June 19, 2015

Democratic Party of Arkansas: Our search for Executive Director begins

Candace Martin, who has done amazing work for the DPA for the last four and a half years, has sadly announced she is leaving. We will be depending on her to help get us through our exciting JJ Dinner with Hillary Clinton and other immediate things. But we must plan this transition and bring a new ED on board, with the plan that he or she will be able to spend time with Candace before she leaves.

The DPA has appointed a terrific group of people who have agreed to serve on the Search Committee to find our next Executive Director. This group brings together the best of both elected and party officials. A brief job announcement is below, and you may click on this link to read the full job description.

Job Announcement: DPA Executive Director
The Democratic Party of Arkansas seeks a dynamic and committed individual to lead our staff. Candidates must have extensive experience with management, fundraising, and political skills that will compliment the existing talent within our organization.

The Executive Director works in collaboration with the state Party chair, its officers, and all its affiliates to oversee the strategic plan, programs, and fundraising activities of the state party. He or she must be reliable, honest, loyal and discreet. The Executive Director reports to the state party Chair.

To apply, candidates should email resume, cover letter and three references to jobs@arkdems.org by 5:00 p.m. on Monday, July 20, 2015. Late applications will not be accepted. Salary is commensurate with experience. The DPA is an equal opportunity employer.

To read the full job description, please click here.

June 10, 2015

OP/ED: Leaving Arkansas

Leaving Arkansas
By Rex Nelson
This article was published today at 3:02 a.m.

What's now the Arkansas Economic Development Commission is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. The agency is serving a state far different from the one that existed in 1955.

Desperate to do something about massive out-migration, the Arkansas Legislature passed a bill that year creating the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Though it was given very little money, the commission was tasked with bringing new industries to the state, expanding existing industries and upgrading the standard of living.

For years, Arkansans had been leaving the farm to find work in automobile factories in Detroit and shoe factories in St. Louis. In the Delta, thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were out of work due to the rapid mechanization of agriculture. The exodus, however, wasn't limited to the Delta. In the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, the Arkansas River Valley and the Gulf Coastal Plain, people also packed up and headed out.

...

"Unfortunately, good land soon ran out, leaving many of the state's rural areas overpopulated in relation to arable soil," Holley wrote. "The earliest out-migration, beginning in the 1890s, was in part a response to this fundamental problem. Population losses continued in the first two decades of the 20th Century. In the 1920s, Arkansas lost almost 200,000 people, a record high to that point. Migration slowed slightly during the depressed 1930s, but by the 1940s, when the national economy shifted to war production, the migration stream that had previously been a steady leak turned into a torrential flood. Arkansas, in fact, lost population in every decade between 1890 and 1970."

...

Holley wrote that the magazine's headline had asked "a valid question, and the answer was easy--the lack of well-paying jobs. Arkansas' most significant export was not lumber, cotton or bauxite, but people." Stemming that tide was the first task for Rockefeller and the AIDC six decades ago.

http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/jun/10/leaving-arkansas-20150610/
...

Very interesting article from today's paper. It may be behind a paywall, so sorry in advance if you cannot read the entire article.

March 9, 2015

India’s Daughter

India’s Daughter, a film from the Storyville strand brought forward by the BBC from International Women’s Day (on Sunday) “given the intense level of interest” in it after preview clips sparked outrage in Britain and India, was the most shocking piece of revelatory filming on TV this year. India has now banned its broadcast, with urban development minister M Venkaiah Naidu declaring: “This is an international conspiracy to defame India. We will see how the film can be stopped abroad too.” The splendid news for the ludicrous man is that the genie doesn't go back into that bottle any more.

You can view BBC videos on Chrome and by d/l the Hola app. It will allow the video to play.
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Stunning story, surprised no one has linked it here yet. India screwed up by banning the story - now people all over the world are watching this story. I'd probably not watched it until I read about the banning of the story in the Guardian.
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India news channel banned from showing gang rape documentary
Government stops NDTV from screening Leslee Udwin’s India’s Daughter on International Women’s Day as thousands turn to internet to watch in support

A news channel in India banned by the government from showing a controversial documentary about the fatal gang rape of a young woman in Delhi responded with a powerful hour-long on-air protest on Sunday night.

Leslee Udwin’s documentary India’s Daughter was due to be shown on the Indian news channel NDTV on International Women’s Day, but the screening was cancelled after the government in Delhi went to court to ban the film in India.

