In One Sentence, Michele Bachmann Proves How Ignorant repugicans are about the Constitution

by Allen Clifton

I often comment about how hypocritical repugicans are when it comes to our Constitution.  They’re usually the first to stand on a pedestal and speak about the importance of “Constitutional values,” yet they seem unable to even grasp the basic fundamentals of what that even means.
And while most people with common sense already know this, Michele Bachmann perfectly showcased repugican ignorance about our Constitution in one sentence.
While speaking with wingnut shrieking head Lars Larson, Bachmann said that gay people have “so bullied the American people and they have so intimidated politicians that politicians fear them and they think they get to dictate the agenda everywhere.  Well, not with the Constitution you don’t.”
Though almost perfect, her next sentence really showcased true repugican ignorance about the Constitution.
“If you want take away my religious liberties,” she continued, “you can advocate for that but you do it through the constitutional process and you don’t intimidate and no politician should give away my religious liberties or yours.”
And that’s the sentence that shows the true ignorance repugicans have about our Constitution.
Advocating for equal rights for homosexuals isn’t “bullying” or “taking away” anyone's religious liberties.  It’s simply saying that it’s unconstitutional to discriminate against homosexuals based on religion - because that’s what our First Amendment says! 
First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..”

Notice the whole part about not establishing religion?  That means it’s unconstitutional (be it on a state or federal level) to pass laws that are derived from religious beliefs.
End of story.
So, there’s no need to “advocate” to take away her religious liberties on a Constitutional level because the First Amendment to the United States Constitution already does that for us. 
What these “activist judges” and “lawless President Obama” are doing is simply adhering to the Constitution which says laws cannot be based on religion.
It’s also ironic that these judges, who are making rulings based on the Constitution (which the Supreme Court sided with when they overturned DOMA), are actually using the “constitutional process” for which Bachmann seems to be advocating.
But the real problem is wingnuts like Bachmann just don’t like how reality is proving time and time again that their values don’t seem to be Constitutional.  They long for a version of our Constitution that exists in their minds, just not in reality.

Why Do wingnut 'christians' Think 'Religious Freedom' Means Forcing Their Delusion on You?

by Amanda Marcotte

Religious freedom has turned into wingnut code for imposing christianity.

Religious freedom is one of the most fundamental American values, written directly into the First Amendment of the Constitution. Of course, true religious freedom requires a secular society, where government stays out of the religion game and leaves it strictly to individual conscience, a standard that runs directly against the modern wingnut insistence that America is and should be a “christian nation”. So what are people who claim to be 'patriots' standing up for American values to do? Increasingly, the solution oo the religio-wingnuts is to redefine “religious freedom” so that it means, well, its exact opposite. “Religious freedom” has turned into wingnut code for imposing the christian delusion on the non-believers.
While it seems like a leap even for the most delusional wingnuts to believe that their religious freedom can only be protected by giving christians broad power to force their delusion on others, a new report from the People For the American Way shows how the narrative is constructed. The report shows that christian wingnut circles have become awash in legends of being persecuted for their delusion, stories that invariably turn out to be nonsense but that “serve to bolster a larger story, that of a majority religious group in American society becoming a persecuted minority, driven underground in its own country.” This sense of persecution, in turn, gives them justification to push their actual agenda of religious repression under the guise that they’re just protecting themselves.
The most obvious and persistent example of this is the issue of creationism in the classroom. Clearly, teaching creationism in a biology classroom is a straightforward violation of the First Amendment, a direct attempt to use taxpayer money to foist a very specific religious teaching on captive students. So what the wingnuts do is re-frame the issue, arguing that teaching evolutionary theory is a form of religious oppression, a direct attack on the beliefs of fundamentalists in the classroom. This is pure hooey, of course, since evolutionary theory is not a religion but a scientific reality, and teaching science as science is no more a violation of religious freedom than teaching kids to that “cat” rhymes with “hat” is an imposition of religion. But once they’ve convinced themselves that learning science in the science classroom is religious persecution, it becomes easier to convince yourself that it’s okay to “fight back” by forcing your actual religion on everyone else.
You can see this play out in the legends that PFAW details out. Do christian wingnuts want to force their religious hostility to gays onto the military? Tell a lie about how a sergeant was persecuted for simply holding that religious belief to paint yourself as the “real” victim. Want to justify forcing non-believing kids to pray to your god in school? Tell lies about how kids are being punished for having private prayers all to themselves. Want to force people in the VA hospital to sing your religious songs and worship your god? Spread a false tale claiming that people aren’t allowed private ownership of religious cards. Tell enough of these stories and wingnuts can convince themselves the only way they can protect their own right to worship is to force their religious practice on everyone else.

You can see how this kind of logic swept over the Becket Fund, a legal institution that was initially set up to protect the individual right to religious freedom. As chronicled by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux at The American Prospect, the Becket Fund started off doing easily defensible work protecting people who wanted to express their religious beliefs in personal ways that are not coercive to others, such as protecting prisoners who wanted to have religious tchotchkes or workers who wanted to maintain religious hairstyles at work.

But the Becket Fund’s latest high profile case is an outright attack on religious freedom, in a case that was erroneously decided by the Supreme Court. The Becket Fund defended the Green family that owns Hobby Lobby in their desire to impose their religious delusions about contraception on employees, by denying employees the right to use their own insurance benefits on contraception. The idea that it could ever be “religious freedom” to tell an employee that her private use of her own compensation package should be constrained by her boss's religious delusions should be laughable. But that’s the logic of the modern christian wingnut that holds that the only way to “protect” their own religious delusion is to start forcing it on others.

