Image by Michael Fleshman via Flickr
by Cameron Salisbury
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
September 11, 2013
On Monday night, September 9, 2013, media personality Charlie Rose sat down with Syria’s leader Bashar el-Assad for an interview that lasted the better part of an hour. It was a remarkable conversation but not for the reasons that Charlie Rose is being treated like a conquering hero at CBS. The person who deserves the high-fives is Syria’s president.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com, February 12, 2012
February 26, 2012
Image via Wikipedia
I drive across I-70 periodically between St. Louis and Denver. Something unnerving is happening to the farmland that I pass in Kansas. Sinkholes are opening, only yards from the highway.
The massive Ogallala Aquifer, an ancient underground fresh water lake that made the Plains cornucopia possible after the 1930s Dust Bowl, is located below 8 states in the High Plains, including Kansas. It stretches, at depths ranging from a few feet to 1000 feet, from Texas to South Dakota, and covers roughly 175,000 square miles. Widely exploited only since the 1940s, it has been depleted at an alarming rate since, almost entirely for farming. The problem is causing increasing concern in a number of states including Oklahoma and Texas.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
October 16, 2011
Image by bradley j via Flickr
It is painful to watch the media glom on to incompetent ‘research’ published in medical journals. It would be nice if they made sure of their facts before they spread misinformation and create a bandwagon full of misleading and dangerous hot air.
Take the headline about how Vitamin E causes prostate cancer, for example. What won’t they think of next?
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
October 3, 2011
Image by FasterDix via Flickr
The New York Times ran a recent article about income disparity in the U.S., this time focusing on geography. It seems that the Atlantic corridor, centered in New York City and Washington, DC, has far and away the greatest concentration of household wealth per square mile, and has benefited also as income disparity has turned into a runaway freight train.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
July 16, 2011
Image by Cristóbal del Castillo Camus via Flickr
Canada’s travel advisory for Cuba:
Cuba — There is no Official Warning for this country. …Normal security precautions should be observed while in Havana and other Cuban cities….
U.S. State Department’s travelers advisory for Cuba:
Continue reading
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
July 4, 2011
Image by M.V. Jantzen via Flickr
My plane was taxiing into the gate at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport when the end-of-flight announcements came on. Seatbacks in upright position, trays closed and locked, baggage under the seats, you know the drill. On an in-bound international flight, I was headed for my second trip through TSA security in 3 hours.
Image via Wikipedia
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
May 13, 2011
If one listens between the lines, it seems clear that the U.S. government has serious doubts about who it murdered in Abbottabad. The problem is not just the changing account coming from spokespersons. The problem is the facts themselves.
At first they were 90% sure that they had killed Osama Bin Laden, meaning a one in ten chance that they had screwed up. Pretty poor odds for an assassination. Then the odds went to 95%, and finally, after the fastest DNA analysis in history, to 99.9%.
Image via Wikipedia
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
May 5, 2011
The American media has been joyous about the U.S. trained SEAL guerrillas who murdered an unarmed man in cold blood. The are described as heroes, supermen, and courageous, but one national correspondent got it right. She said they were assassins.
Some questions:
If Bin Laden could have been eliminated with 25 commandos, why have 4800 Americans, so far, been sent to a desert to die?
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com, December 2, 2010
crossposted at Arthritis-Alternatives
May 5, 2011
Image by SEIU International via Flickr
You came out of the meeting with Republican leaders and stood in front of cameras saying that you were optimistic about compromise to improve serious domestic problems.
They came out of the meeting saying that their base liked gridlock and they intended to maintain it.
Were you at the same meeting?
How much clearer can those troglodytes be? What in your background has made conciliation and suck up-ness your most important priorities?
