Women Born Transsexual

From Salon:  http://www.salon.com/2013/02/09/how_do_you_explain_drone_killings_with_post_orwellian_newspeak/

In the logic of perma-war, “imminent threat” is everywhere and drone attacks on Americans are no problem

By Andrew O’Hehir
Saturday, Feb 9, 2013

John Brennan’s confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee struck many observers as a small but significant step in the direction of openness, a chink in the armor of secrecy that the last two presidential administrations have erected around the “war on terror.” Maybe that will turn out to be correct, and the incoming CIA director – the principal architect of President Obama’s drone war, and until recently a defender of rendition and “enhanced interrogation” – will launch a new era of transparency in Langley. While we wait for that, would you like to see this bridge I’ve got for sale in Brooklyn?

Indeed, watching the Brennan hearing, and then struggling through the troubling Justice Department “white paper” spelling out the legal justification for the drone killings of American citizens (which was recently acquired and released by NBC News), left me with quite a different feeling. In large part, this was the feeling that our government’s imperial creep continues uninterrupted, that most people simply don’t care (irrespective of their supposed political views) and that almost everyone involved in this charade, especially those of us in the media who are supposed to serve as the watchdogs, has agreed to ignore the most obvious and glaring questions.

Beyond all that, and to a large extent underlying it, there is also the post-Orwellian creep of our language, and of all public discourse, towards emptiness. What Orwell described was a phenomenon distinct to the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, the abrupt replacement of ordinary language with a propagandistic and bureaucratic Newspeak designed to make ideological resistance impossible. In the electoral dictatorship now developing in the United States – and no, that isn’t a contradiction in terms – you can find sterling examples of such Newspeak and doublethink. But the most prominent American version, which I’m calling post-Orwellian, is subtler: Ordinary words whose meanings seem clear enough on the surface, such as “war” or “enemy” or “self-defense” or “imminent” (not to mention the ever-fraught “terrorism”) turn out not to mean anything at all, or to be legalistic terms of art with endlessly expansive frames of reference.

Continue reading at:  http://www.salon.com/2013/02/09/how_do_you_explain_drone_killings_with_post_orwellian_newspeak/

From Truth Dig:  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/generalissima_clinton_expands_the_empire_20130208/

By Ralph Nader
Feb 8, 2013

This piece first appeared on Ralph Nader’s website, Nader.org.

Hillary Clinton has completed her four-year tenure as secretary of state to the accolades of both Democratic and Republican congressional champions of the budget-busting “military-industrial complex,” that President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address. Behind the public relations sheen, the photo opportunities with groups of poor people in the developing world, an increasingly militarized State Department operated under Clinton’s leadership.

A militarized State Department is more than a repudiation of the Department’s basic charter of 1789, for the then-named Department of Foreign Affairs, which envisioned diplomacy as its mission. Secretary Clinton reveled in tough, belligerent talk and action on her many trips to more than a hundred countries. She would warn or threaten “consequences” on a regular basis. She supported soldiers in Afghanistan, the use of secret Special Forces in other places and “force projection” in East Asia to contain China. She aggressively supported or attacked resistance movements in dictatorships, depending on whether a regime played to Washington’s tune.

Because Defense Secretary Robert Gates was openly cool to the drumbeats for war on Libya, Clinton took over and choreographed the NATO ouster of the dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, long after he had given up his mass destruction weaponry and was working to re-kindle relations with the U.S. government and global energy corporations. Libya is now in a disastrous warlord state-of-chaos. Many fleeing fighters have moved into Mali, making that vast country into another battlefield drawing U.S. involvement. Blowback!

Time and again, Hillary Clinton’s belligerence exceeded that of Obama’s secretaries of defense. From her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee to her tenure at the State Department, Hillary Clinton sought to prove that she could be just as tough as the militaristic civilian men whose circle she entered. Throughout her four years it was Generalissima Clinton, expanding the American Empire at large.

Here is some of what the candid camera of history will show about her record:

Continue reading at:  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/generalissima_clinton_expands_the_empire_20130208/

From The Guardian UK:   http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/09/barack-obama-extreme-anti-terror-tactics-liberal-backlash

Drone attacks and new NDAA law under fire as critics fear US civil liberties are being undermined

Paul Harris in New York
The Observer, Saturday 9 February 2013

President Barack Obama is facing a liberal backlash over his hardline national security policy, which critics say is more extreme and conservative than that pursued by George W Bush.

The outrage comes after a week in which Obama’s nominee to be the next head of the CIA, current White House adviser John Brennan, faced a grilling from the Senate intelligence committee over his enthusiastic support of using unmanned drones to strike suspected Islamic militants all over the globe.

It also comes after a court hearing in New York in which numerous liberal activists and journalists argued that a new Obama law – the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) – has dealt a serious blow to civil liberties by allowing American citizens to be detained indefinitely without trial.

Both developments also add to liberal frustration with an Obama administration that has ruthlessly cracked down on whistleblowers, especially on matters of national security, and failed to implement a promise to close down the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

“If Bush had done the same things as Obama, then more people would have been upset about it. He is a Democrat though, and to an extent can get away with it,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who as a government official leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and helped to expose the truth about the Vietnam war. Ellsberg is now one of the plaintiffs in the case against the NDAA and insists that the administration has used the law to give itself widespread and unconstitutional new powers: “We have been losing our guaranteed freedoms one by one.”

