They're Dying Way Too Fast

American Scofflaw
The Pentagon is intentionally underreporting US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a recent report by veterans' advocacy group Veterans for Common Sense.

The Pentagon's most recent public reports, which can be found in the media, say that 3,587 US troops have been killed and 26,350 have been wounded in Iraq.

In Afghanistan, says the Pentagon, 403 US troops have been killed since 2001, and 1,342 have been wounded.

Thus, the Pentagon's public accounting gives the impression that there have been less than 32,000 casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But documents obtained by Veterans for Common Sense through Freedom of Information Act requests reveal the number of casualties to be much higher.

According to these documents, as of June 30, 2007, US casualties in Afghanistan totaled closer to 7,500 (killed, wounded, injured, and medically evacuated). In Iraq, the total is almost 58,000.

Altogether, the report shows that US casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, between 2001 and June 30, 2007, total 65,278. There is a difference between the Pentagon's publicized casualty reports and reality of almost 34,000.

In the month of June alone, despite a surge ordered by President Bush last January to crack down on the civil war in Iraq, total US casualties mounted to over 1,660 killed, wounded, and medically evacuated.

Veterans for Common Sense attributes the discrepancy to the Pentagon's refusal to include medically evacuated troops for injuries and illnesses in its "wounded" reports.

The purpose of this new distinction is to lower the numbers in Pentagon casualties reports in order to give the impression that "progress" in the war is being made and that harm to US forces inflicted in the war zone is far lower than reality, states Veterans for Common Sense.

These revelations come on the heels of another recent Veterans for Common Sense report indicating that about 180,000 war veterans have filed disability claims with the Department of Veterans' Affairs since 2001.

American Scofflaw
Dasselbe geschah in Nazi-Deutschland, nicht wahr?

Freee At last...Freee At Last

Back In The Day

American Scofflaw
Back in 1976, these were the TV commercials used to scare Americans into going along with the government-mandated vaccination program ... until it was realized that more people were dying from the vaccine than from the flu.

Who Killed This Guy???

American Scofflaw

Barry Jennings died, aged 53, just as the BBC and NIST reports were about to be made public that contradicted Jennings' eyewitness testimony of explosions in the World Trade Towers prior to the actual collapse.

Had Jennings lived, the debate over who was telling the truth and who was lying would have brought even more attention to the controversy over 9-11. But conveniently for the defenders of the status quo, Barry Jennings died.

Now that a peer-reviewed science journal had confirmed the presence of thermite in the remains of the World Trade Towers, it is time to take another look at just how and why Barry Jennings passed away.

Death Takes A Holiday...If Only

American Scofflaw
"There are only four times in recorded history that the death rate actually fell. The first was in highly technologically developed Israel in 1973. During a one-month physicians' strike, the national death-rate reached the lowest rate ever. According to statistics by the Jerusalem Burial Society, the number of funerals dropped by almost half.

The same thing happepned again in 1976 in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia. There, the doctors went on strike for 52 days. The death rate fell by 35% (National Catholic Reporter and confirmed by the National Morticians Association of Colombia).

Similar events happened in California a few years later, and in the United Kingdom in 1978 (see "Confessions of a Medical Heretic", by Robert Mendelsohn, MD)."

So, does in not stand to reason to find others ways to stay healthy, other than using allopathic doctors and getting prescriptions filled?

Think about it...

מזכיר את הומו

מזכיר את הומו

In July 1990 the Auschwitz State Museum in Poland, along with Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Center, reduced the estimated number of victims at Auschwitz from the four million figure engraved on the plaques down to just over 1 million. That is a reduction of almost 3 million.

Yet the claimed 6 million figure, claimed to include the Auschwitz numbers, was never revised downward. At that moment, any claims to knowing the numbers of victims are discredited.

Indeed, over the years, estimates of the total number of victims who died (of all causes) in the slave labor camps have run from 8 million during the Nuremberg trials, down to 140,000 calculated from the camp records of the International Red Cross, down to as low as 74,000 by more recent scholars.