Of course, this kind of logic inevitably starts to crumble when people who don’t share the wingnut christian delusion start pushing back and arguing that their right to their own private beliefs should not be infringed by being made to pray to someone else’s god in school, being taught bible stories in biology class, or being forced to check with the boss first before you pick up your prescription medications after hours. The solution, increasingly, is to outright argue that non-believers or people of different faiths have beliefs that are simply less worthy of basic protections for religious freedom, much less the hyper-charged “religious freedom” of imposing your delusion on others, the kind of “religious freedom” wingnut christians mistakenly believe they’re entitled to.
Take, for instance, Jody Hice, a repugican candidate for a U.S. House seat from Georgia. Hice has a novel solution to the problem of the religious rights of muslims being infringed upon when they are subject to having religion imposed on them by christians: Simply deny that islam is a religion and therefore deny that its followers enjoy freedom of religion. “Although islam has a religious component, it is much more than a simple religious ideology,” he wrote in his 2012 book It’s Now Or Never. “It is a complete geo-political structure and, as such, does not deserve First Amendment protection.”
It’s a dumb statement on two levels. One, it’s plainly obvious that islam is a religion and therefore people who believe in it are absolutely guaranteed their actual freedom to worship how they please. (Though perhaps Hice is worried that muslims will decide to adopt the christian wingnut definition of “religious freedom” and start demanding that you can’t eat pork and you have to pray five times a day.) But even if someone doesn’t have a religion doesn’t mean that they lose their basic right to decide for themselves what to believe. Atheists do not have a religion, but it’s just as wrong to force atheists to pray to your god as it would be to do so to a muslim.
Sadly, this argument that the christian wingnuts try to make that  religious freedom includes the right to foist their delusion on others has made the leap to the Supreme Court, with Justice Scalia arguing incoherently that the “First Amendment explicitly favors religion” in order to justify the hijacking of a school event to force religion on the non-believers in attendance. As Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns and Money pointed out, it’s actually the exact opposite: “it disfavors religious endorsements by the state.” But in this new topsy-turvy bizarro wingnut world, up is down, left is right, and the only way to protect religious freedom is to use government and corporate force to make everyone follow the wingnut version of christianity, whether they believe it or not.

Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why wingnuts Are ... Well, wingnuts

Ten years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and wingnuts. Today, it's becoming hard not to.  
Scientists are using eye-tracking devices to detect automatic response differences between liberals and wingnuts. 

You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you'll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called "Open Peer Commentary": An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and wingnuts disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.
That's a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests, and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

It is a "virtually inescapable conclusion" that the "cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and wingnuts are quite different."

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political wingnuts have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. (The paper can be read for free here.) In the process, Hibbing et al. marshal a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That wingnuts respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers put it).
In other words, the wingnut ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.
The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. "One possibility," they write, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, and he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:
Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what's truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, "22 or 23 accept the general idea" of a wingnut negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of "modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work," and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.
That's pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. [Italics added]

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional repugicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what's clear is that today, they've more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

"One possibility," note the authors, "is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene," when it would have been super-helpful in preventing you from getting killed.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but not-paradigm-shifting side issues, such as the question of how wingnuts can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, wingnuts tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that "successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as wingnuts tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience."
All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

You know it's going to be a bad day when ...

... this is the first thing you see upon waking up

Big Banks Hit with Monster $250 Billion Lawsuit for Fraud in Housing Crisis

by Ellen Brown

Whoa!
Did the banksters just meet their match?
For years, homeowners have been battling Wall Street in an attempt to recover some portion of their massive losses from the housing Ponzi scheme. But progress has been slow, as they have been outgunned and out-spent by the banking titans.
In June, however, the banks may have met their match, as some equally powerful titans strode onto the stage.  Investors led by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and PIMCO, the world’s largest bond-fund manager, have sued some of the world’s largest banks for breach of fiduciary duty as trustees of their investment funds. The investors are seeking damages for losses surpassing $250 billion. That is the equivalent of one million homeowners with $250,000 in damages suing at one time.
The defendants are the so-called trust banks that oversee payments and enforce terms on more than $2 trillion in residential mortgage securities. They include units of Deutsche Bank AG, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, HSBC Holdings PLC, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. Six nearly identical complaints charge the trust banks with breach of their duty to force lenders and sponsors of the mortgage-backed securities to repurchase defective loans.
Why the investors are only now suing is complicated, but it involves a recent court decision on the statute of limitations. Why the trust banks failed to sue the lenders evidently involves the cozy relationship between lenders and trustees. The trustees also securitized loans in pools where they were not trustees. If they had started filing suit demanding repurchases, they might wind up suedon other deals in retaliation. Better to ignore the repurchase provisions of the pooling and servicing agreements and let the investors take the losses—better, at least, until they sued.
Beyond the legal issues are the implications for the solvency of the banking system itself. Can even the largest banks withstand a $250 billion iceberg? The sum is more than 40 times the $6 billion “London Whale” that shook JPMorganChase to its foundations.
Who Will Pay - the Banks or the Depositors?
The world’s largest banks are considered “too big to fail” for a reason. The fractional reserve banking scheme is a form of shell game, which depends on “liquidity” borrowed at very low interest from other banks or the money market. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, triggering a run on the money market, the whole interconnected shadow banking system nearly went down with it.
Congress then came to the rescue with a taxpayer bailout, and the Federal Reserve followed with its quantitative easing fire hose. But in 2010, the Dodd Frank Act said there would be no more government bailouts. Instead, the banks were to save themselves with “bail ins,” meaning they were to recapitalize themselves by confiscating a portion of the funds of their creditors – including not only their shareholders and bondholders but the largest class of creditor of any bank, their depositors.
Theoretically, deposits under $250,000 are protected by FDIC deposit insurance. But the FDIC fund contains only about $47 billion – a mere 20% of the Black Rock/PIMCO damage claims. Before 2010, the FDIC could borrow from the Treasury if it ran short of money. But since the Dodd Frank Act eliminates government bailouts, the availability of Treasury funds for that purpose is now in doubt.

