NATO Watch Editorial: ‘Zero Option' for Afghanistan – a realistic possibility?
Review Article: The Taliban at war: inside the Helmand insurgency, 2004–2012
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WASHINGTON — It’s long been known that America’s school kids haven’t measured well compared with international peers. Now, there’s a new twist: Adults don’t either.
In math, reading and problem-solving using technology – all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength – American adults scored below the international average on a global test, according to results released Tuesday.
Chris Hedges: Ted Cruse and Radical Republicans Implementing Dominionst/Christian Reconstructionism Agenda, “They seek total cultural and political domination”
Hedges explains one of the largest pieces of the puzzle on why the Republicans are willing to go for broke in the battle of the budget default and government shutdown and unlikely to halt the stalemate with Obama and the Democrats. The prize they seek to gain is, for them, well worth the chaos and breakdown they seek to precipitate to gain that prize, which is nothing less than total domination and control of all aspects of life in America.
Looking for which highly organized and intellectually developed manifestation – articulated over the course of decades and much longer if we factor in John Calvin's profound inspiration on them – of American fascism and which is waiting in the wings, still half-hidden, but perhaps soon to be center-stage? Look no further than the Dominionists, who counts Ted Cruz's father as a rabid and influential member. Chris Hedges, a graduate from major theological seminary and former NYT reporter is well-qualified to recognize their real character, and plans:
Privacy – Henrik Alexandersson: US corporations routinely ignore and abuse the strict privacy rules of European private citizen data, which they have accessed under the “safe harbor” agreement of the European Union. This surfaced in this week’s Europarl hearing on mass surveillance, causing the European Parliament’s rapporteur to call for a complete scrapping of the safe harbor arrangement right in the middle of the hearing. This is a further erosion of already-brittle trust in privacy respect by the United States.
To be delivered to: Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General, United Nations and Barack Obama, President, United States of America
Petition Statement
At Fukushima Unit 4, the impending removal of hugely radioactive spent fuel rods from a pool 100 feet in the air presents unparalleled scientific and engineering challenges. With the potential for 15,000 times more fallout than was released at Hiroshima, we ask the world community, through the United Nations, to take control of this uniquely perilous task.
Petition Background
The danger of huge radiation releases from Fukushima 4 has taken on a new dimension; the world community must step in!
Koch Brothers and Boehner Plot to Take Down – or Over – the Government
The government shutdown and debt ceiling crises is getting wilder and more dangerous by the day. Here's writings, if true, showing very rich right-wing extremism at work behind Boehner:
“The Koch Brothers and other right-wing billionaires who provoked the government shutdown and now are angling for an even more devastating credit default see themselves as the people who deserve to rule the United States without interference from lesser citizens, especially those with darker-colored skin. Their “masters of the universe” world view is that they or their daddies or their daddies’ daddies were the ones who “built America” and, thus, it’s their right to tear down the remarkable edifice of U.S. law, politics and economics created over the past two-plus centuries — if the country’s less-deserving inhabitants insist on raising taxes on the rich to fund programs benefiting the poor and the middle class. Oil billionaires David and Charles Koch. That is what we’re watching now, what might be called the Koch Brothers’ “Samson Option,” pulling down the temple to destroy their enemies even if doing so is also destructive to them and their fortunes…Now, in 2013, the Republican Right has doubled down on that strategy, merging a government shutdown with an impending credit default in an effort to extort more concessions from Obama and the Democrats. But the larger goal is to create a new constitutional structure in which the Right, regardless of its minority status, gets to dictate what the federal government can and cannot do. To make this strategy work, however, requires a readiness to play Samson and to pull down the temple on your enemies as well as yourself. That appears to be the extreme option that the Koch Brothers and their fellow right-wing billionaires have chosen. If they can’t rule America, they will reduce the country to economic rubble through a fiscal crisis and a premeditated financial collapse. Then, perhaps out of the rubble, a chastened American people will emerge to accept their subordinate position in this new plutocratic structure. In the future, they will know better than to do something that the Koch Brothers and their right-wing friends don’t like. All that stuff about a government of the people, by the people and for the people will finally have perished from the earth.
In this July-September 2013 edition:
