Thank you Rave for summing it up in such a beautiful way:
So it comes down to greed or need defining freedom.
Greed says I want, need says our wants.
Greed says my freedom, need says our freedom.
Greed says my choice, my rights. Need says our choice, our rights.
Greed says private ownership, need says collective ownership.
Greed says private responsibility, need says collective responsibility.
Greed says the individual is sovereign, need says the people are sovereign.
Greed says market, need says society.
Greed will destroy the planet, need saves the planet.
Greed is self-serving, self-defeating, need is humanity-serving and surviving.
Greed is boring, tiresome, stupid; need is alive, challenging, wise.
Congressman Ron Paul has warned millions of radio listeners that the US is heading into a deadly confrontation with Iran, revealing his disbelief at members of Congress who have openly voiced support for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the country.
“If we do (attack) it is going to be a disaster,” the Congressman told the Alex Jones show this Thursday.
“I was astounded to see on one of the networks the other day that the debate was not are we going to attack? but are we going to attack before or after the election?” Paul continued.
The Congressman recently voiced his concern over House Congressional Resolution 362 which he has dubbed a ‘Virtual Iran War Resolution’.
About a month ago I promised to publish photo’s of our first test model Hydrogen/Oxygen fuel cell.I’m sorry about the delay. But here they are. In the spirit of the Spirit of the free energy movement we want our knowledge to be out there and free for all to use. We feel that this is the only way to free us from the Money Masters who ruled us for way too long. (Click on the thumb nails for bigger images.)
Fuel cell in car
If you decide to do the research and build one for yourself be sure to visit Patrick Kelly’s excellent site for safety precautions. You will be producing a highly explosive Hydrogen and Oxygen mixture and there are certain rules you must follow to keep it safe.
Disassembled Fuel Cell
This is what my husband who goes by the Monnicker Mudsucks (Don’t ask) has to say about it: Read the safety section in chapter 10. Don’t be an idiot and build a bomb through ignorance.
You will be building the cell on your own responsibility and we will not be held accountable for mishaps. Having said this it is not hard to build a perfectly save cell.
One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of back-room arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oil fields, accounting for around half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms will keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25 percent for their Iraqi partners.
Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly right-wing media hosts had to prove their populist cred by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: “disaster capitalism.” It usually goes well–until it doesn’t.
For instance, “independent conservative” radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: “I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down,” Doyle announced. “We’ve invested $650 billion to liberate a nation of 25 million people. Shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the Stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government…. Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in ten days, not ten years.”
There were a couple of problems with Doyle’s plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stickup in world history. The second, that he was too late: “We” are already heisting Iraq’s oil, or at least are on the cusp of doing so.
The Kiwi involvment in Afghanistan is a war crime. The war in Afghanistan is an illegal war of agression and genocide. KABUL (AFP) - Children in Afghanistan suffer more than in any other country in the world from violence, war and poverty, and sometimes become suicide bombers, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Thursday.
Afghan children were not only caught up in fighting between Taliban rebels and international forces, but there was evidence of an increasing number ending up on the frontlines.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN’s Special representative for Children in Armed Conflict, said Afghan children were the “forgotten victims” of three decades of war and violence.
“I can’t think of any country in the world where children suffer more than in Afghanistan,” Coomaraswamy told reporters.
The Home Secretary has appeared to give the ‘green light’ to police officers to monitor and even restrict journalists and photographers covering public events.
In a letter to the National Union of Journalists, Jacqui Smith says the Home Office produces no guidance on photography in public places.
But she adds that “…decisions may be made locally (by police) to restrict or monitor photography in reasonable circumstances”.
Ms Smith’s letter also said: “The Government greatly values the importance of the freedom of the press.
“It is for the local Chief Constable to decide how his or her officers and employees should best balance the rights to freedom of the press, freedom of expression and the need for public protection.
I’m sure the US marines are badass fighters but they are not supermen and they are battling 20 million very angry Pashtun.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States has extended the stay of 2,200 marines in Afghanistan for one month until November, making their tours eight months long instead of seven, a marines spokeswoman said Thursday.
