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SourceWatch Visit our new clearinghouse on corporate "rights."
This special initiative of the Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes SourceWatch, has links to the real story about the Supreme Court's revolutionary and unconstitutional decision asserting that federal laws cannot limit corporate "speech" and undermining the integrity of our democracy.
This special feature helps document who is behind the argument that we the people should not be able to regulate corporations, such as Citizens United, which was founded by Floyd Brown of the infamous Willie Horton smear campaign against then-presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. It features information on growing national efforts to change the law, including moving to amend the Constitution
End Cruel Farm Animal Confinement Nationwide http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/end-cruel-farm-animal-confinement-nationwide
We are writing to encourage you to please introduce legislation this session to ban battery cages for egg-laying hens, gestation crates for pregnant pigs, and veal crates for young calves.
* Before May 2003: 15 of 92 torture tapes erased or damaged
* Early 2003: Dunlavey’s paper trail “lost”
* Before August 2004: John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s torture memo emails deleted
* June 2005: most copies of Philip Zelikow’s dissent to the May 2005 CAT memo destroyed
* November 8-9, 2005: 92 torture tapes destroyed
* July 2007 (probably): 10 documents from OLC SCIF disappear
* December 19, 2007: Fire breaks out in Cheney’s office ( The 'missing' emails come to mind )
Afghan Prince says U.S. and Coalition Forces making big mistake http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/03/15/afghan-prince-says-u-s-and-coalition-forces-making-big-mistake
We have to change our philosophy. We have to make the question I’ve asked of my friends at NATO — the Americans, the Canadians, and the Europeans — “What is your plan for Afghanistan?” I still have not — I don’t have — I haven’t had somebody sit down and tell me that this is the plan for Afghanistan, and this is what we want to do.
Israel Crackdown Puts Liberal Jews on the Spot http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/israel_crackdown_puts_liberal_jews_on_the_spot_20100315
The Israeli government, its brutal war crimes in Gaza exposed in detail in the U.N. report by Justice Richard Goldstone, has implemented a series of draconian measures to silence and discredit dissidents, leading intellectuals and human rights organizations inside and outside Israel that are accused—often falsely—of assisting Goldstone’s U.N. investigators. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to shut down Israel’s premier human rights organizations, including B’Tselem, the New Israel Fund (NIF) and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. It is busy expelling or excluding peace activists and foreign nationals from the Palestinian territories. The campaign, if left unchecked, will be as catastrophic for Palestinians as it will be for Israel.
Recipe for Kindness http://www.audubonmagazine.org/web/naturalhigh
. Psychologist Richard Ryan and his colleagues at the University of Rochester have found that paying attention to the natural world makes people nicer.The surveys revealed that the more attention participants paid to natural elements, the more socially connected they felt. Conversely, the more they zeroed in on manmade elements, the more selfish their goals became.
The Hottest Hoax in the World http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-hottest-hoax-in-the-world
It was presented as fact. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by India’s very own RK Pachauri, even announced a consensus on it. The world was heating up and humans were to blame. A pack of lies, it turns out.
Check out some of these websites for the latest exciting developments in sustainability and maybe get some ideas on how you can improve your own ecological footprint and lift your spirit.
Blasphemous Quotations http://garycruse.blogspot.com/
On Jan. 1, a new law in Ireland made blasphemy an offense punishable by a fine of up to $35,000. That ludicrous political maneuver was promptly answered by Irish advocacy group Atheist Ireland, which published a list of 25 blasphemous quotes from Frank Zappa, George Carlin and other godless jerks.
We decided to toss in 10 more quotations and lyrics from South Park, Arthur C. Clarke and others — including that dick Gandhi — to stand up for free speech (on the Emerald Isle and elsewhere). But we need your help to rub the blasphemy in even deeper.
Scan our list of barbs that might make Bible-thumpers break the First Commandment, then drop your own in the comments section below. Jehovah, Jehovah!
Populism helps explain not only the success of the revolution but also the continued survival of the Islamic Republic. The Republic’s constitution—with 175 clauses—transformed these general aspirations into specific inscribed promises. It pledged to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, slums and unemployment. It also vowed to provide the population with free education, accessible medical care, decent housing, pensions, disability pay and unemployment insurance. “The government,” the constitution declared, “has a legal obligation to provide the aforementioned services to every individual in the country.” In short, the Islamic Republic promised to create a full-fledged welfare state—in its proper European, rather than derogatory American, sense.
