ONION Medley
by ilene - April 9th, 2010 9:30 am
Sampling several articles from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source (click on titles for whole articles):
U.S. Government: We Have Not Forgotten About Osaka Binn Rogen
WASHINGTON—High-ranking intelligence officials said Monday that the military was still aggressively pursuing notorious terrorist Osaka Binn Rogen, declaring that they had not forgotten about bringing the leader of the Al Hydra network to justice.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates assured citizens that American forces were actively hunting down Osaka Binn Rogen, and asserted that locating the mastermind behind the tragic 19-11 attacks is as pressing now as it was when their search first began, six or 10 years ago or however long it’s been.
"This homicidal madman committed terrible atrocities against the American people, and we have never, ever lost sight of that," Gates said. "Binn Rogen is the most wanted man on the planet, and he remains our No. 1 priority."
"We have only one thing to say to this heinous individual," Gates added. "We will find you, Osaka Binn Rogen."
Based upon field surveillance and intelligence, officials recently widened the search for Orlama Win Roben by dispatching CIA paramilitary officers and Delta Force soldiers to track down, capture, or assassinate the terrorist leader, who has been described as a "very bad, very tall guy with a beard."
"Every single day our brave soldiers are out plastering wanted posters with Owanda Bun Luvin’s face on buildings, telephone poles, and surrounding trees," Gen. Stanley McChrystal said. "We are constantly scouring the dangerous borderlands of Latvia for this terrible, terrible man."…
Here’s a little something we may have suspected, but now there’s a scientific study:
Study: Shoving, Yelling Makes Things Go Faster 76% Of Time
TUCSON, AZ—Researchers at the University of Arizona released a study Monday showing a causal relationship between raising one’s voice, pushing people in the chest, and getting what you want more quickly. …
Similarly unsurprising…
Chimp In Cocaine Study Starts Lying To Friends
ATLANTA—Concerned workers at the National Primate Research Center said Bobo, a 5-year-old chimpanzee participating in a 16-month cocaine study, was observed this week lying to the faces of friends, family, and staff.
"Our goal was to determine how large doses of the stimulant would improve or impair the chimpanzee’s ability to perform memory and language tasks," said primatologist Daniel Martin, the project’s lead researcher. "What we found was that cocaine
…
 Email This Post
|
 Twitter
|
LinkedIn
|
 del.icio.us
|
Google+ |
Border Justice
by ilene - February 2nd, 2010 12:26 pm
This is a chapter from Ryan Grim’s book on drugs, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America."
Excerpt from a review "Why we say yes to drugs" by Laura Miller in Salon:
…Yet even politicians inclined to support a treatment-oriented approach to diminishing the American appetite for illegal drugs have opted to emphasize enforcement in order to position themselves as "tough" on crime.
For just this reason, President Clinton replaced his first, reform-minded drug czar, Lee Brown, with retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who squandered billions on a scandal-ridden media campaign (planting secret anti-drug messages in prime-time TV dramas) and combating the medical marijuana movement, which is supported by a majority of Americans. Worse yet, overseas enforcement campaigns lead to horrific blowback. Grim points out that aggressive attacks on growers and suppliers cause centralization of the drug trade (only big organizations can afford the losses) and this in turn leads to corruption, as cartel leaders parlay their fortunes into political influence. Not only are we pissing away our own resources on ineffectual enforcement efforts, we have "brought the Mexican government to the brink of collapse, making the prospect of a failed state on America’s southern border a very real possibility."
For Grim, most of these mistakes have roots in an elementary error, the inability to accept that "altering one’s consciousness is a fundamental human desire." The craving to be more relaxed or more alert, more outgoing or more reflective, happier or deeper or even just sillier and less bored — in one form other another, this drive has always been and always will be with us, though many of us refuse to admit it. As a result, our political response to drug problems tends to be blinkered. "In reality, there’s no such thing as drug policy," Grim writes. "As currently understood and implemented, drug policy attempts to isolate a phenomenon that can’t be taken in isolation. Economic policy is drug policy. Healthcare policy is drug policy. Foreign policy, too, is drug policy. When approached in isolation, drug policy almost always backfires, because it doesn’t take into account the powerful economic, social and cultural forces that also determine how and why Americans get high."
Border Justice
…
| Email This Post
|
Twitter
|
LinkedIn
|
del.icio.us
|
Google+ |
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(
