Poor Mojo's Newswire

Last week came allegations from Harris County voter registrar Leo Vasquez that Houston Votes had engaged in potentially fraudulent activity, including falsifying government documents and submitting multiple voter registrations for the same people. This means that in at least one reported case, a single person was registered to vote six times.

Vasquez compared the irregularities to those pinned on the ACORN group during the 2008 election cycle. “Houston Votes is the voter registration machine of the ‘Texans Together Education Fund.’ Houston Votes and Texans Together have effectively emerged as our area’s new ‘ACORN’ organization,” Vasquez reportedly said last week.

Fred Lewis, the president of Texans Together, told the Houston Chronicle that the allegations were baseless and that Vasquez should be investigated for trying to suppress voter registration.

Rescue attempts are under way for at least 12 people, Coast Guard spokesman John Edwards told CNN. 13 people were on board the production platform total, Edwards said, noting 12 have been accounted for, but one person was missing.

The accident took place 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana on the Vermilion Oil production platform 380, which is owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy.

The Coast Guard has multiple helicopters, an airplane and several Coast Guard cutters en route. It's unknown if there are any injuries.

Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. Find solutions to stopping it. Call for people in the world to develop solutions to stop it completely and permanently. Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!)

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.

Back in England, Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution were busily uprooting the Garden of Eden.

But on a green hill far away, a new "island Eden" was being created.

She manages to be at once a closed book and a constant noisemaker. Her press spokesperson, Pam Pryor, barely speaks to the press, and Palin shrewdly cultivates a real and rhetorical antagonism toward what she calls “the lamestream media.” The Palin machine is supported by organizations that do much of their business under the cover of pseudonyms and shell companies. In accordance with the terms of a reported $1 million annual contract with Fox News, Palin regularly delivers canned commentary on that network. But in the year since she abruptly resigned the governorship of Alaska, in order to market herself full-time—earning an estimated $13 million in the process—she has submitted to authentic, unpaid interviews with only a handful of journalists, none of whom have posed notably challenging questions. She keeps tight control of her pronouncements, speaking only in settings of her own choosing, with audiences of her own selection, and with reporters kept at bay. (Despite many requests, neither Palin nor her current staff would comment for this article.) She injects herself into the news almost every day, but on a strictly one-way basis, through a steady stream of messages on Twitter and Facebook. The press plays along. Palin is the only politician whose tweets are regularly reported as news by TV networks. She is the only one who has been able to significantly change the course of debate on a major national issue (health-care reform) with a single Facebook posting (in which she accused the Obama administration, falsely, of wanting to set up a “death panel”).

More staggering is the level of executive pay, according to IPS:

[A]fter adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.

American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s.

What’s the beef? Well:

“…the Company failed to disclose and misrepresented the following material adverse facts which were known to defendants or recklessly disregarded by them: (1) that they had made “diligent efforts” to comply with labor and employment regulations, when in fact they had not done so; (2) that they failed to disclose to investors, and made false statements regarding facts surrounding the Company’s illegal hiring practices and its effect on the Company’s operating costs and margins; (3) that they failed to disclose or indicate that the Company lacked adequate internal and financial controls; (4) that they failed to disclose that, as a result of the foregoing, the Company’s financial statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times; and (5) that they failed to disclose that, as a result of the foregoing, their statements regarding the Company’s prospects were false and misleading at all relevant times.”

Now Aino Hosia of the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway, and Josefin Titelman of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have found that captive lion's manes will readily prey on sea walnuts – transparent animals of the comb jelly type and a voracious invaders of the world's oceans – and may help to control their numbers in the wild.

The sea walnut is native to the western Atlantic, but has now spread to the North Sea and even to the chill waters of the Baltic. It feeds on tiny plankton, devastating their populations – and in turn it brings about crashes in the numbers of fish that depend on the plankton for food. Like many species invading new territories, it had been thought to have avoided significant predation – but no longer.

