Thursday 27 November 2008

Ex-CIA Spy, Boris Korczak, speaks some home truths on World Events










Deepak Chopra: 'War on Terrorism' is an Oxymoron
CNN.com Asia, 26 November 2008

"It's interesting how it takes someone from a poor country, at the other end of the stick, [who] finds it so easy to describe the world exactly as it is, and yet we who hold the stick find his statement of the obvious "extraordinarily enlightening", as if it were cloaked in some kind of impenetrable mystery."

Medialens,
27/11/08


Chopra: I think Mr. Obama has a real opportunity here, but a challenging opportunity, a creative opportunity.

Get rid of the phrase "war on terrorism." Ask for a creative solution in which we all participate.

King: Is it because the war on terrorism really can never be won because the terrorists (inaudible)?

Chopra: Because it's an oxymoron. It's an oxymoron, Larry, a war on war, a war on terrorism.

You know, terrorists call mechanized death from 35,000 feet above sea level with a press of a button also terror. We don't call it that, because our soldiers are wearing uniforms. They don't see what is happening, and innocent people are being killed. So, you know, terror is a term that you apply to the other.

King: Thanks, Deepak Chopra, as always, extraordinarily enlightening.

Saturday 22 November 2008


Agents of war: How British papers did Bush's dirty work
Posted on MEDIALENS, November 22, 2008

Morning Star 21/11

SOLOMON HUGHES investigates how British papers did Bush's dirty work.

IF YOU or I told the editors of the Times, Telegraph or Sun that their coverage of the "war on terror" was just a lot of US Department of Defence propaganda, I am sure that they would say that we were crass and crude and conspiracy theorists to boot.

The intelligent and well-educated journalists on those newspapers would be proud to say that they swallowed all the lies about weapons of mass destruction and failed to see the truth of secret US torture camps entirely of their own accord.

Well, actually, it turns out that they were helped to these rotten conclusions over drinks and dinners in smart London clubs and the US Department of Defence picked up the tab.

Since 2003, the nominally private Policy Forum on International Affairs has invited British journalists to meet top US politicians in London clubs and restaurants.

However, the organisation, which introduced British editors and columnists to mostly neoconservative politicians who were arguing for the "war on terror," was actually funded by the US Department of Defence.

The Policy Forum is a British-based company with two directors - low-profile London multimillionaire Zac Gertler and high-profile New York rightwinger Devon Gaffney Cross.

They say that they wanted to counteract the way that "American foreign policy and its goals and motivations in undertaking the war on terror were increasingly subject to caricature and worse in the European media."

The organisation, "based in London," says that it "began hosting a series of roundtable discussions, often off-the-record, with key American policy-makers and leading columnists, editors, writers and producers from the UK."

People like James Woolsey and Paul Wolfowitz were introduced to British journalists at posh clubs and restaurants. The Forum says that "editors of The Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The London Times, The Economist, The Sun and The Spectator have all participated in our discussions" as well as "leading columnists."

Gertler and Gaffney Cross are independently very wealthy, but they didn't pay for the dinners after all. At the end of last year, the US Department of Defence paid the Policy Forum around $80,000 for "consulting services for public liaison and media outreach services in support of the diplomacy mission, including addressing and informing European and Middle Eastern audiences on the challenges facing US national security policies."

Three months later, the Policy Forum officially dissolved itself. It seems that the Department of Defence was actually paying for the previous five years of private diplomacy aimed at British journalists.

The forum looks like yet another way that the Bush administration ran foreign policy outside official structures. As a private organisation, the forum could invite speakers mostly from the neocons rather than represent the whole of the US leadership to all British papers. However, the initiative was ultimately funded by the US government, although, as with other Bush schemes, through the Department of Defence rather than the State Department.

Obama's election presumably means the end of this kind of clandestine diplomacy.

Devon Gaffney Cross's brother Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan official, wrote in the press that Obama's election would lead to "global theocratic rule under shariah and the end of our constitutional, democratic government." His sister Devon may not have made similar comments, but it is hard to imagine her being invited to run secret lobbying of the British press for president Obama.

The dinners-with-neocons scheme also shows yet again how London was central to Washington's propaganda effort over Iraq and the war on terror.

The US government liked placing stories in the British press to pass its dubious stories out to Europe and the Middle East and back to the US.

Placing lies in the US newspapers was too obvious. Tall tales about terrorism in the US media look like US propaganda. However, if the same stories are "confirmed" in supposedly independent British papers, the propaganda is sanitised.

Our newspapers acted as a laundering scheme to wash the US government fingerprints from official lies. If we ever get a real inquiry into the Iraq deception, that inquiry should concentrate on what was written in British newspapers as well as by British officials.

Thursday 20 November 2008


A revolutionary reworking for Marx's 'Kapital'

Treatise on capitalism to be turned into manga comic 140 years after publication


Karl Marx, the German revolutionary who predicted that capitalism would crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, is making a comeback – in the form of a comic.

More than 140 years after Marx's Das Kapital was released on an initially baffled world, its dense exploration of political economy and alienation is to be splashed across speech bubbles on the pages of a Japanese manga.

Set for release next month, the comic is expected to be a bestseller. A string of publications have found success capitalising on Japan's growing inequalities and economic insecurity.

more...