The ban forced tens of thousands of Indians to turn to the internet to see the film. And the response of viewers was overwhelmingly against the ban on the film about the horrific gang rape of a student in December 2012.

more at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/08/india-news-channel-banned-from-showing-gang-documentary

March 8, 2015

The Drug Lord With a Social Mission

The Drug Lord With a Social Mission
Matt Bowden (sometimes known as Starboy, an "interdimensional traveler&quot helped create one of the most viral outbreaks of new drugs in history. He might also have the antidote.
MAIA SZALAVITZ MAR 2, 2015

http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/the-drug-lord-with-a-social-mission-also-performs-under-the-alter-ego-starboy?Src=longreads

[snippage]

For a time in the late 1990s, Bowden had worked in the “herbal highs” business—developing and selling products similar to Red Bull, as well as some containing ephedrine, the active ingredient in the now banned performance-enhancing stimulant ephedra. In part to look for new products, and in part out of a personal fascination with drugs, Bowden had trained informally with a neuropharmacologist. And while perusing the scientific literature, he had come upon a drug called benzylpiperazine (BZP).

[snippage]

And sell it did: His customer base quickly climbed to half a million. Within a few years, a study would find that 20 percent of adult New Zealanders had tried “legal party pills”—as products made from BZP rapidly became known—and 44 percent of respondents who reported having used both legal party pills and illegal party drugs said they’d used BZP to replace the illegal drugs. Soon, the press in New Zealand was spending less time writing about the country’s meth epidemic, and more time sounding the alarm about an epidemic of drugs like BZP.

[snippage]

New Zealand, an isolated island nation where popular traditional drugs are harder to come by, was one of the first countries to see the commercial spread of so-called legal highs (thanks in no small part to Matt Bowden). But when a worldwide ecstasy shortage in 2008 spiked the price and lowered the quality of traditional club drugs, the market for legal highs went global. The new drugs started to show up worldwide in online marketplaces, at head shops, even in gas stations—and, finally, on the radar of the world’s drug control agencies.

[snippage]

Worldwide, more than 350 new substances are now marketed as alternatives to marijuana, amphetamines, and other drugs, branded with names like bath salts, Spice, K2, and Blaze, according to the United Nation’s drug control agency. In the United States, by 2012, over 11 percent of high school seniors were reporting that they had tried at least one of these new psychoactive substances, usually a synthetic cannabinoid designed to substitute for pot. That made synthetic marijuana the second most popular class of drugs among American teens, after marijuana itself.

[snippage]

In 2013, New Zealand passed a law creating the world’s first set of regulations to allow the clinical testing and approval of new recreational drugs. Much as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does for medicines, New Zealand’s system stands to create a government-regulated market for legal highs—an attempt to tame the industry not by stamping it out, but by guiding consumers to safe, reliable products, and giving suppliers an incentive to bring such products to market.

much, much more at: http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/the-drug-lord-with-a-social-mission-also-performs-under-the-alter-ego-starboy?Src=longreads

February 12, 2015

Did anyone watch American Experience this week? "The Forgotten Plague"

Holy crap! TB has been with mankind since the beginning. The ancient Greeks are the one's who called it consumption. It could take 30-40 years to die of TB.

I cannot highly praise this show - show much information, especially about the early Public Health systems and the draconian ways they had of coming in and just taking people from their homes. Bellevue ran out of space for TB patients and put them on barges on the Hudson River.

The shows talks to patients who had to go to Sanatoriums and their lives during those times.

November 7, 2013

Texas Farmer Wins Entry of Default in Keystone Lawsuit

[I did an extensive search for this article and didn't find one; if I missed it, mea culpa]

A Texas farmer has won an entry of default against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which failed to respond to a federal lawsuit claiming it illegally granted environmental permits to TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL pipeline.

Michael Bishop, a farmer in Douglass, about 150 miles northeast of Houston, said he will ask U.S. Magistrate Judge Keith Giblin, in Lufkin, Texas, to invalidate the pipeline’s permits and order the Army Corps to conduct public hearings that it skipped before issuing water-crossing permits to Keystone, which will transport Canadian tar-sands crude to refineries on the Texas Gulf coast.

[snippage]

Bishop is one of the last Texas landowners still battling Calgary-based TransCanada, Keystone’s parent, in court over the company’s use of eminent domain laws to install the pipeline against the property owners’ wishes. The company has said construction on the southern leg of the pipeline is largely complete in Texas and Oklahoma.