The extension had been requested by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and was approved by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates “within the week,” Captain Amy Malugani said.
The change applies to members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, who are deployed in Helmand province along with Canadian, British and Dutch soldiers in the south where forces are fighting a resurgent Taliban.
For those Kiwi’s who still believe that we are in Afghanistan to “help” the Afghans>
By Mike Whitney
03/07/08 “ICH” — - Afghanistan was supposed to be the “good war”; a “just response” to the attacks of September 11. It was supposed to bring Bin Laden to justice “dead or alive” and quash terrorism in the places where it originated. 95 per cent of the American people supported the invasion of Afghanistan. Now less than half think the U.S. will prevail. The war was promoted as a way to replace a repressive fundamentalist regime with a democratic government based on western ideals. The Bush administration promised to rebuild war-torn Afghanistan, transform its feudal system into a free market economy, and liberate its women from the oppression of Islamic extremism.
It was all hogwash. None of the promises have been kept and none of the goals have been achieved. The Bush P.R. campaign was a hoax. War isn’t an instrument for positive social change; it’s about killing people and blowing up things. Dressing-up military aggression and calling it “preemption” can work for a while, but eventually the truth comes out. Democracy and modernity don’t come from the barrel of a gun.
Far from being the “good war”, Afghanistan has turned out to be a brutal war of revenge. Three decades of fighting has left the country in ruins and the violence is only getting worse. As victory becomes more elusive, the US has stepped up its bombing campaign making 2008 the most deadly year on record. Civilian casualties have skyrocketed and millions of Afghans have become refugees. At the same time, the Taliban have regrouped and taken over strategically vital areas in the south which is disrupting US supply lines from Pakistan. Khost has fallen into the hands of the Afghan resistance just as it did before the Soviet Army was defeated in the 1980s. The Taliban are moving towards Kabul and a battle for the capital now seems inevitable.
Blackwater Worldwide, Cheney’s Gestapo has it’s own intelligence unit I’m sure the contract is theirs. How does it feel to know the US army is going to trawling the internet to find people like you and me?It scares the shit out of me.
WASHINGTON, June 30 (UPI) — The U.S. military is looking for a contractor to patrol cyberspace, watching for warning signs of forthcoming terrorist attacks or other hostile activity on the Web.
“If someone wants to blow us up, we want to know about it,” Robert Hembrook, the deputy intelligence chief of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany, told United Press International.
In a solicitation posted on the Web last week, the command said it was looking for a contractor to provide “Internet awareness services” to support “force protection” — the term of art for the security of U.S. military installations and personnel.
“The purpose of the services will be to identify and assess stated and implied threat, antipathy, unrest and other contextual data relating to selected Internet domains,” says the solicitation.
The first act of war: the isolation and impoverishment of Iran to prepare and weaken this country of 70 million people for the final genocidal bombardment will begin when the US congress votes in favour of the resolution 362.
The internet giant Google is being forced to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube website as part of a billion-dollar court case in the US.
A judge in New York has ordered that Google, which owns YouTube, must pass on the details of more than 100 million people - many of them in the UK - to Viacom, the US broadcasting company which owns channels including MTV and Nickelodeon.
The data will include unique internet addresses, email accounts and the history of every video watched on the website, giving Viacom’s experts the ability to conduct a detailed examination of the viewing habits of millions of people around the world.
Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly rightwing media hosts had to prove their populist credibility by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: “disaster capitalism.” It usually goes well - until it doesn’t.
For instance, “independent conservative” radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: “I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down,” Doyle announced. “We’ve invested $650bn to liberate a nation of 25 million people, shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush-hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government … Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in 10 days, not 10 years.”
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.
The figure emphatically contradicts the US government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.
Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
“It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.
WASHINGTON — The words Wednesday from Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were notable for their blunt pragmatism: An Israeli airstrike on Iran would be high-risk and could further destabilize the region, leading to political and economic chaos.
