SAR #13164

I've always wanted to be part of a grand experiment, just not this one.

For The Morale Of Some Of The Troops: The Senate, under the leadership of Carl Levin (D-MI) has decided that rape by fellow soldiers and superiors is good for the morale of the troops and that the victims should shut up and let the Chain of Command continue to ignore the problem. Military sexual assaults are at an all time high. Prosecutions are at an all time low. What's the problem?

Wanted: If Snowden is to be painted a villain, it must be assumed that the information he provided has done a measure of demonstrable harm - which would be plausible if our enemies had no idea that NSA was tracking their communications. Which isn't.

Equality: Under Obama, the leveling of the nation's economic horizon has accelerated to the point than now at least 50% of the population is “considered poor or low-income.”

Correcting the Record:Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) held forth on the Senate floor for nearly 13 minutes. In Spanish. It is being marked as “the first time a senator had addressed the legislative body entirely in a foreign language.” Although just how foreign Spanish is these days is debatable.

Dueling Headlines: The IEA says the world is heading for a glut of refined petroleum products, while OPEC reports boosting its production to a seven month high and another office of the IEA predicts that the demand for OPEC crude will fall. Questions?

Oldie/Goodie: The attraction of austerity is that it fits a well known story line: living well is not a part of God's plan and must be punished. Excessive good times – a boom in say, housing – must be 'paid for' by suffering, preferably by the downtrodden so as not to inconvenience the owners. But an economy is not a morality play (assuming having the poor suffer for the sins of the rich is somehow moral) . Recessions are not inevitable, recessions happen when, for whatever reason, demand dries up. The cure, of course, is to increase demand.

Doom: BP reports that coal is the world's fastest growing source of global warming fossil fuel.

Check The Rigging: No, it's not a sailboat, it's the economy, silly. We are all simply dumbfounded that it has taken this long for the powers that be to get around to “consider opening a probe” into the decade-long manipulation of foreign-exchange rates. The culprits are the usual bunch of leading financial institutions. What? You thought Tommy down at the Grab and Run was doing it?

Factoid: At least half of American children are expected to be on food stamps before they are 18, assuming the Republicans stop whittling away at the program.

Chosing Sides: There is a real scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, simple observation has shown that austerity does not work and stimulus does, and nearly all the developed nations operate successful universal health care systems for their peoples. These are not liberal issues, there is no issue to them; these are observable realities. That the conservative right denies them says volumes about their contact with reality, but reality continues to ignore their ideology. So should we.

Impartiality: A study funded by Google has found that moving computer services to The Cloud would save a lot of energy. Raise you hand if you didn't know that Google is a major provider of cloud computing.

The Parting Shot:

Maypop/Passion Flower, Passiflora incarnata