Would you believe Arsenic,Silicone breast implant filler, and rat hair, click the Source.

Stop watching TV an read People.

[SOURCE: Anna Brones | UK Guardian | 13 May 2013]

Farm laborers in Australia make much more than American ones. And yet they still have a functional agricultural sector. It turns out that allowing companies to import an unlimited number of foreign workers desperate to work at a wage of epsilon will create shitty working conditions and low wages!

Labor costs as a percentage of consumer cost of most fruits and veggies are pretty tiny. Even for fruits like raspberries, they're on the order of 15-20%, and for most crops they're much lower. You could double or triple labor prices and, even if all the costs are passed off to consumers and there are no productivity boosts, there still wouldn't be particularly large increases in produce prices.

From Paul Krugman

Noah Smith recently offered an interesting take on the real reasons austerity garners so much support from elites, no matter hw badly it fails in practice. Elites, he argues, see economic distress as an opportunity to push through “reforms” — which basically means changes they want, which may or may not actually serve the interest of promoting economic growth — and oppose any policies that might mitigate crisis without the need for these changes:

Talking to a moron is like a circle trying to explain a radius to a square. What do you mean all points equidistant from the center? A square has no idea what that means.

From Atrios

Lots real scandals out there, just not ones our Villagers care much about. Wrongful foreclosures, massive long term unemployment, bankster fraud.

Edited talking points. That's the one that got them.

Also:

• Wisconsin Rethuglican governor Scott Walker has been a running soap opera of scandal for the last two years
• The Offshore bank account scandal !!!!!!! (See ... I told you they'd bury the real scandal with something else.)
• Various non-profit political groups that filter and funnel money into localities and states to circumvent the local laws against outside money
• The on-going revolving door between appointed staff and bureaucrats and legislators who serve the interests of the corporations that hire them for large salaries after their brief interim in government
• The ongoing illegality of Guantanamo and the current massive hunger strike where almost every single "prisoner" is having to be feed intravenously

Yep, plenty of scandals abound for the press to do its job and educate the people. But that's not the purpose of the "mainstream" press. The "mainstream" press creates the normative background that crowds out other facts and topics that occur within the reality of the now. This is how the public is "managed" and "massaged".

You want a scandal. How about when Team Bush fucked up the "war effort" so poorly that they forgot to organize the distribution of food and collection of the mail because they outsourced everything to private insider groups under the guiding philosophy that the "free market" would automatically supply the troops with their food and bring them their mail. American soldiers were having to get their food from Italian troops because the food their "free market" distribution system was getting them was often rancid and unedible. The privatized mail delivery system would drop the mail at a few central locations and expect troops to come get their own mail, sometimes a hundred miles away. And soldiers were complaining of the pilfering of the mails. The fly-by-night corporations set up by the "free market" entrepreneurial insiders were only out to make a quick buck. They were unwilling to invest in a business model that provided quality efficient services. It didn't happen. Once again privatized government failed.

But at least they proudly sang the God Bless America and put a metal flag pin on their lapel.

Now that story never became a scandal. I heard it on a radio show and have remembered it ever since. I think there was a small New York Times article, but that's it. Back when the story broke, it became quickly pushed aside by one of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge's mysterious Terrorist Alerts about possible terrorist activity.

Just like they have pushed aside the Off-shore banking scandal with this nonsense scandal called Benghazi.

What happened in Benghazi was that a CIA operation got hit, and the state department and CIA were at odds about how to portray the event. The talking points of the event is what the scandal is now about.

Richard Nixon has been vindicated because big bad Team Obama used poor talking points. Gosh darn. If Team Obama would have just used better talking points, this would have ended ... right?

One of the bloggers at Daily Kos David Waldman has been doing a Gun Fail weekly log of all the incidents in which people accidentally shot themselves or someone else. It happens more often then you think.

This week's compilation includes incidents in which seven kids were accidentally shot, three of them by other kids. A pair of adult brothers joined the parade of sibling shootings this week, of which there were four. It was a bad week for concealed carry ninjas, both licensed and unlicensed, with five shooting themselves and three forgetting their guns, bringing the total of Patriots who forgot to keep their guns in their hands until they were cold and dead to six for the week. There were three "home invasion" shootings, in which Patriotic Freedom Lovers shared their Liberty Projectiles with neighbors, three people who shot themselves or others while cleaning loaded guns, two hunting accidents, three girlfriends and/or wives, four cops and one security guard accidentally shot.

In fact, according to study of data published in the the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine , guns in the home are more likely to be used stupidly then against an intruder. This is why having a police department is important. Citizen vigilantes will over-react and screw-up more often than not.

[SOURCE: John Timmer | ArsTechnica | 27 April 2011]

And According to a Harvard 2007 Study : States with higher levels of household gun ownership had higher rates of firearm suicide and overall suicide.

[SOURCE:  | Harvard | 2007]

Click the Source Link if you want more details. Headline says it all.

[SOURCE:  | Washington Post | 11 May 2013]

I've said this so many times it's nice to see a TED Talk that says the same thing.

However, this TED Talk was "banned" from the TED website because it was considered "controversial". Strange, that of the plethora of things that are on TED, this topic is "controversial".

[SOURCE: Justin Acuff | addictinginfo.org | 11 May 2013]

That's a quote from Glenn Greenwald at the end of this Bill Maher segment.

I just realized I've been blogging for 10 years at a website in my own name. Wow.