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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

27 Oct - News Picks

Image by Jamiecat * via Flickr

Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opiumtrade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.


So, Uh. How Much CIA Money Inadvertently Funds The Taliban?




Dems: CIA may have misled Congress five times since 2001

The Speaker came under fire after she said at a testy press conference in May that the CIA had lied to her and other members during a 2002 briefing about its use of waterboarding on detainees. Pelosi was the ranking member of the Intelligence panel at the time. 

“We were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used,” she said at the May press conference. “They [the CIA] misled us all the time.”




Iraq goes nuclear with plans for new reactor programme

( Does the U.S. have its bafflegab prepared to reinstitute sanctions ? )



Obama Admin Announces $3.4 Billion for Smart Grid



Maternal High-Fat Diet Has Serious Implications For Brain Development Of Offspring, Mouse Study Finds

Feeding high-fat food to pregnant mice can affect their pups' brain development in ways that may cause them to be more vulnerable to obesity and to engage in addictive-like behaviors in adulthood


Arctic Lake Sediments Show Warming, Unique Ecological Changes In Recent Decades

 An analysis of sediment cores indicates that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Tax refugees staging escape from New York


More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.
The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.



What We Need to Know About the Crash

My favorite grand unifying theory of the financial collapse right now is this column by Jonathan Rauch, in which he sums up the complex and fascinating theories of Yale's Gary Gorton. Here's Rauch's nutshell, in my even smaller nutshell:


Financial innovation produced a vast network of complicated asset-backed securities traded among what insiders call "shadow banks," or unregulated banks. Shadow banks looking to park cash where it would hold value and earn interest created a short-term securities market -- much like a checking account. But unlike a regular FDIC-insured checking accounts, these deposits would not be guaranteed by the government. So investors borrowing from this shadow depository system had to put up collateral. And they chose ... their asset backed securities.


Why is that dangerous? Because in the shadow banking industry, these deposits, backed by sub-prime mortgages instead of the FDIC, acted as money. Banks relied on them for transactions. "Subprime mortgage debt had entered the money supply." But then the housing bubble burst. Depositors dumped their assets to raise cash and tried to withdraw their money, raiding the shadow depository market, and the money supply crashed.
 But really, just read his piece.





The Wages Of Misinformation


" I think anyone should be allowed to marry the person they love. If they’re in love, who am I to say to them that they can’t marry, right?”
So this was someone who believed in marriage equality but was being harassed by those insidious ads into possibly voting against her own instincts.




Well then, maybe it isn't so cute : Pandagon

One of the first things to jump out at me about this story in the NY Times about child prostitution was that we have even more evidence of the harmful effects of the War on Drugs.This article is one of the best I’ve read on the subject in a long time, and it even ends with a note of optimism, detailing how the Dallas police have initiated a program that allows them to get 3/4 of the prostitutes that enter the program out of prostitution. 

EFF opens the "Takedown Hall of Shame"


The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a big fan of naming and shaming. When it launched its patent-busting project a few years back, the activist group put up a "Wanted by EFF marshals" poster; eight of the ten patents on the list have already been narrowed, invalidated, or reexamined.
So when it wanted to highlight the overzealous use of DMCA takedown notices on the Web, the EFF went a similar route with its new "Takedown Hall of Shame."
Initially, eight items have been granted the coveted laurel wreath of infamy:



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