The overwhelming majority of media fund (and/or are owned by those who fund) one or the other of the two major candidates. Why would they want to cover candidates that they don't believe in enough to want to buy them, thus increasing the chance that their investment won't pay off?
luckily, we in backward Yurop (specifically, the EU) do not allow companies to do with our data what they wish, so that our government cannot argue, on the basis of specious reasoning about how, since the data about you isn't "owned" by you, they aren't invading your privacy by keeping all that data about you. They simply have no right to do so except when they get a warrant first. Which, at the very least, means that they cannot use it in court.
It would help if you had actually clicked the links before spouting this comment. I don't read pravda, and I don't care for most of the salon writers either (self-congratulatory bunch of liberals that they are), but I don't think Greenwald should be dismissed as a source simply because he's paid by Salon... So please be a tad more substantive the next time you write something.
(PS. Why do you assume I would be shocked to hear something bad about canada, a country I've never visited?)
Of course it's 'short on science'.. It's in a pop sci magazine. Will have a look at the nature article, but from your description it leads to the same conclusion: that given modern-day farming practices, and the drive towards monocultures -- a move encouraged and enforced by companies like Monsanto -- problems arise.
In any case, given that you cannot forbid farmers to act in stupid (short term profit-maximizing) fashion -- since it is nearly impossible to police them in most countries -- I much prefer a world in which different farmers are planting different crops than a world in which all farmers are encouraged (via Monsanto et. al propaganda) to plant the same crop.
Again: contrary to your assertion to the contrary, you cannot separate IP and contract law considerations from Monsanto's lobbying efforts AND business practices, AND market dominance; all of these are related, and it can behave the way it does in large part because of its worldwide oligopoly position.
For similar reasons, you cannot leave the decision to use/not use this "potentially useful tool" to individuals, because of Monsanto's aggressive blackmail practices.
As for your claim that insect die-off isn't caused by Roundup specifically, but some other herbicide: this may be, but monoculturation is a big reason why herbicides are becoming more important to use, making it undesirable that Monsanto (et al.) gain a (worldwide) oligopoly status as supplier of seeds. (This is also why your claim that 'this is also a problem with other cultivars' has only limited validity: before we saw this push towards monoculturation, herbicides played a far smaller role in food production.)
Lastly, here's a nice article that discusses how weeds are becoming multiply resistant in time-spans that were considered "theoretically" impossible.
The "crop yield increases" so frequently touted as the great advantage disappear after a few years. Herbs become roundup-resistant, requiring the use of more roundup, leading to more pollution, and the destruction of bee populations (like there's no tomorrow). Then there's lock-in, aggressive law-suits by Monsanto to force other farmers to start using their products, etc.. Lots of problems that don't exist with other cultivars. (Because no, you cannot separate GMOs from their salesmen.)
But the cost for failure falls disproportionately on those who just happen to need a HDD during the period of downtime, while those who bought it at the right time pay less than the average cost, so I'm not sure this is a fair system. (Similar arguments seem to apply to this as to the question whether participation in insurance schemes can be mandated.)
That is only true if you assume that it is no problem that the supply is interrupted in the meantime.. And there is no good way to quantify the "cost" of interrupted access.
Meant to type: "I'm sorry, but this is simplistic nonsense (that gets you +4/5 insightful...). What we are dealing with is not "fear economics", but "bad economics". That is, what we are dealing with are the consequences of the fact that all the players are overemphasizing efficiency at the cost of resilience and/or robustness. And the reason they do that is because that is what economic "thinking" teaches everyone to do."
I'm sorry, but this is imply bullshit. What we are dealing with is not "fear economics", but with the consequences of overemphasizing efficiency over resilience and/or robustness. And at the root of that is that that is what economic "thinking" teaches economic actors to do.
Video footage has emerged of a police officer beating an Iraq war veteran so hard that he suffered a ruptured spleen in an apparently unprovoked incident at a recent Occupy protest in California.
The footage, which has been shared with the Guardian, shows Kayvan Sabehgi standing in front of a police line on the night of Occupy Oakland's general strike on 2 November, when he is set upon by an officer.
He does not appear to be posing any threat, nor does he attempt to resist, yet he is hit numerous times by an officer clad in riot gear who appears determined to beat him to the ground.
