Tag: Government Intervention

What Has Happened To the Gov Websites

The takeover of government by unqualified thugs has begun.

In the last few weeks websites of the government having started going dark and seemingly disappearing….WTF?

As an FYI I would like to help my readers that maybe looking for one or more of these sites….

In recent days—in response to directives from the Trump administration—thousands of federal agency web pages have been deleted or altered to remove research, reports, and references to everything from vaccines to environmental policy initiatives. According to The New York Times, more than 8,000 pages have disappeared from the websites of agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Census Bureau, the Department of Justice, and the Food and Drug Administration (to name a few). In other cases, sites are still accessible but have had language related to diversity, gender, and climate change scrubbed.

There are a number of efforts from scientists, researchers, journalists, and advocacy groups to compile and save information that has been removed from federal websites (or is at risk). For example, CDCGuidelines.com has downloadable PDFs of documents on topics like contraception, LGBTQIA+ health, and intimate partner violence, while the Public Environmental Data Project has replicated the Council on Environmental Quality’s deleted Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool. The Harvard Dataverse is another repository for public data, while the End of Term Archive preserves government websites at risk of changing or being lost in transition between presidential administrations.

You can also find deleted pages yourself using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which scrapes and archives websites across the internet to create a digital information repository. You can enter a specific URL (if you know it) or search specific collections—such as .gov websites and .gov PDFs—using keywords.

On the Internet Archive’s main page, enter the URL of the page you want to read into the Wayback Machine search bar. When the results appear, hover over any calendar date with a blue circle and select a time from the pop-up, which indicates when a snapshot of the page was taken. Depending on the page you’re searching for, you may need to navigate back into 2024.

Alternatively, locate the collection search bar at the bottom of the page, enter keywords, and select a collection from the drop-down. The Wayback Machine has collections for .gov pages and PDFs as well as COVID and end-of-term data.

(lifehacker.com)

I try to be helpful….Hopefully this will help those that are interested in what is being done to our government….if not then stick with fake news of FOX and remain ignorant for the rest of your life.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

Resetting the Poverty Debate: State of the States 2013

As this year ends, 2013, poverty seems to be moving at any alarming pace……markets hit all time highs almost daily….while workers make a mere penitence….the old saying….”the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”…….is more pre3valent today than anytime in the last hundred years…….

Today we are looking at the economy and economics……this will be talked about and while they are wasting time talking more of the Middle Class will slip into poverty…..

Poverty is the enemy of the American Dream…..end it and the dream will come alive!

Resetting the Poverty Debate: State of the States 2013.

Stalin Would Be Proud!

From the VOMITORIUM

I am weary of analogies….especially when they are erroneous…….

We all have heard the chatter and the ranting about this socialist thing or that communist person….he acts like Stalin or that he/she thinks like Marx….there seems to be much of the manufactured stories flying all around the web and especially on the blog-a-sphere…..

But there are few things happening that would make the despicable dictator like Stalin swell with pride…..one such happening is the current situation in Michigan….

Michigan’s new governor, Rick Synder has stepped into a pile of bovine fecal matter…..

Snyder recently signed a bill that gives him powers to unilaterally take over local governments by appointing “emergency financial managers” with near absolute powers to supersede decisions made by democratically elected officials.

Snyder just made Orwellian Tea Party history when his appointed “emergency financial manager” for Benton Harbor, Michigan, prohibited elected officials of that city from making any decisions or otherwise carrying out their duties.

As an outraged Michigan blogger observes:

This is a complete disenfranchisement of an entire community, an entire city in my state. The voters are now denied the ability to be governed by the people they elected in a democratic election.

This is nothing short of an abridgment of democracy in raw form.

After all the sign pumping about patriotism and democracy and government intervention….where are those crazy right wing nuts on this situation?

Sorry, but I do want to burst people’s bubble…but if you want analogy (it seems many cannot live without them) then the action by Snyder is straight out of a playbook of Stalin and his rush to control every aspect of Russian life and governance….I want these loud mouth people on the Right to call out the people in their own movement as quickly as they condemn others…..

When All Else Fails…..Tax The Bastards!

