Clay Shirky has the best overview I’ve seen/heard/read of PIPA and SOPA and the context from whence they emerged; the bottom line: the legilsation’s about wanting us to be passive consumers, not producing and not sharing.
Phi Beta Iota: To this we would add it is also about a criminally negligent and corrupt Congress exercising its power against the public interest (treason), and a criminally negligent and corrupt combination of Hollywood and Internet Service Providers seeking to legitimize vigilante arbitrary untempered attacks on anyone anywhere without due process.
Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.
Phi Beta Iota: The 1% actually believe in “survival of the fittest” and earnestly consider most humans to be less than human, mere animals to be exploited as is their God-given right. Religions that regard others as heathen–this includes the Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, and Mormon religions–that “do not count,” are as corrupt as the governments they join in serving the 1%. Sluts lack integrity. It's time we stop following sluts, be they securlar or sanctimonious.
Since the drug war has become so unpopular with the electorate, instead of politicians actually changing the drug laws, the Department of Defense seeks to reduce and conceal the real costs by transferring the “dirty work” to private contractors to do what “U.S. military forces are not allowed or not encouraged to do.
The BBC (in Spanish) is reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense is delegating the war on drugs to private mercenary companies. Of those companies, the increasingly infamous organization previously known as Blackwater is said to have received several multimillion-dollar government contracts for “providing advice, training and conducting operations in drug producing countries and those with links to so-called “narco-terrorism” including Latin America.” The “no bid” contracts, issued under the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office's $15 billion dollar budget, are described as “non-specific” and are said to be “juicy” for the private contractors. The Pentagon says “the details of each cost in very general contracts do not go through bidding processes.”
An unnamed analyst says “the responsibility of the public and national security changing from a state's duty to be a private business…has become the trend of the future.”
Although parts of the drug war have been privatized for years, the BBC reports this “transfer” of responsibilities is an attempt to placate those looking for Pentagon budget cuts in an election year.
The former director of U.S. programs for production of nuclear materials and components for nuclear weapons, Clinton Bastin, sent an open letter to President Obama the morning of January 13, explaining that there is no weapons threat from Iran's fully safeguarded nuclear power and research programs. A copy of the letter, which the nuclear scientist also sent to the Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations, was made available to 21st Century Science & Technology magazine yesterday. It is reproduced below in full.
Bastin, who has served in leading positions in government since the 1950s, laid out the case on Iran in greater detail in an interview with 21st Century Science Nov. 18, 2011. The interview, which devastates the arguments for an Iranian nuclear weapons threat, is available at the 21st Century Science and Technology website.
Phi Beta Iota: The Iranians certainly have nuclear weapons ambitions. Bearing in mind that Zbigniew Brzezinski personally approved the Pakistani (Sunni) nuclear weapons program, it hardly seems fair to deprive the Iranian (Shi'ite) community of their own nuclear weapons program–from where we sit, they fear the Saudis and Pakistanis vastly more than they fear the USA. The bottom line is that the White House is not making decisions based on intelligence with integrity.
UPDATE 22 March 2012. The Iran situation appears to be theater:
1. To meet oil futures bets made by Israel, Iran, and Wall Street [the high end — some sources say that oil futures were also bought at the low end such that the oil producing countries are not receiving any kick from the higher prices]
2. To distract everyone from Israel pressing forward with more settlements and more atrocities against the Palestinians.
The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary. Our special Summer Issue cover story.
When Codevilla’s article appeared I stated that it was the most important essay I had ever read. I still believe this because it is a superb synthesis of class analysis with keen insights on contemporary power elite relationships regarding today’s rulers and the ruled.
This class division of present-day America into two factions, Court and Country, has absolutely nothing to do with any Marxian view or analysis. It is a reaffirmation of the seminal insights of Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ideological Origins of the AmericanRevolution, and Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.
These books demonstrate that the Founders’ world-view saw the crucial struggle of the Revolution as a battle of liberty versus power. Codevilla posits today’s battle in the same dramatic terms.
Every political movement needs a manifesto. The Tea Party surely needs one. So do other grassroots political resistance organizations. They don’t have it yet, but they now have its preliminary foundation, Angelo Codevilla’s essay, “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.”
. . . . . . .
I regard this essay as the finest statement on the two-fold division in American political life written in my lifetime — more than this, in the last hundred years. He has laid it out clearly, accurately, and eloquently.
. . . . . . .
Codevilla correctly identifies the source of legitimacy for the ruling class: Darwinism. Darwinism removed God from the vocabulary of self-accredited academia. Once liberated from the doctrine of original sin, the Progressives regarded as illegitimate the Constitutional limits placed on the Federal government.
The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq. See thisand this. (They planned both wars at least 20 years ago.)
The IAEA report being trumpted as a casus belli contains no new information, but is based on a re-hashing of old, debunked claims stemming from “laptop documents”.
3) Slightly less sensational, the book reveals for the first time that a CIA “bait” operation actually delivered to Iran completely useful plans for creating a nuclear bomb…the CIA “flaws” intended to render the plans unworkable were detected in one glance by a Russian courier scientist, and easily correctable by the Iranians.
This web site honors Dr. Martin Luther King by pointing to specific links beginning with the first in isolation: he was assassinated by his own government. Truth & Reconciliation are the order of the day, but the reconciliation cannot begin until the truth is known to the full public.
