TALKING POINTS MEMO – An anchor on the Russian-funded network RT America took to the airwaves on Friday to say that if a Russian-backed rebel militia brought down the Malaysian airliner in Ukraine, it shows why governments should not be providing weapons to insurgent forces.

Abby Martin’s Statement on Downed Malaysian Plane & State Sponsorship of Militias

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More at Talking Points Memo.

Abby and Robbie Martin discuss the potentiality of an ‘Occupy Silicon Valley’ protest movement in a similar mold to ‘Occupy Oakland’ taking place in California’s San Francisco Bay Area. They address the ethical issues revolving around tech-companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Soundcloud and debunk the notion that private corporations will install privacy safeguards on their own without the pressure of public consumer outrage. Robbie goes into the history of Silicon Valley’s roots, which tie directly to the Pentagon’s post-WWII defense industry private sector push.

Watch Robbie Martin talk about Facebook’s new police force and why Occupy Wall Street should take on Silicon Valley on Breaking the Set:

Robbie Martin Breaks the Set on Occupy Silicon Valley 

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Have you ever found it odd that a side effect of Cymbalta, a leading anti-depressant, is suicide? It seems counterintuitive, but in a country where medicine is dictated by Big Pharma, such a paradox is hardly surprising.

That’s because, as former CNN correspondent Amber Lyon points out, Western medicine treatments are not intended to get to the root of the sickness.

The result of prolonged medical treatment is a country with 70% of its citizens on prescription drugs. And perhaps more shocking, where at least one fifth of its population is taking five or more prescription pills.

The US remains one of only two countries in the world with direct-to-consumer advertising, and the sheer amount of pills flooding the market is having deadly results. According to the book Our Daily Meds, nearly 100,000 Americans die each year from prescription drugs, roughly 270 people every day.

The non-profit organization Trust For America’s Health also found last year that deaths involving prescription drugs quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. Nearly 6.1 million people abuse prescription pills and overdose deaths have doubled in 29 states, exceeding vehicle related deaths.

With the innate perils of these drugs becoming more evident, Lyon dedicated her journalism to finding another way to treat psychological illnesses. Her personal experience curing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with psilocybin mushrooms led her into a world of research establishing that what we’ve been told by the establishment about psychedelics is wrong.

Lyon travelled around the world to legally take psychedelics with foreign cultures that have used them medicinally for thousands of years. She explains that when done in a safe setting, these psychedelic therapies allow people to confront, process and purge their darkest memories, instead of numbing them with pharmaceuticals.

How Psychedelics Are Saving Lives

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Amber Lyon joined Abby Martin on Breaking the Set to debunk the myths surrounding psychedelics and explain their proven benefits.

Amber Lyon Trips All Over the World to Discover the Power of Hallucinogens

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Lyon launched the website Reset.Me in order to change the narrative and spread awareness about the benefits of psychedelics.

Written by Abby Martin and Anya Parampil, photo by Wikimedia Commons

When I was in 5th grade, I was obsessed with animals. It was an age where most of my friends were going through the phase of wanting to be either a veterinarian or whale trainer at Sea World (yes, this was before Blackfish).

My love for animals may have been innocent and ill-informed early on, but it led me to become passionate about animal rights.

Over the years, vegetarianism has stuck with me despite the fact that most of my friends, family, and men I’ve dated eat meat. It certainly hasn’t been easy – but it’s been worth it. People might never stop asking me why I don’t eat meat, but my answer will remain simple and the same: I like animals too much to bring myself to eat them.

Yet Gary Francione, a self proclaimed animal abolitionist, has a much more sophisticated argument in favor of vegetarianism. Rather than focusing merely on the treatment of animals, Francione defines “animal abolitionism” as the inability to “justify using animals at all, no matter how humanely we treat them”. He’s structured a moral argument against the alleged necessary use of animal products, particularly with the advent of technology and alternative materials like hemp.

And whilst Francione acknowledges that animals are cognitively different than humans, he explains why it still doesn’t justify the consumption and use of animals for our benefit. Francione argues that the cognitive differences don’t matter morally, because animals are sentient.

He underscores this by posing a scenario comparing two different human beings: one who is brilliant and one who is mentally disabled. Whilst the two humans are “different” from one another, Francione points out that a cognitive difference would not justify, for example, subjecting the disabled individual to a harmful biomedical experiment.

So why would we do the same to animals?

Well, as Francione points out, animals are little more than helpless resources at the hands of exploitative human beings. But “how can you justify using a sentient being exclusively as a resource?” Francione asks.

The answer: you can’t.

Even back in 1884, Henry David Thoreau proposed “… that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals…” just as “savage” humans “have left off eating each other”.

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Professor Gary Francione on Breaking the Set

Gary Francione on Animal Abolition & Ethical Consumption

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Written by Anya Parampil for Media Roots, Photo by flickr user b3d