Sabehgi, 32, an Oakland resident and former marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has since undergone surgery on his spleen. He says it took hours for him to be taken to hospital, despite complaining of severe pain. Police have told the Guardian they are investigating the incident.
The footage was recorded by artist and photographer Neil Rivas, who said Sabehgi was "completely peaceful" before he was beaten. "It was uncalled for," said Rivas. "There were no curse words. He was telling them he was a war vet, a resident of Oakland, a business owner."
Sabehgi has previously said he was talking to officers in a non-violent manner prior to his arrest, which the footage appears to confirm.
The 32-year-old can be seen standing in front of a line of police officers, all of whom are in riot gear. The officers walk forward, chanting and thrusting their batons, and Sabehgi starts to walk backwards.
Although the video is dark, an officer can clearly be seen beginning to hit Sabehgi around the legs with a baton, then starting to strike him higher up.
Oh, I do not dispute that medical 'science' is just as bad at this if not worse.. But the problem behind that seems to be that 'social' scientists of any stripe are simply not being taught proper methods, and that they lack the statistical/mathematical background necessary to do their own research. This is largely ignored by most of the social sciences (I guess so kids who are no good at math can also do 'science'), but it is a quite important thing to get right. Being capable of pressing buttons in SPSS is not enough, so to speak. Secondly, please note that I have nothing against observational research. I have something against shoddily set up observational research, and I think that the latter is a rampant issue in the social (and that includes medical) sciences. Ioannidis, IIRC, also mentions somewhere how the more shocking the 'finding', the more likely it is to turn out a misinterpretation of data, or an outright statistical fluke (or worse). This is part of what I mean by "lack of replicability".
Lastly, I am not sure what you're trying to accomplish by straw-manning me, and suggesting I am a 'scientific bigot.' Again, I have already stated in the post you are replying to that I think that anything can be studied scientifically. Observational research is a fine, and a legitimate mode of research, depending on how it is done. What I object to is simply the -- pervasive -- attitude of not taking methodological issues seriously, and the equally wide-spread issues with the lack of statistics education. I can understand that understanding statistics is difficult, and that it is frustrating that the education system is lacking in that respect, but from this it does not follow that those issues can be ignored, or that knowing which button to press without understanding the limits of the tests being used is unproblematic..
While I will admit that my assertion was somewhat flippant, and could've used further elaboration, I don't think it follows from that that I have "no understanding of the literatures". I never suggested (as you seem to read into my post) that social science research is invalid because it isn't done in carefully controlled settings (I do not particularly care for laboratory research); what I was hinting at was simply that the methodological "rigor" you are referring to simply isn't there when it comes to many if not most researchers. And because not enough attention is paid to that, it usually turns out that attempts at replication find different things, without anyone knowing whether this is due to differences implicit in the setup, because of unrecognized differences in the participants, etc.
Compare: when a physicist finds something shocking, he tries in pretty much any way he can to explain it, by doing new tests, etc. When a social scientist finds something exciting he is generally reluctant to go over the data again because he knows the statistics behind it are dubious at best, he will cite money constraints as preventing him from retesting his hypothesis in a different fashion, and he will quickly try to submit his Amazing Finding to Science. Now, while I will admit that I am now slightly type-casting, and probably over-hyping the physical scientist, it seems to me that this difference in basic attitude is quite important.
That's all well and good, but I suspect that the majority of those papers will be shoddy methodologically/statistically; In all of the social sciences there is a widely shared shared tendency to say "let's keep analyzing the data until we find something that gives us a p value smaller than or equal to 0.05. Once we have that, we will write an introduction that fits that 'finding,' and we shall not mention that we did 30 different analyses to find this 'significant' finding (which might just be a statistical fluke, but who knew).." There is a reason why most social science research findings simply are not replicable.
Certainly the subject can potentially be researched scientifically, but from that it does not follow that the actual research being done is actually rigorous.
I suspect you've missed it, but Obama also desires to gut SS/medicare.. This isn't just the republicans being evil; the only reason they rejected his earlier proposal because they want a slightly worse one to be accepted.
Put differently, printing money can lead to inflation if the printed (or whatever) money enters the real economy (or M1, I guess), but so long as it doesn't, it doesn't matter how much money is floating around. (That's why the Fed has given up tracking M3, I guess.)
And that's also why QE1, 2 and 3 didn't impact inflation: the money that was given to the banks was immediately moved to Australia via the carry trade because Oz offers 5.7% interest or so..
