination of these two strategies, the US government obtained the cooperation of 54 governments to…

From NBC  we learn Obama is going to give Americans more “confidence” in the NSA.  “I’ll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA and initiating some reforms that can give people some more confidence.” But lack of confidence is not the problem.  Setting up a straw man to knock down “is an intentional misrepresentation of an opponent’s position, often used…