Wednesday 19 November 2008

Don't let Rupert Murdoch decide Ireland's future

In whose interests did the 'Sunday Times' decide to campaign against the Lisbon Treaty? ...

more...

Tuesday 18 November 2008

Top judge: US and UK acted as 'vigilantes' in Iraq invasion
Former senior law lord condemns 'serious violation of international law'

One of Britain's most authoritative judicial figures last night delivered a blistering attack on the invasion of Iraq, describing it as a serious violation of international law, and accusing Britain and the US of acting like a "world vigilante".

more...

Saturday 15 November 2008

Totally New Green Energy Source on a par With Nuclear Power

We often hear that solar and wind power are the future of renewable energy, and of course they're important. Important, though, is not enough.

We live in a 24/7 society, but neither wind nor solar are 24/7 sources. If you've ever used your computer or turned on a light on a windless night, whether you're aware of it or not, the power is coming from a conventional power plant, fired either by fossil fuels, hydroelectric, or by nuclear power.

That's the reality we're facing no matter how much we invest in solar and wind. The technologies simply don't work when the wind and sun are down. While that's obvious to anyone who's ever been outdoors, policymakers and those who have huge amounts of money at stake would prefer that the issue remain unaddressed. You simply can't turn up the sun or wind with demand.

They have another problem as well. If you've ever seen a wind farm or a commercial solar system, you know they take huge tracts of land, necessary because the energy source they're tapping is not very dense. At best, it takes a whole lot of real estate to gather enough power to make a difference - assuming, of course, that the source of the needed energy happens to be available at that moment.

Hydrothermal Vents are the solution ...



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Friday 14 November 2008

For the Earth to Live, Capitalism must Die

This is the Day of Reckoning. This is the Time of Purification. This is the end of the “world”, the end of the city-state, the end of city life, of “Civilization.” The early Christians called it the “apocalypse,” the unveiling. Now, at last, the truth of what we have been presents itself unclothed. There is nowhere to hide. It is upon us. Like a cancer, capitalism, industrialism- truly the most advanced stage of civilization – “advanced” the way that a cancer is called “advanced” - has ravaged the body of the Earth. Life on Earth is disappearing. Nothing that can be done- or that will be done – under the system of global death called capitalism will save Life on Earth.

The capitalist, as Karl Marx rightly noted, is “the soul of capital personified.” – a soul unable to see beyond the limits of its own immediate perception of “gain.” The capitalists as a whole – as a white imperial world-ruling class - understand the depth of the emerging crisis as well as we do. But they advance nothing more than schemes to sustain markets and profits, while life itself is allowed to perish in a holocaust in the making, one whose end is as certain as a nuclear winter.

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Massaging Capitalism rather than Managing the Crisis

UK Premier, Gordon Brown, is proposing tax cuts in order to avoid making tough decisions about the economy. We should demand more honesty from our leaders.

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Thursday 13 November 2008

Don't Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart
Why Americans Shouldn't Go Home
By Tom Engelhardt

Political Washington is a conspiracy -- in the original sense of the word: "to breathe the same air." In that sense, there is no air in Washington that isn't stale enough to choke a president. Send Obama there alone, give him that "breathing space," don't start demanding the quick ending of wars or anything else, and you're not doing him, or the American people, any favors. Quite the opposite, you're consigning him to suffocation.

Leave Obama to them and he'll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself, not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for "change we can believe in," which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror.

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Wednesday 12 November 2008


The day that we remember the victims of those who profit from war: Remembering that War is a Racket on Remembrance Day

A day too late to have been published on Remembrance Day but better late than never. Yesterday I was unable to bring myself to comment on Remembrance Day, so profound is my feeling of disgust for the manner in which our rulers continue to sanctify the meaningless slaughter of humanity in their selfish, imperialist wars.

Chycho's article says it all and I commend it to my readers ...

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Beware of the Obama hype. What 'change' in America really means

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger writes that the lauding of Barack Obama has a history and that 'historical moments' ought to be less about their symbolism and accompanying histrionics than what they really mean. The question is: what is Obama's true relation to unchanging American myths about the imposition of its notorious power?

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Britain's Big Brother: Government black boxes will 'collect every email'

Home Office says all data from web could be stored in giant government database

Internet "black boxes" will be used to collect every email and web visit in the UK under the Government's plans for a giant "big brother" database, The Independent has learnt.

Home Office officials have told senior figures from the internet and telecommunications industries that the "black box" technology could automatically retain and store raw data from the web before transferring it to a giant central database controlled by the Government.

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Tuesday 11 November 2008

Who are the Architects of Economic Collapse?

Most Serious Economic Crisis in Modern History

The October 2008 financial meltdown is not the result of a cyclical economic phenomenon. It is the deliberate result of US government policy instrumented through the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve Board.

This is the most serious economic crisis in World history.

more ...

Wednesday 5 November 2008

Nader speaks on an Obama Presidency







Now go to November5.org


Obama Wins



Sunday 2 November 2008

Beyond the Triple Crisis: A Green New Deal

An imaginative and radical set of policies is needed to address the triple crunch of debt, peak oil and climate change ...

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