Less is more

EU citizens demonstrate to take back privacy

2010-09-13T14:50:00.000+01:00

Shoes and eggs thrown at Blair

2010-09-04T11:31:00.009+01:00

Saturday, 4 September 2010
Belfast Telegraph

[Yeahhhh! My personal choice would have been a wellie. Good job lads.]

Tony Blair appears on The Late Show at RTE TV studios in Dublin

Shoes and eggs have been pelted at Tony Blair as he attended his first book signing in the Irish Republic.

The missiles, which were thrown by anti-war protesters, did not hit the former prime minister as he arrived at a bookshop in Dublin.

Activists clashed with Gardai as they tried to push down a security barrier outside the Eason store on O'Connell Street.

Read more

Arrests made at Blair booksigning in Dublin
By the CNN Wire Staff
September 4, 2010 BBC

Blair pelted with eggs in Dublin Al Jazeera Video

Oil all gone! Bippity boppity boo.

2010-09-01T16:17:00.008+01:00

Has anyone noticed how the 'Oil spill' just vanished from mainstream media? Crisis over. Look this way to ring number three, folks, where we have Glenn Beck performing his high wire act on a teabag string.

I do not think for a nanosecond that the absence of coverage of the continuing effects of the BP oil spill is accidental. The ghastly consequences of the toxic soup in the Gulf is just beginning to be uncovered.

Though the mainstream media has found another side show to preoccupy Americans, people who live in the South continue to present their evidence on the net, through Youtube, local newspapers, radio shows, blogs and newsites.

Following here is a list of scores of links which I keep, as of today, updated presenting information and real experiences conveniently omitted from mainstream media menus. For links prior to September 1, 2010, see here.

EXCLUSIVE: Tests find sickened family has 50.3 ppm of Corexit’s 2-butoxyethanol in swimming pool — JUST ONE HOUR NORTH OF TAMPA (lab report included)
August 30th, 2010 Levels over 2.6 ppm of corexit are considered toxic.

Is Using Dispersants on the BP Gulf Oil Spill Fighting Pollution with Pollution? - Scientific American Journal
It remains unclear what impact chemical dispersants will have on sea life--and only the massive, uncontrolled experiment being run in the Gulf of Mexico will tell

Miles of Dead Fish in lower Plaquemines by jackbnimblenquic Aug 31, 2010

Uncovering Lies About Disappearing Oil And Toxic Dispersants Found In BP Gulf Oil Spill Waters Opened For Fishing

The cost of war to your (USA) town: interactive site

2010-08-31T15:43:00.005+01:00

It's very fun, if not funny: really, try it. Right click 'open in new tab' if the sizing is distorted.

Who are the terrorists again, please?

2010-08-30T14:55:00.007+01:00

It's getting harder and harder to tell who is a terrorist. Apparently, the American government is concerned with being perceived as a terrorist government!

I can well see their concern: after relabelling every independence battle in the world as terrorist activity, present and past; after causing more than a million unnecessary deaths and untold suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan - they should be worried.

CIA says Irish Americans were terror agents in new Wilkileaks document

kenny's sideshow: Wikileaks Psyops Takes a New Twist

2010-08-22T14:25:00.000+01:00

kenny's sideshow: Wikileaks Psyops Takes a New Twist

Illegal GM maize grown in Ireland

2010-08-13T09:45:00.011+01:00

ILLEGAL GM MAIZE GROWN IN IRELAND

MEDIA RELEASE GM-FREE IRELAND,
23 JULY 2010 ILLEGAL GM MAIZE GROWN IN IRELAND
• Government destroys its own field trials
• Pioneer Hi-Bred seeds contaminated by Monsanto’s NK603
• Call for investigation to determine extent of contamination www.gmfreeireland.org/press/GMFI50.pdf DUBLIN and GENEVA —

The Irish Government has been accidentally growing GM maize, despite its own policy to ban field trials and commercial cultivation of GM crops in the Republic. [1] The blunder is doubly embarrassing because this GM maize is an illegal variety that is not allowed for cultivation anywhere in the EU.

The discovery was made by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (DAFF) at four of its own field trial sites including the National Crop Variety Testing Centre at Backweston in Co. Kildare, and at three other undisclosed locations in Counties Kildare, Kilkenny, and Cork. DAFF carried out the field trials with a supposedly Non-GM maize variety PR39T83 supplied by Pioneer Hi- Bred Northern Europe, a subsidiary of DuPont, the world’s second biggest seed company and sixth biggest agrochemicals company. The purpose of the trials was to find out if this conventional maize is “suitable for cultivation and use under Irish farming conditions”.

According to a press release issued late yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [2], routine tests by DAFF discovered that the Pioneer Hi-Bred maize is contaminated by Monsanto’s patented GM “event” NK603. The genetic modification forces the crop to survive heavy spraying with glyphosate, part of the cocktail of toxic chemicals contained in Monsanto’s controversial Roundup herbicide. [3]

Cultivation of this GM maize is illegal the EU, although importation is allowed for animal feed and human food. It is unclear when DAFF first discovered the contamination. The EPA says it was only notified on 3 June - 3 months after the same seeds were found to be contaminated in Germany, and long after they were sown in Ireland. DAFF re-confirmed the contamination on 19 July.

The EPA says that Pioneer provided a “certificate of analysis” claiming the maize was GM-free. But random tests by DAFF found that 3 out of every 1,000 plants were contaminated by the illegal GM maize variety. That’s about 300 illegal GM crops per hectare. DAFF says it destroyed its fields of contaminated maize plants before they reached the flowering stage, in order to prevent pollen drift that would further contaminate neighbouring conventional and organic farmers, whose crops would then also have to be destroyed.

This is the first time a GM crop has been grown – albeit accidentally - in Ireland since protestors destroyed field trials of Monsanto’s patented GM beets in 1998. Economic threat to Irish farmers and food producers It is unclear how much, if any, of the illegal GM maize seeds have been sold and are now being cultivated by Irish farmers. This would cause large economic losses, and would be an ironic blow for farmers who would lose their biggest maize crop in history, thanks to this year’s unusually hot and sunny summer.

Contamination by pollen drift and seed dispersal from GM maize has already contaminated hundreds of conventional and organic farmers in Spain. [4] Lack of due diligence and false certificates GM-free Ireland spokesperson Michael O’Callaghan said “The Pioneer company has provided false GMfree certificates for its GM seeds on at least two previous occasions. The first was in 2007 when we discovered thousands of tonnes of Pioneer’s Herculex GM maize (which was then illegal) entering the EU through Dublin port [5].

The second scandal occurred in March of this year, when Pioneer and other agribiotech corporations sold 23 different varieties of maize seeds contaminated by Monsanto’s illegal NK603 to farmers who cultivated them on 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) in seven states in Germany, where contaminated farmers had to destroy their crops. [6]

According to the German-based Foundation on Future Farming [7], the seed companies refused to accept liability and have not compensated farmers for up to hundreds of millions of Euro in economic losses.” “The Department of Agriculture knew this and should therefore have exercised due diligence by testing Pioneer’s maize seeds before the field trials began.

This is another example of the Government’s failure to implement the GM free policy it first agreed three years ago in 2007 and again in 2009.” 2 Call for investigation Michael O’Callaghan called on the Government to answer the following questions so as to protect the ability of Irish farmers and food producers to retain their share of the rapidly growing EU and US markets for GM-free meat and dairy produce. [8]
• Why did the Department of Agriculture (DAFF) trust the GM-free certification provided by Pioneer Hi-Bred, even though it must have known that similar assurances provided in Ireland in 2007 and in Germany in 2010 proved to be false? •
• Why did DAFF not test the seeds before it planted them, in view of the fact that the same contamination by Monsanto’s NK603 was discovered 3 months ago in Germany, in early March?
• When did DAFF make the discovery? Why did it wait until 3 June to notify EPA? And why did EPA wait until 22 July to issue a press release? •
• Will the Government and the Northern Ireland Assembly require Pioneer Hi-Bred to provide a list of its customers in the Republic and Northern Ireland, publish the names of dealers that may have received the contaminated seeds, and make this information publicly available to farmers?
• Does the Government know if the illegal seeds have been sold and planted by Irish farmers? If so, how many acres of maize will have to be destroyed? •
• Will the Government test all maize seed stocks and fields of maize crops for GM contamination? •
• Who will pay the costs for testing, crop destruction, and related economic losses? Will the Government apply the Polluter Pays principle and demand reparation from Pioneer Hi-Bred, or will taxpayers and/or farmers end up having to foot the bill?
• Is this an isolated case? Will the Government now make a commitment to test every shipment of imported seeds for GM contamination, or will it continue business-as-usual with random tests?

ENDS CONTACT Michael O’Callaghan, Founder and Acting Co-ordinator, GM-free Ireland Network Now based in Geneva, Switzerland: tel + 41 22 732 8685 mobile: + 41 948 5491 • mail@gmfreeireland.org • www.gmfreeireland.org NOTES FOR EDITORS 1. In 2007 the Irish Government said it would “seek to negotiate to declare the island of Ireland as a GMO-free zone”, but there is no record of any such negotiations having taken place. Ireland’s official policy to ban GM crops is published on page 11 of the Renewed Programme for Government, 10 October 2009: http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Publications/Publications_2009/Renewed_Programme_for_Government, _October_2009.pdf But as of June 2010, the Government had not even begun to draft any related legislation. 2. Unauthorised release of GM event NK603 in conventional maize seed, EPA press release, 22 June 2010: http://www.epa.ie/news/pr/2010/name,30182,en.html 3. Time and Dose-Dependent Effects of Roundup on Human Embryonic and Placental Cells, Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol. 53, 126–133 (2007) DOI: 10.1007/s00244-006-0154-8. http://www.springerlink.com For more information on Glyphosate and other toxic ingredients of Monanto’s RoundUp herbicide see: http://www.criigen.org/SiteEn/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=71&Itemid=102 3 4. Testimonies of Contamination, Greenpeace, 15 October 2009. This report documents the socioeconomic and human impacts of GM contamination, based on testimonials from farmers and food producers who have been directly or indirectly harmed as a result of contamination in Spain, the only EU Member State whose government allows the commercial cultivation of GM maize. The testimonials depict the stark reality of serious contamination of conventional and organic crops and the food chain. Download report: http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/eu-unit/press-centre/reports/testimonies-ofcontamination- 15-10-09.pdf 5. A joint Greenpeace / GM-free Ireland investigation discovered thousand of tones of Pioneer’s illegal Herculex GM maize from the USA entering the EU through Ireland in 2007. The shipment was accompanied by laboratory certificates from Eurofins GeneScan Inc. which specifically claimed that the cargo contained no Herculex. But subsequent tests commissioned from Genetic ID by Greenpeace and by the Dutch Government proved contamination by the illegal GMO. The mistake triggered a moratorium on transatlantic shipments of animal feed from the USA to Europe, and hundreds of millions of dollars of losses for grain traders.

For related information see:
• http://www.gmfreeireland.org/pakrac/index.php
• Illegal GM maize enters EU through Ireland, GM-free Ireland press release, 30 April 2007: http://www.gmfreeireland.org/press/GMFI35.pdf
• Ireland’s Genetically Modifed Food Scandal, GM-free Ireland press release, 23 May 2007: http://www.gmfreeireland.org/press/GMFI36.pdf 6. These include five seed varieties sold by Pioneer Hi-Bred and 18 by Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow AgroSciences and other agri-biotech companies. The contamination was discovered by Lower Saxony’s Ministry of Agriculture at the beginning of March 2010. For details see:
• Banned GM maize sown in Germany, BBC News, 7 June 2010: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/10254080.stm • Genetically modified corn contaminates crops in seven German states, Deutsche Welle, 7 June 2010: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5657053,00.htm 7. Foundation on Future Farming: http://www.gmo-free-regions.org/foundation.html 8. See GM-free Irish label good for business: Added value, increased market share, better branding and unique selling point: the most credible GM-free food brand in Europe. GM-free Ireland Network press release, 17 November 2009: http://www.gmfreeireland.org/press/GMFI46.pdf See also: GM-free production: a unique selling point for Ireland - the food island. 47-page briefing with GM-free market survey, 17 Nov. 2009 (1.2MB pdf). http://www.gmfreeireland.org/GMFI-briefing-3.pdf

RELATED

Genetically Manipulated Crops: The GMO Catastrophe in the USA. A Lesson for the World by F. William Engdahl

Protestors of toxic GM crops resort to literally destroying them A worthwhile site to visit if you like news on natural living.

Fourteen year old tortured and held in Gitmo for 8 years - Update

2010-08-09T10:22:00.007+01:00

Omar Khadr

Do you ever wonder what happens to those unfortunates like this boy: Another proud moment in US history -Omar Kahdr's Interrogation Video From Guantanamo, and Aafia Siddiqui both in US custody after years and years have past? Mostly, they are still being held and noone can help them. And no trial for 5-8 years.

Here is an update on the boy who has been held in US custody since 2002 without a trial - he is finally getting one - a military one.

KADR GITMO TRIAL BEGINS THIS WEEK

Chemtrails in Ireland

2010-08-05T09:43:00.005+01:00

I have been watching the evidence of chemtrails for some years now. It's amazing more people don't notice these patterns in the sky and question what the feck they are.

Recently on two separate occasions, I photographed chemtrails over the midlands of Ireland. These images are taken in June and July 2010 over Roscommon. I couldn't understand why the planes deliberately made 'X' patterns. Then I ran across the video below.

We should be asking more questions about what these planes are doing and dispersing in the air. There are only two airports in the west of Ireland that these planes could hail from: Shannon and Knock. Are there any watchers out there with more info?

More pix of 'X' patterns

And yet more.

Chemtrails (contrails) in Wiki

Chemtrails over Kingsville Texas in 'X' pattern

Chemtrails over NE Texas in 'X' pattern

What does it all mean?

The most dangerous man in America

2010-08-02T09:34:00.010+01:00

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty
as is cooperation with good." - Ghandhi

The three videos below detail how and why Daniel Ellsburg released the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The similarity of the cover-up behind the Viet Nam invasion to the invasion of Afghanistan today is shocking and humbling, and could not be more pertinent to the situation citizens find themselves in today vis-a-vis media manipulation by the government.

There was still a semblance of separation of powers in American government in the 1960's: something that is gone today. When will American citizens refuse to fund the illegal war in Afghanistan? Perhaps we must look to the past to find the future.

Bradley Manning is the conscience of the American people today: no doubt he will pay a heavy price for this burden.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil
is that good men do nothing. - Edmund Burke

2 minute trailer for the full length video posted below.

FULL LENGTH (128 min)

INTERVIEW WITH DANIEL ELLSBERG/REAL NEWS (18 min) - Absolutely excellent! Ellsberg's comments were made before the dismissal of McCrystal and read like a prophecy come true.

Why the world needs Wikileaks

2010-07-31T22:42:00.001+01:00

Oil spill links

2010-07-15T09:34:00.073+01:00

I have compiled a list of links from both mainstream and other media sources here to better understand the reality of the Deepwater disaster. Included are only the best I have found.

It is black irony indeed, that the scarcity of oil has fueled so much death misery and destruction on the planet; and now Mother Nature forces more oil on us than we can live with.

Hope you find some value or clarity in these links, together or singly.
As I find links, I will add to this list. Posts in chronological order; first earliest, last most current.

A compilation of video and quotes from BP and others addressing the seriousness of the oil leak..

Oceanographer John Kessler analyses methane.

Oil rain in Louisiana

Corexit and crop damage

Reports Say Huge Explosions Cause Seafloor Collapse Beneath Gulf Oil Spill (Update 9)

Oil And Gas Leaks From Cracks In Seabed Confirmed – Videos Show Gulf Oil Spill Leaking From Seafloor

It’s Official: Huge Area of the Gulf Has Been Turned Into A Massive Dead Zone By The BP Gulf Oil Spill

BP Gulf Oil Spill Is Already In Gulf Stream And May Hit North Carolina Beaches Any Day

MSNBC July 15: Matt Simmons still says BP covering up MASSIVE HOLE miles away, cap test is "absurd"

This video was taken on July 3rd, 2010 in Fort Worth, Texas, just after the first few days of rain we received here from Hurricane Alex

Why BP is readying a ’super weapon’ to avert escalating Gulf nightmare

Oil Pressure Stopping Short of Target ... Does that Mean the Well Integrity Test Is Failing? Washington's blog is an excellent compilation of all the media waffle out there.

Is oil leaking from the sea floor around the BP well? Video

Hell Has Come to South Louisiana

Toxicologists: Corexit “Ruptures Red Blood Cells, Causes Internal Bleeding”, "Allows Crude Oil To Penetrate “Into The Cells” and “Every Organ System"

Doomsday Methane Bubble Rupture?: How the BP Gulf Disaster May Have Triggered a 'World-Killing' Event

Republicans Block Investigative Power for Oil Spill Commission

JULY 2010 - BANNED FILM - BP GULF OF MEXICO OIL SPILL

Dr.Riki Ott alleges BP engaged in massive cover-up to hide Gulf Disaster damage video

Technician: Deepwater Horizon Warning System Disabled video The chief engineer on the Deepwater Horizon tells a government panel that warning systems on the drilling rig were inhibited because the crew did not want to be disturbed in the middle of the night.