Britain is (going to be) in a pretty bad recession (soon), which is going to hit the lower/middle classes pretty hard.. That seems to me to be a pretty good (if, of course, always only a partial) explanation for this phenomenon.
Wrong, there is ample evidence that there are adverse effects. But the reason you believe that is because these contraindications get almost no press, either in the MSM or in US-based journals. Never mind that it is nearly impossible to get funding for research for it, thanks largely to the US government actively funding only that research which does not "threaten" the health of large US companies like Monsanto. See here
The basis of both letters and much of the research is the herbicide glyphosate. First commercialized in 1974, glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world and has been for some time. Glyphosate has long been considered a relatively benign product, because it was thought to break down quickly in the environment and harm little other than the weeds it was supposed to kill.
According to the National Pesticide Information Center, glyphosate prevents plants from making a certain enzyme. Without the enzyme, they are unable to make three essential amino acids, and thus, unable to survive. Once applied, glyphosate either binds to soil particles (and is thus immobilized so it can no longer harm plants) or microorganisms break it down into ammonium and carbon dioxide. Very little glyphosate runs off into waterways. For these reasons, glyphosate has been thought of as more or less harmless: you spray the weeds, they die, the glyphosate goes away, and nothing else in the environment is harmed.
But Huber says this is not true. First of all, he points out, evidence began to emerge in the 1980s that "what glyphosate does is, essentially, give a plant AIDS." Just like AIDS, which cripples a human's immune system, glyphosate makes plants unable to mount a defense against pathogens in the soil. Without its defense mechanisms functioning, the plants succumb to pathogens in the soil and die. Furthermore, glyphosate has an impact on microorganisms in the soil, helping some and hurting others. This is potentially problematic for farmers, as the last thing one would want is a buildup of pathogens in the soil where they grow crops.
The fate of glyphosate in the environment is also not as benign as once thought. It's true that glyphosate either binds to soil or is broken down quickly by microbes. Glyphosate binds to any positively charged ion in the soil, with the consequence of making many nutrients (such as iron and manganese) less available to plants. Also, glyphosate stays in the soil bound to particles for a long time and can be released later by normal agricultural practices like phosphorus fertilization. "It's not uncommon to find one to three pounds of glyphosate per acre in agricultural soils in the Midwest," says Huber, noting that this represents one to three times the typical amount of glyphosate applied to a field in a year.
Huber says these facts about glyphosate are very well known scientifically but rarely cited. When asked why, he replied that it would be harder for a company to get glyphosate approved for widespread use if it were known that the product could increase the severity of diseases on normal crop plants as well as the weeds it was intended to kill. Here in the U.S., many academic journals are not even interested in publishing studies that suggest this about glyphosate; a large number of the studies Huber cites were published in the European Journal of Agronomy.
If Huber's claims are true, then it follows that there must be problems with disease in crops where glyphosate is used. Huber's second letter verifies this, saying, "we are experiencing a large number of problems in production agriculture in the U.S. that appear to be intensified and sometimes directly related to genetically engineered (GMO) crops, and/or the products they were engineered to tolerate -- especially those related to glyphosate (the active chemical in Roundup® herbicide and generic versions of this herbicide
I'm not really trying to troll, but that's the American justice system for you..
To quote Greenwald writing about something Obama said about Bradley Manning:
Obama: "We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law."
The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?
When I saw that, I was going to ask how the NYT could possibly know that the people whose lives the U.S. just ended were "militants," but then I read further in the article and it said this: "A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed." So at least 9 of the 23 people we killed -- at least -- were presumably not "militants" at all, but rather innocent civilians (contrast how the NYT characterizes Libya’s attacks in its headlines: "Qaddafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas").
Or, about a guy who hit a bicyclist in NYC causing "spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident."
This kind of egregious hit-and-run is, obviously, a very serious crime. Milo is incredulous at the suggestion from Erzinger’s attorneys “that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea”, and wants Erzinger to be charged with a felony. Justice must be served: the case “has always been about responsibility, not money”, he wrote to DA Mark Hurlbert.
Yet Hurlbert, looking at Erzinger’s wealth, decided that the case really was about the money after all:
“The money has never been a priority for them. It is for us,” Hurlbert said. “Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it.”
Hurlbert said Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution.