The only thing that can be deduced from the wide variance is that we do not really know how many died (of all causes) in those slave labor camps.

But we do know lies are being told. Camp inmates were not made into soap and lampshades. There was no Camp Walszak despite Hoess's coerced confession. There was no electrical machine that simply vaporized corpses to leave no trace. And ground penetrating radar shows that there are no mass graves at Treblinka.

Poppycock

The Gay Secretary

Let's remember what the "internet" is. It's nothing more than several suites of protocols for transferring data from one computer to another, or from one newtwork to another; and it's any set of (say it with me now) inter-networked computers running those protocols. Thanks to the boys at DARPA, the internet we know and love (based largely around the TCP/IP protocol suite) is desinged to be decentralised, with realtime compensation for changes in the number and positioning of functioning routers and nodes.

If I have a computer publishing a web page using HTTP and another computer across the room reading it, that's the internet. If I maintain a file server that exterior clients can access using VPN, that's the internet. If I work out a means to shift packets using AM radio, and such packets can cross from one network to another, that's the internet.

In essence, the internet is like a road system. Sure, and interested party can put up roadblocks at strategic locations, and they can try to lock down or tear up any routes they don't like. But others can build new roads and new roadnetworks as well, and it's impossible to control the whole thing at once, as long as the equipment and the people who know how to build and use it are scattered throughout the populace.

Now, possibly, the World Wide Web as we know it might be able to be co-opted. But the www is not the whole internet. I recall the salad days of Usenet - a decentralized method of collecting public information. In fact, I recall the atomic bomb board. Either a legitimate means for nuclear engineering students to share infromation or an elaborate joke, the atomic bomb board (Usenet designations varied) held actual real-world information on nuclear weapons design. Not the kind of thing that the Department of Energy, the Secret Service, or the FBI liked to see.

However, they couldn't get rid of it. Not just because of the perfidy of computer savy students, but because of the nature of Usenet. Usenet consisted of directories of files stored at various nodes. Periodically, each node hosting a Usenet directory would enquire if any of the nodes it was connected to lacked any of the files in it's host directory. Any missing files (or the whole directory) would be transferred to the other nodes.

So for instance, the University of Illinois would ask the University of Wisconsin if there were any Usenet files the UofI was lacking, or the UofW was lacking, and they'd copy and transfer files. Simple enough. So if the Secret Service tried to take down all of the atomic bomb board files at the Univeristy of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin would just copy it's files over to UofI, and service would be restored. If the University of Wisconsin suffered the same treatment, then the Univeristy of Illinois would fill in the gap. If, somehow, there was a co-ordinated attack at both of them simultaneously, then it was likely that the Univeristy of Minnesota would update both UofW and UofI after the fact. The atomic bomb board became almost impossible to remove.

Now, interestingly, that was the model of the late 1980's and early 1990's. The hacker/cracker credo was "All information wants to be free". Using a redundant, decentralised, self-correcting model, the information was in a sense free.

But something changed. E-commerce. The World Wide Web came into general use, and with it attempts to sell things online. The need to control access to information (paid sites, credit transfers, personal financial information) led to information no longer being free. Gradually, the server-client structure became commonplace, as it is easier to control information that way. Web-mail has edged aside traditional email, Chat clients have overtaken IRC, Web forums have replaced newsgroups and mailing lists. Websites have replaced gopher sites.

But we remember. We remember Usenet. We remember SMTP and POP3. We remember Gopher. We remember Telnet and the BBS. In the 21st century, the information we need is canaled, damed, and piped. It's controlled because it's easier that way, because money can be made that way, and free information doesn't drive an economy well. But all that can change. If anyone tries to "control the internet" we remember how to set that information free.

