“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” – UNESCO Constitution, 1945
Today, in Kenya, PeaceTXT is building the defenses of peace out of text messages (SMS). As The New York Times explains, PeaceTXT is developing a “text messaging service that sends out blasts of pro-peace messages to specific areas when trouble is brewing.” Launched by PopTech in partnership with the Kenyan NGO Sisi ni Amani (We are Peace), the Kenyan implementation of PeaceTXT uses mobile advertising to market peace and change men’s behaviors.
Conflicts are often grounded in the stories and narratives that people tell them-selves and in the emotions that these stories evoke. Narratives shape identity and the social construct of reality—we interpret our lives through stories. These have the power to transform or infect relationships and communities. As US-based PeaceTXT partner CureViolence (formerly CeaseFire) has clearly shown, violence propagates in much the same way as infectious diseases do. The good news is that we already know how to treat the later: by blocking transmission and treating the infected. This is precisely the approach taken by CureViolence to successfully prevent violence on the streets of Chicago, Baghdad and elsewhere.
A big problem in sharing even excellent, well-sourced information on the theme of pedophiles occupying the highest ranks of organizations, whether they be corporate, governmental or even religious, is not the sense of incredulity such information usually provokes in typically asleep middle-class readers who have lived relatively protected, cocooned existences oblivious to the innumerable black undersides of what some call reality. That's to be expected from those who live in middle-class cocoons. The real difficulty is in examining and sharing information on practices that are unarguably loathsome, depraved, vile, degenerate and in essence evil, and done by people we look upon as our highest and most respectable leaders. It's easy to accuse someone of evil, and it is insufficient by itself to do so. One has to provide evidence, and providing evidence entails describing something ineffably malign and almost unutterable in its horror – that's hard to do, by comparison, because except for those with a strong appetite or attraction to very, very dark things, a minority, no one else, understandably, wants to look at such things. People flee from what repels them, and what is more repellent than pederasts, especially those who have great power and privilege?
This undoubtedly largely has to do with living in a dominantly secular age. The influence of those who don't believe in a Divine Order or God is pervasive enough to compel the masses to assume the flip side: to take for granted there is no Devil, no source of deep, abiding non-human evil. Anything conveyed about people and their practices that smacks of a quality or degree of evil that puts the smug assumptions of modernity into doubt, that makes the Satanic much more plausible despite the stubborn persistence of modernity's assumptions about good and evil, is an object of terror and revulsion to the degree that modernity's values has descended into people's hearts and minds. Not that religious “authorities” can be counted on to protect innocent children. Note the Catholic Church's endless calls to stop abortion, which victimizes innocent children, they say, which is all well and good, but its compulsive, monotonic repetition of this meme seems to be a sign of a compensatory spilling-out of a guilty conscience for having permitted and protected the many pederast priests in its midst. They seem to ignore the more concrete or real crime in exchange for protesting the more abstract one when it comes to their most repeated phrase: innocent children. This happens likely because the real crime is done by their very own, at the center of power and control in the Church, by priests and their bishops.
For these and other reasons, getting the message out about pedophiles who are very powerful is more challenging and daunting than getting out information on any other category of crimes performed by members of the Elite. Yet the task should be done, if only as a microscopic, belated effort to help get some chance of justice for the countless and truly innocent children victimized and even tortured and killed by pederasts, especially those in the highest places, plus to help prevent new such crimes by the high and mighty especially.
The real reason U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has not been seen for the last month is because she was injured during a secret mission to Iran, according to published intelligence sources.
Quoting sources around Tehran and the Gulf Emirates, DEBKAfile, a Middle East news service known as an outlet for Israeli and Western intelligence, says Secretary Clinton made the clandestine trip during the first week of December.
Although the objective of her mission remains unclear, the incident, which took place shortly after December 1, coincides with an earlier DEBKAfile report that Obama administration officials launched secret talks with senior representatives of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Iran’s nuclear program.
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The DEBKAfile article speculates that Secretary Clinton was on her way to a secret meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in regard to those negotiations.
The plane carrying Secretary Clinton and her entourage of advisers and security personnel left Bahrain for its logged destination of Baghdad, but changed direction in midair and headed for Ahvaz, capital of the south Iranian province of Khuzestan. The Iranian president was waiting there for her arrival.
According to DEBKAfile, the plane somehow ran into technical trouble during the flight and made an emergency landing. Secretary Clinton was injured in the crash, and several of her staff were either injured or killed.
