Now for a Bit of News

Like many of you, I receive feeds for several different news reporting and/or news gathering organizations. In the glorious olden days -- pre-2000 -- I learned about most of the international, national, regional and local news from reading an "in-my-hands" newspaper or by watching newscasts on the telly. No more! Most of it now comes to me via the internet.

So, here are some of the stories I'm reading today and a few comments about each.

Bed Bug Infestation Is Scaring Millions Of Americans
By Anneli Rufus
Peter Krask stepped out of his New York City apartment one day last year, shut the door, and walked away forever, leaving behind almost everything he owned.

He carried away only a few items of clothing, personal records, and his computer.

Krask's apartment was infested with bedbugs. Savoring warmth, they swarmed in his DSL port, light fixtures, carpets and furniture. They'd feasted on him nightly for a year — which he spent visiting doctors in an increasing state of panic over the rashes inflaming his buttocks and other body parts before finally ascertaining the cause.

It was Cimex lectularius, the flat, cockroach-colored, lentil-sized pest whose favorite food is not just warm blood but human blood. Bedbugs are back, bigtime. According to a National Pest Management Association study, outbreaks have soared 81 percent nationwide since 2000. Their sudden resurgence in all fifty states of a formerly bedbug-free nation has caught off-guard not just the medical and pest-control industries but millions of ordinary people who now apply costly, time-consuming, potentially toxic and inconclusive strategies for slaughtering insects that inhabit indoor environments both soft and hard and can lie in wait without eating for up to a year. Finding hosts, they feed by night, doubling in size as they suck.

Lending a whole new meaning to the phrase "home invasion," the very idea stokes our deepest fears of swarming hordes and sleeper cells and sneak attacks...

Hmm. Could it be that our continual assault on and degradation of dear Mother Earth is coming back to bite us literally on the butt?

Mankind Is Using Up Global Resources Faster Than Ever
by Louise Gray
Think tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) look at how much food, fuel and other resources are consumed by humans every year. They then compare it to how much the world can provide without threatening the ability of important ecosystems like oceans and rainforests to recover.

This year the moment we start eating into nature's capital or ‘Earth Overshoot Day' will fall on 21st August, a full month earlier than last year, when resources were used up by 23rd September.

Andrew Simms, Policy Director at NEF, blamed increased consumption...

As conditions worldwide grow worse, the capitalist response is to use up even more. What is it that is said about burning the candle at both ends?

The Myth of the Free Market
by Craig Barnes
Millions of Americans are today unemployed because the free market is not working for them. Millions of Americans have lost their homes because the free market did not work for them or for the banks. Before the health care bill passed last January millions could not get health care because the free market worked for them when they were healthy but often did not work at all when they needed care.

The free market sent jobs to China and Mexico, India and Taiwan. The free market encouraged subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations that were collages of numbers that the market itself did not understand. The free market encouraged insurance companies to compete for ways not to pay for health care rather than to encourage ways to provide health care.

During the years of the Bush administration's free market advocacy, Bear Stearns collapsed, Merrill Lynch failed, and Lehman Brothers collapsed. The free market enabled Goldman Sachs to act as if it believed in securities that it sold to others while at the same time betting with its own money that these securities would fail. To knowingly induce buyers with misinformation is intentional fraud, but the free market did not and has not ever protected against intentional fraud.

In a free market, British Petroleum risked environmental catastrophe in order to save money on expensive cement or time-consuming testing and used cheaper designs rather than safer ones for the most complex drilling apparatus in the world. Transocean obeyed the demands of the market by not fixing 390 maintenance items that were back-listed, ignored a leak in the control pod of the blowout preventer, and avoided the delay caused by its gas detection alarms by simply shutting them off.

Now come Rep. John Boehner of Ohio and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky leading the Republican charge toward the fall elections urging Americans to once again undo government regulation and rely for their protection and safety, their jobs and their health care on the free market. They would undo newly passed protections against free market fraud and against incentives for health care providers and against more regulation of Wall Street...

Sigh. Things seem to get worse by the day.

Petraeus’s New Offensive: Preparing the Way for Obama to Retract the Withdrawal Pledge
By Matthew Rothschild
General David Petraeus is in the midst of his Afghanistan offensive.

But it’s not against the Taliban; it’s against those in Congress, and those of us in the public, who oppose the ongoing — and escalating — Afghan war.

Petraeus is preparing the battlefield for next summer, when President Obama is on record as saying the withdrawal from Afghanistan will commence.

Petraeus announced very publicly over the weekend that he didn’t take the job as top general in Afghanistan to preside over “a graceful exit,” and he affirmed that he may advise Obama to delay the withdrawal.

Some in the media claim Petraeus is trying to strengthen his position against those in the Administration who want to greatly reduce the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

But I’m not buying that.

I believe Petraeus is doing what his commander in chief wants him to do...

What does it say about a nation that always can find the will and money to kill people in foreign lands, but can find neither the will nor money to feed the starving at home?

Candidates Agree On This: The Other Guy's A Bum
from the AP
Name-calling is a winner this campaign season. By a landslide.

In Illinois, dueling political wordsmiths long ago cast the Senate race as a choice between a "mob banker'' and a "serial liar.'' The rivals are more generally known as Alexi Giannoulias, the Democrat, and Rep. Mark Kirk, the Republican. One of them will soon trade in his label for another: the distinguished senator from Illinois.

Then there's Connecticut, and a statement the Democratic National Committee sent around referring to the Republican Senate candidate as Linda "crotch-kicker'' McMahon. Asked about his choice of words, spokesman Brad Woodhouse said in an e-mail: "Well, her opponent ran that ad ... showing her doing it.'' She is a former executive of World Wrestling Entertainment.

In the current election environment, calling an opponent extreme evidently isn't sufficient. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's latest television commercial attacks Republican challenger Sharron Angle as "too extreme.''

Political insults are as old as America itself, morphing into ever-new forms as television, the Internet, bloggers and Twitter replaced more technologically primitive forms of communication. Then, as now, they were intended to render a target loathsome...

You see, this is the kind of problem a society runs into when elections are based on the cult of personality and not the issues themselves. It becomes nothing more than a perverse beauty pageant in which the contestants don't try to convince you of their own beauty, but instead try to convince voters that they aren't as unfathomably ugly as the others.