Nothing for The Men

American Scofflaw

For years, Jeff Seymour collected donations of reading materials and other items from area businesses to be shipped out of the Marine Corps Air Station at Miramar to ship to U.S. troops overseas. Now, Seymour wants the Marines to explain to him why they unceremoniously dumped thousands of the donations into the Miramar Landfill.

A supervisor at the landfill says he witnessed a group of Marines dump as many as six pallets full of the donations—magazines, books, DVDs and hygiene products, packed in boxes plainly marked “For Our Troops in Iraq”—into the landfill last summer. A spokesperson for the air station confirmed the incident but provided multiple and at times conflicting explanations for why it happened.

Pocket Money

American Scofflaw

The bailout money is just going to line the pocket of the wealthy, instead of helping to stabilize the economy or even the companies receiving the bailouts:

• Bailout money is being used to subsidize companies run by horrible business men, allowing the bankers to receive fat bonuses, to redecorate their offices, and to buy gold toilets and prostitutes

• A lot of the bailout money is going to the failing companies' shareholders

• Indeed, a leading progressive economist says that the true purpose of the bank rescue plans is "a massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives"

The Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry (this has caused a lot of companies to bite off more than they can chew, destabilizing the acquiring companies)

Citizens 1, Police 1

American Scofflaw
Like all things in soccer, it ended in a tie, but this precisely explains why the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division is watching you and me!!!!

What The ???

American Scofflaw

What boggles my mind is, what sane country on the planet would actually want his shoes soiling their sidewalks?

This is a petty, crass, sociopath, who has told the world - and the American people - an extraordinary pack of lies with which to generate two horrendous wars, both of which look as though they're about ready to boil over in South Asia.

These wars have so sapped this country, both in blood and in money, that the national economy is staggering like a punch-drunk fighter, claiming they're OK when they're about to keel over for the count.

And let's not forget the jewels in the crown of the Bush "Legacy"; the legitimizing of torture, the vivisection of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the destruction of American civil rights as we used to know them. We have devolved, under Bush's watch, from "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" to the "land of the surveilled, and the home of the cowed.

I cannot think of a country on this planet which wouldn't be painfully embarrassed to have this man, strutting like a popinjay, representing the US on the lecture circuit. Unless, that country was also run by sociopaths who believes that the sun rises and sets in their glory, and that all those people who work desperately longer and longer hours to pay their bills are simply just a never-ending source of tax dollars for the elites' amusement.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. To those who fanatically believed - and still clutch to the belief - that everything Bush has done is absolutely right, I would caution them to remember this.

Let's hope that some of these countries will have the courage to "Just Say NO" to a Bush lecture at one of their venues.

Perhaps the costs of security arrangements, (which will have to be vast, and probably well above what the Secret Service can really do to protect him) may well cause some countries, political, social, and educational entities to have cause to reconsider.

The Reason For All This

American Scofflaw
This holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis.

A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past.

The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century.

The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?

David Thewlis, playing a death camp commandant in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," will be joined by Willem Dafoe, who takes on a similar role in "Adam Resurrected," Paul Schrader's new film. In "The Reader," directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel of the same name, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp guard tried for war crimes. Tom Cruise, the star of Bryan Singer's "Valkyrie," wears the uniform of the Third Reich though his character, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, was not a true-believing Nazi but rather a patriotic German military officer involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

And of course there will be plenty of room on screen for the victims and survivors of Hitler's regime. Adam, the title character in "Adam Resurrected," is a Berlin nightclub performer, played by Jeff Goldblum, who finds himself, after enduring the camps, confined to an Israeli asylum. And in Edward Zwick's "Defiance," Daniel Craig plays Tuvia Bielski, the real-life leader of a group of Jewish partisans who fought the Germans in the forests of Belarus. Meanwhile, the wave of European cinema dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust - most prominently represented on American screens in recent years by "The Counterfeiters," which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film back in February, and earlier aspirants like "Downfall" and "Black Book" - continued this autumn with the U.S. releases of "A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand," two quiet, powerful French-language films exploring themes of memory and its suppression.

