Pakistan-US: The government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan has vowed to close the Khyber Pass to NATO in reaction a US drone attack in the province this week. Chief Minister Imran Khan said his provincial administration will blockade the pass to all NATO traffic
Comment: Khan had initially threatened such a blockade after the 1 November US drone strike that killed Hakimullah Mehsud, just 24 hours before Hakimullah was set to open peace talks with the Pakistani government, but delayed his plans when no US strikes followed.
November 22, 2013, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The true story of JFK’s murder has never been officially admitted, although the conclusion that JFK was murdered by a plot involving the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been well established by years of research, such as that provided by James W. Douglass in his book, JFK And The Unspeakable, published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. Ignore Douglass’ interest in the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Merton’s prediction and focus on the heavily documented research that Douglass provides.
Or just turn to the contemporary films, taken by tourists watching JFK’s motorcade that are available on YouTube, which show clearly the Secret Service pulled from President Kennedy’s limo just prior to his assassination, and the Zapruder film that shows the killing shot to have come from President Kennedy’s right front, blowing off the back of his head, not from the rear as postulated in the Warren Commission Report, which would have pushed his head forward, not rearward.
I am not going to write about the assassination to the extent that the massive information permits. Those who want to know already know. Those who cannot face the music will never be able to confront the facts regardless of what I or anyone else writes or reveals.
A European Transgovernmental Intelligence Network and the Role of IntCen
Mai'a K. Davis Crossa
ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway
Published online: 27 Sep 2013.
ABSTRACT This article makes the case that the most important developments in the European intelligence arena actually have little to do with member states’ willingness to cooperate. Rather, the context for the intelligence profession has changed fundamentally in the past few years in light of globalization and the information revolution, and this has made the creation of a single EU intelligence space far more likely, even despite member states’ resistance. The author argues that the emerging European intelligence space is increasingly consolidating around a transgovernmental network of intelligence professionals that draw upon open-source knowledge acquisition, with IntCen at its centre. One implication of this is that the field of EU intelligence may be a rare example in which integration can be achieved before cooperation, rather than the latter serving as a stepping-stone to the former.
Groups Call on Congress to Make Massive Cuts in Runaway Military Spending
A diverse array of organizations today launched a campaign to enact major cuts in wasteful military spending, as part of the December 13 federal budget resolution. The groups include peace, human service, economic and environmental justice organizations, food sovereignty and green energy groups, and grassroots community organizations. They are calling for long overdue reductions in military spending in order to meet dire needs at home and reinvest in our future.
The groups are launching a sign-on letter calling for cuts of 25-50% in the trillion dollar military budget that accounts for 53% of all discretionary federal spending. The groups will deliver the letter to Congress on December 10 – International Human Rights Day.
The groups want Congress to focus on:
– Adequately funding critical social needs, including food stamps, Social Security, improved and expanded Medicare for all, and public education including college,
– Creating a full employment public jobs program to jump start the green economy (a Green New Deal),
Boris Artzybasheff's anthropomorphic illustrations are surreal and often bordering on the grotesque. But as I look at them I can't help but think that they're more accurate representations of contemporary reality than what most of us perceive as reality.
Modern citizens have become so alienated that we aren't even aware of the degree to which we've become alienated. Many of Artzybasheff's illustrations are weapons systems, like tanks and planes and artillery pieces, with human features. And actually this isn't too far fetched, because modern warfare essentially turns soldiers—and the citizens who send them into battle and support the war effort—into killing machines. Equally, our economic systems, in a very real sense, turns us into machines. We all know what it's like to feel like a hamster on a wheel that's spinning faster than we can keep up. The demands of work and commuting often don't take into account whether our duties are humanly possible. The demands of economic competition force us to become virtual machines in service of the greater economy.
In Japan, for example, the demands of education and the workplace have almost eliminated any semblance of a private life. But this is becoming true of all developed economies; and it's even more true of third world economies, where companies exist that are essentially a new form of slave labor. And the forces that drive us all are essentially impersonal; they pertain to profits and the bottom line. We all serve the numbers on bank ledgers! America is competing with Germany, Japan, and now China and India; and they're competing with us. But we're all actually competing with a single force: “efficiency.” And efficiency is a relentless master—a master that no single nation can gurantee it will always be able to satisfy. Any nation can fall out of favor with the grand master known as efficiency. Aand Artzybasheff's illustrations of humanoid industrial machines are a vivid representation of that reality as well.
Click on Image to Enlarge
So I submit that his illustrations show the true reality stripped of all pretense. They're more than symbolic and metaphorical: they remove the veil from our eyes and allow us to see things as they actually are! In fact we're more like Artzybasheff's machine-creatures than any of us wants to admit. And unless we citizens of the world reclaim our humanity and stop allowing impersonal economic forces to turn us all into machines, we'll get ground up in the gears of our machines.
It's too bad that Artzybasheff isn't still around. We could really use him to help us see the realies that we've taken so much for granted for so long that they've become invisible to us.
Please be aware that “the Israel Lobby” is not equivalent to “American Jews.” As MJ Rosenberg notes, most American Jews are far more progressive than the organizations that officially speak for them (because most American Jews are not affiliated with those organizations). The Israel Lobby gets much of its strength from a minority of American Jews who back their positions with lots of money, and by the Christian Zionists.
The Israel Lobby Is Killing Iran Negotiations In Favor Of War
MJ Rosenberg
The Israel Lobby has truly gotten out of control.
The Obama administration is close to an agreement with the Iranian government to achieve a decade’s long goal. Iran would give up any plans it might have to develop nuclear weapons (verified by international inspections) in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions that are doing significant damage to the Iranian economy.
