300 Million Talons...
Excuse Me, But Israel Has No Right To Exist
Grow a new vocabulary of possibilities – the new state will be the dawn of humanity’s great reconciliation. Muslims, Christians and Jews living together in Palestine as they once did.
by Sharmine Narwani
Veterans Today, 17 May 2012
The phrase “right to exist” entered my consciousness in the 1990s just as the concept of the two-state solution became part of our collective lexicon. In any debate at university, when a Zionist was out of arguments, those three magic words were invoked to shut down the conversation with an outraged, “are you saying Israel doesn’t have the right to exist??”
Of course you couldn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist – that was like saying you were negating a fundamental Jewish right to have…rights, with all manner of Holocaust guilt thrown in for effect.
Except of course the Holocaust is not my fault – or that of Palestinians. The cold-blooded program of ethnically cleansing Europe of its Jewish population has been so callously and opportunistically utilized to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab nation, that it leaves me utterly unmoved. I have even caught myself – shock – rolling my eyes when I hear Holocaust and Israel in the same sentence.
What moves me instead in this post-two-state era, is the sheer audacity of Israel even existing.
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May 18
Who? Who?
This adds to the Sears-sized catalog of particularly vile predations the rich ruling class – in the form of private equity investors – imposes on the poor in order to grab every penny and every buck. In this case, they are causing innocent children much physical suffering through fraudulent means. By buying off North Carolina politicians to the tune of at least $1 million, they will most certainly get their way unless there is a public outcry:
Private-equity driven dentists accused of “dentally abusing” poor kids on Medicaid with painful, unnecessary procedures
“Hedge funds in America have backed several dental practices, and Medicaid and parents allege that this has led to a rash of “dental abuse” of poor children, who are seen by dentists at school, without parental consent, for invasive and painful (and expensive) procedures performed by dentists. Critics say the dentists have to meet quotas in order to attain the valuations set by the private equity funds who call the shots. A North Carolina bill aimed at fighting this practice is being fought by three funds (Leonard Green, Court Square Capital Partners, and Levine Leichtman Capital Partners) who’ve raised $1.1 million to kill it.”
May 18
Who, Me?
With respect to both Ignatius and Pincus lacking integrity, am inclined to give Pincus the benefit of the doubt. Here is one piece that certainly took integrity to develop and present.
Is U.S. going above and beyond for Israel?
Walter Pincus
Washington Post, 16 May 2012
Should the United States put solving Israel’s budget problems ahead of its own?
Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, will meet Thursday in Washington with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta to finalize a deal in which the United States will provide an additional $680 million to Israel over three years. The money is meant to help pay for procuring three or four new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome short-range rocket defense program. The funds may also be used for the systems after their deployment, according to the report of the House Armed Services Committee on the fiscal 2013 Defense Authorization bill.
The Iron Dome funds, already in legislation before Congress, will be on top of the $3.1 billion in military aid grants being provided to Israel in 2013 and every year thereafter through 2017. That deal is part of a 10-year memorandum of understanding agreed to in 2007 during the George W. Bush presidency.
“Those funds are already committed to existing large-ticket purchases, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, C-130J transport planes and other items,” according to George Little, spokesman for Panetta. He also said the Israelis had increased their own spending on Iron Dome this year and the U.S. funds are to “augment” their funding.
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May 18
Winslow Wheeler
Dina Rasor and Pierre Sprey have collaborated on an important and informative piece on the F-22. It expands the publically available thinking about the nature of the toxicity problem facing F-22 pilots, and–just as importantly–it probes the nature of one of the prime suspects for the problem: the F-22′s “stealth” coating. Note at the end of the piece: for all the astronomic cost, low sortie rates, and aerodynamic mis-shaping of aircraft those stealth coatings have caused, they bring little meaningful tactical advantage against an enemy who knows how to deal with them. Case in point: not mentioned in the brief but important discussion of radars that see “stealth” aircraft is the antiquated Soviet era radar and SA-3 missile system that was used by the Serbs in the 1999 Kosovo air war to shoot down one “stealthy” F-117, as was widely reported, but also damaged a second F-117 seriously enough that it never flew again in the conflict–giving the F-117 the highest casualty rate of any US aircraft in that conflict.
Consider also, as Rasor and Sprey make clear, the values of a system that places the continued operation of a hardware system above the health, well-being and confidence of the pilots operating it. It literally reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” when nothing, not even workers’ severed body parts, were permitted to stop the sausage machine.
Find the important and informative Rasor authored piece at Truthout at http://truth-out.org/news/item/9195-pilots-as-lab-rats-the-reprehensible-risk-taking-on-the-f-22-raptor and below:
Pilots as Lab Rats: The Reprehensible Risk-Taking on the F-22 Raptor
Thursday, 17 May 2012 09:58 By Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions<
Full article and comment below the line.
