PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan—The Taliban's influence in northern Afghanistan has expanded in recent months from a few hotspots to much of the region, as insurgents respond to the U.S.-led coalition's surge in the south by seizing new ground in areas once considered secure.
Taliban militants stop traffic nightly at checkpoints on the road from Kabul to Uzbekistan, just outside Baghlan province's capital city of Pul-e-Khumri, frequently blowing up fuel convoys and seizing travelers who work with the government or the international community.
Deja Vu Back Centuries
In many areas here and the rest of the north, the Taliban have effectively supplanted the official authorities, running local administrations and courts, and conscripting recruits.
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The Taliban have consolidated their war gains by tapping into broad disillusionment with the incompetence and venality of Afghan government officials.
“People don't love the Taliban—but if they compare them to the government, they see the Taliban as the lesser evil,” said Baghlan Gov. Munshi Abdul Majid, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai.
Phi Beta Iota: Based on what we now know about Viet-Nam, we predict that the military-industrial complex will declare victory in November 2012, and inform the new President that the US military has been entirely “used up” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and therefore we need to increase the Pentagon budget to rebuy the military from scratch.
Phi Beta Iota: What we notice is that the federal government is spending trillions in an elective invasion of two other countries and in the maintenance of over 700 military installations outside our territory, many of them secret and some of them for purposes antithetical to our values and inconsistent with our Constitution–while Texas has to “make do” in confronting a very real war in which more people die in the border area than in Iraq or Afghanistan.
UPDATE of 19 Oct to resurface the CORE COMMON ISSUE and add THIRD PARTY book reviews (immediately below the line). The legislative proposal still needs work, e.g. ballot access not well covered, but this is the starting point. It was created by Jim Turner and Robert Steele based in large part on points made by Ralph Nader is his book Crashing the Party–Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender. We cannot understand why Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney, and Jackie Salit–and Mike Bloomberg–don't get serious about this ONE THING they can all agree on….
Click on either of the images to see a collection of documents on Democracy in America as it could be, should be, must be. The Republic has been destroyed by a combination of domestic enemies and a public slow to realize that it was being disenfranchized.
Click on the page below to read the single page summary of eight simple reforms, most conceived by Ralph Nader, as refined by Jim Turner (Nader #2 for many years) and Robert Steele.
Electoral Reform Act of 2009
Only recently have major financial figures such as John Bogle and Peter Peterson come forward with works that call into question the integrity, santiy, and viability of the Republic as it is now being looted by Wall Street and the two-party tyranny. Below are several titles worthy of study, with links to the summary reviews of those titles by Robert Steele. Below them are twice as many titles capturing the spirit of the Republic that has been in re-gestation for decades. The mood of Middle America is clear: we want our Republic back, and we want both government and commerce to be open, honest, and in the public service. We are going to get what we want by 2012, peacefully, on the strength of our numbers and our common collective intelligence.
Use the Reviews menu to rapidly survey over 1,400 non-fiction books all focused on the future of the Republic and the Earth in the context of restoring the faith of humanity in itself. Each review leads back to both the Amazon page, and to the original review on Amazon should you wish to vote on the review.
In a new article at ForeignPolicy.com, I [Steven Aftergood] take a critical look at the current policy landscape, including the newly enacted Reducing Over-classification Act and the pending Fundamental Classification Guidance Review. See “Telling Secrets,” October 15.
“Everybody who’s a real practioner, and I’m sure you’re not all naive in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it’s about 90 bureaucratic turf, 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned.”
Phi Beta Iota: Although we gave this book a very strong positive review, we were not aware the author had failed to comply with the pre-publication review process. As critical as we may be of CIA, we have always complied with our lifetime secrecy agreement with respect to publications about the core nature of intelligence and especially human intelligence. Each of the following was cleared by CIA, and cleared in record time.
On Sunday, 60 Minutes reported on a visit to San Diego, where a yearly “Stand Down” event for homeless veterans is designed to change lives in just three days.
A skeptical Scott Pelley found that while the event's clean, safe and empathetic environment can't fix the problems homeless veterans face, the event serves as a “ceasefire” to show vets that they aren't alone.
Phi Beta Iota: There are two threads here, the first being that attention is healing and nurturing, whether it is new-borne babies or hardened vets. The second is that this is a complete break from treating homeless vets or homeless anyone as “the other” that is not “noticed” as if they did not exist. San Diego has done a good thing with this annual event, it ought to take place all across America.
Agence France-Presse First Posted 07:22:00 10/19/2010
TOKYO—The world must act immediately to stop the rapid loss of animal and plant species that allow humans to exist, the United Nations warned on Monday at the start of a major summit on biodiversity.
EXTRACT:
At the start of the decade, UN members pledged under the Millennium Development Goals to achieve “a significant reduction” in the rate of wildlife loss by 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity.
Instead, habitat destruction has continued unabated, and some experts now warn that the planet faces its sixth mass extinction phase – the latest since dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.
EXTRACT:
The Earth's 6.8 billion humans are effectively living 50 percent beyond the planet's biocapacity in 2007, according to a new assessment by WWF that said by 2030 humans will effectively need the capacity of two Earths.
Terrorism is, roughly, the intentional random murder of defenseless non-combatants, with the intent of instilling fear of mortal danger amidst a civilian population as a strategy designed to advance political ends. This basic understanding (which admittedly allows for some variation and has some fuzzy edges) cannot be ‘deconstructed’, nor can it be obscured.
Phi Beta Iota: This suggests that state actions including democide, assassination by drone, and all other state-driven means of terrorizing non-combatants through group punishment, are terrorism.
