Friday, May 31, 2013

March against Monsanto: Rallying for our Future

The worldwide March Against Monsanto this past Saturday was no mere political demonstration. Rather, it was a worldwide mobilization against corporate greed, the assault on our health and environment, and the oppression of small farmers.

As the diverse crowd gathered in New York City’s Union Square on an unseasonably cold and rainy Memorial Day weekend – just as they did in hundreds of cities around the world – it was clear that Monsanto and the issue of health and food sovereignty transcends political ideology. People from all walks of life joined together to reject Monsanto and its pesticides, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), and socially and environmentally destructive business practices.

However, some might wonder, why such focus on Monsanto? After all, isn’t Monsanto merely one of many multinational corporations that damage our political, economic, environmental, and physical well-being?
It’s true that Monsanto is not alone in promoting destructive technologies such as pesticides, herbicides, and GMOs – DuPont, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta, and others are also culprits.

However, due to its global dominance and ubiquity, Monsanto has become the rallying cry, the symbol for all that is wrong with our agricultural, political, and economic systems.

Read the entire article

 

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Why John McCain Wants to Aid Syrian Terrorists

When John McCain slipped into Syria the other day to meet with Islamist rebels, Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted “best wishes” to his fellow warmonger and claimed “dibs on his office if he doesn’t come back.” Leave it to Sen. Graham, who has been agitating along with McCain for the US to send weapons to the rebels, to joke about the untrustworthiness of the very people he wants to arm. But the rebels’ savagery is no joke: we are, after all, talking about people who eat the lungs of their enemies.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) had it kind of right when he admonished the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after it voted for a bill that would arm Syria’s Islamist insurgents:

“This is an important moment. You will be funding, today, the allies of al Qaeda. It’s an irony you cannot overcome.”

And yet irony doesn’t quite cover it: insanity is more like it. Here is a man who is the Republican party’s voice when it comes to foreign policy, a role he has appropriated due to his intimacy with those who book the Sunday talk shows, and yet when it comes to America’s relationship with the rest of the world his utter and complete ignorance is appalling.

He told us the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be “fairly easy.” He pontificated that the anthrax attacks were delivered by the Iraqis. His preferred policy for Afghanistan: we should “muddle through,” rather than withdraw. When the North Koreans started acting out, he averred we ought to threaten them with “extinction.” And when Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia got into an armed conflict over the breakaway province of South Ossetia, McCain announced “Today, We Are All Georgians” and demanded we go to war with Moscow. He thinks Iran is training Al Qaeda: he also thinks Iraq shares a border with Pakistan.

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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Monday, May 27, 2013

Brits Brace for Bilderberg

In Hertfordshire, England, in the town of Watford, the mayor and the local press are not giving the silent treatment to the upcoming Bilderberg Group meeting at the luxurious Grove Hotel, June 6-9. This advance, prominent publicity on Bilderberg is welcome news, considering that for decades the globalist cabal has been able to operate behind a veil of near-total secrecy.
 
Mayor Dorothy Thornhill is already speaking to the press about her concerns that Bilderberg protesters, intent on crashing the internationalists’ elite party, will soon be descending on her quiet town.
 
“I have my concerns about it, because it does attract people who can and do cause violence and disturbance,” Ms. Thornhill quavered to the Watford Observer.
 
It seems Ms. Thornhill got her knickers in a knot regarding the basic concept of who the purveyors of violence really are. Is it really the protesters, or could it be the power players who conduct these Bilderberg meetings to secretively and undemocratically lay out broad objectives, such as sustaining existing wars and planning new ones?
 
A UK blogger adroitly noted: “It is not the protesters that should be the main concern—it is the fact that the world’s political, financial and military elite meet in absolute secrecy, including their own [UK] elected officials.”
 
If the mayor seems a tad dim in her estimation of who the real troublemakers are, she still is noticeably uncomfortable that local taxpayers, to the extent that local resources are used to handle the Bilderberg group’s security needs, must pick up the tab. While the 140 or so major bankers, corporate captains, media moguls, policy wonks, royalty and other manicured mavens who come to these meetings do spend their own funds for private security, the locals are milked to pay for a heightened police presence over the weekend.
 
 

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Department of Homeland Security Teaching Kids To Go To FEMA Camps In a Time of Crisis

Public schools in cooperation with the department of homeland security are now teaching kids safety measures, and advising that they seek relief in FEMA camps in a time of crisis. But are these post disaster relief camps, or military internment camps?

FEMA , the Red Cross, and the department of homeland security are now using taxpayer money to educate children in public schools about ‘getting ready for disaster’. But why would government agencies hold interest in this? Is it because they want schools to be safer, or because they want citizens to flee to FEMA camps in a time of crisis?