In the three decades since the revolution, the Islamic Republic—despite its poor image abroad—has taken significant steps toward fulfilling these promises. It has done so by giving priority to social rather than military expenditures, and thus dramatically expanding the Ministries of Education, Health, Agriculture, Labor, Housing, Welfare and Social Security. The military consumed as much as 18 percent of the gross domestic product in the last years of the shah. Now it takes up as little as 4 percent. The Ministry of Industries has also grown in most part because in 1979–1980 the state took over numerous large factories whose owners had absconded abroad. The alternative would have been to close them down and create mass unemployment. Since most of these factories had functioned only because of subsidies from the old regime, the new regime had no choice but to continue subsidizing them.
By GARETH PORTER U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by theTimes of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a "neutron initiator" for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official. Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told me that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however. The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted "an Asian intelligence source" - a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials - as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007. The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel's threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.
Baluchistan is home to an insurgent movement that is not aligned with either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and that has fought for national independence from Pakistan for more than 60 years. In this exclusive interview conducted on December 27, noted Pakistani Baluch journalist, Ahmar Mustikhan, founder and director of the American Friends of Baluchistan, spoke with me about the current regional conflict and about Baluchistan’s appeal to the West for military and diplomatic support for its struggle.
We were incorporated in Pakistan against our will on March 27, 1948, and we have lived under some form of military occupation ever since.
In the 19th century, whenever Afghanistan came under threat, it reached out to the Baluch people. There a number of inter-marriages between Pashtuns, the dominant nationality in Afghanistan, and the Baluch. In my own family there have been a number of such nuptial knots with Pashtuns, including those tied with Pashtuns from Afghanistan.
“I actually would be very interested to hear what the President of the United States has to say about this nonviolent, democratic demonstration of ordinary people from forty-two countries all over the world,” says Waters. “They feel solidarity with their brothers and sisters, other human beings who are living in conditions that none of us would stand for, for a single second, in any of our countries.”
ICRC was not allowed to reach the victims. No place in Gaza was safe. Ambulances, ICRC, we could not move without a green light from the Israeli authorities. And even when we were given the green light, we were told, “You have to be careful. Things might happen. Explosions can happen.” What does it mean? What guarantee I am getting from a military operation, from operators of military activities without proper guarantees?
And most often also, people were asking for evacuation at the same time in large numbers. Hundreds of people were having the same scenario. It’s not an incursion into Beit Hanoun or Jabalia or Shouka in Gaza. It’s an incursion—it’s a military operation all over Gaza. How can any humanitarian organization respond to such large-scale operation while being limited, while being denied access? Most of the time these people wanted to leave.
Like in this neighborhood, if you go around, you will see that all the houses—there is no one single exception—sustained injuries, sustained a smoke, heavy smoke, or explosions or fire into their buildings. We could not bring fire brigades. We were not allowed to bring the fire brigades. We were not allowed to move with ambulances of the PRC’s to rescue people. And families, they were calling, “Evacuate us to a safer place.” But where to take them? Even if ICRC managed to reach to these people calling, to take them where? To which place? There was no place called safe in Gaza to move these people to.
Thousands of Iranian political supporters jammed the streets of the capital and other cities Wednesday in response to anti-government rallies during Sunday's observances of the holy day of Ashura.
As crowds headed toward Revolution Square, they cried "Death to America," "Death to Israel," and "Death to Moussavi."
Protest organizers distributed a news release after the march that condemned the Ashura demonstrations. They accused those who participated of acting against Ashura, the holy Quran, Islamic values and the Islamic Republic, according to ILNA (Iranian Labour News Agency).
In Jerusalem on Wednesday, international representatives of jurists, parliamentarians, human rights activists and Iranian dissidents held a news conference to reveal their petition for additional sanctions against Iran.
They cited the country's "harsh crackdown on opposition demonstrators" as well as its defiance over its nuclear program.
Leading the coalition of about 60 people was Irwin Cotler, a former Justice Minister of Canada, now a Liberal Party member of the Canadian Parliament. He accused the Iranian government of "gross violations of international law."
"What we are witnessing in Ahmadinejad's Iran is a toxic convergence of four distinct yet interrelated dangers: the danger of a nuclear Iran, the danger of state-sanctioned incitement to genocide, the danger of state sponsorship of international terrorism and the danger of a massive assault on human rights," Cotler * said.
Irwin Cotler : He is a past president of the Canadian Jewish Congress. In recent decades the CJC launched campaigns to pressure the Soviet Union to allow Jewish emigration, to pressure the Canadian government to prosecute Nazi war criminals who had settled in Canada, and to enact and use hate crimes legislation against anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers such as Ernst Zündel. The CJC also works to promote tolerance and understanding between religious and ethnic groups, promotes anti-racist work and other campaigns.
( In Jerusalem, yet. Scene of more Palestinian repression of late.But hey. Does he work on behalf of the Palestinians in their holocaust ? "Gross violations of international law". Like Gaza ? BTW Many Palestinians would have been called Samaritans once upon a time : maybe why they are Semites ? Not like the Europeans. )
China has warned Britain that it must stop its fierce condemnation of the execution of Shaikh for drug smuggling, or risk harming diplomatic ties between the two countries.
