Category Archives: Profiteering

UK grants first license for GM embryos

Britain has given the green light to scientists to modify the genes of human embryos for research. Critics say it raises ethical questions over the future of “designer babies.”

Source: UK grants first license for GM embryos

Money, get back.
I’m all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it’s a hit.
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit.
I’m in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.

Money, it’s a crime.
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re
giving none away.

Russia-OPEC meeting flagged to limit oil production | News | DW.COM | 29.01.2016

Russia may attend an upcoming meeting with world’s leading oil producing nations over low oil prices. Moscow says Saudi Arabia has proposed global production be cut to reduce a supply glut and boost sinking prices.

Source: Russia-OPEC meeting flagged to limit oil production | News | DW.COM | 29.01.2016

Armed Occupiers at Oregon Refuge Rejected Offers to Leave or Negotiate | Southern Poverty Law Center

“There doesn’t have to be bloodshed in our community,’’ the Harney County sheriff said.Those who “have issues with the way things are going in our government” have a responsibility as citizens to act in an appropriate manner, Ward said. “We don’t ‘arm up’ and rebel,” he said, but rather should “work through the appropriate channels.”“This can’t happen anymore,” he said in a halting voice. “It can’t happen in America, and it can’t happen in Harney County.”Bill Williams, the U.S. attorney for Oregon, who traveled from Portland to Burns for the mid-day press conference, told reporters the community of Burns and Harney County clearly have been “disrupted by the armed occupation.”“We continue working toward resolution and will do so with the primary goal of restoring normalcy to this community,” the state’s top federal law enforcement officer said in his first public comment on the Malheur occupation.The arrests came a week after Oregon Gov. Kate Brown spoke publicly for the first time about the Malheur occupation after being told by federal officials to remain silent as the FBI said it was taking a “deliberate and measured” response without initially setting up roadblocks.Turning up the heat, the Oregon governor called the White House, the FBI director and the U.S. Attorney General, demanding that the FBI take action and “move quickly to end the occupation and hold all of the wrongdoers accountable.” The following day, an FBI negotiator made contact with Ammon Bundy via cell phone as news reporters listened in on a road near the Burns airstrip where the FBI established a command post. But those negotiations went nowhere when Ammon Bundy wouldn’t participate in a follow-up session with the FBI negotiator.Word of Finicum’s death lit up social media. When the two vehicles were stopped, “everyone obeyed orders to surrender except” Finicum and Bundy’s brother, Ryan Bundy, who was shot and wounded, CNN reported.Already, antigovernment and militia groups — including the Bundy family that was behind a still-unresolved standoff with federal authorities in 2014 — are spouting conspiracy theories that Finicum was unarmed, had his hands up and was shot and murdered.

Source: Armed Occupiers at Oregon Refuge Rejected Offers to Leave or Negotiate | Southern Poverty Law Center

“Black Americans for a Better Future” Super PAC 100% Funded by Rich White Guys

Mercer, co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies on Long Island, is best-known politically for donating $11,000,000 to Keep the Promise I, a Super PAC backing Ted Cruz’s presidential run.Beyond Mercer’s support of Black Americans for a Better Future and Ted Cruz, Mercer has a long and peculiar history of donations to political and philanthropic causes.The Mercer Family Foundation has given over $1.4 million to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, which is stockpiling huge amounts of human urine to “revolutionize the evaluation of personal chemistry.” In 2010 Mercer spent $600,000 in an effort to elect OISM’s co-founder Arthur Robinson to Congress. (OISM is eager to collect as much urine as possible, so if you would like to donate a sample of your own, the details are available here.)BABF appears to exist solely as a vehicle for Washington, D.C., consultant Raynard Jackson, who is African-American. Jackson is quoted on his firm’s website stating that “You have a fundamental right to pursue business interests with the least amount of interference from the government.” Jackson has elsewhere accused Barack Obama of “relentless pandering to homosexuals.”

Source: “Black Americans for a Better Future” Super PAC 100% Funded by Rich White Guys