A disaster that very well could be orchestrated by a government agency, one might add. So what are these ‘disaster relief’ camps like? A quick google search for ‘FEMA camps’ would turn up thousands of results. Yet contrary to what one may think, leaving these camps may not be voluntary.

In fact, a leaked document signed by Joyce E. Morrow (administrative assistant to the secretary of the army) suggests that disaster relief camps may actually be military internment camps. The document is titled ‘internment and resettlement operations’ , and it describes these camps in great detail, stating that ‘civil support is the department of defense support to civil authorities for domestic emergencies. Civil support includes operations that address the consequences of natural or man-made disasters, accidents, terrorist attacks, and incidents in the U.S.’ .

To sum it up, this leaked document confirms plans by the department of defense to operate internment prison camps for citizens during a crisis . But why would they need a crisis to imprison large amounts of people, and why would they imprison large amounts of people in the first place? But the real question is, do these prison camps tie in with FEMA?

Read the entire article

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft –  hire mercenaries!
 
There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?
 
This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.
 
However, what can be designated the “McChrystal Moment” – the probably brief period during which the media are again focused on the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the Rolling Stone story about General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, which led to his resignation – provides the best opportunity for some time to raise fundamental questions about this war. Various commentators have already been asking some pretty basic questions: about the effectiveness and affordability of the present “counterinsurgency strategy” and even whether American fighting forces should remain in Afghanistan at all. But I am interested in an even more fundamental question: Whether this war was ever really justified by the publicly given reason: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
 

Monday, May 20, 2013

Friday, May 17, 2013

The Heretic At Heritage: If Richwine Is Right, What Becomes Of Our "Indivisible" Nation?

Jason Richwine, the young conservative scholar who co-authored the Heritage Foundation report on the long-term costs of the amnesty bill backed by the "Gang of Eight," is gone from Heritage.

He was purged after The Washington Post unearthed his doctoral dissertation at the JFK School of Government.

Richwine's thesis:

IQ tests fairly measure mental ability. The average IQ of immigrants is well below that of white Americans. This difference in IQ is likely to persist through several generations.
 
And the potential consequences of this?
"A lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market."
Richwine defended his 166-page thesis before Harvard's George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser and Christopher Jencks, who once edited The New Republic. But while his thesis was acceptable at Harvard—it earned Richwine a Ph.D.—it has scandalized the Potomac priesthood.

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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

No Intervention in Syria

If after the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (dare I say Vietnam?) some people still want the U.S. government to intervene — further — in the war inside Syria (but fueled by outsiders), we must conclude, not that they can’t learn the lessons of recent history, but that they won’t because doing so would be contrary to their assorted political, ideological, and material interests.

It is quite clear that the U.S. military is powerless to make things better in Syria. That’s right. For all the trillions spent on the national-security state and global empire, the United States stands as a pitiful giant on the Middle East stage. Sure, it could increase the bloodshed on the ground and perhaps even cause the release of chemical agents. Indeed, it could even turn the dominant al-Qaeda-related rebels, some of them the same jihadists the U.S. government fought in Iraq, into a better-armed force. As the New York Times reports,
Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government. 
Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.
Professor Stephen Zunes adds, “Even the so-called ‘moderate’ Free Syrian Army consists of literally hundreds of separate armed militias, some of which are quite radical, without a central command.”

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Monday, May 13, 2013

THERE IS A CONSPIRACY

The title of today’s column, “There Is A Conspiracy,” is a direct quote from Ezekiel 22:25. In this passage, God instructed Ezekiel to blow the whistle on the conspiracy of Israel’s prophets to deny people truth, to devour people’s souls, to defraud people’s substance, and to destroy people’s lives. I dare say this conspiracy is still alive and well today. Many pastors and religious leaders in 2013 America are as guilty of Ezekiel’s charges as were Israel’s ancient prophets.
 
However, use the word “conspiracy” today and even most Christians will roll their eyes in disbelief. And, of course, the mainstream media is so paranoid of the word conspiracy that one has to speculate that the reason for this aversion to objectively dealing with the subject is simply due to the fact that they are among the co-conspirators.
 
But once in awhile, someone in the media has the guts to broach the subject of conspiracy. My friends at TruthAlliance.net recently covered a report written by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine. Taibbi begins his report saying, “Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.”
 
Speaking of the LIBOR and other Wall Street scandals, Taibbi goes on to write, “All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings--in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP--are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.
 
“If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati--this is the real thing, and it's no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.”
 

Thursday, May 9, 2013

California, New York and DC look to ban 3D-printed guns

A handgun made almost entirely using a consumer-grade 3D printer fired a bullet over the weekend for the first time in the history of the infant technology. If some lawmakers have their way, it will also be the last.