The official statement from the Chinese embassy said the "strong resentment" felt by the Chinese public to drug traffickers was in part based on "the bitter memory of history".
Jonathan Fenby, the author of The Penguin History of Modern China, said it was a reference to the two Opium Wars fought between China and Great Britain and its allies in the middle of the 19th century and the wider opium trade.
"It is one of those historical events that is still brought up," he said.
"How much your average Chinese person would think about it I'm not sure but it would be taught in Chinese schools for instance."
The trade in opium, often grown in India, boomed in China despite efforts to ban it with large amounts of the drugs being shipped into the country by British merchants.
Attempts by the Chinese government to disrupt the trade were met with force and Britain twice went to war to protect its stranglehold on the market and expand its reach into a country which had been closed off to western influence.
British merchants forced the Chinese to grant them access to Chinese ports and won the right for their citizens to be exempt from Chinese law.
We take a look at some of the more unusual businesses and interest groups lobbying Congress on climate change issues. A new Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal records shows that the 140 companies that joined the fray for the first time late this year include venture capitalists, the natural gas lobby, and America’s most iconic soup maker, Campbell Soup
This argument which has been buttressed now by Canadian scientists is that kids who grow up in a cleaner atmosphere have trouble dealing with medical issues when they get older. ( Would that be the super polluted air in 'super insulated' homes ? )
Scientists have found that the protein within a dirt pile actually lowers the risk of people getting a heart attack once they get older.
A technical problem occurred in our region, suddenly cutting the Internet and power. The combination and rapid sequence of events caused hard drive and caching failures. Bang! My two RAID-chained hard drives couldn't initialize Ubuntu's GRUB anymore.
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Dr. John reinstalls - and updates - Ubuntu after a number of simultaneous problems go makes things go haywire. Colourful illustrated commentary is his regular style.
I don't hear anymore about the silently forward creeping, frightening NATO 'expansion' towards the Ukraine, Georgia and even Pakistan. In fact everywhere pipelines are (projected) to Western-Europe and America: imperialism at gunpoint sold as 'reconstruction-work'? The pipeline as a 21st century Trojan Horse, like ancient rebels once conquered Naples (Italy), the start of a new myth?
Obama Weakened Nuclear Safety Bill After Consulting With Firm http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/03/obama-weakened-nuclear-sa_n_84651.html
When residents in Illinois voiced outrage two years ago upon learning that the Exelon Corporation had not disclosed radioactive leaks at one of its nuclear plants, the state's freshman senator, Barack Obama, took up their cause.
Mr. Obama scolded Exelon and federal regulators for inaction and introduced a bill to require all plant owners to notify state and local authorities immediately of even small leaks. He has boasted of it on the campaign trail, telling a crowd in Iowa in December that it was "the only nuclear legislation that I've passed."
"I just did that last year," he said, to murmurs of approval.
A close look at the path his legislation took tells a very different story. While he initially fought to advance his bill, even holding up a presidential nomination to try to force a hearing on it, Mr. Obama eventually rewrote it to reflect changes sought by Senate Republicans, Exelon and nuclear regulators. The new bill removed language mandating prompt reporting and simply offered guidance to regulators, whom it charged with addressing the issue of unreported leaks. Read the whole story: New York Times
Another Israeli spy scandal is making news. Of course, at this point, we don't know much only that like other recent spy scandals, it is an ugly episode that will reverberate negatively on the "Israel, right or wrong" crowd. ITALICIZED MATERIAL IS NEW. The Israel-first crowd is screaming that this spy case doesn't involve the government of Israel. Not true. The US government charges that the spy took over $200,000 from Israel Aircraft -- an Israeli government entity -- in exchange for top secret information. Obviously, the case involves the government of Israel. This is not to say the accused spy is guilty. A trial will determine that. However, the State of Israel is deeply implicated in the charges. It is also worth noting how quickly the Israel firsters defend accused spies. Why? It is as if Arab-Americans immediately rushed to defend those charged with terrorism based on ethnic solidarity? Can you imagine the brouhaha if Arab Americans rushed to knee-jerk defense of the guy charged with those thwarted New York terror attacks scheduled for this September 11? They don't do that. The Israel-first do, over and over again. Any Israeli, any Jew, is always, by definition, unjustly accused. It is exactly the opposite with Arabs and Arab Americans. Fortunately, the Israel firsters constitute exactly .000003% of the American Jewish community (slighly higher here at the Cafe).
This is from the Wall Street Journal. It looks huge.
"A top U.S. space researcher was arrested in a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting Monday and charged with attempting to spy for Israel.
