Reason: Cut-Rate Diplomas: How doubts about the government’s own “Dr.
Lauraâ€? exposed a résumé fraud scandal — If this sort of thing is widespread, it explains a lot about the government’s relationship to computers and software, and the laws and corporations that deal with them. (Equal opportunity outrage! This fraud not only was in charge of information systems for Homeland Security under Bush, she also covered up lost emails that were subpoenaed for the Lewinsky scandal under Clinton!)
Category: News
The Torture President Still Choosing Pro-Torture Cabinet Members
ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society: White House Chooses New Homeland Security Chief
: ‘According to American University Law Professor and ACS Faculty Advisory Herman Schwartz, Chertoff is the second major Bush cabinet nominee to be involved in the scandal over abusive treatment of detainees. In an August 18, 2004 op-ed published in Newsday, Schwartz writes that “[h]arsh ‘stress and duress’ tactics used by the CIA in early 2002 – such as simulated drowning – were reviewed and apparently cleared by the Justice Department Criminal Division, then headed by Michael Chertoff.”‘
Boing Boing: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his
Boing Boing: Desperate Ken Lay paying search-engines to return links to his “version” of Enron.
You know all those cool “click for charity” things where you can click to give a buck to hungry people or something?
Now the magic of the internet has given us a link you can click to deliberately cost a robber-baron corporate scumhole five to twelve cents for nothing. (Unless you start reading and believing his web site, in which case it’s not for nothing…)
Exhuming Reagan?
One of the big secrets of the Reagan Administration was that they were collaborating with really viciously evil right-wing groups in Central America, “kill and torture civilians” kind of evil (you may remember them being called “freedom fighters”). Big scandal, but not covered much in American news. Think “School of the Americas,” think United-States-sponsored terrorism. It was funding for this whole thing, which had to be done secretly to keep it off the books, that precipitated the Iran-Contra scandal.
Apparently this is now being contemplated as a strategy for Iraq: “many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.”
Link to Newsweek story.
This story suggests just what chilling things were implied by the reverence, piety, and even nostalgia for Reagan at the time of his death last year.
It’s not that people have forgotten the atrocities he and his crew were responsible for. It’s that they look back on them fondly.
Apparently I Shall Live Forever
Telegraph | News | Want to live longer? Then drop the fitness regime and put your feet up
It is the news that all sloths have been waiting for. Scientists in Germany have found that too much exercise is bad for you and that doing less could lengthen your life.
In a new book called The Joy of Laziness: How to slow down and live longer, Dr Peter Axt, retired professor of health science at Fulda University near Frankfurt, and his daughter, Dr Michaela Axt-Gadermann, a GP, say that everybody has a limited amount of “life energy” and that the speed with which it is consumed determines their life span.