1. “Do you love humanity enough to stop illegal US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran?
We know the “leadership” of both the Republican and Democratic parties lied to get into wars against peoples who were no threat to US national security. Both parties’ Presidents were chief spokespersons for lies of commission and lies of omission. The victims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and potentially Iran, were declared as less than worthy of truth, less than deserving of rights, justice, dignity, cooperation, and certainly unworthy of love. These lies to commit illegal Wars of Aggression are fact, not opinion, and can be verified by anyone with the curiosity to read the disclosed evidence from our own Congressional committees
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Do you have the intellectual integrity, moral courage, and love to think, speak, and act for peace when the case against war is so crystal clear? Even if you fear that your answer is “no,” doesn’t your heart and mind call to take this step forward to be the person you’ve always wanted to be? Who you really are is attracted to love and all virtues. You are repulsed by vicious acts, especially non-defensive wars.
And if you need more evidence that the US has been a non-loving influence, consider these lies of omission from your government “leadership” and enabling five corporation “mainstream media:” Iraq now has between 2.5 – 4.5 million orphans, depending on who does the counting. That’s 10-18% of their total population. That’s as if China invaded the US to free us from war-causing government, and approaching eight years after their “gift of freedom,” the US had 30-54 million orphans. And Afghanistan is now ranked in overall quality of life as second-to-last out of 182 countries.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21731
2. It was obvious from the beginning. Car bombs CAN’T cause the damage done to the building, just like a truck bomb COULDN’T have been the cause in Oklahoma City:
“Largest Iraq bombing in two years may have been inside job
“In order to reach their targets, the bombers driving these truck bombs had to pass through several checkpoints that were guarded by security forces and those security forces were supposed to be using hand-held devices designed to detect explosives.”
Maddow quoted a comment from Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress, who wrote, “You don’t want to do this kind of attack without having someone on the inside. It implies infiltration of the government. If there is an objective, it’s to send a message to whoever is in power that not everyone recognizes them as being in charge.”
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/iraq-bombing-inside-job/
3. “Think about this for a moment. Suppose that your boss at the lab or law firm or newsroom demanded that, when he entered the room, you leapt spasmodically to your feet, stood rigidly erect with your feet at a forty-five degree angle like a congenitally deformed duck, and stared straight ahead until he gave you permission to relax. You would think, correctly, that he was crazy as a bedbug. If he then required reporters to stand in a square so he could inspect their belt buckles, you would either figure he was a gay blade or call for a struggle buggy and some big orderlies. This weird posturing is not normal, nor are those it appeals to.
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Now, what kind of kid wants to go for robot training at West Point or boat school at Annapolis? Statistically these kids are bright, gregarious, “motivated” (a favorite military word), athletic, perhaps Eagle Scouts. Psychologically they want (need?) to live under a regime of rigid conformity and obedience that would appear as absurd as it is if we were not accustomed to seeing it among soldiers. That is, they are autoselected not to think for themselves or question decisions from above. They are exactly what universities exist not to produce.
The service academies reinforce these unfortunate characteristics. Their schooling consists of four years of learning what to think, not how to think. There are hours of running in formation (“If I die on the Russian front….”), close-order drill, manual of arms (“Hen-spection…harms!”). Why? There is no military value in being able to shift your rifle from shoulder to shoulder crisply. Like the endless inspections of everything, all of this participation in the hive inculcates groupishness and a curious sense of safety in conformity.
The effects are remarkable and, from a standpoint of civilization, undesirable. Large authoritarian organizations make easier the compartmentalization of morality. A colonel typically will be a good neighbor, civic-minded, responsible, unlikely to steal your silverware or kick your dog. If the Pentagon tells him to bomb a city he has never heard of and has no reason to bomb, killing people who pose no threat to him, he will. He feels no individual responsibility for atrocious behavior ordered from above. “I vas only followink orders,” the Nuremberg defense, is the bedrock of military ethics, if any.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed167.html
4. “Big Banks Are NOT More Efficient
“They actually experience diseconomies of scale,” [Celent analyst Bart] Narter wrote of the biggest banks. “There are so many large autonomous divisions of the bank that the complexity of connecting them overwhelms the advantage of size.”
Now, James Kwak has done some sleuthing and discovered that even Fed economists don’t buy the bigger-is-more-efficient argument.
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“We find evidence of economies of scale for small and mid-size banks, but little evidence that significant scale economies remain for the very largest banks. Finally, evidence on scope economies is weak for the largest banks that are involved in a wide variety of activities. These results suggest few obvious benefits from the trend toward larger universal banks.”
The kicker is that Stiroh is the main source cited by those claiming that bigger banks produce greater efficiencies.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/10/big-banks-are-not-more-efficient.html
5. “Tariq Mehanna: Obama’s Latest Muslim Target
More than any other ethnic-religious group, Western discourse has long portrayed Muslim/Arabs stereotypically as culturally inferior, dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy, religiously fanatical, and violent.
According to Jack Shaheen’s book, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People,” defaming them has been fair game throughout decades of cinematic history (from silent films to today’s blockbusters) as a way to foster prejudicial attitudes and reinforce notions of Western values, high-mindedness, and moral superiority.
Worse still are slanderous media characterizations of dangerous gun-toting terrorists who must rounded up and put away, never mind the rule of law, right or wrong, or whether those accused are guilty or innocent.
It’s no surprise why it’s dangerous to be Muslim in America at a time when we’re all as vulnerable as Tariq Mehanna.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15861
6. “US Strategic Interests in Latin America: The Militarization of Colombia
To prolong influence over Colombia, every US administrations from Nixon [1969-1974] to Obama [2009-] embraced a ‘war on drugs,’ [1] or more recently a ‘war on terror,’ as a means to deploy counterinsurgency campaigns to silence antagonistic sectors of said population. It is increasingly clear, when concerning the recent actions of Bogotá and Washington to facilitate seven fortified bases controlled by the United States on Colombian territory, that both states have coordinated a strategic alliance to militarize the region, not simply one country. German Rodas Chavez (2007: 97) suggests that such activities are an attempt to enable the US to stabilize at least a portion of Latin America’s territory. Securing some form of control over Colombia – and subsequently using the country as a centralized outpost – would assist the US to deploy ‘sub-regional military operations’ throughout the domestic and regional geography (Campos, 2007: 31). From this one can view Colombia as a strategic ‘national security’ case for Washington on three fronts:
First, the country’s influential economic and geopolitical placement as the regions gateway to South America: bordering on the Panama Basin and Caribbean Sea, access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and neighbouring five nation-states (Panama, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil).
Second, Colombia is one of the United States’ most important Latin American and Caribbean energy suppliers in both present and future forms via extensive untapped oil/coal reserves and already established pipelines and open-pit mines.
Lastly, both states share a dual goal of eliminating the ideological significance and potential political-military threat of the FARC-EP from creating a successful revolutionary shift ‘from below’.
Supporting such a scenario, John Perkins describes Colombia as the last bastion of US imperial power in Latin America. As a result of the country’s tactical location Washington has attempted to financially and militarily sustain the basis of power in Colombia to ensure that a geopolitical opening remains in the grasp of the US – hence, the importance of the seven bases. [2] If the Colombian state can hold power than Washington still has a hope of regaining regional political-economic authority.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15853
7. “Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza. The threat to Israel is not the 1.5 million Gazans who reside in the world’s largest open-air prison. The threat is the fast-growing global outrage at the abuse inflicted on Palestinians, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of 400-plus villages six decades ago.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23822.htm