"Stewart Nozette, 52 years old, of Chevy Chase, Md., is a former government physicist who worked for agencies ranging from the Defense Department to the White House.
I know people who are unwilling to express an opinion on Arab-Israeli issues because the political atmosphere is so charged with animosity. The decades-long conflict has the nature of ancient tribal hatred and vendetta. And it seems that nothing will ever solve the problem except a willingness by all parties to let go of this tribal hatred for a greater good.
But there’s also the peculiar nature of the debate as it manifests in the United States. One might more accurately say “lack of debate,” because in mainstream American politics there is a general taboo against criticizing the government of Israel. It’s not my intention to analyze the immensely complex and entangled history around this issue. I only want to make one important point about nations and their governments. To consider any country as simply a nation among nations, with the same powers, rights and responsibilities as any other nation, is a sign of respect. When Israel was founded, as much as that event was marked by conflict and injustice, the true intent was to create a new nation that would be equal to other nations in the sense that I have just stated, a country that a long-suffering and persecuted people could call their own.
It seems more than evident to me that there is always a difference between the people of a given country—the country per se—and whatever government that country may have at a given time. I am opposed, for instance, to the repressive and inhumane policies of the current Iranian government, but I do not hate Iranians as people. Even more to the point, I have strongly opposed the policies of my own government, yet I myself am an American and do not hate Americans.
Equating opposition to a government’s policies with hating the country itself, is a common rhetorical trick. It is nothing more than a way of silencing dissent without having to argue effectively with it. In fact, it exemplifies what I would call totalitarian thinking, since it identifies the people of a country with the state. In the case of Israel, this rhetorical trick has the added potency of race and religion. If you publicly criticize the government of Israel in the U.S., I can guarantee that you will be accused of anti-Semitism. Keeping in mind the long and shameful history of Jewish persecution, culminating in the horrific genocide in Europe, this is a very serious accusation indeed. Although “anti-Semitism” is the common term, I will use the more explicit phrase “Jew hatred” here to avoid confusion, since the Arabs are a Semitic people as well. Jew hatred has not gone away. It exists on the extreme right and extreme left. Because it has finally become generally unacceptable in society, it is usually disguised. We find it frequently on the “conspiratorial” fringes, by which I mean those groups that interpret world power relations in terms of certain groups of people that secretly control institutions. Recently someone told me that the Jews controlled most of the American media, and he named the heads of some of the networks and movie studios, as if this Jewish element somehow explained everything. Countering this argument with the names of numerous Gentiles wielding enormous power is only partially effective as an answer. The point is that ethnicity and religion are nothing more than lightning rods for scapegoating behavior. To believe in their significance is to claim an essentialist meaning for these categories, the same way a white supremacist believes that Africans are “inferior.”
Of course there is Jew hatred among Arabs and Muslims as well. And there is hatred of Arabs and Muslims among Jews, Christians, Europeans and Americans. The latter has been greatly encouraged recently within mainstream discourse in America, without the contradiction being widely noted.
If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers ~~Albert Camus
There is no subject more restricted nor more controlled in the United States than a critical discussion of Israel. Balanced argument is ignored while each word is parsed -- and condemned. It's strange that we are free to rant and rave and point out the war crimes of our own administration -- of all other administrations throughout the world -- but not those of Israel. The few who dare to question the damage Israel has wrought throughout the Middle East for decades are immediately labeled "anti-Semitic," and are in danger of losing their friends, jobs, their reputations and, if they persist, their country -- for America has zero tolerance for those who recognize Israel's brutality.
Why is this? Are not crimes against humanity just that, regardless of who is committing them? For example, when one-and-a-half million human beings are imprisoned like caged animals, with no food, electricity, medical care, clean water, and then are exterminated like so many insects -- cut to pieces, burned to a crisp with illegal weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions -- is that not a crime against humanity? Are the men, women and children trapped behind the walls of Gaza with nowhere to run -- nowhere to hide -- not human?
Kill Them All
If you've been listening to the Israeli leadership for the past 60 years, the last 10 years -- the last year -- you know very well that Palestinians are many things, but not human. In 1982, former Likud leader and prime minister Menahim Begin said Palestinians "are beasts walking on two legs." The next year, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces Raphael Eitan gloated, "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." And, in 1988, Yitzhak Shamir, a Likudnik elected Prime Minister twice, told the settlers taking over the Palestinian land, "The Palestinians will be crushed like grasshoppers...heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
But it was our own Evangelical, oxy-moronic (sic) Judeo-Christian (sic) cloven-hoofed Pat Robertson, who chats often with God who gave us the real lowdown on Israel's "moral" savagery. Robertson explained God's rationale to his 700 Club members in May 1985...