The government denies that the NDAA represents any sort of threat to ordinary citizens and has appealed against a judge’s ruling that it is unconstitutional, saying that the White House needs such powers to fight terrorism. However, critics say its use of broad language to define what constitutes a terrorist or what actions make up support for terrorist groups could drag in journalists, activists and academics. The case, which is currently on appeal in New York, could go all the way to the supreme court. Liberal film-maker Michael Moore has attacked the Obama administration for backing the NDAA. “In order to protect us from terrorism, the government is taking away our constitutional rights,” said Moore, who made the anti-Bush documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/09/barack-obama-extreme-anti-terror-tactics-liberal-backlash

From Mother Jones:  http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/02/meat-industry-still-gorging-antibiotics

By Tom Philpott
Fri Feb. 8, 2013

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a set of voluntary “guidelines” designed to nudge the meat industry to curb its antibiotics habit. Ever since, the agency has been mulling whether and how to implement the new program. Meanwhile, the meat industry has been merrily gorging away on antibiotics—and churning out meat rife with antibiotic-resistant pathogens—if the latest data from the FDA itself is any indication.

The Pew Charitable Trusts crunched the agency’s numbers on antibiotic use on livestock farms and compared them to data on human use of antibiotics to treat illness, and mashed it all into an infographic, which I’ve excerpted below. Note that that while human antibiotic use has leveled off at below 8 billion pounds annually, livestock farms have been sucking in more and more of the drugs each year—and consumption reached a record nearly 29.9 billion pounds in 2011. To put it another way, the livestock industry is now consuming nearly four-fifths of the antibiotics used in the US, and its appetite for them is growing.

In an email, a Pew spokesperson added that while  the American Meat Institute reported a 0.2 percent increase in total meat and poultry production in 2011 compared to the previous year, the FDA data show that antibiotic consumption jumped 2 percent over the same time period. That suggests that meat production might be getting more antibiotic-intensive.

Not surprisingly, when you cram animals together by the thousands and dose them daily with antibiotics, the bacteria that live on and in the animals adapt and develop resistance to those bacteria killers. Pew crunched another new set of data, the FDA’s latest release of results from its National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System, or NARMS, which buys samples of meat products and subjects them to testing for bacterial pathogens. Again, the results are sobering. Here a a few highlights pointed to by Pew in an email:

Continue reading at:  http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2013/02/meat-industry-still-gorging-antibiotics

From Huffington Post:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/08/climate-change-blizzard-global-warming_n_2649587.html

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/09-0

by Joseph Nevins
Published on Saturday, February 9, 2013 by Common Dreams

As I watched a video of Barack Obama delivering his second inaugural address last month, and listened to his call to “respond to the threat of climate change” lest we “betray our children and future generations,” I could not help but think of another president.

Indeed, the very holding of the event at which Obama spoke is one indication why it is not to the occupant of the White House that those concerned global warming should look for inspiration, but to someone else. After all, there is something disconcerting about hearing about the need to fight climate change—to reduce the gargantuan greenhouse gas-related footprint of the United States in other words—at a huge event that was both unnecessary and expensive. Obama was already president of the United States, so why another inauguration?

No doubt, the answer illustrates how the nation-state relies to a significant degree on performances to reproduce itself. This is especially the case in countries such as the United States where the benefits that the state actually delivers to its citizenry are increasingly meaningless in terms of everyday wellbeing. In a country in which more than 20 percent of its children live below the official poverty line, for example, approximately half of discretionary U.S. government spending is dedicated to its enormous, global military apparatus and what is called “homeland security.” (Under a Nobel Peace Prize-winning president, U.S. military spending rivals that of all the rest of the world’s countries combined.)

But the event is also a manifestation of U.S. wealth and power. As one historian stated in endorsing Obama’s decision to hold the inauguration, to “let it roll,” a U.S. president “is part of the most elite club in the world,” and a second-term president “the most elite within the most-elite club.”

Such elitism is costly: while the final price tag of the inauguration won’t be known for months, it will certainly be many tens of millions of dollars. According to The Economist, security alone for what it called “the three days of revelry” totaled around $100 million.

Continue reading at:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/09-0

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/09/soybean-farmer-monsanto-supreme-court

Who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground? A 75-year-old farmer takes the agricultural giant to court to find out

Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 February 2013

As David versus Goliath battles go it is hard to imagine a more uneven fight than the one about to play out in front of the US supreme court between Vernon Hugh Bowman and Monsanto.

On the one side is Bowman, a single 75-year-old Indiana soybean farmer who is still tending the same acres of land as his father before him in rural south-western Indiana. On the other is a gigantic multibillion dollar agricultural business famed for its zealous protection of its commercial rights.

Not that Bowman sees it that way. “I really don’t consider it as David and Goliath. I don’t think of it in those terms. I think of it in terms of right and wrong,” Bowman told The Guardian in an interview.

Either way, in the next few weeks Bowman and Monsanto’s opposing legal teams will face off in front of America’s most powerful legal body, weighing in on a case that deals with one of the most fundamental questions of modern industrial farming: who controls the rights to the seeds planted in the ground.

The legal saga revolves around Monsanto’s aggressive protection of its soybean known as Roundup Ready, which have been genetically engineered to be resistant to its Roundup herbicide or its generic equivalents. When Bowman – or thousands of other farmers just like him – plant Monsanto’s seeds in the ground they are obliged to only harvest the resulting crop, not keep any of it back for planting the next year. So each season, the farmer has to buy new Monsanto seeds to plant.

However, farmers are able to buy excess soybeans from local grain elevators, many of which are likely to be Roundup Ready due to the huge dominance Monsanto has in the market. Indeed in Indiana it is believed more than 90% of soybeans for sale as “commodity seeds” could be such beans, each containing the genes Monsanto developed.

Continue reading at:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/feb/09/soybean-farmer-monsanto-supreme-court