Fucking hippies

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

This reminds me: I have to get my flu shot!

According to an investigation by The Hollywood Reporter, wealthy and educated parents are forgoing vaccinations for their kids in some of the most elite and affluent areas of Los Angeles, California – all this while a potentially dangerous outbreak of whooping cough spreads through the L.A. area like “wildfire.”

In a stunning comparison, the vaccination rates in areas such as Malibu, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills are apparently on par with South Sudan.

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Across California, thousands of children and babies are coughing so violently that their bodies convulse, uncontrollably wheezing and fighting to breathe for weeks. Nearly 8,000 pertussis cases have been reported in 2014 to the state’s Department of Public Health as of Sept. 2, and 267 of those patients have been hospitalized, including 58 requiring intensive care.

Adults can contract the disease, but 94 percent of all cases reported statewide involve children — and the youngest suffer the most. So far this year, three infants under 2 months of age have died statewide from pertussis, a disease commonly known as whooping cough (named for the high-pitched sound that kids make when they inhale after coughing).

L.A.’s Children’s Hospital has seen 72 pertussis patients so far this year. Many of these children suffer broken ribs because the coughing is so violent.

“A number of them have been in the ICU and very, very sick,” says infectious disease specialist Dr. Jeffrey Bender. “They cough so hard, it turns into vomiting and broken ribs; they end up intubated, to ventilate their lungs.”

Israel’s NSA scandal

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

So that’s how it happened. The Israelis have been blackmailing gay Palestinians to force them to be informants (always the hallmark of a democratic nation, I say!):

WASHINGTON — IN Moscow this summer, while reporting a story for Wired magazine, I had the rare opportunity to hang out for three days with Edward J. Snowden. It gave me a chance to get a deeper understanding of who he is and why, as a National Security Agency contractor, he took the momentous step of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents.

Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way.

Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”

It appears that Mr. Snowden’s fears were warranted. Last week, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 — many still serving in the reserves — accused the organization of startling abuses. In a letter to their commanders, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the head of the Israeli army, they charged that Israel used information collected against innocent Palestinians for “political persecution.” In testimonies and interviews given to the media, they specified that data were gathered on Palestinians’ sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions and other private matters that could be used to coerce Palestinians into becoming collaborators or create divisions in their society.
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Kumquats

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

IMG_4908

Because if we acknowledged that Israel has illegal nukes, we’s look pretty silly going after other Middle Eastern nations for the same thing, amirite?

Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Former CIA director Robert Gates said so during his 2006 Senate confirmation hearings for secretary of defense, when he noted — while serving as a university president — that Iran is surrounded by “powers with nuclear weapons,” including “the Israelis to the west.” Former President Jimmy Carter said so in 2008 and again this year, in interviews and speeches in which he pegged the number of Israel’s nuclear warheads at 150 to around 300.

But due to a quirk of federal secrecy rules, such remarks generally cannot be made even now by those who work for the U.S. government and hold active security clearances. In fact, U.S. officials, even those on Capitol Hill, are routinely admonished not to mention the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal and occasionally punished when they do so.

The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world’s “worst-kept secrets” dates from a political deal between the United States and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny — and occasional disapprobation — directed at the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.

But the U.S. policy of shielding the Israeli program has recently provoked new controversy, partly because of allegations that it played a role in the censure of a well-known national laboratory arms researcher in July, after he published an article in which he acknowledged that Israel has nuclear arms. Some scholars and experts are also complaining that the government’s lack of candor is complicating its high-profile campaign to block the development of nuclear arms in Iran, as well as U.S.-led planning for a potential treaty prohibiting nuclear arms anywhere in the region.
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Hits the nail on the head

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Sen Bernie Sanders in Iowa talking Presidential run

Charlie Pierce on the media bobbleheads’ attack on Bernie Sanders:

Bernie Sanders won’t be president? No kidding, Bob. What was your first freaking clue? But, as I said, here’s the thing. Chris Christie won’t be president, either. Rand Paul won’t be president, either. Nobody’s out there in 2014 reminding their supporters that they’ll have to come to their senses some day. There is nobody telling Martin O’Malley’s supporters that they all should lay in some “READY FOR HILLARY” buttons against that inevitable day when the campaign craters. It is not a disqualifying flaw in a candidate two years before the election that the candidate is unlikely to win — or, even, that the candidate is very unlikely to win — because, if it were, nobody would be qualified to run. This is all understood, if rarely spoken, by the people who judge such things. But, so far, it’s a standard that has been openly applied only to Bernie Sanders. (Jesus, there are reporters out there who still are seriously talking about bringing back Willard Romney.) Why is it that Bernie Sanders is only in this to “push the dialogue to the left,” while Ted Cruz, who is a fking nut six ways to Sunday, is running because he has a “substantial constituency within the party”?

What is going on, I believe, is not an effort to marginalize Sanders but, rather, to marginalize what he’s talking about, because making a presidential election purely about class is something we don’t do any more. It really isn’t funny that Sanders talks incessantly about “the middle class,” because people who perceive themselves as middle class are finding themselves broken and sinking into poverty. Income inequality, and its pernicious effects on our people and our politics and our entire culture, is worth discussing, in detail, in a national election, and if Bernie Sanders wants to be monomaniacal on the subject, so what? Rudy Giuliani got months of great press as a potential president out of what Joe Biden famously called, “A noun, a verb, and 9/11.” Nobody accused Giuliani of running merely to push the conversation to the right, or into drag, or whatever. I’m old enough to remember 1979, when the smart money thought Ronald Reagan a superannuated joke. Right now, the 2016 election is nothing more than a vague national conversation about what’s important. If it’s all the same to everybody, for the moment, I’ll treat Bernie Sanders as a potential president the same way I’d treat Hillary Clinton or any of the others, thanks. It’s fking September of 2014. Nothing else makes sense.