"The wars of extermination have given a lot of people trouble unless they know what was going on. The people in the land of Palestine were very wicked. They were given over to idolatry; they sacrificed their children; they had all kinds of abominable sex practices; they were having sex, apparently, with animals; they were having sex men with men, and women with women; they were committing adultery, fornication; they were worshipping idols, offering their children up; and they were forsaking God.
"God told the Israelites to kill them all -- men, women and children, to destroy them. And that seems to be a terrible thing to do. Is it? Or isn't it? Well, let us assume there were 2,000 of them, or 10,000 of them living in the land, or whatever number there was of them. I don't have the exact number. Pick a number. God said, 'Kill them all.' . . . the abomination was there like a contagion. God saw that there was no cure for it. It wasn't going to change; their hearts weren't going to change; and all they would do is cause trouble for the Israelites, and pull the Israelites away from God, and prevent the truth of God from reaching the Earth. So, God, in love, took away a small number that he might not have to take away a large number."
Beasts. Insects. Victims of a relentless, methodical genocide that grinds away, day after day, year after year, with no analysis, no reflection, no questions -- subsidized with US equipment, US political support, US taxpayers' money.
How easily we have not only excused, but given our blessing to Israel's crimes -- handed over our brothers -- from the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty using US-financed French aircraft leaving 34 dead and 174 injured American sailors, to massacres using US-furnished weapons in Jenin, Rafah, Sabara, Shatila, Lebanon, and repeatedly in Gaza.
How silently we stood on March 16, 2003 when an Israeli soldier in a US Caterpillar bulldozer crushed to death 23-year-old Rachel Corrie -- shot and seriously wounded 26-year-old Brian Avery on April 5, 2003 -- and, on April 11, 2003, shot and killed 21-year-old Tom Hurndall while he was attempting to save three terrified Palestine children who were being shot at as they played.
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As I watched those caught up in the shockingly racist excitement of that rally, I could not help but wonder what these people -- what US politicians -- would do if the children being blown to bits, the homes bombed and bulldozed, the families mutilated, the livelihoods destroyed --were theirs. And, I also am forced to wonder -- is the inability to hold back tears at the sight of so much inhumane lust for blood anti-Semitic -- even anti-American?
We don't need them. They'll never see things our way, no matter what. Let them go.
It's a new Israeli approach which borrows from the very worst of our aging instincts. It says: We're moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that's all you need to know. No modifications necessary. Stay the course. Concede nothing. Ease no siege. Give no ground. Ever.
It is a radical redefinition of Postmodern Zionism, this time from the right. Over the past weeks, it's been test-run in our relations with Turkey, with the Goldstone Commission, with Mahmoud Abbas - and with consistent results.
Now it's about to be tried on North American Jewry, some 6 million strong, a community at a critical crossroads, one that will have lasting and - if mishandled - dangerous consequences for Israel.
The opening shot was fired this month by the former chairman of the Governing Board of the World Jewish Congress, Isi Liebler, who declared it "our obligation to confront the enemy within - renegade Jews - including Israelis who stand at the vanguard of global efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state."
"Such odious Jews can be traced back to apostates during the Middle Ages who fabricated blood libels and vile distortions of Jewish religious practice for Christian anti-Semites to incite hatred which culminated in massacres," Liebler wrote in the Jerusalem Post. "It was in response to these renegades that the herem [excommunication] was introduced."
Citing the example of Jewish communists who applauded Stalinist executions of fellow Jews on trumped-up charges, Liebler added, "Like their contemporary counterparts, some of them attempted to depict themselves as devoted Jews championing 'world peace.'"
Among these counterparts, it develops, is J Street, the new dovish lobbying organization which describes itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace. Writing ahead of J Street's first annual national conference, which begins on Sunday in Washington, Liebler argued that although J Street and other U.S. Jewish groups critical of Israel may describe themselves as Zionist, "their prime objective is to pressure the U.S. government to use 'tough love' against Israel - a euphemism for demanding that the Jewish state make further unilateral concessions to neighbors pledged to its annihilation."
...........what of J Street and the spectrum of Jewish leftists and peace advocates? The world unity conference would deal with them as well. According to Liebler, "in addition to encouraging millions of Jews in the Diaspora who remain committed to Israel to become more actively engaged in our struggle, such a gathering would also provide an opportunity to exorcise the renegades from our midst."
THE farmers of Beit Ula spent two years preparing their new groves of fruit, nut and olive trees, clearing rocks, building stone terraces and digging deep cisterns to catch the scarce rain.
The Israeli army destroyed it all in less than a day.
"We heard they were here at 6.30 in the morning, when it was still dark," said Sami al-Adam, one of eight farmers whose terraces were bulldozed on January 15.
