BMBS

Texas Gov. Rick Perry:

In Texas for a substantially long period of time, our citizens have decided that if you kill our children, if you kill our police officers, for those very heinous crimes, that the appropriate punishment is the death penalty. …  I’m confident that the way that the executions are taken care of in the state of Texas are appropriate.

New York Times reporters Manny Fernandez and John Schwartz:

Some of those who condemn the state grudgingly agree that it kills with efficiency — from initial slumber into cessation of breathing — even though a prisoner who died of lethal injection in April was reported to have said, “It does kind of burn.”

Secretary of State John Kerry on April 25:  “A two-state solution will be clearly underscored as the only real alternative. Because a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.”

Pro-Israel lobby AIPAC on April 28: “Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate. The Jewish state is a shining light for freedom and opportunity in a region plagued by terror, hate and oppression,”

Secretary of State John Kerry on April 28:  “Israel is a vibrant democracy and I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately, that Israel is an apartheid state or that it intends to become one. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that without a shred of doubt.”

Speaks for itself.

Some powerful facts from an article by Eduardo Porter in the NYT:

• In 2012, 2.2 million Americans were in jail or prison, a larger share of the population than in any other country; and that is about five times the average for fellow industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
• The United States spent about $80 billion on its system of jails and prisons in 2010 — about $260 for every resident of the nation. By contrast, its budget for food stamps was $227 a person.
• A little under half the state and federal prison population is black. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that a black boy born in 2001 had a 32.2 percent chance of doing time behind bars.
• The United States still suffers higher rates of violent crimes than European countries that have lighter sentencing policies. In 2012, the United States had five intentional homicides for each 100,000 people. In Canada, the rate was 1.8. In Australia, 1.2. Mass imprisonment not only suffers from diminishing returns. After a certain point, it might actually increase crime.

Amazing, isn’t it?  Something’s wrong.

An editorial in today’s NYT documents how the Koch brothers and their “conservative” allies support a new tax on solar energy panels.  They particularly want to discourage homeowners from installing panels by putting a surtax on power that they sell back to the electric utilities because they don’t need it.  The initiative is supported by the utility industry and, of course, fossil-fuel producers.

Too bad that the industry sponsors of this stuff hide behind front men like the Kochs, who can cast any critical reporting as a personal campaign against them.

Jen Psaki, State Department spokesperson, on Friday, April 25, 2014  at 1:26pm:

Beginning on Monday and all of next week, we will highlight emblematic cases of imperiled reporters and media outlets that have been targeted, oppressed, imprisoned or otherwise harassed because of their professional work.

That same afternoon, Obama’s Justice Department filed a legal brief at the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the Court should NOT hear a petition by New York Times reporter, James Risen, in his efforts to avoid going to jail for refusing to answer questions about a confidential source.

“While the question presented does not warrant this court’s review, this case is a particularly unsuitable vehicle,” Obama’s Justice Department wrote.  It also said, that “although many states recognize a reporter’s privilege of some sort in some circumstances, no ‘consensus’ exists about who qualifies for such a privilege, what types of communications are covered, and the circumstances in which it may be invoked.”

Is this one Administration speaking, or two?

In 2012 the top 1 percent of American households collected 22.5 percent of the nation’s income, the highest total since 1928.

The richest 10 percent of Americans now take a larger slice of the pie than in 1913, at the close of the Gilded Age, owning more than 70 percent of the nation’s wealth. And half of that is owned by the top 1 percent.

In The Princess Bride, Mandy Patinkin gets the greatest line:  “My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die.” During a visit to CIA headquarters recently, he reportedly got a lecture from the man whose role he’s now playing on TV, John Brennan, about keeping America’s relentless extremists at bay (as the New York Times put it).  The Times doesn’t say whether Patinkin used one of his trademark lines on Brennan: “I have been in the revenge business so long, now that it’s over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.”

The Associated Press reports:  NASA’s Voyager I probe has left the solar system, boldly going where no machine has gone before. Thirty-six years after it rocketed away from Earth, the plutonium-powered spacecraft has escaped the sun’s influence and is now cruising 11-1/2 billion miles away in interstellar space, in the vast, cold emptiness between the stars, NASA said Thursday.

U.S. Government agencies charged with “protecting” us are, according to reports, working long and hard to make sure that our on-line activities are not protected.  Documents released by former intell officer Edward Snowden indicate that NSA is sabotaging all kinds of measures intended to make the internet safe for communications and commerce.  According to the documents, the agency has built “backdoors” into systems, to enable it to circumvent security, and has even broken the SSL protocols that encrypt a lot of our on-line activity.  A “Sigint Enabling Project” costing $254.9 million a year “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable” or hackable, according to the documents.  Google pushed back on the assertion of an NSA back door into its system, but the company admitted “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.”  (It didn’t say whose interpretation of the law it abides by.)

Researchers have fund that, in the words of the New York Times, “The trillions of bacteria that live in the gut — helping digest foods, making some vitamins, making amino acids — may help determine if a person is fat or thin.”  Scientists were puzzled by pairs of human twins in which one was obese and other other lean.  They took “gut bacteria” from both of them and put them, separately, into mice.  The mice with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that got bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.

And then … they did more.  They created mouse food that was “healthy” — with fruits and vegetables and low fats — and that was less healthy — with no fruits or vegetables and with lots of fat, and they fed them to the mice with the twins’ bacteria.  The result:  The fat mice that got food high in fat and low in fruits and vegetables kept the gut bacteria from the fat twins and remained fat. The thin twins’ gut bacteria took over only when the mice got pellets that were rich in fruits and vegetables and low in fat.