Home · News · News Jul 2014 · Jul 03 2014
Thursday July 03, 2014
News Articles

This "Tough-As-Nails" Banking Watchdog Isn't That Tough-As-Nails
MotherJones | Erika Eichelberger | 07/03/14

"Mary Jo is…tough as nails." That's just a sampling of the many compliments paid to former Wall Street defense lawyer Mary Jo White in January 2013, when President Barack Obama nominated her to run the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a major banking watchdog. But after more than a year in charge, White hasn't lived up to the hype, instead crafting weak regulations, delaying new rules to rein in the industry, and granting special privileges to a bank involved in fraud.

White has made some aggressive moves--she slapped more than 60 penalties on financial firms for violations including insider trading and refusals to cooperate with investigations. Last year, she announced that the SEC will start to force more bad-behaving banks into admissions of wrongdoing instead of allowing firms to just settle without admitting or denying guilt. But overall, White has not been the hard-nosed, take-no-prisoners reformer Obama and his fellow Democrats promised. Here are five reasons why: ... Read more

The Disaster We've Wrought on the World's Oceans May Be Irrevocable
Newsweek | Alex Renton | 07/11/14

By the end of this century, many fish may be history due to man's reckless abuse of the planet. As we keep dumping greenhouse gases into the air, the oceans keep sucking them up, making the waters deadly to their inhabitants.

... The last is the least understood of these phenomena. Along the coasts and out in the deep, huge "dead zones" have been multiplying. They are the emptiest places on the planet, where there's little oxygen and sometimes no life at all, almost entirely restricted to some unicellular organisms like bacteria. Vast blooms of algae--organisms that thrive in more acid (and less alkaline) seawater and are fed by pollution--have already rendered parts of the Baltic Sea pretty much dead. A third of the marine life in that sea, which once fed all of Northern Europe, is gone and may already be beyond hope of recovery. ...

... Carbon dioxide, one of the key perpetrators in the lineup of man-made greenhouse gases, is absorbed by seawater, causing a chemical reaction near the ocean surface that results in lowered pH levels. And about one-third of all the man-made carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere ends up absorbed by the oceans. Carles Pelejero, a scientist working less than a mile from La Boqueria at the Institut de Cienciès del Mar (ICM), on Barcelona's seafront, calls it "climate change's evil twin." ... Read more

Inside the Struggle to Preserve the World's Data
Newsweek | Newsweek | 07/02/14

When masked gunmen smashed their way into the offices of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism, the staff knew what was coming. For years, the center had been a lone crusading voice exposing corruption in Ukrainian government circles while defying threats of violence and attempts to close it down ...

... By the time the center's site was finally shut down in March--albeit put back up soon after--everything it contained, including more than 5,000 videos, had been preserved and made accessible online. It was another coup for Internet Archive's founder, Brewster Kahle, who is also behind the hugely popular Wayback Machine, an enormous online museum that enables users to see what a website looked like at any time since 1996, the year Kahle set up his first commercial web crawl company. Kahle's operation now costs around $10 million a year, covered by revenue generated by web crawling services, grants, donations and a foundation established by Kahle and his wife.

Kahle is a history-maker: on the front line with other archivists around the world deciding what digital artifacts should be gleaned from the universe of information and stored for future generations to access. "Websites disappear into the digital equivalent of a black hole all the time.… Their average online life in the U.K. is just 75 days," says Helen Hockx-Yu, who leads the British Library's web archiving operation, rated by experts in the field as among the best in the business. "A lot of material, including sites dealing with the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 and the 2008 financial crisis, has been lost because we weren't able to capture it in time." ... Read more

DemocracyNow Daily News
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Thursday, July 03 [8:56]
DN | Swedish Left Party Surges in Polls With Focus on Climate Action & Fighting Privatization (07/03/14) [10:09]
DN | As Neo-Nazis Rally, Sweden Poised for Election-Year Shift of Power Balance from Right to Left (07/03/14) [7:01]
*DN | Dennis Kucinich on the Iraq Crisis & What the U.S. Can Learn From Sweden's Political Diversity (07/03/14) [7:31]
TRNN News
TRNN | Author Todd Miller: Corporations Making a Killing as Billions Are Poured into Border Enforcement (07/03/14) [10:47]
The Ocean Is On The Brink OF Collapse, Here's A Rescue Package (07/03/14) [8:32]
Ring of Fire
Ring of Fire | Papantonio: Kochs Buying What's Left of Our Democracy (07/03/14) [6:42]
Ring of Fire | Atrocious SCOTUS Deals Blow to Labor Unions (07/03/14) [6:06]
Ring of Fire | Papantonio: Women Who Vote Republican Are A Pathetic Embarrassment (07/03/14) [9:05]
More News Articles

We're Fishing the Oceans Dry. It's Time to Reconsider Fish Farms.
MotherJones | Maddie Oatman | 07/02/14

... For many consumers, aquaculture lost its appeal after unappetizing news spread about commercial fish farms--like fish feed's pressure on wild resources, overflowing waste, toxic buildup in the water, and displacement of natural species. But consider this: Our appetite for seafood continues to rise. Globally, we've hungered for 3.2 percent more seafood every year for the last five decades, double the rate of our population. Yet more than four-fifths of the world's wild fisheries are overexploited or fully exploited (yielding the most fish possible with no expected room for growth). Only 3 percent of stocks are considered underexploited--meaning they have any significant room for expansion. If we continue to fish at the current pace, some scientists predict we'll be facing oceans devoid of edible marine creatures by 2050.

But unlike alot of fishermen, Belov has a stash of treasure in his warehouse, as he soon shows me: a golf-cart-size container of plump trout, their glossy bodies still taut from rigor mortis. The night before, Belov drove north to Humboldt to help "chill kill" the fish by submerging them live into barrels of slushy ice water. Belov can count on shipments of these McFarland Springs trout every week--because he helped grow them himself on a farm. ... Read more
Farmed Fish That's Better Than Wild? (07/02/14) [3:20]

Forget the Bahamas. Michigan is one of the best places to SCUBA dive
Michigan Radio | author | 2014

When it comes to great places to SCUBA dive, lots of people immediately think of the waters of the Caribbean or Mexico, with lots of amazing underwater life, beautiful coral, gentle warm water.

But there's a hardy group of SCUBA divers who point to Michigan as one of the best places to dive. ... Read more

Other Videos and Documentaries I Ran Across
Note: I don't endorse any of the videos in this section.
As I construct My News Pages I constantly run across a lot of NEW videos, and since I find YouTube frustrating trying to re-find videos, I save the links in this section so I can find them again.

07.03.2014. 14:04



Special Interest Important stuff
GOOD Shorts Videos

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I'm still working on this

GOOD Short Videos
Newer Documentaries You Might Not Have Seen

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I'm still working on this

Newer Documentaries
Documentaries You've Never Seen

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Documentaries (small | pop-up)
Documentaries (big | full screen)
Good YouTube Documentaries

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Great YouTube Docs. (small | pop-up)
Good YouTube Docs. (big | full screen)

Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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