1. “Congratulations to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
They have reached the milestone number of 1000 A&Es!
http://www.911blogger.com/node/22396
2. “A country programmatically gripped by fear – yes, that’s us for more than eight years now. Fear of terrorism to be exact, even as truly terrible things happened in this land and elsewhere, from hurricane Katrina in 2005 to last week’s devastating Haitian earthquake, which should have put our fears into perspective. But no such luck.
Since 9/11, the thought of “terrorism” has seized the U.S. by the throat. People who are terrified of flying for fear of a terrorist attack are perfectly willing to drive a car to the nearest mall without a passing worry, even though traffic fatalities indicate that this is a relatively dangerous act. There were a staggering 34,000 fatal crashes in the U.S. in 2008, 12.25 fatalities for every 100,000 Americans, and carmakers are now intent on featuring ever more immersive Internet-linked “infotainment systems” on dashboards. These are sure to up the distraction level and lead to more deaths on the highway, and yet the country is barely focused on this fact. And mind you, despite all the attention, not one American died in a terrorist attack on an airplane last year. In fact, Nate Silver of the Web site FiveThirtyEight.com recently crunched a few numbers and came up with the following: “the odds of being on [a] given [airplane] departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade.
…
At the comical (but also profitable) end of this spectrum of fear were all those places like Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, and the Mule Day Parade that were put into the DHS’ National Asset Database as “potential terror targets,” opening up the possibility that they might receive DHS money to protect them. “The database,” reported the New York Times, “is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism grants each year.”
…
All of this might be dismissed as a joke, if American life weren’t filled with phantasmagoric terrors that are also money machines. Everywhere that fear rules, from the U.S. to Israel, there are people exploiting and making money off it – and it’s in the nature of the beast for them to want the gift-that-never-stops-giving to go on forever.”
http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2010/01/17/the-wages-of-fear-in-israel/
3. “Why they hate us? It’s not a secret
We proclaim our innate goodness, our pure motives, while decrying “terrorism” and never conceding that to the bulk of the world’s Muslims, the greatest terrorism is the destruction of Iraq, a war we started that has seen the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of more than 4.5 million from their homes. To them, understandably, the bombings from American drones, now killing Afghans and Pakistanis by remote control, are acts of terror. To them, the plight of the Palestinians under siege in Gaza is the result of American-supported Israeli terrorism. This is widely understood around the world, except for the purposefully misled American public.”
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.smith0115,0,7475823.column
4. “Twitter joke led to Terror Act arrest and airport life ban
When heavy snowfall threatened to scupper Paul Chambers’s travel plans, he decided to vent his frustrations on Twitter by tapping out a comment to amuse his friends. “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
Unfortunately for Mr Chambers, the police didn’t see the funny side. A week after posting the message on the social networking site, he was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for almost seven hours by detectives who interpreted his post as a security threat. After he was released on bail, he was suspended from work pending an internal investigation, and has, he says, been banned from the Doncaster airport for life. “I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post,” said Mr Chambers, 26. “I’m the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-joke-led-to-terror-act-arrest-and-airport-life-ban-1870913.html
5. “The passage quoted below is about conformism and about the attempt of Establishment social scientists to create conformism as the social norm (a tendency that went further in the Soviet Union but was also present in the US).
Today, we are told by the Republican minority that is holding the country hostage in the Senate that we are maladjusted if we object to 37 million Americans not being covered by health care. We are maladjusted if we want to see banks regulated. We are maladjusted if we want a graduated income tax so that the richest, with their billions in bonuses, pay more for government social services from which they and their corporations benefit. We are maladjusted if we object to escalating the war in Afghanistan or to covert drone assassinations in Pakistan or to starting a whole new war in Yemen. We are maladjusted if we object to racially profiling Arabs and Arab-Americans. We are maladjusted if we object to mountain top removal coal mining, or, indeed, if we object to destroying the world with the burning of coal in general. We are maladjusted if we won’t disfigure our shorelines with oil rigs. We are maladjusted if we support choice for women or marriage for gays.”
6. “Scott Brown implies that Obama was born out of Wedlock
An evolution in the birthers and teabaggers? Joan Walsh points out that Republican candidate for senator from Massachusetts Scott Brown says he doesn’t know if Obama’s parents were married when they had him.
…
A subtext here is condemnation of adult men and women having children at 18. The Right wants to juvenilize us so as to control us, and are gradually defining up adulthood so that more of the population can be regulated by religious zealots, being actually ‘children.’”
7. “Israel to Station German Nuclear Submarine in Persian Gulf
The Dolphin submarines are among the most sophisticated and capable submarines in the world, that could be equipped with nuclear missiles. Built in German shipyards for the Israel Navy, the submarine is capable of carrying American-supplied Harpoon cruise missiles equipped with nuclear warheads.
