This is one of the most amazing stories SR has ever published. This is what vampire capitalism has produced. Think about this: There are seven billion people on earth, 85 of them have so much wealth that it equals the collective wealth of three billion two hundred million co-inhabitants of the Earth. How can anyone think this is O.K.? How can a democracy operate in that reality, particularly after Citiz! ens' United.
Iran: For the record. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a report passed to member states that Iran “has ceased enriching uranium above five percent” fissile purity at the Natanz and Fordo facilities. The report also said that Iran was also converting its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium into uranium oxide, a diluted form.
Americans do not hear or care much about the fruits of our “humanitarian” intervention in Libya (except for those Republicans trying to make domestic political hay out of the debacle in Benghazi), but the situation in the Libyan hinterlands is deteriorating rapidly. Even if we prevented a massacre, which can not be proven, since the evidence of the looming massacres is speculative, violence and suffering are now escalating rapidly. Chaos is also spilling over into neighboring countries with unpredictable consequences. Is another unending “whack a mole” Jihadi hunt in the tribal periphery looming in the offing of America's perpetual war on terror?
No one can say, but the attached AP report by Paul Schemm places the Libyan deterioration in a regional perspenctive. I prepared the introductory map to help you orient yourself to the locations of the places and the patterns of the flows of fighters and weapons he describes. The map is a very superficial orientation, because these locations are far away places with highly evolved tribal cultures, about which Americans know almost nothing. Shemm tells us the so-called Jihadis are concentrated in the southwest and northeast of Libya. The remote areas of the southwest are safe havens where guerrilla fighters can move freely across porous borders. This is where they rest, regroup, and resupply themselves using money gained from smuggling and the weapons looted from Qaddaffy’s arsenals. These safe havens now serve as bases for forays into NW Libya, Algeria, Niger, Mali, and more distant places, like Nigeria — attacks will take the form of tips and strokes, not pushes, always retreating from superior forces. Note particularly the references to the increasing radicalization of Tuareg nomads. Borders mean nothing to Tuaregs — like the Pashtun in Afghanistan and Pakistan, they are an ancient tribal people who move freely and inconspicuously throughout the region. And like the Pashtun, they are a proud people with real grievances to motivate them … and they are good fighters.
Remarks by the President on Review of Signals Intelligence
(if he had told the truth)
Department of Injustice
Washington, D.C.
11:15 a.m. EST
Who Am I? Who Are We?
THE PRESIDENT: A small, secret surveillance committee of goons and thugs hiding behind the mask of patriotism was established in 1908 in Washington, D.C. The group was led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover, and during his reign it became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI agents spied upon and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those led by African-Americans—anti-war groups and the civil rights movement in order to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices, illegally opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps. Bureau leaders created blacklists. They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. They demanded loyalty oaths. By the time they were done, our progressive and radical movements, which had given us the middle class and opened up our political system, were dead. And while the FBI was targeting internal dissidents, our foreign intelligence operatives were overthrowing regimes, bankrolling some of the most vicious dictators on the planet and carrying out assassinations in numerous countries, such as Cuba and the Philippines and later Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I am now convinced that the simplest approach… to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Research shows that just giving people a few hundreds or thousands of dollars can lift them out of poverty more effectively than welfare. Furthermore, giving everyone a basic poverty-level annual income could shift the whole dynamics of economics towards greater quality of life and sustainability. It is high time for more of us to seriously consider this approach, which has had support from across the political spectrum, from Nixon to Martin Luther King, Jr.; from neoliberal economists to Green Parties…
Dear friends,
Imagine what would happen if poor people were just given a sizable chunk of money to do with as they pleased – or even if every citizen were granted a basic poverty-level income with no strings attached.
It turns out that such wild ideas are not as far-fetched as they sound – and could have some potent transformational impact.
I wrote Foreign Policy's Global Conversation Infographic on New Year's Day. The content used to create the visualization was based on the Global Data of Events, Language and Tone, commonly referred to as GDELT. The effort was suspended during the week ending January 17th via this terse announcement.
Click on Image to Enlarge
. . . . . .
I believe this means that whomever created the CAMEO coding was either not credited appropriately, or there may be an issue with using it in a derivative product. I ran into this late last year – I was going to republish the Global Terrorism Database packaged for use with Sentinel Visualizer, but this was not allowed. I was free to publish a set of scripts to accomplish this task, the issue was that the entities that fund that effort wanted a count of total users, so any derivative work had to be post processing run by the user, rather than repackaging.
I hope what we are seeing here is some sort of pause to clean house and/or make things right with regards to whatever coding material was incorrectly used. The volume and quality of content was extremely promising and I hope the suspension is just some misunderstanding that can be quickly corrected. I kept the archive of the 1979 – 2012 data so I can continue working on something that will handle the live feed when it returns.
If the Obama administration wanted to improve relations with Latin America the most obvious move would be to seek closer ties with Ecuador. Ecuador has been transformed into a nation with a stable political system, a head of state reelected by enormous margins in free elections, substantial economic progress, and a pragmatic development program. That program embraces policies that even the Washington Consensus praised that focus government expenditures on health, education, and infrastructure. The policies also champion an idea most identified with the conservative economist Hernando de Soto – making it far easier for entrepreneurs to start new businesses. President Correa is the leader who continues to surprise his friends and foes by taking steps that make economic sense even if they are identified with the “right” while keeping a relentless focus on the needs of the poor. That focus on the poor comes from Correa’s Catholic social justice beliefs that the Pope has recently been returning to centrality.
