Beetle Mania

If you like Yoplait strawberry yogurt, Tropicana grapefruit, orange-strawberry juice, or Hershey's Good & Plenty candies, chances are you will be sucking on the red coloring extracted from the female cochineal beetle and her eggs. These insects live on cactus plants in Peru and the Canary Islands.

According to the best-selling book by Eric Schlosser, Chew on This, the female bug feeds on cactus pads, and color from the cactus gathers in her body. The bugs are collected, dried, and ground into a coloring additive. It takes 70,000 of the insects to make a pound of carmine dye, as it is known. The Food & Drug Administration doesn't require that this cochineal be identified in the ingredients. Manufacturers simply identify it as an "artificial color."

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/08/food/source/4.htm

Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker Yukihisa Fujita takes 9/11 doubts global

In a September 2003 article for The Guardian newspaper, Michael Meacher, who served as Tony Blair's environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003, shocked the establishment by calling the global war on terrorism "bogus." Even more controversially, he implied that the U.S. government either allowed 9/11 to happen, or played some role in the destruction wrought that day. Besides Meacher, few politicians have publicly questioned America's official 9/11 narrative — until Diet member Yukihisa Fujita.

Speaking out: Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker Yukihisa Fujita addresses the Diet and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on his doubts about the official story of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. COURTESY OF YUKIHISA FUJITA

In January 2008 Fujita, a member of the Democratic Party of Japan, asked the Japanese Parliament and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to explain gaping holes in the official 9/11 story that various groups — including those who call themselves the "911 Truth Movement" — claim to have exposed.

Fujita, along with a growing number of individuals — including European and American politicians — are leading a charge to conduct a thorough, independent investigation of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

...

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20080617zg.html

French Government decides to censor the Internet, Time Warner Cable closes Usenet

Keep your Égalité and Fraternité but shove your Liberté!

..In fact, worse still is that any site is now game for a French blockade, as Sarkozy’s government is inviting people to send in huge long lists of sites which offend their delicate sensibilities. The French government, which will purportedly be able to receive complaints from Internet users in real time, will be able to add sites to a so called “black list”, which it will then force national ISPs to block.
The move, announced by France’s Interior Minister, Michel Alliot-Marie, is France’s way of showing it is indeed taking a strong stand against cyber-criminality, but it seems that the line between ‘strong’ and ‘authoritarian’ is a little fuzzy on this one.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/06/10/french-government-decides

Time Warner Cable To Stop Offering Newsgroup Access

An internal tipster drops me a line to note that Time Warner Cable/Roadrunner will be eliminating newsgroup access. The newsgroup ax is expected to fall before the end of the month, and my source says that an official announcement should go up on the Roadrunner website sometime around the sixteenth. Roadrunner has actually held on for some time, given many broadband ISPs stopped offering newsgroup access several years ago. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Time-Warner-Cable-To-Stop-Offering-Newsgroup-Access-95030

According to a report by Declan McCullagh, Sprint will be blocking the entire alt. hierarchy of Usenet, while good old Time Warner Cable has no time for such fussiness and will just stop offering all Usenet access. Verizon, the third participating ISP, has not yet announced its blocking plans.
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Verizon__Time_Warner_Cable__and_Sprint_To_Block_Usenet

David Davis resignation speech

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/davis-resignation-unlikely-hero-of-liberal-britain-shocks-the-political-establishment-846220.html

Congressman Dennis Kucinich introduces 35 articles of Impeachment for Pres. G. W. Bush

ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=93581

Children should no longer be taught history, geography and science

Official Government on education policy advisor:

Children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are "middle-class" creations, a Government adviser will claim today.
Professor John White, who contributed to a controversial shake-up of the secondary curriculum, believes lessons should instead cover a series of personal skills.
Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1024031/Drop-middle-class-academic-subjects-says-schools-adviser.html?printingPage=true

Anti police state music videos

Flobots - Handlebars
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2tkiy_handlebars-flobots_creation

Aimee Allen's *Unofficial* Ron Paul Revolution Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBCKMTo210k

John "Insane" McCain’s YouTube Problem

"John McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare"

ABC website tells kids when they should die

The site has several features including a cartoon series, Adventures of Greena, and a tool called Prof Schpinkee's Greenhouse Calculator to help kids work out their carbon footprint.

The calculator lets users compare their own carbon output to the "average Aussie greenhouse pig" and estimates at what age a person should die so they don't use more than their fair share of the Earth's resources.

Too much carbon production causes a cartoon pig to explode, leaving behind a pool of blood.

Victorian Liberal senator Mitch Fifield today questioned the accuracy and appropriateness of some of the imagery and content on the website.

"I know there's a little bit of goth in all of us, but this might be taking it just a little too far," Senator Fifield said of the quasi life-expectancy calculator.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,23765244-5014239,00.html

Scientists sign petition denying man-made global warming

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of ... greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the forseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments."The petition was reissued last year by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, an independent research group, partly in response to Al Gore’s film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth.

Its president, Arthur Robinson, said: "If this many American scientists will sign this petition, you certainly can’t continue to contend that there is a consensus on this subject."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2053842/Scientists-sign-petition-denying-man-made-global-warming.html