The month of November 2010 has proven to be pregnant with implications for future developments. It is difficult in our monthly summary post to capture all of the salient stories.
We began on November 2nd with one of the more abrupt about-faces in the U.S. House of Representatives in recent history; but notwithstanding the Tea Party insurgency within the Republican party, the "right-left paradigm" will likely remain intact for at least a little while longer... Until civil war comes...
Sipsey Street Irregulars: An open letter to Andrew Traver on the occasion of his appointment to be Director of the ATF.
As if in answer to the people's rebuke, however, the very next day, Nov. 3, was greeted with the much dreaded second injection of "quantitative easing" (QE2) by Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve. One potentially positive implication of this is touched upon here...
ZeroHedge: Dallas Fed Admits "For The Next Eight Months, The Nation’s Central Bank Will Be Monetizing The Federal Debt", Opens Door To Bernanke Impeachment
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Yet on the other side of the pond, November has given Europe the hardest blows in the enduring financial world war. Ireland is on the ropes, Portugal and Spain are soon to follow. It turns out that the Inter-Alpha banking group is at the heart of these sovereign debt crises...
Financial Times/Alphaville: Worst banking conspiracy ever
And as we are looking on the positive side of things, shall this at last usher in the end of the Rothschild/Windsor syndicate..?
Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.: The Present Fall of the House of Windsor
But meanwhile, a mysterious "Foundation X" is making offers to Britain that she best not refuse...
AntiPope: Did somebody just try to buy the British government?
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On the other side of the globe, North Korea made everyone mad by lobbing a few missiles onto South Korean islands. Never mind, we'd wager that the real action is found not in these old-fashioned warlike gestures, but in things like Chinese reconnaissance missions into the infosphere...
PBS Newshour: China's Internet 'Hijacking' Creates Worries for Security Experts
Of course, when it comes to the infosphere, the U.S. can be its own worst enemy, with net neutrality going, going...
Level3: Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning Comcast's Actions
In another infosphere happening, WikiLeaks issued another massive data-dump, to be a treasure-trove for future research (even if a disinfo mine-field)...
Secret US Embassy Cables
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A Macondo methane update...
Yale Daily News: Human race survives methane plume, for now
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Fetus Bush for Prez...
YahooNews: The Strange Bush Fetus Secret
Subject of a classic Lame Cherry rant...
A kinder, gentler Rapist
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Millions of Americans "Pornografried" on Thanksgiving
As predicted with our headline of January 11... Undie Bomber Turns X-mas into XXX-mas ...so has it come to pass, even one holiday sooner, that the full body scanner requirement would be universally appiled, that every American must be explicitly irradiated and imaged. Hence, our new word: Pornografry.
However, we did not anticipate the lengths to which the perv police state apparatus would go in pursuit of the "safety" of the traveling public. We knew of course that it is in the nature of this apparatus to have a voracious hunger for bodies, and to require yet more bodies to be sucked into its panopticon of awareness. Yet this hunger as presently manifest in the TSA has far outstripped anything we imagined. The scenes now taking place in airports across America are of abject surreality...
PrisonPlanet: TSA Now Putting Hands Down Fliers' Pants
Drudge Report: TSA gropes nun
MSNBC: TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine
The humiliations are not quite entirely egalitarian however; for, while on the one hand, Congressman Ron Paul's crotch is groped by TSA, soon to be Speaker of the House John Boehner's boner remains unmolested.
However, we did not anticipate the lengths to which the perv police state apparatus would go in pursuit of the "safety" of the traveling public. We knew of course that it is in the nature of this apparatus to have a voracious hunger for bodies, and to require yet more bodies to be sucked into its panopticon of awareness. Yet this hunger as presently manifest in the TSA has far outstripped anything we imagined. The scenes now taking place in airports across America are of abject surreality...
PrisonPlanet: TSA Now Putting Hands Down Fliers' Pants
Drudge Report: TSA gropes nun
MSNBC: TSA pat-down leaves traveler covered in urine
The humiliations are not quite entirely egalitarian however; for, while on the one hand, Congressman Ron Paul's crotch is groped by TSA, soon to be Speaker of the House John Boehner's boner remains unmolested.