“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”
In other words, Erzinger has bought his way out of a felony charge, over the strenuous objections of his victim; it’s very unlikely that online petitions will do any good at this point. Just another thing to add to the list of things that money can buy, I suppose. [The story continues here]
Or this about regulators who refused to regulate banks because fining them would hurt them financially. Or this about a state AG being bought by the mortgage lenders he's supposedly investigating/prosecuting. Or
If you want to know why oil prices are fluctuating so much even though Libya is hardly relevant as an oil producing country, read Chapter 4 of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia. The short answer, however, is that, for some time now, a select number of banks have been allowed to speculate on the commodity markets. This was expressly forbidden before 1991, but after a Goldman Sachs subsidiary whined that this was unfair, this was changed for them, and then for another 16 banks under Clinton (and Bush 2).
Now, the notable thing about the commodities markets is that you can only bet one way: long (Futures). This means that, when more money flows into the market, prices can and will only go up to reflect this; and from 2003 to 2008, the amount of money invested in commodity indices has gone from $13B to $317B. Care to guess what the effect was for oil?
Nonsense. Berlusconi likes Ghadaffi very much, and his son ("Rivers of blood will flow") is pals with lots of British and American nationals. The only reason the US has agreed to it is because the momentum of public opinion has swung against him too far.
Slashdot Mirror
The overwhelming majority of media fund (and/or are owned by those who fund) one or the other of the two major candidates. Why would they want to cover candidates that they don't believe in enough to want to buy them, thus increasing the chance that their investment won't pay off?
luckily, we in backward Yurop (specifically, the EU) do not allow companies to do with our data what they wish, so that our government cannot argue, on the basis of specious reasoning about how, since the data about you isn't "owned" by you, they aren't invading your privacy by keeping all that data about you. They simply have no right to do so except when they get a warrant first. Which, at the very least, means that they cannot use it in court.
It would help if you had actually clicked the links before spouting this comment. I don't read pravda, and I don't care for most of the salon writers either (self-congratulatory bunch of liberals that they are), but I don't think Greenwald should be dismissed as a source simply because he's paid by Salon... So please be a tad more substantive the next time you write something.
(PS. Why do you assume I would be shocked to hear something bad about canada, a country I've never visited?)
The US is kinda bad, eh? Then why are its citizens petitioning for the creation of a (Please) Do Not Kill (Me) list?
Of course it's 'short on science'.. It's in a pop sci magazine. Will have a look at the nature article, but from your description it leads to the same conclusion: that given modern-day farming practices, and the drive towards monocultures -- a move encouraged and enforced by companies like Monsanto -- problems arise.
In any case, given that you cannot forbid farmers to act in stupid (short term profit-maximizing) fashion -- since it is nearly impossible to police them in most countries -- I much prefer a world in which different farmers are planting different crops than a world in which all farmers are encouraged (via Monsanto et. al propaganda) to plant the same crop.
Again: contrary to your assertion to the contrary, you cannot separate IP and contract law considerations from Monsanto's lobbying efforts AND business practices, AND market dominance; all of these are related, and it can behave the way it does in large part because of its worldwide oligopoly position.
For similar reasons, you cannot leave the decision to use/not use this "potentially useful tool" to individuals, because of Monsanto's aggressive blackmail practices.
As for your claim that insect die-off isn't caused by Roundup specifically, but some other herbicide: this may be, but monoculturation is a big reason why herbicides are becoming more important to use, making it undesirable that Monsanto (et al.) gain a (worldwide) oligopoly status as supplier of seeds. (This is also why your claim that 'this is also a problem with other cultivars' has only limited validity: before we saw this push towards monoculturation, herbicides played a far smaller role in food production.)
Lastly, here's a nice article that discusses how weeds are becoming multiply resistant in time-spans that were considered "theoretically" impossible.
The "crop yield increases" so frequently touted as the great advantage disappear after a few years. Herbs become roundup-resistant, requiring the use of more roundup, leading to more pollution, and the destruction of bee populations (like there's no tomorrow). Then there's lock-in, aggressive law-suits by Monsanto to force other farmers to start using their products, etc.. Lots of problems that don't exist with other cultivars. (Because no, you cannot separate GMOs from their salesmen.)
But the cost for failure falls disproportionately on those who just happen to need a HDD during the period of downtime, while those who bought it at the right time pay less than the average cost, so I'm not sure this is a fair system. (Similar arguments seem to apply to this as to the question whether participation in insurance schemes can be mandated.)