"There must have been dozens of soldiers with jeep and bulldozers, and they brought a lot of Filipino workers, or maybe they were Thai, who pulled up the trees and cut them and buried them so we wouldn't be able to plant them again."
When the soldiers and police left the site, in the low hills on the West Bank's border with Israel, 6.4 hectares of trees and terraces had been uprooted and bulldozed. The concrete cisterns were broken open and choked with rubble. Two years' work and an investment of more than 100,000 euros ($160,000) had gone to waste.
The Israeli military department that controls the occupied West Bank, confusingly called "the Civil Administration", said it demolished the terraces because they were built illegally on state land belonging to Israel.
This came as a surprise to the West Bank farmers, who brandish documents with Palestinian, Israeli and even Turkish stamps that, they say, prove their title to the land. It came as an even bigger surprise to the European Union, which provided 64,000 euros to the project as part of a program to improve "food security" for Palestinians.
I have learned over the past decade if I want to know what's really going on in the United States, I have to cruise through the foreign media to see what's creating a furor or causing a stink. So, while searching for the status of Spain's on-again, off-again criminal proceedings against six Bush Administration war criminals, this headline in Der Spiegel caught my eye -- "Frankenfood Ban is Neither Populism nor Panic-Mongering."
A closer look at the article revealed it wasn't a Norm Coleman ploy to get folks in Minnesota to quit eating burgers and fries, nor a menu for the genetically obscene monster in Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein," but an announcement by Germany's Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner that Germany is banning the cultivation of MON 810, a genetically modified (GM) corn produced by US
biotech giant Monsanto.
It appears that MON 810 is also believed to be the "Frankenstein" of GM crops by at least five other European countries -- France, Austria, Hungary, Greece and Luxembourg -- all of whom have banned its use. MON 810 was approved by the European Union in 1998, and was the only GM crop approved for cultivation in Germany. Aigner said she had legitimate reasons to believe that the genetically modified Monsanto seed "presents a danger to the environment." The plant produces a toxin that not only destroys the larvae of the corn borer moth, but other, beneficial, insects as well.............................................................
But the feeder GM corn is just one tiny blip on the Frankenfood radar. And, it's not just Europeans who should worry. As Jim Hightower, former two-time Texas agriculture commissioner warned way back in June 2004...
"For some time, the likes of Monsanto have had their white-smocked engineers tinkering merrily and dangerously with the very DNA of food, genetically modifying the natural composition of things like potatoes so they contain a pesticide in every one of their cells, or altering rice so it contains a diarrhea drug in every bite. This is no mere lab experiment, for unbeknownst to the vast majority of Americans, Monsanto and a handful of other global biotech giants have quietly spread the seeds of these genetically altered Frankenfoods to so many farms over the past decade that about a third of the foods on U.S. supermarket shelves now contain organisms with tampered DNA -- everything from baby food and milk to products made with soybean and corn. Thanks to well-placed campaign donations and powerhouse lobbying, this infiltration of our food supply has been done with practically no consumer awareness, since both Bill Clinton's and George W's administrations have let these foodstuffs be sold in America without so much as a label on them to tell us that we're buying something that our families might prefer to avoid."
Kinda ruins the appetite, doesn't it? Not just the fact that Monsanto has infiltrated the bulk of our food chain, but that it clearly believes it has the right to do so with or without our knowledge. It has fought oversight, regulation, labeling and scientific research for years. The arrogance with which multinational biotech corporations such as Monsanto are disrupting and modifying life's natural genetic order -- from seeds to food to animals to humans to the environment -- is creepy. The Almighty must surely be watching in slack-jawed amazement....................This goes way beyond garnering profits for agriculture conglomerates such as Monsanto. It is about disrupting the natural order of life -- whether plant or animal. And, for those orchestrating this havoc, it is about control. As Henry Kissinger once said matter-of-factly, "If you control the oil you control the country; if you control food, you control the population." Kissinger has long been obsessed with two things -- depopulating the world and establishing a New World Order..........Engdahl says that, since 2007, Monsanto and the US Government together hold the patent for a commercial seed called "Terminator," designed to commit suicide after just one harvest, and farmers will be forced to return to Monsanto or other seed giants to purchase new seeds each year for crops needed to feed their populations. He said if they're allowed to continue their reckless pursuit of power, in a decade or so, the small farmer will be but a memory and the majority of the world's food producers would be little more than feudal serfs in bondage to three or four giant seed corporations. "Those who say 'it can't happen here' should look more closely at current global events," he wrote. "The mere existence of that concentration of power in three or four private US-based agribusiness giants is grounds for legally banning all GMO crops even were their harvent gains real, which they manifestly are not."