When depositors open their online accounts and see that their balances have shrunk or disappeared, a run on the banks is likely. And since banks rely on each other for liquidity, the banking system as we know it could collapse. The result could be drastic deleveraging, erasing trillions of dollars in national wealth.

Phoenix Rising
Some pundits say the global economy would then come crashing down. But in a thought-provoking March 2014 article called “American Delusionalism, or Why History Matters,” John Michael Greer disagrees. He notes that historically, governments have responded by modifying their financial systems:

Massive credit collapses that erase very large sums of notional wealth and impact the global economy are hardly a new phenomenon . . . but one thing that has never happened as a result of any of them is the sort of self-feeding, irrevocable plunge into the abyss that current fast-crash theories require.
The reason for this is that credit is merely one way by which a society manages the distribution of goods and services. . . . A credit collapse . . . doesn’t make the energy, raw materials, and labor vanish into some fiscal equivalent of a black hole; they’re all still there, in whatever quantities they were before the credit collapse, and all that’s needed is some new way to allocate them to the production of goods and services.
This, in turn, governments promptly provide. In 1933, for example, faced with the most severe credit collapse in American history, Franklin Roosevelt temporarily nationalized the entire US banking system, seized nearly all the privately held gold in the country, unilaterally changed the national debt from “payable in gold” to “payable in Federal Reserve notes” (which amounted to a technical default), and launched a  series of other emergency measures.  The credit collapse came to a screeching halt, famously, in less than a hundred days. Other nations facing the same crisis took equally drastic measures, with similar results. . . .
Faced with a severe crisis, governments can slap on wage and price controls, freeze currency exchanges, impose rationing, raise trade barriers, default on their debts, nationalize whole industries, issue new currencies, allocate goods and services by fiat, and impose martial law to make sure the new economic rules are followed to the letter, if necessary, at gunpoint. Again, these aren’t theoretical possibilities; every one of them has actually been used by more than one government faced by a major economic crisis in the last century and a half.
That historical review is grounds for optimism, but confiscation of assets and enforcement at gunpoint are still not the most desirable outcomes. Better would be to have an alternative system in place and ready to implement before the boom drops.

The Better Mousetrap
North Dakota has established an effective alternative model that other states might do well to emulate. In 1919, the state legislature pulled its funds out of Wall Street banks and put them into the state’s own publicly-owned bank, establishing financial sovereignty for the state. The Bank of North Dakota has not only protected the state’s financial interests but has been a moneymaker for it ever since.
On a national level, when the Wall Street credit system fails, the government can turn to the innovative model devised by our colonial forebears and start issuing its own currency and credit—a power now usurped by private banks but written into the US Constitution as belonging to Congress.
The chief problem with the paper scrip of the colonial governments was the tendency to print and spend too much. The Pennsylvania colonists corrected that systemic flaw by establishing a publicly-owned bank, which lent money to farmers and tradespeople at interest. To get the funds into circulation to cover the interest, some extra scrip was printed and spent on government services. The money supply thus expanded and contracted naturally, not at the whim of government officials but in response to seasonal demands for credit. The interest returned to public coffers, to be spent on the common weal.
The result was a system of money and credit that was sustainable without taxes, price inflation or government debt – not to mention without credit default swaps, interest rate swaps, central bank manipulation, slicing and dicing of mortgages, rehypothecation in the repo market, and the assorted other fraudulent schemes underpinning our “systemically risky” banking system today.
Relief for Homeowners?
Will the BlackRock/PIMCO suit help homeowners?  Not directly.  But it will get some big guns on the scene, with the ability to do all sorts of discovery, and the staff to deal with the results.
Fraud is grounds for rescission, restitution and punitive damages.  The homeowners may not have been parties to the pooling and servicing agreements governing the investor trusts, but if the whole business model is proven to be fraudulent, they could still make a case for damages.
In the end, however, it may be the titans themselves who take each other down, clearing the way for a new phoenix to rise from the ashes.

Corporate Greed Exacerbates Drought

Nestle Believes Water Is Not a Basic Human Right 

According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, Nestle, corporations own every drop of water on the planet …

There are few things as fundamentally crucial to the existence of human beings and, indeed, all life on Earth as water. It is difficult to believe any human being thinks water is privately-owned, a commodity, to use for profit at the expense of human life, but Americans know there are entities that will go to any lengths to feed their corporate greed. In several states in this country, climate change is wreaking havoc on the people in the form of severe, multi-year droughts. So, with extreme water shortages, what do two industries do with the vanishing precious resource? They either mix it with deadly carcinogens and pump it, under extremely high pressure, back into the ground, often directly over active earthquake faults, or draw it out of the ground, bottle it, and sell it for profit. It is a wealthy corporations’ ideal business model; free raw materials and a product no human being can survive without.

California, like many states primarily in the southwestern United States, is facing one of its most severe droughts on record. The conditions are so severe that in January Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought state of emergency in preparation for water shortages that are especially dangerous during the summer months. The critically severe drought has entered its third year of a projected decade (at least) long drought, and throughout California water restrictions are having a profound impact on agriculture. In fact, the water shortage is so severe that farmers in some of the most agricultural-rich areas of the country are being forewarned there may be no water within two years at best; that is if the extreme conservation measures work.

