Shake down

Organized crime has long been involved in drug traffic, money laundering, arms dealing and terror financing and over the recent past, more and more, media and government. The American public consequently more and more gets its news, information and government from...organized crime. This would have seemed outlandish years ago, but now it's just one more piece of information that just passes us by while we do...what are we doing?

One hand of the government is creating problems while the other hand tries to solve them. It's an an ever-growing multi-dimensional cottage industry but cottage industries provide jobs...

Decriminalizing drugs leads to less drug abuse?

Champions of harsh drug criminalization laws as the best solution to curbing drug use will be chagrined to find that Portugal’s eight year history of decriminalization has led to lower drug usage rates.

Mexican President: US officials are involved in drug trade.

Obama protecting illegal Bush programs

President Barack Obama invoked "state secrets" to prevent a court from reviewing the legality of the National Security Agency's warantless wiretapping program, moving late Friday to have a lawsuit that challenged the program dismissed.

Some might say this science is a smoking gun that should be investigated. Some might say that the story will get legs even if the TV news ignores it:

The Open Chemical Physics Journal: Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade

We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later. The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approximately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures. Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms occurring at approximately 430 °C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite. Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.

I like enjoying life and being as uplifting as possible, so I'm fighting the cynicism that tells me we are incapable as a society of processing, investigating, comprehending, accepting or responding to such a smoking gun.

From one of our readers:Escape from the Zombie Food Court

No matter how smart we may think we are, the larger world cannot and does not exist for most of us in this room, except through media and maybe through the shallow experience of tourism, or in the minority instance, we may know of it through higher education. The world however, is not a cultural history course, a National Geographic special or recreational destination. It is a real place with many fast developing disasters, economic and ecological collapse being just two. The more aware among us grasp that there is much at stake. Yet, even the most informed and educated Americans have cultural conditioning working against them round the clock.

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