Daily Agitator

Thirty years ago when the government started its assault on tobacco, I said then that we have not seen the end of it if it was to be successful…..back in the day, I did not think that any bad would come to the tobacco industry for they had the “clout”…I was mistaken….and then they came for trans fats….and again I was mistaken……now they are coming at sugar….in the form of a tax on the sodas and such……

And back during the start of the tobacco tax, I said, that if they succeeded then there would be NO stopping them elsewhere….looks like I was a seer and did not know it…..

And then I was listening to the news on XM Radio and heard the magic word, Tax”  and this time they were calling for a tax on red meat….atr first I thought I was once again mistaken….after a little Googling for the helluva it I found this on taxmeat.com:

PETA is calling on members of Congress to support a “sin” tax on meat. Why? Among other reasons, meat is the number one cause of global warming, a looming environmental disaster that threatens the United States with billions of dollars in damages from rising sea levels, worsening storms, and increased droughts. A tax on meat would help prevent future global warming-related natural disasters by encouraging a decrease in meat consumption.

A 10-cent tax on every pound of chicken, turkey, pig, fish, and cow flesh sold in grocery stores and restaurants would also help reduce Americans’ skyrocketing annual health care costs by encouraging people to eat less meat. According to the American Dietetic Association, vegetarians are less prone than meat-eaters to develop heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer or to become obese. Revenue from the tax could be used to fund education programs about the health and environmental benefits of reducing meat consumption.

There goes the burgers on the barbie thingy!

Okay, dipsticks…when is enough enough?  I would have said that this was not possible….but then I think back to my disbelief on the tobacco tax so many years ago and I wonder…..

I wonder where all this intervention in people’s personal lives and decisions will cease….just like the seatbelt thing…Americans want to drive 80 mph into a tree and walk away….they are trying to protect people from themselves…..who and when did we give them this option?

Once again I would like to ask where will this stop?  What will be next?  Salt is bad for your health, when will it be the next thing in the bull’s eye of taxes?

It Is Tobacco Again

The Philly Inquirer reports:

The tobacco-control movement celebrated another milestone yesterday as the U.S. Senate easily passed a bill giving the government unprecedented power over the making and marketing of tobacco products.

Supporters say the law will enable the Food and Drug Administration to protect children from the addictive lure of cigarettes, make tobacco products safer, and, ultimately, save some of the 400,000 lives lost annually to tobacco-related illness.

But like every victory in the decades-long battle to curb the tobacco industry, the latest one comes with limitations, compromises, and inherent conflicts. Even many antismoking activists doubt the law will have the intended public-health impact.

Tobacco companies will have to disclose their product research and ingredients – secrets previously revealed only in court cases – and seek approval for new products. The FDA will publish an annual list of harmful ingredients by brand and can ban the most dangerous of the estimated 6,000 chemicals in cigarettes, except nicotine, the key to addiction. Nicotine, the bill says, can only be reduced.

How flippin’ wonderful….the US will now dictate to an industry more so than in the past.  Tobacco MUST comply.  In the same vain….why not go to more extremes?  Force car companies to make cars that get 50 mpg by next model year.  Or dictate to the Insurance comnpanies what their price sand pay outs should be.  Pick anything….and let the government dictate to it….the conditions of their business.

Smoking is a bad habit…but it is just that a habit…..everyone who smokes knows it could kill, them at anytime….that it is extremely unhealthy…anti-smoking people have won…now move on to anything industry and sure and control them….okay?

Is That Reincarnation Approved?

A top Chinese official warned on Friday that the central government in Beijing must approve the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation, and would not recognise any candidate that it had not endorsed, the official Xinhua agency said.

The Dalai Lama’s succession has become a prickly issue, as the Nobel Prize winner ages and his health declines.

He has suggested that his incarnation might be found outside China, or even that Tibetans themselves could order a vote on whether to continue an institution that once gave one monk both spiritual and temporal sway over Tibet.

But the Chinese leadership appears determined not to cede any kind of authority to a candidate beyond their control.

Now this has got to be the ultimate in government intervention into a private life.  I mean reincarnation is preordained, or at least I thought it was.  But now the Chinese government has said that it has the final say in the process.  Damn!  I thought government banning porno was an intrusion…but what do I know?