However, while the rest of the state is attempting to conserve what little life-sustaining water California has left, the Nestle Company ignores the emergency measures the state adopted because its water bottling plant is conveniently located on a Native American reservation. Like all N.A. reservations, it is considered a sovereign nation by the US government. It is a water-theft enterprise any greedy corporation would lust after because unlike farmers, individual Californians, and every municipality in the state, Nestle is exempt from complying with any water-saving state or federal regulations. To make matters worse, Nestle is depleting what precious water reserves lie deep underground in the aquifer and pumping it directly to its bottling plant and selling it for profit. This is not a new endeavor for Nestle, and their blatant disregard for Californians’ need for basic survival was best expressed by Nestle’s CEO and Chairman.

According to the former CEO and now Chairman of the largest food product manufacturer in the world, Nestle, corporations own every drop of water on the planet, and because he believes water is not a basic human right; if human beings get thirsty, they have to pay or die. It is the ultimate privatization insult to mankind, and worse because Nestle is intent on privatizing water the world over; a natural resource that falls from the sky and seeps into the Earth for man to use for survival. In the case of California, and other regions around the world, what precious little water remains for basic survival is being stolen by a filthy corporation to sell to those who can afford to survive, and they are being assisted by Native Americans claiming to be good stewards of the Earth. Maybe this is Native American vengeance on the white man for invading their sovereign land, massacring them, and sending the survivors to permanent interment camps with high-sounding names like “sovereign nations.” But that is another story altogether; this is about Nestle draining California’s water.

The Nestle Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water bottling plant is located on the Morongo Band of Mission Indians reservation and drains water from a Mojave Desert oasis at the base of the San Bernardino Mountains 85 miles from Los Angeles where just three inches of rain falls each year. Their little enterprise prevents water from seeping downhill to fill aquifers of nearby towns struggling for water during the drought, and prior to 2009, about when the drought began, Nestle submitted annual reports to local water districts detailing how much groundwater they were extracting for profit. Since the drought began, neither Nestle nor the Morongo tribe submitted any forms; likely because it would be bad for business to tell local residents how much of their precious water they are being forced to buy to increase Nestle’s profits.

Nestle already has a history of showing blatant disregard for the human race according to Corporate Watch. The company regularly barges into struggling rural areas and extracts groundwater to sell in bottles “completely destroying the water supply without any compensation,” and in fact “actually makes rural areas in the United States foot the bill.” However, Nestle is not focusing only on Americans’ water as reported by Corporate Watch that has documented Nestle and former CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe’s long history of disregarding public health and abusing the environment for profit to the tune of $35 billion annually from water bottle sales alone. Corporate Watch states that “Nestlé production of mineral water involves the abuse of vulnerable water resources. In the Serra da Mantiqueira region of Brazil, home to the “circuit of waters” park whose groundwater has a high mineral content and medicinal properties, over-pumping has resulted in depletion and long-term damage.”

One wonders if when the Morongo Band of Indians runs out of water themselves and is forced to buy water they allowed Nestle to deplete for profits, they will still consider themselves good stewards of the Earth or that Nestle is a “valued partner.” California is home to the largest Nestle water bottling operation near Mount Shasta that is suffering the drought as much as any other part of the state with nearby Shasta Lake unrecognizable as a lake. Still, the piece of human filth, Nestle CEO, condemned non-governmental organizations like the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations for perpetuating the “extremist idea that drinking water is a human right” that should not have a market price to enrich the Nestle corporation.

Although the extreme California drought is just one reason to take action against Nestle, the point is the giant corporation is pillaging a basic necessity for human life all over the world with little opposition and relative impunity. The company touts job creation as validation for draining the water supply dry and selling it back to thirsty Americans, but when they have exhausted the water supply, no amount of jobs or money will sustain life devoid of water. There is no end to the disregard for human life that corporations have made their overriding mission after profit taking, and at least in one California region, there is no possibility of holding a truly vile and inhumane corporation accountable for a crime against humanity; stealing their dwindling water supply and selling it back for profit because they set up shop in a sovereign nation inside drought-stricken California.

Ultra Pure Water

(video link)

People are always filtering, purifying, and even distilling their water to make it as pure as possible. Of course, it's a good idea to get rid of germs and toxins, but what if we achieved perfectly pure water, with nothing but H₂O? That might not be such a great idea. David Rees talked with a water scientist named Kim at ThermoFisher Scientific about the properties of pure water. Kim really needs a last name because she has the best line in the video.

As far as drinking ultra-pure water, it’s not something we need to worry about. The water made in this lab is not comparable to water available to the public. And drinking distilled water will only hurt you if that’s the only water you consume and you don’t make up the difference in minerals with the food you eat.

Why Do We Have Blood Types?

Why do 40% of Caucasians have type A blood, while only 27% of Asians do? Where do different blood types come from, and what do they do? More than a century after their discovery, we still don’t know what blood groups like O, A and B are for. Do they really matter?

Ziggy

Hundreds of bras missing after fence ransacked

The bra fence in the Cardrona Valley, New Zealand, has been ransacked and hundreds of bras were removed one night last week. The bras have been a feature of a farm fence just north of the Cardrona Alpine Resort entrance for about 15 years.
Operator of The Cardrona Horse Trekking and Quad Biking tours business behind the fence, Sean Colbourne, said he was disappointed a ''sneak thief'' was prowling around at night with a pair scissors taking the bras, many of them left by passing tourists. ''The next time someone tampers with it we will charge them with theft and trespass.
''We're not quite sure who's doing it or what their agenda is. I just find people sneaking around in the middle of the night with scissors is a little bit mischievous.'' Mr Colbourne said he had not complained to the police but was looking at ways to make the bra fence more secure. One possibility was to move it further away from the road on to the land where his business operates.
The original bra fence was started by Cardrona identity John Lee and revived by son Sam Lee last year, in memory of his late girlfriend, Danielle Cook, who had enjoyed the fun of contributing to the bra fence. Supporters have always maintained it is a bit of fun that puts the Cardrona on the map. Opponents have raised concerns about road safety. Senior Sergeant Allan Grindell, of Wanaka, said as no complaints had been laid with police they were not actively seeking a bra thief.

