Judges: No problem taking valuable gifts from litigants

Why should members of Congress get to receive lots of tainted largess, whereas judges are left behind? At least three federal judges don't see a problem with judges accepting expensive services from an organization financed by large corporations, corporations that often appear before the judges as litigants: "An organization called the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE) routinely hosts free junkets for federal judges where they can ride horses, bunk with industry attorneys, and learn how to decide environmental cases in ways that benefit FREE’s corporate funders. Those funders include corporations such as Texaco, Exxon, General Electric, Koch, Monsanto, and Shell. FREE’s board of trustees includes three sitting U.S. Court of Appeals Judges: Edith Clement of the Fifth Circuit and Alice Batchelder and Danny Boggs, both of the Sixth Circuit. Yet, despite the obvious ethical problems raised by Clement, Batchelder and Boggs’ service on the board of an organization that both provides free trips to judges and is funded by frequent litigants before those judges’ courts, these three judges continue to serve." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/09/bpa-found-on-receipts-and_n_794067.html

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Obama justice and the lies about Wikileaks

Glenn Greenwald has been working around the clock to shed meaningful light on the media claims, many of them lies, regarding Wikileaks. Here's Greenwald's comment on the biggest and most common lie one hears these days:

Anyone listening to most media accounts would believe that WikiLeaks has indiscriminately published all 250,000 of the diplomatic cables it possesses, and Gitlin -- in the course of denouncing Julian Assange -- bolsters this falsehood: "Wikileaks’s huge data dump, including the names of agents and recent diplomatic cables, is indiscriminate" and Assange is "fighting for a world of total transparency." The reality is the exact opposite -- literally -- of what Gitlin told TNR readers. WikiLeaks has posted to its website only 960 of the 251,297 diplomatic cables it has. Almost every one of these cables was first published by one of its newspaper partners which are disclosing them

Greenwald also exposes a corrupt frame being pushed by the media - that Wikileaks is perpetrating a massive injustice. This has it upside-down, according to Greenwald:
To recap "Obama justice": if you create an illegal worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected. But if you expose any of the evils secretly perpetrated as part of those lawless actions -- by publishing the truth about what was done -- then you are an Evil Criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.
You'll find a hot list of media lies exposed by Glenn Greenwald here. And you'll find much more at this same link. See also, the video interview of Greenwald by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. What are the government attacks on Wikileaks really about? Greenwald argues that these attacks on WikiLeaks constitute "a literal war over who controls the Internet and the purposes to which it can be used." Western governments have made it clear that citizens cannot freely band together to launch honest and blistering criticism against their government. Without even being accused of any crime, western governments, led by the United States, have used extra-judicial means to take Wikipedia off the Internet. And see here. You can sense the government end game in your bones: The Internet will be for sports and entertainment, not for free-wheeling citizen journalism. In short, the U.S. government will use its massive power to make sure that the Internet becomes just like most newspapers and radio and television stations. Don't you dare tell citizens that we are pumping out an unrelenting stream of lies! Don't you dare tell them that we are killing twice twice as many civilians as we are admitting! Don't tell them that we are spilling blood and treasure to prop up corrupt leaders. Go back to your sports events, soap operas and so-called reality shows! Greenwald also points out the hypocrisy of the mainstream media:

Journalists cheering for the prosecution of Assange are laying the foundation for the criminalization of their own profession, or at least of the few who actually do investigative journalism. There is simply no coherent way to argue that what WikiLeaks did with these cables is criminal, but what the NYT, the Guardian and other papers did is not.

In conclusion, Greenwald mentions that the U.S. Department of State is purportedly preparing to celebrates "World Press Freedom Day.

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Why we should eat insects.

Marcel Dicke is a Dutch insect agricultural specialist. At TED, he made a strong case they need to switch our diets from eating mammals to eating insects. By insects, Dicke is referring to critters with six legs, of which there are 6 million species. 80% of the people of the world currently eat insects (relatively wealthy Western countries being the exception to the rule), and they pick and choose from as many as 1000 species of insects. Dicke referred to fine restaurants in China that allow customers to pick and choose from the bugs they want to eat (I once went to one of these restaurants Guangzhou). Dicke makes a wide variety of impressive arguments. For instance, we should not get grossed out about eating insects because we already eat lots of insects. On average, each of us already eats 500 g of insects per year--they are ground-up and made part of our peanut butter, tomato soup and other processed foods. Many food dyes are made of insects. There are also pragmatic reasons for switching over to insects. For instance, the Earth's population is rapidly growing, and it is predicted that we will need 70% more food in coming decades, yet there does not seem to be any way to obtain this increase relying on traditional sources of protein. Meat is expensive to produce and, on average, each person on the planet eats 80 kg of meat per year (that's 120 kg per year in the United States). 70% of our land is already used for producing livestock. We have no more land to use for raising food, unless we are willing to destroy even more of our precious dwindling rain forests, and this would give us only an incremental increase in production. The main reason that we should eat insects is that "we will have to." We are already making the move to insect food. Dicke notes that we are increasingly finding insect food products even in developed Western countries. Insects do not present the danger of recombinant viruses that mammals do. Insects are amazingly efficient at converting food into protein (10 kg of food can be turned at 9 kg of locusts). Further, insects produce far less greenhouse gases and far less waste in general then mammalian livestock. Dicke argues that insects also provide excellent nutrition, and they can be made into a wide variety of foods-- they can be ground into an innocuous looking meal that provides excellent protein. He argues that we already eat a delicacy much like insects when we each shrimp. "The locust is a shrimp of the land." And insects taste good. Many people currently eat insects because they prefer to eat insects. And check out the specialty foods and pastries that Dicke presents to the audience toward the end of the presentation.

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The insanity of tax cuts for billionaires by a government heavily in debt with high unemployment

Senator Bernie Sanders understands what's going on. Why is there no outrage from most of us?

"For a Democratic president, Democratic House, Democratic Senate, to be following the Bush economic philosophy of tax breaks for millionaires, billionaires is absolutely wrong public policy, absolutely wrong politically, and I gotta tell you, I will do whatever I can to see that 60 votes are not acquired to pass this legislation," Sanders said on on MSNBC's "The Ed Show," before telling host Ed Schultz that he might go as far as to filibuster the legislation.

"Millionaires and billionaires do not need huge tax deductions, that's the simple truth," Sanders continued.

Think Progress quantifies the insanity:
Despite Republican wrangling over the past two years about deficit spending and debt, the New York Times reports that the entire package "would cost about $900 billion over the next two years, to be financed entirely by adding to the national debt."
I think we should settle this immediately with a national referendum. Allow the citizens to go to the voting both and check YES or NO: "Should we give big tax cuts to people who don't need the money, where the effect is to plunge this country more deeply into debt?"

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