Fervor in Oregon Compound and Fear Outside It – The New York Times

Unfamiliar people have been stalking refuge employees, idling outside their homes and questioning them at some of the few grocery stores in Burns, said the sheriff, Dave Ward. “While not direct physical threats,” he said in a statement recently, “these activities are clearly designed to try to intimidate.”Tensions escalated over the weekend when another band of outsiders arrived at the refuge’s entrance, toting long guns and promising to act as liaisons between law enforcement officials and the occupiers at Malheur. When the occupiers rebuffed the group, the newcomers headed to the county courthouse, surrounded it and demanded to meet with the sheriff. He acquiesced, but nothing came of the meeting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyInside the occupied compound, life has settled into a sort of giddy war-room-style routine, one that mixes the mundane — laundry, snowball fights, nap time for the children — with bellicose talk of facing down federal agents and heading off what some people holed up in the compound say is a government plan to force all Americans to move to cities by 2040.“We expect the federal government to voluntarily step back, observe the Constitution and back off,” Ryan Bundy, who is leading the occupation with his brother Ammon, said in an interview at the compound. “They better back off,” Mr. Bundy continued. “If they don’t, then this is going to continue to happen.”PhotoZoey Justus, 9, came with her parents to meet the occupiers at the wildlife refuge. Credit Julie Turkewitz/The New York TimesOn Tuesday, the occupiers emerged once again at the entrance to the refuge, and a spokesman for the group, LaVoy Finicum, a rancher in his mid-50s from Arizona, stood before the microphone to announce that the protesters would travel to town on Friday evening “to explain to the community why we are here and when we will be leaving.”The refuge sits about 30 miles from Burns, in a remote area past snow-covered ranches and a single restaurant labeled “saloon.” The Bundy brothers, sons of a Nevada rancher named Cliven Bundy who made national news in 2014 for facing down the federal government over grazing fees on public lands, say they came here to support Dwight L. Hammond and his son Steven D. Hammond, who have been jailed for arson for setting fires that burned federal lands. However, the Hammond family and other local ranchers have said they do not welcome the gesture.The protesters, most of them from outside Oregon, have blocked off the entrance road with a conscripted government vehicle, and each morning they haul out a photo-ready horse named Hellboy for a quick news conference with reporters. The landscape is surveyed 24 hours a day by a rotating cast of armed watchmen who climb into a fire tower with broken windows.Each morning at 4, a man named Duane Ehmer takes Hellboy on a pre-dawn inspection of the refuge, an 1860 cavalry pistol clipped to his hip. “I’m looking for anybody that ain’t supposed to be there,” he said.PhotoAmmon Bundy, left, one of the occupation leaders, and one of his sons at the wildlife refuge on Saturday night. Credit Julie Turkewitz/The New York TimesDeeper inside, down an icy, tree-lined road, the group has seized about a dozen buildings, and the Bundy brothers have commandeered the cluttered office of Linda Sue Beck, a government biologist who had been leading a war on invasive carp before the occupiers took over.The heart of the protest, however, is a quarter-mile from the biologist’s office, at a bunkhouse with bedrooms and a large kitchen where women marinate chicken, grill salmon, bake brownies and organize a stockroom that swelling with donations from around the nation. To slip in, a reporter just has to ask.“We are here because we are needed. We were asked to come,” said Debra Bass, 61, a Nevadan who is running the kitchen. Speaking of Harney County ranchers, she said, “Our hope is to lift them up and give them the courage to fight back.”On any given day, there appeared to be about 25 people on the compound, though the number varies with visitors. The Justus family was visiting from Baker City, Ore., where they say they have been frustrated by management coming from Washington, D.C., including a plan they said would close hundreds of miles of roads in their area. “It’s like New York asking me to run a subway,” Mr. Justus said. “It doesn’t make sense.”Other visitors included Matt Wandersee, 26, a barber from Texas; Kristi Jernigan, 44, who described herself as a Christian missionary from Tennessee; and Paul Nelson O’Leary, an Idahoan who came dressed as one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Source: Fervor in Oregon Compound and Fear Outside It – The New York Times

James Lovelock: ‘enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan’ | Environment | The Guardian

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose – that’s what people want.”

Source: James Lovelock: ‘enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan’ | Environment | The Guardian

 

I’d like to think he is wrong, I really do. I think, however, that he is right and that we are already past the tipping point for changes that will force those left, after all all the eco-disasters to find a way of living in nature in a way that will enable us not to kill millions of humans because of shortsightedness, hubris and delusion.

Tearful Obama, Announcing Gun Control Steps, Condemns Shootings – The New York Times

As tears streamed down his face, President Obama on Tuesday condemned the repeated spasms of gun violence across America as he announced new executive actions intended to reduce the number of mass shootings, suicides and killings that have become routine in the nation’s communities.Speaking in the East Room of the White House surrounded by gun control activists and the families of gun victims, Mr. Obama broke down as he spoke about the young children shot to death in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.“First graders,” he said, his eyes drifting to a distant place and becoming red with tears. The president wiped his eye and paused to regain his composure. “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad,” he said.

Source: Tearful Obama, Announcing Gun Control Steps, Condemns Shootings – The New York Times

DuPont’s deadly deceit: The decades-long cover-up behind the “world’s most slippery material” – Salon.com Ohio screwed again by upstream polluters!

On October 7, after less than a day of deliberations, the jury found DuPont liable for Bartlett’s cancer, agreeing with the defendant that the company had for years negligently contaminated her drinking water supply in Tuppers Plain, Ohio with a toxic chemical formerly used to make its signature brand of nonstick coating: Teflon.

Source: DuPont’s deadly deceit: The decades-long cover-up behind the “world’s most slippery material” – Salon.com

Rail Industry Again Given More Time to Install Safety System – The New York Times – Green light to risk killing more people in exchange for campaign funds!

When Congress in October gave railroads extra time to install a badly needed speed-control system, officials at the Federal Railroad Administration vowed to move aggressively to make sure the safety technology would be in place by the end of 2018, the new deadline.This month, Congress struck again. Tucked into a 1,000-page transportation law signed Dec. 4 is new language that could effectively extend the deadline until the end of 2020. And positive train control, a technology that safety advocates say could have prevented the deadly Amtrak crash in Philadelphia in May, could stay on the shelf even longer.

Source: Rail Industry Again Given More Time to Install Safety System – The New York Times

9-year-old schoolboy with brain tumour is first to have testicular tissue frozen to save fertility – Telegraph – {Crass commercialization, exploitation, and experimentation on children!}

“Tissue freezing gives children hope not just for the future but it also means that they suddenly believe they are going to survive their cancer.”They have the same options as all their peers. It makes a big difference to them.”The NHS does not fund the freezing of testicular tissue but money from fertility firm IVI has helped boost the clinical service in Oxford so patients can access it for free.Dr Lane said she hopes to be able to secure NHS funding for testicular tissue freezing but is still gathering the data needed to put to bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).Martin Ledwick, Cancer Research UK’s head cancer information nurse, said the new procedure is promising and gives hope to young cancer patients.He said: “Thousands of young people are diagnosed with cancer every year so finding ways to preserve their chance of having a family later in life is a really important part of their treatment.”

Source: 9-year-old schoolboy with brain tumour is first to have testicular tissue frozen to save fertility – Telegraph