Chinese city has banned and destroyed 20,000 boxes of matches in bid to fight terror attacks

A city in China's far western region of Xinjiang has banned matches and destroyed more than 20,000 boxes of them as part of efforts to fight terror attacks.

Fukang, which sits near regional capital Urumqi, decided to remove all matches from circulation to ensure they are not used by "terrorist groups or individual extremists to carry out criminal activities."

Police destroyed 20,223 boxes of matches, which will ensure that the city maintains its current peaceful environment, a local government spokesperson said. The county police made the original announcement last week but it was only picked up by state media on Tuesday.
The announcement didn't say how the matches are used for criminal activity. China has been toughening its response after a spate of bloody incidents nationwide centred on Xinjiang, the traditional home of the muslim Uighurs. China has blamed attacks on Islamist separatists in the region, who, it says, want to establish an independent state there called East Turkestan.

Man arrested for allegedly stabbing and carving watermelon in a passive-aggressive manner

A Connecticut man has been charged with threatening after his wife told police he stabbed and carved a watermelon in a passive-aggressive manner.

Thomaston Police Chief Jim Campbell said Carmine Cervellino’s wife originally went to police on July 4 to report finding marijuana and drugs in a toolbox at the house.

The toolbox was not there when police responded and no charges were filed. When the woman later returned home, she found a watermelon on the counter with a butcher's knife in it, police said.
She told police that Cervellino, 49, came in soon after and carved the watermelon in a passive-aggressive manner, Campbell said. Cervellino was arrested on July 12 and charged with threatening and disorderly conduct. According to police the couple are in the process of going through a divorce.

Man faces charges after jumping into aquarium tank containing shark

A man is facing charges after jumping into a tank containing a shark at the New England Aquarium in Boston on Thursday evening.

Stephen Pellegrine, 51, of Quincy, Massachusetts, was arraigned in Boston Municipal Court on Friday on charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct after jumping into the tank, according to Jake Wark, a spokesman for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office.
Aquarium staff demanded that he get out of the water, but he swam around for “several minutes” before exiting, Wark said. “Fortunately the shark had already been fed,” Wark added. The four-storey tank is 26 feet deep, 40 feet wide and holds 200,000 gallons of salt water.
In addition to the shark, it includes a coral reef and hundreds of Caribbean animals, including sea turtles, stingrays, eels and fish. Pellegrine was held on $1,500 cash bail and ordered to undergo a drug and alcohol evaluation and to stay away from the aquarium. He is due back in court on July 23.

Random Photos

Didn't know granny was a biker chick now did you

A Rift Runs Through It

Iceland's Divergence Of The Plates

Thingvellir, Iceland: the landscape is wild and desolate but hauntingly beautiful. Yet the serene magnificence of the surroundings belies an astonishing fact. It is here as a result of massive, geological trauma.
This is one of the few places above sea level where you can see with your own eyes what happens when two major tectonic plates drift away from each other. In fact, Iceland owes its very existence to the tectonic processes which have played out along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for millions of years.

Clouds Flowing over the Rock of Gibraltar

)This is the Levanter Cloud, an unusual and beautiful cloud formation that appears on Gibraltar. That promontory rises high into the air before the Levanter, a wind that blows west out of the Mediterranean Sea. The frequent result is a heavy cloud cap resting over the mountain.

Daily Comic Relief

41 Facts About Dogs

(YouTube link)

There are plenty of things that dog lovers need to know, like how to care for them and make the most of your lives together. Beyond that, there are plenty of stories about dogs that are just plain interesting. In this week’s mental_floss video, John Green tells us stories about dog breeds, famous dogs in history, and even scientific research about dogs.

Glo-Brite

When Fish Go Deeper They Glow Brighter

A new study reveals that these fish fluoresce more in deep water, a technique that allows them to convert blue-green light into red or yellow light.

Whale Shark Hot Spot

Climate-Challenged Whale Sharks Flocking to Island Chain

Whale sharks are congregating to a new shark hot spot that's not too toasty or too cold. 

Sea Monsters

520-Million-Year-Old Sea Monster Unearthed in China

One of the first predators of its day, the creature sported compound eyes, body armor and two spiky claws for grabbing prey.

Imperiled Endangered River Dolphins

Dams Imperil Pakistan's Endangered River Dolphins

The Indus River dolphin's range has declined as a result of dams and irrigation projects, a new study shows.

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Trouble is - they've already had that meeting ...!

 

Carolina Naturally is read in 200 countries around the world daily.   

Colorful Fish Eggs and Potatoes, Yum ... !