Monday, November 15, 2010
U.S. Senate Wants To Stick It Down Your Throat
As the lame duck U.S. Senate is scheduled to debate the S 510 food bill this week, so does it prepare to aid and abet its big agri-business sponsors in shoving more sub-lethal poisons down the throats of every man, woman and child in America (not to mention our four-legged friends).
While the bill may reduce to some extent the occasional incidents of headline-grabbing illnesses and deaths resulting from E-coli and salmonella outbreaks originating primarily from industrial food facilities, the more subtle, slow acting poisons such as can be found in genetically modified organisms, bovine growth hormones, herbicides and pesticides will become more widespread and much more difficult for the discerning and cautious consumer to avoid. These sub-lethal poisons are of the sort that you can't identify with any particular meal; rather, as they accumulate, they result in, say, the chance occasion of horizontal gene transfer from Monsanto's Bt corn to your intestinal flora, leading to episodes of putrid burp syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome, with such intestinal stresses eventually culminating in colon cancer. Or these slow poisons will gradually compromise your immune system, making you more and more susceptible to viruses, and rendering you a little more vulnerable to the grim reaper a little sooner than you would have been under historical alimentary conditions.
Indeed, this bill may be said to institute Death Panels on the cellular level.*
How is this achieved? It is achieved in the same way that any industry comes to be dominated by its largest corporations - by co-opting large government bureaucracies to set up regulatory standards which it has little trouble meeting (or the violations of which are fiscally manageable) while smaller companies must devote proportionately larger shares of resources to dealing with paperwork and inspectors (of agencies like the FDA which tend to avoid prosecutions of large corporations armed with formidable legal departments). The smaller the business is, the larger the fraction of its budget that must be devoted to satisfying regulatory regimes. The result in the case of the food bill then will be less small, locally owned, organic producers of high quality, unprocessed, non-GMO, fresh, delicious and highly nutritious food, and more factory-farmed, industrial-processed, irradiated and additive-laden GMO "food".
While many are promoting the Tester Amendment to the bill as way to exempt small farms and local food products, the amendment may be a fake out, its words trumped by a sovereignty-eviscerating passage in the main body of the bill:
COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.
Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.
For more on all this...
Yupfarming: Leaked trade agreements and hidden things inside S 510: Corporations plan to end normal farming
Food Freedom: S 510 is hissing in the grass
FarmWars: Food ‘Safety’ Bills Harmonize Agribusiness Practices in Service of Corporate Global Governance
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* A sweeping inference, one might say; but see Unintended Horizontal Transfer of Recombinant DNA, by Kaare M Nielsen and Daniele Daffonchio.
And consider the claim, albeit anecdotal, in Jeffrey Smith's article, Doctors Warn: Avoid Genetically Modified Food...
When evidence of gene transfer is reported at medical conferences around the US, doctors often respond by citing the huge increase of gastrointestinal problems among their patients over the last decade. GM foods might be colonizing the gut flora of North Americans.
Finally, in Science News: Colorectal cancer risk linked to stomach bacterium, inflammation, we read...
Many common cancers arise in cells that line the insides of organs, such the lung and colon, [William Nelson, a medical oncologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, in Baltimore,] said. “This is the barrier from the outside world, and these areas carry huge amounts of bacterial flora. So these are sites in which the immune inflammatory response is going to try to control that flora — and there is always going to be collateral damage.” If that damage includes changes to the cells’ genes and disturbs their growth cycle, such cells can turn malignant, he said.
While the bill may reduce to some extent the occasional incidents of headline-grabbing illnesses and deaths resulting from E-coli and salmonella outbreaks originating primarily from industrial food facilities, the more subtle, slow acting poisons such as can be found in genetically modified organisms, bovine growth hormones, herbicides and pesticides will become more widespread and much more difficult for the discerning and cautious consumer to avoid. These sub-lethal poisons are of the sort that you can't identify with any particular meal; rather, as they accumulate, they result in, say, the chance occasion of horizontal gene transfer from Monsanto's Bt corn to your intestinal flora, leading to episodes of putrid burp syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome, with such intestinal stresses eventually culminating in colon cancer. Or these slow poisons will gradually compromise your immune system, making you more and more susceptible to viruses, and rendering you a little more vulnerable to the grim reaper a little sooner than you would have been under historical alimentary conditions.
