Wednesday 08 April '09 show

• Privacy, which meant going to the privy in the founders' time.
• "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin.
• Article: Fujimori jailed for 25 years over role in killings.
• Article: Obama administration invokes ‘state secrets’ claim to defend Bush’s wiretapping program.
• Bumper Music: (You Gotta Walk) Don't Look Back, Peter Tosh & Mick Jagger.
• "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.

  The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

  No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

  No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken. *

  No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

  No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another; nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.

  No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.

  No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

  "
  Constitution of the United States, Article I, section 9.

  * modified by amendment 16

• "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
  Amendment III, Bill of Rights.
• Amendment IV
  The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Espionage Act.
  Constitution of the United States
• The right to privacy is protected in the constitution, but not using that word. Amendments 1, 4, 3. The argument you have nothing to hide is no good. A future government like Fujimori or China or Don Siegelman's case may decide that what you are doing is illegal. Obama is taking the same position as Bush on spying on you, and we do not have the right to sue under the Constitution to find out what is being searched upon. Conservatives are freaking out, but in a toxic way and leading to mass murder.
• Bumper Music: Policy of Truth, Depeche Mode.
• Privacy. wiretapping political enemies. The guys on the right are taking legitimate concern about overreaching power, reaching into conversations and associations.
• Clip:
  "Morris: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case" "
  Dick Morris.
• Clip:
  "The government is a heroin pusher, using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state. If you look at the logo on the Web site, it's really nice, do we have it? It's a child surrounded by a parent, which is then all surrounded by this nice little eagle. And I saw the eagle, and I like 'this is fantastic, I trust that eagle to come down swooping out of the sky and peck all of our eyes out."
  Glenn Beck.
• Clip:
  "A lot of these women look like post-op transvestites today ... The bigger problem is that we have a naked Marxist for president, here".
  Michael Savage.
• Article: Glenn Beck and the rise of Fox News' militia media, Eric Boehlert.
  "After a night of drinking, followed by an early-morning argument with his mother, with whom he shared a Pittsburgh apartment, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski put on a bulletproof vest, grabbed his guns, including an AK-47 rifle, and waited for the police to respond to the domestic disturbance call his mother had placed. When two officers arrived at the front door, Poplawski shot them both in the head, and then killed another officer who tried to rescue his colleagues.

  In the wake of the bloodbath, we learned that Poplawski was something of a conspiracy nut who embraced dark, radical rhetoric about America. He was convinced the government wanted to take away his guns, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Specifically, Poplawski, as one friend described it, feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon." (FYI, there is no Obama gun ban in the works.) The same friend said the shooter feared America was "going to see the end of our times."

  We learned that Poplawski hosted his own (failed) Internet radio show and that he visited the website of 9-11 conspiracy backer Alex Jones, who has been hyping the threat of a totalitarian world government for years. More recently, Jones has been warning listeners like Poplawski about The Obama Deception (that's the name of Jones' new documentary DVD) and how President Obama is bound to destroy America.

  ...

  I wonder if Glenn Beck knows who Jim Adkisson is. Adkisson made headlines on July 28, 2008, when he brought his sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and, after whipping it out of a guitar case, opened fire on parishioners while a group of schoolchildren performed songs up by the altar. Adkisson killed two people and wounded several others.

  Adkisson, a 58-year-old unemployed truck driver, brought 70 shotgun shells with him to the church and assumed he'd keep killing until the police arrived on the scene and shot him dead as well. Instead, some members of the congregation were able to wrestle him to the ground and hold him for police.

  When investigators went to Adkisson's home in search of a motive, as well as evidence for the pending trial, they found copies of Savage's Liberalism is a Mental Disorder, Let Freedom Ring by Sean Hannity, and The O'Reilly Factor, by Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. They also came across what was supposed to have been Adkisson's suicide note: a handwritten, four-page manifesto explaining his murderous actions. The one-word answer for his deed? Hate. The three-word answer? He hated liberals.

  "

  The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just Kill yourself. Do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals!

• Clip:
  Glenn Beck: "The only Frenchman I like is Wayne LaPierre. He's with us now from the NRA, the National Rifle Association, because the Second Amendment is under fire."

  ...

  Wayne LaPierre: "Well, we're all seeing one of the greatest freedom movements in the world right now. It's women, men, people all over this country, in one of the worst economies of our lifetime, going out and buying firearms. They are saying — I will protect my family, I will protect my neighborhood, and I will stand up for my rights. And that's happening everywhere."
  Glenn Beck," March 18, 2009.

• Right wing fear mongering is causing people to killing for what the consider socialism, while real rights such as the right to privacy are being contravened, including by the Obama administration. New tea party. Contact the Obama administration.
• Bumper Music: Politician, Cream.
• Power given is rarely given back.
• Micro epidemics of food poisoning. Salmonella. New E. Coli. Alzheimer's might be a prion disease. Downer cows. USDA, FDA, few inspections. About 1,000 cows out of 34 million were kept from the food supply last year.
• Guest: Alex Epstein, Ayn Rand Institute. How do we protect ourselves without agencies, or with them, since we can't test all our own food? Create private for-profit regulatory agencies.
• Bumper Music: A Fine, Fine Day, Tony Carey (video)
• Guest: Jaydee Hanson, Policy Analyst on Cloning and Genetics, Center for Food Safety. Alex Epstein said to create private for-profit regulatory agencies. When the tobacco industry was regulating itself it lied about the dangers of smoking. The asbestos industry knew about the dangers of asbestos in 1934, thanks to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but covered it up until the 1970s or 1980s. Side saddle gas tanks were not made more safe because the cost would outweigh the cost of compensation to victims. The food safety industry has regulated itself for 30 years, and we have seen increasing numbers of people sick from salmonella and E. Coli. The system is broken. The FDA and USDA. More than 98% of imported food, is not inspected; there have been a lot of cases of Chinese food being contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides, and food from South America is also contaminated, and so is some American food, which is also rarely inspected. The FDA may inspect a producer once every 5 years. They are calling for there to be one food safety agency instead of 15 which have other priorities, like the USDA promoting agriculture.

