Israeli daily Haaretz unloads on extremists like the six Israeli citizens who murdered Mohammed Abu Khdeir. To merely note that Haaretz suggested they were "vermin" would be to cheat you of experiencing how brilliantly the metaphor unfolds in the second paragraph of its editorial. It's appalling that it takes courage to say things like this, and it's no less appalling that those of us who criticize Israel have their loyalty questioned routinely, as if telling your friend they're screwing up is no more and no less than a complete betrayal.
Ellen Brown describes how local governments could ameliorate the harm caused by our ongoing foreclosure crisis. Long story short: cities can use eminent domain power to "buy the bad mortgages at fair market value and then reset them to current value," or counties can sue the MERS database -- you remember, the database responsible for the "robosignings" that routinely violated state and federal law? -- and then, when MERS can't produce the required transfer records, states can claim the resulting orphaned properties. Then we'll have to press our local governments to do the right thing, but all I ask is a fighting chance.
British gay activist Julie Bindel opines that the gay rights movement has gotten too commercial. Lest this sound like a complaint about post-Peter Gabriel Genesis, Ms. Bindel notes that focusing on corporate sponsorship doesn't necessarily create a society "based on equality" or one that opposes consumerism and misogyny, and adds that the earliest gay rights activists held that marriage itself was itself an "oppressive, patriarchal regime." She's right to be suspicious of corporate involvement, and right to suggest that gays still have a long road ahead -- and yet I still presume that what changes the world also preserves the world, that successful movements have vigorous radical and conservative elements.
Pentagon has invested $40 million into "brain implants" that will supposedly help our PTSD soldiers restore their memories. That could be a big deal -- but if our government knows what neurologists know (which they know from reading their emails, amirite?), then they also know that neurologists can't say for sure you can even "stimulate the brain's memory centers" in this way, which leads me to suspect, naturally, that our government has some other aim. In any case, best to ameliorate the problem by not fighting stupid wars in the first place.
Finally, Kentucky state legislator suggests that climate change is a hoax because "the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here" and "there are no coal mines on Mars." Never mind that the average temperature of Mars is 138 degrees lower than that of Earth; never mind, even, that he did the helicopter dance in front of us by saying "(n)obody will dispute" the falsehood he spewed forth -- saying similar conditions exist in two places and supposing they could have only one cause is bad argument, and the anti-science crowd uses it a lot (cf. when they say the Earth has heated in the past, as if there's only one way to heat a planet).
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