Indeed, this bill may be said to institute Death Panels on the cellular level.*
How is this achieved? It is achieved in the same way that any industry comes to be dominated by its largest corporations - by co-opting large government bureaucracies to set up regulatory standards which it has little trouble meeting (or the violations of which are fiscally manageable) while smaller companies must devote proportionately larger shares of resources to dealing with paperwork and inspectors (of agencies like the FDA which tend to avoid prosecutions of large corporations armed with formidable legal departments). The smaller the business is, the larger the fraction of its budget that must be devoted to satisfying regulatory regimes. The result in the case of the food bill then will be less small, locally owned, organic producers of high quality, unprocessed, non-GMO, fresh, delicious and highly nutritious food, and more factory-farmed, industrial-processed, irradiated and additive-laden GMO "food".
While many are promoting the Tester Amendment to the bill as way to exempt small farms and local food products, the amendment may be a fake out, its words trumped by a sovereignty-eviscerating passage in the main body of the bill:
COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.
Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.
For more on all this...
Yupfarming: Leaked trade agreements and hidden things inside S 510: Corporations plan to end normal farming
Food Freedom: S 510 is hissing in the grass
FarmWars: Food ‘Safety’ Bills Harmonize Agribusiness Practices in Service of Corporate Global Governance
+
* A sweeping inference, one might say; but see Unintended Horizontal Transfer of Recombinant DNA, by Kaare M Nielsen and Daniele Daffonchio.
And consider the claim, albeit anecdotal, in Jeffrey Smith's article, Doctors Warn: Avoid Genetically Modified Food...
When evidence of gene transfer is reported at medical conferences around the US, doctors often respond by citing the huge increase of gastrointestinal problems among their patients over the last decade. GM foods might be colonizing the gut flora of North Americans.
Finally, in Science News: Colorectal cancer risk linked to stomach bacterium, inflammation, we read...
Many common cancers arise in cells that line the insides of organs, such the lung and colon, [William Nelson, a medical oncologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, in Baltimore,] said. “This is the barrier from the outside world, and these areas carry huge amounts of bacterial flora. So these are sites in which the immune inflammatory response is going to try to control that flora — and there is always going to be collateral damage.” If that damage includes changes to the cells’ genes and disturbs their growth cycle, such cells can turn malignant, he said.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Monsanto: Devoured by its Monsters
It is one of the basic principles that one learns in high school biology - the tendency for species to evolve strains that adapt to environmental challenges. But this is a principle that the geniuses at Monsanto have forgotten. In designing monoculture crops to resist herbicides, the weeds it intended to kill have now evolved into superweeds, thus devouring their GMO crops, and so necessitating the increased use of herbicides that GMOs were touted to reduce...
Grist: Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides
Plus this debacle...
ISIS: Mad Soy Disease Strikes Brazil
Perhaps they should have heeded the advise of a scientist they attempted to silence...
Organic Consumers Association: Arpad Pusztai and the Risks of Genetic Engineering
Fundamentally the science of genetic engineering is crap. One gene expressing one protein is the basis of genetic engineering, but the Human Genome Project discovered 23,000 genes, and there are 200,000 proteins in every cell. With this discovery, genetic engineering should have disappeared into the dustbin, but the biotechnology industry is so strong. Genetic engineering is a product driven technology. If you have enough money to throw at it, you can do many things. But the industry won't waste money on safety assessment.
Consider this the harbinger of a paradigm shift... The "Gene" is dead.
Grist: Why Monsanto is paying farmers to spray its rivals’ herbicides
Plus this debacle...
ISIS: Mad Soy Disease Strikes Brazil
Perhaps they should have heeded the advise of a scientist they attempted to silence...
Organic Consumers Association: Arpad Pusztai and the Risks of Genetic Engineering
Fundamentally the science of genetic engineering is crap. One gene expressing one protein is the basis of genetic engineering, but the Human Genome Project discovered 23,000 genes, and there are 200,000 proteins in every cell. With this discovery, genetic engineering should have disappeared into the dustbin, but the biotechnology industry is so strong. Genetic engineering is a product driven technology. If you have enough money to throw at it, you can do many things. But the industry won't waste money on safety assessment.
Consider this the harbinger of a paradigm shift... The "Gene" is dead.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
11 09 10
The anagram date suggests that it was as good a day as any for generating mass anxiety...
