Plane Stupid environmental campaign

The Unbending Trees: Overture with Tracey Thorn

The collapse of communism and capitalism

...The idea that Bush Junior was an anomaly is an illusion that's dying a hard death. Of course, much more than the accepted worldview about George W. Bush is at issue. Indeed, it isn't really about W at all, who is about as relevant as yesterday morning's New York Times.

No, the real reason progressives cling to the falsehood that Bush was the problem is because they don't want to face the fact that Obama isn't the solution.

On the Charlie Rose Show recently, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in his usual half-an-insight-wrapped-in-a-falsehood way, intoned as much. You know that when the “War of Choice” in Iraq man pontificates that the problem isn't American leadership but American citizenry, denial is running out of running room.

Friedman said, “Maybe, as good as Obama is, he can't trump the system.” Waking up is hard to do. Given that Rose and Friedman are the system, there's plenty of irony to go around.

[ ... ]

I still feel that the hinge of history could have squeaked a different way, but both Russians and Americans fell short. As we all know, American capitalism proclaimed a glorious victory over godless communism. Problem was, we had become the godless ones, in a true sense, and so it was a quick and globalizing downhill slide under Bill and Hillary to George and Laura.

The question now is: What is Obama? Sad to say, he's an empty promise, a hyped hope. The proud proclaimer of “I got game” has become the graying thin man of 'it's still the same.'

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Merck's Vioxx scandal widens: Drug maker knew Vioxx was deadly for years before risk was made public (opinion)

(NaturalNews) The Vioxx scandal widened this week as new research published in the Archives of Internal Medicine reveals that Vioxx maker Merck held data for three years that proved Vioxx caused an alarming increase in the risk of heart attacks and strokes. And yet Merck chose not to release that data. In fact, it took three more years of patients dying from heart attacks before Vioxx was pulled off the market, and even then, Merck insisted the drug was not dangerous.

This new study was based on a meta-analysis of several unpublished studies that Merck obviously didn't want to see published in medical journals. Drug companies routinely engage in this subterfuge: They cherry-pick which studies they want published while burying the rest. They also choose which studies to forward to the FDA, all while claiming the whole charade is based on "evidence-based medicine."

It is, sort of. If you add the word "selective" in front of the phrase, making it: "Selective evidence-based medicine."

So how were the authors of this new study able to find these unpublished studies that Merck would much prefer remained hidden? They were disclosed in court proceedings against Merck. So many people were harmed by Vioxx, you see, that some of them decided to sue. And in that legal process, many "secret" studies were revealed. Some smart-minded researchers decided to analyze the data in those studies and that's what reveals Merck knew Vioxx raised the risk of heart-related side effects by 35 percent and yet did nothing to warn the public about those risks.

In essence, these documents prove that Merck knowingly and maliciously allowed a deadly drug to continue to be sold to patients for years. It's a clear case of profits before patients from a drug company mired in one scandal after another. (Merck is also the maker of Gardasil, the cervical cancer vaccine.)

In its defense, Merck says its own scientists couldn't find any link between Vioxx and heart attack deaths. Understandably, it's difficult to find anything when your profits depend on not finding it.

The Merck conspiracy
Now that this data is public, it reveals that Merck's executives and / or employees were engaged in a conspiracy to withhold important drug safety data from the public and the FDA. The aim of this conspiracy was simple: To maximize profits through the sale of a product they knew was killing people.

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Tibet wasn't ours, says Chinese scholar

A leading Chinese historian and a veteran of the committee that advises on official Chinese history textbooks has broken step with the official Chinese line on historical sovereignty over Tibet and said that to claim that the ancient Buddhist kingdom "has always been a part of China" would be a "defiance of history".

In an article in the China Review magazine, Professor Ge Jianxiong, 62, director of the Institute of Chinese Historical Geography and the Research Centre for Historical Geographic Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, states that while considering how big China was during the Tang Dynasty (7th to 10th century), "we cannot include the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, which was ruled by Tubo/Tufan..."

Tubo/Tufan, notes Ge, "was a sovereignty independent of the Tang Dynasty. At least it was not administered by the Tang Dynasty." If it were not, he argues, there would have been no need for the Tang emperor of the day to offer Princess Wen Cheng in a "marriage of state" to the Tibetan king, Songtsen Gampo.

"It would be a defiance of history," asserts Ge, "to claim that Tibet has always been a part of China since the Tang Dynasty; the fact that the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau subsequently became a part of the Chinese dynasties does not substantiate such a claim."

Ge's article is an exploration of a larger theme of Chinese identity in history -- and precisely when it evolved. And his comments on Tibet conform to scholarly accounts that acknowledge that the takeover of Tibet during the Qing Dynasty (17th to early 20th century) was the starting point for"Chinese sovereignty" over the region.

Yet, Ge's comments are controversial insofar as they deviate from the official Communist Party line that Tibet has always been an inalienable part of China; in the past China has regarded as any weakening of that theory as "anti-national" and "split-ist". It will be interesting to see how the authorities respond to Ge's scholarly article.

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