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May 18
Sepp Hasslberger
Air-powered Car Coming to India
Analysis by Jesse Emspak
Discovery, Wed May 9, 2012 09:09 AM ET
This car runs on the ultimate emissions-free fuel: air.
In 2007, Mumbai, India-based Tata Motors signed a licensing deal with Motor Development International, a French design firm. The idea was to build a car that could run on compressed air. Now Tata says it has tested two cars with the engines. The next step is setting up the manufacturing plants to actually build them.
Click on Image to Enlarge
May 17
Josh Kilbourn
Chris Martenson: “We Are About To Have Another 2008-Style Crisis”
EXTRACT:
There really is no choice for Greece but to leave the euro, and the sooner, the better. Even then, there is a lot of hardship coming their way. But in my estimation, that’s better than the imposed austerity that is a guaranteed torture chamber. The institutions that avoided taking losses on their Greek debt on the first pass through, due to their preferred status in the process (the ECB among them), are almost certainly going to eat big losses this time, perhaps a full 100% of them.
Long article, many links, worth a full read.
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May 17
Who? Mini-Me?
Huh?
The Problem: The depth of hostility which divides the United States is clearly evident to any observer of the ongoing political campaigns. What’s more worrisome, however, is the possibility that this conflict could escalate beyond the violence threshold. In this context, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent report on “patriot” groups and militia activity is quite troubling. It reveals that increasing numbers of people feel so alienated from society that they have essentially given up hope of working within the system. When we further consider the recent FBI report indicating that extremist groups have been recruiting military personnel, we have even more cause for concern.
Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added. The Southern Poverty Law Center has always had a problem understanding that when a government fails to actually represent the public interest, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government. What the Southern Poverty Law Center does not get is that it is not just white militants that are making plans for life without the existing government, but all groups with any degree of sense. The USA suffers from massive corruption across all elements of the society, led by a two-party tyranny of corruption so deep and pervasive as to make a third world dictator envious. Europe is on the verge of implosion, with Spain, Portugal, and Italy primed to follow in the steps of Greece, where the banks have collapsed and informal currencies are proliferating. After the faux US election in November 2012, it is highly likely there will be a severe Reduction in Force (RIF) across the government, at the same time that multiple forms of economic collapse come to the fore in the US. In a situation like this, it is good to recollect the words of Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York):
When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.
See Also:
May 17
Who? Mini-Me?
Huh?
Greeks Bank Run; Lines Form at ATMs; Nearly $1 Billion Withdrawn in Past Week
Without a government for the last eleven days, and amid mainstream discussion of a Euro Zone exit, the Greek people are realizing that the economic and political system as they know it is rapidly descending into chaos.
With massive jobless rates that have forced many into bartering to survive, and facing credit destruction across the entirety of the country that has led to shortages of critical supplies like life saving medicines, those with any money left at national banks are taking the desperate step of withdrawing as much of their savings as they can from a banking system on its last leg.
This is what it looks like when a populace plagued with uncertainty finally loses trust in the credibility of their country’s leadership and financial system.
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May 17
DefDog
The power of OPEN *. You might think that the media would be doing this, but one would be wrong….they are content to be spoon fed lies, more lies, and damn lies…..it takes the public to pull back the curtain and expose what is really going on….that may be a reason the IC doesn’t like Open Source, it would continually show their inefficiencies…..
Blogger Shines Light on U.S. Shadow War in East Africa
David Axe
WIRED, 15 May 2012
An innocuous-seeming U.S. Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.
In a series of blog posts over the past two weeks, Cenciotti has described in unprecedented detail the powerful aerial force helping wage Washington’s hush-hush campaign of air strikes, naval bombardments and commando raids along the western edge of the Indian Ocean, including
terror hot spots Yemen and Somalia. Cenciotti outlined the deployment of eight F-15Es from their home base in Idaho to the international air and naval outpost at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, north of Somalia.
. . . . . . . . .
But arguably the most interesting vessels in the area are also the least flashy. Lewis and Clark-class supply ships, normally used to carry fuel and cargo, have also been used as Afloat Forward Staging Bases — in essence, seaborne military camps for housing Special Forces and launching helicopters and small boats. The ships can be configured with makeshift jails for holding captured pirates and, in theory, terror suspects.
Read full article with many links.
May 15
Who? Who?
This interview overall undoubtedly has misconceptions, self-inflated bravado, gross exaggerations and so forth, but if the last statement he utters is true about people coming to them, even to a significantly lesser degree than he indicates, the world-ruling elites might be quaking ever-so-slightly, but involuntarily, in their boots. And much more so if indeed insiders are giving Anonymous the “keys to the kingdom,” the passwords into it.
Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth
EXTRACT:
Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody. Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.
Read full article.
Phi Beta Iota: 01 Any system built by humans can be hacked by humans. 02 A system’s security is heavily dependent on the legitimacy of the system owner in the eyes of those using the system.
See Also:
Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
May 15