Today is  -  National Caviar Day 
 

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Some of our reader today have been in:

The Americas

Hoschton, Tucson, Luverne, Wahiawa, Vinings and Suwanee, United States

Bogota, Medellin and La Calera, Colombia

Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Pocao De Pedras, Brazil

Santiago, Chile

L'ancienne-Lorette, Brampton, Fort Saint John, Toronto and Byward Market, Canada

Mexico City, Mexico

Europe

Czerwionka-Leszczyny and Warsaw, Poland

Stockhlom, Sweden

Velizy-Villacoublay, Cerny and Rouen, France

Riga, Latvia

Nuremberg, Rothe Erde and Konstanz, Germany

Sarajevo and Hadzici, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Reykjavik, Iceland

Tbilisi, Georgia

Timisoara, Romania

Treviso, Milan, Bari and Ravenna, Italy

Lisbon and Covilha, Portugal

Pavshino, Ryazan and Moscow, Russia

London, South Lambeth and Milton Keynes, England

Madrid and Torrent, Spain

Bratislava, Slovakia

Tallaght, Ireland

Bergen, Norway

Zhovtivody, Ukraine

De Haag, Netherlands

Asia

Medan, Jakarta and Palembang, Indonesia

Doha, Qatar

Melaka, Kuala Lumpur and Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia

Banadr Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam

Patna, Dhanbad, New Delhi, Mumbai, Bikaner, Chennai, Suratgarh, Kolkata and Amritsar, India

Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, Pakistan

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Bangkok and Ko Samui, Thailand

Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Singapore, Singapore

Harbin, China

Hanoi, Vietnam

Shizuoka, Japan

Tehran, Iran

Dhaka, Bangladesh

Africa 

Harare and Shurugwi, Zimbabwe

The Pacific

Cebu City and Makati, Philippines

Sydney, Australia

Today in History

1789		Robespierre, a deputy from Arras, France, decides to back the French Revolution.
1812		Great Britain signs the Treaty of Orebro, making peace with Russia and Sweden.
1830		Uruguay adopts a liberal constitution.
1861		Union and Confederate troops skirmish at Blackburn's Ford, Virginia, in a prelude to the Battle of Bull Run.
1877		Inventor Thomas Edison records the human voice for the first time.
1872		The Ballot Act is passed in Great Britain, providing for secret election ballots.
1935		Ethiopian King Haile Selassie urges his countrymen to fight to the last man against the invading Italian army.
1936		General Francisco Franco of Spain revolts against the Republican government, starting the Spanish Civil War.
1942		The German Me-262, the first jet-propelled aircraft to fly in combat, makes its first flight.
1971		New Zealand and Australia announce they will pull their troops out of Vietnam.
1994		In Buenos Aires, a massive car bomb kills 96 people.

Non Sequitur

Veteran's Wheelchair Falls Apart in Hardware Store, Employees Fix It Immediately

40 years ago, Michael Sulsona lost his legs to a landmine in Vietnam. For two years, he's been trying to get the Veterans' Administration to provide him with a replacement for the rickety old wheelchair that he's been using. The old chair finally collapsed while Sulsona and his wife were in a Lowe's hardware store on Staten Island, New York. Sulsona describes what happened next:

Three employees, David, Marcus and Souleyman jumped to my assistance immediately. They placed me in another chair while they went to work.
They took the wheelchair apart and replaced the broken parts and told me, "We're going to make this chair like new."
I left 45 minutes after closing hours in my wheelchair that was like new.
I kept thanking them and all they could say was, "It was our honor."

Virginia Man Claims Land To Make Daughter A Princess

We’ve posted before about Bir Tawil, a stretch of land between Egypt and Sudan that neither country wants. Maybe Jeremiah Heaton of Abingdon, Virginia, read about it then. Last winter, Heaton’s six-year-old daughter Emily asked him if she could be a princess. He said yes, and has worked since then to make it so. To that end, Heaton has claimed the 800-square-mile territory of Bir Tawil as his own, renaming it the Kingdom of North Sudan. He planted a homemade flag there on June 16, Emily’s seventh birthday. That makes him the king, and Emily a princess. Heaton has two other children, who would also be royalty.

Sheila Carapico, professor of political science and international studies at the University of Richmond, told the Bristol Herald Courier last week that Heaton would need legal recognition from neighboring countries, the United Nations or other groups to have actual political control of the land.

Heaton, who ran for Congress out of Virginia’s 9th district in 2012 and lost, plans to reach out to the African Union for assistance in formally establishing the Kingdom of North Sudan and said that he is confident they will welcome him. Representatives from the Egyptian and Sudanese embassies in Washington did not respond to requests for comment Saturday.

Bir Tawil, or The Kingdom of North Sudan, is all desert, but Heaton plans to turn it into an agricultural area, which should please both Egypt and Sudan.

Read about Heaton’s journey to his new kingdom at the Washington Post.

A Fed Up Obama Tells Congress, “Just do something.”

President Obama has had enough of repugican obstruction. He had a simple message for Congress during a speech in Virginia, “Just do something.”

The president said:

And the point is we could do so much more if we just rallied around a sense of economic patriotism that says, you know what, the parties compete, but every once in a while, we got to actually do some work, instead of worrying about elections, or trying to score points on cable TV. And we can start by investing in our country.

Because historically — it was Eisenhower who built the Interstate Highway System, working with Democrats and Republicans. This isn’t a partisan issue. And when we treat some basic investments as something that we do as Americans, when we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, things work and nobody can beat us. And that’s the spirit that all of you show here. That’s what I’m going to keep on fighting for every single day.

So I’m proud of you. I want you to keep on doing what you’re doing. We’re going to try to make sure Congress actually does as good of a job at what they’re supposed to be doing as you guys are doing on yours. If we do, then you’re going to have some parents who are getting home a little earlier. You’re going to have folks who aren’t going to have to go to the body shop quite as often. You’re going to be seeing millions of people across the country saving money at the pump. We’re going to see airline delays reduced, so when you plan that Thanksgiving trip, you’re not spending the whole time in the airport. All that can make a huge difference.

