The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
US Troops are the Greatest Impediment to Peace in the Korean Peninsula
Posted: 13 Aug 2013 06:22 AM PDT
American Armies are the Greatest Impediment to Peace in the Korean Peninsula The Korean war never really ended, of course. It was just put on hold. The war itself lasted three years from 1950 to 1953, with both sides — the ROK in the south backed primarily by the US, and the DPRK in […]
This is how aggressive, life destructive, and single-mindedly focused on profit Fracking is. When it comes to people or money, as this report explains, the carbon industry is very clear on its priority — profit first.
A Texan Tragedy: Ample Oil, No Water
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG – The Guardian (U.K.)
Note that I get many, perhaps even most of these reports from non-U.S., or non-corporate internet sources. (The one exception, in this case, is 60 Minutes.) Ask yourself: Why isn't this a story and Donald Trump's latest pronouncements are?
BARNHART, TEXAS — Beverly McGuire saw the warning signs before the town well went dry: sand in the toilet bowl, the sputter of air in the tap, a pump working overtime to no effect. But it still did not prepare her for the night last month when she turned on the tap and discovered the tiny town where she had made her home for 35 years was out of water.
“The day that we ran out of water I turned on my faucet and nothing was there and at that moment I knew the whole of Barnhart was down the tubes,” she said, blinking back tears. “I went: ‘dear God help us. That was the first thought that came to mind.”
Across the south-west, residents of small communities like Barnhart are confronting the reality that something as basic as running water, as unthinking as turning on a tap, can no longer be taken for granted.
Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry's outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers. And climate change is making things worse.
Read full post.
Taking the Pulse of the Boston Marathon Bombings on Twitter
Social media networks are evolving a new nervous system for our planet. These real-time networks provide immediate feedback loops when media-rich societies experience a shock. My colleague Todd Mostak recently shared the tweet map below with me which depicts tweets referring to “marathon” (in red) shortly after the bombs went off during Boston’s marathon. The green dots represent all the other tweets posted at the time. Click on the map to enlarge. (It is always difficult to write about data visualizations of violent events because they don’t capture the human suffering, thus seemingly minimizing the tragic events).
Visualizing a social system at this scale gives a sense that we’re looking at a living, breathing organism, one that has just been wounded. This impression is even more stark in the dynamic visualization captured in the video below.
Terrorists' Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao
The Ramadan holiday is done and the threat to U.S. diplomats in most of the middle east is over. Or at least they can return to their embassies and consulates with enough confidence to think the Al Qaeda bombers are not going to strike right away and anyway they’ll be safe and secure behind their barricades.
Al Qaeda, though, is the winner, having made clear their psywar strategy works. They can strike fear among Americans, and others, merely by sending out messages for the U.S. intelligence machine to monitor and distribute with dire warnings.
Meanwhile, from disputed borders between India and Pakistan in Kashmir to the middle east, terrorists of one stripe or another, maybe Al Qaeda, maybe the Taliban, maybe lesser groups inspired by them, go on in a wave of killings to which there seems no end. A splurge of slaughter in Iraq over the final Ramadan weekend, normally a time for joy and celebration, showed the failure of the hundreds of billions invested there and the tens of thousands of lives lost. Now U.S. forces face frustration in Afghanistan — and President Obama warily avoids a serious commitment to still more mayhem in Syria.
In this cauldron of suffering, it’s gone largely unnoticed that the U.S. ever so slowly is on the verge of expanding a commitment to the Philippines from which enormous U.S. navy and air bases had to shut down in the early 1990′s after the Philippines refused to extend the bases agreement in a surge of anti-Americanism. The Philippines faces a local version of the type of militant forces that are plaguing the middle east and Pakistan. That’s on top of worries about China’s claims to the entire South China Sea, including islands and shoals that are clearly Philippine territory.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Terrorists' Psywar Strikes Fear From Middle East To Mindanao”
The WHO must release report on Iraqi birth defects now
The indefinite postponement of the World Health Organisation's report is alarming scientists and activists
Al Jazeera, 11 Aug 2013 13:28
Mozhgan Savabieasfahani
Dr Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, a native of Iran, is an environmental toxicologist based in Michigan. She is the author of over two dozen peer reviewed articles and the book, Pollution and Reproductive Damage (DVM 2009).