That is only true if you assume that it is no problem that the supply is interrupted in the meantime.. And there is no good way to quantify the "cost" of interrupted access.
Meant to type: "I'm sorry, but this is simplistic nonsense (that gets you +4/5 insightful...). What we are dealing with is not "fear economics", but "bad economics". That is, what we are dealing with are the consequences of the fact that all the players are overemphasizing efficiency at the cost of resilience and/or robustness. And the reason they do that is because that is what economic "thinking" teaches everyone to do."
I'm sorry, but this is imply bullshit. What we are dealing with is not "fear economics", but with the consequences of overemphasizing efficiency over resilience and/or robustness. And at the root of that is that that is what economic "thinking" teaches economic actors to do.
Oh, I do not dispute that medical 'science' is just as bad at this if not worse.. But the problem behind that seems to be that 'social' scientists of any stripe are simply not being taught proper methods, and that they lack the statistical/mathematical background necessary to do their own research. This is largely ignored by most of the social sciences (I guess so kids who are no good at math can also do 'science'), but it is a quite important thing to get right. Being capable of pressing buttons in SPSS is not enough, so to speak.
Secondly, please note that I have nothing against observational research. I have something against shoddily set up observational research, and I think that the latter is a rampant issue in the social (and that includes medical) sciences. Ioannidis, IIRC, also mentions somewhere how the more shocking the 'finding', the more likely it is to turn out a misinterpretation of data, or an outright statistical fluke (or worse). This is part of what I mean by "lack of replicability".
Lastly, I am not sure what you're trying to accomplish by straw-manning me, and suggesting I am a 'scientific bigot.' Again, I have already stated in the post you are replying to that I think that anything can be studied scientifically. Observational research is a fine, and a legitimate mode of research, depending on how it is done. What I object to is simply the -- pervasive -- attitude of not taking methodological issues seriously, and the equally wide-spread issues with the lack of statistics education. I can understand that understanding statistics is difficult, and that it is frustrating that the education system is lacking in that respect, but from this it does not follow that those issues can be ignored, or that knowing which button to press without understanding the limits of the tests being used is unproblematic..
While I will admit that my assertion was somewhat flippant, and could've used further elaboration, I don't think it follows from that that I have "no understanding of the literatures". I never suggested (as you seem to read into my post) that social science research is invalid because it isn't done in carefully controlled settings (I do not particularly care for laboratory research); what I was hinting at was simply that the methodological "rigor" you are referring to simply isn't there when it comes to many if not most researchers. And because not enough attention is paid to that, it usually turns out that attempts at replication find different things, without anyone knowing whether this is due to differences implicit in the setup, because of unrecognized differences in the participants, etc.
Compare: when a physicist finds something shocking, he tries in pretty much any way he can to explain it, by doing new tests, etc. When a social scientist finds something exciting he is generally reluctant to go over the data again because he knows the statistics behind it are dubious at best, he will cite money constraints as preventing him from retesting his hypothesis in a different fashion, and he will quickly try to submit his Amazing Finding to Science. Now, while I will admit that I am now slightly type-casting, and probably over-hyping the physical scientist, it seems to me that this difference in basic attitude is quite important.
That's all well and good, but I suspect that the majority of those papers will be shoddy methodologically/statistically; In all of the social sciences there is a widely shared shared tendency to say "let's keep analyzing the data until we find something that gives us a p value smaller than or equal to 0.05. Once we have that, we will write an introduction that fits that 'finding,' and we shall not mention that we did 30 different analyses to find this 'significant' finding (which might just be a statistical fluke, but who knew).." There is a reason why most social science research findings simply are not replicable.
Certainly the subject can potentially be researched scientifically, but from that it does not follow that the actual research being done is actually rigorous.
working link
I suspect you've missed it, but Obama also desires to gut SS/medicare.. This isn't just the republicans being evil; the only reason they rejected his earlier proposal because they want a slightly worse one to be accepted.
Put differently, printing money can lead to inflation if the printed (or whatever) money enters the real economy (or M1, I guess), but so long as it doesn't, it doesn't matter how much money is floating around. (That's why the Fed has given up tracking M3, I guess.)
