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How can it be possible that a reverend like Pat Robertson can promote God and assassination in the same time?

Big Oil, Big Ketchup and “The Assassination of Hugo Chavez”

Greg Palast

TruthOut, 9 January 2013

Greg Palast reviews the extraordinary career of Venezuelan President and Robin Hood figure Hugo Chavez, how he has cheated kidnap and assassination and may yet cheat death by maintaining his accomplishments.

Venezuelan President Chavez once asked me why the US elite wanted to kill him. My dear Hugo: It's the oil. And it's the Koch Brothers – and it's the ketchup.

[As a purgative for the crappola fed to Americans about Chavez, my foundation, The Palast Investigative Fund, is offering the film, The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, as a free download here. Based on my several meetings with Chavez, his kidnappers and his would-be assassins, it was filmed for BBC Television. DVDs also available.]

Reverend Pat Robertson said,

Hugo Chavez thinks we're trying to assassinate him. I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.

It was 2005 and Robertson was channeling the frustration of George Bush's State Department. Despite Bush's providing intelligence, funds and even a note of congratulations to the crew who kidnapped Chavez (we'll get there), Hugo remained in office, re-elected and wildly popular.

But why the Bush regime's hate, hate, hate of the president of Venezuela?

Reverend Pat wasn't coy about the answer: It's the oil.

This is a dangerous enemy to our South controlling a huge pool of oil.

A really big pool of oil. Indeed, according to Guy Caruso, former chief of oil intelligence for the CIA, Venezuela holds a recoverable reserve of 1.36 trillion barrels, that is, a whole lot more than Saudi Arabia.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Pierre Cloutier: Grag Palast on Hugo Chavez — Justice in Venezuela, Ignorance and Arrogance in Washington”

Why Africa is turning to China

By Kwei Quartey

Asia Times, 22 December 2012

Ghana held its general elections on December 7 and 8, 2012, re-electing incumbent President John Dramani Mahama. However, Nana Akufo-Addo, flag-bearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party, is challenging Mahama's narrow win and intends to contest the result in court, a legal process that is sure to be prolonged. The verdict could potentially challenge Ghana's generally stable and peaceful political environment. What will not change are the country's close economic ties to China.

On my trip to Ghana in 2011, I observed Chinese foremen at the construction sites of the now completed George W Bush Highway. The massive Ministry of Defense building in Ghana's capital, Accra, was constructed with a US$50 million Chinese grant. The Bui Hydroelectric Dam is a collaborative project of the government of Ghana and SinoHydro, a Chinese construction company. In 2012, China invested in a new Ghanaian airline that serves domestic routes, and it is likely that the China Airports Construction Corporation (CACC) will be involved in building Accra's new international airport.

Ghana is not the only African country in which China operates. Indeed, China is the largest financier on the entire continent. Chinese corporations, financial institutions, and the government have invested billions of dollars in large new dams, for example.

A common charge is that Chinese companies prefer to bring in Chinese employees (and even prisoners) to work on African projects, rather than relying on a local labor force. But Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo maintains that in Zambia, at least, the ratio of African to Chinese workers exceeds 13:1, and that there is no evidence of Chinese prisoners working there.

As African countries like Ghana search for infrastructure improvements to accelerate their economic growth, China has sidelined the role of the West on the continent.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Schwartz Report: Why Africa is Turning to China”

What a Dronet (a more compressed spelling?) can leverage

Arg.  Got distracted by this.  Ok, let me peel back the next layer of the onion.  An open drone network can leverage:

a)  3D transportation uses the “big sky theory.”   Lots of space.  Very few obstacles.  Compare that to 2D transpo on the ground — lots of obstacles and limited routes.

b) Ubiquitous navigation.  GPS.  Easy point point.  Also, dirt cheap autopilot software.

c) Relaxed rules.  Uncontrolled flight is possible over most of the US (except for cities, which are going to miss out on this, like so many other post-industrial innovations).

d) Dirt cheap drones.  $400 for a high quality quad that can carry a kilo for 8-10 miles.  This is a big reason why costs are less than $0.25 every ten miles and/or hop.

e) Innovative open source hardware/software community.  It's so big that Chris Anderson left his editor's job at Wired to jump into the space full time.  Tack onto that arduino, makerspaces, etc.

f) Wireless comms.  Easy to connect and coordinate both via standard wireless networking and cell phone data networks.  This will also make it easy to lay on Internet/Web based services to coordinate the system.

g) Easy mental model for how it can work in a distributed fashion (the Internet/Web). However, that also means that lots of schmucks will try to game it by locking down important design elements (like the way 3D Systems is slowing down 3D printing right now — to the detriment of humanity).

See Also:

John Robb: DRONENET for Useful Services

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media looks like a free and easy way to jump start sluggish sales or generate qualified new leads. That's probably why so many companies adopt the Nike slogan and “Just Do It.”

But random acts of social media can be expensive, wasteful and are usually ineffective. The typical impact of a weekly tweet or Facebook post, no matter how well-phrased, will be zero. In fact, poorly planned efforts can be counterproductive and, in extreme cases, even dangerous.

Perhaps you saw these stories in the news:

Fashion designer Kenneth Cole used Twitter to make light of demonstrations and social unrest in Egypt by linking it to his spring line. He later apologized on his Facebook page.

McDonald's asked Twitter users to share their favorite memories of the burger chain. Instead it got horror stories of bad food and shoddy service.

After a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces posted a YouTube video of the attack that killed a Hamas leader, the Hamas military wing vowed to take vengeance on “leaders and soldiers wherever they are.”

Learn more.

 

Testimony In the congressional hearings into the pivotal role that the rating agencies played in the financial mess, was that the rating agencies were paid for triple-A ratings even when both the rating agencies and the sellers knew that the toxic CDOs weren't worth triple-A. TV news commentary during the hearings was that the rating agencies would likely avoid federal prosecution with the threat of downgrading US gov. ratings.

Can Open Source Ratings Break the Ratings Agency Oligopoly?

Friday, November 30, 2012

Yves here. One of the causes of the financial that should have been relatively easy to fix was the over-reliance on ratings agencies. They wield considerable power, suffer from poor incentives, in particular, that they can do terrible work yet are at no risk of being fired thanks to their oligopoly position, and are seldom exposed to liability (they have bizarrely been able to argue that their research is journalistic opinion, which gives them a First Amendment exemption). But they are not big enough moneybags to be influential donors, nor are they critical to the financial infrastructure.

Read full article.