The moral imperatives imposed by the slaughter of European Jews are Never Again and Never Forget, which mean, logically, that the story of the Holocaust must be repeated again and again. But the sheer scale of the atrocity - the six million extinguished lives and the millions more that were indelibly scarred, damaged and disrupted - suggests that the research, documentation and imaginative reconstruction, the building of memorials and museums, the writing of books and scripts, no matter how scrupulous and exhaustive, will necessarily be partial, inadequate and belated. And this tragic foreknowledge of insufficiency, which might be inhibiting, turns out, on the contrary, to spur the creation of more and more material.

Shortly after the war the German critic T.W. Adorno declared that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." This observation has frequently been interpreted, aphoristically, as a fiat of silence, a prohibition against the use of the ordinary tools of culture to address the extraordinary, inassimilable fact of genocide. But those tools are what we have to work with. The perception that this catastrophe overwhelms conventional aesthetic strategies and traditions has led to the creation of a remarkable range of formally innovative work, including the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, the early prose works of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary "Shoah," Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Peter Eisenmann's Berlin memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism.

To describe these as masterpieces is not especially controversial, but it is also, as Adorno perhaps anticipated, somehow unseemly. If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also incubate the ambition to achieve such greatness, and thus open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity. Worse, the aura that still surrounds this topic - the sense that it must be treated with a special measure of tact and awe - can be appropriated by clumsy, sentimental and meretricious films or books. Thus the immodest indecency of a movie like Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning "Life Is Beautiful" was, during its initial period of triumph, deflected onto those with the temerity to criticize it.

And a similar defense is invoked, explicitly or implicitly, so routinely that it calls forth cynicism. Why do opportunistic, clever young novelists gravitate toward magic-realist depictions of the decidedly unmagical reality of the Shoah? For the same reason that actors preen and leer in jackboots and epaulets, or for the same reason that filmmakers commission concrete barracks and instruct their cinematographers to filter out bright, saturated colors. To win prizes of course.
Winslet said as much on an episode of "Extras": "I've noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you're guaranteed an Oscar." She was joking, of course, though her appearance in "The Reader" suggests that the joke is funny because it's often true. Why else do you suppose all the movies listed at the beginning of this article, including "The Reader," are coming out in November and December? Not because Hanukkah is coming.

The television miniseries "Holocaust" is nobody's idea of a masterpiece, but its broadcast, in 1979, on West German state television was a decisive event in that nation's reckoning with its culpability. It is estimated that more than half of the adult German population watched the series.

Subsequently, according to the historian Tony Judt, "Germans would be among the best-informed Europeans on the subject of the Shoah and at the forefront of all efforts to maintain public awareness of their country's singular crime." The French conscience may have been stirred by superior movies - "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah" - but France was much slower to acknowledge the full measure of its complicity.

And in the United States "Schindler's List" in 1993 was a similar watershed. Though the Holocaust was not a central event in U.S. history, "Schindler's List," even more than "Holocaust," made it into one by turning it into the basis of a Hollywood epic. Buying a ticket was treated almost as a moral duty.

"Schindler's List" undoubtedly gave rise to a new pedagogical and commemorative impulse. It also, however, helped to domesticate the Holocaust by making it a fixture of American middlebrow popular culture. Which I don't mean entirely as a criticism, since that culture is better than a lot of the alternatives. But Hollywood trades in optimism, redemption and healing, and its rendering of even the most appalling realities inevitably converts their dire facts into its own shiny currency.

Thus "Schindler's List," for all its unsparing and powerful re-creations of the horror of the Krakow ghetto, is a story of heroism, resilience and survival. And a great many of the mainstream Holocaust movies that have followed, including documentaries and some foreign films, have emphasized hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction. When death dominates these films - as it does in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," an apt successor to "Life Is Beautiful" - it is spiritualized and rendered aesthetically palatable by an overlay of maudlin sentiment.

