The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Russia: For the record. The Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, Vice Admiral Chirkov said today that Moscow is involved in talks toward establishing naval bases in Cuba, Vietnam and the Seychelles.
Comment: This is the first public notice of any plan to build more bases.
Printing Weapons at Home for Fun and Mayhem
It's now possible to print functional weapons at home. This is going to progress rapidly now.
Think: global file sharing of designs for servicable weapons, from pistols on up to ?, that can be printed at home. What you can print — from the materials to the size/quality of the object to the completeness (snap together construction) — is already moving forward quickly. The weapons effort will just be along for the ride.
“HaveBlue” has tested the first “printed” firearm and it works. Here's his site, but it's VERY slow. It didn't blow up in his face.
Granted, he used an older professional grade Stratys 3D printer to do it. Printeres are much better now and handle many new materials.
Haveblue has been testing the “market” for distributing CAD/CAM weapons designs. His post of an earlier design to Thingverse (a site for 3D printing design patterns) led to a change in their policy (although it hasn't been enforced).
Haveblue's work is based on the Solidworks files available for download from the CNCguns site. Here's his earlier project:
Phi Beta Iota: Violence should be a last resort — publics today are far from fully exploiting the use of public intelligence in the public interest. However, it bears mention that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King were quite clear: non-violence is preferable to violence, but violence is preferable to continued oppression. Most governments, including the European governments still favoring banks over people and refusing to honor the Iceland model, no longer represent their publics and have lost all legitimacy in the eyes of many. We pray they will awaken to the reality that those governments that do not empower, protect, and respect the public, will ultimately be abolished. In the meantime, they are merely ignored.
Attached is a very thoughtful report on what is happening to Syria, written by a long-time observer of the Middle East.
Chuck Spinney
La Spezia, Italia
by Patrick Seale
Agence Global, 24 Jul 200012
Once one of the most solid states in the Middle East and a key pivot of the regional power structure, Syria is now facing wholesale destruction. The consequences of the unfolding drama are likely to be disastrous for Syria’s territorial integrity, for the well-being of its population, for regional peace, and for the interests of external powers deeply involved in the crisis.
EXTRACT:
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Syria Lessons Learned and Current SitRep”
Human Cities Symposium in Bruxelles.
The proceedings for the conference have just been published.
You can also click below to download them.
UPDATE 28 June: Added Linked-In Exchange at End of Post
Landmark Forum 001
First, I want to thank Bob for making this experience possible. I am about to go into an intense three-day boot camp but have already gotten my first insight from a meeting last night.
“Accept responsibility for how you are heard, not for what you say.”
Duh. Not so obvious to me. I have gone my whole life assuming that I should put what I think on the table and rely on others to triage, ingest, etc. So this is my first big insight, the undertone is that your body language is part of how you are heard and obvious impatience, which I have already been trying to curb, is a downer.
I will not return as Miss Congeniality, but I am certainly going to return vastly more sensitive to effect rather than intent.
Landmark Forum 002
This is exhausting. It is also very worthwhile, and the course does NOT impose any restrictions on going to the bathroom or taking an urgent phone call, nor does the course force everyone to expose their innermost concerns. In a class of about 120, there are ample volunteers for the training points to be made. At no time did I feel, observe, or hear anyone else observe, that the course was over-bearing.
Day One focused on three big things:
Continue reading “Robert Steele: Landmark Forum Trip Report”
Wealthy Americans Jumping Obama’s Ship
NewsMax, Sunday, 24 Jun 2012 12:46 PM
Wealthy Americans aren’t just leaving tax-heavy states like New York and California, they’re leaving the country.
U.S. citizens are defecting at record levels in order to escape high taxes, the New York Post reported. About 8,000 U.S. citizens are projected to renounce their citizenship in 2012, or about 154 a week — versus 3,805 in 2011, or about 73 per week, according to immigration officials, the Post reported.
They want to avoid tax bills resulting from the proposed 55-percent hike on the wealthy and the anticipated expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts at the end of the year, the Post reported.
“High-net-worth individuals are making decisions that having a US passport just isn’t worth the cost anymore,” Jim Duggan, a lawyer at Duggan Bertsch, which specializes in protecting assets of the wealthy, told the Post.
“They’re able to do what they do from any place in the world, and they’re choosing to do it from places with much lower tax rates,” he said. “Some are philosophically disgusted at the course our country is taking in all kinds of ways. They’re making a strong protest of, ‘Enough is enough.’ But largely it’s an economic decision.”
But to leave means finding a new country and obtaining citizenship and there are many that are eager to welcome wealthy Americans, such as Australia, Norway, Singapore, Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, and Antigua, according to the Post.
These countries tend to offer a fast track to citizenship and protections from the Justice Department and IRS.
El Correo de las Indias English edition
The “Sharing Economy,” the “economy of the commons,” deserves and needs a point of reference equivalent to the large institutions of European social theory.
Via GAIA: Global Alliance for Immediate Alteration
Production, not consumption; Economics of the Commons, not Sharing Economics
For a “Somewhere School of Sharing Economics”
See Also:
