Category: Communities of Practice

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Gordon Duff: Germany Mounts Nuke Missiles On Subs For Israel

08 Proliferation, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
Gordon Duff

Germany Mounts Nuke Missiles On Subs For Israel

Israel Has No Cruise Missile Capabability, Germans Violate Non-Proliferation Treaty

Today, Germany admitted arming nuclear submarines for Israel, not just selling subs, but supplying missiles and warheads.  Did they say so openly?  In fact, based on research any journalist is capable of, they did exactly that. 

We had long suspected, as have most Germans, that Merkel was an agent of some kind, a handmaiden of the secret societies trying to bring about global Armageddon.

Germany’s admissions today aren’t news to those who follow defense issues.  They don’t even come close to full disclosure, but they do make it inexorable, that we can now safely assume that Germany has long been a rogue nation and a “behind the scenes” manipulator with leadership only slightly changed from the Hitler era.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Officially, Israel has 3 Dolphin Class submarines supplied by Germany.  Der Spiegel announced today that these boats had been specially modified to launch nuclear cruise missiles.  What Der Spiegel failed to note is that the missiles themselves were supplied with the boats, nuclear weapons included.

Germany is helping Israel to develop its military nuclear capabilities, SPIEGEL has learned. According to extensive research carried out by the magazine, Israel is equipping submarines that were built in the northern German city of Kiel and largely paid for by the German government with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The missiles can be launched using a previously secret hydraulic ejection system. Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told SPIEGEL that Germans should be “proud” that they have secured the existence of the state of Israel “for many years.”

Read full article.

See Also:

Dolphin Getting Nuke Load in Germany, Violation of NP Treaty

Phi Beta Iota:  All sources have mixed reliability depending on many factors.  This is worth noting but not sufficient in and of itself.

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Dolphin: Stuxnet – Throwing Rocks When You Live in a Glass House!

Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War
YARC YARC

Outlines the potential unintended consequences (blowback) resulting from the USG's apparent covert action employing Stuxnet.

Stuxnets are Not in the US National Interest: An Arsonist Calling for Better Fire Codes

Jason Healey | June 01, 2012

The United States government has apparently struck a blow against the Iranian nuclear enrichment capability by using Stuxnet to disable centrifuges.   While this cyber weapon destroyed centrifuges and seized up the enrichment process, the cost in American cyber power ultimately will not have been worth these limited gains.

On the plus side, the United States has struck against some of the world’s most terrible organizations working towards the world’s most horrible weapons.  If the Iranians ever did build and use a nuclear weapon, we would have regretted missing any chance to disrupt that process.  Given the implications, it is understandable that two US presidents authorized and continued a covert program of cyber force to disrupt Iranian nuclear ambitions.

However, not all good ideas, and even fewer covert ones, should be executed.   Though it did not cause any physical damage outside of the intended target of Iranian enrichment plants, Stuxnet somehow sprung loose from its intended target and spread in computers – and headlines – around the world.  And this leak (along with those from the White House) led to the many downsides.

Few in the world will ever believe the peaceful motives of the United States in cyberspace again, giving us even less leverage to ensure this new cyber dimension develops in a way encompassing America’s wider economic and security interests.

Cyberspace is “the backbone that underpins a prosperous economy and a strong military and an open and efficient government,” according to President Obama.  Because of this importance, not much more than a year ago, the president committed the United States to “work internationally to promote an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable” cyberspace “built on norms of responsible behavior.”  He wrote that, “While offline challenges and aggression have made their way to the digital world, we will confront them consistent with the principles we hold dear: free speech and association, privacy, and the free flow of information.  The digital world is no longer a lawless frontier … It is a place where the norms of responsible, just and peaceful conduct among states and peoples have begun to take hold. ”

Stuxnet was not an act of peaceful conduct.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The only thing worse that launching Stuxnet is claiming false credit for something we did not actually do.  The Israeli Zionists are howling–gentiles have once again proven they are too stupid to be “counted.”

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Patrick Meier: UN Report on Big Data for Development – Highlights

Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, IO Deeds of Peace, Non-Governmental
Patrick Meier

Big Data for Development: Challenges and Opportunities

The UN Global Pulse report on Big Data for Development ought to be required reading for anyone interested in humanitarian applications of Big Data. The purpose of this post is not to summarize this excellent 50-page document but to relay the most important insights contained therein. In addition, I question the motivation behind the unbalanced commentary on Haiti, which is my only major criticism of this otherwise authoritative report.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: UN Report on Big Data for Development – Highlights”

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NIGHTWATCH: 6 Latin American Countries Reject Rio Pact

01 Brazil, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency

Organization of American States (OAS): For the record. At the end of the 42d General Assembly of OAS members in Bolivia, the foreign ministers of Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Nicaragua announced that their countries had decided to withdraw from the Inter-American of Reciprocal Assistance, better known as the Rio Pact.