Methane Release From the Gulf Oil Spill: What Does It Mean? How Bad Could It Get?

Short videos on the Blow out preventer failure. Very well explained

The New York Times page of videos on various aspects of the Macondo spill. Very worthwhile and fascinating.

Corexit vapour turns planes orange/causes acid rain? video

New Photos: Suffering Dolphins in Barataria Bay - oil bp

Gulf Citizens Do Media’s Job, Find Deadly Amounts of Toxins at Grand Isle

Barge crashes into oil well in Gulf, NEW 20ft High Oil Gusher (RAW FOOTAGE)

NWS: Oil spill [another one!] could reach Lake Michigan by Sunday

Growing Health Crisis in the Gulf

BP Gulf Oil Spill Seeps Mapped In Google Earth – Feds Explanation Of Sea Floor Leaks Don’t Add Up

Irish firm gambles on extinction
Online betting site calculates the odds of several species' demise due to Gulf oil spill.

Admiral Allen Says Gas Seep is from the Rigel Gas Field ... Did BP Accidentally Tap Into the Rigel Gas Field?

Attempted arrest of BP executives in DC recently

Dublinmick Many links and videos here I have not seen before.

Good toxic rain video/links

Michigan oil spill

Find more videos like this on 12160.org

BP's oil now oozing out from Beach sand in Louisiana

Breaking Gulf news: Land Surveyor proves Simmons right. TV well sham. These videos use BP/Dept of Interior's own documents to show there are 2 wells.

And from a different source, the 2 well conclusion.

Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food web

BP's Insidious Coverup and Propaganda Campaign: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Disturbing discovery of crabs filled with black substance

BP's oil lingers, seen and unseen: An editorial

Oilgate! BP and All the President's Men (Except One) Seek to Contain Truth of Leak in the Gulf (PHOTOS)(VIDEO) Alot of info in this one including pics of blisters and rashes on Gulf workers

Censored Gulf health news: Call it what it is: Genocide. Crime Against Humanity (videos) Another excellent article with docs on health effects

Plant damage in Minnesota - What acid rain might look like

Oil well blowout in Louisiana
This is a new one as of Aug 11, 2010 in a sugar field in rural LA. Area evacuated.

Officials deny dispersant use, residents beg to differ
Nothing like eye witness reports to show up official liars. Aug 10, 2010

UV Light Reveals Hidden Sand Contamination from the Gulf oil disaster Aug 13, 2010

Hundreds of Thousands of DEAD FISH on NEW JERSEY SHORE AUG 12 2010

BP downsizes Miami oil spill operations center

BP: Dispersing Oil or Criticism?
Toxic chemicals helped the oil giant save face, but their health and environmental impacts are unknown

The BP oil-methane-dispersant-drilling fluids disaster
Huge volumes of methane from the well along with toxic dispersants used to break up the oil could do vast damage

Mojo's BP Oil Spill Coverage

Stationary Corexit Device at Sea Floor

Brazil beaches - oil washed up

Millions of Dead Fish, Alligators, Turtles Floating Down Bolivian Rivers!

Amazon Crude (60 Minutes - length 13 min) How long does it take to sue an oil company for environmental damage? After 16 years, the case againsy Chevron for 27 billion dollars has not been heard.

Journalist Exposes How Private Investigation Firm Hired by Chevron Tried to Recruit Her as a Spy to Undermine $27B Suit in Ecuadorian Amazon

Mid August, 2010 - More and more eyewitness accounts of oil spill evidence (since BP said the oil is 75% cleaned up) floods you tube. Just a few below.

Fisherman and Families know Gulf Seafood is unsafe, DEMAND Dispersants stop being sprayed!

Two officials from different Florida counties report “what looks like ‘a congealed GLOB of VASELINE’ that is HOVERING just offshore”

Uncovering the Lies That Are Sinking the Oil Nothing like eyewitness testimony from locals to make BP's clean up claims look ridiculous. Good article.

dead fish all over the east coast, lack of oxygen from gulf disaster Aug 16, 2010

Louisiana Fishermen Slam Claims that Oil Almost Gone, Seafood Safe

Gulf Fishermen Debate Whether to Risk Selling Seafood Again - PBS News hour

Gulf Shrimpers Find Oil In Reopened Fishing Areas. Governnment Says "Shut Up". Sierra Club Alleges Areas Were Solely Reopened to Limit BP's Liability

Is the Spill Victims' Fund Keeping BP and the Feds in Bed?

Scientists: Oil Contaminating Vital Gulf Habitat Democracy Now - corroboration for other articles from various sources above

The BP Cover-Up: BP and the government say the spill is fast disappearing—but dramatic new science reveals that its worst effects may be yet to come. Easy reading article detailing the food chain in the Gulf and how it is affected by the oil spill.

The spider web of gas pipelines lurking under the Gulf.

The 15 Biggest Oil Spills As of Aug 2010

BP's Damage Control: A Timeline

"The Goal Is Not to Let It Blow Up": A Tour of BP's Relief Rig

August 13, 2010 Video Oil all gone?
"We are just uneducated fisherman, if we can find it (oil), anyone can."

"Everything is Dead Out There": Uncovering the Lies That Are Sinking the Oil What if the 'news' were written by real people on the scene of the disaster? This article is good reading to show the difference of 'official' news releases about the 'clean up' and the reality experienced by residents.

The James Fox reports - eyewitnesses on the media black out etc. More of these videos can be found on Youtube.

Source
Video - who is responsible for 'contaminated fish' brought in by fishermen? Dock Owners Asking Fishermen to Sign Waiver Stating That They Would be Responsible for Contaminated Fish?

Gulf Oil May Not Degrade for DECADES

Source

BP's "Cloak of Silence": Geology is "Fractured", Relief Wells May Fail Few people in the world know more about oil drilling disasters than Dr. Robert Bea.

Bea teaches engineering at the University of California Berkeley, and has 55 years of experience in engineering and management of design, construction, maintenance, operation, and decommissioning of engineered systems including offshore platforms, pipelines and floating facilities. Bea has worked for many years in governmental and quasi-governmental roles, and has been a high-level governmental adviser concerning disasters.

(DAUPHIN ISLAND, Ala.) Residents living in DeSoto Landing say they've never seen this black mess before. They believe the stained sand covering their beautiful white beach is a sign the oil spill is far from over.

Major study charts long-lasting oil plume in Gulf

Scientist Accuses Obama Administration and BP of Underestimating Amount of Oil Left in Gulf of Mexico Democracy Now - short video

Fishing Industry in Gulf Still Worried About Levels of Toxins in the Water and the Impact on Marine Life Democracy Now - short video

Gulf Chemist: Mercenaries Hired By BP Are Now Applying Toxic Dispersant - at Night and In an Uncontrolled Manner - Which BP Says It No Longer Uses

New Orleans TV: “Alarming discovery” of adult crabs “filled with some sort of black substance” (VIDEO)

Oiled crabs stoke fears spill is tainting food web

Corexit found in Orange Beach Waters Orange Beach, Alabama resident Margaret Long took her own samples of a strange substance in the water near her home and sent it to a chemist. The result? Corexit.

What’s the Rush? “NOAA sends its samples to a lab in POLAND” — “Will take MONTHS” to know
August 25th, 2010

Underwater 'River' of Oil Confirmed in Gulf Source: Adam Sharp, Wealth Daily 08/23/2010

Alabama Charges BP, Transocean For BP Gulf Oil Spill Coverup and Using Dangerous Toxic Dispersants WKRG News 5 in Alabama reports that the Attorney General of Alabama has filed charges against BP and Transocean for covering up the BP Gulf Oil Spill and using a dangerous and highly toxic choice of chemical dispersants among other things.

Gulf Loop Current Stalls from BP Oil Disaster: Global Consequences if Current Fails to Reorganize

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
BP's Crude Oil May Be Radioactive

Rare oil spill video and pictures

2010-07-13T10:09:00.005+01:00

This is the best collection of images and videos depicting the oil spill damage in the Gulf of Mexico I have so far seen.

The great thing about the net, is that when a corporation like BP calls for a media blackout, the corporation can NOT blackout net information about the blackout.

Absolutely must see videos and pix here.

What we need is a good war

2010-07-03T15:14:00.003+01:00

The USA/Israel war machine is gearing up for a war with Iran. The UN sanctions against Iran and the unilateral sanctions imposed by the US this week are the smokescreen out of which will appear some catastrophic event at sea, that will trigger WW3.

I hope I am wrong. But I am afraid I might be right. Paul Craig Roberts blows away the smoke to look at the possibility of world war in the near future. I wonder if we add up all the expenditures on technology to kill people, if the sum will equal or surpass the amount we spend to ensure the dignity of life. Have to be careful with this question: I might not like the answer.

Even more flotillas going to Gaza

2010-06-08T13:34:00.002+01:00

German-Jewish organisation to send flotilla to Gaza

Gaza: George Galloway announces new convoys

Iranian Aid Ships to Set Sail for Gaza

This one might be the one to watch. If Israel shoots its friends from Turkey and the US in their heads, at point blank range multiple times, I wonder what sort reception Iran's flotilla will get.

Scary facts about the US economy

2010-06-07T05:01:00.005+01:00

This article reveals some very frightening statistics about the US economy.

Desperate Financial Situation,
Biggest Debt Bubble in World History:
Fifty Statistics About The U.S. Economy

It's definitely worth a read but don't expect to be in a good mood afterwards. Here are a few highlights:

#50) In 2010 the U.S. government is projected to issue almost as much new debt as the rest of the governments of the world combined.

#44) U.S. corporate income tax receipts were down 55% (to $138 billion) for the year ending September 30th, 2009.

#39) More than 40% of those employed in the United States are now working in low-wage service jobs.

#34) According to RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings were reported on 367,056 properties in March 2010, an increase of nearly 19 percent from February, an increase of nearly 8 percent from March 2009 and the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report in January 2005.

#29) For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

#17) Paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history during the first quarter of 2010.

#15) 39.68 million Americans are now on food stamps, which represents a new all-time record. But things look like they are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is forecasting that enrollment in the food stamp program will exceed 43 million Americans in 2011.

#7) According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, two-thirds of income increases in the U.S. between 2002 and 2007 went to the wealthiest 1% of all Americans.

#6) The bottom 40 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Related:

11 Points Of Comparison Between Life In The United States And Life Under Hitler From A Woman Who Has Experienced Both

Uprooted Palestinians: Galloway announces new land and sea convoys to break the siege of Gaza

2010-06-06T21:45:00.000+01:00

Uprooted Palestinians: Galloway announces new land and sea convoys to break the siege of Gaza

Victory! Flotilla 100, Israel -10.

2010-06-06T12:52:00.004+01:00

If Palestinian supporters had spent one hundred million dollars on a media campaign to make the world aware of the Gaza blockade, they could not have done a tenth as well as the Gaza Flotilla in capturing the attention of the world. The Flotilla did not reach Gaza; but it reached into the hearts and minds of people the world over. People, busy coping with the realities of modern life, paused and really saw the brutality of Israel, and the suffering of 1.5 million Gazans, just for a moment. And in that moment, anger and outrage desended on Israel from the hearts of people and governments the world over.

Israel has been dealt a mortal wound by a scraggly group of peace activists delivering humanitarian aid. The Likud party has yet to fully realise this: but the political fallout from the attack on the flotilla will change the future of Israel in a major way. Not only are its allies shrinking in horror from its tactics, but previous neutral countries like Ireland are becoming anti-Israel. This universal outrage of Israel's bullying aggression is the death knell for Talmudic Imperialism.

Other atrocities by Israel have been certainly more brutal than the attack on the Flotilla; yet, the Flotilla is the final stone that tips the weight of world opinion against Israel. It is the small magnifying glass that focused the sunlight into a searing hot beam exposing the absurdity of Israeli propaganda. Without the input of millions of volunteer activists, in blogs, in protests, in organising, in donations, throughout time, the Flotilla might not have succeeded.

This victory belongs to all who have untiringly, against overwhelming odds, continued to raise their voices for and lent their hands to helping the people of Gaza. It belongs to all the countries who have raised their voices in a chorus of outrage about the Gazan occupation. The activists aboard the Flotilla were brave. They are brave not because they are heroes, but because in the face of personal harm and uncertain outcome, they laid their lifes on the line in spite of their fear and possible losses.

This victory also belongs to those people who are just waking up and taking note that Israel maintains a constant state of war in order to sustain its existence. People are now realising the price tag for allowing Israel to do as it pleases, disregarding UN resolutions, invading it's neighbours, maintaining a nuclear arsenal while criticising other Mideast countries for defending themselves.

People in Israel are also waking up and many Israelis do not support the tactics the government has used against its neighbours and vehemently criticise the Likud government and its paranoic and psychotic world view. In a way these people are the bravest of all; because they dare to challenge the authority which rules their lives for no other reason than they can not morally countenance the actions of their (democratically elected) government.

This victory of course belongs to the Gazan people too. For their long suffering internment under the Israeli military, their battle against the goliath of the Israeli media domination, their undisclosed suffering and losses, they now have the world on their side.

Best of all, the repercussions to Israel for it's barbaric behaviour have not yet really arrived. The victory of the Flotilla will curse every trade and political negotiation Israel attempts for years to come. Already the global boycott of Israel has accelerated with no end in site. Even it's 'best friends' are hoping to avoid the fallout from the Flotilla attack.

So .... it's a great week - a week which I believe will change the future irrevocably for all nations. Congratulations to all who have supported Gaza and Palestine: every little contribution will be a pixel in the new picture of the Mideast.

And congratulations to Israel and the Likud party. You have now shot yourself in both feet and I think may be in danger of suicide. And nothing would delight me more than to see the obnoxious hubris of your rhetoric poison your body politic.

You see....it's win-win Mr Netanyahu.

Why the US can't condemn Gaza blockade

2010-06-04T10:53:00.007+01:00

No one is really surprised at Joe Biden's response to the attack of the flotilla in international waters. Most assume this is because Israel and the USA are really grotesque Siamese twins; but there may be another reason why the US cannot condemn Israel.

The US plans a blockade of Iranian waters and currently has a nuclear submarine near the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran Detects US Nuclear Sub in Persian Gulf
(Sunday, May 30th, 2010)

According to a report released at the end of the week by Iran’s Fars News Agency, Iranian naval forces detected the presence of a US navy nuclear submarine in the Persian Gulf, in the Strait of Hormuz area. This is a critical passage, which permits 90% of the oil produced by Persian Gulf state to get to Asia, W. Europe and the United States.

In addition, Israel is also planning on stationing nuclear subs in the Persian Gulf.

Report: Israel to station nuclear missile subs off Iran

Sunday Times says Jewish state plans to deploy three submarines equipped with nuclear cruise missiles in Persian Gulf. According to report, decision has been taken to ensure permanent presence of at least one of vessels...

The US can hardly condemn a blockade on Gaza when it is in fact planning the same for Iran in the Persian Gulf.

While most of the world reels from the sheer brutality of Israel's actions and Israel PR desperately spins its 'we are the victims' tale of woe, the geopolitical plans of US hegemony provides a larger context from which to view this event. If the Gaza blockade stands, then the world will also permit the actions of the US/Israel in interfering with traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Freedom Flotilla must indeed be a thorn in the paw of the US in its efforts to isolate Iran via economic sanctions in the UN. I truly hope it is. The outcome of the Freedom Flotilla's efforts to break this illegal blockade will not just influence the life of Gazans. It will set the global stage for the tactics US/Israel will use in the Persian Gulf; and in this sense would quicken the pace to war.

What we permit Israel to do to Gaza now, will also be permitted against Iran in the Persian Gulf. This is why the USA CANNOT condemn Israel's interference of ships in international waters.

'Next time we'll use more force'

2010-06-02T14:17:00.003+01:00

This is the comment of an Israeli top navy commander:

Jerusalem Post

Israel will use more aggressive force in the future to prevent ships from breaking the sea blockade on the Gaza Strip, a top Navy commander told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

"We boarded the ship and were attacked as if it was a war," the officer said. "That will mean that we will have to come prepared in the future as if it was a war."

What a great strategy! It's a sure fire plan for Israel to become THE international pariah. I could hardly approve more. As the world sees the truth about Israeli brutality, Israel sinks deeper and deeper into the public relations hole it is digging for itself globally. It seems poetic justice that Israel should annihilate itself. Good job Netanyahu: you have accomplished in a day more than Palestinian activists have managed in three years.

