Phi Beta Iota: BRAVO ZULU Huazzaah to the Utah Sheriff's. Oath Keepers is doing its job. This is law enforcement ethics at its best. We must all transfer our money to local credit unions and community banks, and being by-passing the federal government's corruption (as well as state and local corruption), and work to reassert the sovereignty of the individual citizen and the security and prosperity of the individual neighborhoods. Resilience is the goal, intelligence with integrity is the method.
Today's issue is a selection of the many stories I have found showing the results arising from the efforts of the Theocratic Right to shape the world as they wish it. I want to be clear that this is only a selection. I could have picked 10 other stories.
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Because many of these efforts are either esoteric assaults on regulatory agencies, or programs at the state level, and they get little national discussion, I don't think most people quite realize how pervasive these efforts have been.
This all gets down to voting. All of us who want our country to choose a compassionate and life-affirming course must not only vote, we must take on the responsibility of counseling and assisting others of like mind to vote.
Oceana, an international ocean advocacy group, has released a report on national seafood fraud [pdf], and the results are disconcerting. The report, which is one of the largest on seafood fraud to date, found that one-third of fish was mislabeled.
Oceana performed DNA testing from 2010 to 2012 on 1,215 fish samples from 674 retail outlets in 21 states. In this study, Oceana found seafood fraud everywhere it tested, with rates hitting as high as 52 percent in Southern California. Here are the full results:
In a very oddly worded public response to a question posed to him during an online interview, Barack Obama dances around the topic of using military drones to kill Americans inside of the United States. Watch the following response and as you do, keeping in mind at no point does President Obama simply say NO we would never do that…
Phi Beta Iota: What is frightening is that Obama is incapable of saying, simply, “NO, we will not use drones to kill people inside the USA.” Taken in combination with the various “suicidings” across the USA, the “natural gas” explosions, and many unexplained “disappearances,” an outside observer would be hard-pressed to offer a vote of confidence for this Administration's grasp of the “rule of law.” John Brennan was told, in writing, to get the drones off the table in his opening remarks. He refused to do that. For that reason alone (the willful confirmation that he WANTS the drones unfettered), he should not be confirmed and Congress should mandate an end to the CIA drone program — transfer all of the drones to the military, and turn them into UNARMED organic reconnaissance assets within the Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) Program.
The president has a clandestine network targeting a ‘kill list' justified by secret laws. How is that different than a death squad?
The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global “war on terror”. It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation's contemporary history.
Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding “kill lists”. It was JSoc that ran the operation behind the Navy Seal team six that killed bin Laden.
Scahill and Rowley track this new model of US warfare that strikes at civilians and insurgents alike – in 70 countries. They interview former JSoc assassins, who are shell-shocked at how the “kill lists” they are given keep expanding, even as they eliminate more and more people.
Which vaccines contain human protein and DNA?
Would you object to taking vaccines on moral, philosophical, scientific or religious grounds knowing you are consuming human material? The FDA itself admits in its “Vaccine Ingredients Calculator” that's what you are receiving in a vaccine. “A recent CBS News Investigates article quotes a former senior scientist at a pharmaceutical firm who claims that human tissue is currently used in 23 vaccines; however, we adhere strictly to the vaccine package inserts from the FDA as our ingredient data source and cannot confirm nor deny this claim.
Tetanus Vaccine Causes New Disease: New Vaccines Worse?
Does the doctor who cheerfully injects you with tetanus vaccine warn you about this?
“The tetanus vaccine causes a new disease known both as Hughes syndrome and antiphospholipid syndrome (APS). It’s an autoimmune condition that can attack any part of the body, though is best noted for heart attacks and killing fetuses. It’s likely that APS will become more common with the new generation of vaccine adjuvants now being produced. The sufferers of (APS) are mostly women, and its diagnosis is often made as a result of multiple pregnancy losses. As is typical of new diseases, research is focused on finding a genetic cause, in spite of the fact that the connection with vaccines is well known and documented.”
Last Monday, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC) met for its second summit in Santiago, Chile, one year after its founding meeting in Caracas, Venezuela in 2011. The Summit is the culmination of roughly a decade of efforts to create a viable mechanism for greater integration in the Americas, and particularly a year of planning by a “troika” of representatives from, believe it or not, Chile, Venezuela and Cuba. They were able to pull it off successfully, despite their obvious differences, and all 33 presidents or heads of state from the region attended, with the exception of Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, who sent a letter with his Vice-President Nicolás Maduro.
CELAC explicitly excludes the US and Canada, a historic first for a hemispheric organization with huge symbolic importance, because it answers a long-standing dream for unity of the subcontinent that harks back to Simón Bolívar and the struggles for independence from the European colonial powers. Beyond the symbolism, however, it is strategically crucial: It means that there is now a subcontinent bloc of developing nations that can speak with one voice,, and also serve as a counterweight to US political and economic hegemony.
And the winner of the Oscar for Best Sequel of 2013 goes to… The Global War on Terror (GWOT), a Pentagon production. Abandon all hope those who thought the whole thing was over with the cinematographic snuffing out of “Geronimo”, aka Osama bin Laden, further reduced to a fleeting cameo in the torture-enabling flick Zero Dark Thirty.
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It’s now official – coming from the mouth of the lion, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, and duly posted at theAFRICOM site, the Pentagon’s weaponized African branch.
Exit “historical” al-Qaeda, holed up somewhere in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas; enter al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). In Dempsey’s words, AQIM “is a threat not only to the country of Mali, but the region, and if… left unaddressed, could in fact become a global threat.”
With Mali now elevated to the status of a “threat” to the whole world, GWOT is proven to be really open-ended. The Pentagon doesn’t do irony; when, in the early 2000s, armchair warriors coined the expression “The Long War”, they really meant it.
Even under President Obama 2.0′s “leading from behind” doctrine, the Pentagon is unmistakably gunning for war in Mali – and not only of the shadow variety. [1] General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, already operates under the assumption Islamists in Mali will “attack American interests”.
Thus, the first 100 US military “advisers” are being sent to Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Togo and Ghana – the six member-nations of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) that will compose an African army tasked (by the United Nations) to reconquer (invade?) the parts of Mali under the Islamist sway of AQIM, its splinter group MUJAO and the Ansar ed-Dine militia. This African mini-army, of course, is paid for by the West.
Students of the Vietnam War will be the first to note that sending “advisers” was the first step of the subsequent quagmire. And on a definitely un-Pentagonese ironic aside, the US over these past few years did train Malian troops. A lot of them duly deserted. As for the lavishly, Fort Benning-trained Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, not only did he lead a military coup against an elected Mali government but also created the conditions for the rise of the Islamists.
