Phi Beta Iota: All our sources call into question all claims that CW has been used by anyone. The highest probability is that the rebels are faking it hoping to lure the USA into Syria the way the USA lured Russia into Afghanistan. We tend not to believe that the USA is behind the effort, or it would have come off much more credibly (witness the Boston false flag endeavor). Truth is a casualty across all fronts on the matter of Syria.
When your government lies to you over and over, as is the case in the U.S. today, the result is a loss of faith in the institutions of the state. I saw this happening in the old Soviet Union. People openly talked about how nothing the government said could be trusted. At the time it struck me as a very dangerous trend. Now it is happening here. This statement by the National Institute on Drug Abuse is an exa! mple. It is deceitful and dishonest in intent, and in fact, and the Obama Administration should be ashamed of itself. The lying that is coming out of the administration on in everything from national security to Marijuana is a disgrace. Click through to see some a very good compendium of actual facts.
This is a very serious issue that is getting almost no coverage in corporate media. Given its implications this is quite revealing of the state of American media. I have been digging into this for the past couple of weeks, and I am still unclear whether articles like this are alarmist, or an accurate representation of! what is going on. But one thing is clear, this is a major issue and appears to be a critical step in the rise of the Non-geographical corporate State's acquisition of power. A world without democracy, ruled by a technocratic elite serving the interests of US and global capital – protecting “investor rights” against national laws and regulations – is now being created in secret negotiations over free-trade treaties, one of which, the TransPacific Parnership (TPP), may be sewn up this fall. Can popular will stop it?
One of the more interesting trends going on right now as the decision by the Millenials to abandon Christianity. I think this is happening because the Theocratic Right lives in a realm of fantasy that Millenials can see is utterly bogus — 6,000 year old Earth, inerrant Bible, Creationism, and Clima! te Denierism.
American President Obama says he deplores the Egyptian junta’s decision to massacre peaceful protesters and declare martial law.
If he deplores it so much, why is he paying for it?
It is no secret that Egyptian strongman el-Sisi and the soldiers he is sending to slaughter protesters are on the US payroll.
According to official estimates, US taxpayers give the Egyptian military 1.3 billion dollars per year in direct military aid. When various forms of indirect aid are taken into account, including money from US puppet states in the Persian Gulf, the real annual total is in the billions.
This lavish US funding has allowed Egypt’s military to balloon into a monster that controls between one-quarter and one-third of the Egyptian economy. That is why Egypt is economically moribund.
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Military spending kills economies, as shown by Dr. Robert Reuschlein of RealEconomy.com. Money wasted on militaries, which are non-productive organizations, is stolen from the productive sector. In societies with large militaries, the best scientists, engineers, and other experts stop producing valuable goods and services, and spend their lives figuring out how to destroy things and kill people. And poorer people, instead of becoming productive citizens, are trained to mindlessly obey orders and kill on command. Many of them suffer severe psychological damage that renders them non-productive.
In Egypt, the military’s economic hegemony creates even more problems.
Egypt has inherited a millennia-old authoritarian bureaucratic tradition. Pharaohs, emirs, presidents-for-life, and generals serve as dictators, and their bureaucratic lackeys have the high-status, high-paying jobs. Productive people are considered mere peasants and tradesmen, inferior in status to the bureaucrats.
British colonialism, which imposed a new layer of foreign bureaucracy, worsened the problem. Bright young Egyptians were trained to believe they were owed government jobs when they graduated from college. Widespread belief that “the government owes me a high-paying non-productive job” persists in Egypt. And the military officers and their cronies are the biggest and most bloated parasites.
Pauling Lecture, Oregon State University, Power Point
Good evening. I want to thank the committee for inviting me to speak with you this evening—it is such a pleasure to be here.
When I received the letter from Professor Clinton congratulating me on being nominated as the 30th person to receive the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Memorial Lectureship for World Peace, I was stunned! After I went to the website and read the names of the 29 others who had given this lecture in years past, I became increasingly filled with a sense of honor, humility and gratitude that I had been chosen to follow in the footsteps of such notable intellectuals and activists as ***John Kenneth Galbraith, William Sloane Coffin, Noam Chomsky, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Grace Lee Boggs, not to mention the 8 Nobel Laureates: ***Linus Pauling, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Mairead Maguire, Oscar Arias Sanchez, Jose Ramos-Horta, Betty Williams, Rigoberta Menchu, and Jody Williams. And now my name was going to be added to this prestigious list. I started feeling a strong sense of burden and responsibility to live up to the honor that had been given me. What could I possibly tell an audience that would be worthy of this lectureship? Even calling it a “lecture” gave me a sense of responsibility that I have not felt with any other speech or presentation that I have given. Although I enjoy telling people that by serving 20 years on Active Duty in the Navy, I am now able to live off of my military pension and work as a full-time volunteer peace activist, I have only been an “activist” for the past 6 years or so—a relative novice compared to so many others who have dedicated their lives to peace and justice. And so, I went very quickly from feeling elated that I had been chosen to give this lecture, to feeling a bit inadequate and unsure of what to say.