Of course Israel is at war with the entire world, in it's collective mind. And like a self fulfilling prophecy, the country now ensures that it's worst fears are coming true. It does not occur to the Israeli leadership that the country is committing political suicide with it's paranoic and psychotic world view. See Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion

In this world view, the bully becomes the victim. Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT, responded to this classic argument best:

"You can't defend yourself when you are militarily occupying someone else's land. Call it what you like, it is not self-defense." Flotilla Attack: Media Reporting Lacked Critical Thinking

The world sees this more clearly now thanks to the Freedom Flotilla and it's brave activists.

At present, the MV Racheal Corrie heads to Gaza, arriving on Friday. Will Israel use more force? Will it board the ship in international waters? Will it shoot itself in it's other foot on the world stage? I hope so. It's high time for the bully of the Mideast to depose itself: what better way than political suicide? The 11 brave activists onboard are willing to put their lives on the line to uncover the truth about Israeli brutality for all the world to see.

Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion

2010-06-01T01:38:00.005+01:00

May 31, 2010 | 1828 GMT
By George Friedman
Stratfor

On Sunday, Israeli naval forces intercepted the ships of a Turkish nongovernmental organization (NGO) delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Israel had demanded that the vessels not go directly to Gaza but instead dock in Israeli ports, where the supplies would be offloaded and delivered to Gaza. The Turkish NGO refused, insisting on going directly to Gaza. Gunfire ensued when Israeli naval personnel boarded one of the vessels, and a significant number of the passengers and crew on the ship were killed or wounded.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon charged that the mission was simply an attempt to provoke the Israelis. That was certainly the case. The mission was designed to demonstrate that the Israelis were unreasonable and brutal. The hope was that Israel would be provoked to extreme action, further alienating Israel from the global community and possibly driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The operation’s planners also hoped this would trigger a political crisis in Israel.

A logical Israeli response would have been avoiding falling into the provocation trap and suffering the political repercussions the Turkish NGO was trying to trigger. Instead, the Israelis decided to make a show of force. The Israelis appear to have reasoned that backing down would demonstrate weakness and encourage further flotillas to Gaza, unraveling the Israeli position vis-à-vis Hamas. In this thinking, a violent interception was a superior strategy to accommodation regardless of political consequences. Thus, the Israelis accepted the bait and were provoked.

The ‘Exodus’ Scenario

In the 1950s, an author named Leon Uris published a book called “Exodus.” Later made into a major motion picture, Exodus told the story of a Zionist provocation against the British. In the wake of World War II, the British — who controlled Palestine, as it was then known — maintained limits on Jewish immigration there. Would-be immigrants captured trying to run the blockade were detained in camps in Cyprus. In the book and movie, Zionists planned a propaganda exercise involving a breakout of Jews — mostly children — from the camp, who would then board a ship renamed the Exodus. When the Royal Navy intercepted the ship, the passengers would mount a hunger strike. The goal was to portray the British as brutes finishing the work of the Nazis. The image of children potentially dying of hunger would force the British to permit the ship to go to Palestine, to reconsider British policy on immigration, and ultimately to decide to abandon Palestine and turn the matter over to the United Nations.

There was in fact a ship called Exodus, but the affair did not play out precisely as portrayed by Uris, who used an amalgam of incidents to display the propaganda war waged by the Jews. Those carrying out this war had two goals. The first was to create sympathy in Britain and throughout the world for Jews who, just a couple of years after German concentration camps, were now being held in British camps. Second, they sought to portray their struggle as being against the British. The British were portrayed as continuing Nazi policies toward the Jews in order to maintain their empire. The Jews were portrayed as anti-imperialists, fighting the British much as the Americans had.

It was a brilliant strategy. By focusing on Jewish victimhood and on the British, the Zionists defined the battle as being against the British, with the Arabs playing the role of people trying to create the second phase of the Holocaust. The British were portrayed as pro-Arab for economic and imperial reasons, indifferent at best to the survivors of the Holocaust. Rather than restraining the Arabs, the British were arming them. The goal was not to vilify the Arabs but to villify the British, and to position the Jews with other nationalist groups whether in India or Egypt rising against the British.

The precise truth or falsehood of this portrayal didn’t particularly matter. For most of the world, the Palestine issue was poorly understood and not a matter of immediate concern. The Zionists intended to shape the perceptions of a global public with limited interest in or understanding of the issues, filling in the blanks with their own narrative. And they succeeded.

The success was rooted in a political reality. Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. And on a matter of only tangential interest, governments tend to follow their publics’ wishes, however they originate. There is little to be gained for governments in resisting public opinion and much to be gained by giving in. By shaping the battlefield of public perception, it is thus possible to get governments to change positions.

In this way, the Zionists’ ability to shape global public perceptions of what was happening in Palestine — to demonize the British and turn the question of Palestine into a Jewish-British issue — shaped the political decisions of a range of governments. It was not the truth or falsehood of the narrative that mattered. What mattered was the ability to identify the victim and victimizer such that global opinion caused both London and governments not directly involved in the issue to adopt political stances advantageous to the Zionists. It is in this context that we need to view the Turkish flotilla.

The Turkish Flotilla to Gaza

The Palestinians have long argued that they are the victims of Israel, an invention of British and American imperialism. Since 1967, they have focused not so much on the existence of the state of Israel (at least in messages geared toward the West) as on the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Since the split between Hamas and Fatah and the Gaza War, the focus has been on the plight of the citizens of Gaza, who have been portrayed as the dispossessed victims of Israeli violence.

The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis. The way this resistance was carried out, from airplane hijackings to stone-throwing children to suicide bombers, interfered with the first part of the campaign, however. The Israelis could point to suicide bombings or the use of children against soldiers as symbols of Palestinian inhumanity. This in turn was used to justify conditions in Gaza. While the Palestinians had made significant inroads in placing Israel on the defensive in global public opinion, they thus consistently gave the Israelis the opportunity to turn the tables. And this is where the flotilla comes in.

The Turkish flotilla aimed to replicate the Exodus story or, more precisely, to define the global image of Israel in the same way the Zionists defined the image that they wanted to project. As with the Zionist portrayal of the situation in 1947, the Gaza situation is far more complicated than as portrayed by the Palestinians. The moral question is also far more ambiguous. But as in 1947, when the Zionist portrayal was not intended to be a scholarly analysis of the situation but a political weapon designed to define perceptions, the Turkish flotilla was not designed to carry out a moral inquest.

Instead, the flotilla was designed to achieve two ends. The first is to divide Israel and Western governments by shifting public opinion against Israel. The second is to create a political crisis inside Israel between those who feel that Israel’s increasing isolation over the Gaza issue is dangerous versus those who think any weakening of resolve is dangerous.

The Geopolitical Fallout for Israel

It is vital that the Israelis succeed in portraying the flotilla as an extremist plot. Whether extremist or not, the plot has generated an image of Israel quite damaging to Israeli political interests. Israel is increasingly isolated internationally, with heavy pressure on its relationship with Europe and the United States.

In all of these countries, politicians are extremely sensitive to public opinion. It is difficult to imagine circumstances under which public opinion will see Israel as the victim. The general response in the Western public is likely to be that the Israelis probably should have allowed the ships to go to Gaza and offload rather than to precipitate bloodshed. Israel’s enemies will fan these flames by arguing that the Israelis prefer bloodshed to reasonable accommodation. And as Western public opinion shifts against Israel, Western political leaders will track with this shift.

The incident also wrecks Israeli relations with Turkey, historically an Israeli ally in the Muslim world with longstanding military cooperation with Israel. The Turkish government undoubtedly has wanted to move away from this relationship, but it faced resistance within the Turkish military and among secularists. The new Israeli action makes a break with Israel easy, and indeed almost necessary for Ankara.

With roughly the population of Houston, Texas, Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation, meaning this event has profound geopolitical implications.

Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation. Israel is not a fundamental interest to other nations. The ability to generate public antipathy to Israel can therefore reshape Israeli relations with countries critical to Israel. For example, a redefinition of U.S.-Israeli relations will have much less effect on the United States than on Israel. The Obama administration, already irritated by the Israelis, might now see a shift in U.S. public opinion that will open the way to a new U.S.-Israeli relationship disadvantageous to Israel.

The Israelis will argue that this is all unfair, as they were provoked. Like the British, they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard? As with a tank battle or an airstrike, this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction.

Internationally, there is little doubt that the incident will generate a firestorm. Certainly, Turkey will break cooperation with Israel. Opinion in Europe will likely harden. And public opinion in the United States — by far the most important in the equation — might shift to a “plague-on-both-your-houses” position.

While the international reaction is predictable, the interesting question is whether this evolution will cause a political crisis in Israel. Those in Israel who feel that international isolation is preferable to accommodation with the Palestinians are in control now. Many in the opposition see Israel’s isolation as a strategic threat. Economically and militarily, they argue, Israel cannot survive in isolation. The current regime will respond that there will be no isolation. The flotilla aimed to generate what the government has said would not happen.

The tougher Israel is, the more the flotilla’s narrative takes hold. As the Zionists knew in 1947 and the Palestinians are learning, controlling public opinion requires subtlety, a selective narrative and cynicism. As they also knew, losing the battle can be catastrophic. It cost Britain the Mandate and allowed Israel to survive. Israel’s enemies are now turning the tables. This maneuver was far more effective than suicide bombings or the Intifada in challenging Israel’s public perception and therefore its geopolitical position (though if the Palestinians return to some of their more distasteful tactics like suicide bombing, the Turkish strategy of portraying Israel as the instigator of violence will be undermined).

Israel is now in uncharted waters. It does not know how to respond. It is not clear that the Palestinians know how to take full advantage of the situation, either. But even so, this places the battle on a new field, far more fluid and uncontrollable than what went before. The next steps will involve calls for sanctions against Israel. The Israeli threats against Iran will be seen in a different context, and Israeli portrayal of Iran will hold less sway over the world.

And this will cause a political crisis in Israel. If this government survives, then Israel is locked into a course that gives it freedom of action but international isolation. If the government falls, then Israel enters a period of domestic uncertainty. In either case, the flotilla achieved its strategic mission. It got Israel to take violent action against it. In doing so, Israel ran into its own fist.

Reprinting or republication of this report on websites is authorized by prominently displaying the following sentence at the beginning or end of the report, including the hyperlink to STRATFOR:

"This report is republished with permission of Stratfor"

Iraq War Vet Commits Suicide at Ohio Military Hospital

2010-05-26T13:13:00.004+01:00

Here is an Iraq War fatality: don't bother Googling the story for it is nowhere to be found except for the link below. Why is that I wonder. I have blogged on this subject before: The Horror: War vets 'can't turn it off'. The newscast below on Jesse Charles Huff starts at 10.20 in the Democracy Now headline news.

Iraq War Vet Commits Suicide at Ohio Military Hospital

An Iraq war veteran has committed suicide in front of a veterans hospital in Dayton, Ohio. Jesse Charles Huff shot himself with a rifle in front of the Veterans Affairs Department’s Medical Center last month. Huff had been denied unspecified treatment at the hospital just hours earlier. The father of Huff’s former roommate says he thinks Huff killed himself in part to make a statement about the inadequate medical care he received as an injured veteran. Huff was wounded by a bombing in Iraq and had been undergoing treatment for a back injury and depression.

A message from Argentina

2010-05-22T18:53:00.004+01:00

A Message from Argentina:
Our Sympathies to the People of Greece!
by Adrian Salbuchi*

Every once in awhile I run across an article that gives me some understanding of the bigger picture and I learn something. Why exactly IS there a crisis in global finances? And why do the PEOPLE always have to pay for it? The above article was very helpful to me and I present it here for those who want to know more......but don't have alot of time to study global finance.

I found both the article and the videos easily digestible and thought provoking. I am not sure it is possible for enough people to wake up to this information to stop the global financiers from completing their cycle. But I don't think it very dignified to play my part as an ostrich with my head in the sand bending over.

I hate dealing with economic global collapse because it is so messy and requires so much specialised knowledge to analyse it; more often than not I throw up my hands and move along to another issue.

But I am wrong to do this. Those who run the global finance know I probably won't study economics to understand today's mess; and probably will prefer to digest simplified media headlines. Average people who work and raise families barely have enough hours in the day to attend to their lives without devoting time to studying complex economic banking theories. Isn't that what politicians are elected to do?

One thing is clear to me though: democracy is dead. It is dead because the people are hoodwinked and too busy (and have little inclination) to learn more about the bigger picture of finance: people are content to play the part assigned to their little pixel in the picture painted by 'invisible hands'. Democracy requires enlightened citizens and most of us are still consumer zombies.

Related: Naomi Klein (search this blog)

Populism rising: Mobs converge on bankers

2010-05-17T10:05:00.004+01:00

More frogs jumping out of the pot. Fair play to them.

Class Warfare: Hundreds Protest
Outside Bankers' Houses In DC

From Huffington Post
May 17, 2010
Huge angry mobs converged outside bank employees' houses on Sunday afternoon to demand banks stop lobbying against Wall Street reform.

"Bank of America: bad for America!" shouted community leaders outside the house of Bank of America general counsel Gregory Baer. The Chicago-based grassroots organization National People's Action, in coordination with the SEIU, bused more than 700 workers from 20 states to Baer's neighborhood, one of the wealthiest corners of Washington.

The action kicks off several days of protests targeting K Street for lobbyists' role in financial reform. Baer himself apparently tried to blend in with the crowd until a neighbor outed him. The mob booed loudly as he walked into his house. "I don't have time for you," he said, according to Trenda Kennedy of Springfield, Ill. who used a bullhorn to tell the crowd about her trouble getting a mortgage modification from Baer's bank. Kennedy told HuffPost she'd been making reduced monthly payments thanks to a trial modification via the Home Affordable Modification Program.

She said that when the bank turned her down for a permanent mod, she was told she still owed all the money she'd been paying during the trial. She said she's been notified of several sheriff's sale dates but has somehow managed to keep her home. "Every time I'm inches away from losing my house, by some miracle it's been pushed off," said Kennedy, who is a member of Illinois People's Action.

Passersby and dogwalkers smiled at the sight of people gathered all over Baer's lawn and blocking the road. Baer's neighbor from across the street won little sympathy when he angrily yelled at protesters for waking up his two-year-old daughter.

Kennedy was one of several people who used a bullhorn to tell personal bank horror stories. Story continues below Baer, formerly a senior official at the Treasury department, is a lawyer for the bank's regulator and public policy legal group. Bank of America declined to comment.

"Bank of America came to the homes of everyday Americans when you spread predatory loans in neighborhoods across, the country, when you financed payday-lending storefronts, when your reckless behavior sent the economy to the brink of disaster, and when your bank-owned properties littered neighborhoods from coast to coast," said a letter the group asked Baer to deliver to CEO Brian Moynihan.

"You've created a historic mess and have been unreceptive to very polite, very formal and very consistent requests to fix the problems you helped create." The group also protested outside the house of Peter Scher, a lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase. Nobody answered the door.

VAT should be imposed on food and children's clothes, says IMF

2010-05-16T22:23:00.002+01:00

Think this could happen in Ireland?

VAT should be imposed on food
and children's clothes, says IMF

By By Edmund Conway, Economics Editor
Published: 9:30AM BST 15 May 2010
Telegraph.co.uk

David Cameron should use this summer's emergency Budget to raise VAT on a host of excluded products, including food and children's clothes, the International Monetary Fund signalled yesterday.

In an unusual intervention, the IMF said one of the best ways for the coalition Government to raise money and repair the public finances would be to remove the zero-rate that excluded a number of goods from VAT.

The recommendation came amid suspicion that the Government would also have to raise the level of the sales tax from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent if it was to afford the tax pledges it made in its agreement earlier this week.

Although the IMF's suggestion, published in a comprehensive survey of public finances around the world, was less eye-catching than raising the headline rate, it would potentially have a greater impact on the price of goods, and on families' living standards.

The document, signed by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF's managing director, said: "There is substantial scope for improving the revenue performance of the VAT in almost all countries, including by eliminating exemptions and reduced rates."

VAT is not charged by HM Revenue and Customs on certain items, including food, children's clothes, domestic passenger transport, books and prescription drugs.

The IMF said Britain could raise 3.3 per cent of its economic output – about £50 billion a year – merely by halving the number of exemptions.

It added that despite having among the highest levels of petrol duty in the Western world, Britain could afford to increase fuel taxes slightly more, raising a further £3 billion.

The suggestions were likely to fuel suspicion that George Osborne, the Chancellor, would raise a series of taxes, including VAT, at the emergency Budget, which is due to take place within 50 days.

City commentators, including Robert Chote, the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and 24 of the 28 economists regularly surveyed by the Treasury, pinpointed the sales tax as the most likely candidate to rise in the Budget.

However, few suggested that the Treasury should lift the exemptions, which also included financial services fees. Some warned that increasing VAT on zero-rated items would affect the finances of lower income families in particular.