01 Negativland - U2: Special Edit Radio Mix (5:46)
02 Biz Markie - Alone Again (2:52) *
03 People Like Us - Swinglargo (5:20)
04 Culturcide - They Aren't the World (4:30) *
05 The Evolution Control Committee - Rocked by Rape (4:28)
06 Beastie Boys - Rock Hard (4:53) *
07 Dummy Run - f.d.(1:23)
08 John Oswald - black (2:01)
09 Corporal Blossom - White Christmas (3:19)
10 Tape-beatles - Reality of Matter (2:37)
11 Public Enemy - Psycho of Greed (3:11)
12 The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony (4:35) *
13 Wobbly - Clawing Your Eyes Out Down to Your Throat (1:21)
14 De La Soul - Transmitting Live from Mars (1:07) *
15 Buchanan and Goodman - The Flying Saucer (4:18) *
16 The JAMs - The Queen and I (4:50) *
17 Elastica - Connection (2:20) *
18 Steinski and Mass Media - The Motorcade Sped On (4:26) *
19 Invisibl Skratch Piklz - white label edit (5:30) *
20 Xper.Xr - Wu-chu-tung (1:43)
21 Boone Bischoff - Happy Birthday To You (0:28)

* used without permission

LINER NOTES

Music has always been a craft of borrowing. In traditional, or folk, music, melodies and lyrics were handed down from generation to generation. At every stage, musicians would change the tune or substitute words at will, adapting songs to their own situations.

Like their predecessors, the artists featured here have drawn from the music around them--whether by borrowing a guitar riff or taking a digital sample--to create something new. But unlike their folk ancestors, they all run the risk of getting sued....

For our culture to be a space for free expression and for creativity to flourish, audio artists must be able to build on bits and pieces of preexisting music. While the "fair use" doctrine allows artists to appropriate other works, it does so only in cases of commentary or parody. Fair use doesn't apply to the majority of "second-takers," those artists who reuse sounds without directly referring to the original.

Most of these tracks would never have existed if the artists had adhered to copyright law. Many other works might never be heard unless we act soon to grant artists the right to create them.

A Theocracy.

The only thing more dangerous than 100k racists wanting to “take the country back” is 100k zealots who want to establish a Theocracy. Who honestly believe that fundamental Christianity should be the foundation of every decision this country makes.

This goes beyond the idea of having an official State Religion, something that is in-and-of-itself dangerous. Having a theocracy would put us on the same list with a handful of other countries, including Iran and Afghanistan under the Taliban.

What happens to Jews and Muslims under this proposed theocracy? What happens to the non-believers? Forced conversions? Stonings? Or maybe a more “diplomatic” solution, like increased taxes or segregation or deportation.

More:

This is the Army’s new physical-training program, which has been rolled out this year at its five basic training posts that handle 145,000 recruits a year. Nearly a decade in the making, its official goal is to reduce injuries and better prepare soldiers for the rigors of combat in rough terrain like Afghanistan.
. . .
The rationale for the changes are the general levels of ill-fitness the Army sees in large percentages of new recruits. Youth raised on sugary sodas and saturated fat lack the bone density and endurance to safely train the old way. As I discussed last November when the DOD released its report “Too Fat to Fight,” this public health problem is also a national security problem and I concur with our generals that it ought to be solved by stronger federal intervention into – and funding for – healthy food in public schools.

“The first time I saw one that wasn’t dated 1957 and mounted on a microscope slide was in 2001,” said Dini M. Miller, a Virginia Tech cockroach expert who has added bedbugs to her repertoire.

The bugs have probably been biting our ancestors since they moved from trees to caves. The bugs are “nest parasites” that fed on bats and cave birds like swallows before man moved in.
. . .
Why the bugs disappeared for so long and exploded so fast after they reappeared is another question. The conventional answer — that DDT was banned — is inadequate. After all, mosquitoes, roaches and other insects rebounded long ago.

Much has to do with the bugs’ habits. Before central heating arrived in the early 1900s, they died back in winter. People who frequently restuffed their mattresses or dismantled their beds to pour on boiling water — easier for those with servants — suffered less, said the bedbug historian Michael F. Potter of the University of Kentucky.

Early remedies were risky: igniting gunpowder on mattresses or soaking them with gasoline, fumigating buildings with burning sulfur or cyanide gas. (The best-known brand was Zyklon B, which later became infamous at Auschwitz.)

The new nine-hour school day might sound like an adolescent nightmare, but district officials hope that more time in class will help boost the test scores of students at United for Success Academy and Elmhurst Community Preparatory School, both considered by the state to be among the 188 worst schools in California.

But keeping students in class an extra three hours won't come cheap, costing the district up to $2,400 more per school year for each of the 270 or so sixth-graders attending the schools. A nonprofit organization will run the extended program.

Eliza Byard, executive director of the national Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, agrees with a big part of that statement.

"Yes, we want LGBT students afforded full respect," she said.

GLSEN says its agenda is to ensure safe schools and acceptance for all students, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, race, national origin or ability.

"Bullying is a serious public health crisis in this country, according to no less an authority than the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services," Byard said.