On Iran’s western border, the U.S. military is more than five years into a war in Iraq that has taken 4,113 American lives and cost U.S. taxpayers more than $600 billion. And on Iran’s eastern border, American commanders are now openly questioning whether they have lost their way in the fight against a resurgent Taliban.
Israel, the United States’ closest ally in the Middle East, has refused to rule out a strike against Iranian nuclear sites, and this week’s New Yorker magazine reported that the U.S. has stepped up its covert operations inside Iran.
I would really have liked to have gotten to know my grandmother but I couldn’t. Why?
Because she died from blood loss and blood poisoning after she had an abortion in a filthy little back room. She was poor, had 5 mouths to feed and could not afford another child.
What men don’t understand is when a woman is desperate enough she will have an abortion, legal or illegal. Having an abortion is lonely, painful and sad. We don’t need for narrow minded little men to make it more grievous than it already is so back off, OK.
Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Awarded in memory of the great US war correspondent, the prize goes to journalists who expose establishment propaganda, or “official drivel”, as Gellhorn called it. Mohammed shares the prize of £5,000 with Dahr Jamail. At 24, he is the youngest winner. His citation reads: “Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.” The eldest of eight, Mohammed has seen most of his siblings killed or wounded or maimed. An Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while the family were inside, seriously injuring his mother. And yet, says a former Dutch ambassador, Jan Wijenberg, “he is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel”.
Germany has a unique experience. They were manipulated into the third world war by a series of False Flag operations. The Reichstag fire, and an staged attack on a German radio station by German soldiers dressed as Polish peasants was al it took to get the German people frenzied enough to follow their dear leader into the nightmare that was WW II. The German people learned from this experience and it is this knowledge that has made this documentary possible. This is a 1.5 hr. long documentary and was shown on mainstream TV. It is subtitled in English and I hope you will watch it with an open mind.
Ok, hacking not easy and to get to someone’s mail is neigh on impossible. It may be readable when seen on a screen but it is just loads of incomprehensible data on the computer and while zapping around the web. I’m sure National uses encoding when sending e-mail making it impossible to track down. John Key has been caught with his pants down and has been forced to come clean on some of his policies. That’s what journalists are supposed to do. It’s called building good relations with people and doing the research.
It is shameful for John Key to accuse the system and another typical strategy to avoid the real issues: Why won’t they discuss their real agenda? Because it’s the same old, same old.
National fears its parliamentary computer system has been breached again.
National leader John Key said today he had raised the issue with Parliamentary Services after investigative author Nicky Hager reported at the weekend that Mr Key had hired Australian political strategy company Crosby/Textor.
The company had courted controversy for tactics including push polling.
Hagar’s report included dates and details of Mr Key’s meetings.
“I don’t believe National internally has a security problem, but I think it’s quite possible Parliamentary Service has issues,” Mr Key said.
A residential real estate market in nationwide freefall has shed 1636 employees in six months.
New figures from the Real Estate Institute of New Zealand (Reinz) released yesterday show the number of real estate agents, salespeople, licensees and branch managers in Canterbury-Westland fell 8 per cent in the six months to July.
Nationally, the 19,059 people working in the industry in December 2007 fell to 17,453 at the end of June. They shared 4373 sales across the country in May.
The 2201 people left working in the Canterbury-Westland district shared 619 sales in May less than half of the 1276 sold in May 2007.
Christchurch realtor Diane Astle said people were leaving the industry every day.
“They’re just saying it’s a tough market now, and they’ve got families,” she said.
Well I guess they had to come clean on that one since the private insurence companies couldn’t keep their mouths shut, while salivating at a possible $200 million windfall.
National Party leader John Key says he will end ACC’s monopoly on providing work place accident insurance if he wins the election.
Key said that was not the same thing as privatisation and full details of National’s policy would be released by the end of this month.
“We believe we can deliver safer workplaces at a cheaper price,” Key told reporters.