Defense Distributed of Texas announced on Sunday that researchers fired a bullet designed for a traditional .380-caliber firearm with a gun built all but exclusively using digital blueprints, some plastic and an $8,000 printer. The only item aside from the bullet not printed out was a single nail that served as the firing pin.

As early s Tuesday, though, California State Senator Leland Yee was already looking to pass a bill that would outlaw other 3D weapons from being built outside of the factories where firearms are regularly assembled.

Sen. Lee, a Democrat that represents a large chunk of California that includes parts of San Francisco, issued a press release this week condemning Defense Distributed’s inaugural 3D handgun.

We must be proactive in seeking solutions to this new threat rather than wait for the inevitable tragedies this will make possible,” Yee said.

Read the entire article

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Israel adds fuel to the fire in Syria

Explosions illuminated the skies over Damascus on Friday and Sunday causing casualties. But these weren’t the work of the Bashar Al Assad/Iran/Hezbollah camp or its opponents—the Free Syrian Army, Jabhat Al Nusra or Al Qaida. Israel has muscled into the raging conflict attacking an alleged military research centre close to the capital and a consignment of Iranian guided missiles en route to Tehran’s proxy, Hezbollah.

Israel has confirmed its intervention, maintaing that it will not tolerate the transfer of sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah’s military wing. But at a time when Hezbollah’s attention is focused on elements attempting to bring down the Syrian regime rather than Israel, could Tel Aviv be using weapons transfer as a pretext to manipulate the Syrian conflict to suit its own interests?

Put simply, is Israel trying to provoke Al Assad into retaliating so as to heap pressure on the US to get involved? President Barack Obama is currently wavering. He has little appetite to embroil his nation in yet another war in the Middle East and is reluctant to align Washington with Syrian radicals and foreign terrorists congregating in Syria like bees to honey.

Obama is in an unenviable quandary when the self-styled regional guardian is considered by some to be morally bound to intercede on humanitarian grounds to stop the carnage. But if Al Assad is foolish enough to strike Israel, the US will inevitably be dragged into a complex fray that could easily escalate to a stage when America is forced to strike Iran, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been unsuccessfully urging the US to do for almost a decade.

Moreover, even if Assad and his cronies are forcibly sent packing, it’s likely their exit will signal revenge attacks on Alawite communities and others that have remained faithful to the government. The cherished ambition of those, who initially participated in the Arab Spring uprising seeking political pluralism has become a pipedream when in all probability the regime will be succeeded by Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

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Friday, May 3, 2013

Florida Sheriff: “Call us if the Guy Down the Street Says he Hates the Government”

The snitch culture is being promoted heavily all over the country, and there have been a few cases recently where politicians and law enforcement groups have been extremely open about their own tyranny.

In a recent case in Florida a sheriff encouraged his audience to report their suspicious neighbors and friends, especially those that “hate the government”.

According to the Palm Beach Post:
Florida House and Senate budget leaders have awarded Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw $1 million for a new violence prevention unit aimed at preventing tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., from occurring on his turf. Bradshaw plans to use the extra $1 million to launch “prevention intervention” units featuring specially trained deputies, mental health professionals and caseworkers. The teams will respond to citizen phone calls to a 24-hour hotline with a knock on the door and a referral to services, if needed.
“Every single incident, whether it’s Newtown, that movie theater, or the guy who spouts off at work and then goes home and kills his wife and two kids — in every single case, there were people who said they knew ahead of time that there was a problem,” Bradshaw said. “If the neighbor of the mom in Newtown had called somebody, this might have saved 25 kids’ lives.”

Read the entire article

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Tsarnaev Brothers had a CIA Connection

Let’s do a little exercise. Forget nationalities and identities for a moment.

Imagine you are a police detective investigating a horrific bombing in your city -- one in which several people were killed and hundreds were injured. You have a captured suspect whom you are sure was one of the bombers, and another was killed in a shootout, but both are young and not very sophisticated.

They might have acted alone, of course, but knowing how these things work, you are also looking for leads to try to determine who else might have been involved, and especially who might have been behind the incident.

As it happens, your two suspects are immigrants. They were brought to your country at a young age by parents who were refugees seeking asylum from from a region of the world riven by civil war, brutal repression by a larger power, and that was a breeding ground for terrorists who had been known to have launched terrible attacks against civilians, including schools and full movie theaters in that larger power.

Now supposing you discovered that the national intelligence agency of a rival nation to that larger power had actually provided support to the terrorists that were attacking it, and that, moreover, the two young men who were your suspects were related to an uncle who had for three years been married to the daughter of a top member of that intelligence agency -- the latter a man who had had a long history of active involvement in that agency’s major covert operations.

Wouldn’t you be deeply suspicious about the nature of the connections between the two young men and this intelligence agency? Of course you would!

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