More often the reality of mass death gives way to yet another affirmation of life, and even faithfully rendered true stories are bent into conformity with familiar patterns, themes and conventions: forbidden love; noble sacrifice; victory against the odds. The Holocaust is more accessible than ever, and more entertaining.

At the same time it is receding from living memory, which may by itself explain the recent burst of cinematic and literary interest. The movies I find most interesting, most authentic, either address this painful process directly, measuring the distance between our time and the 1930s and '40s rather than recreating that era faithfully in every detail, or else cleave to the particulars of a single story. Thus Roman Polanski's "Pianist" and Lajos Koltai's "Fateless," though both tales of survival, register the absurdity and abnormality of survival in the manner of the first-person literary works on which they are based.

"A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand" are meditations on what it means to remember. It is no coincidence that both take place in France, where the habit and policy of forgetting endured until quite recently. In those films, full of unresolved feelings of grief, tenderness and bewilderment, French Jews born after World War II try to figure out what the annihilation of their parents' world means to them. In both cases the past is both painfully pressing and, mercifully but maddeningly, out of reach.

And in both cases the filmmakers explore not only strong feelings but also complicated ideas. The sensations associated with the Holocaust have become perhaps too easy to evoke, given the power of cinema to dispense fear, pity, sorrow and relief through sound, image and pageantry.

This has been the route taken by most English-language films about the Holocaust, and also some of their slick European counterparts, like "Black Book" and "The Counterfeiters." But "A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand" represent another strain in European and Israeli film, one that may reflect a deeper cultural difference. In the United States the Holocaust is a mystery, a puzzle, and the obsessive interest in it testifies to its intrinsic strangeness. In France, in Germany and in Eastern Europe it remains an urgent problem that needs to be worked out - in art, in politics and in the society as a whole.

It seems right that movies about a difficult subject should themselves be difficult. But the fate of difficult movies with subtitles, usually, is to slip in and out of American theaters without leaving much of a trace. The big Holocaust movies of the big movie season will make more of an impression, allowing audiences vicarious immersion in a history that they, nonetheless, keep at a safe, mediated difference, even as they risk bathos and overreach in the process. We don't have to ask what the Holocaust means to us since the movies answer that question for us.

For American audiences a Holocaust movie is now more or less equivalent to a western or a combat picture or a sword-and-sandals epic - part of a genre that has less to do with history than with the perceived expectations of moviegoers. This may be the only, or at least the most widely available, way of keeping the past alive in memory, but it is also a kind of forgetting.

Read It And Weep, Scofflaw

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

• #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
• # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
• # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
• # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
• # 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
• # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
• # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
• # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
• #9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
• # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
• # 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
• # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
• # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
• # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
• # 15 Worldwide Slavery
• # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
• # 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
• # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
• # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
• # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
• # 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
• # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
• # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
• # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
• # 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

אם להתלונן על משהו, אתה הולך להיענש

דיפלומט ישראלי בכיר הוא הזהיר כי ישראל מוכנה לשגר מתקפה צבאית נגד איראן כדי למנוע ממנה לפתח נשק גרעיני.

בראיון עם גיל, דן Gillerman, שהיה נציג קבוע של ישראל ב האומות המאוחדות מ 2003 עד ספטמבר האחרון, אמר פעם עבור המאמצים הדיפלומטיים לעצור את איראן לרכוש יכולת גרעינית אולי כבר פג.

"העולם לא יכול להרשות לעצמך לחיות עם איראן גרעינית", אמר מר Gillerman.

האמת היא, כי לאחר עדים הישראלי פשעי מלחמה בלבנון, וכן את השטח הפלסטיני בשטחים באופן בלתי חוקי, העולם לא יכול להרשות לעצמך לחיות עם גרעיני ישראל. בניגוד לאיראן, ישראל פיתחה בחשאי מאות warheads הגרעיני ואספקת נשק מחוץ כל פיקוח על ידי הקהילה הבינלאומית. איראן ממשיכה להפעיל תוכנית הגרעין שלה תוך שיתוף פעולה עם האו"ם הבינלאומי של Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

לדברי טלוויזיה העיתונות בדו"ח של פברואר 13,

החדש של ראש המודיעין של ארה"ב אישרה את ממצאי הדו"ח של 2007 מודיעיני כי איראן נשק גרעיני, אין לו תוכנית.