This is while political groups opposed to Israel’s “occupation, settler and war politics” have announced plans to demonstrate near the Federal Chancellor’s Officer.
“Why is a joint cabinet session taking place with a racist, fascist, Zionist ideology?” one of the groups asked in its announcement.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17048
8. And of course the CIA funds itself from this drug trade:
“UN Report: Afghan Heroin Killed 90,000 in 2009″
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17047
9. “Zbigniew Brzezinski: An Israeli Attack on Iran Would be a Disaster”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17026
10. “The Haiti Disaster Response: Is Another Katrina Relief Effort in the Making
The disaster planners have an agenda that goes beyond just saving lives. They want to use the crisis to rebuild Haiti along lines they support. (ie. Support of property rights etc) So far they have not spoken about how policies backed by the United States through the Caribbean Basin Initiative was responsible for uprooting peasants from the counttyside to move them to the city to be a cheap labor reserve. In that Reagan era effort, pigs were killed and imported food replaced home grown varieties to benefit US suppliers. Debt dependence grew—classic imperialist policies.
Read this report in coded uncritical top-down language from the Washington Post: “Even as rescuers are digging victims out of the rubble in Haiti, policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into a self-sustaining nation.
…
“It’s terrible to look at it this way, but out of crisis often comes real change,” said C. Ross Anthony, the Rand Corp.’s global health director. “The people and the institutions take on the crisis and bring forth things they weren’t able to do in the past.”
The Rand Corporation is a military contractor primarily, a center for spooks and covert strategies. The fact that they are being quoted as saviors is scary in itself. In other words, Haiti’s future is being planned outside of Haiti and will be imposed step by step. “
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17015
11. Why is there a question mark in this headline?
“Obama: A hawk?”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17028
12. “Bush and Clinton have shown extreme contempt for human life. “
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17037
13. “All current financial aid announced following the earthquake is already lost to the debt repayment!
…
Irrespective of the debt issue, it is feared that the aid will take the same form as that provided after the tsunami hit several Asian countries at the end of December 2004 (Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh) or after cyclone Jeanne hit Haiti in 2004. Promises were not kept and a large part of the funds were used to line the pockets of foreign or local elites. The majority of these “generous donations” came from the creditor countries. Rather than giving donations, it would be preferable that they cancel Haiti’s debt: totally, unconditionally and immediately. Can we really speak of donations when we know that this most of this money will either be used to repay foreign debt or to implement “national development projects” decided on the basis of the interests of these creditors or local elites? It is clear that without these immediate donations, it will not be possible to secure repayment of this debt, at least half of which corresponds to odious debt. The major international conferences, whether G8 or G20 expanded to include IFIs, will not produce any progress whatsoever in terms of Haiti’s development rather, they will rebuild instruments to help them secure neo-colonial control of the country. The purpose is ensuring that debt repayments continue, the basis for submission, as has been the case since the recent debt relief initiatives.
On the contrary, in order for Haiti to rebuild itself in dignity, national sovereignty is the fundamental issue. A total and unconditional debt cancellation for Haiti must be the first step towards a more general course of action. A new alternative development model to the IFIs and the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA signed in December 2009, the Hope II Accord…), is necessary and urgent. The most industrialized countries, which have systematically exploited Haiti, beginning with France and the United States, must pay compensation towards a fund aimed at financing the reconstruction of the country, controlled by the Haitian people’s organizations.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17042
14. “Congress takes a bold stand against surveillance abuses
It should go without saying that all of the sponsors of the pending bill to ban American companies from collaborating with domestic Internet spying in foreign countries — the inspirationally-named Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 — voted in favor of the 2008 bill to legalize what had been the illegal warrantless interception of emails and to immunize telecoms which helped our own government break the law in how it spied on Americans.
That’s our Government and political class in a nutshell: vocally condemning other countries for abuses which we ourselves engage in with impunity. Earlier this year, Business Week described how “Senators Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are making fools of themselves with their war on Nokia Siemens for supplying the Iranian government with equipment that lets authorities monitor wireless phone calls and data transmissions.” Why, as Business Week described it, must this crusade be the by-product either of “ignorance or hypocrisy”? Because U.S. law “requires that all wireless carriers provide the technological means for law enforcement authorities to tap wireless accounts” and the Congress has done nothing about mountains of evidence of abuses by the U.S. Government within the U.S.
It goes without saying that countries like China and Iran — along with many of our closest allies — are far more repressive of internal dissent than is the U.S. But the role of the American Congress is supposed to be to check surveillance abuses by the U.S. Government and to safeguard the privacy of American citizens inside the U.S. Instead, they do the opposite: flamboyantly condemn transgressions by other governments (at least the ones we don’t like) while enabling, empowering and protecting our own government officials and private telecoms who illegally spy within our own country.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