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
crossposted at Arthritis-Alternatives
October 5, 2010
A Swedish study published recently maintains that mammograms for women in their 40s saves lives. It contradicts numerous studies done over the past 20 years, as well as recommendations from The American College of Physicians in 2007 and from the expert U.S. Preventive Services Task Force in 2009 which concluded that the benefits of mammography screening before age 50 do not outweigh the risks, something that has been widely acknowledged in public health circles since mammography became big business in the late 1980s.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
March 15, 2010
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It’s happened again. Another well meaning soul insisting that EveryOne is to blame for the mess that engulfs the U.S. politically, militarily and economically because in our political system, the country gets what it votes for. Therefore, ‘we are all responsible.’
Some may get their kicks from an existential guilt trip, but please count me out.
First, we almost never get what we think we voted for. Just a few examples: Remember George W. saying he’d be a ‘uniter, not a divider’? Before the vote he also said yes to more social programs, lower taxes and a balanced budget. Franklin Roosevelt said he’d keep the U.S. out of foreign wars and Richard Nixon said he’d end the war in Viet Nam.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
February 3, 2010
It’s not easy to establish a clear line in history between the time when American democracy belonged to citizens and when it was lost, but wars give us starting point.
The first wars were fought over ideas. There was the Revolutionary War in the 18th century and then in the 19th century, the Civil War ‘preserved the union’ and ended slavery.
In the 20th century came the wars for national imperialism. First, Teddy Roosevelt’s wars in the Philippines and Cuba, then WWII which more or less accidentally resulted in imperial expansion.
After 1945, the U.S. was very good at waging war but no longer so good at winning, so we kept practicing. Wars waged against Korea and Vietnam failed to accomplish anything but massive destruction on somebody else’s land, ratchet up the hate index for the U.S., and give the Pentagon an excuse to exercise its military muscles and escalate its budget.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com Sept. 22, 2009
Sept. 28, 2009
Who are those people? They look like ordinary citizens but they act like maniacs, screaming at members of congress who want to discuss health care coverage for the tens of millions, including themselves, who are either uninsured or may become so tomorrow. They shout gibberish into the microphones of reporters, things like “I don’t have a job. I don’t have health insurance. Keep the government out of my business!” No one could make this up.
They spread incomprehensible nonsense about President Obama’s birth, and prevent their children from listening to a U.S. president, THEIR president, speak to them in the classroom, as other presidents have in the past.
At first glance they seem to have sprung from the media’s imagination, manufactured to placate the mindless and fill time between stories devoted to happy talk about Wall Street and the ‘recovering’ economy.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
June 8, 2009
With the government-mandated bankruptcy of one of the largest, longest-lived, and, until recently, most profitable manufacturers in the world, the takeover of the U.S. economy by the same East Coast forces that destroyed it is now complete.
The speed with which GM spiraled into insolvency was breath taking. Less than 18 months ago, just as the horrifying effects of Wall Street’s malfeasance were becoming clear, GM was profitably selling SUVs, making money for its shareholders and paying big ticket CEOs far more than they were worth, just like Wall Street.
Suddenly the rules changed. In a spectacular reversal, GM was deceptively accused of failing to sell what consumers wanted to buy, of being out of touch and out of date, of having too many built in personnel costs which made them unable to compete with foreign auto makers whose short history in the U.S. left them free of pension liabilities.
by Cameron Salisbury
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Opedinfo.com
March 19, 2009
If you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
And so it is with Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, the entire East Coast financial establishment, innumerable Ivy League economists including Paul Krugman, and people who really should know better, like the media, Congress and the President.
Truly mindless fuzz continues to flow out of Washington, accepted as gospel by both its inhabitants and the media. For example, there’s the idea that the worldwide financial crisis can only be solved by the same institutions and people that created it; that the banking sector needs lots and lots of additional money and political support to solve problems that trillions of dollars so far have not; that months of nonexistent positive results means only that we haven’t handed financiers sufficient loot; that the failure to bail out Lehman’s is what caused this whole mess; that reinvigorating casino capitalism is the way out of the dilemma; that public outrage shows that the rest of us just don’t get it.
Worse than senseless, the nonsense that passes for conventional wisdom in the corridor between New York and Washington, D.C., is worrisome on a number of levels.
Dandelion Salad 