". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
The White House moved to enforce tightened sanctions against Iran on Monday because of the country’s suspect nuclear program, freezing all property of the Central Bank of Iran, other Iranian financial institutions and the Iranian government in the United States.
The new restrictions also raised new warnings to financial institutions in other nations that they could face big penalties in the United States if they did business with Iran’s central bank. 
(Read more)
U.S. companies, facing slowing markets and rising costs around the world, are taking a new look at their home market.
With growth slowing in China and a slump gripping much of Europe, companies are adding capacity in the U.S., replacing aging equipment and even moving overseas production back from low-cost labor markets, a sign that corporate America could be poised to take a bigger role in the economic recovery. (Read more)
Analysis by Patrick Barron: Dear Sirs:
Perhaps that light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. There is another interpretation to the report that some US companies are “bringing business home”. It is that the worldwide economy is shrinking and is shedding layers of specialization as a result. Austrian business cycle and capital theory explains that an expanding economy–which, of course, does not recognize political borders–requires the establishment of new, more specialized stages of production, which can only be financed with new, real capital. If you became poorer and could no longer afford to pay the neighbor kid to mow your lawn, would you consider it a good thing that you were repatriating this toil to yourself?
Reasons this is pathetic:
1- Aside from prisoners, soldiers are the people over whom the government has the most direct control. They can’t even prevent
2- A fat Army represents the bureaucratization of the military.
3- Gives Michelle Obama more opportunities to talk about obesity as a national security issue.
4- Weight loss injection do NOT need a government subsidy. Any company that develops this stands to make a fucking fortune.
Officials for the US Army are worried that its soldiers are getting to fat and to combat that issue they plan on injecting soldiers with fat.
While it might seem odd to think that fat injections can help soldiers lose weight there are actually two types of fat, the first is white adipose tissue which causes weight gain while the second is brown adipose tissue which actually helps lose weight.
A recent study has found that brown adipose tissue can burn up to 250 calories in a three hour period and even more special is the fact that it uses conventional fat cells to fuel it’s work, burning energy from those cells. The study also found that exercise can help create additional brown fat cells.
Researchers are now attempting to create the brown adipose cells in a laboratory at which point they will be injected into overweight soldiers.
If you aren’t in the Army and you want weight loss injections you might be in luck, a Boston-based company is already working on a commercial treatment.
In the Army’s researcher note in which they granted money to examine the use of brown adipose tissue they wrote:
“Obesity and its associated metabolic complications…are becoming increasingly prevalent in military personnel. Increasing [brown fat] by about 50 grams in obese patients could induce strong weight loss and improve metabolic status.”
If all goes as planned researchers will isolate brown adipose progenitor cells which they will then use to generate new adipose cellsin the lab. If all goes as planned soldiers will receive “transplantation therapy” to shed their extra pounds. (Read more)
For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials’ neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year.
. . . .
It is curious that the world already confronts over 100 Islamic bombs: those possessed by the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It is even more curious that Pakistan may have had a maximum of 30 to 50 such weapons at the time of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on this country, which resulted in a shotgun marriage between Washington and Islamabad. A decade of partnership with the United States netted Pakistan about $20 billion in aid money and at least 50 more nuclear devices; anyone who knows anything about the fungibility of money will conclude that the United States partially funded Pakistan’s nuclear buildup, knowingly or not. Pakistan’s government has also been credibly linked to sponsorship of terrorist organizations that have operated outside its territory. But Iran, we are told, is different. A window is closing, and it is closing not in two years, but in six months.
. . . .
the government of Israel is attempting to force the pace with increasingly hyperbolic predictions. It is also evidently manipulating Congress (e.g., the director of Mossad meeting with the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee last week). Whether it is sources in Tel Aviv, sources in Washington, or both, that are feeding Iran stories to the US news media is unclear. Whoever they may be, they are playing much of the press – The Washington Post and CBS News are standout examples – like a Stradivarius. In Pentagon-speak, this is known as “prepping the psychological battlefield.”
(Read more)
Mossad officials are training Iranian dissident activists to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientists, a NBC News report citing U.S. officials said on Thursday. The report noted, however, that Washington was not directly involvement in the alleged attacks.
The report by NBC News followed Iranian accusations that Israel and the U.S. had been orchestrating attacks against Iranian scientists and military officials associated with Iran’s nuclear program. (Read more)
Health experts in Portugal said Friday that Portugal’s decision 10 years ago to decriminalise drug use and treat addicts rather than punishing them is an experiment that has worked.
“There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” said Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, a press conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the law.
The number of addicts considered “problematic” — those who repeatedly use “hard” drugs and intravenous users — had fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people, Goulao said. (Read more)