Asked if that meant private insurers would be able to offer insuarance in place of ACC, he said:
Toll threatened to close down much of New Zealand’s regional rail service during its negotiations with the Government, Finance Minister Michael Cullen said today. Blog: Clark gets Key attack wrong
As details over the renationalisation of the rail service began to emerge, Prime Minister Helen Clark said under parliamentary privilege that National Leader John Key had personally profited during the rail network’s chequered financial history.
The attack came as Finance Minister Michael Cullen defended the $690 million deal saying it was influenced by plans to close regional rail services throughout New Zealand.
Former CIA agent files motion accusing superiors of deliberately ignoring the realities of the US NIE on Iran’s nuclear activities.
Once a secret agent, barred by the CIA from revealing his true name, an individual says he attempted to warn the Agency about its wrong intelligence on Iraq’s weapons. Now the Central Intelligence Agency is repeating the same mistake on Iran.
The former CIA operative filed a motion in federal court late Friday asking the government to declassify documents describing what he says was a deliberate suppression of findings on Iran that were contrary to agency views at the time, The Washington Post reported.
WASHINGTON (AP) — When viewed from the rest of the galaxy, the edge of our solar system appears slightly dented as if a giant hand is pushing one edge of it inward, far-traveling NASA probes reveal.
New data suggests our solar system is not as symmetrical as astronomers have long assumed.
Information from Earth’s first space probes to hit the thick edge of the solar system — called the heliosheath where the solar wind slows abruptly — paint a picture that is not the simple circle that astronomers long thought, according to several studies published Thursday in the journal Nature.
Surprised astronomers said they will have to change their models for what the solar system looks like.
In 1977, NASA launched two space probes on missions beyond the solar system. Voyager 1 went north and Voyager 2 went south. What startled astronomers is that when the two of them hit the heliosheath they did so at different distances from the sun.
Voyager 2 hit the southern edge of the solar system nearly 1 billion miles (1.61 billion kilometers) closer to the sun than Voyager 1 did to the north. Voyager 2 hit the edge at 7.8 billion miles (12.55 billion kilometers) from the sun.
Washington - The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The Americans and the Israelis are acting in concert vis-à-vis Iran. The unmistakable message they are putting out loud and clear is that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is on the cards in the event Tehran doesn’t cave in to their demands. Are they bluffing as part of an arm-twisting strategy or are they seriously planning to transform this region into an inferno?
Pundits have been analyzing the probability of a US or Israeli attack on Iran for several years now. Some have even come up with likely dates but most of those have come and gone, eroding the analysts’ credibility and dulling fears. There’s been so much chatter on the subject that we may reach the point when a “will they or won’t they?” discussion will turn into nothing more than an academic exercise on the basis it hasn’t happened so, therefore, it probably never will. The danger is Iran and the region could easily be lured into letting down its guard. Certainly, members of the Iranian leadership have indicated they don’t take the threat very seriously even though they are planning for every contingency and threatening to set the Middle East aflame if attacked.
In recent weeks, since the Israelis launched a supposed dry run in the eastern Mediterranean using 100 fighter planes and aerial tankers, the chatter has reached a crescendo. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has vowed, “Iran will not be nuclear.” Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz has termed a strike on Iran “unavoidable.”
Cherie, god bless her cotton socks, fears for her children.
The wife of a warmongering liar, responsible for the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan children, fears for her ofspring.
The other half of an evil warmongering piece of trash who brought about the destruction of two ancient cultures fears for the violence she helped to make glamorous now that it starts to haunt her own country. I’m speechless.
At least Hitler had the decency to remain childless and commit suicide after all the destruction he had wrought.
God damn her and her offspring for all eternity.
Cherie Blair admitted yesterday that she fears for the safety of her children when they go out on the streets. She also claimed that government figures drastically underestimate the scale of knife crime among children in Britain.
In a dramatic intervention, the wife of the former prime minister told MPs that while chairing a “street weapons commission” she found alarming evidence of rising violence involving knives among children.