The IFS calculated in its Green Budget earlier this year that such a move – even at a more limited level, raising only £24 billion – would account for about 7 per cent of the income among low-paid workers.

The increases may be necessary if Britain was to start reducing its deficit, the IMF said.

It pointed out that, over the next few years, Britain would need to reduce its deficit by 9 per cent of gross domestic product – equivalent to £130 billion.

The Government has yet to specify how fast it intended to cut the deficit, although it pledged to cut spending by more than it raised taxes.

Iceland jails and sues banksters

2010-05-13T11:04:00.009+01:00

The AFP publishes a story on the only country in the developed world with enough courage to jail their banksters. We could all do better to imitate the spirit of Iceland's people.

Related:

Iceland: a ray of hope in a dark world
Ireland could learn from Iceland
Ireland should be leading

Maybe there is hope for us afterall.

Bankers jailed, sued as
Iceland seeks culprits for crisis

More than a year and a half after Iceland's major banks failed, all but sinking the country's economy, police have begun rounding up a number of top bankers while other former executives and owners face a two-billion-dollar lawsuit.

Since Iceland's three largest banks -- Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir -- collapsed in late 2008, their former executives and owners have largely been living untroubled lives abroad.

But the publication last month of a parliamentary inquiry into the island nation's profound financial and economic crisis signaled a turning of the tide, laying much of the blame for the downfall on the former bank heads who had taken "inappropriate loans from the banks" they worked for.

On Wednesday, the administrators of Glitnir's liquidation announced they had filed a two-billion-dollar (1.6-billion-euro) lawsuit in a New York court against former large shareholders and executives for alleged fraud.

"I think this lawsuit is without precedence in Iceland," Steinunn Gudbjartsdottir, who chairs Glitnir's so-called winding-up board, told reporters in Reykjavik.

"It is about higher figures than we have ever seen," she said, adding that she expected Glitnir to file more lawsuits going forward, but that "it is unlikely any will be this big."

Glitnir said it was suing "Jon Asgeir Johannesson, formerly its principal shareholder, Larus Welding, previously Glitnir's chief executive, Thorstein Jonsson, its former chairman and other former directors, shareholders and third parties associates with Johannesson for fraudulently and unlawfully draining more than two billion dollars out of the bank."

The bank also said it was "taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by Johannesson and his associates, which ultimately led to the bank's collapse in October 2008."

Glitnir's suit, filed in the New York state Supreme Court on Tuesday, blamed most of the bank's woes on "Johannesson and his co-conspirators," who had "conspired to systematically loot Glitnir Bank in order to prop up their own failing companies."

Johannesson, the former owner of the now-defunct Baugur investment group with stakes in a number of British high street stores including Hamleys, Debenhams and House of Fraser, said he was shocked by the lawsuit.

"The distortions and the nonsense in the lawsuit are incredible," he told the Pressan news website.

Glitnir's administrators "can get a 10-year-prison sentence for misusing US courts in this manner," he insisted.

The bank's chief administrator Gudbjartsdottir took his comments in stride.

"I didn't expect him to be happy with the lawsuit," she said.

In addition to its New York suit, Glitnir said it had "secured a freezing order from the High Court in London against Jon Asgeir Johannesson's worldwide assets, including two apartments in Manhattan's exclusive Gramercy Park neighbourhood for which he paid approximately 25 million dollars."

Gudbjartsdottir said Johannesson had just 48 hours to come up with a satisfactory list of his assets.

"If he does not give the right information he faces a jail sentence," she said.

Four former Kaupthing executives, who all live in Luxembourg, have meanwhile been arrested in Iceland in the past week and Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for that bank's ex-chairman, Sigurdur Einarsson.

Former head of the bank's domestic operations, Ingolfur Helgason, and former chief risk officer Steingrimur Karason were arrested late Monday on arrival from Luxembourg, just days after former Kaupthing boss Hreidar Mar Sigurdsson, along with Magnus Gudmunsson, who headed the bank's unit in Luxembourg, were taken into custody.

The 49-year-old Einarsson, who lives in London, said late Tuesday he had no plans to travel to Iceland to be arrested.

"I'm absolutely flabbergasted about the latest news," he told the Frettabladid daily.

"There is in my opinion no need for the arrests or custody rulings, and I will not of my own free will take part in the play that it appears is being staged to soothe the Icelandic people," he said.

"I'll put the human rights I enjoy here in Britain to the test and will not therefore come home (to Iceland) to these conditions without being forced," he added.

Polish plane crash - Shocking video

2010-05-05T14:06:00.003+01:00

Digital Enhancement
Of Polish President Plane Crash Site
Footage Reveals Mysterious Activity, Gunshots

The resurgence of populism

2010-05-04T11:24:00.010+01:00

Everything old is new again. As 'we the people' are being slowly boiled like frogs in a lukewarm pot, some are jumping out. As austerity cuts in budgets and social services hit more and more, people are getting pissed off. And increasingly willing to do something about it.

History is repeating itself in country after country; the fat cats v. the rest of humanity. The answers for today's problems are the same as always: the people themselves must stand up and say, 'NO MORE'. As Jim Hightower says: 'Fat cats are no match for alley cats.'

And people are protesting, everywhere; they just don't get the press coverage by the media giants that the politicians and Wall Street get. From peasants in Peru to citizens of Kyrgyzstan, from Iowa to Greece, the people are taking to the streets to take back their power, power which has been abused by an international plutocracy.

The following three videos are from Bill Moyer's Journal. They show the stuff that hope is made of. They are the antidote to cynical apathy. They inspire me to keep on 'keepin on': a grain of sand may be small, but a sand storm can carve into granite cliffs. I hope you will find some inspiration in these interviews with Howard Zinn and Jim Hightower. The third video is about how Iowans took back their power. Each video is approximately 30 min.

Bill Moyers and Jim Hightower
Click here

Iowa Citizens
Click here

Howard Zinn and Bill Moyers
Click here

Half of inmates jailed for non-payment of fines

2010-05-03T14:37:00.005+01:00

A lovely state of affairs we have here in Ireland: debtors prisons. When half the prison population is there for non-payment of government fines, me thinks that history is repeating itself in Ireland. Instead of the English jailing us, we just jail ourselves.

Fair play to Sunday Business Post and Richard Curran/John Burke for bringing the story to light.

If you live in the USA, don't feel left out. Apparently the majority of prison inmates there are guilty of smoking pot.

Read and weep.

Half of inmates jailed
for non-payment of fines

02 May 2010
By Richard Curran and John Burke
Sunday Business Post

Half of all the people who were sent to prison last year were incarcerated for non-payment of fines, new figures reveal.

In the first ten months of 2009, 3,300 people were sent to prison for failing to pay fines.

A continuation of that pattern for the final two months of the year would leave the full-year total equal to half of all those placed in prison last year, according to Professor Ian O’Donnell of the Institute of Criminology at University College Dublin.

O’Donnell said that the number of people in Irish prisons was set to top 100 per 100,000 of the population for the first time since the foundation of the state. When remand prisoners are included the figures are even higher, according to O’Donnell.

‘‘The numbers in prisons have been creeping up, and it is part of an alarming trend," he said.

Breaching the 100 per 100,000 figure crossed a ‘‘significant threshold, taking Ireland from a comparatively low prison population to a middle ranking level by EU standards’’, added O’Donnell.

The growing numbers in prison for non-payment of fines reflects the economic downturn, ac cording to O’Donnell. He condemned the trend, which ‘‘breaks up families, while failing to recover the fine, and costs the state a lot of money’’.

Meanwhile, a previously-unpublished report has found that diseases such as hepatitis C are ‘‘endemic’’ in Irish prisons.

The examination, carried out by public health experts, found that medical infrastructure at more than one-third of the state’s 14 prisons was ‘‘unsuitable’’ for meeting patient health needs. Some equipment in use was found date back to Victorian times, the experts concluded.

Related: Prison population increased in '08

Number of committals for non-payment
of fines and RTA offences 1990-2006

Source: http://www.crimecouncil.gov.ie/statistics_cri_prison_table3.html

We DO know who you are

2010-05-02T21:49:00.006+01:00

This is a real television commercial in the USA.

CIA agent with crack pipe tased

2010-05-01T19:53:00.004+01:00

Ex-CIA Star Accused of Rape Tasered Twice
During Arrest, Had Gun, Crack Pipe

Click above link to story and video.

And if you like that one, you're gonna love this one.

Naked, drunk, surrounded by sex toys - it's the Israeli ambassador

It's OK to tase children...Really!

2010-04-27T11:09:00.003+01:00

Wouldn't you know it? Tasing children falls under the guidelines for taser use by law enforcement. In fact it's probably safer for them (the cops AND the kids) - just ask law enforcement specialists. I wonder if parents tasing children would be child abuse; spanking is.

10 year old tased

An act of war - Ron Paul to Congress

2010-04-26T15:21:00.007+01:00

Ron Paul's message is about as public as it can get. Who doesn't still have a slumbering incling that what is he saying, is true. But he has put it so succinctly to the American people (and the world), I am impressed with his candour. If after reading this short speech, you would like to see the reason why what Paul is saying is true, have a look see at this chart on the 2009 DOE on world oil depletion: The Imminent Crash Of The Oil Supply

An Act Of War

By Congressman Ron Paul

Statement of Congressman Ron Paul - United States House of Representatives

Statement on Motion to Instruct Conferees on HR 2194, Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act - April 22, 2010

April 23, 2010 "United States House of Representatives"

Mr. Speaker:

I rise in opposition to this motion to instruct House conferees on HR 2194, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act, and I rise in strong opposition again to the underlying bill and to its Senate version as well. I object to this entire push for war on Iran, however it is disguised. Listening to the debate on the Floor on this motion and the underlying bill it feels as if we are back in 2002 all over again: the same falsehoods and distortions used to push the United States into a disastrous and unnecessary one trillion dollar war on Iraq are being trotted out again to lead us to what will likely be an even more disastrous and costly war on Iran. The parallels are astonishing.

We hear war advocates today on the Floor scare-mongering about reports that in one year Iran will have missiles that can hit the United States. Where have we heard this bombast before? Anyone remember the claims that Iraqi drones were going to fly over the United States and attack us? These “drones” ended up being pure propaganda – the UN chief weapons inspector concluded in 2004 that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ever developed unpiloted drones for use on enemy targets. Of course by then the propagandists had gotten their war so the truth did not matter much.

We hear war advocates on the floor today arguing that we cannot afford to sit around and wait for Iran to detonate a nuclear weapon. Where have we heard this before? Anyone remember then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s oft-repeated quip about Iraq: that we cannot wait for the smoking gun to appear as a mushroom cloud.

We need to see all this for what it is: Propaganda to speed us to war against Iran for the benefit of special interests.

Let us remember a few important things. Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never been found in violation of that treaty. Iran is not capable of enriching uranium to the necessary level to manufacture nuclear weapons. According to the entire US Intelligence Community, Iran is not currently working on a nuclear weapons program. These are facts, and to point them out does not make one a supporter or fan of the Iranian regime. Those pushing war on Iran will ignore or distort these facts to serve their agenda, though, so it is important and necessary to point them out.

Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to “work” – to change the regime – war became the only remaining regime-change option.

This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war.

COMMENTS

I always like to read the posted comments - sometimes they tell more than the article.

Here is my comment: ["He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." -Einstein]

Zengine · 2 days ago
Always have admired Paul. He speaks truth, even if he can't take a joke.

orbital · 2 days ago
Israel's too smart to launch a strike against Iran. They'll bide their time, ride the public wave of discontent and wait until they can get the US/EU to do their bidding... just like they did with Iraq. It's all about timing.

John S. Hatch · 2 days ago
Sanctions against Iraq didn't inconvenience Saddam in any way, but they killed up to a million innocent Iraqis, including a half-million children, something that ex Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared to be 'worth it'.

Iran never threatened or attacked the US, but the CIA removed a democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953. His 'crime'? Wanting control of Iranian oil for Iranians. America installed the hated Shah, who could only maintain control through the use of Savak, his savage secret police. Then America wonders why radical mullahs took over and expressed popular hatred for everything American. Who could blame them?

Now, using the same tired old lies that led to the illegal and inhuman invasion of Iraq, America, which never seems to learn anything, prepares to attack Iran, perhaps drawing China and Russia into a broader war, maybe the final one.

America remains the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. For shame.

arthurdecco · 2 days ago
My gawd! What a sensible man! (At least on this subject.)

carmen · 2 days ago
I met a friend of mine who get removed from government health insurance because his income of $ 1100 a $ 23 over the limit of eligibility...a government that think $ 23 can makes a difference in a life or death situations to one of her citizen deserve to spit on it...sorry can't find other more polite expressions...but they can spend trillions on a cause that will never benefit us ..benefits our parasite....

oyate · 2 days ago
Here's one of his recent--AND ALL TIME BESTS. He talks to the Teocons and totally puts the whole deal in their faces.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr8XSUTALYI

Guest · 2 days ago
Both Houses of Congress have sold out to the jews.

GORBALT · 2 days ago
I don't see Ron Paul as anyone special merely because he can recognize a few facts that any studious high-school boy or girl could also find. But it's a wonder that so few members of Congress are familiar with these simple facts, a wonder that so few can recognize lies and propaganda. What is the explanation of this? Is it that other members are just stupid, or that they have all been bought off? If this is the case then why hasn't Paul been eliminated by the same methods? Why has an opponent not run effectively against him and used lies and accusations of terrorist sympathies and disloyalty to the US to oust Paul from his seat? What the hell makes him immune?

Who are Paul's constituents? I really don't know what part of Texas he's from and why the people there elect someone so different. It's a similar situation with Kucinich, who mouths a lot of progressive principles whether you take him as genuine or not, and who represents people of rust-belt Cleveland who I really don't think are as progressive as Kucinich sounds. I don't understand how even a few reality-based people are still standing. Explain this to me.

BDJUSA · 2 days ago
Was doesn't Ron Paul have the courage to admit that the Israeli Lobby is behind these sanctions and the clamor to murder Iranians? The Israeli Lobby and the high ranking Zionists brought us the Iraq war. Israel's intelligence agency the Mossad masterminded the 911 attacks. The Israeli governments our enemy not our friend

hayate · 2 days ago
The usa is gung ho for war against iran.

Why?

Because zionazis run the usa and zionazis want zionazi control over everybody and everything. This is of course ordained by god.

But wont war with Iran further erode an already faltering ami economy.

Who cares, they're expendable, well worth sacrificing to further empower zionazi, inc. And besides, the zionazis own Europe, as well, and whatever drop in baksheesh they skim in the usa, they can squeeze out of the European colonies. The usa is rich enough, and big enough, that they wont go completely under, and will still be useful as cannon fodder and enforcers.

More comments from original article here.

IMF says 'Suck it up, the party's over.'

2010-04-25T10:18:00.005+01:00

For those of you who know what this means, read and weep. For those of you who don't, you soon will. It effectively means a democratic loss in creating fiscal policy. The people of the EU PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) countries will understand in short order that all their demonstrations against pay and service cuts, no matter how justified, will be for naught. How EU member states spend their tax money will be overseen by the IMF.

"You will see many headlines complaining and moaning and stirring the pot," Lagarde said, as issues such as pension reform are debated. But ultimately, she said, "there is no way out."

For nations living the good life, the party's over, IMF says

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 24, 2010

In the lingo of the International Monetary Fund, the future of the world hinges on "rebalancing and consolidation," antiseptic words that would not seem to raise a fuss.

Who doesn't want more balance in their life?

But the translation is a bit ruder, something on the order of: "Suck it up. The party's over."

To keep the global economy on track, people in the United States and the rest of the developed world need to work longer before retiring, pay higher taxes and expect less from government. And the cheap imports lining the shelves of mega-chains such as Wal-Mart and Target? They need to be more expensive.

That's the practical meaning of a series of policy papers and statements issued in recent days by IMF officials, who have a long history of stabilizing economies and solving global financial problems, as they plot a course to keep the world economy growing and reduce the risk of another "great recession."

That message has been delivered subtly, woven into documents with titles such as "Resolving the Crisis Legacy and Meeting New Challenges to Financial Stability," and justified by concepts such as "raising retirement age in line with life expectancy," as IMF economic counselor Olivier Blanchard put it this week.

But fully deciphered, it means a pretty serious reworking of expectations in the developed world: changes in labor rules, product prices, currency values and even the social contract between governments and an aging citizenry.

"It is not that living standards will lower, but they will not increase as fast as they have been," said Domenico Lombardi, a former IMF executive director. The ideas being discussed by world leaders "are coded words," he said. "They don't like words like 'imposing higher taxes' and 'cutting spending.' "

Rebalancing

The IMF has long had a reputation as a bearer of bad news -- it dispatches well-educated and diplomatically deft teams to tell economically troubled countries how many people they have to fire and which programs they have to cut to get financial assistance. But the IMF now finds itself in the odd position of having that conversation not with a single ailing sovereign but with the developed countries at the core of the world system, including the United States.