דניס בלייר אמר כי ועדת הסנאט המודיעין שלו הארגון יש הערכה כי טהראן אין נשק גרעיני תכנון weaponization עבודה.

הערכת המודיעין הלאומית (nie), שפורסם בנובמבר 2007 על ידי שש עשרה סוכנויות המודיעין של ארה"ב, הבהירו כי איראן לא להמשיך עם תוכנית נשק גרעיני.

2007 דו"ח מודיעיני היה לראות מגוון רחב של נסיגה עבור בוש המאמצים הלחץ איראן לעצור את תוכנית הגרעין.

כלב שמירה גרעינית של האו"ם, אשר ביצע את המספר הגבוה ביותר של הבדיקות שלו בהיסטוריה על אתרי הגרעין האיראנית, אף מצאו כלום לציין כי התוכנית כוללת מוסח לכיוון weaponization.

בינתיים, הן ממשלות ארה"ב וישראל ממשיכות ללחוץ את הבעיה של החשודים בפיתוח טכנולוגיה גרעינית צבאית באיראן, סטירות שלושה סיבובים של סנקציות נגד טהרן. ישראל מאיימת לתקוף בגלוי איראן על מנת להשמיד את מתקני הגרעין והמדע.

הבעיה האמיתית, כפי שכולנו יודעים עד עכשיו, היא זו:

שלא כמו ארה"ב וישראל, איראן לא תקפו מדינות אחרות האחרונים ההיסטוריה. יש מספיק ראיות מתועד המעיד כי ארה"ב תיכננו את השמן מלחמות מזמן וכי איראן היה אחד ממוקד. איראן היא חזקה גם מכשול עבור טריטוריאלי ישראלי הרחבת ב מדינות ערב. במצב זה, גם אם איראן הייתה מנסה לפתח הרתעה אפקטיבית גרעיני יכולת הגנה עצמית, זה יהיה מושלם או מובן לחלוטין מוצדק.

אם ארצות הברית וישראל מדינות אחרות רוצה לוותר על תוכניות הגרעין שלהם, הם צריכים לתת דוגמה ע"י עושה אותו ראשונים. זה, עם זאת, לא יקרה, כי אלה שני "שותפים" מאמינים כי הם יכולים באופן חד צדדי בריון עמים אחרים לתוך הגשתן. הברורים דפוס כאן: לנטרל, כדי שנוכל להתחיל לנהל את המשאבים שלך ואת השטחים, או במקום אחר ... אנו לתקוף אותך!

דרך אגב, אף אחד עדיין לא הסביר מדוע: "העולם לא יכול לחיות עם איראן גרעינית". העולם חי עם אמריקה גרעיני, גרעיני עם רוסיה, סין גרעיני, והודו, ופקיסטן, ועל גרעיני צרפת, בריטניה ו, גרעיני עם ישראל, כנראה שורה של מדינות אחרות גרעיני - ואף אחד לא מאיים במלחמה נגדם זה סיבה. איכשהו, העולם בטוח יותר, כאשר המדינות בהן יכולות הרתעה גרעינית. אף אחד לא שאלות זכויותיהם לפתח תוכניות הגרעין של שלום או למטרות צבאיות. אז מדוע איראן? אני חושב שאני כבר ענה כי השאלה נאיבי.

מעניין, רוסיה היא לא באמצעות כוח וטו על מועצת הביטחון של האו"ם, כדי לחסום את הסנקציות נגד אירן. אולי רוסיה רוצה אותנו לשלב לתוך הבלאגן הזה ואת שטוח למתוח את עצמנו? אני לא יהיה מופתע. רוסיה היא מאוד טובה בו הדיפלומטיה ועל לטווח ארוך משחקי שחמט.

