This superb piece by Andrew Bacevich (Colonel US Army Ret.) is one the best portraits of what is wrong with self-important warmongering commentariat in the mainstream media: Track records count for nothing in the cozy salons of Versailles on the Potomac.
One of the most important revelations from the international drama over Edward Snowden's NSA leaks in May is the exposure of a nearly lunatic disproportion in threat assessment and spending by the US government. This disproportion has been spawned by a fear-based politics of terror that mandates unlimited money and media attention for even the most tendentious terrorism threats, while lethal domestic risks such as contaminated food from our industrialized agribusiness system are all but ignored. A comparison of federal spending on food safety intelligence versus antiterrorism intelligence brings the irrationality of the threat assessment process into stark relief.
In 2011, the year of Osama bin Laden's death, the State Department reported that 17 Americans were killed in all terrorist incidents worldwide. The same year, a single outbreak of listeriosis from tainted cantaloupe killed 33 people in the United States. Foodborne pathogens also sickened 48.7 million, hospitalized 127,839 and caused a total of 3,037 deaths. This is a typical year, not an aberration.
The news that Twitter has taken the first steps towards a stock marketflotation has triggered a predictable storm of speculation about the valuation of the company. How much is a corporation with 200 million monthly users actually worth? How does it compare with Facebook, with its billion users?
The answer is: nobody knows. But that doesn't matter because it's not the important question. Although Twitter and Facebook are categorised as social networking services, in fact they are as different as chalk and cheese. And, of the two, Twitter is more important in one respect: its impact on the arena in which societies discuss their political issues.
Phi Beta Iota: Not so fast, Cantinflas! Twitter is stupid….Kum Ba Ya on steroids, which is to say, lots and lots of people holding each others hands digitally, but all largely unintelligent in the decision-support sense of the word. Yes, Twitter has the ability to harness collective intelligence, but when that collective intelligence is drugged up, dumbed down, clueless on true cost economics, and largely devoid of ethical holistic understanding of systems dynamics, cause and effect, and so forth, Twitter has to be considered the equivalent of a billion drunk teen-agers all trying to drive the same car via a shared joy-stick. Without an honest Wikipedia and an honest Google (just to be explicit, both corrupt to the bone), Twitter is noise.
New revelations about National Security Agency abuses, which now include everything from industrial espionage to reports that the agency can access most data on our smartphones, seem to put everything we know about how business is done on the Internet in danger.
This is today's Theocratic Rightist story; it is so bizarre that The Daily Show would find it too far out. A little background before you read this piece: Alex Jones has two million daily listeners, and over 300 million people have visited his YouTube channel. His program is ranked as one of the top 100 radio shows in the U.S..
When people like Alex Jones have this kind of influence one can see how the Dark Ages were created as the Roman Empire fell.
I think it is worth noting that the average IQ in the U.S. is 98, and that 15 per cent of the population is 85 or less — 71-84 is considered “Borderline Intellectual Functioning”; 70 is considered “Retarded.” It may be that the world is just too complex for many millions of citizens, and that is why hucksters like Jones, Beck, and Limbaugh hold such sway. An absolute answer, however buffoonish, is at least simple to understand.
“There are very dark storm clouds gathering around the country and North America as a whole. Things are about to get dark, very dark in just a few short weeks. In just over two months, on November 13-14, 2013, the lights are about to go out. Will the lights come back on? It depends on who you ask. Given the past behavior of those in power, it would behoove all of us to prepare for the fact that we could be living for an extended time with no electricity…The working scenario that has emerged is that World War III is on the horizon. Syria was to be the flash point. However, with American and international sentiment running so high against American involvement in the Syrian conflict, Obama needs a Plan B in order to get America into war, because it does not appear that Congress is going to give him the authorization that he needs to force our way in Syria culminating in a military stand off between the Russians and the Chinese and the United States. Subsequently, if Obama fails to obtain Congressional support to attack Syria, he could very well turn his attention to the take down of the power grid and he could still achieve his goals in under two months.
The Vietnam War ended nearly 40 years ago, but the casualties continue as birth defects plague the country.
There are claims that thousands of children continue to be born with horrific facial deformities due to the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange chemical sprayed by the United States.
The Vietnamese call the disfigured youngsters ‘the children of Agent Orange'.
Da Nang in central Vietnam is thought to have the highest level of congenital deformity in the world.
Inside Out's Mark Jordan joins a team of top London plastic surgeons on their unpaid mission to help these children through the charity Facing the World.
Inside Out is broadcast on Monday, 9 September at 19:30 BST on BBC One London and nationwide on the iPlayer for seven days thereafter.
