If You Have the Cojones to Rob The Feds, the Feds Have The Money to Give You – Lots of It
“A Maryland woman pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges related to setting up at least 15 false businesses in six states that received government contracts despite often being registered to people who did not exist. The businesses subcontracted all the work to other companies, then took the federal dollars without paying the companies doing the work. Larayne Whitehead, 34, of Clinton, Md., agreed to forfeit $2.4 million in illegal proceeds and a silver Audi.
Create Interactive Maps to Explore the Connections Between the Rich and Powerful with Muckety
A wonderful, cool and richly educational tool, and for free. The rich and powerful don't exploit, manipulate and strip the economy all by themselves. They do so with others, benefiting themselves by networking with others who are like themselves in various ways.This tool lets you see who is on their “team”! You can also explore connections between organizations, too.
“Welcome to Muckety, where interactive maps enable you to explore relationships of the rich, powerful and connected. We list top government and political figures, as well as board members of Fortune 1000 companies, major nonprofits and influential colleges. We show lobbyists, political contributors, Hollywood celebs and pop culture icons. Occasionally, we even map fictional characters such as Harry Potter.”
The free ride is over. Google seems to have decided it is time to make the most of AdWords, the Tutorspree Blog illustrates in, “How Google is Killing Organic Search.” The post begins by praising the Google of the past which, writer Aaron Harris accurately observes, “won search by providing the best organic results users had ever seen.” Since then, though, the company’s profit motive has been slowly strangling unpaid, organic search results.
The post begins with an visual presentation. Harris took screen shots of some different Googley searches and calculated the percentage of each results page devoted to organic results. The low numbers (all under 15 percent) are particularly galling, he says, for local business owners who bought into Google’s promises that well-structured pages would mean high visibility. The post concludes:
“Google is building a new version of the search engine that made it great. This time, however, it is a search engine exclusive to the garden of Google products. If you compete with Google in any way, you’re in its crosshairs. Your chances of ranking high enough to garner traffic are virtually nil and getting smaller.
“The scariest part of this is that, if you sell something using the internet, regardless of whether or not you see yourself as a ‘local’ business – or think you’re competing with Google – Google sees you as competition. Searching for ‘Camera’ or ‘Buy a Dress Shirt’ gets you a nearly identical split of screen real estate as that of ‘local’ searches. Nearly everything leads back to a Google product except for an ever-decreasing amount of ‘Organic’ real estate.”
I wish I could say I was surprised, but Google is in business to make money, after all. They do seem to be more directly focused on that goal lately. Will the approach pay off, or will users turn to other search alternatives?
Phi Beta Iota: Long long ago, in a land far far away, this slide created by Stephen E. Arnold was modified by Robert David Steele to add the red bit at the bottom — a truth that was discovered by Brother Stephen, but a truth he was reluctant to spell out for an increasingly dumbed down drugged up public. Google is massively well-funded fraud. They are the Goldman Sachs of cyberspace. The US Government is a village idiot in this domain, the laughingstock of the world, and particularly of the Israelis, Chinese, Iranians, and Russians. INTEGRITY MATTERS.
With a diplomatic attitude more reminiscent of a spoiled brat grabbing his toys and leaving the room, US President Obama has resorted to diplomatic snubs and childish criticisms of Russian behavior as if the Russian leaders were small children.
In a press conference Obama described the Russian President as having a “slouch…looking like that bored schoolboy in the back of the classroom.” Yet behind the childish form of the latest White House refusal to meet President Putin before the G-20 St. Petersburg Summit is a grim reality:
Washington is rapidly losing its way to impose its will in the world on multiple fronts and the Putin snub is an impotent reflection of that loss of power. The real issues in US-Russian relations go far deeper.
When President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan, he revived virtually every known lie about the war on Iraq, from the initial WMD BS to the “surge.” While Americans remain unfathomably ignorant about the destruction of Iraq, a majority says the war shouldn't have been fought. A majority says the same about the war on Afghanistan. This is, pretty wonderfully, impeding efforts toward a U.S. war on Syria or Iran.
The new wars were supposed to cure the Vietnam Syndrome — that public reluctance to support mass murder for no good reason. The Pentagon is now turning to the source of the disease. The war in most need of beautification for Americans, the military has decided, is the war the Vietnamese call the American War.
Most people in the United States have no idea that this was, like all other recent U.S. wars, a one-sided slaughter — in this case, of 3.8 million Vietnamese men, women, and children. But most Americans know the war was awful, even on the side of the aggressor. The Vietnam Syndrome (popular opposition to wars) still frightens war makers.
Obama is usually opposed to any “looking backwards,” as doing so might involve prosecuting criminals for their crimes. But, making a big exception, he is dumping 65 million of our dollars into prettying up the war on Vietnam.
Please read the following statement, put together by some U.S. veterans of that war, and sign onto it here.
An Open letter to the American People about a
Project to Accurately Commemorate the American War in Viet Nam
We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of key moments in the American war in Viet Nam. As peace and justice activists, we believe it is crucial that the realities of the war be faced squarely. President Obama has announced his plan for a 13-year-long commemoration funded by Congress at $65 million, featuring a full panoply of Orwellian forgetfulness and faux-patriotism. On May 25, 2012, President Obama proclaimed: “As we observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away from everything they knew and everyone they loved … fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.”. The purpose of the official proclamation — rather than honestly looking backward so as to glean and educate about important lessons — will be to promote an ex post facto justification of the war, lay lingering doubts to rest, and provide a stamp of approval without attending to or contending with the horrors of the war that many of us opposed.
The indefinite postponement of the World Health Organisation's report is alarming scientists and activists
Al Jazeera, 11 Aug 2013 13:28
Mozhgan Savabieasfahani
Dr Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a native of Iran, is an environmental toxicologist based in Michigan. She is the author of over two dozen peer reviewed articles and the book, Pollution and Reproductive Damage (DVM 2009).
Click on Image to Enlarge
Large parts of the Middle East are now contaminated with war pollutants.
In Iraq, war debris continues to wear away and erode populated cities. Such debris includes the wreckage of tanks and armoured vehicles, trucks and abandoned military ammunitions, as well as the remains of bombs and bullets. Left unabated, the debris will act as dangerous toxic reservoirs; releasing harmful chemicals into the environment and poisoning people who live nearby.
Today, increasing numbers of birth defects are surfacing in many Iraqi cities, including Mosul, Najaf, Fallujah, Basra, Hawijah, Nineveh, and Baghdad. In some provinces, the rate of cancers is also increasing. Sterility, repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and severe birth defects – some never described in any medical books – are weighing heavily on Iraqi families.
