Tax breaks are as big as the deficit

According to the National Priorities Organization:

In 2013, the cost of tax breaks was equal to the entire U.S. discretionary budget [1]. However, the discretionary budget is subject to an annual appropriations process, where Congress debates the proposed spending. Tax breaks, on the other hand, remain on the books until lawmakers modify them. As a result, over a trillion dollars a year in lost revenue – more than 1.6 times the 2013 budget deficit – goes largely unnoticed.

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Chris Hedges on the NDAA

From Truthdig:

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

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Re-paint

Last month I carefully sanded and painted the passenger side rear corner of our 2001 Dodge Caravan. It didn't look perfect, but it was more than passable. Yesterday someone scraped the same part of the same car while it was sitting on a parking lot. So tonight I rode the same bicycle back to the same auto parts store and the same guy sells me another can of the same type of paint as I stood there wearing the same bike helmet that I wore last time. "Have we met?," he asked. I explained, "Yes, you're the guy who insisted that I use grade 2,000 sand paper last time, and I refused, saying that it would make that part of the car look too nice--and it all would have been for naught. I explained why I had returned, then asked, "Did I CAUSE that jerk to scrape my car yesterday by choosing to paint it last month? He said, "Yes. That's how life works."

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The promise of fecal transplants

Some patients are having astounding success with fecal transplants, and a DIY community is growing. BBC reports:

There is growing recognition that faecal transplant is the best way to treat [some] patients. In the first randomised trial of the technique published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, 94% of patients were cured by the treatment, whereas a course of antibiotics cured just 27%. The disparity was so huge that the researchers stopped the trial early, on the grounds that it was unethical to deny the better cure to the cohort assigned antibiotics.

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