But the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that perhaps I had been chosen to give this lecture precisely because I was not a big name celebrity, or a Nobel Laureate. Maybe I had been chosen because I am like so many of us—just someone who is outraged by injustice, and plugging along in the trenches, trying to exact change on the issues we believe in. Maybe I could use this opportunity to speak with you, not to “lecture” you, but perhaps to encourage and motivate you to realize the power of our potential as activists. The fact is that you don’t have to be a Nobel Laureate to make a difference. The work of most activists will never be recognized outside of their own communities, but we must remember that the power of activism is about all of us contributing a little. These little contributions, when coupled with the actions of others, multiply in their power exponentially.
Current events are an essential tool for learning civics. So today we are going to stay on track with our objectives for a national service with three events of the last few days. The first event was President Obama’s speech to the Convention of the Disabled American Veterans. You can watch it on the White House website, or, you can read the major points at this Stars and Stripes article.
There is nothing objectionable in the President’s remarks. His Administration’s commitment to our soldier/veterans is demonstrably more deeply felt and resourced than that of Mr. W. Bush and Mr. Clinton. In structuring greater transition services for our veterans, his Administration approaches President Reagan’s vision and commitment, abandoned during the first Bush Administration. Nevertheless, the President’s approach amounts to little more than a hardy salute and severance for our veterans. As we have discussed, our military will be shrinking in favor of freeing the Defense budget for buying new hardware, meaning more young people will be entering a shrinking labor market to compete with departing soldiers and laid-off veterans; the long term costs of treating and sustaining our wounded veterans and their families remain unaddressed; and the military structure and the cause for which they had fought are now known by our veterans to be corrupt.
These are continuing psychological and emotional burdens that must be shouldered by our veterans throughout their lives. These are matters unaddressed by the President, as is the potential of our veterans to be valued as the precious national assets we identified last week:
In June 1967, it took Israeli forces only six hours to rout the Egyptian military and devastate its air force, inflicting the most humiliating defeat on the Arab world in the last half century. In the 1973 October war, the Egyptian army killed 2600 Israeli soldiers in 20 days of combat. Nearly forty years later, the Egyptian military turned its guns on its own citizens to much devastation: on August 14, it took the combined forces of Egypt’s army and police twelve hours to disperse tense of thousands of unarmed peaceful protesters in two sit-in camps in the eastern and western suburbs of Cairo. It was a determined effort by the July 3 coup leaders to not only defeat their political opponents, but also to strike a decisive blow to democracy and the rule of law in Egypt and across the Arab world.
Since June 28, Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) have been camped out at these two sites, initially as a show of support to President Mohammad Morsi as he was being challenged by the opposition. But since he was deposed on July 3, the protesters have been demanding his return, the restoration of the suspended constitution, and the reinstatement of the dissolved parliament. For 48 days, the sit-ins and demonstrations across Egypt attracted millions of Morsi supporters as well as pro-democracy groups, who protested the coup’s nullification of their presidential and parliamentary votes and their ratification of the referendum on the new constitution.
An Obstinate Military Enabled by Liberal and Secular Forces and Western Powers
This past January, Laura Poitras received a curious e-mail from an anonymous stranger requesting her public encryption key. For almost two years, Poitras had been working on a documentary about surveillance, and she occasionally received queries from strangers. She replied to this one and sent her public key — allowing him or her to send an encrypted e-mail that only Poitras could open, with her private key — but she didn’t think much would come of it.
The stranger responded with instructions for creating an even more secure system to protect their exchanges. Promising sensitive information, the stranger told Poitras to select long pass phrases that could withstand a brute-force attack by networked computers. “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second,” the stranger wrote.
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Before long, Poitras received an encrypted message that outlined a number of secret surveillance programs run by the government. She had heard of one of them but not the others. After describing each program, the stranger wrote some version of the phrase, “This I can prove.”
Seconds after she decrypted and read the e-mail, Poitras disconnected from the Internet and removed the message from her computer. “I thought, O.K., if this is true, my life just changed,” she told me last month. “It was staggering, what he claimed to know and be able to provide. I just knew that I had to change everything.”