  Salmonella is a fecal bacterium, so why is it showing up in peppers and pistachios? Processing facilities do not do a good job of controlling rats and mice. It can live in mold. If the roof is leaky it can drip down from pigeons and starlings. If there is a pig or chicken or cattle operation next door it can run off onto your land. The people now running plants have grown up without regulation.

• Bumper Music: A Higher Place, Tom Petty.
• Article: Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican, John Gray.
• With a private food inspection system, some less popular foods, just like orphan drugs, would tend to be ignored. The profit motive is not enough.
• Libertarianism, objectivism.
• Bumper Music: A Face in the Crowd, Tom Petty.
• Bumper Music: Crazy, Gnarls Barkley.
• Article: Woman calls 911 over lack of shrimp in fried rice.
• Argentina. Chicago boys economics. IMF. Everything would have to be privatized if America needs funds from the IMF.
• Article: Madison’s Ghost on The Intoxicated Presidency - and its Corporate Support Group. Thom Hartmann, October 25, 2002 (Written on return from Argentina).
• Detection of bacteria in factories. Externalizing the costs. Universities, CDC.
• Consumer reports.
• We're disconnected from our food supply, the world around us.
• Article: Celebrity chef butchers live rabbit in front of young audience.
• Article: UK kids 'think bacon is from cows or sheep'.
• Should we film capital punishment? The Bush administration tried to keep us disconnected from the reality of war. During the first Bush administration a split screen showed the coverage of a casket being returned to on one side Bush senior and others laughing it up on the other, and so a new policy was announced saying that they could not film these things. It was reversed last week by the Obama administration. In Saudi Arabia they have public beheadings.
• Doctor Lorraine Day
• We have been removed from hunger, yet can "kill" on video games. Aboriginals hunting to eat typically do it in a very respectful fashion.
• Music: Ghost Chickens in the Sky, Sean Morey.
• Salmonella got in from pigeon droppings on the roof.
• Geeky science section.
• Article: Dog Tail-Chasing Linked to High Cholesterol.
  "A team of veterinarians has found a surprising link between compulsive tail-chasing in dogs and high cholesterol, according to a study published in the March issue of the Journal of Small Animal Practice.

  The finding adds to a growing body of evidence -- mostly from studies on humans -- that high cholesterol may be a marker for behavioral problems such as panic attacks and obsessive compulsive disorder, which could be expressed by frequent tail-chasing falls in dogs.

  "
• Article: Gaze follower.
  "Jackdaws, relatives of crows, can track human eye movements to help themselves find hidden food--a feat that most chimpanzees can't match. A team of behavioral biologists individually placed nine hand-reared jackdaws in an enclosure with a tasty mealworm hidden under one of two containers. A keeper would face the bird and move only her eyeballs to “point” to the container hiding the morsel. With that prompting, the jackdaw picked the correct container significantly more often than it would by random chance, as reported online 2 April in Current Biology. The ability may stem from the way jackdaw couples cooperate to find food--or it could be a product of the test-birds’ captive upbringing."
• Article: Ahh.
  "Why does scratching relieve an itch? In a paper published online 5 April in Nature Neuroscience, researchers provide a possible explanation. Certain neurons in the spinal cord of anesthetized monkeys increase their firing in response to an itch-inducing injection of histamine under the skin--but decrease their activity when the area is scratched. Scratching in the absence of itch, however, had no effect on the neurons' activity. The findings were previously presented at a meeting on itch in 2007, along with other research on the biology of itch. Read Science's coverage here."
• Article: Ouch!.
  "Think twice before ordering the crab legs. New research shows that crustaceans feel and remember pain. While previous studies have shown that the animals have an instinctual aversion to harm, a crab's reaction to pain may be more pensive, researchers report in the 27 March issue of Animal Behaviour. After receiving small electric shocks, hermit crabs living in higher-quality shells were less likely to evacuate their homes than those living in more mediocre real estate, suggesting the crustaceans were evaluating the level of pain they felt. In addition, crabs who had been zapped before were quicker to abandon their home for a new one than those who hadn't, indicating that the crustaceans remember being hurt."
• Article: Veteran.
  "Researchers have found the world's oldest known coral in deep waters off the coast of Hawaii. Using radiocarbon measurements, scientists estimate that Leiopathes glaberrima is about 4,265 years old. That makes it about twice as old as others in its species, but not quite as ancient as the world's oldest tree, a 4800-year-old bristlecone pine in California. It takes about 200 years for Leiopathes to grow 1 millimeter, the team reports online 23 March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That slow growth rate, the authors say, highlights the need to protect deep-sea ecosystems from damaging activities, such as bottom trawling and commercial harvesting for jewelry."
• Bumper Music: Who'll Be The Next In Line?, Kinks (video).
• Turmeric for skin cancer, Alzheimer's. Thom used curcumin from turmeric for his father's mesothelioma.
• Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News. The president is having a passover seder at the White House tomorrow. This could be a first. The Treasury Department announced that they are going to do a $5 billion program to help auto parts suppliers. Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuits. Leura Canary is still in post.