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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

5 Jan - BlogNews


5 nuevos wallpaper de animales

posted by Banco de Imágenes Gratuitas atfotoFRONTERA - 20 minutes ago
*Nota:** Haz click aquí o sobre la imagen para ampliar el tamaño de estos wallpapers.* No olvide usted hacer click sobre las imágenes pa...

"Rift" Sucks Us In

posted by Jennifer Ouellette at Discovery News - Top Stories- 1 hour ago
Just when the media hysteria over doomsday scenarios relating to the Large Hadron Collider has died down, along comes a visually stunning short film from L Studio called Rift that explores just what such a...

Toxic Dust from Roads Travels into Homes

posted by Jessica Marshall at Discovery News - Top Stories - 3 hours ago

Could we be literally walking toxic compounds right into our homes? Find out here.

Google's Nexus One: Unlocked and Loaded

posted by Clark Boyd at Discovery News - Top Stories - 3 hours ago
I'll admit I'm a little out of my usual element here, writing about the oh-so-freshly released Nexus One smart phone from Google. After all, I usually leave the gadget writing to the gadget experts. In fac..

Shimmer Me This

posted by Jennifer Ouellette at Discovery News - Top Stories- 3 hours ago
Back in September, a fascinating paper appeared on the arXiv about a new way to search for gravitational waves to complement major endeavors such as LIGO and the planned space-based LISA collaborations. It...


Where is El Niño when we need him?

posted by John D. Cox at Discovery News - Top Stories - 5 hours ago

Just when we might be expecting the influence of unusually high Pacific ocean temperatures to warm us up -- or for global warming to bring relief -- along comes another wave of incredibly cold storms. How ...



Tall Buildings Sway More Than You Think
posted by Tracy Staedter at Discovery News - Top Stories - 5 hours ago
Yesterday, the world's tallest building (for now) opened in Dubai. The Burj Khalifa has moved ahead of other tall buildings that have recently debuted and in the next decade or so, it will no doubt be ecli...

Denim May Guard Against Rattlesnake Bites


posted by Jennifer Viegas at Discovery News - Top Stories - 6 hours ago
Wearing a sturdy pair of denim pants may be just what the doctor ordered when it comes to preventing rattlesnake bites, according to a study recently published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. It stand...


Atomic Clocks Use Vibration to Keep Time

posted by Gene Charleton at Discovery News - Top Stories - 6 hours ago
Instead of pendulums, gears or even quartz crystals, atomic clocks use the vibration between the nucleus and electrons of atoms.


The Rules of Smart Phone Etiquette

posted by null at Discovery News - Top Stories - 6 hours ago
Tweeting in church. Facebooking in class. Texting in a public restroom. All of these activities are possible with a smart phone, but are they appropriate? What are the rules of smart phone etiquette?


Tsunami Spares Solomon Islanders' Lives, Not Homes

posted by Michael Reilly at Discovery News - Top Stories - 8 hours ago
A ten-foot-high tsunami crashed ashore in the Solomon Islands on Monday following a magnitude 7.2 earthquake. Some 200 homes were destroyed and1,000 people left homeless, and yet no one has been reported i...


Will Canada Ever Join the United States?


posted by C. Moffat at Lilith News - 22 hours ago


When Death Comes to Town

posted by C. Moffat at Lilith News - 1 day ago
CANADA/ENTERTAINMENT - The Kids in the Hall comedy troupe is back together again in Canada and this upcoming Tuesday January 12th at 9 PM their new mini series will hit the air: When Death Comes to Town. ...


POLITICS - The quickest answer is no. Not during this century at least. The issue of whether Canada should (or will ever) join the United States has been batted around for several decades, if not longer. T...


Viva Palestina 3 convoy due to enter Gaza today tomorrow

posted by Alison at Creekside - 1 day ago

The third Viva Palestina convoy of 198 vehicles bearing humanitarian aid is due to enter Gaza today. It was held up by Egypt, long the 2nd largest recipient of US military aid, who demanded that the conv...


How China Partnered with the GOP to Screw America


posted by Len Hart at The Existentialist Cowboy - 1 day ago
by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy Chinese rulers and the US elites partnered to enslave US workers and consumers. As a result, the US became a vassal state of China, a huge population which props up ...

Tensions grow as U.S. heightens role in Yemen

Friction emerged Tuesday in the growing alliance with the Yemeni government as the U.S. Embassy ended a two-day closure triggered by a terror threat from al-Qaeda.
The Yemen government, which sent thousand of troops this week to remote provinces where al-Qaeda has set up strongholds, has been angered by suggestions the state is too weakened to handle the fight against terrorists.
The embassy closure on Sunday became a case in point, rankling some officials who said it gave the appearance that Yemeni security forces could not protect the facilities.
On Tuesday, as the embassy reopened, the Interior Ministry insisted the fight against al-Qaeda was under control, saying Yemeni forces "have imposed a security cordon around al-Qaeda elements everywhere they are present and...are observing and pursuing them around the clock."

The government also has carried out a series of U.S.-backed strikes against militant hideouts in the past month.
More broadly, the intensified partnership with the U.S. presents dilemmas for Yemen.

The government is deeply sensitive over any hint of meddling in its internal affairs. But at the same time, it is being battered by multiple crises and needs assistance.
It has little control outside the capital, and heavily armed tribes hold sway over large parts of the mountainous, impoverished nation. Many tribes are disgruntled with Saleh, and some have allowed al-Qaeda fighters to take refuge. On other fronts, it is battling Shiite rebels in the north and a revived separatist campaign in the once-independent south.