לאחרונה,

מזכירת המדינה של ארה"ב, הילארי קלינטון, הצהיר כי בסוף יום שלישי Obama המינהל עשוי לשקול תוכניות עבור מערכת טילי ההגנה באירופה, אם איראן מפסיקה ארה"ב פקידים מאמין מה הוא הכונן עבור נשק גרעיני. (מקור)

זה היה אולטימטום ישירה להתייחסות לרוסיה. "תעזרו לנו להתעמר באיראן, או אנו מקימים שלנו טילים על הגבול". שוב, השאלה האמיתית היא, "אם אירופה מערכת טילי הגנה על מנת למנוע איראן גרעינית warheads להגיע אמריקה, למה הם שיוצבו בפולין במקום גרמניה, בריטניה או צרפת? או איסלנד? לחלופין, בקנדה? "מובן מאליו, אירופה מערכת טילי הגנה בפולין המאיים רוסיה וזה למה זה הפך bargaining שבב geopolitical את המשחק עבור המזרח התיכון וכן הקווקז. הילארי (אשר לכאורה יש ניסיון נרחב בפוליטיקה) יש סוף סוף הודתה שהיא.

בוודאי, מר Lavrov פועלת באופן המתאים להעביר בתגובה זו "הזמנה". אולי, התשובה צריכה להיות: "ברוח של שיתוף פעולה ממתינים האו"ם לחקור פשעי המלחמה של ישראל בעזה, אם ארה"ב מסייעת לנו כוח כדי לחסל את ישראל בנשק גרעיני, וכדי לקבל הבינלאומית הבדיקות של מתקני הגרעין שלה, אנחנו יעזור לך

להתמודד עם איראן ".

המזכיר של הומואים

I Warned Ya

American Scofflaw

I warned you; this human-caused global warming crap is nothing but a scam by a corrupted and bankrupt government to take more money from you.

Just ask yourself how you paying a new tax in any way affects the environment? It's not like we go out burning rain forests down on the weekend for laughs. In the current economy we are already living as cheaply as we can, driving only when we need to, buying only the essentials, to the point where American businesses are complaining that we are not spending ENOUGH! So, how will taking more money from us change our behavior, other than to force us all to pay even more for the same products?

More to the point, we know from Europe's experiment with a carbon tax that while the trading of credits made some individuals very rich, and the tax as a whole moved more money from the citizens to the government, there was no discernible reduction in Carbon Dioxide.

And, of course, a carbon tax has no effect of sulfur dioxide pouring out of volcanoes, methane bubbling up from the deep ocean depths, or the worst greenhouse gas of all, water vapor!

Do we really want the government managing the environment? These are the same people that wrecked the economy, lied us into two wars, and launched Challenger even when the engineers who built the thing said not to.

Take a lesson from Yellowstone in 1988 or Australia today. It was environmentalists, not evil corporate officers, that opposed the use of controlled burns to keep the dried overburden under control. With the very best of motives, these self-declared experts set the stage for a hideous runaway conflagration. Down in Australia, again with the best of motives, the environmentalists blocked controlled burns and worse, allowed the fire breaks to fill in to return them to their "natural state."

Well, they succeeded. because fire is part of nature (seeds of the Redwood tree cannot germinate without a fire), and no doubt this fire has put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere then all the cars in Australia for the whole year!

Look at the ethanol debacle. It sounded like a good idea, growing the fuel for our cars, and letting the plants take as much carbon out of the air as burning the ethanol put back in. But ethanol is not carbon neutral. When you include the emissions from the process converting the plant material to ethanol you wind up with more carbon in the atmosphere. Then there is the fact that ethanol contains far less energy than gasoline, so you have to buy and burn more of it to travel the same distance. Germany finally banned ethanol when it was discovered that ethanol was destroying the gaskets and seals of auto fuel systems, which were designed to work with gasoline, not alcohols. And finally, the land with which to grow the ethanol crops didn't appear out of thin air, which triggered a food shortage.

