The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Published on Apr 30, 2013
Capt. Robert Salas (USAF, Ret.) testifies and then describes a series of incidents that he witnessed both first hand and then has continued to study, where US Nuclear capabilities were disabled or compromised in conjunction with sightings of UFOs and unexplained phenomena in the vicinity of the bases.
Citizen Hearing on Disclosure
April 30, 2013
‘Millennials' are leveraging their tech savvy for social change and economic opportunity.
How social network policies are changing speech and privacy norms
Is the proprietary nature of online speech poised to change cultural norms?
Big Banks are Victims of Their Own Success
The biggest banks have done an excellent job of delaying and undermining the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law and staving off criminal investigations into wrongdoing.
Privacy in the Age of Big Data
Social media, Web 2.0, the Internet of Things, mobile computing, and the expansion of sensors is allowing more information to be gathered than ever before which, coupled with Big Data analytics, offers unprecedented insight into the needs, patterns, and habits of users, citizens, and consumers.
Free Software Supporter
Issue 61, April 2013
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While there is little that is new in the attached article by Philip Giraldi; it is nevertheless very important and well worth reading. Giraldi has produced an excellent summary of the truly poisonous influences on US foreign and defense policies, a group more accurately described by the collective modifier neo-conmen.
He describes how the influence of this movement's current incarnation got its start inside the Scoop Jackson (aka the Senator from Boeing) mafia during the 1970s, how it grew and infiltrated establishment of Versailles on the Potomac in the 80s and 90s, and then metastasized into a truly destructive menace after 9-11, which to the neo-conmen, became a kind of manna from heaven. The trauma unleashed by that attack enabled them to cynically fan the fires of blind fear and convert a horrendous crime into an act of war. I was in the Pentagon between 1973 and 2003 and first became aware of their growing influence in 1977 or 1978, although I erroneously discounted them at the time as being nutty. But, by 1983 or so, my discounting began to disappear. From my mind’s eye, Giraldi's retrospective is spot on,
Think about it: The neoconmen’s poison has been one of the (and in some cases “the,”) central causes of (1) the mistaken war in Iraq, (2) the failed war in Afghanistan, (3) the rise of a state of perpetual war that is morphing into an endless, as yet unacknowledged, and increasingly unfocused war against tribal Islam in the Middle East and Africa, (4) the hijacking of US foreign policy by our client state of Israel, (5) the never-ending crisis with Iran, (6) the continued addiction to high and economically counterproductive defense budgets, the growth of which are more tuned to the obsessions of the Cold War than the wars the neo-conmen started, (7) the reduction of civil liberties at home, and most importantly, (8) a web of growing grand-strategic mismatches among the (a) values America professes to uphold (what we say we are), (b) the actual values revealed to world by America’s actions (what we really are) and (c) the growing constraints of the world America has to deal with. This arrogant hypocrisy implicit in this grand-strategic web is becoming increasingly obnoxious to people living in the rest of the world.
Left uncorrected, this behaviour is a prescription for isolation. There can be no good end to the 21st Century grand-strategic pathway launched by the people described by Giraldi below. In saner times their destructive actions would have placed the neo-conmen in the dock of public opinion, if not the law.
Chuck Spinney
by Philip Giraldi, Antiwar.com, May 02, 2013
It has been noted ironically by Justin Raimondo at antiwar and also by Scott McConnell over at The American Conservative how the neoconservative dominated American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, which sees Chechens and other Central Asian Muslim militants as “freedom fighters” against Russian rule, exists side by side with other organizations like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Enterprise Institute that feature many of the same neoconservatives dedicated to restraining Political Islam while extirpating what they frequently describe as “Islamic fascism.” As is frequently the case with ideologically driven positions, the American neocon supporters of Chechen independence have failed to note that the Chechen nationalist uprising of the 1980s has now morphed into an Islamic based insurgency. The contradictory behavior is particularly glaring as Chechens have frequently been identified among al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and elsewhere and have carried out major terrorist operations in the Russian Confederation, highlighted by the killing of 186 schoolchildren at Beslan in September 2004. The friends of Chechnya response to the massacre has been to successfully pressure the State Department to provide political asylum and a government job for Ilyas Akhmadov, a rebel leader who might have been party to the terrorist attack, a bit of hypocrisy that the Russians have noted vis-à-vis Washington’s professed global war on terror.
Iran: The Foreign Minister said Iran considers use of chemical weapons in Syria a “red line” and wants the opposition investigated for using them.
“We have always emphasized that the use of chemical weapons on the part of anyone is our red line,” Salehi said, according to the ISNA news agency. “Iran is opposed to the use of any kind of weapon of mass destruction, and not just their use but their production, accumulation, and use.”
Salehi also urged the United Nations to investigate accusations by the Syrian government that Syrian opposition fighters had used chemical weapons.
Comment: Iran might be opposed to weapons of mass destruction, but Syria is not. It and North Korea have some of the largest stocks of chemical weapons among all countries. Iranian leaders know this.
What have been missing from the public domain coverage of this issue are tactical details of use, such as the target and amount of gas used. For Syria, limited use would seem to serve no tactical purpose, but large scale use would. For example, Iraq used chemical weapons extensively in the Iran-Iraq War, against the Kurds in Halabja in 988 and more than a dozen times against the Iranians between August 1983 and July 1988. They were decisive in an Iraqi victor in 1988.
Iraq also was prepared to use chemical weapons in 1991 to suppress a Shiite uprising in Najaf and Karbala after the war, but was deterred by the US. Instead it shelled the rebels.
No similar tactical or political advantage of limited use has been established in the public domain.
Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Iran, Syria, WMD — and Bolivia Expels AID for Covert Operations”
198 Methods of Nonviolent Action
These methods were compiled by Dr. Gene Sharp and first published in his 1973 book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Vol. 2: The Methods of Nonviolent Action. (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers, 1973). The book outlines each method and gives information about its historical use.
You may also download this list of methods.
THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION
Formal Statements
1. Public Speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions
4. Signed public statements
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions
Continue reading “Reference: 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action”
The Pope Called One of the Foundations of the Global Capitalism System ‘Slavery'
Pope Francis on Wednesday condemned as “slave labour” the conditions for hundreds of workers killed in a factory collapse in Bangladesh and urged political leaders to fight unemployment in a sweeping critique of “selfish profit”.
The pope said he had been particularly struck by a headline saying workers at the factory near Dhaka were being paid just 38 euros ($50) a month.
“This is called slave labour!” the pope was quoted by Vatican radio as saying in his homily at a private mass in his residence to mark May Day.
More than 400 workers have been confirmed dead and scores are missing in the collapse, which occurred in a suburb of the capital Dhaka last week in the country's worst-ever industrial disaster.
“Today in the world this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us — the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity,” the pope said at the mass.
