Category: Communities of Practice

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John Steiner: Genetic Foods – Transparency, Truth, & Trust versus Tyranny, Toxicity, & Theft

07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Knowledge
John Steiner

Genetic Engineers Explain Why GE Food Is Dangerous

Nation of Change, Sunday 24 June 2012

One of the report¹s authors, Dr. Michael Antoniou of King¹s College London School of Medicine in the UK, uses genetic engineering for medical applications but warns against its use in developing crops for human food and animal feed.

Aren¹t critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn¹t the debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on the other?

A report released June 17, GMO Myths and Truths, challenges these claims.  The report presents a large body of peer-reviewed scientific and other authoritative evidence of the hazards to health and the environment posed by genetically engineered crops and organisms.

Unusually, the initiative for the report came not from campaigners but from two genetic engineers, who believe there are good scientific reasons to be wary of GM foods and crops.

Continue reading “John Steiner: Genetic Foods – Transparency, Truth, & Trust versus Tyranny, Toxicity, & Theft”

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David Swanson: NATO, Sardinia, Contamination, & The Truth

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military
David Swanson

ADVANCE EXTRACT

Demands of the people

·       Transparency and truth – reveal what chemicals and metals have been used.
·       Close all of the bases and radar facilities – completely de-militarize the island.
·       Clean and decontaminate the bases and land, aquifers and sea around them.
·       Provide health care to all people affected by military activity on the island
·       Provide financial assistance and clean land and sea to farmers and fishers

Sardinia: Militarization, Contamination and Cancer in Paradise

By Helen Jaccard, WarIsACrime.org

Need to test some new weapons?  Bomb paradise!
The sound of bombs, missiles, and other explosions; massive attacks from the sea onto the beach; an epidemic of cancers and birth defects; soil, air, food and water contaminated with heavy metals, jet fuel and other poisons; and national and company secrets that prevent the residents from learning the truth:  Is this a modern war zone?  No – Sardinia is the victim of weapons manufacturers, polluting military activities and a political system that cares about power and money over the health of people and the environment.

Continue reading “David Swanson: NATO, Sardinia, Contamination, & The Truth”

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Josh Kilbourn: Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us

03 Economy, 12 Water, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government
Josh Kilbourn

Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us

Abrahm Lustgarten

ProPublica, 21 June 2012

Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation's geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

Click on Image to Enlarge

There are growing signs they were mistaken.

Records from disparate corners of the United States show that wells drilled to bury this waste deep beneath the ground have repeatedly leaked, sending dangerous chemicals and waste gurgling to the surface or, on occasion, seeping into shallow aquifers that store a significant portion of the nation's drinking water.

In 2010, contaminants from such a well bubbled up in a west Los Angeles dog park. Within the past three years, similar fountains of oil and gas drilling waste have appeared in Oklahoma and Louisiana. In South Florida, 20 of the nation's most stringently regulated disposal wells failed in the early 1990s, releasing partly treated sewage into aquifers that may one day be needed to supply Miami's drinking water.

There are more than 680,000 underground waste and injection wells nationwide, more than 150,000 of which shoot industrial fluids thousands of feet below the surface. Scientists and federal regulators acknowledge they do not know how many of the sites are leaking.

Federal officials and many geologists insist that the risks posed by all this dumping are minimal. Accidents are uncommon, they say, and groundwater reserves — from which most Americans get their drinking water — remain safe and far exceed any plausible threat posed by injecting toxic chemicals into the ground.

But in interviews, several key experts acknowledged that the idea that injection is safe rests on science that has not kept pace with reality, and on oversight that doesn't always work.

Read full article.

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Marcus Aurelius: 8,000 Wealthy US Citizens Leaving US and Renouncing US Citizenship

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Marcus Aurelius

Wealthy Americans Jumping Obama’s Ship

NewsMax, Sunday, 24 Jun 2012 12:46 PM

Wealthy Americans aren’t just leaving tax-heavy states like New York and California, they’re leaving the country.

U.S. citizens are defecting at record levels in order to escape high taxes, the New York Post reported. About 8,000 U.S. citizens are projected to renounce their citizenship in 2012, or about 154 a week — versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week, according to immigration officials, the Post reported.