Its prescription is centered on two concepts.

"Rebalancing" is an idea that most everyone endorses -- including the technicians at the fund and President Obama and the leaders of the G-20 group of economically powerful nations. In broad strokes, it means curbing what has been a massive transfer of capital from nations that consume more than they produce, such as the United States, to nations that produce more than they consume, such as China.

The imbalance has been key to China's modernization: The country buys U.S. government bonds by the tens of billions to keep the dollar stronger than it would be and to keep its domestic currency -- and its exports -- cheaper. Looked at one way, the flow of U.S. debt to the People's Bank of China has acted like a giant, collective credit card, underwriting consumers across the United States and driving the business models of major retailers such as Wal-Mart.

The message from the IMF is that the card is about maxed out and that the imbalance in trade flows needs to be corrected.

How to do it? One way is for China -- or Asian exporters, more generally -- to let their currencies rise on world markets. The other way, which IMF economist Blanchard raised this week, would be to devalue the dollar, the euro and other developed-world currencies.

"The advanced economies as a whole may need to depreciate their currencies so as to increase their net exports," Blanchard said.

The less well-advertised side of the equation: If the dollar is worth less, then imports, regardless of their source, will cost more. U.S. exports will be proportionately cheaper -- a good thing for American businesses trying to become more competitive in overseas markets -- but everything from iPods to jeans to the latest Barbie doll would jump in price.

The ideas offered by the IMF "could certainly reorder the balance of the international economy, but not in a way that benefits the average person in the U.S.," said J. Craig Shearman, vice president of government affairs for the National Retail Federation.

He continued: "If a few factories have an increase in exports, that is good for them, but it leaves the vast majority of people paying more for consumer goods. Talking about consuming less and saving more is a nice, ivory tower approach. But it is not real world economics. People have to put clothes on their children's backs and food on the table."

Wal-Mart declined to comment.

Consolidation

"Fiscal consolidation" is another idea promoted by IMF leaders. Again, the aim seems unobjectionable: The United States and other developed-world governments ran record deficits during the crisis, both to pay for stimulus programs and because tax and other receipts cratered. Across the developed world, the IMF says, government debt will rise from about 80 percent of economic output before the crisis to roughly 115 percent of output in 2014.

That's considered a dangerous trajectory, and IMF officials say that by next year, governments need to announce "credible" plans to cut their annual deficits, turn them into surpluses and start paying off what is owed.

The level of the correction needed is large, perhaps 10 percent of gross domestic product. In the United States, that would amount to roughly $1.4 trillion annually, to be cut from government programs or raised through new taxes.

Better-than-expected growth would help, or increases in productivity, or even surprises in the form of new technologies. But what's on the horizon is, more likely, a difficult reckoning -- one that Greece is facing and that other developed nations know is in the offing, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said in an interview Thursday.

"We're all in the same boat," Lagarde said as she looked ahead to a tough debate in France over changes in pension rules that will make not just government workers but also many in the private sector add years before their expected retirements.
ad_icon

The IMF is studying issues such as which taxes should be raised and which programs should be cut to make "consolidation" as painless as possible. But it views a longer working life as an important tool -- one that would save large amounts of money in the future without cutting spending and decreasing economic activity today.

In the United States, a new fiscal commission is beginning to study how to bring U.S. government debt into line.

"You will see many headlines complaining and moaning and stirring the pot," Lagarde said, as issues such as pension reform are debated. But ultimately, she said, "there is no way out."

Group Gathers Signatures for Taser Restrictions

2010-04-23T16:07:00.012+01:00

As we come into the age of advanced weaponry and surveillance used against citizens by law enforcement, the laws against abuses will take time to emerge and come into effect: perhaps years. Ironically the surveillance used on ordinary citizens has now captured police officers using the taser inappropriately in instances where such force was unnecessary. Officers Caught on Camera Increase Scrutiny

The internet (and this blog) is awash with horrifying videos of taser abuse. Anyone who hasn't watched at least some of these should have a look-see.

taser deaths

california taser abuses

Such injustices and perversion of human rights will eventually draw heroes from the people themselves - who will demand that laws protect their rights against taser-happy cops who can explain away every taser incident as 'justified'. (Sounds a bit like the bankster rationale - after all, they weren't breaking any laws.)

The story below is of just such people, who have taken to the streets to bring about change to laws involving the use of tasers on citizens. I salute them for their courage.

Group Gathers Signatures for Taser Restrictions
Click above link to view video

By Stacia Kalinoski
April 10, 2010

EUGENE, Ore. -- Outrage over EPD's use of taser guns has spurred one man to try and change the policy.

Randy Prince wants a city ordinance that classifies tasers as deadly weapons. He brought the idea before the public at the Saturday Market, recruiting others to help him gather signatures. He's hoping to find enough names to put the proposal on the November ballot.

Though no one has died from being stunned by EPD, Prince says it has happened elsewhere, and therefore says it makes sense to place it under the same restrictions as a firearm.

He wants to limit taser use to the very serious cases, and says an ordinance will help decrease potential abuse of the weapon by officers.

"We think by carrying this petition that it's not enough to advise the police chief through some city council committees. We want the principal established that people shouldn't be killed over lesser offenses, and the problem is, is that the taser does kill," he said.

Prince needs more than 12,000 registered Eugene voters in the next three months to get this on the November ballot. Saturday, he recruited nearly 20 others to help him, and he plans to hit the campus area hard the next few weeks to gather signatures.

Prince said this measure could also regulate civilian use. While not putting a ban on tasers, he said new rules could change how residents use tasers for self defense.

Related: Taser International sued for product causing cardiac arrest

The power you gave them...

2010-04-02T14:37:00.005+01:00

"The power you gave them to torture me, rape me ... search me naked and to present me in court, I am dead....

I was dead the first time I was raped.

...I do not consider you a judge, a court!...

This country [USA]. Leave me alone or send me back to my country Pakistan."

-Dr. Aafia Siddiqui during court hearing Feb 2010

I do not wish to preach to the choir on the issue of Aafia Siddiqui: I have blogged several times on her plight. For those of you who are unfamiliar, click on one of the following links and read the first two paragraphs in any one. My purpose here is to get those who are too busy, just living, to ask questions about their own responsibility as to their role in creating governments who have such power and such control over the media, as to inflict upon a person, that which Aafia Siddiqui has, so far, suffered.

My purpose here is to present for all readers the opportunity to awaken in themselves compassion, and courage to take back the power they have given away to their repressive governments, in many countries.

If the people lead, the government must follow. -anon

Before we can run we must walk, and before we walk we must crawl. First though, we must desire to move; and if in tiny episodes of awareness and compassion, we must crawl toward controlling our governments, then I hope Aafia's story is the beginning of a beginning for more and more people. A moment of curiosity is all it takes to stir the best in human nature. All that is required is a willingness to be aware.

Today is Good Friday, the day on which Jesus was crucified. Though I do not celebrate Holy Days in the traditional sense, including Easter and Christmas, I always like to have a good think about the meaning of the event the holiday commemorates.

Many people have been crucified, physically and symbolically, through abuse of power throughout history. They lie in unknown graves,vanquished and anonymous, the pain which they suffered consigned to oblivion. They have been the victims of power weilded by those who wish to rule as much of the universe as they can manage. We shall never know them all.

If the lament of Good Friday is anything, it is the sadness we feel that Jesus, duly convicted in a court of law, was executed on Good Friday for his policy of preaching love and forgiveness. Sedition was his crime. He was convicted by the people themselves and meted the horrible death He suffered, by the people.

I think this should raise some questions in our collective psyche about the individual integrity that is required for a democracy to function for 'good' instead of 'evil'.

I hope this story of Aafia awakens in us the power we possess, unused, to create a better world for our children.

Links for Aafia's recent US trial:

Justice for Aafia

IMF to create policy for EU coutries

2010-03-27T00:53:00.002Z

Read and weep all those of you who voted yes to Lisbon. At least those of you who understand the implications of this change.

Greek Plan Extends IMF's Sway

Iceland: a ray of hope in a dark world

2010-03-23T05:17:00.007Z

For a while now, I have been lamenting about the demise of real democracy. An ignorant populace cannot really be democratic because knowledge is necessary for free choice. What passes for knowledge these days is what the mass media tells people is happening. And people digest this propaganda whole, sheltering themselves in apathy because either they feel politically impotent, or they have no concept of the obligation each person has to seek the truth when exercising one's vote in a democracy.

People who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. To protect ourselves from becoming zombified media consumers, we need freedom of information to empower people.

In all this darkness of today's economic and political meltdown, there is a single ray of light which Ireland would do well to follow: Iceland. Birgitta Jonsdottier has come forth to lead her country in practicing real democracy, of the people, for the people and by the people.
The people of Iceland were hit hard by the banking collapse - but they did something about it. They demanded that the people VOTE on the use of their tax money to pay off debts caused by the deriviative fraudsters. They also demanded freedom of information about what their government was doing. In short, the implemented real democracy for their island.

I needed the hope Icelanders are giving me: that people can take control of their country's government and future - if they want to - non-violently and democratically.

The interview below explains the changes the people of Iceland have made following the collapse of their banks. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have.

Find the next two parts of the interview here.

Preventative detention? Who cares?

2010-03-12T10:58:00.010Z

I think in the end, We the people will get what we deserve...the consequences of ignorance and indifference. Most Americans (or Irish people) don't even know the laws passed to take away their rights, nor do they care to learn about them...too much anxiety.

Here is just another example in the long line of draconian laws passed to 'protect' people from them thar 'terrorists'.

Who cares? We can't do anything about it anyway.

OR.....What in the hell is Posse Comitatus....and....who cares?

People who can't be bothered to defend their freedoms may not deserve them.

Wonder why I am disgusted?

Marines at DUI roadblocks

The evaporation of privacy and freedom

Man arrested/convicted for complaining to government

Ireland could learn from Iceland

2010-02-19T08:20:00.005Z

The difference between the two countries is much greater than just one letter in their spelling. Both have suffered devastating economic collapse. Both are islands.

But the response of the people and governments to the crisis of today is quite different. Ireland is still trying to emulate the US style of business and to boost itself with the same strategy that gave birth to the Celtic Tiger: attracting foreign direct investment (jobs from foreign multinationals). Apparently, the leaders have not learned what Einstein said: One cannot fix a problem with the same thinking that created the problem.

Ireland is still hot to attract those major corporate employers to save the country. It is difficult to understand how so many do not notice that most of Ireland's skyrocketing unemployment is the direct result of reliance on foreign corporations (who now find Irish workers too expensive). Iceland, which suffered a much greater economic collapse is using another strategy: to reinvent itself. As someone once said, 'Insanity is not doing something entirely strange: it is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results'.

Iceland is forging ahead with a government that is now much more responsive to the people of Iceland - of course they did have to overthrow it to accomplish this, but then, that is the way of history. Iceland is going to make itself the global center of internet freedom of expression with the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. The plan is brilliant: it not only supports the values of the people but promises to stimulate the economy and make Iceland a unique haven in the world.

"The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative addresses the key issues for free expression in the digital age, and may yet be the catalyst for the kind of legislative reforms that all 21st Century democracies will need." —Index on Censorship

"I am proud to advise the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative's proposal to create a global safe haven for investigative journalism. I believe this proposal is a strong way of encouraging integrity and responsive government around the world, including in Iceland. In my work investigating corruption I have seen how important it is to have have robust mechanisms to get information out to the public. Iceland, with its fresh perspectives and courageous, independent people seems to be the perfect place to initiate such an effort towards global transparency and justice." —Eva Joly MEP

I urge you to glance through the link above. The entire idea inspires hope in an age of darkness and demonstrates that people must demand their governments implement legislation which reflects the will of the people.

To my mind, this is not the case in Ireland. People are frightened here; and that fear of loss of the 'good life' or perhaps even a 'decent life' clouds their anger toward a government which has become entrenched in Jurassic age economic thinking - following the USA down the rosy path. People are grasping at straws and not yet damaged enough to say, 'Enough is enough!'

In only the past week, three high government officials left office; two because of the grinding mechanisms of the current political culture and another resignation due to perjury in the High Court. Yet it's only a bit of gossip. Public sector employees demonstrated against paycuts in the last budget. But these are the same people who voted to give away our fiscal power to Brussels by voting 'yes' on Lisbon. In essence, they voted themselves their own paycuts - and they didn't even know it. They followed Fianna Fail's party position without really looking at the issues the 'no' side was questioning. Now, they are clueless.

Had the Irish government listened to its own public sector employees protesting, it would have gotten the same treatment the EU is now giving Greece: austery cuts in public services mandated in Brussels. Ireland could re-invent itself as Iceland is doing.

The country has much to offer as a leader in the world. Ireland could brand itself the capital of organic farming and cuisine. It could market its unique history and scenic green hills to China. It could imitate the Swedish system of social welfare and medical care. I am sure there are many other ideas for Ireland to use its unique assets to create employment and economic growth.

But it won't happen. Because, unlike the Icelanders, the Irish are afraid to take their government to task for the purpose it was created: to serve the citizens. Things are not bad enough here - people will not rebel until they must. The major parties here are filled with the equivalent of American 'good ole boys'. They are a blast from the past...and intend to keep things that way.

I am thinking Iceland looks pretty good. It will not be long until Ireland is simply a dancing puppet on the EU stage chasing the specter of the glory days of the Celtic Tiger. But the people voted this in - isn't democracy great!

We the people, wherever we are, will not get a better shake until we demand it. This is the real lesson from Iceland. I admire the courage of the people there and wish them the best in this new endeavour. And I hope we Irish learn something from them.

Government stores your baby's DNA

2010-02-14T02:45:00.008Z

I blogged about this in December, 2008 Baby's DNA now stored in National Database - It's the law: but few believed me.

I guess now that CNN has come out with verification of this fact - people may pay attention. Or will they? There is hardly a damn thing anyone can do about it anyway.

Maybe watching Gattaca might wake some of us up. Oh no, wait, that's science fiction, isn't it?

This video may be found on Youtube if it is removed from this site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF4VdCIoUkY&feature=youtu.be&a

Cradle to Cradle thinking - Waste = Food

2010-02-11T05:25:00.007Z

During the recent snow storms, I was housebound for many weeks except for a trip to the local post office/grocery store. It wasn't too bad - I survived. However, during this period the trash accumulating in the house began to become a problem.

I have bags and bins for all sorts of recyclables; but inevitiably there is refuse I cannot recycle. The bins over flowed with plastic bottles from water, washed cat food and aluminum cans, glass jars and bottles...etc. But the worst was when the kitchen became so cold, the refrigerator shut down. The inside of the frig was warm compared to the room and everything inside grew mold: all the frozen food thawed and went bad. This made more garbage - and unpleasant at that. Outside the road was impassable.

I began thinking how much waste in packaging I had accumulated from consumables in just over six weeks. Garbage is a big issue in my life - and I live a fairly spartan existence. The problem is not what to do with garbage though: the problem is how to design a system that does not produce it.

Enter 'Cradle to Cradle' (C2C) thinking.

Today, with our growing knowledge of the living earth, design can reflect a new spirit. In fact, the authors write, when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems—the effectiveness of nutrient cycling, the abundance of the sun's energy—they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist.

Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough & Michael Braungart

Video

One cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created the problem. -Albert Einstein

William McDonough is now working with China to help design C2C towns.

Wonder why I am disgusted?

2010-01-29T05:38:00.004Z

These two videos sum it up pretty well.

Would Americans sign a petition to repeal the First Amendment?

How about a petition to increase inflation to 100% per year?!

Vaccine causes miscarriages

2009-11-17T16:35:00.002Z

Here is an article of testimony from women who lost their babies immediately after receiving the H1N1 vaccine. It's pretty scary, especially since these are real people reporting, not agencies of the government.

Source

Good riddance to Rupert Murdoch's yellow journalism

2009-11-13T11:31:00.007Z

Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation) is going to start charging for internet content from his media empire. Read the story here.

I say, Good fecking riddance!!! Murdoch can take his propaganda from the net and search engines; and the world will be a better place for it. Other more honourable media feeds will quickly fill the hole left by what he assures us is 'news'. (Isn't that what capitalism is all about?)

Watch this short video to see how reporters feel about the intervention of 'corporate strategy' on the ethics of journalism.

Globelisation and the internet

And as an added benefit, I won't have to sift through all the garbage his publications fill the search engine news pages with. Perhaps we can have real news then, which is not motivated by the corporatised agenda of more, more, more, profit, profit, profit. Perhaps we can get a bit of unvarnished truth for a change. Maybe the real 'spirit of journalism' will be reborn.

So Good Riddance to the Murdoch empire's propaganda. For in my humble opinion, you should have to PAY US to read your crap.