But the American people have to demand that folks in Washington do their job. Do something: That’s my big motto for Congress right now. Just do something. And if they don’t like the transportation plan that I put forward, at least come up with your own plan. And then we can compromise. But don’t just sit there and do nothing. We don’t have time. America is on the move.

It’s clear that the president wants to get the legislative process moving again. The problem is that repugicans have no incentive to do anything. The repugicans think they are going to take back the Senate, and there is little hope for Democrats to win back the House. In their view, doing nothing is the best political strategy. The only way they are going to move off of their do nothing position is if voters show that they are prepared to make repugicans pay a heavy price for their obstruction.

President Obama is fed up, and he correctly senses that the American people are fed up. A stagnant Congress is bad for the country. Things that need to be done are being ignored as House repugicans have made Benghazi investigations and lawsuits against the president their top priorities. In the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is so desperate to hang on to his seat that he won’t support any legislation.

The repugicans have paralyzed Congress, and it is up to voters to make our government function again by voting the obstructionists out of office.

The White House Smacks Down Darrell Issa By Refusing To Send Adviser To Testify

The White House is fighting back against Darrell Issa’s (r-CA) abuse of his subpoena power by refusing to send an administration adviser to testify at his hearing that is designed to drum up another Obama scandal.

Issa has been claiming for days that the White House is misusing taxpayer funds for partisan political purposes. As Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Issa unilaterally issued a subpoena for the testimony of David Simas, who is the director of the Office of Political Strategy and Outreach.

Issa claimed in a letter to White House counsel Neil Eggleston, “The Clinton White House, the shrub White House, and other administrations before them have all faced congressional oversight of political activity supported by taxpayer funds. Under this Administration, like previous Administrations, members of President Obama’s cabinet have committed violations of the Hatch Act, which draws a line between campaign and official business.”

Eggleston’s reply to Issa was very telling:

Democratic ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings detailed a briefing that was held  for the Oversight Committee, “The briefing was attended by nine repugican staff working for Chairman Darrell Issa, who issued a unilateral subpoena last Friday to compel testimony at tomorrow’s hearing from David Simas, a senior advisor to the President and director of this new Office, despite the absence of any evidence of inappropriate activity by Simas or this Office.”

A Democratic source told Roll Call that Issa didn’t bother to come to the briefing, “Guess who didn’t even bother to show-up? One guess. Correct, no Issa. I do think it’s fairly remarkable, that if Issa wants to be seen as genuinely caring about the issue (and not just cameras), that he didn’t even bother to attend. I would love to know what his staff says he was doing instead.”

Issa didn’t bother to show up for a briefing that the White House is holding for him, but he knows that the Obama administration is breaking the law. This is why Darrell Issa’s investigations are a partisan abuse of power. Issa has no evidence that any laws were broken. He only wanted the Obama adviser at his hearing tomorrow to gin up publicity for his new conspiracy.

The White House counsel said Simas has immunity, and can’t be compelled to testify. Issa has no evidence. His subpoena is based on his belief that the Obama administration is guilty. It is clear that the White House isn’t playing these games anymore. Democrats are engaging in a coordinated effort to knock down Issa and his conspiracies.

Issa has been on a subpoena rampage since John Boehner took his Benghazi toy away from him. The California repugican is trying to reclaim the spotlight with his increasingly desperate and abusive subpoenas. Darrell Issa is in full-blown tantrum mode and President Obama just sent him to bed without supper.

Bernie Sanders Sends Shudders Up Koch Spines By Explaining Why repugicans Attack The IRS

Sen Bernie Sanders exposed a dirty little secret that the Kochs and other wingnut billionaires don’t want you to know. The repugican attacks on the IRS are part of a deliberate strategy to help the Kochs buy our democracy.

Video:

Sen. Sanders said:

So when you see repugicans beating up on the IRS, when you see repugicans defunding or cutting back on funding for the IRS so there is less ability to monitor what these organizations are doing, this is not an accident. This is real goal, and let’s be very very clear. What the leadership of the repugican cabal wants, and you should talk to them about it. They won’t deny it. Is they want to end all campaign finance regulations. They don’t want to have to go around in this circle anymore.

What they want is the ability of the Koch brothers and others to be able to contribute as much money as they want directly into the candidates that they support, and that is the direction in which we are moving. So you weaken the IRS. You come up with the phony social welfare situation. You pass Citizens. You have a Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United on McCutcheon. It leads us directly into a situation will billionaires own and control the candidates that they support.

What Sen. Sanders explained in the video above is what the repugican cabal and the Koch brothers don’t want the American people to understand. The IRS scandal isn’t about the “targeting” of wingnut cabals. The scandal is a repugican attempt to scare the IRS off of looking into their dark money cabals and the billionaires who fund them. The repugicans are trying to protect their money machine.

The repugican cabal is extremely dependent on large donors for their funding. They don’t have the small donor base that fuels the Democratic Party. This is why repugicans are pushing for more unlimited contributions in politics. More unlimited contributions mean more direct spending by billionaires to buy their candidates, and when a billionaire owns a member of Congress, that member no longer works for the American people.

The repugican majority in the House is an example of a billionaire owned legislative body. House repugicans aren’t interested in passing legislation to extend unemployment benefits, help veterans, and create jobs. Their top priority is to take away programs that help the non-wealthy (Obamacare, Medicare, food stamps, school lunches, etc.) and replace them with tax breaks for the wealthy and deregulation.

Speaker John Boehner loves to refer to the House as the People’s House, but really it is a billionaire’s lounge. The Koch brothers and the other billionaires are trying to purchase our representative democracy. The last thing they want is for people to catch on to their newfound purchasing power.

