14 May - Media Mania

Image via Wikipedia

Major Fail In The ‘Hearts and Minds’ PR ‘Processes’

"We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat" -ISAF/NATO Gen. McChrystal

ICRC Confirms Existence of Second Secret Prison at Bagram, BBC Reports Torture

Hilary Anderson at BBC has been following the Bagram prison story closely. Today, she reportsthat the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has confirmed the existence of a second prison site at BagramLast month, BBC reported on conditions at the main Parwan facility. The scenes as described were right out of the iconography of Guantanamo. Prisoners in handcuffs and leg shackles, "moved around in wheelchairs" with blackout goggles and headphones "to block out all sound." This was the treatment for a prison population that even the U.S. military admits is far and away not made up of serious terrorists. Meanwhile, the number held at Bagram has swelled to approximately 800 prisoners.

But we don’t know how many are in the other, "the Black Hole." We don’t know because the U.S. still insists that no second prison exists. Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, are tossed into cold concrete cells, where the light is kept on 24 hours. Noise machines fill their cells with constant sound, and prisoners are sleep deprived as a matter of policy, with each cell monitored by a camera, so the authorities will know when someone is falling asleep and come to wake them.

A question hangs heavily over the U.S. political scene: how long will denial exist among liberals aU.S. Companies Dodge $60 Billion in Taxes With Global Odysseynd progressives over the persistence of an aggressive military policy and the concomitant crimes against humanity that come with it? How long will the supporters of Barack Obama maintain their studied indifference to the crimes against humanity done in their name? The shine is off this new president, and underneath it all we can discern the same old game of lies covering for crimes.

U.S. Companies Dodge $60 Billion in Taxes With Global Odyssey

Small business lobby to go to court on health law 

The National Federation of Independent Business will join the argument that Americans cannot be required under the Constitution to obtain insurance coverage, the group's president, Dan Danner, said Friday."This law is the first time the federal government has required individuals to purchase something simply because they are alive," said Danner.

(Wikipedia -  A head tax is a tax of a portioned, fixed amount per individual in accordance with the census (as opposed to a percentage of income). When a corvée is commuted for cash payment, in effect it becomes a poll tax (and vice versa, if a poll tax obligation can be worked off). Head taxes were important sources of revenue for many governments from ancient times until the 19th century. There have been several famous (and infamous) cases of head taxes in history, notably a tax formerly required for voting in parts of the United States that was often designed to disenfranchise poor people, including African Americans, Native Americans, and white people of non-British descent (e.g., the Irish). In the United Kingdom, poll taxes were levied by the governments of John of Gaunt andMargaret Thatcher in the 14th and 20th centuries, respectively. )

Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog
Wayback Machine Archive

More Bias and Inaccurate News Reporting in the Media
On my quote (which should be there is no peer reviewed support in the scientific literature for the claim of skillful regional multi-decadal regional forecasts , Jim Erickson did not follow up on this conclusion with other climate scientists that I recommended to him. Rather he chose to present me as an outlier from the mainstream of climate science on this issue.

 How do you address the issue that models cannot be used to predict the future? In other words, models can only predict what might happen under a given set of conditions, not what will happen in the future.

Opinion: Reason Clouded by Carbon

Peter Schwerdtfeger is emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University in Adelaide.

ALTHOUGH there are many doubters of man-made climate change, I am not yet one of them. But I remain unconvinced that carbon dioxide is the sole bete noire. Two decades ago, I pored over the spectral properties of the infra-red radiation of this gas, which is essential to plant life, and found that it was almost completely overshadowed by the radiative properties of water vapour, which is vital to all forms of life on earth.

iSkeptics Global Warming


Climate Alarmism, Media Bias and the Rise of the New Media
Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University, Faculty of Science, UK Paper to be presented at the Climate Conference in the European Parliament, Brussels, 18 November 2009 Media

1. More Charts and Graphs on Global Warming Hoax - 12,972 views
2. The Global Warming Myth - Your 2008 Year-in-Review - 8,838 views
3. Global Warming Hoax: A Skeptical Beginner’s Guide, Part I - 8,210 views
4. Global Warming Hoax: A Skeptical Beginner’s Guide, Part II - 6,478 views
5. Opinion: The Global Warming Scare is All Over but the Shouting - 6,313 views
6. Is Al Gore’s Global Warming Hoax in Trouble? - 5,928 views
7. Six Questions to Ask A Global Warming Hoaxer - 5,515 views
8. See Al Gore’s Houseboat - 4,756 views
9. Sunspots and a possible new ice age - 4,374 views
10. Full Circle: Global Warming in 25 Years - 4,200 views

Related articles by Zemanta

• Military Expanding Obama's Gitmo in Afghanistan (wired.com)