Friday, April 27, 2012

Paying To Lose A Job

American taxpayers are paying millions to train foreigners to take our jobs.  This is another example of wasteful federal government spending that further increases the deficit while sending jobs overseas.  It it time to reduce the size of the federal government and balance the budget.


Asian Call Center Workers Trained With U.S. Tax Dollars

Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to "insource" jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses. 
...
The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. ... That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka...
JEEP is part of a larger USAID initiative in the Philippines, known as Growth and Equity in Mindanao (GEM), on which the agency is spending about $100 million per year, according to an audit by the USAID's Office of Inspector General.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

NSA Vacuum

The NSA is illegally vacuuming data from Americans, says a whistle-blower.


He estimates the NSA has assembled 20 trillion "transactions" — phone calls, emails and other forms of data — from Americans. This likely includes copies of almost all of the emails sent and received from most people living in the United States.

Surveillance Nation

Drones are watching.  Don't look up.


View Map of Domestic Drone Authorizations in a larger map

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Whooping Cough Vaccine Fails

In California, vaccinated children were more likely to suffer from disease.  If the vaccine fails, why take the risk of injecting the vaccine and the toxins into our children?

During a whooping cough outbreak in California in 2010, immunized children between eight and 12 years old were more likely to catch the bacterial disease than kids of other ages ...
What was very surprising was the majority of cases were in fully vaccinated children.

Monday, April 16, 2012

USA Intelligence Was Duped

The basis for the invasion of Iraq was flawed. The Iraq invasion failed to find weapons of mass destruction, and wasted lives and money.

Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war
Everything he had said about the inner workings of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons programme was a flight of fantasy - one that, he now claims was aimed at ousting the Iraqi dictator. Janabi, a chemical engineering graduate who had worked in the Iraqi industry, says he looked on in shock as Powell's presentation revealed that the Bush administration's hawkish decisionmakers had swallowed the lot. Something else left him even more amazed; until that point he had not met a US official, let alone been interviewed by one.

"I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime," he told the Guardian in a series of interviews carried out in his native Arabic and German. "I and my sons are proud of that, and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

NASA Scientists Dispute Climate Change

Asking NASA to use proven empirical data seems reasonable.

49 Former NASA Scientists Send A Letter Disputing Climate Change
Some prominent voices at NASA are fed up with the agency's activist stance toward climate change.

The following letter asking the agency to move away from climate models and to limit its stance to what can be empirically proven, was sent by 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts.

...

The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, and specifically the Goddard Institute For Space Studies (GISS), to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change.

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Brain Tumors Caused By Dental X-Rays

When a dentist purchases a piece of equipment, there is a strong financial interest to use that equipment to increase patient bills.  Dentists routinely push x-rays, even for young children.  X-rays are dangerous.

Dental X-Rays Linked To Common Brain Tumor

A new study suggests people who had certain kinds of dental X-rays in the past may be at an increased risk for meningioma, the most commonly diagnosed brain tumor in the U.S.

 

Friday, April 06, 2012

Unreliable Cancer Studies

The cancer detection and treatment industry generates enormous income for medical companies.  Due to the money involved, researches rarely document that cancer research is unreliable and can not be reproduced.

In cancer science, many 'discoveries' don't hold up
A former researcher at Amgen Inc  has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

 During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 "landmark" publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

 Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated.  ...
  As we tried to reproduce these papers we became convinced you can't take anything at face value.
...
Of 47 cancer projects at Bayer during 2011, less than one-quarter could reproduce previously reported findings, despite the efforts of three or four scientists working full time for up to a year.

Read the entire article to learn about selective publication of results and how grant money leads to unreliable results.

Pay To Travel

Congress is considering revoking travel if the IRS determines taxes are owned.  Restraint from travel, without conviction by a court of law, seems unconstitutional.  The bill is authored by Senator Barbara Boxer.

Owe The IRS? Bill Would Suspend Passport Rights For Delinquent Taxpayers

A bill authored by a Southland lawmaker that could potentially allow the federal government to prevent any Americans who owe back taxes from traveling outside the U.S. is one step closer to becoming law.

...

includes a provision that would allow for the “revocation or denial” of a passport for anyone with “certain unpaid taxes” or “tax delinquencies”.

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Irish Are Getting Restless

The Irish government caved in to the demands of the banksters and had the Irish government take over the banker's bad debts.  Maybe the Irish people are becoming willing to stand up and tell the bankers to take their losses.

Ireland Faces Popular Revolt Over New Property Tax
The government said less than half of the country's 1.6 million households paid the charge by Saturday's deadline to avoid penalties. And about 5,000 marched in protest against the annual conference of Prime Minister Enda Kenny's Fine Gael party.

...


Kenny said his government had no choice, but to impose the new charge as part of the nation's efforts to emerge from an international bailout.  ...

Monday, April 02, 2012

Tsunami Wreckage

A year after a tsunami in Japan sent debris into the sea, the debris is reaching western shores of North America.  Did radioactive debris also make the trip?

Japanese Ghost Ship Spotted Off Coast of Canada Signaling Arrival of Tsunami Wreckage
Last week, a unmanned boat identified as a Japanese fishing vessel was spotted off the coast of Canada, indicating that after more than a year, some of that debris could still be on its way to American and Canadian shores.