The ongoing disinformation campaign financed by carbon interests such as the Koch brothers, combined with the corruption of every branch of our government, has left us in this condition.
In the age of the Iraq war and Obamacare, the government is hardly a trustworthy body.
The 841-page National Climate Assessment released by the US government this week has been described as ‘sobering”, but Americans do not appear sobered. The report goes into astonishing detail about what severe climate change would mean – and what it means already to specific villages, mountains and beaches.
I think the evidence is now in, and it seems quite clear, as this story describes. The toxins produced by companies like Monsanto and Dow are literally putting the world's food supply at risk. It is going to be very interesting to watch how the Obama Administration reacts. He has proven to be so disappointing in so many ways, but this is a clear and urgent da! nger. We are about to see whether Obama thinks profit for a few corporations is more important than the wellbeing of all humanity.
Honeybees exposed to a certain class of insecticide are more likely to die from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the name given to whatever is causing a mass decline in the bee population over the past six years, according to a new study.
The sobering story of Janet Vertesi's attempts to conceal her pregnancy from the forces of online marketers shows just how Kafkaesque the internet has become
John Naughton
The Observer, 10 May 2014
When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – “Orwellian” is the word that people generally reach for.
But “Kafkaesque” seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality”, but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. “What's Kafkaesque,” he once told the New York Times, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.”
A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.
Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.
. . . . . . . .
In preparing for the birth of her child, Vertesi was nothing if not thorough. Instead of using a web-browser in the normal way – ie leaving a trail of cookies and other digital tracks, she used the online service Tor to visit babycenter.com anonymously. She shopped offline whenever she could and paid in cash. On the occasions when she had to use Amazon, she set up a new Amazon account linked to an email address on a personal server, had all packages delivered to a local locker and made sure only to pay with Amazon gift cards that had been purchased with cash.
The really significant moment came when she came to buy a big-ticket item – an expensive stroller (aka pushchair) that was the urbanite's equivalent of an SUV. Her husband tried to buy $500 of Amazon gift vouchers with cash, only to discover that this triggered a warning: retailers have to report people buying large numbers of gift vouchers with cash because, well, you know, they're obviously money launderers.
. . . . . . . .
Even more sobering, though, are the implications of Professor Vertesi's decision to use Tor as a way of ensuring the anonymity of her web-browsing activities. She had a perfectly reasonable reason for doing this – to ensure that, as a mother-to-be, she was not tracked and targeted by online marketers.
But we know from the Snowden disclosures and other sources that Tor users are automatically regarded with suspicion by the NSA et al on the grounds that people who do not wish to leave a digital trail are obviously up to no good. The same goes for people who encrypt their emails.
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, is one of America's best-known critics of the War on Terror. Dr. Barrett has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications. Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin, where he ran for Congress in 2008. He is the co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance, and author of the books Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009). His website is www.truthjihad.com. More articles by Dr. Barrett
Here is a very good assessment discussing what I think is wrong with American foreign policy first under Bush and, now, under Obama. In my view Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are mass murderers no less than John Wayne Gacy, Jr., and ought to be in prison. It is it any wonder we are hated around the world?
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Dick Cheney’s ideology of U.S. global domination has become an enduring American governing principle regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, a reality reflected in the recent Ukrainian coup, the 2011 ‘regime change” in Libya and drone wars waged in several countries by President Barack Obama.
“According to the evidence that I’ve seen …Odessa was a giant false flag operation. It… was one of those staged massacres that the pro-Western forces from Bosnia to Kosovo, now Ukraine, excel at staging, intended to draw Russia to overreact and commit military forces … I believe that the fact that they are willing to stage such a horrendous atrocity shows the depth of their desperation at this point.”
– Nebojsa Malic, political analyst, Russia Today
“Not under foreign skies Nor under foreign wings protected – I shared all this with my own people There, where misfortune had abandoned us.”
– “Requiem” – Anna Akhmatova
Photos of the victims of the Odessa fire which have been circulating on the Internet have cast doubt on the official version of events. It’s now clear that many of the anti-junta activists who occupied the Trade Unions House were neither burned to death nor died of smoke inhalation, but were savagely shot at point-blank range by agents and thugs who had infiltrated the building to kill as many of the occupants as possible, burn the corpses, and then slip away without notice. Some of the victims–like a young woman who was eight months pregnant –were strangled with an electrical chord and left slumped backwards over her desk in a room that shows no sign of fire or smoke damage. In another case, a woman was stripped naked from the waste down, raped, killed, and set ablaze.
In still other cases, victims with bullet-holes through their skulls, had flammable fluid dumped on their heads and were incinerated, leaving a charred head atop a corpse whose clothes were untouched by fire. The sloppily-executed killing-spree proves that the fire was not the result of a spontaneous clash between pro and anti-Kiev demonstrators, but a carefully planned black-op that likely involved foreign Intel agencies working hand-in-hand with the fascist junta government in Kiev. Did we mention that the CIA has taken up residence in the Ukrainian capital? Here’s the scoop from the AFP:
“Iranian Fars News Service reported a massive explosion in Qazvin, Iran today. The origins may have been nuclear. Arutz Sheva reported:
An immense explosion has been heard throughout the northern Iranian city of Qazvin, semi-official Fars news agency reported, and many casualties are expected from the blast.
Around 1.1 million people live in the city, which is located about 100 miles north of Tehran.
The blast may be related to nuclear development in Iran, according to the Los Angeles Times. Iranian officials in the past have strongly denied claims by Mujahedin Khalq Organization, or MKO, a cult-like Iranian exile group, that it has a secret nuclear enrichment facility in Abyek, near the major city, according to the daily.
The source of the blast remains undetermined. Several mystery explosions have been reported in the past several years in the region, none of which were ever verified.”
Phi Beta Iota: It has been known since 2005 that CIA gave the Iranians the complete plans for making a nuclear bomb, with many errors called “rudimentary” at the time, easily discovered and fixed by Russians working for Iran. Perhaps one of the errors was not so rudimentary after all.