In From The Cold: The Mystery Missile
Milcom Monitoring Post: Update: Missile Launch Off California Coast
Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said he is not able to concur with an official from North American Aerospace Defense Command/U.S. Northern Command who told Fox News earlier that there was "no threat to the homeland."
In From The Cold: The Mystery Missile
Milcom Monitoring Post: Update: Missile Launch Off California Coast
Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said he is not able to concur with an official from North American Aerospace Defense Command/U.S. Northern Command who told Fox News earlier that there was "no threat to the homeland."
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Petraeus Gives War a Chance
Some substantive insight is coming from analysis of the WikiLeaks Iraq war reports... Not from the New York Times of course, but from...
Antiwar: Torture Orders Were Part of US Sectarian War Strategy
Here, Gareth Porter argues that in designating Shi'a and Kurd forces to raid Sunni areas and interrogate Sunni civilians, General Petraeus was deliberately stoking an Al Qaeda led Sunni insurgency and the ethnic civil war that resulted.
Petraeus then would subscribe to the Luttwakian doctrine of non-suppresion of violent conflict. The opening paragraph of Edward Luttwak's 1999 essay in Foreign Affairs: Give War a Chance, summarizes the main points...
An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.
Essentially, the best that outside moderators can do is to create an arena in which ethnic conflicts can be contained until either a victor prevails or sheer exhaustion suspends the violence. As applied in the Iraqi theatre, however, the outside moderator is neither outside nor a moderator, but an invading force. In order to redirect insurgent violence away from itself, then, the U.S. military adopted a strategy of creating a framework or mise-en-scène in which indigineous ethnic tensions could explode.
But we're still waiting for the exhaustion...
•Sunday: 11 Iraqis Killed, 30 Wounded - November 7th, 2010
•Saturday: 2 Iraqis Killed, 52 Wounded - November 6th, 2010
•Friday: 5 Iraqis Killed, 9 Wounded – November 5th, 2010
•Thursday: 9 Iraqis Killed, 28 Wounded – November 4th, 2010
•Wednesday: 3 Iraqis Killed, 8 Wounded – November 3rd, 2010
•Tuesday: 120 Iraqis Killed, 369 Wounded – November 2nd, 2010
•Monday: 7 Iraqis Killed, 13 Wounded – November 1st, 2010
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Luttwak is also the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook
Antiwar: Torture Orders Were Part of US Sectarian War Strategy
Here, Gareth Porter argues that in designating Shi'a and Kurd forces to raid Sunni areas and interrogate Sunni civilians, General Petraeus was deliberately stoking an Al Qaeda led Sunni insurgency and the ethnic civil war that resulted.
Petraeus then would subscribe to the Luttwakian doctrine of non-suppresion of violent conflict. The opening paragraph of Edward Luttwak's 1999 essay in Foreign Affairs: Give War a Chance, summarizes the main points...
An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have a great virtue: it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace. This can happen when all belligerents become exhausted or when one wins decisively. Either way the key is that the fighting must continue until a resolution is reached. War brings peace only after passing a culminating phase of violence. Hopes of military success must fade for accommodation to become more attractive than further combat.
Essentially, the best that outside moderators can do is to create an arena in which ethnic conflicts can be contained until either a victor prevails or sheer exhaustion suspends the violence. As applied in the Iraqi theatre, however, the outside moderator is neither outside nor a moderator, but an invading force. In order to redirect insurgent violence away from itself, then, the U.S. military adopted a strategy of creating a framework or mise-en-scène in which indigineous ethnic tensions could explode.
But we're still waiting for the exhaustion...
•Sunday: 11 Iraqis Killed, 30 Wounded - November 7th, 2010
•Saturday: 2 Iraqis Killed, 52 Wounded - November 6th, 2010
•Friday: 5 Iraqis Killed, 9 Wounded – November 5th, 2010
•Thursday: 9 Iraqis Killed, 28 Wounded – November 4th, 2010
•Wednesday: 3 Iraqis Killed, 8 Wounded – November 3rd, 2010
•Tuesday: 120 Iraqis Killed, 369 Wounded – November 2nd, 2010
•Monday: 7 Iraqis Killed, 13 Wounded – November 1st, 2010
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Luttwak is also the author of Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook
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