Most environmentalism is more pop-culture than real science. They have a few jingos which sound good on a TV set, but have not been thought all the way through.

This is politics. This is advertising. This is taxes. This is almost a religion. But it is not science.

What's Mine Is Yours

American Scofflaw
A Louisiana man finds a homeless man living on his property, but doesn't call the police. Instead, Jim Stewart moved the homeless man, Kenny Woods, from under his porch to inside the home.

Woods and his dog, "17," are now security guards for Stewart's property. It's an arrangement Stewart says keeps Woods out of the rain and keeps his second home safe.

"It seemed a shame to me, I have a 2,000 square foot house and a guy living under the porch," Stewart said.

"People don't realize they're just a paycheck away from being where I'm at," said Woods.

Police say it's no excuse to break the law, but the homeowner says he just saw a man in need and decided to help.

Wanna Get Away?

American Scofflaw

I have a buddy who's a commercial pilot, and every now and again we talk about how, if we were serious enough, it would be fairly easy to just up and leave our current life -- to literally extract ourselves from polite society and free ourselves from the heavy hand of the state and its goon squad. In other words, to "disappear."

"You'd be amazed at how much unpopulated territory there is out there," he says, "mostly out in the midwest and beyond." He's flown over it all many times over and insists it wouldn't be too difficult to squat somewhere, build a house, and basically start over. Clearly it would take some doing -- and it would be helpful to be independently wealthy -- but set yourself up with some untraceable phone and internet connections, and you'd be on your way.

Admittedly, for as much as I detest the entire catalog of government violence, such an undertaking would probably be pretty cost prohibitive for me and my family at this point. But it's telling that I've seriously thought about it. Several times.

At this point, I'd be more apt to buy 100 acres in Montana or Wyoming -- or maybe shuffle off to a Caribbean island somewhere -- and remain visible, but at least minimize the influence of the nanny and police states. But if you're in a position to make the leap and you've got the will power, there's a man who might be able to help.

Frank Ahearn, the world's leading "privacy expert," has just published a guide called, How to Disappear and Fall off the Grid. Ahearn specializes in helping people avoid "stalkers, kidnappers, violent partners or the Mob," but certainly his advice might come in handy for folks looking to slip off Big Brother's radar too.

One easy route to anonymity is to establish an International Business Corporation. IBCs, available in many countries, are both legal and allow for complete secrecy with directors and officers of the corporation not having to be listed. An IBC enables you to open an offshore bank account and get a so-called “black” credit card in its name, keeping your personal shopping history anonymous.

Surely this option is only open to the rich and financially literate? Not so, says Ahearn. “Anybody can set one up with, say, $5,000 [£3,500], and you can even do it online.” There are other ways to keep you off unwanted radar. For around $12 a month (£8), you can set up a JFAX or eFax account which means you can get a local phone number in almost any country. When someone calls that number, the message will be forwarded to your e-mail address. Nobody will know where you are. Use prepaid phones, internet cafés, and pay for flights in cash. “Anybody can do this,” Ahearn says. “I can make people hard to find, but fake identities I don’t do. They don’t work, and most times they are illegal.”

Neither will he help fake people’s deaths, a process known as “pseudocide”, much in the news since swindling canoeist John Darwin and his wife Anne were jailed last year for faking his death in a £250,000 life insurance fraud. “Having all those photographs taken of themselves in Panama was a pretty dumb thing to do,” Ahearn says dismissively. “After the Darwins were arrested, I got a lot of e-mails from people in the UK asking me to fix it for them to fake their death and disappear, but I’m just helping genuine folks get a little more privacy from those they don’t want to know, and to help them stay off the radar.”

For more information on how to disappear, visit Frank's website.