And that's also why QE1, 2 and 3 didn't impact inflation: the money that was given to the banks was immediately moved to Australia via the carry trade because Oz offers 5.7% interest or so..
Britain is (going to be) in a pretty bad recession (soon), which is going to hit the lower/middle classes pretty hard.. That seems to me to be a pretty good (if, of course, always only a partial) explanation for this phenomenon.
Have you seen Lifting the Veil? It tries to go into and discuss this problem of indistinguishability a bit.
See here
The basis of both letters and much of the research is the herbicide glyphosate. First commercialized in 1974, glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world and has been for some time. Glyphosate has long been considered a relatively benign product, because it was thought to break down quickly in the environment and harm little other than the weeds it was supposed to kill.
According to the National Pesticide Information Center, glyphosate prevents plants from making a certain enzyme. Without the enzyme, they are unable to make three essential amino acids, and thus, unable to survive. Once applied, glyphosate either binds to soil particles (and is thus immobilized so it can no longer harm plants) or microorganisms break it down into ammonium and carbon dioxide. Very little glyphosate runs off into waterways. For these reasons, glyphosate has been thought of as more or less harmless: you spray the weeds, they die, the glyphosate goes away, and nothing else in the environment is harmed.
But Huber says this is not true. First of all, he points out, evidence began to emerge in the 1980s that "what glyphosate does is, essentially, give a plant AIDS." Just like AIDS, which cripples a human's immune system, glyphosate makes plants unable to mount a defense against pathogens in the soil. Without its defense mechanisms functioning, the plants succumb to pathogens in the soil and die. Furthermore, glyphosate has an impact on microorganisms in the soil, helping some and hurting others. This is potentially problematic for farmers, as the last thing one would want is a buildup of pathogens in the soil where they grow crops.
The fate of glyphosate in the environment is also not as benign as once thought. It's true that glyphosate either binds to soil or is broken down quickly by microbes. Glyphosate binds to any positively charged ion in the soil, with the consequence of making many nutrients (such as iron and manganese) less available to plants. Also, glyphosate stays in the soil bound to particles for a long time and can be released later by normal agricultural practices like phosphorus fertilization. "It's not uncommon to find one to three pounds of glyphosate per acre in agricultural soils in the Midwest," says Huber, noting that this represents one to three times the typical amount of glyphosate applied to a field in a year.
Huber says these facts about glyphosate are very well known scientifically but rarely cited. When asked why, he replied that it would be harder for a company to get glyphosate approved for widespread use if it were known that the product could increase the severity of diseases on normal crop plants as well as the weeds it was intended to kill. Here in the U.S., many academic journals are not even interested in publishing studies that suggest this about glyphosate; a large number of the studies Huber cites were published in the European Journal of Agronomy.
If Huber's claims are true, then it follows that there must be problems with disease in crops where glyphosate is used. Huber's second letter verifies this, saying, "we are experiencing a large number of problems in production agriculture in the U.S. that appear to be intensified and sometimes directly related to genetically engineered (GMO) crops, and/or the products they were engineered to tolerate -- especially those related to glyphosate (the active chemical in Roundup® herbicide and generic versions of this herbicide
Or this, an equally disturbing (though probably less obviously so because this concerns "foreigners":
Or, about a guy who hit a bicyclist in NYC causing "spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident."
Or this about regulators who refused to regulate banks because fining them would hurt them financially. Or this about a state AG being bought by the mortgage lenders he's supposedly investigating/prosecuting. Or
If you want to know why oil prices are fluctuating so much even though Libya is hardly relevant as an oil producing country, read Chapter 4 of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia. The short answer, however, is that, for some time now, a select number of banks have been allowed to speculate on the commodity markets. This was expressly forbidden before 1991, but after a Goldman Sachs subsidiary whined that this was unfair, this was changed for them, and then for another 16 banks under Clinton (and Bush 2).
Now, the notable thing about the commodities markets is that you can only bet one way: long (Futures). This means that, when more money flows into the market, prices can and will only go up to reflect this; and from 2003 to 2008, the amount of money invested in commodity indices has gone from $13B to $317B. Care to guess what the effect was for oil?
Nonsense. Berlusconi likes Ghadaffi very much, and his son ("Rivers of blood will flow") is pals with lots of British and American nationals. The only reason the US has agreed to it is because the momentum of public opinion has swung against him too far.
Here's a nice summary of Berlusconi's history.