What better way to control the food than to ban seed saving -- what better weapon is there to use against starving populations than food? The answer is laid out in detail in F. William Engdahl's November 2007 critical book about genetic manipulation, "Seeds of Destruction." Engdahl is no conspiracy theorist. He is a leading researcher as well as an economist and an associate and regular contributor for the Centre for Research on Globalization.
* Ian Traynor in Brussels
* The Guardian, Tuesday 22 January 2008
The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.
Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".
The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to Nato's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April.
"The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible," the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. "The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."
By asking tough questions, a whole lot can be learned that as an independent can be published freely without fear of employer retribution.
It's why no bureaucracy likes independent journalism, especially radical muckrakers digging out the most sensitive material it wants suppressed. The fault Stone found with most newspapers wasn't the absence of dissent. It was the absence of real news, the timidity of journalists to write it, and the power owners held over them.
"Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling." Most newspaper owners are businessmen, not journalists. "The news is something which fills spaces left over by advertisers."
Most publishers aren't just hostile to dissent, they suspect any opinions likely to antagonize readers, consumers, and mainly advertisers. As a result, most newspapers "stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news, prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons." Even the best papers are timid. They don't question the Cold War, arms race, or stand up for civil liberties and the rule of law. Only a few "maverick" dailies are around making it "easy for a one-man four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course opinion they would rarely express."
Journalism was a "crusade" for Stone. What Jefferson symbolized for him was being "rediscovered in a socialist society as a necessity for good government." During the height of the McCarthy era, he felt like a pariah but believed he stood for and was preserving the best of America's traditions. It inspired what he did to the end.
Depleted Uranium Weapons: Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan Are No Joke http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=LIN20091020&articleId=15744
Dave Lindorff The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban, populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.
Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material from nuclear power plants, DU as it is known, is what is removed from the power plants’ spent fuel rods and is essentially composed of the uranium isotope U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission, not found in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements. Once simply a nuisance for the industry, that still has no permanent way to dispose of the dangerous stuff, it turns out to be an ideal metal for a number of weapons uses, and has been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times heavier than lead, and much harder than steel, and with the added property of burning at a super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an ideal penetrator for warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense concrete bunkers made of reinforced concrete and steel. Once through the defenses, it burns at a temperature that incinerates anyone inside (which is why we see the carbonized bodies of bodies in the wreckage of Iraqi tanks hit by US fire). Accordingly it has found its way into 30 mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the A-10 Warthog ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for Abrams tanks and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later GBU-37 bunker buster bombs, each of which can have 1-2 tons of the stuff in its warhead. DU is also used as ballast in cruise missiles, and this burns up when a missile detonates its conventional explosive. Some cruise missiles are also designed to hit hardened targets and reportedly feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-ground missile, which carries a one-ton penetrating warhead. In addition, depleted uranium is used in large quantities in the armor of tanks and other equipment. This material becomes a toxic source of CU pollution when these vehicles are attacked and burned.
While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific evidence, that there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops in Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers, etc.—and to wear masks if they do have to approach. Many torched vehicles have been brought back to the US, where they have been buried in special sites reserved for dangerously contaminated nuclear materials. (Thousands of tons of DU-contaminated sand from Kuwait, polluted with DU during the US destruction of Iraq’s tank forces in the 1991 war, were removed and shipped to a waste site in Idaho last year with little fanfare.) Suspiciously, international health officials have been prevented or obstructed from doing medical studies of DU sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. But an excellent series of articles several years ago by the Christian Science Monitor described how reporters from that newspaper had visited such sites in Iraq with Geiger-counters and had found them to be extremely “hot” with radioactivity.
The big danger with DU is not as a pure metal, but after it has exploded and burned, when the particles of uranium oxide, which are just as radioactive as the pure isotopes, can be inhaled or ingested. Even the smallest particle of uranium in the body is both deadly poisonous as a chemical, and over time can cause cancer—particularly in the lungs, but also the kidneys, testes and ovaries.
There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of deformed babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons were in wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US Marines. The British TV station SKY UK, in a report last month that has received no mention in any mainstream American news organization, found a marked increase in birth defects at local hospitals. Birth defects have also been high for years in the Basra area in the south of Iraq, where DU was used not just during America’s 2003 “shock and awe” attack on Iraq, but also in the 1991 Gulf War.
America’s tap water is contaminated with toxic heavy metals, synthetic organic chemicals, chlorination by-products, biological parasites and virtually thousands of harmful contaminants.
“E.P.A. reports show that U.S. water supplies contain over 2300 cancer causing chemicals…” – Ralph Nader Research Group
In America’s highly industrialized society we use over 80,000 toxic chemicals every day, and over 1000 new ones are being developed every year. We are learning the hard way that all of the chemicals we use, will ultimately show up in the water we drink.
