The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Technology Changing How Students Learn, Teachers Say
MATT RICHTEL – The New York Times
Pedagogies such as that used in Waldorf education counteract this trend. We know what kids need to learn appropriately and in a life-affirming way. We just don't choose to do it.
Continue reading “Schwartz Report: Kids, “Education,” Technology, & Learning”
If you subscsribe now, you will also get my first topical report, entitled: ‘Water Abundance: How to Declare Your Water Sovereignty’.
No Democracy without Sortition : the cause of the causes of our powerlessness is that we let the political professionals draw up and modify the Constitution
First, here is the text (complete) of the 15 minutes synthesis that I had prepared for the TEDx conference (on March 22nd, 2012 in Paris) :
• pdf file : • PowerPoint ppt file : • Mp3 file
Syria-US: US can no longer support the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the “visible leader” of opposition forces. US Secretary of State Clinton and other U.S. officials reportedly are fed up with infighting among the SNC leaders and have become convinced that the group does not represent the interests of all ethnic and religious groups in Syria. Ms. Clinton said there is a need for an official opposition umbrella which rejects “efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution.
Comment: More than 18 months into a rebellion of sorts, this is an astonishing admission of poor judgment and faulty political intelligence on multiple levels. It seems to have taken a year and a half for the US government to appreciate that the Syrian expatriates have no influence over the fighting in Syria. No fighting groups respond to their direction. No fighting groups depend on their dispensation of American funds.
Spokesmen for various Syrian fighting groups have been denouncing the expatriate politicians and the SNC as venal and out of touch for 18 months, openly and sometimes bitterly. The SNC has experienced repeated desertions by its most capable leaders, who also denounced its feckless venality.
The fighting will not stop in Syria because the SNC gets cut off. Even were the Free Syrian Army, which operates in Syria as one of many fighting groups, to lose its funding and supplies, fighting would continue because the rebellion appears to have been hijacked by the jihadists. They do not rely on the West or the US for support, though they will purloin it if given the opportunity.
Libya: Update. On 1 November, about 100 Libyan fighters have circled and occupied the Libyan national assembly to protest the new cabinet lineup.
Comment: Judging from the large number of documents about security in Benghazi that have been leaked or found in Benghazi, the cabinet in Tripoli does not govern Libya beyond parts of Tripoli. The fragmentation of the state actually worsened with the killing of Qadhafi.
If the news and leaked reports may be trusted, Libya has become a political fiction, like Somalia. Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, is an al Qaida base, training location and arms depot for jihadists in Syria and Mali. The rest of Libya is a mélange of competing tribal territories. Libya seems to have devolved as a nation-state – gone backwards.
Under the Mask of the War on Drugs
LARS SCHALL – Asia Times (Hong Kong)
The corruption prohibition produces is so much more extensive than most people realize. An unholy alliance between governments and cartels and, like a cancer, is eating us alive from the inside. Here is a taste of reality that explains how so many feed at the narco-trough and why no one who is making this money, be they sheriff, legislator, or mule has any real interest in ending prohibition.
Lars Schall is a German financial journalist.
Oliver Villar is a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia, a country where he has lived for most of his life. He was born in Mendoza, Argentina. In 2008 he completed his PhD on the political economy of contemporary Colombia in the context of the cocaine drug trade at the UWS Latin American Research Group (LARG). Whilst completing his PhD, Villar's research interests in political economy, Latin America and the global drug trade followed teaching positions in politics at UWS and Macquarie University.
For the past decade his research has been devoted to the book (co-written with Drew Cottle) Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: US Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (Monthly Review Press, 2011). He has published broadly on the Inter-American cocaine drug trade, the US War on Drugs and Terror in Colombia, and US-Colombian relations. This abiding interest extends across economic thought, economic development and the development of social and political relationships between the First World and Third World (in particular between the United States and Latin America) and the impact of neoliberal economic globalization.
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“If you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel.” Milton Friedman
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Lars Schall: What has been your main motivation to spend 10 years of your life to the subject of the drug trade?
Continue reading “Spanish Dancer: State-Sponsored Drug Crime Type B”
The Drugs Don't Work: a Modern Medical Scandal
BEN GOLDACRE – The Guardian (U.K.)
This is an excellent and very insightful account of what has happened in Big Pharma's quest for profit above health. Although the physician author is based in the U.K., his comments apply to the U.S. as well. If it doesn't scare you, you're not paying attention. I hope all the physicians who are readers particularly take this to heart. Irving Kirsch, Associate Director of the Program in Placebo Studies, a lect! urer in medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor of psychology at Plymouth University in the United Kingdom, and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Hull, United Kingdom, and the University of Connecticut has published many papers showing that anti-depressants in general do little better, or even not as well as placebos. It is hard not to see the entire anti-depressant industry as anything other than a multi-billion scam.
This is an edited extract from Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, by Ben Goldacre (Faber & Faber, 2013
Continue reading “Spanish Dancer: State-Sponsored Drug Crime Type A”