The battle to preserve our democracy begins by making sure as many Americans as possible hear and understand the words of Sen. Sanders. Because the Koch brothers can buy candidates, but they can’t buy votes.

The repugicans Sneak Amendment Into Bill That Forces The Pentagon To Deny Climate Change

The new amendment prohibits both the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Army Corps of Engineers from acknowledging or spending even one penny "to design, implement, administer or…

Ever since repugicans, and teabaggers, took control of the House of Representatives in 2011, they have revealed their corporate loyalties, hypocrisy, devotion to the dirty energy industry, religious opposition to science, and abject hatred of the people they were elected to serve. Of course, the list of who repugicans serve over the American people is endless, but those specific items were encapsulated in one amendment snuck in at the eleventh hour in the House Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act that passed with undying support of the repugican caucus.

The amendment in question was inserted by David McKinley (r-WV) who continued his anti-science, hypocritical, dirty energy devotion, disregard for national security, and hatred of his constituency that he began last May. The new amendment is similar to McKinley’s budget amendment in May that forbade the Pentagon from acknowledging climate change exists despite the Department of Defense’s annual warning that addressing climate change is vital to protecting national security. The new amendment prohibits both the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Army Corps of Engineers from acknowledging or spending even one penny “to design, implement, administer or carry out specified assessments regarding climate change.”

According to McKinley, “Congress should not be spending money pursuing an ideologically driven experiment. Spending precious resources to pursue a dubious climate change agenda compromises our clean-energy research and America’s infrastructure,” McKinley is a typical repugican liar because the same spending bill forbidding the Energy Department and Army Corp of Engineers from spending to design, implement, administer, or carry out anything to do with climate change also slashed $100 million from the DOE’s budget for renewable and clean energy programs while increasing federal funding for coal and other fossil fuels. McKinley, and House repugicans, cannot have it both ways and say spending on climate change compromises “our clean energy research and infrastructure” while cutting $100-million from clean-energy research and prohibiting the DOE and Army Corps from designing or implementing infrastructure improvements to address anything regarding climate change.

The bill that passed Thursday night is a veritable dirty energy industry wish list of anti-environmental measures to thwart efforts to save energy, maintain clean air, and preserve precious water resources. McKinley’s amendment that every repugican voted for is best summarized as a House mandate that the federal government ignore climate change and the preponderance of climate science as well as severe droughts, wildfires, superstorms, flooding, and heat waves plaguing Americans, threatening national security, and harming the economy. McKinley’s remark that spending on preventing the deadly effects of climate change is a “dubious ideologically driven experiment” is typical rhetoric from the religiou-wingnuts' anti-science crusade, and as blatant a display of repugican hypocrisy Americans will ever witness.

If McKinley and House repugicans reject “spending precious resources” on something as crucial as national security, energy independence, and the nation’s economic well-being, then why are they spending millions to sue the President, giving billions-of-dollars in welfare to the dirty energy industry, or $700-million to the dirty religious industry? It must be part of the repugicans’ storied “prioritizing” where they spend Americans’ tax dollars; particularly on national security. It is noteworthy that when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton requested additional embassy security spending, repugicans not only rejected her request out of hand, they cut security spending by $300 million as a budget priority and then voted to “spend precious resources” for corporate tax breaks.

The repugican prohibition on acknowledging, or “spending precious resources” to address climate change is likely a continuation of the repugican cabal’s outrage against President Obama for directing the Environmental Protection Agency to cut carbon emissions in light of the National Climate Assessment reports that detailed the ongoing and extremely detrimental effects of climate change. It was less than a month ago that congressional repugicans threatened to shutdown the government if the EPA dared impose any of the President’s recommendations to curb carbon emissions driving climate change. At the end of 2103, repugicans attempted to insert an amendment in the budget banning the EPA from inspecting polluting industries or enforcing federal environmental regulations in the states to protect the dirty energy industry.

According to the Department of Energy, it is heavily involved with efforts to address climate change that Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said was “a top priority of the Energy Department.” He continued that “We develop new technologies and reduce the costs of renewables, environmental protection in natural gas production, carbon capture, and sequestration, really across the board. As global temperature rise, wildfires, droughts, and high electricity demand put stress on the nation’s energy infrastructure. And severe weather, the leading cause of power outages and fuel supply disruption in the United States is projected to worsen.” According to repugicans, the Energy Department addressing severe weather impacting America is nothing but “an ideologically-driven experiment” wasting “precious resources pursuing a dubious climate change agenda.”

Although repugicans are waging a ferocious war against any and all efforts to combat climate change, McKinley’s amendment will never get past the Senate or President Obama’s veto. One House Democrat, Mary Kaptur of Ohio said, “This amendment requires the Department of Energy to assume that carbon pollution isn’t harmful and that climate change won’t cost a thing, that’s nothing but a fantasy.” It may well be a fantasy, but it is more likely repugicans doing what comes naturally; protect the dirty energy industry. The repugicans cannot deny that climate change’s detrimental effects and devastation are already wreaking havoc on the people, national security, and the economy. Especially after warnings that states suffering critical record-breaking droughts like Arizona and California are likely to run out of water within two years due to climate change.

If nothing else, the amendment forbidding the DOE and Army Corps of Engineers from addressing the devastation of climate change epitomizes what any conscious American has learned is part and parcel of what it means to be a teabagger-repugican. It is inherent rank hypocrisy, blatant adoration and devotion to the dirty energy industry, opposition to spending on national security, religious rejection of science, disregard for the nation’s economic health, and blatant contempt for the American people; all fundamental requirements to be a congressional repugican.