Large parts of the Middle East are now contaminated with war pollutants.
In Iraq, war debris continues to wear away and erode populated cities. Such debris includes the wreckage of tanks and armoured vehicles, trucks and abandoned military ammunitions, as well as the remains of bombs and bullets. Left unabated, the debris will act as dangerous toxic reservoirs; releasing harmful chemicals into the environment and poisoning people who live nearby.
Today, increasing numbers of birth defects are surfacing in many Iraqi cities, including Mosul, Najaf, Fallujah, Basra, Hawijah, Nineveh, and Baghdad. In some provinces, the rate of cancers is also increasing. Sterility, repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and severe birth defects – some never described in any medical books – are weighing heavily on Iraqi families.
Google Pays AdBlock Enough Said
Posted: 11 Aug 2013 04:59 PM PDT
Pulling from the German Web site Horizont comes an interesting insight into Google’s dealings with AdBlock: “Google Is Funding AdBlock Plus.” AdBlock is a plugin users can download to block ads on their Internet browsers, but it still allows ads through that it deems “acceptable.” What makes an ad acceptable? Apparently if you pay Eyeo, the company that created AdBlock, enough money it will allow your ads to pass through the plugin. In a not too surprising deal, Google pays up.
Google is not the only one that pays out of pocket. Amazon, Reddit, and Yandex are also on the acceptable list. So money oils the squeaky wheel, but what makes Google stand out is what might be a suspect transaction. Forgive the translation below from Google. Deutsch ist eine schwierige Sprache.
“However, as a glance at the forum said of AdBlock Plus to receive Google AdWords shows, there are a total of nine entries. Till user – probably AdBlock Plus boss Till Faida personally – put the post on 18 Online in June 2013, six anonymous users briefly discussed what Google AdWords are ever exactly brought no reasons why it would violate the Acceptable Ads Rules, and three days later, on 21 June 2013, wrote Till user “Added” in the forum thread – Google’s advertising has since no longer filtered by AdBlock Plus. The same applies for the AdSense advertising program in which third party sites advertising Google can embed in their web sites, and be compensated for it.”
Suspect? Yes. Good business practice? No. If you do not want targeted ads, should you switch to a different plugin? Not a bad idea.
Whitney Grace, August 12, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
(1) Anybody else think this sounds like Sovs' Patrice Lumumba University of another decade?;
(2) totally unsurprising; to use WWII terminology, development of an Iranian “fifth column” in Latin America, an organization that has the capability to fulfill roles similar to the “underground” and “auxiliary” in a doctrinal US-sponsored insurgency;
(3) might also be unsurprising to find Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Lebanese Hezbollah (LH), effectively an Iranian surrogate, doing deals with the Mexican drug cartels for use of the cartel's smuggling routes so as to develop support mechanisms for Iranian operators in the United States;
(4) article appeared on front page of Sunday's WaPo under title, “Mexican depicts iran's wooing of Hispanic youths.”
With lure of religious classes, Iran seeks to recruit Latin Americans
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post, 10 August 2013
The Mexican law student was surprised by how easy it was to get into Iran two years ago. By merely asking questions about Islam at a party, he managed to pique the interest of Iran’s top diplomat in Mexico. Months later, he had a plane ticket and a scholarship to a mysterious school in Iran as a guest of the Islamic Republic.
Next came the start of classes and a second surprise: There were dozens of others just like him.
“There were 25 or 30 of us in my class, all from Latin America,” recalled the student, who was just 19 when he arrived at the small institute that styled itself an Iranian madrassa for Hispanics. “I met Colombians, Venezuelans, multiple Argentines.” Many were new Muslim converts, he said, and all were subject to an immersion course, in perfect Spanish, in what he described as “anti-Americanism and Islam.”
Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Iranian Outreach to Latin American Youth”