In making the announcement, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Patino said, “Our countries have made the decision to bury what deserves to be buried, to throw into the trash what is no longer useful.”

Article Three states, in pertinent part,”The High Contracting Parties agree that an armed attack by any State against an American State shall be considered as an attack against all the American States and, consequently, each one of the said Contracting Parties undertakes to assist in meeting the attack in the exercise of the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations”

Twenty-two American countries variously have ratified the Treaty since 1947, but Cuba withdrew after the revolution and Mexico withdrew in 2004.

Comment: This is primarily a symbolic snub because the Pact is a relic of the Cold War and no surprise because the US Secretary of State did not attend the meeting.

All four withdrawing states have leftist governments and are the members of Venezuelan President Chavez' initiative known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the People of our Americas (ALBA), which is supposed to be a counterweight to the OAS. They appear determined to assert their distance from the US.

Argentina invoked the Rio Pact when it fought the British in the Falklands, but no American state rallied. The US invoked the Pact after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 to enlist the aid of the other American states in the War on Terror. Only four Central American states agreed to participate actively.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota:  The creation of CELAC — the alternative to the OAS that excludes Canada and the US, has not been covered by the mainstream media.   A sustainable revolution is occurring in the South; the US Government will be the last to understand this.

See Also:

DuckDuckGo on CELAC

CELAC at Phi Beta Iota

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Paul Craig Roberts: Collapse at Hand – and ONE THING an Honest Government Could Do To Make It All Right

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, General Accountability Office, Government, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Office of Management and Budget
Paul Craig Roberts

Collapse At Hand

Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.

In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.

The question is: when is sooner or later? The purpose of this article is to examine that question.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: Collapse at Hand – and ONE THING an Honest Government Could Do To Make It All Right”

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David Swanson: Voice for Activism

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence
David Swanson

David Swanson: A Voice For Never-Ending Activism

For activist, author, and blogger David Swanson, it really is about the never-ending struggle for social and economic justice; the same battle that has been fought since time began.  And for him, “success” or “defeat” cannot be defined by one election or one Supreme Court ruling.  For Swanson, “victory” may be generations away, but that does not deter him from keeping the activism fires burning via every avenue he can find.

“I don’t necessarily tell people not to lose hope,” Swanson said in a recent interview with Wisdom Voices.  “I think there’s a problem with having a dependency on hope. I don’t go through these cycles of being hopeful and then being despondent. I actually enjoy activism. I don’t think activism is something temporary that we do it once and then everything will be fixed and then we stop.  I think it’s permanent and it should be permanent.  Activism is more enjoyable than sitting home and griping.  It provides me a way to enjoy living every day.”

. . . . . . . . .

Activism has been rooted in almost all of Swanson’s adult life.  He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN.  John Nichols of The Nation magazine once said:  “David Swanson will be remembered and well recognized as the citizen who held up a lamp in the darkness and cried, as did good Tom Paine: ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ ”

“The most important work I think is educational,” Swanson said.  “By that I mean activism has to take a kind of broad term organizational effort.  It’s not in passing a particular bill or electing a particular person.  Setbacks shouldn’t get us down.  If all of our hopes lie in (President) Obama turning out to be better than he claimed to be or all of our hopes are in un-electing (Wisconsin Governor Scott) Walker, we’re setting ourselves up for defeat because we can lose a particular battle and because elections can be the wrong place to be putting our emphasis to begin with. I think we should be putting about 95 percent of our efforts into educating and organizing and mobilizing non-violent struggle and maybe 5 percent into elections.

Read full article.

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Mini-Me: Slavery By A Different Name – The Convict Lease System

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement
Who? Mini-Me?

Slavery By A Different Name: The Convict Lease System

by Devon DB

GlobalResearch, 1 June 2012

After the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional amendments were passed which aided newly freed slaves in being equally treated under the law, or so the story goes. The fact of the matter is that slavery was- and still is- completely legal in the United States and not only that, but it took on a much different form. The institution of slavery changed as instead of having the direct enslavement of blacks with an entire apparatus that had to be created to keep slaves in their condition, elements of the state apparatus were used to enslave blacks, namely the legal and prison systems. Yet, the enslavement itself was changed as black convicts were no longer slaves to individual masters, but rather they were enslaved to the companies which they were leased out to. To create this system there not only had to be the involvement of the Southern judicial system and individual Northern and Southern elites, but also the involvement of the corporation and reinstitution of slavery within a corporate context.

 

The 13th Amendment

To attain a full understanding of the convict lease system, there must first be a reexamination of the 13th amendment. It has been stated in history books and in classrooms across America that this amendment ended slavery, yet this is quite false. The 13th Amendment states “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [1] (emphasis added) Thus, slavery is completely and totally legal if it is part (or the whole) of a punishment for someone who was convicted of a crime.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Slavery By A Different Name – The Convict Lease System”

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