Communities worldwide want economies that are stronger, greener, fairer, more resilient, more democratic, and more diverse. Jobs must be created, climate change addressed, infrastructure repaired, schools upgraded, and more. The LEDDA economic direct democracy framework, now under development, offers a bold yet practical solution.
Capitalism is at risk of destroying itself unless bankers realise they have an obligation to create a fairer society, the Bank of England governor has warned.
Dr. Colin S. Gray is Professor of International Politics and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, England. He worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London) and at the Hudson Institute (Croton-on-Hudson, NY) before founding the National Institute for Public Policy, a defense-oriented think tank in the Washington, DC, area. Dr. Gray served for 5 years in the Ronald Reagan administration on the President’s General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. He has served as an adviser to both the U.S. and British governments (he has dual citizenship). His government work has included studies of nuclear strategy, arms control, maritime strategy, space strategy, and the use of special forces. Dr. Gray has written 25 books, including: The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order (University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005); Strategy and History: Essays on Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2006); Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace and Strategy (Potomac Books, 2009); National Security Dilemmas: Challenges and Opportunities (Potomac Books, 2009); The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010); War, Peace and International Relations: An Introduction to Strategic History, 2nd Ed. (Routledge, 2011); Airpower for Strategic Effect (Air University Press, 2012); and Perspectives on Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2013), which is the follow-up to Strategy Bridge. Dr. Gray is a graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford.
Paul Adams: As I was listening to the 9/11 segment of the interview, you should know I just viewed a documentary where Larry Silverstein in front of a group of Jews, explained how in April 2000 – 17 months before 9/11 – he was reviewing the blueprints for the new WTC towers which were to be rebuilt, and on which construction did not start until 2002. Here's the clip. Action starts at 34:54
US Will Have To Rebut Or Accept Statement As Truth
A former CIA and civilian pilot has sworn an affidavit, stating that no planes flew into the Twin Towers as it would have been physically impossible.
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John Lear, the son of Learjet inventor, Bill Lear, has given his expert evidence that it would have been physically impossible for Boeing 767s, like Flights AA11 and UA175 to have hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, particularly when flown by inexperienced pilots:
‘No Boeing 767 airliners hit the Twin Towers as fraudulently alleged by the government, media, NIST and its contractors’, he stated in the affidavit.
‘Such crashes did not occur because they are physically impossible as depicted, for the following reasons: in the case of UAL 175 going into the south tower, a real Boeing 767 would have begun ‘telescoping' when the nose hit the 14 inch steel columns which are 39 inches on center.
‘The vertical and horizontal tail would have instantaneously separated from the aircraft, hit the steel box columns and fallen to the ground.
‘The engines when impacting the steel columns would havemaintained their general shape and either fallen to the ground or been recovered in the debris of the collapsed building.
‘No Boeing 767 could attain a speed of 540 mph at 1000 feet above sea level ‘parasite drag doubles with velocity’ and ‘parasite power’ cubes with velocity.
The fan portion of the engine is not designed to accept the volume of dense air at that altitude and speed.
The piece of alleged external fuselage containing 3 or 4 window cutouts is inconsistent with an airplane that hit 14 inch steel box columns, placed at over 500 mph. It would have crumpled.
No significant part of the Boeing 767 or engine could have penetrated the 14 inch steel columns and 37 feet beyond the massive core of the tower without part of it falling to the ground.
The successful launch marks the next step in an ambitious space program that aims to send a Chinese astronaut to the moon.
BEIJING — China's first moon rover set off slowly Sunday to travel across the right eye of the Man in the Moon, leaving the first wheeled tracks on the moon's surface in nearly 40 years.
No quote emerged to rival “one giant leap for mankind,” but with one loud confirmation by mission control — “the probe landed safely” — China established its status Saturday night as the third nation ever to achieve a “soft-landing” on the moon.
Two weeks after its launch from southwest China, the Chang'e 3 lunar probe, named after a moon goddess, made a careful descent that was reported live on state television. Only the USA and former Soviet Union have previously made soft landings on the moon, whereby the spacecraft and equipment remain intact and operable.
Further celebrations followed Sunday morning as its major cargo, a solar-powered lunar rover named Jade Rabbit after the goddess' pet, rolled down a ramp and set off on a three-month mission to hunt for natural resources and conduct geological surveys.
Privacy: The Swedish citizens will get all their phone calls and e-mail traffic wiretapped in real time not just by the Swedish NSA branch, but also by police, customs, the tax authority, and others. These plans were revealed today by the Ny Teknik magazine, sending shockwaves among civil rights activists. This follows a previous law change that gave the Swedish NSA branch, the FRA, realtime access to all Internet traffic that crossed the country borders – effectively wiretapping everybody warrantlessly all the time.
Circumventing the entire legislative process and every democratic shred of oversight, the Swedish Police are demanding voluntary agreements from telecom operators to give the Police and other Swedish authorities direct and real-time access to phone call data, mail traffic, and much more. This is not just the slippery slope into an Orwellian society that civil rights activists have warned about: this is a slippery precipice.
We’re now officially past the point where “national security” (and the the ever-present disgusting child porn/terrorism argument) is used to justify bulk warrantless wiretapping of everybody, all the time. We’ve arrived at the point where the Police justify the complete elimination of entire classes of civil liberties with nothing more than “because it can be done, and we want it”.
The authorities that would get direct real-time access to most communications aren’t just the Police, but also the Customs Office, the Security Police, and the Tax Authority (!!).
A key difference between a functioning democracy and a police state is, that in a functioning democracy, the Police don’t get everything they point at. While the border between the two is arguably a lot of gray area, and subject to a lot of polemic, it can no longer be reasonably stated that police powers are under checks and balances.
According to the Ny Teknik article, followed up by manyothers in Swedish oldmedia, it’s not just real-time data on phone calls and mail that the Police are demanding. A sample of other things included in the proposed mass surveillance package:
How telecom bills are paid – cash, credit, direct deposit. If credit card, which one, and if direct deposit, from which bank account.
The subscriber’s PUK code, enabling a police authority to activate the cellphone’s SIM card without the subscriber’s PIN code.
There are hints in the article that many other items may be covered by the realtime wiretapping, referring to a wiretapping standard called ITS27.
The only telecom operator to say a blank never, this is completely unthinkable to the Police demands is the Swedish Tele 2.
The fact that the Swedish regime isn’t immediately firing everybody in the Police demanding this wholesale abolition of civil rights is practically an endorsement of the plans – and one that goes hand in hand with the much-criticized Swedish FRA Law that legalized warrantless bulk wiretapping in the first place.