“Public hearings should’ve been held in accordance with the law,” Bishop said in his original petition, filed in April. He claims the agency “yielded to political pressure and expedited the permit” in violation of federal environmental regulations.

more at link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-07/texas-farmer-wins-default-in-keystone-pipeline-fight-correct-.html

October 18, 2013

Paul Ryan’s Worst Nightmare Comes True as Bernie Sanders Is On The Budget Committee

Source: Politics USA

Paul Ryan’s Worst Nightmare Comes True as Bernie Sanders Is On The Budget Committee

By: Jason Easley
Friday, October 18th, 2013, 3:28 pm

Majority Leader Harry Reid has shattered Paul Ryan’s dreams of killing Social Security and Medicare by putting Sen. Bernie Sanders on the budget conference committee.

Sen. Sanders reacted to the official news of being appointed to the budget conference committee by saying, “I am excited about being a member of the budget conference committee and I look forward to working with my Democratic and Republican colleagues to end the absurdity of sequestration and to develop a budget which works for all Americans. In my view, it is imperative that this new budget helps us create the millions of jobs we desperately need and does not balance the budget on the backs of working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.”

In other words, Bernie Sanders opposes everything that Paul Ryan wants. Sen. Sanders has long been an outspoken critic of the Ryan budgets, and the Wisconsin Republican’s borderline obsession with privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare.

In response to Ryan’s recent Wall Street Journal editorial where he once again put entitlements in the crosshairs, Sanders said, “In a sense, what Paul Ryan is saying is yeah, I lost the election. It doesn’t matter. I want you to implement all of the ideas that I campaigned on and lost. You know what? The American don’t want to see cuts in Social Security, or privatization of Social Security, They don’t want to see cuts in Medicare. They don’t want to see cuts in Medicaid. They don’t want to see the EPA abolished, the Department of Education abolished. They don’t want to see the VA privatized. They don’t want to see the minimum wage, the concept of the minimum wage, done away with so that the people of America could work for four bucks an hour.”

More at link:

Read more: http://www.politicususa.com/2013/10/18/paul-ryans-worst-nightmare-true-bernie-sanders-budget-committee.html

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Woot woot! Harry seems to be hardening that spine that's started growing

October 16, 2013

Outsourced Cities, Brought to You by CH2M Hill

Published on Wednesday, October 16, 2013 by PR Watch
Outsourced Cities, Brought to You by CH2M Hill
by Brendan Fischer and Seep Paliwal
When the town of Sandy Springs, Georgia, spun-off from Fulton County and established a brand new government, it didn't sign a Declaration of Independence; it signed a contract.


Sandy Springs, GA
The 100,000-person town entered into a five-year contract with the for-profit management company CH2M Hill to operate almost all of the town's services: running trash collection, and street cleaning, and wastewater management, and even security and administration for the courthouse. A for-profit company, rather than public officials and public employees, would be in charge of providing all "public" services except for fire and police departments. CH2M HILL employees, wearing Sandy Spring uniforms and driving trucks with Sandy Spring logos, even enforced municipal ordinances like grass-cutting and parking regulations.

Sandy Springs, an affluent suburb of Atlanta -- home to Herman Cain, professional sports players, and the woman who voiced Iphone's Siri -- had been fighting for years to spin-off from Fulton County, with many residents resentful that they were subsidizing services for poorer parts of the county. In 2005, after Republicans gained new majorities in both chambers of the Georgia legislature, Sandy Spring got its wish. The new town -- conceived by retired engineer Oliver Porter, a devotee of Austrian free-market economist Frederich Hayek -- had just a few months to set up a fully-functioning city government, and CH2M Hill stepped in, offering itself up as a one-stop-outsourcing-shop.

In the next two years, the newly-created communities of Johns Creek, Milton, and Chattahoochee Hills -- which, like Sandy Springs, were wealthy suburbs cutting themselves loose from less-affluent counties -- followed suit, signing contracts with CH2M Hill to establish fully outsourced cities.

more at link: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/10/16-0
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Straight out of "The Shock Doctrine" by Naomi Klein. She stated in the book that this would become the new norm - 2 America's, one for the rich and the rest, well let's just say, let them eat cake.

December 30, 2011

If people post about their 2nd amendment rights, is it cool to say so what when a family dies via

gun fire? Case in point - on our news tonight the lead story was about someone or some family about 30 miles west of here dying via gunfire. I went to the FB page and said "this is news?" then I was called out about children dying. The very next post on this particular news channels FB page is about Obama et al taking about our 2nd amendment rights. Am I the only one who sees a disconnect here? If we are to be all for the constitution, our bill of rights, which happens to include the au currant definition of what the 2nd amendment stands for, why then am I to open a vein when someone dies, even a child, from gunfire? I bleed for everyone who dies, especially those children who die from starvation even though mom and/or dad are working 2 jobs but still can't afford food every night for the table. Can I not choose when and which vein to open for my sympathy?