In contrast to popular belief, our water treatment facilities were not designed to take out synthetic organic chemicals and toxic heavy metals like lead. Municipal water treatment today is essentially the same as it was over 100 years ago, the water is flown through sand beds to remove visible particles and then bleach (chlorine) is added to kill most of the bacteria! We do not filter out the synthetic chemicals!
75 years ago, before all of these chemicals were present in our environment, 1 out of 50 Americans would get cancer in their lives… now, 1 in 3 Americans… 1 in 2 males, will become cancer victims! 1 in 8 women get breast cancer, childhood cancers have increased 300% in just the last 20 years… and much of this can be linked to the accumulation of man made chemicals in our body.
Intake of less than required amounts of water causes dehydration. Partial dehydration, even if not serious enough to debilitate the human body and to require medical attention, may cause minor ailments like back-pain and possibly hypertension. More severe dehydration may worsen asthma as a consequence of dryness in the lungs and may also induce morning weariness.
* All the negative influences of inadequate or low quality water supply are much more dangerous for small children and babies than for adults since their immune systems are not well developed. It is reported in various medical studies that children ailments are on the rise around the globe especially in poor countries where people do not have easy access to high quality water.
* Experts are quoted as suggesting that children’s weakening in health is partly due to their increased exposure to environmental toxins and that water quality and consumption has a part to play in the capability of their bodies to eliminate the effects of such toxins.
Rebuilding efforts in St. Bernard Parish, a small community just outside New Orleans, have recently gotten a major boost. One nonprofit focused on rebuilding in the area has received the endorsement of CNN, Alice Walker, the touring production of the play The Color Purple, and even President Obama. But an alliance of Gulf Coast and national organizations are now raising questions about the cause these high profile names are supporting.
The dispute focuses on the responsibility of relief organizations to speak out against injustice in the communities in which they work. Since September of 2006, St. Bernard Parish has been aggressive in passing racially discriminatory laws and ordinances. Although these laws have faced condemnation in Federal court and in the media, rebuilding organizations active in the parish have so far refused to take a public position.
Racial discrimination has a long history in St. Bernard politics. Judge Leander Perez, a fiery leader who dominated the parish for almost 50 years, was known nationally as a spokesman for racial segregation. The main road through the Parish was named after Perez, and his legacy still has a hold on the political scene there.
Lynn Dean, a member of the St. Bernard parish council told reporter Lizzy Ratner, "They don't want the Blacks back... What they'd like to do now with Katrina is say, we'll wipe out all of them. They're not gonna say that out in the open, but how do you say? Actions speak louder than words. There's their action."
The action Lynn was referencing is a "blood relative" ordinance the council passed in 2006. The law made it illegal for Parish homeowners to rent to anyone not directly related to the renter. In St Bernard, which was 85% white before Katrina hit, this effectively kept Blacks, many of whom were still displaced from New Orleans and looking for nearby housing, from moving in.
Since its origins, the IPCC has been open and explicit about seeking to generate a ‘scientific consensus’ around climate change and especially about the role of humans in climate change
I've been 'around' for a few years now, pursuing the shifting goal of a sharable home-made surfers resource site focused on ease of use and variety of mostly adult ( whoa : I didn't say prurient ) content.
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It’s not my intention to analyze the immensely complex and entangled history around this issue. I only want to make one important point about nations and their governments. To consider any country as simply a nation among nations, with the same powers, rights and responsibilities as any other nation, is a sign of respect. When Israel was founded, as much as that event was marked by conflict and injustice, the true intent was to create a new nation that would be equal to other nations in the sense that I have just stated, a country that a long-suffering and persecuted people could call their own.
In the case of Israel, this rhetorical trick has the added potency of race and religion. If you publicly criticize the government of Israel in the U.S., I can guarantee that you will be accused of anti-Semitism. Keeping in mind the long and shameful history of Jewish persecution, culminating in the horrific genocide in Europe, this is a very serious accusation indeed. Although “anti-Semitism” is the common term, I will use the more explicit phrase “Jew hatred” here to avoid confusion, since the Arabs are a Semitic people as well.
Jew hatred has not gone away. It exists on the extreme right and extreme left. Because it has finally become generally unacceptable in society, it is usually disguised. We find it frequently on the “conspiratorial” fringes, by which I mean those groups that interpret world power relations in terms of certain groups of people that secretly control institutions. Recently someone told me that the Jews controlled most of the American media, and he named the heads of some of the networks and movie studios, as if this Jewish element somehow explained everything. Countering this argument with the names of numerous Gentiles wielding enormous power is only partially effective as an answer. The point is that ethnicity and religion are nothing more than lightning rods for scapegoating behavior. To believe in their significance is to claim an essentialist meaning for these categories, the same way a white supremacist believes that Africans are “inferior.”
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