Israel already threatens war on Iran. It’s also involved with Washington, Turkey, Jordan, and other rogue Arab states behind Syria’s externally generated insurgency.
Gaza’s also threatened. On January 1, Haaretz writer Amos Harel headlined “Will 2012 bring another Israeli war against Hamas in Gaza?” saying:
Repeated Israeli air strikes and incursions target Gaza. Perhaps they precede a broader offensive. Israel’s IDF chief Benny Gantz “said on Army radio that ‘Operation Cast Lead was carried out in a professional, determined manner, and significantly strengthened Israel’s deterrent strength.’ ”
At the same time, he suggested another round of fighting is likely. “Particularly worrisome (are the alleged) weapons smuggl(ed) into the Gaza Strip. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have….many thousands of rockets; hundreds” able to reach central Israel, said Harel.
As a result, “the IDF is preparing itself for the possibility of a land operation in another few months.”
On January 16, Jerusalem Post writer Yaakov Katz headlined, “IDF preparing for major Gaza action within months,” saying:
In the 2008 economic meltdown, Iceland nearly collapsed. Its three banks failed, it's currency lost 50 per cent of its value and in an unprecedented display of anger, usually peaceful Icelanders took to the streets to protest.
But Iceland defied the orthodox economic wisdom of the time—bailouts and slashing government services—and now is on the road to a recovery that the rest of Europe envies.
The hero of the hour and the man almost solely responsible for this remarkable turnaround is the country's president Olafur Grimmson.
By refusing to go along with conventional thinking and by asking the people themselves what they wanted, he set a course for Iceland's remarkable economic recovery.
Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.
Phi Beta Iota: The 1% actually believe in “survival of the fittest” and earnestly consider most humans to be less than human, mere animals to be exploited as is their God-given right. Religions that regard others as heathen–this includes the Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, and Mormon religions–that “do not count,” are as corrupt as the governments they join in serving the 1%. Sluts lack integrity. It's time we stop following sluts, be they securlar or sanctimonious.
The “big story” of the U.S. economy is that we have substituted expansion of debt for meaningful increases in productivity.
For the past 30 years, the U.S. economy has become increasingly dependent on explosive debt expansion for its “growth” rather than on meaningful rises in meaningful productivity. Growth is in quotes because growth based on secular increases in productivity–that is, the same investment of labor and capital produces goods and services of greater value–is qualitatively different from “growth” based on a pyramiding of debt.
The most surprising thing about the recent downgrading of nine Eurozone countries by S&P is that anyone is surprised to hear that the government debt of any of these countries is risky!
The eurozone debt crisis returned with a vengeance on Friday as Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded France and Austria – two of the currency zone’s six triple A rated countries – as well as seven nations not in that top tier, among them Italy and Spain.
S&P, under political fire since it announced a review or eurozone debt in December, gave 14 of 16 countries – including France, Italy and Spain – a negative outlook, which it said meant a one-in-three chance for each country of a further downgrade this year or next.
It seems as though it is only a matter of time before they each fall to bankruptcy, no matter how many bailouts they can muster. It's almost enough to make us change our logo. But, we've always said the euro would fall before the US dollar. The dollar will be the last in what will be a crescendo of currency collapse.
What the students of the Austrian School (aka real economics) have understood since the turn of the 20th century was that this was the inevitable result of the pursuit of the socialist utopia where humans would not have a worry in the world, cared for from cradle to grave by the all knowing state.
The modern Welfare/Warfare state was born in the in late nineteenth-century Imperial Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck – his intention was clear from the outset:
“My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare”
Bet you never saw that quote in your government run schoolbooks. Frideric Howe, an admirer of the german systeml wrote that under that system, “The individual exists for the state, not the state for the individual.”
We are now witnessing the end result of the institutions of bribery and theft that swept the rest of the world in the first half of the 20th century.
Phi Beta Iota: Where the libertarians and the advanced cybernetics, collective intelligence, and systems theory people come together is in the recognition that “management” or “command and control” do not scale. Bottom up agility that can only be achived by having the greatest intelligence “on the edges” is the only means of achieving resilience in complex systems. Those of us who saw the death of the state in 1970's (Richard Falk a leading light) made the cardinal mistake of thinking that something BIGGER was needed–world government. Now we recognize that we must reverse a century of increasingly corrupt centralization of power; that the preconditions of revolution are created by the overconcentration of power, wealth, corruption, and evil.
European Intelligence & Security Informatics Conference (EISIC 2012)
The Premier European Conference on Counterterrorism and Criminology
Odense, Denmark August 22-24, 2012 http://www.eisic.org, http://www.eisic.eu
Co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society
National Science Board Report: US Losing R&D Jobs To Asia The United States is losing ever more jobs and becoming ever less competitive as our universities are cut back and companies move R&D jobs to Asia. We lost 687,000 high-tech manufacturing jobs lost since 2000. Universities cut back 20% on public research. 85% of growth in R&D employment by American companies occurred abroad.