Top intel officer slams work of U.S. spies in Afghanistan

U.S. spies "can do little but shrug" when commanders ask for the information they need to fight the Taliban insurgency, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan said in a blistering report.The report said some good work is being done on the ground, and that local intelligence officers "know a great deal about their local Afghan districts." But, the report said, they "are generally too understaffed to gather, store, disseminate and digest" information.

And, critically, they do not have the resources to gather information which could give Americans a better understanding of Afghanistan, such as census data, patrol debriefs, minutes from councils with local farmers and tribal leaders, polling data, translated summaries of radio broadcasts that influence local farmers and the like.

"This vast and underappreciated body of information.... provides... a map for leveraging popular support and marginalizing the insurgency itself," Flynn and his colleagues argue.

As a result, "U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency," they say.


Thursday, December 3, 2009


A Message From our Troops in Afghanistan

Back in early October, Spencer Ackerman from his blog had linked to this blog requesting supplies for the soldiers who's forward operating base was destroyed during a twelve hour intense firefight with Taliban forces on the bordering region with Pakistan. Because of the quick response generated and due to people like Spencer Ackermann and others pointing to the blog, the troops were able to quickly resupply themselves with the goods they need to get back out there and finish the job they signed up to do.

I thought I'd share the letter of appreciation so others that may have played a part could read it.

2010: U.S. To Wage War Throughout The World by Rick Rozoff

January 1 will usher in the last year of the first decade of a new millennium and ten consecutive years of the United States conducting war in the Greater Middle East.
Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.
The Afghan war, the U.S.’s first air and ground conflict in Asia since the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first land war and Asian campaign, began during the end of the 2001 war in Macedonia launched from NATO-occupied Kosovo, one in which the role of U.S. military personnel is still to be properly exposed [1] and addressed and which led to the displacement of almost 10 percent of the nation’s population.
In the first case Washington invaded a nation in the name of combating terrorism; in the second it abetted cross-border terrorism. Similarly, in 1991 the U.S. and its Western allies attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait and launched devastating and deadly cruise missile attacks and bombing sorties inside Iraq in the name of preserving the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait, and in 1999 waged a 78-day bombing assault against Yugoslavia to override and fatally undermine the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the name of the casus belli of the day, so-called humanitarian intervention.
Two years later humanitarian war, as abhorrent an oxymoron as the world has ever witnessed, gave way to the global war on terror(ism), with the U.S. and its NATO allies again reversing course but continuing to wage wars of aggression and “wars of opportunity” as they saw fit, contradictions and logic, precedents and international law notwithstanding.
Several never fully acknowledged counterinsurgency campaigns, some ongoing – Colombia – and some new – Yemen – later, the U.S. invaded Iraq in March of 2003 with a “coalition of the willing” comprised mainly of Eastern European NATO candidate nations (now almost all full members of the world’s only military bloc as a result of their service).



, November 1, 2009


When Did The Housing Bubble Start?

One of the more accurate accurate depictions I've run across of exactly what happened to cause the final burst is this Jonathan Jarvis video, The Crisis of Credit. It explains how the large investment firms perpetuated the massive bubble by encouraging lending to just about anyone to keep the revenue momentum flowing.


'Avatar' arouses conservatives' ire

Cameron's grand cinematic fantasy, with its mixture of social comment, mysticism and transcendent, fanboy-style video game animation, seems to have hit a very raw nerve with political conservatives, who view everything -- foreign affairs, global warming, the White House Christmas tree -- through the prism of partisan sloganeering.

But why is it doing so well with everyday moviegoers if it's so full of supposedly buzz-killing liberal messages?

"It has the politics of the left, but it also has extraordinary spectacle," says Govindini Murty, co-founder of the pioneering conservative blog Libertas and executive producer of the new conservative film "Kalifornistan." "Jim Cameron didn't come out of nowhere. He came on the heels of all the left-wing filmmakers who went before him, who knew that someone with their point of view would have the resources to finally make a breakthrough political film. But even though 'Avatar' has an incredibly disturbing anti-human, anti-military, anti-Western world view, it has incredible spectacle and technology and great filmmaking to capture people's attention. The politics are going right over people's heads. Its audience isn't reading the New York Times or the National Review."

Conservatives are blind to the 3-D blockbuster's charms.


Politico Editor Defends Platform Granted To Cheney


Politico editor John Harris is pushing back hard on criticism of his publication for providing a frequent, often uncritical platform to Dick Cheney, claiming in an email to me that “trying to get newsworthy people to say interesting things is part of what we do.”


Responses :

Right wing Politico.com’s Republican masters:
“Who funds and runs the Politico?” [Answer: REPUBLICANS]
>>Trying to get newsworthy people to say interesting things is part of what we do.
Caring whether those newsworthy people are saying things that are actually true isn’t at all part of what they do.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com


More about Republican funded Politico.com editor John Harris:
By the way, is Politic.com still just right wing wingnut welfare?
Last I read Politico.com was still losing money, it’s business plan is apparently the same as Republican Messiah Moon’s plan with his Washington Times:
Print Republican Talking Points => POWER.

Coming back its blatant obvious how childish our politics is. Politicians are so overly sensitive and the public plays right into it.
Once upon a time it was not so (back when there wasn’t a 24/7 news cycle). It seems to me The Gong Show really got started after ‘94, when Gingrich was made Speaker of the House. The devolution had already started, even going back into the 1980’s (it was a HUGE scandal when presidential candidate Sen. Gary Hart was hounded by the press into revealing he had not always been faithful to his wife), but by ‘95 everything was in place to cause press coverage of national politics to be nothing more than a particular form of infotainment, as it continues to be.






Posted by opit at 8:10 PM
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