Info Overload

2009-11-12T02:43:00.003Z

I haven't posted for a couple weeks, not because I have not found articles worth sharing; but rather because I have reached saturation point in how much information I can digest comfortably. To some extent, the majority of folks reach this point. My particular response is to freeze. If I need time to chew the cud, then that is what I need.

I appreciate those of you who have followed my blog and those who have enriched my perspective with their blogs. I know you are still there carrying on; and this is what gives hope to a better future. Thank you for your support and comments.

I am just going to take a break. And then I will recover my fervor.

In the interim, please feel free to review my older posts. I often find items there I had forgotten about entirely. And feel free to remind me of anything you think I may have forgotten about.

Peace and Passion

Sheilnagig

2009-10-29T17:42:00.004Z

Moyers Interviews Goldstone - Video and transcript

Obama's children will not get vaccine

2009-10-28T11:23:00.002Z

Update....

So it is just announced Obama's kids got the vaccine. I ask: if they were at risk 20 days ago, how did they recover from 'being at risk' in such a short time?

In Germany, A Better H1N1 Vaccine For Politicians?

Well, what do you know? Obama's daughters will not be getting the swine flu vaccine. Hmmm.
I wonder why not? If it's safe for everyone else's children, why not his?

First Daughters Not Vaccinated Against H1N1

The Story of Stuff

2009-10-27T14:56:00.006Z

Part of my purpose in continuing this blog is to bring to readers bits of news and interesting perspectives which people might ordinarily not have time to find.

The video below is quite easy to watch: yet terribly profound. I asked the question of myself some years ago: Who am I without my Stuff? The answer is my journey.

I highly recommend this article on 'Enoughism' along with its links to those who are interested in this question for themselves in today's collapsing consumer culture.

This video below draws the big picture...with a crayon no less. Hope you enjoy it.

10 Steps to end democracy - Naomi Wolf

2009-10-24T14:15:00.003+01:00

How much profit is fair for prescription drugs?

2009-10-23T17:42:00.006+01:00

How much does the average citizen pay for prescribed drugs? What % mark-up is fair for the societies who depend on prescriptions for their daily health?

Research and development costs on patented drugs must be reimbursed. But beyond that, is the sky the limit for the prices on prescription drugs?

Who do pharmaceutical companies serve primarily? Is it their stockholders; or is it the people who consume the drugs? These are questions we should be asking in terms of corporate social responsibility of the major pharma corporations.

Take a look at this mark up list for prescription drugs and see how you feel about it.

Source

Don't get mad. Just do some reading and decide how much is fair for corporate profits in the pharmaceutical industry. Then talk about it to your neighbours and friends, write your Congressman (though I doubt that will help), organise a boycott; just do something even it is only entertaining how outraged you are by these corporate practices.

Decide whether people's health or corporate profits are the goal of a healthy society.

Irish4Palestine: ATTENTION PLEASE READ THIS

2009-10-14T20:18:00.000+01:00

Irish4Palestine: ATTENTION PLEASE READ THIS

Bill Moyers - Kaptur: Cleaning up the gov't aka Wall Street

2009-10-11T13:28:00.005+01:00

I have been a fan of Bill Moyers for decades: he is truly an artist in presenting today's crises in depth and with plain talking clarity. The interview below is with Marcy Kaptur (Dem. Ohio), the outspoken critic from the Heartland who advocates that people evicted not leave their homes, and Simon Johnson. How do the banksters view the tradegies of economic collapse affecting the American people? The answer might shock you. A thoroughly engrossing expose of the banker culture.

Click here to watch the video.

Are we fooked? Have a laugh

2009-10-11T09:16:00.002+01:00

Better have a laugh while we still have our sense of humours left.

Delightful genius in the midst of Chaos

2009-10-09T14:02:00.002+01:00

This video speaks for itself. When the chaos of today has drained my soul of hope, such genius as this woman has - makes my soul smile.

Dollar losing reserve currency status - Engdahl

2009-10-08T05:38:00.006+01:00

Anyone with even a watchful (not necessarily expert) eye on the dollar over the past year and a half, could predict its fall as the world reserve currency. At first the idea seemed absurd and impossible: now the prediction is 99% certain.

Update October 8, 2009

I just can't believe that if a lay person like myself can glean this castrophe lying in wait for the US , that experts such as Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner and Obama could possibly not have figure it out by now. They MUST know.

And if they do know, they are surely preparing for this bomb to hit.

At the last G20 conference in Pittsburgh, the US ceded economic control to the IMF.
Northcom has estabished a disturbing presence acting in the role of the National Guard.
Swine flu has been declared an epidemic effectively activating Directive 51.

And these are only a few of the indicators inside the US: the international pressures which guarantee thedollar losing reserve currency status in recent months are overwhelming.

I wonder what the economic catastrophe will look like in human cost to Americans? It won't be pretty and may very well resemble the economic collapse in Russia in the early 1990's.

If the Big Dogs do know what is coming, it means they are lying like the devil now in redirecting the focus of media attention to 'heathcare' and 'birthers'. I hear alot of clamour about such things; but no on is discussing the consequences of this monumentous change just around the Main Street corner.

Of course, for many other countries this change will mean increased prosperity and economic growth.

The article below by F. William Engdahl neatly explains why the dollar will fall. Americans truly have no hand in their own destiny now - the are up the creek without a paddle - they just don't know it yet. (Could be all the hyper-control freak-indoctrination that passes as education now in the US.)

The next decade will bring changes to civilisation which we could hardly have imagined. What the human cost will be is a question I am almost afraid to ask.

Will the Dollar get an “Arab oil shock”?

by F. William Engdahl
October 7, 2009
Source
Arab oil producing nations and the some world’s largest oil consumers including China and Japan are reliably reported to be secretly planning a long-term exit from pricing their oil trade in dollars. If true, it would spell the death knell for the dollar as world reserve currency, and for the USA as “the” global economic power.

Ever since Washington tore up the Bretton Woods treaty in August 1971 and went onto a “dollar paper reserve system” instead of a dollar backed by gold, the United States, as the world’s most powerful military power, has been able to dictate financial terms to the world. Nations like Japan and later China, dependent on US export markets, would dutifully invest their trade surplus dollars into US Government debt, in effect financing wars such as Iraq or Afghanistan they opposed. They saw no choice. Arab oil producing countries, under US military pressure, were forced to sell oil only in dollars, a direct prop to the dollar when the US economy was in terminal decline. That may be rapidly about to come to an end.

According to a leaked report from Arab Gulf oil producers, there have been a series of secret meetings in recent months between the major Arab oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, and reportedly also Russia, together with the leading oil consumer countries including two of the three largest oil import countries—China and Japan.

Their project is to quietly create the basis to end a 65-year long “iron rule” of selling oil only in US dollars. Following the 400% oil price shock of 1973, which was deliberately blamed by US media on “greedy Arab Shiekhs,” a senior US Treasury official made a secret trip to Riyadh to tell the Saudis in blunt terms that if they wanted US military defense against potential Israeli attack, that OPEC must privately agree never to sell oil in currencies other than the US dollar. That “petrodollar” system allowed the US to run staggering trade deficits and remain the world reserve currency, the heart of its ability to dominate and control world financial markets, until the crisis of the sub-prime real estate securitization in August 2007.

The participants in the oil pricing project reportedly envision using a basket of currencies reflecting producer-consumer trade relations, one backed by gold as a solid backbone. It would not initially be a new currency as some have surmised, but rather an arrangement that would eliminate the risks of pricing oil sales in fluctuating and likely depreciating dollars.

Iran announced recently that in the future it would sell its oil for euros not dollars. According to these reports, the basket of currencies would include a mix of yen, euros, Chinese yuan, gold. Brazil would reportedly join as both a producer and consumer country.

The secret plan was first reported by Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, in the UK Independent.

I have confirmed from very senior and well-informed Gulf sources that the talks are in fact real. The oil producing countries have been fed up for years about having to price their oil in dollars or face US reprisals. They are steadily losing as the dollar depreciates against other currencies and against gold. As most Gulf Arab oil countries depend on imports for much of their economy, dollar pricing de facto introduces serious inflation into their economies as well. Most of their trade is with the EU or other countries outside the US, but now that trade must be mediated through a sinking currency, the dollar.

Following the US declaration of the War on Terror by the Bush Administration after September 11, 2001 most leading Arab oil producing countries privately saw US policy as being aggressively aimed at them. The un-justifiable US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 merely confirmed that as well as subsequent US threats against Iran.

Initially various governments involved in the leaked plan have publicly denied vehemently such a plan. That in no way invalidates that such moves are afoot. The participating countries are well aware that the United States as a wounded tiger can be far more dangerous. The leak of the plans in the world media, whether every detail reported by Fisk is true or not, feeds what is an inevitable decline in the dollar as a reliable reserve currency for world commerce.

What is not clear is what the potential response of Germany and France, the two pivot powers within the EU will be. If they decide to cast their lot with oil producing and consuming countries, they open their doors to vast new trade and investment potentials from the countries of Eurasia. If they cringe from that and decide to remain with the British Pound and US dollar, they will inevitably sink along as the dollar Titanic sinks.

With that decline of the US dollar goes the lessening of the political power of the United States as sole economic and financial superpower. We face very turbulent waters ahead and gold not surprisingly is gaining in this uncertainty.

Copyright © 2009 F. William Engdahl
Editorial Archive

*F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). He also authored A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His newest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is now in print and will be available by mid-June. He may be contacted over his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

SWAT teams ransack senior's home for orchids

2009-10-07T03:38:00.004+01:00

You won't believe this story!

Criminalizing everyone

Monday, October 5, 2009
By Brian W. Walsh
Source
"You don't need to know. You can't know." That's what Kathy Norris, a 60-year-old grandmother of eight, was told when she tried to ask court officials why, the day before, federal agents had subjected her home to a furious search.

The agents who spent half a day ransacking Mrs. Norris' longtime home in Spring, Texas, answered no questions while they emptied file cabinets, pulled books off shelves, rifled through drawers and closets, and threw the contents on the floor.

[To view a portion of what chaos this is, check this video out.]

The six agents, wearing SWAT gear and carrying weapons, were with - get this- the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

That's right. Orchids.

By March 2004, federal prosecutors were well on their way to turning 66-year-old retiree George Norris into an inmate in a federal penitentiary - based on his home-based business of cultivating, importing and selling orchids.

Mrs. Norris testified before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime this summer. The hearing's topic: the rapid and dangerous expansion of federal criminal law, an expansion that is often unprincipled and highly partisan.

Chairman Robert C. Scott, Virginia Democrat, and ranking member Louie Gohmert, Texas Republican, conducted a truly bipartisan hearing (a D.C. rarity this year).

These two leaders have begun giving voice to the increasing number of experts who worry about "overcriminalization." Astronomical numbers of federal criminal laws lack specifics, can apply to almost anyone and fail to protect innocents by requiring substantial proof that an accused person acted with actual criminal intent.

Mr. Norris ended up spending almost two years in prison because he didn't have the proper paperwork for some of the many orchids he imported. The orchids were all legal - but Mr. Norris and the overseas shippers who had packaged the flowers had failed to properly navigate the many, often irrational, paperwork requirements the U.S. imposed when it implemented an arcane international treaty's new restrictions on trade in flowers and other flora.

The judge who sentenced Mr. Norris had some advice for him and his wife: "Life sometimes presents us with lemons." Their job was, yes, to "turn lemons into lemonade."

The judge apparently failed to appreciate how difficult it is to run a successful lemonade stand when you're an elderly diabetic with coronary complications, arthritis and Parkinson's disease serving time in a federal penitentiary. If only Mr. Norris had been a Libyan terrorist, maybe some European official at least would have weighed in on his behalf to secure a health-based mercy release.

Krister Evertson, another victim of overcriminalization, told Congress, "What I have experienced in these past years is something that should scare you and all Americans." He's right. Evertson, a small-time entrepreneur and inventor, faced two separate federal prosecutions stemming from his work trying to develop clean-energy fuel cells.

The feds prosecuted Mr. Evertson the first time for failing to put a federally mandated sticker on an otherwise lawful UPS package in which he shipped some of his supplies. A jury acquitted him, so the feds brought new charges. This time they claimed he technically had "abandoned" his fuel-cell materials - something he had no intention of doing - while defending himself against the first charges. Mr. Evertson, too, spent almost two years in federal prison.

As George Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg testified at the House hearing, cases like these "illustrate about as well as you can illustrate the overreach of federal criminal law." The Cato Institute's Timothy Lynch, an expert on overcriminalization, called for "a clean line between lawful conduct and unlawful conduct." A person should not be deemed a criminal unless that person "crossed over that line knowing what he or she was doing." Seems like common sense, but apparently it isn't to some federal officials.

Former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh's testimony captured the essence of the problems that worry so many criminal-law experts. "Those of us concerned about this subject," he testified, "share a common goal - to have criminal statutes that punish actual criminal acts and [that] do not seek to criminalize conduct that is better dealt with by the seeking of regulatory and civil remedies." Only when the conduct is sufficiently wrongful and severe, Mr. Thornburgh said, does it warrant the "stigma, public condemnation and potential deprivation of liberty that go along with [the criminal] sanction."

The Norrises' nightmare began with the search in October 2003. It didn't end until Mr. Norris was released from federal supervision in December 2008. His wife testified, however, that even after he came home, the man she had married was still gone. He was by then 71 years old. Unsurprisingly, serving two years as a federal convict - in addition to the years it took to defend unsuccessfully against the charges - had taken a severe toll on him mentally, emotionally and physically.

These are repressive consequences for an elderly man who made mistakes in a small business. The feds should be ashamed, and Mr. Evertson is right that everyone else should be scared. Far too many federal laws are far too broad.

Mr. Scott and Mr. Gohmert have set the stage for more hearings on why this places far too many Americans at risk of unjust punishment. Members of both parties in Congress should follow their lead.

Brian W. Walsh is senior legal research fellow in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.

US cedes economic control to IMF

2009-10-07T02:15:00.006+01:00

This is the news you didn't hear about from the G20 that will change the way the world operates. This is the big step toward the NWO, the one that crosses the threshold of the way it was, and the way it will be in the future.

Whether the news is good or bad depends on one's point of view entirely: good for some, bad for others. Remember the IMF has imposed conditions of economic reforms on countries in the past that literally resulted in the death of millions in third world economies. On the other hand, the US fiscal policy will now be controlled by the IMF. One might almost guess that the consequences of the Federal Reserve's deplorably duplicitous decisions of monetary policy and how it affects common people, will now be blamed on the IMF instead of those who caused the economic collapse in the first place.

Do NOT underestimate the consequences of this unreported event at the recent G20. Those who fail to appreciate the monumental importance of this event are destined to grope in the darkness of reforms which will change the standard of living of millions: this time in the West. There is a very good reason the media did not report this event to US citizens.

The real import of the US ceding control to the IMF is yet to be disclosed.

Related

UN calls for new reserve currency

Scott Ritter - More crap on Iran from Obama

2009-10-06T00:46:00.006+01:00

The following short video features Scott Ritter of the IAEA (1991-1998) detailing the position of the IAEA on Iran's capability to produce nuclear weapons and the so called 'discovery' of a new Iranian facility to produce plutonium.

Read Scott Ritter's article here

Video - C-Span - Scott Ritter

Here is another video from Scott Ritter on the wisdom of bombing Iran.

Iran was a democracy before US intervention reinstating the Shah.

Irish YES voters - Meet your new president

2009-10-05T15:38:00.004+01:00

Thanks to the party in power now in Ireland, Fianna Fail and its scare mongering campaign on Lisbon, we will all be represented by the English, again. All you YES voters, be proud, you have returned Ireland to the control of Great Britain.

First Order of Business for Post-Lisbon EU:
Appoint War Criminal As President

Source
Major media outlets from the BBC in Britain to RTE in Ireland are now reporting that the Yes side scored a resounding victory in Ireland's vote Friday on the EU Lisbon Treaty. With the treaty's ratification, the obstacles preventing the total federalization of the EU superstate are now removed.

As the Daily Mail reported earlier this week, one of the first orders of business for the post-Lisbon EU will be to appoint Tony Blair as the first President of the European Union. This move has been fully expected ever since Tony Blair's highly suspect conversion to Catholocism two years ago. Of course, the many laudatory pieces (and even the adversarial ones) we are likely to read about Mr. Blair in the coming weeks will signally fail to mention that he has been accused of numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity including:

- Continuing economic sanctions imposed on Iraq from 1990 until its invasion at the hands of his government in 2003 that resulted in the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.

- Conspiracy to join with another power in a war of aggression (the supreme international war crime).

- High treason in manufacturing a case for war (including the infamous Downing Street Memo).

- Participating in a political and military coalition with the U.S. in Iraq that deployed contravened weapons like white phosphorus.

