According to a startling new piece of research by a pair of political science professors, ordinary Americans have virtually no impact at all on the making of national policy. By contrast, reports The Hill, “The analysts found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape policy outcomes in the United States.”
As we had, likewise, reported on after the issuance of last weeks SVR report, of the estimated 111,000 Saudi Arabian students currently in the United States, 8,000 have been identified as being Islamic State (IS) [also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)] terror members, of which nearly 3,000 of them have become “Ebola Martyrs” willing to die in their “mission” of infecting as many Americans as they can before their stated deadline of October.
Phi Beta Iota: We have no direct knowledge. By all accounts available the US intelligence community appears to have helped the US special operations community achieve an extraordinary intervention in the past 24 hours. The FBI has absolutely no clue who's who among all the foreigners inserted into the USA, and least of all among the Saudis and the combination of Israelis and multinational “sayonim” (Jews who blindly support the Zionist state). Note that the posited 8,000 above could easily provide a 1,000 individuals to be voluntarily infected with Ebola or anything else AFTER their arrival in the USA, with the viruses imported via the Saudi diplomatic pouch. However, having lost all faith in the integrity of the US Government in relation to the public interest, we do not discount the possibility that this is a false flag operation intended to justify a fake Ebola crisis to further test the ability of the federal government to restrict travel and shut-down any areas of the country they wish. We pray the Obama Administration understands just how close the USA is to massive armed push-back against the militarization (and potential federalization) of the state and local police. We suspect Obama has no one he can actually trust to tell him the truth.
The plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the use of the “no fly list” to bar a US citizen from boarding an aircraft said last week that he would introduce a leaked copy of the government's Watchlisting Guidance “to show just how objectionable and evidence-free Defendants' watch listing process is.”
The government said it did not acknowledge the authenticity of the leaked document, and that the case should be dismissed since the Attorney General had invoked the state secrets privilege concerning core issues that it raised.
The UK’s child abuse scandal, rooted in the media, Westminster and the Royal Family and personified by serial abuser and BBC personality Jimmy Savile, has been shocking enough. But far more insulting to the victims, the nation and the world is the Cameron government’s attempt, in early July, to institute two separate child abuse inquiries led by establishment figures who, due to family and work connections, immediately faced suspicions of possible conflicts of interest.
I was very happy to see a more civilized approach to policing in Ferguson, Missouri, but it got me to thinking how many black teenagers are killed by white police officers every year. I was not alone in this thinking apparently, as this report explains.
WASHINGTON — Nearly two times a week in the United States, a white police officer killed a black person during a seven-year period ending in 2012, according to the most recent accounts of justifiable homicide reported to the FBI.
On average, there were 96 such incidents among at least 400 police killings each year that were reported to the FBI by local police. The numbers appear to show that the shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last Saturday was not an isolated event in American policing.
The wars begun in 2001 have been tremendously painful for millions of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and the United States, and economically costly as well. Each additional month and year of war adds to that toll. Moreover, the human costs of these conflicts will reverberate for years to come in each of those four countries. There is no turning the page on the wars with the end of hostilities, and there is even more need as a result to understand what those wars’ consequences are and will be.
The goal of the Costs of War Project has been to outline a broad understanding of the domestic and international costs and consequences of those wars. A team of 30 economists, anthropologists, political scientists, legal experts, and physicians were assembled to do this analysis. Their research papers are posted and summarized on this website.
We asked:
What have been the wars’ costs in human and economic terms?
How have these wars changed the social and political landscape of the United States and the countries where the wars have been waged?
What have been the public health consequences of the wars?
What will be the long term legacy of these conflicts for veterans?
What is the long term economic effect of these wars likely to be?
Were and are there alternative less costly and more effective ways to prevent further terror attacks?
The militarization of the police in the United States is a major sociological change in the way our country operates, as this report spells out very clearly. What concerns me as much as the war toys, is that the use of such equipment and the context in which it is used attracts exactly the wrong type of personality for law enforcement. It exerts a siren call to the bully, the thug, the s! hoot first and ask questions later type of individual. And, as Ferguson makes clear, that is exactly who signs up, and how they behave.