The unexplained death of Navy SEAL Commander Job Price is tied by some to the Clinton incident. At the time, the Pentagon reported that his sudden death on December 22, in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, was under investigation. Sources have told the UK Guardian that the reason for Commander Price’s death was suicide. It is now suggested that he headed the security detail for Secretary Clinton’s Iran mission and was killed in the accident.
The vague details and fuzzy timeline of events have led to wild speculation about the real reason for her sudden illness. Several top-ranking Republicans, including former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, claimed Secretary Clinton came down with “diplomatic illness” to avoid testifying at a House Foreign Affairs Committee on the September 11 terrorist attack on the American embassy in Benghazi. Others have claimed she really had a stroke, or fell during a drunken stupor.
Many Kurds have come to believe that the present prolonged turmoil in the Middle East — in Syria and Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Iran and Turkey — is giving them their best chance of self-determination in modern times. They are determined to seize it. It could be that the map of the region is being redrawn before our eyes.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a no-brainer for anyone with intelligence and integrity. The artificial boundaries imposed by centuries of empire are collapsing, in part because they are unaffordable to maintain, in part because Epoch B has begun and the world is reverting to the pre-empire eras where indigenous peoples in close harmony with nature established natural boundaries over the course of centuries. The US Government, nominally led in foreign affairs by the Department of State, is ignorant and arrogant. It has the temerity to believe that it can a) know better and b) impose its ignorant arrogant will on others. Those days are over. What we should be doing is striving to offer all dictators an exit strategy as Ambassador Mark Palmer (our choice for Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy) has been recommending, getting serious about self-determination, and butting out of the internal affairs of others.
Inclusive global governance is one of the on-going efforts of the developing countries in this fast changing and complicated world. This is a process that started in the 1960s and will continue for many years to come.
I. Current Roles of the Developing Countries in Global Governance. Among all the roles, the following three stand out prominently. (1) They are the promoters of the UN centrality and democratization of international relations. Actually they are evolutionary reformers of the existent mechanisms. (2) They are invigorators of new mechanisms to cope with new challenges of our times, both institutionally and conceptually. A case in point is their role of G-20 by pursuing consultation and cooperation with the developed countries during the ongoing financial crisis and economic difficulties. (3) They are initiators of mechanisms of developing/emerging powers, such as the BRICS. The forming of BRICS reflects the shifting distribution of powers and upgrading of the developing countries.
Given the out of control slander and vicious opposition of the Zionists and the neo-cons to Chuck Hagel's leaked nomination prospects, this comes as a pleasant surprise.
In case you haven’t heard, President Obama is considering appointing Chuck Hagel, a former United States senator from Nebraska and a Purple Heart winner, as the next secretary of defense — and this has triggered a minifirefight among Hagel critics and supporters. I am a Hagel supporter. I think he would make a fine secretary of defense — precisely because some of his views are not “mainstream.” I find the opposition to him falling into two baskets: the disgusting and the philosophical. It is vital to look at both to appreciate why Hagel would be a good fit for Defense at this time.
The disgusting is the fact that because Hagel once described the Israel lobby as the “Jewish lobby” (it also contains some Christians). And because he has rather bluntly stated that his job as a U.S. senator was not to take orders from the Israel lobby but to advance U.S. interests, he is smeared as an Israel-hater at best and an anti-Semite at worst. If ever Israel needed a U.S. defense secretary who was committed to Israel’s survival, as Hagel has repeatedly stated — but who was convinced that ensuring that survival didn’t mean having America go along with Israel’s self-destructive drift into settling the West Bank and obviating a two-state solution — it is now.
I am certain that the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes on Israel — that it is surrounded by more implacable enemies than ever and needs and deserves America’s backing. But, at the same time, this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account by slowing its self-isolating settlement adventure. And it’s going to get worse. Israel’s friends need to understand that the center-left in Israel is dying. The Israeli election in January will bring to power Israeli rightists who never spoke at your local Israel Bonds dinner. These are people who want to annex the West Bank. Bibi Netanyahu is a dove in this crowd. The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth. But most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews prefer to stick their heads in the sand, because confronting Israel is so unpleasant and politically dangerous. Hagel at least cares enough about Israel to be an exception.
Iceland’s citizens were given a chance to help forge a new constitution for their country through Facebook and Twitter, so it’s not surprising that they backed the resulting draft. Now it’s over to the politicians.
A constitution is a deeply serious thing: the bedrock of a country’s identity. So Iceland’s decision to let the general populace participate in the drafting of its new constitution – via social media such as Facebook and Twitter – was a bold move.