Of course, the Irish electorate has not only allowed Blair to become the President of the EU. According to the National Platform EU Research and Information Centre, which has compiled a list of 13 Facts About the Lisbon Treaty, they have also created a self-amending treaty that will no longer allow national vetoes on key issues like tax harmonization, crime, transport, energy and public health and services. As the head of the National Platform Anthony Coughlan explained in a pre-vote interview on the significance of the treaty: "It [Lisbon] would establish a kind of European Federation which would in effect have all the powers of a traditional state. And this new EU Federation would then sign treaties with other states in all areas of its powers and would have its own voice at the United Nations and its own foreign minister and its own diplomatic service and so on." Listen to the interview in the audio player below:

Now that the EU has "won" by forcing the Irish public to vote on the Lisbon Treaty until they got it "right," liberty-minded people the world over will have the uncomfortable experience of watching the expansion of this vast new tyrannical superstate headed by unaccountable bureaucrats. Of course, given that the EU has been frustrated in its attempts to undermine national sovereignty again and again and again when the people are actually given a chance to have their say, we can only hope that the entire EU enterprise has been so discredited now that the political opposition to this rising EU Federation will continue to rise.

The coming weeks and months will be the most critical for the creation of this pumped-up regional superpower. One can only hope that the European citizenry will redouble their efforts to stop the inevitable power grabs before it is solidified because the consequences for the entire world if this Nazi-inspired and Bilderberg organized regional monstrosity is created are simply too ghastly to contemplate.

El Baradei's comments on Israel

2009-10-05T01:26:00.006+01:00

I am pretty disgusted with the US rhetoric over Iran. Who does not see through this shite? Are the same ones who believed Sadam had WMDs now believing this pulp fiction about Iran?

David Kelly is dead, no doubt from his activities with the IAEA in confronting Tony Blair's lies from Downing Street to justify the invasion of Iraq. I wonder if El Baradei will be the next to 'commit suicide'.

The propaganda that emanates from western media is unforgivable and pathetically transparent.

ElBaradei says nuclear Israel number
one threat to Mideast: report

2009-10-04
TEHRAN
Source
Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday that "Israel is number one threat to Middle East" with its nuclear arms, the official IRNA news agency reported.

At a joint press conference with Iran's Atomic Energy Organization chief Ali Akbar Salehi in Tehran, ElBaradei brought Israel under spotlight and said that the Tel Aviv regime has refused to allow inspections into its nuclear installations for 30years, the report said.

"Israel is the number one threat to the Middle East given the nuclear arms it possesses," ElBaradei was quoted as saying.

Israel is widely assumed to have nuclear capabilities, although it refuses to confirm or deny the allegation.

"This (possession of nuclear arms) was the cause for some proper measures to gain access to its (Israel's) power plants ... and the U.S. president has done some positive measures for the inspections to happen," said ElBaradei.

ElBaradei arrived in Iran Saturday for talks with Iranian officials over Tehran's nuclear program.

Leaders of the United States, France and Britain have condemned Iran's alleged deception to the international community involving covert activities in its new underground nuclear site.

Last month, Iran confirmed that it is building a new nuclear fuel enrichment plant near its northwestern city of Qom. In reaction, the IAEA asked Tehran to provide detailed information and access to the new nuclear facility as soon as possible.

On Sunday, ElBaradei said the UN nuclear watchdog would inspect Iran's new uranium plant near Qom on Oct. 25.

17 September 2009 | With respect to a recent media report, the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran.

READ HIS LIPS...NO NUKES IN IRAN

US dictatorship - Gore Vidal

2009-10-01T02:54:00.002+01:00

Gore Vidal: ‘We’ll have a dictatorship soon in the US’

Source

September 30, 2009

The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it
Gore Vidal

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.” In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. “Crashed many barriers,” he corrects me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time. But he’s inexperienced. He has a total inability to understand military matters. He’s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.” America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.” Has he met Obama? “No,” he says quietly, “I’ve had my time with presidents.” Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and mutters: “Bang bang.” He is referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated. “Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the capital,” he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better president. “Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they’re good at it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.”The Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there is little difference between the parties. “Remember the coup d’etat of 2000 when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest man in the country, Mr Bush.”

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he’d never moved back to the US to live in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime’s-span of pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. “The only one I knew well was Kennedy, but he didn’t impress me as a good president. It’s like asking, ‘What do I think of my brother?’ It’s complicated. I’d known him all my life and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack had gone, lies started to be told about him — that he was the greatest and the King of Camelot.”

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

Vidal adds menacingly: “Don’t ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren’t any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I’m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect it.”

While materially comfortable, Vidal’s was not a happy childhood. Of his actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: “Give her a glass of vodka and she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my grandparents and my father was a saint.” His parents’ many remarriages means that even today he hasn’t met all his step-siblings.

He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels to deal graphically with homosexual desire. “You’ll be amazed to know it is still going strong,” he says. The “JT” it is dedicated to is James “Jimmy” Trimble, Vidal’s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. “That was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn’t any other. In the new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a great athlete.” Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. “We were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban’s [boarding school]. He was killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2 [intelligence].”

Vidal says Trimble’s death didn’t affect him. “No, I was in danger of dying too. A dead man can’t grieve a dead man.” Has love been important to him? “Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different.

In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs — Live From Golgotha, Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation — which have fully rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that ideal has been corrupted.

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims. “And I was torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma into the Union.” McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber and Vidal charged with desire.

“He’s a filthy, low writer,” Vidal says of White. “He likes to attack his betters, which means he has a big field to go after.” Had he wanted to meet McVeigh? “I am not in the business of meeting people,” Vidal says. “That play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White’s] writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it’s the greatest thing on Earth. He thinks I’m another queen and I’m not. I’m more interested in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar fag-ism.”

Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He was once quoted as saying that he’d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal’s life companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only, love.

Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. “People ask [of he and Austen], ‘How did you live together so long?’ The only rule was no sex. They can’t believe that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by half. They can’t tell the difference between ‘The Sun rose in the East’ and ‘The Sun is made of yeast’.” Was sex important to Vidal? “It must have been yes.”

He is single now. “I’m not into partnerships,” he says dismissively. I don’t even know what it means.” He “couldn’t care less” about gay marriage. “Does anyone care what Americans think? They’re the worst-educated people in the First World. They don’t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke.” You could have been the first gay president, I say. “No, I would have married and had nine children,” he replies quickly and seriously. “I don’t believe in these exclusive terms.”

Impaired mobility doesn’t bother him — he “rose like a miracle” on stage at the National — and he doesn’t dwell on mortality either. “Either you accept there is such a thing or you’re so dumb that you can’t grasp it.” Is he in good health? “No, of course not. I’m diabetic. It’s odd, I’ve never been fat and I don’t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.”

There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. “I would have liked to have been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK’s father] was buying him his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn’t know how lucky he was. Here’s a story I’ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture them. He was really angry. He said, ‘All you read about the Kennedy fortune is untrue. It’s non-existent. We’ve spent so much getting Jack elected and not one of you is living within your income’. They all sat there, shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ‘Mr President, what’s the solution?’ Jack said, ‘The solution is simple. You all gotta work harder’.” Vidal guffaws heartily.

Hollywood living proved less fun. “If there was a social whirl, you can be sure I would not be part of it.” He does a fabulous impression of Katharine Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer, which he wrote. “I hate this script,” he recalls Hepburn saying . “I’m far too healthy a person to know people like this.” Vidal snorts. “She had Parkinson’s. She shook like a leper in the wind.”

I ask what he wants to do next. “My usual answer to ‘What am I proudest of?’ is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation, I have never killed anybody and you don’t know how tempted I have been.”

That wasn’t my question, I say. “Well, given that I’m proudest that I haven’t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.” A perfect line: we both laugh.

Is he happy? “What a question,” he sighs and then smiles mischievously. “I’ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ‘Call no man happy till he is dead’.”

IAEA Chief - No nukes in Iran

2009-10-01T01:13:00.005+01:00

I am just wondering if Elbaradei will be found dead in the woods next, with his wrists slashed. RIP David Kelly...you tried to tell the truth.

Iran not after nuclear weapons,
says IAEA chief

Wed, 30 Sep 2009
Source
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei says he does not believe that Iran has a military nuclear program, adding that the lack of evidence to the contrary supports his belief.

Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei talking to the Indian TV channel CNN-IBN, September 30.

"I do not think... Iran has an on-going nuclear weapons program. Whether they have done some weaponization studies, as was claimed by the US and others, this is one of the issues that are still outstanding," ElBaradei told the Indian TV news channel CNN-IBN.

"But I have not seen any credible evidence to suggest that Iran has an on-going nuclear program today. I hope that they are not having one," he added during the Wednesday interview.

The outgoing director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also touched on Iran's construction of the Fordu nuclear facility. Elbaradei said that he talked to the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization Ali Akbar Salehi, who informed him that the facility was far from complete.

"There are no centrifuges in the facility, there is no nuclear material, it is simply still just ready in term of cables and construction," the IAEA chief quoted Salehi as saying.

Elbaradei also pointed out that the IAEA should conduct an inspection of the facility "as soon as possible."

"Through that [inspection], again, [we can] provide assurance to the international community, that this facility is meant to be a facility devoted for peaceful purposes."

ElBaradei also commented on the impending talks between Iran and the P5+1 (Permanent member of the Security Council plus Germany) in Geneva, and expressed hope that the meeting would "usher in a comprehensive, meaningful dialogue."

"Recently, [Iran has] asked the Agency for assistance in getting fuel for its existing research reactor and asked the Agency to see whether we can be of help," he said, expressing optimism about a possible deal between Iran and the West.

"I was quite pleased to see that there is a very large amount of goodwill on the part of the suppliers to provide fuel for Iran for its research reactor in Teheran. The world is keen, is ready to help Iran to make full use of nuclear energy for nuclear purposes."

Earlier in the month, Iran wrote a letter to the UN nuclear watchdog, saying that it was constructing a second plant for uranium enrichment.

The Agency received Iran's letter 18 months prior to the date set for the plant to enter operational phase. That is one year before Iran was officially obliged to do so, based on the IAEA document INFCIRC/153.

IAEA to get visit schedule
for Iran's new nuclear facility

Source
MOSCOW
September 29 (RIA Novosti)
The head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI) has said the Islamic Republic will provide inspectors from the international nuclear watchdog with a timetable of visits to a new nuclear site.

Tehran revealed last week that it was building a second uranium enrichment plant. The news was met by indignation from the West which suspects Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Ali Akbar Salehi told Press TV late on Monday that the site is being built in line with IAEA regulations, adding that Iran had taken "all the precautionary steps to safeguard its nuclear facilities."

Iran has said on a number of occasions that it only needs nuclear power to generate electricity.

Salehi said his country has no plans to develop nuclear weapons, adding that the nuclear program is peaceful and that having an atomic weapon is "against our ethics and religion."

"It is against our tenets, it is against our religion to produce, use, hold or have nuclear weapons or arsenal, how can we more clearly state our position, since 1974 we have been saying this," he was cited by Press TV as saying.

Update 7/10/09 Leaked Iran paper exposes IAEA rift

Rugfish and politics: Lisbon Treaty delayed "again"

2009-09-29T23:49:00.000+01:00

Rugfish and politics: Lisbon Treaty delayed "again"

A final thought before the Irish Lisbon vote

2009-09-29T13:44:00.002+01:00

One thing has always undermined the will of the people in passing legislation they believe to be beneficial: the riders included in the legislation. It's not the issues one votes for as much as it is the terms within the legislation one does not know about.

Irish people (as well as Americans) should be well acquainted with the technique, e.g. propose peace between the Republic and Northern Ireland (who would vote NO on this?); but include other terms which the people of Ireland would not approve of if the issues were voted on separately.

The Patriot Act in the US was passed with glee by a Congress who never read it. All the nasty little caveats in that piece of legislation I do not think have yet been activated. The Treaty of Lisbon is another such manipulation of voters: give the EP more co-decision power (all would say YES), but, turn over national foreign policy and taxing to the EU; or supercede national policing function with a Brussels ordained protocol.

This is a problem in the structure of legislation in a democracy: bills should be brief and transparent enough for all to understand EXACTLY what they are voting for or against. For this reason alone, I will vote NO...to let Brussels know that the democratic approval of the people will only be given to legislation presented in a clear and understandable format.

If these means chopping monster treaties up like Lisbon into bite size pieces; then Brussels had better start figuring out how to do this.

One thing is for sure: the EU will not stand long as a political power without the support of its citizens. Denying referendums to the member states is either very foolish or suicidal. The union will not stand long as its foundation has a huge crack which Lisbon will not solve: the democratic deficit this treaty creates for all EU citizens.

Revenge of the bees: watch and learn

2009-09-29T13:17:00.002+01:00

Feeling powerless and helpless as a single force for change in the world? Think you little input doesn't matter because you are just one person?

Take a lesson from the bees. One bee sting might hurt: many might cause death. The bees have their thing together when it comes to defending their homes. I had thought humans were supposed to be smarter than bees?

Rescue workers attacked by bees
after truck carrying beehives crashes

Click above url to view video

Jim Corr's letter on Lisbon to Irish Papers

2009-09-26T08:56:00.009+01:00

Media censorship on NO opinions to Lisbon are quite shocking and only those who cannot be ignored are printed. I am reprinting this letter from Jim Corr's website (an excellent source for Irish news). I also wrote a letter to the Irish media and not one of the 15 papers I sent it to printed it.

My Lisbon letter to every paper in the country

Now is the time, for all good men and women,
to come to the aid of their Country!

Written by Jim Corr
Saturday, 19 September 2009 20:13
Source

Dear all,

Within the next few weeks, we have coming, the most important vote of our lives. I will outline my main concerns in relation to this 2nd referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Guarantees: Not worth the paper they're written on. Denmark's stronger protocol promises after their Maastrict no vote have since been over ruled and nullified by the European Court of Justice!

Article 48: The self amending clause or escalator clause. Allows the EU to escalate it's power into new areas WITHOUT coming back to the people for a vote on any changes. So what we have in fact is a treaty that is not set in stone like our own constitution. It is a flexible treaty free to be amended by the EU elite as they wish. This leaves our country and the other individual member states extremely vulnerable! Would you sign a contract on a deal with someone who could legally adjust that contract to favour themselves AFTER you'd signed it ?

Article 2 ECFR: Under Lisbon, The European Charter of Fundamental Rights AND the European Charter of Human Rights become legally binding. Both of those charters are intertwined and will merge.

Article 2 ECFR "Nobody shall be condemned to death, everybody has a right to life" Article 2 protocol 6 of the ECHR which will merge with the ECFR, "A state may make provision for the death penalty in times of war or imminent threat of war". There you have a 'backdoor' whereby the main article can be diluted or negated entirely and this is typical of the deception we will find upon study of the treaty and it's additional charters. Who's to say we are under threat of war, could we trust Tony B'liar who led his nation into war under false pretences and who is in the running to be SELECTED, not elected, as the president of the EU ?

As was stated by our own Charlie McCreevy: 95% of Europeans would vote no to this treaty if given the chance. We the people of this country are their voice, and we owe it to them to make the right decision on Oct. 2nd.

Hasn't the EU been good for Ireland ? We gave the EU 200 Billion worth of our fishing stock. The fishing industry has been decimated as a result. Now our farming industry is under attack, where our farmers are being forced because of EU law to sell milk cheaper than cost, while at the same time becoming ever increasingly crippled under EU bureaucracy. With this pattern in mind would you trust the EU with the Irish economy and our Government ?

I'm all for co-operation with our European neighbours, I just don't want them telling us what to do. I am for co-operation, not domination!

Creeping EU Tip-Toe Totalitarianism: Have you noticed how with each successive EU treaty it has gradually moved from economic integration into political integration ? Watch how civil liberties globally are being incrementally eroded due to this fraudulent 'War of Terror" and now via Phoney Environmentalism. Visit my web-site for more on this.

Is it democracy to keep coming back to the people with the same treaty that we've already voted on ? Is it democracy not to allow the individual member states a referendum on something so crucially important to their futures and the futures of their children's children ? Was it democracy for most individual member states to ratify the treaty against the wishes of the vast majority of their own people even though it was ILLEGAL for them to do so due to We the People of Ireland having already voted this treaty down ?

Where is this progressing towards ? The agenda is World Government, for the many of us that are awake to see, which is clearly outlined in the books written by the elite and their insiders, books they don't count on the general population reading. World Government would not be a bad thing if Angels were going to run it, but the people striving for this are anything but. We are NOT ready for World Government yet, not by a long shot. Again more on this on my web-site.

What this is simply about is POWER going into yet fewer and fewer hands, and those that forget history are doomed to repeat it, because Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely!

This progression MUST be stopped dead in it's tracks, and we can help scupper this agenda by voting NO on the 2nd of October.

There is no question of Ireland being sidelined or pushed out of the EU or the euro-currency if we stand by our No to Lisbon. As Ireland’s EU Commissioner Charlie mccreevy said last December : “There is no provision in the existing treaties to isolate anybody. There is no provision to throw out anybody, unless unanimously all the existing members of the club agreed to throw you out. And I doubt, now or in the future, any Irish Government is going to unanimously agree to throw them selves out.”