They want to avoid tax bills resulting from the proposed 55-percent hike on the wealthy and the anticipated expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at the end of the year, the Post reported.

“High-net-worth individuals are making decisions that having a US passport just isn’t worth the cost anymore,” Jim Duggan, a lawyer at Duggan Bertsch, which specializes in protecting assets of the wealthy, told the Post.

“They’re able to do what they do from any place in the world, and they’re choosing to do it from places with much lower tax rates,” he said. “Some are philosophically disgusted at the course our country is taking in all kinds of ways. They’re making a strong protest of, ‘Enough is enough.’ But largely it’s an economic decision.”

But to leave means finding a new country and obtaining citizenship and there are many that are eager to welcome wealthy Americans, such as Australia, Norway, Singapore, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, and Antigua, according to the Post.

These countries tend to offer a fast track to citizenship and protections from the Justice Department and IRS.

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Patrick Meier: Crisis Mapping End of Sudan’s Dictatorship?

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Government, Knowledge, Media
Patrick Meier

Crisis Mapping the End of Sudan’s Dictatorship?

Anyone following the twitter hashtag #SudanRevolts in recent days must be stunned by the shocking lack of coverage in the mainstream media. The protests have been escalating since June 17 when female students at the University of Khartoum began demonstrating against the regime's austerity measures, which are increasing the prices of basic commodities and removing fuel subsidies. The dissent has quickly spread to other universities and communities.

There's no doubt that Sudan's dictator is in trouble. He faces international economic sanctions and a mounting US$2.5 billion budget deficit following the secession of South Sudan last year. What's more, he is also “fighting expensive, devastating, and unpopular wars in Darfur (in the west), Blue Nile, Southern Kordofan, and the Nuba Mountains (on the border with South Sudan)” (UN Dispatch). So what next?

Enter Sudan Change Now, a Sudanese political movement with a clear mandate: peaceful but total democratic change. They seek to “defeat the present power of darkness using all necessary tools of peace resistance to achieve political stability and social peace.” The movement is thus “working on creating a common front that incorporates all victims of the current regime to ensure a unified and effective course of action to overthrow it.”

According to GlobalVoices, “The Sudanese online community believe that media coverage was an integral part of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and are therefore demanding the same for Sudan.” The political movement Sudan Change Now is thus turning to crisis mapping to cast more light on the civil resistance efforts in the Sudan:

Read full article with maps, photos

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Reference: Spending on War

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, Budgets & Funding, Government, Military

From: http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish

June 18, 2012 – Do you know how your tax dollars are spent?

US radio host Dennis Bernstein and investigative reporter Dave Lindorff illustrate just how much US tax money goes towards the country's war chest.

“People have to realise that 53 cents of every dollar that they are paying into taxes is going to the military to an astonishing figure there is an enormous, enormous amount of money being blown on war an killing and destruction.”

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Chuck Spinney: The Truth About West versus Iran

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency
Chuck Spinney

At a time when pressures to punish Iran with more sanctions or perhaps even war (I still consider the latter unlikely), it might pay to try to understand things from the Iranian point view.  Attached below  is an excellent essay in the London Review of Books analyzing Iran's recent history.  It puts the CIA/MI6 overthrow of the popularly elected Muhammad Mossadegh (1953) in a historical context of the preceding 75 years as well its ramifications for the present crisis.  Note how the author, Pankaj Mishra, also shows how the poisonous roles played by the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal in the heinous warmongering against Iraq is part of much longer tradition of yellow journalism in this part of the world.

Chuck Spinney
San Remo, Italia

Pankaj Mishra, London Review of Books, 20 July 2012

Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue
Bodley Head, 310 pp, £20.00, February, ISBN 978 1 84792 108 6

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York) has it exactly right… When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.  The U.S. Government in particular, all Western governments generally (including the Nordics) have been so busy lying to their publics that they have not been able to connect to the truth.  As Robert Steele likes to say, “The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.”

See Also:

Phi Beta Iota About (Other Quotations)

2012 PREPRINT AS SUBMITTED: The Craft of Intelligence

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO – Transparency, Truth, & Trust . . . the meme, the mind-set, and the method

noble gold