Monthly Archives: October 2011

Dozens of settlers surround IDF patrol in West Bank and assault soldiers

open quoteDozens of Jewish settlers surrounded an IDF patrol vehicle on Wednesday evening near the Shilo settlement, setting up roadblocks and physically assaulting IDF soldiers.

The incident began after rumors circulated that the Gal Yosef illegal outpost is about to be evacuated. At approximately 9 P.M. the settlers erected roadblocks and blocked the entrance to the outpost with their cars.

An IDF patrol vehicle that arrived on the scene was blocked by settlers. The soldiers tried to turn back, but were stopped by more roadblocks.

The vehicle was then surrounded by a few dozen youth from nearby settlements. When the soldiers asked them to let the vehicle pass, one of the soldiers was punched in the face, prompting a violent clash between the two sides. Soldiers who were called to the scene were able to detain one of the attackers, but he managed to escape. close quote (Read more)

Feds To Legal Medical Marijuana Patients: You Don’t Have Second Amendment Rights. Period.

However, if pot users are also Mexican drug lords, then they’re not only allowed to carry guns, they are armed at U.S. taxpayer expense.

open quoteThe federal government, notably under the current administration, continues to paint itself into a corner politically speaking regarding Mr. Obama’s pre-election promises to ‘fix the problem with medical marijuana’.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) issued a memorandum on September 21 to all gun dealers in the United States for the expressed purpose of informing them that they MUST discriminate against lawful medical cannabis patients and DENY them their Second Amendment right to buy and possess a firearm for hunting and/or personal protection.close quote (Read more)

U.S. Post Office set to lose $8 billion this year

I guess it’s true that there are some thing which only government can do. For example, no private firm can ever come close to losing 8 billion dollars and stay in business.

open quoteThe Postal Service says the decline in letter-writing is “primarily driven by the adoption of the Internet as a preferred method of communication.”

The loss of that lucrative first-class mail is just one part of the agency’s financial troubles, along with payment of bills via Internet and a decline in other mail. The Postal Service is facing losses of $8 billion or more this year.

The loss to what people in the future know about us today may be incalculable.

In earlier times the “art” of letter writing was formally taught, explained Newbold.

“Letters were the prime medium of communication among individuals and even important in communities as letters were shared, read aloud and published,” he said. “Letters did the cultural work that academic journals, book reviews, magazines, legal documents, business memos, diplomatic cables, etc. do now. They were also obviously important in more intimate senses, among family, close friends, lovers, and suitors in initiating and preserving personal relationships and holding things together when distance was a real and unsurmountable obstacle.”close quote (Read more)

Fat in Japan? You’re breaking the law.

open quoteTOKYO, Japan — In Japan, being thin isn’t just the price you pay for fashion or social acceptance. It’s the law.

So before the fat police could throw her in pudgy purgatory, Miki Yabe, 39, a manager at a major transportation corporation, went on a crash diet last month. In the week before her company’s annual health check-up, Yabe ate 21 consecutive meals of vegetable soup and hit the gym for 30 minutes a day of running and swimming.

“It’s scary,” said Yabe, who is 5 feet 3 inches and 133 pounds. “I gained 2 kilos [4.5 pounds] this year.”

In Japan, already the slimmest industrialized nation, people are fighting fat to ward off dreaded metabolic syndrome and comply with a government-imposed waistline standard. Metabolic syndrome, known here simply as “metabo,” is a combination of health risks, including stomach flab, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that can lead to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

In the United States, the Senate and House health care reform bills have included the so-called “Safeway Amendment,” which would offer reductions in insurance premiums to people who lead fitter lives. The experience of the Japanese offers lessons in how complicated it is to legislate good health.

Though Japan’s “metabo law” aims to save money by heading off health risks related to obesity, there is no consensus that it will. Doctors and health experts have said the waistline limits conflict with the International Diabetes Federation’s recommended guidelines for Japan. Meantime, ordinary residents have been buying fitness equipment, joining gyms and popping herbal pills in an effort to lose weight, even though some doctors warn that they are already too thin to begin with.close quote (Read more)

Obama Gives $737 Million Dollar Loan To Solar Company Connected To Nancy Pelosi’s Brother In Law

open quote
STEP 1: Today the Department of Energy announced $1 Billion in new loans to solar companies…

DOE announced a $737 million loan guarantee to help finance construction of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a 110-megawatt solar-power-generating facility in Nye County, Nev. The project is sponsored by Tonopah Solar, a subsidiary of California-based SolarReserve.

STEP 2: SolarReserve is partnered with a company called PCG – Pacific Corporate Group…

STEP 3: The number two guy at Pacific Corporate Group is Ronald Pelosi. Coincidence???close quote (Read more)

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Green Jobs = Transferring public money to your political friends. (And the suckers think they’re saving the planet)

Mosque Set on Fire in Northern Israel

open quoteA mosque in an Arab village in the Galilee, northern Israel, was set on fire in the early hours of Monday morning in what police said was an arson attack, and its walls were defaced with Hebrew graffiti. The perpetrators were widely suspected of being Jewish extremists.

The fire caused “serious damage” to the mosque in the village of Tuba-Zangariya, according to Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman.

Later Monday, about 200 villagers began to march from the village along the main road toward Rosh Pina, a Jewish town. Mr. Rosenfeld said the police used tear gas to disperse the protesters after some threw stones at police officers and burned tires on the road.

There have been a number of similar arson attacks on mosques in West Bank villages in recent months, part of a campaign known as “price tag” in which radical settlers exact a price from local Palestinians or from the Israeli security forces for any action taken against their settlement enterprise. close quote (Read more)

“Fast And Furious” Just Might Be President Obama’s Watergate

open quoteWhy a gunrunning scandal codenamed “Fast and Furious,” a program run secretly by the U.S. government that sent thousands of firearms over an international border and directly into the hands of criminals, hasn’t been pursued by an army of reporters all trying to be the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein is a story in itself.

But the state of modern journalism aside, this scandal is so inflammatory few realize that official records show the current director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), B. Todd Jones — yes the individual the Obama administration brought in to replace ATF Director Kenneth Melson Aug. 30 in an effort to deflect congressional criticism — also has questions to answer about his involvement in this gunrunning scandal.

Fast and Furious was an operation so cloak-and-dagger Mexican authorities weren’t even notified that thousands of semi-automatic firearms were being sold to people in Arizona thought to have links to Mexican drug cartels. According to ATF whistleblowers, in 2009 the U.S. government began instructing gun storeowners to break the law by selling firearms to suspected criminals. ATF agents then, again according to testimony by ATF agents turned whistleblowers, were ordered not to intercept the smugglers but rather to let the guns “walk” across the U.S.-Mexican border and into the hands of Mexican drug-trafficking organizations.

When the Gunrunning Program Began

A Jan. 8, 2010 briefing paper from the ATF Phoenix Field Division Group VII says: “This investigation has currently identified more than 20 individual connected straw purchasers…. To date (September 2009-present) this group has purchased in excess of 650 firearms (mainly AK-47 variants) for which they have paid cash totaling more than $350,000.”close quote (Read more)

Israel approves plan to relocate 30,000 Bedouin from unrecognized villages

open quotePrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet on Sunday approved a plan to relocate tens of thousands of Bedouin from their unrecognized villages into settlements with official state status.

The plan emerges from the Prawer Report, drafted to find a solution to the problem of unrecognized villages in the Negev.

As part of the plan, some 20,000 to 30,000 Bedouon will be relocated to recognized settlements including Rahat, Khura and Ksayfe. The plan also includes financial compensation for those relocated, as well as alternate plots of land. The program is estimated to cost the state NIS 6.8 billion.

Opponents of the plan have accusing the government of evacuating people from their homes for no justified reason and against their will.

Bedouin representative called the decision “a declaration of war,” and some 150 members of the community gathered outside the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on Sunday to protest the decision.

“This stupid government will be responsible for a Bedouin Intifada in the Negev,” said Arab MK Taleb al-Sana, who took part in the protest.close quote (Read more)