Let's be on the right side of history...

God bless you all,

With respect,

Jim Corr

http://www.jimcorr.com/

Related:

coircampaign

13 Critical Lisbon Treaty Facts - Must Read *

NO to a blank cheque for power

Fear and Loathing in Dublin

NO Pulling ahead

Irish4Palestine: ARRESTED & CONVICTED ~FREE SPEECH GONE

2009-09-25T23:20:00.000+01:00

Irish4Palestine: ARRESTED & CONVICTED ~FREE SPEECH GONE

Verichip stock up %186

2009-09-22T00:26:00.008+01:00

VeriChip shares jump after
H1N1 patent license win

Mon Sep 21, 2009 3:21pm EDT
Source
(Reuters) - Shares of VeriChip Corp (CHIP.O) tripled after the company said it had been granted an exclusive license to two patents, which will help it to develop implantable virus detection systems in humans.

The patents, held by VeriChip partner Receptors LLC, relate to biosensors that can detect the H1N1 and other viruses, and biological threats such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, VeriChip said in a statement.

The technology will combine with VeriChip's implantable radio frequency identification devices to develop virus triage detection systems. The triage system will provide multiple levels of identification -- the first will identify the agent as virus or non-virus, the second level will classify the virus and alert the user to the presence of pandemic threat viruses and the third level will identify the precise pathogen, VeriChip said in a white paper published May 7, 2009.

Shares of VeriChip were up 186 percent at $3.28 Monday late afternoon trade on Nasdaq. They had touched a year high of $3.43 earlier in the session.

(Reporting by Mansi Dutta in Bangalore; Editing by Mike Miller and Anil D'Silva)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved

Boston launches flu shot tracking
City to pinpoint areas of
low rates of vaccination

By Stephen Smith Globe Staff
November 21, 2008
Using technology originally developed for mass disasters, Boston disease trackers are embarking on a novel experiment - one of the first in the country - aimed at eventually creating a citywide registry of everyone who has had a flu vaccination.

The resulting vaccination map would allow swift intervention in neighborhoods left vulnerable to the fast-moving respiratory illness. The trial starts this afternoon, when several hundred people are expected to queue up for immunizations at the headquarters of the Boston Public Health Commission.

Each of them will get a bracelet printed with a unique identifier code. Information about the vaccine's recipients, and the shot, will be entered into handheld devices similar to those used by delivery truck drivers. Read more

Related
Get the vaccine or go to jail
Microchips for bowser; Now for you

English call for a referendum on Lisbon

2009-09-21T13:23:00.003+01:00

Lord Tebbit urges David Cameron
to pledge referendum on Lisbon treaty

From The Times
September 15, 2009
Francis Elliott, Deputy Political Editor
Source
Lord Tebbit called on David Cameron yesterday to pledge a referendum on the new EU reform treaty even if it has already been introduced.

The Tory leader is facing increasing pressure to spell out what he will do if, as expected, the Irish vote to ratify the Lisbon treaty just three days before the start of the Conservatives’ annual conference.

A Yes vote next month makes it likely that the treaty will be in force by the general election. Unless Mr Cameron provides activists with a “satisfactory assurance” that he would hold a referendum regardless, he risks losing ground to UKIP, Lord Tebbit said.

The former party chairman said that Mr Cameron should include a commitment to a retrospective referendum in the Conservatives’ next manifesto.
Related Links

Give us any leader but Brown, say voters

Declan Ganley returns to ‘no’ campaign

Cameron must fight the quangocracy

He added: “It’s perfectly clear that when David Cameron originally gave his undertaking it was nothing about the Irish vote at all. It was an undertaking that there would be a referendum. End of message. Full stop. And I think the party would expect that he would stick to that undertaking.

“My understanding is that they’ve reneged on that commitment and if the Irish vote Yes and the treaty is ratified throughout the community Mr Cameron’s only commitment is that he will not let the matter rest there. I don’t know what that means.”

The peer, who has come close to expulsion in recent months for his outspoken remarks on Europe, called on Mr Cameron to demand wholesale changes in the EU.

“Mr Cameron must not forget that things which are set out in the election manifesto, if he wins the election, would not be obstructed in the House of Lords. If he comes up with something after the election which was not in the election manifesto, it is quite possible that the House of Lords might turn it down. That is convention.”

Mr Cameron’s senior colleagues concede that the Irish vote poses a “headache” for him before the party’s annual conference in Manchester. He is being urged by some to tackle the issue head-on.

However, a senior Conservative said that Mr Cameron regarded Afghanistan as his most important foreign policy priority and wished to avoid a long-running battle with Brussels.

Czechs won't sign Lisbon even if Irish vote YES

2009-09-21T13:00:00.003+01:00

Czech Republic 'planning to delay
signing Lisbon treaty'

(Julien Warnand/EPA)

Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer

September 21, 2009
David Charter in Brussels
Source
EU leaders are said to be furious that the Czech Republic is planning to delay signing the Lisbon treaty for up to six months even if the Irish vote "yes" in their referendum next month.

The country might even try to delay it until after the British general election campaign when a Tory victory would see the question put to voters by David Cameron.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who helped to draw up the treaty after the French and Dutch voted against its predecessor, the EU Constitution, has warned Prague that it faces "consequences" if it does not swiftly follow an Irish "yes" with its own ratification.

The outburst followed a private warning from Jan Fischer, the Czech caretaker Prime Minister, to his EU counterparts over dinner at their summit in Brussels last Thursday, it has emerged.

Related Links

Lord Tebbit calls for vote on Lisbon treaty

European leaders come to Gordon Brown's aid

Mr Fischer said that Václav Klaus, the country's unpredictable President, was planning to have a group of loyal senators in the Czech Upper House refer the treaty back to the country's constitutional court for a second time, which could delay ratification for between three and six months.

This would mean that the treaty could still be unratified going into the British general election campaign, expected next April or May. Mr Cameron has pledged that, if the document remained a live issue, even though Britain has completed its own ratification, he would call a referendum on it. This prospect horrifies most EU leaders, given the strong vein of euroscepticism in Britain.

Tensions are already running high among EU leaders over whether the Irish will vote in favour of the treaty on October 2 after a close-run referendum campaign. They are desperate that the momentum of a "yes" is not lost on the eurosceptic Czech and Polish presidents, the final two signatures required for EU ratification.

The treaty further erodes national powers to veto EU decisions, and a Tory government would campaign against it. President Klaus is understood to have told allies that he wants to wait if possible to see if Mr Cameron wins the next election.

Speaking after last Thursday's dinner, Mr Sarkozy said: "I stated clearly that if the Irish say 'yes', there is no question that we will accept to stay in a no-man’s land with a Europe that does not have the institutions to cope with the crisis,” he said.

Asked about what could be done to persuade President Klaus to sign, he added: "It will be necessary to draw the consequences — but those will be the subject of another meeting."

Mr Fischer is acting as caretaker Prime Minister after the Government of Mirek Topolánek fell in the summer and while fresh elections are organised. He has warned privately that he has little control over the country's headstrong President. Speaking to Czech journalists after last week's summit, he admitted: "It is certainly a fact that several government leaders perceive the ratification process in the Czech Republic with a degree of nervousness."

Common Sense about Lisbon

2009-09-20T10:32:00.005+01:00

After all the brouhaha on Lisbon, I have come to see what I must do and why. The reasons have been neatly summed up in the article below. I wish I had written it; but, I didn't. It is delightful to have the issues clarified when so much of the Lisbon Treaty seems to depend on confusing the Irish voter.

Three good reasons to spurn Lisbon once again

06 September 2009
By Vincent Browne
Source
The deceivers and manipulators are out again. ‘Ireland Needs Europe,’ a Fianna Fail poster proclaims. ‘Yes to Jobs, Yes to Europe,’ a Fine Gael one declares. ‘It’s simple, I want a strong voice in Europe,’ another poster proclaims.

Taoiseach Brian Cowen was on radio last Wednesday talking about the other EU member states going ahead without us by inaugurating a ‘‘two-speed Europe’’ if we voted No again. ‘‘It’s in Ireland’s interests to be at the core of Europe," he said.

They rage about the disinformation on the No side, the posters from the last time about conscription, abortion and corporation tax. Those messages may have been bogus, but so are the messages this time from the Yes side. What has the Lisbon Treaty to do with whether Ireland needs Europe or not? The phony implication is that, if we vote No again, we will be rejecting not just the treaty, but the European Union. What has the Fine Gael poster ‘Yes to Jobs, Yes to Europe’ to do with the Lisbon Treaty? Again, it is a sham message suggesting that, if we vote No, we will be voting against jobs and against Europe. As for the ‘‘strong voice’’ stuff, surely the exercise of a strong voice would be to voice our opposition to a treaty that is bad for Europe and, therefore, bad for Ireland, too?

On the two-speed threat, it is impossible for the EU to change the rules and opt for an inner core to proceed towards further integration, while leaving an outer core in a slow lane. It cannot be done, not without us voting Yes to a treaty approving it - and would we be daft enough to do that? Let me repeat: it cannot be done. The main point of the Lisbon Treaty was to streamline decision-making in the EU at a time when it was becoming so large that the old decision-making mechanisms were too cumbersome to work effectively - or so it was thought.

There was also a concession to concerns about the democratic nature of the EU. National parliaments were given a role on EU legislation, and the European Parliament was to be given more competence. But we now find, after five years of working with the old rules, that the EU works just fine and those earlier apprehensions were misplaced. As for the democratic issue, the main problem remains. The Council of Ministers, the main decision-making body, remains unaccountable, as all inter-governmental bodies are (which seems to be the point of them).

The changes also proposed the end of the circus of the rotating presidency, whereby every member state gets to hold the EU presidency for six months. There are 27 member states. The system means that every state has to wait 13-and-a-half years to get its six months of power.

There are obvious logistical problems with this, and some states are better at hosting the presidency than others. Also, there was the ‘problem’ of member states attempting to run their own agendas while they held the presidency. It seemed sensible enough to end that and have just a single presidency - a single president of the European Council, who would hold the position for five years. Allied to that was the idea of having just one person representing Europe on foreign affairs.

That seemed like a good idea too, better than having three people - a commissioner; the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (that’s the job Javier Solana holds at present); and the foreign minister of the country that holds the presidency. But these ‘sensible’ ideas have dangers. The rotating presidency, while messy, did decentralise power in the EU from Brussels, and that was a good idea. Any subversion of the ‘official’ agenda is also no bad thing. A five-year president, by definition, would have to be the creature of the large powers (certainly Germany and France) and he or she would pursue their agenda. As for a single foreign minister, expressing a single voice on foreign policy on behalf of the EU - no way, Jose.

If we’d had that at the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, you can bet your bottom euro w e would all have been embroiled up to our necks in that criminal enterprise - not necessarily militarily, but politically. So where is the case for the treaty? It boils down to us not annoying our partners in the EU at a time when we need their forbearance to ensure the European Central Bank continues to give us credit. Not a great case, is it? Is it really true that the ECB would withhold funds from us as a penalty for voting No again? And doesn’t it say something about the case for voting Yes that it degenerates into blackmail and damn all else? I think there are strong reasons to vote No. Among them are the following.

First: this Lisbon Treaty is a con job, deliberately constructed to deprive electorates in other member states from having a say on the changes it proposes. The treaty is essentially a redraft of the EU constitution that was rejected by the people of France and the Netherlands. It was then reformulated in unintelligible mumbo-jumbo to allow governments in these and other member states to argue that there was no need to have the electorates decide; parliamentary endorsement would suffice. Now the Irish electorate is being asked again to vote for a treaty that is unintelligible. On that basis alone, we should vote No.

Secondly: for the first time, the treaty incorporates into the institutional structure of the European Union the European Defence Agency, whose primary role is to assist the European armaments industry to prosper - in other words, to assist in the refinement of the instruments of killing. We are often told by EU fans how the organisation ensured peace in Europe for 50 years. How, then, can the incorporation of the dogs of war into its institutional structure be justified?

Thirdly: the treaty seeks to centralise power in the EU. We should not have that.

(A-fecking-men is what I say.)

Related

I stay up all night reading treaty, quips McCreevy

Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran

2009-09-18T21:27:00.001+01:00

Secret updates to White House challenge
European and Israeli assessments.

By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Sep 16, 2009
Source
The U.S. intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK. U.S. agencies had previously said that Tehran halted the program in 2003.

The officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, said that U.S. intelligence agencies have informed policymakers at the White House and other agencies that the status of Iranian work on development and production of a nuclear bomb has not changed since the formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's "Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities" in November 2007. Public portions of that report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies had "high confidence" that, as of early 2003, Iranian military units were pursuing development of a nuclear bomb, but that in the fall of that year Iran "halted its nuclear weapons program." The document said that while U.S. agencies believed the Iranian government "at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons," U.S. intelligence as of mid-2007 still had "moderate confidence" that it had not restarted weapons-development efforts.

One of the two officials said that the Obama administration has now worked out a system in which intelligence agencies provide top policymakers, including the president, with regular updates on intelligence judgments like the conclusions in the 2007 Iran NIE. According to the two officials, the latest update to policymakers has been that as of now—two years after the period covered by the 2007 NIE—U.S. intelligence agencies still believe Iran has not resumed nuclear-weapons development work. "That's the conclusion, but it's one that—like every other—is constantly checked and reassessed, both to take account of new information and to test old assumptions," one of the officials told NEWSWEEK. It is not clear whether U.S. agencies' confidence in this judgment has grown at all since the 2007 statement.

This latest U.S. intelligence-community assessment is potentially controversial for several reasons, not the least of which is that it is at odds with more alarming assessments propounded by key U.S. allies, most notably Israel. Officials of Israel's conservative-led government have been delivering increasingly dire assessments of Iran’s nuclear progress and have leaked shrill threats about a possible Israeli military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.

Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, an atomic-weapons expert who follows Iranian nuclear developments closely, said the U.S. government's current judgments will continue to provoke contention and debate. "People are looking at the same information and reaching different judgments," he said. "Given all the developments in Iran, these assessments are hard to believe with any certainty. Nobody's been able to bring total proof either way."

Israel is not the only American ally that has circulated assessments that contradict the U.S. intelligence conclusion that Iran is not currently pursuing nuclear-bomb development. According to German court documents released earlier this year, Germany's foreign intelligence service, known as the BND, reported in 2008 that “development work on nuclear weapons can be observed in Iran even after 2003."

A European counterproliferation official, who also requested anonymity, said that assessments like the one provided by the BND relied significantly on information collected by German and other intelligence agencies about efforts by suspected Iranian agents and front companies to purchase hardware and technology from Western firms that can be used to design or build nuclear weapons. Such equipment and know-how often has "dual uses"—both peaceful and military applications. But some Iranian purchases have appeared highly suspect. German authorities have been pursuing criminal charges against a German-Iranian businessman who allegedly tried to purchase for Tehran ultrahigh-speed cameras and radiation sensors that are built to withstand extreme heat—equipment that experts believe would be quite useful for nuclear-weapons development, though it could also be used for more benign purposes. The Institute for Science and International Security, run by Albright, recently published a paper on the German investigation.

When it first was made public, the November 2007 NIE was criticized by American and Israeli hardliners for playing up conclusions about Iran's having stopped work on nuclear-weapons development while playing down Iranian advances in its efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, which is the most critical, but difficult to manufacture, element of a primitive nuclear bomb. The NIE said that even though Iran had halted its nuclear-weapons program, it had made "significant progress" during 2007 in installing centrifuges used in uranium enrichment, though U.S. analysts believed that, as a result of technical problems with these machines, Iran probably could not produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb before 2010 at the earliest. The Iranians have consistently claimed that they are enriching uranium only for civilian purposes. Low-enriched uranium, which is all that Iran has made so far, is a common fuel for civilian power plants.

U.S. and European counterproliferation experts believe that Iran's centrifuge program has already produced enough low-enriched uranium, an essential precursor to the production of bomb-grade material, to provide feedstock to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb. However, that is an arduous and technically complicated process. Many U.S. and European experts say that Iran is still experiencing technical problems with centrifuges it would use to produce bomb-grade uranium, which could delay any Iranian bomb program for years.

An Obama administration official says that top policymakers are being told that there is no significant disagreement among U.S. intelligence agencies and experts about the latest assessments regarding Iran's nuclear effort. That may encourage the White House's efforts to continue to try to engage Iran in diplomatic dialogue, including discussion of Iran's nuclear ambitions. A spokesperson for National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair's office, which is responsible for producing NIEs and updates on Iranian nukes, had no comment.

© 2009

Oh oh...Global economic growth will drop like a stone

2009-09-18T11:29:00.001+01:00

Protectionism rising despite G-20 vows on trade